Mao’s Last Dancer Study Guide

Li Cunxin was born into a large, poor Chinese peasant family shortly after the Great Chinese Famine. At the age of 11, he was chosen to attend the Beijing Dance Academy, where he studied ballet. After the death of Chairman Mao and the ascension of Deng Xiaoping, which led to a greater degree of openness and cultural exchange between China and the West, Li was given the opportunity to travel to American and study with the Houston Ballet under the direction of choreographer and artistic director Ben Stevenson. In the spring of 1981, Li married an American woman and publicly defected from the People’s Republic of China. He embarked on a 16-year career with the Houston Ballet, during which he danced leading roles in ballets around the world and won medals in several international ballet competitions. He later married an Australian dancer, Mary McKendry, with whom he has three children. He finished his dancing career with the Australian Ballet before beginning a career in finance. But in 2012, he returned to the dance world as the artistic director of the Queensland Ballet. He lives in Australia with his family.

Li Cunxin was born near the end of the Great Chinese Famine, a human-made disaster of historical proportions that grew directly out of Chairman Mao Zedong’s disastrous attempt to reform the Chinese agricultural sector during the so-called Great Leap Forward. Due to the failure of this and other reforms of the 1950s, Mao was sidelined within the Chinese Communist Party during the latter half of the 1950s and the beginning of the 1960s. To reconsolidate his power and to oust perceived and actual rivals for power, Mao initiated the Cultural Revolution in 1966. This period of political and social purification of anti-communist elements (both real and imagined) in Chinese society continued until Mao’s death in 1976. Mao’s death kicked off a brief but intense period of political realignment within the Chinese Communist Party. Madame Mao and other members of the Party elite (called the Gang of Four) were themselves ousted and prosecuted for crimes relating to the Cultural Revolution, and after a series of adroit political maneuvers, the formerly persecuted Deng Xiaoping secured control of the Party—and thus the country—by the early 1980s. Deng then initiated a series of market and economic reforms that revolutionized China by imbuing the communist country’s market with capitalistic elements. Under Deng’s leadership, living standards in China improved while the country restored diplomatic, economic, and cultural relations with the West.

Mao’s Last Dancer offers a nonfiction account of a Chinese ballet dancer who defects to the West in pursuit of freedom and his art. When Li Cunxin defects, he is keenly aware that he is following in the footsteps of Soviet dancers who defected their country for the west, including Mikhail Baryshnikov and Rudolf Nureyev. Colum McCann’s Dancer, which was published in 2003, presents a fictionalized account of Nureyev. Both Dancer and Mao’s Last Dancer consider the complex interaction of luck and hard work, the oppressive circumstances incumbent on growing up under a communist regime, and the role of art in a changing world. Mao’s Last Dancer also joins an entire subgenre of autobiographies and memoirs written by Chinese people who survived the Cultural Revolution, many—but not all—of whom eventually ended up emigrating to other countries. These include Ji-li Jiang’s 1997 Red Scarf Girl: A Memoir of the Cultural Revolution, Zhu Xiao Di’s 1999 Thirty Years in a Red House: A Memoir of Childhood and Youth in Communist China, and Wenguang Huang’s 2012 The Little Red Guard: A Family Memoir. These accounts explore the changes Chinese society underwent during the Cultural Revolution, during which the Chinese government sought to eradicate traditional religions, social practices, and the Chinese arts.