About China Quyi Artists Association

China Quyi Artists Association

The China Quyi Artists Association is the national association for quyi, China's traditional narrative-singing and comic performing arts, under the China Federation of Literary and Art Circles (CFLAC). Headquartered in Beijing, it unites performers of xiangsheng (crosstalk), pingshu (storytelling), the dagu drum-song traditions, Suzhou pingtan and several hundred other regional forms — between 300 and 400 genres in the counts most often cited. It is distinct from the China Artists Association, the CFLAC body for visual artists, and from the China Television Artists Association: the Quyi Artists Association is the federation's organisation for the folk narrative and comic stage. Its flagship honour is the China Quyi Peony Award, established in 2000 and presented biennially as quyi's highest national prize. Crosstalk master Jiang Kun chaired the association from 2012 to 2022, and Feng Gong succeeded to the chairmanship at its ninth national congress in May 2023.

The association's lineage runs from the quyi improvement and research bodies of 1949 and the 1950s — including the China Quyi Research Association chaired by the drum-singer Wang Zunsan — through congresses that elected crosstalk masters such as Hou Baolin to leading positions. It organises national quyi festivals and competitions, young-performer training, the Peony Award art troupe's tours of new work, and intangible-heritage safeguarding for regional genres, and it publishes the journal Quyi. Documentation in English is thinner than for most CFLAC associations, resting on the association's Chinese official site and journal, the organisational history in Chinese reference works, and English-language government and China Daily coverage of the Peony Awards and national quyi competitions.

What quyi is: the art the association represents

Quyi, rendered "melodious art", and its synonym shuochang yishu, "speaking and singing art", are umbrella terms for China's regional genres of traditional oral performing art — over 300 genres in the Encyclopaedia of Contemporary Chinese Culture's count, more than 400 forms in Chinese official cultural summaries. Quyi is distinguished from xiqu, Chinese opera, by its emphasis on narration rather than acting, although the two share many traditional stories. One or a few performers, using voice, rhythm and a handful of props — drums, wooden clappers, the pipa, yangqin or sanxian, a hand fan and the storyteller's waking-wood block — tell stories, shape characters and express thought and feeling through speaking and singing.

The art is ancient. Chinese cultural surveys describe quyi as an independent art formed in the middle of the Tang Dynasty and flourishing in the Song Dynasty, whose urban entertainments are documented in works such as Meng Yuanlao's record of the Eastern Capital. While the storytelling concept is centuries old, the unified category was recognised mainly in the 1920s, and only after 1949, with the founding of the People's Republic, did the term quyi become widely used; before that the forms were classified simply as shuochang yishu. That mid-twentieth-century standardisation of the name is inseparable from the organisation of performers into associations — the process from which the China Quyi Artists Association descends.

The forms: speech, song and the mixed arts

The association's remit is defined by quyi's variety. Official surveys group the most influential forms by their means of expression. Speech forms include xiangsheng comic dialogue, pingshu storytelling, and Suzhou and Yangzhou pinghua. Sung forms include jingyun dagu (Beijing-melody drum song), meihua dagu, xihe dagu, shulaibao, Dongbei dagu and danxian, the single-string art in which one person sings while playing the sanxian. Mixed speech-and-song forms include kuaiban clapper talk, Tianjin shidiao, er-renzhuan, pingtan, Fengyang huagu, Shandong qinshu and kuaishu, Henan zhuizi, Sichuan qingyin, Hubei daoqing, yuequ, Shanbei shuoshu and Mongolian haolaibao.

The performance scales differ enormously within the family. Pingshu and pinghua tell long stories continuing over weeks or months, a chapter at a sitting; xiangsheng is a short comic piece finished in minutes. Major singing forms such as danxian and jingyun dagu normally tell short stories in short songs, while Suzhou pingtan and xihe dagu combine singing with speech in long pieces. Specialised quyi troupes and teams exist at central and local levels — among them the Central Broadcasting recitation and singing troupe, the Tianjin and Shenyang quyi troupes, the Shanghai and Suzhou pingtan troupes and the Sichuan quyi troupe — and it is from this troupe-and-association ecosystem that the national association draws its membership and its competition entries.

Origins: the quyi bodies of 1949 and the 1950s

The organised history of quyi begins with the founding of the People's Republic. In 1949 quyi improvement preparatory bodies were formed to reform the old storytelling and comic arts for the new society, and in the 1950s the China Quyi Research Association carried that work forward, chaired by Wang Zunsan (1892–1968), a Xihe dagu drummer from Tang County, Hebei, who during the War of Resistance had organised performers in the Jin-Cha-Ji anti-Japanese base area, composing new drum lyrics for the salvation movement, and who after 1949 participated in the leadership of the quyi organisations, actively promoting quyi reform and creating new works. The research association issued honours of its own: Hou Baolin's crosstalk Nocturnal Journey won its Excellent Quyi Works Award in the 1950s.

Hou Baolin (1917–1993), the defining crosstalk master of the twentieth century, attended the first National Congress of Chinese Literature and Art in July 1949 and became a leading figure of the organised quyi world, a pattern repeated across generations: the association's congresses have repeatedly elected the art's greatest performers — Hou among them — to leading positions. The present China Quyi Artists Association, a member association of CFLAC headquartered in Beijing, is the successor of those research and improvement bodies, its history written in Chinese reference sources as an organisational line from 1949 through the research association of the 1950s to today's national association.

The China Quyi Peony Award

The association's flagship honour, the China Quyi Peony Award, was established in 2000 and is selected every two years; it is approved by the central authorities and co-sponsored by CFLAC and the China Quyi Artists Association, and it is recognised within the profession as quyi's highest national award — the national professional prize of the art. Its categories reward programmes, performance, literature (the writing of quyi pieces) and newcomers, so that the award honours creation and authorship as well as performance. A Peony Award art troupe, formed of winners, tours new work around the country — the "Peony Bloomed" performances recorded in festival coverage — extending the award from a ceremony into a travelling showcase.

Since 2006 the award's series of events has been settled in Jiangsu Province, with ceremonies in Nanjing, Xuzhou, Yangzhou, Suzhou, Suqian and Nantong. At the Yangzhou ceremony reported by China Daily's Jiangsu services, the awards gave out 20 prizes covering 16 types of quyi, and famous performers including Jiang Kun, Feng Gong and Gong Hanlin performed alongside newcomers such as Jia Bing and Ji Mingliang. The award's competition structure is national and zone-based: for the 13th edition, the Changzhi division competition in Shanxi — Changzhi being China's first officially styled "Chinese Quyi City", hosting the national competition for the eighth time — drew 47 programmes in 29 genres from 14 provinces, municipalities and autonomous regions, including danxian, errenzhuan, Northeast dagu, Jingyun dagu, Xihe dagu, Henan zhuizi and northern Shaanxi storytelling, competing for programme, performance, literature and newcomer awards.

The 13th Peony Awards and the award today

The 13th China Quyi Peony Awards reached their ceremony at the Nantong Grand Theatre on 26 October 2024, in the reporting of the Nantong municipal government's English service. The edition received 465 entries from 32 member units — provincial quyi associations, art committees and other art groups — and its ceremony presented the CFLAC Lifetime Achievement Award alongside the 13th Peony Awards for programmes, performance, literature and new talent. Around the ceremony the organisers staged ten events: a meeting with award winners, lectures by renowned artists, a training session, young-talent pingtan performances and five public performances bringing crosstalk, narrative singing, storytelling and Beijing-style drumming to Nantong audiences.

The numbers matter because they measure the association's working constituency: hundreds of entries, dozens of member organisations, genres by the score in a single competition division, and provincial hosts competing to stage the ceremonies. For an art form composed of hundreds of local genres, the biennial Peony cycle — division competitions, national judging, ceremony, troupe tours and training — is the principal mechanism by which the China Quyi Artists Association knits regional traditions into a single national art, and by which new performers in local forms gain national standing.

Leadership: Jiang Kun and Feng Gong

The association's recent leadership is inseparable from crosstalk, quyi's most nationally visible form. Jiang Kun, a crosstalk performer who studied under Ma Ji and became famous at the end of the Cultural Revolution with the satirical piece Such a Photograph, was elected a director of the association as early as 1979, served as its vice-chairman from the 1980s and as a vice-chairman and party-branch secretary in the 2000s, and on 29 November 2012 was elected chairman of the China Quyi Artists Association, a post he held through 2022 — a decade in which he also wrote publicly on the mission of quyi workers, reviewing what he called the art's road of weathering wind and frost and constantly rejuvenating, and paying tribute to ten masters of the previous generation, from Wang Zunsan and Chang Baokun to Hou Baolin and Gao Yuanjun.

At the association's ninth national congress in Beijing in May 2023, Feng Gong — Jiang Kun's fellow crosstalk star, a performer who moved from crosstalk into film and the xiaopin comic sketch — was elected to succeed him as chairman. Chinese coverage of the congress noted the significance attached to the transition for the relationship between the association and the large non-state crosstalk world, above all Guo Degang's Deyunshe, the country's largest folk crosstalk organisation, whose position outside the association system had long been a talking point in the quyi world; Feng's election was widely read as opening the door to bringing such folk forces into the association's formal system. Whether or not that reading proves complete, the succession itself — from one nationally beloved crosstalk master to another — continues the association's tradition of leadership by the art's most famous practitioners.

Festivals, training and heritage safeguarding

Beyond the Peony Awards, the association organises national quyi festivals, young-performer training and the cultivation programmes recorded in festival reporting — including a Quyi Talents Cultivation Action whose inductees perform in the award series' special concerts, such as the "Sending Laughter to the Grassroots" performances through which association artists tour to local audiences. Training sessions attached to award ceremonies, lectures by renowned artists and meetings with winners form a standard part of the association's event architecture, transmitting technique in forms whose mastery is traditionally a matter of apprenticeship.

Heritage safeguarding is the other standing task. Quyi's hundreds of regional genres are, by their nature, local, oral and vulnerable: a drum-song style may live in one county's dialect and a handful of ageing masters. The association works on intangible-cultural-heritage safeguarding for regional genres, documenting and promoting forms that the national competition system itself throws into relief — 29 genres in a single division competition, many of them unknown outside their home regions. Its journal, Quyi, is the profession's national periodical, recording repertoire, history and current work across the genres.

The association's place in Chinese cultural life

Quyi has been called the most national and most folk of China's performing arts: rooted in Tang and Song urban entertainment, carried by marketplace storytellers and teahouse comics, and reorganised after 1949 under a unified name and a national association. Its common artistic features — speech and singing as the main means of expression, lively and concise language close to everyday speech, stories praising heroes, honest officials and faithful lovers as readily as they satirise folly — give the China Quyi Artists Association a constituency unlike any other CFLAC body: not one art, but several hundred.

That breadth is the association's continuing rationale. From the research association chaired by Wang Zunsan in the 1950s to the Peony Awards' 465 entries in 2024 and Feng Gong's chairmanship from 2023, the China Quyi Artists Association, headquartered in Beijing under the China Federation of Literary and Art Circles, remains the national organisation through which China's storytellers, drum-singers, balladeers and comics are federated, honoured, trained and heard.