Mao became the driving force behind extreme alterations in China. For centuries, operas had been a traditional form of Chinese arts. These operas featured legends of emperors, princesses, ministers, generals, demons, romance, treachery, and murder, topics which Mao deemed unsuitable for audiences of peasants and farmers. Under the careful watch of his third wife, Mao commissioned a group of writers to create new operas, ones about peasants and farmers, where the audience could see themselves portrayed as the heroines, and their detested landlords as the villains. Mao abolished traditional forms of Chinese art in favor of more vain, self-concerning plays that he claimed were "more appropriate to the interests of the masses and more with the party line."

Censoring the arts was not just limited to our own plays, however. All visiting groups were required to perform first for Mao before they were allowed to perform for a Chinese audience. More often than not, Mao forced the groups to edit their pro

gram. A visiting Portuguese ballet company was driven to remove over half of their program, as he felt it to be "too modernistic."

Naturally, other countries noticed Mao's dramatic changes to China, and they were curious. Many reporters traveled to China to interview government officials, hoping to write brilliant exposes on the horrors of Communism only to be met with application forms. Once an application for and interview with an official had been filled out, the interview would take place in a conference room. The official, joined by the party secretary and a note taker, would record each question asked, and the response given, and they had full rights to object to any question at any time, much like a court trial. Needless to say, these interviews all sounded rather cookie-cutter.

It wasn't long before Mao began censoring not only what we could see and do, but also how we could do it. All writers were to be trained in by government writing officials- the desired effect being, of course, so that they all wrote in the same style. All writing was to be, like the operas, concerning topics of interest to its audience. None of the usual drama and royal scandals, only stories about peasants and farmer

Some common words found in the essay are:
Mao Zedong, Laws Literature, Nietzsche Jail, Gao Li, peasants farmers, roll film, change country,
Approximate Word count = 824
Approximate Pages = 3 (250 words per page double spaced)