ABSTRACT
On 1 October 1949, at the founding of the People’s Republic of China (PRC), Mao Zedong proudly declared in Tiananmen Square, ‘We, the Chinese people, have now stood up.’ This event marked the important moment in the history of the Cold War when socialist China became a strong ally of the Soviet Union against the capitalist West, headed by the United States. In the same year, a new patriotic play entitled Growing Up in the Battlefield (Zhandou li chengzhang), collectively written by Hu Peng and others, premiered. The play, discussed below, though it centred on the ‘hot war’ of the 1930s and 1940s, used the discourse of the Cold War era; at the same time it conveyed the classic image of a socialist nation encouraging the newly liberated Chinese people to fight bravely against the capitalist world – so unfairly divided between rich and poor – both in old China and in the rest of the world.
