Studia Musicologica 56/4, 2015, pp. 355–366 DOI: 10.1556/6.2015.56.4.5 1788-6244/$ 20.00 © 2015 Akadémiai Kiadó, Budapest Zhao Jiping and the Sound of Resistance in Red Sorghum Brian C. T HOMPSON The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Department of Music 2/F, Hui Yeung Shing Building,Shatin, NT, Hong Kong, China E-mail: thompson@cuhk.edu.hk (Received: April 2015; accepted: June 2015) Abstract: Since seizing power in 1949, China’s Communist Party has exerted firm control over all aspects of cultural expression. This policy took its most radical turn in the mid-1960s when Mao Zedong launched the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976), aiming to rid the country of bourgeois elements. The composer Zhao Jiping was a student at the Xi’an Conservatory during this period. He graduated in 1970, but was able to continue his studies only when the Central Conservatory reopened in 1978. On completing his studies, he established himself as a composer of folk-inspired music for film and the concert stage. This paper focuses on Zhao’s score for director Zhang Yimou’s Red Sorghum (Hong gao liang, 1987), a film based on the 1986 novel by 2012 Nobel laureate Mo Yan. While the composer enjoyed only limited recognition beyond China, he went on to score other successful films, among them Raise the Red Lantern (1991) and Farewell, My Concubine (1993), and achieve success as a composer of concert music. The paper connects Zhao’s musical language to the impact of the Cultural Revolution by examining how in Red Sorghum his music was employed to evoke a virile image of rural China. Keywords: Chinese music, Chinese film, Zhang Yimou, Zhao Jiping, Second Sino- Japanese War, Mo Yan In the seven decades since the end of the Second Sino-Japanese War, the Commu- nist Party of China (CPC) has made effective use of military might and propaganda to defeat its rivals and maintain its grip on power. As in other communist states, the CPC has relied on culture and artists to serve political purposes. Even since the 1980s, when China began to open its economy to the outside world, periods of artistic freedom have been the exception. More than any Chinese leader in decades,