ABSTRACT
Two events in Zhao Dan’s life (1915-80) carry uncanny associations. First, when he took the role of Lao Zhao in Crossroads (Shen Xiling, 1937), he was delighted by the opportunity of ‘I play myself’ (wo yan wo) and flaunted a passionate selfperformance that would constitute a centrepiece of his decades-long star image (D. Zhao 2005: 87-91). Second, when he was incarcerated in a single cell in a Shanghai prison in 1967, Zhao found himself in the same location as for shooting his performance of a patriot tortured by Japanese in Female Fighters (Chen Liting, 1949) 20 years earlier (D. Zhao 2003: 97). Equally uncanny is that his five-year incarceration by theCommunist ‘Gang of Four’ from1967 to 1973 is roughly of the same length as his previous incarceration by aNationalist warlord inXinjiang from 1940 to 1945. Such creepy historical and fictional coincidences abound in Zhao Dan’s eventful life (Gu 2000). This chapter aims to demonstrate that the eerie spectrality linking Zhao’s martyrdom and stardom reveals as much about the peculiar nature of socialist stardom as about the anxiety of Chinese artists in a new regime of total ideological control, the latter documented by Paul Clark (1987: 25-87).
