In 1979, she married Cao Yu, one of the most important 20th-century Chinese dramatists, and, following China's opening up under Deng Xiaoping, she ended her life respected as one of the few surviving masters of the dan roles.
Because of the association with prostitution, the work was still stigmatized and female students, despite usually being driven into acting by poverty, had previously needed private tutors.
[6] The school was a more respectable setting but Jiao adopted her mother's assumed name of Li in order to avoid shaming her father.
[12] At 14, she was a "star student" and began "playing all types of leading roles", all the more so because the principal and registrar hadn't realized she'd learned the part ahead of the school's curriculum.
[1] Li's mistreatment at the hands of the Japanese and Nationalists led her to "wholeheartedly" support the people's republic founded by the victorious Communists in 1949.
[15] Her success despite her poverty, lack of family connections, and avoidance of a rich and powerful patron gave her a clean slate[17] and she was relatively young and famous.
[15] Many important cadres, including Zhou Enlai, Chen Yi, and He Long, were fans of Peking opera and made special efforts to cultivate it.
[4] During the Communist Theatre Reform[n 10] begun in 1949,[13] Li was selected as a "people's artist",[1] despite many of the "flowery" plays she had trained for being removed from the stage on account of their lack of ideological significance, violence, and sexuality.
[1] The same year, she was resting in her dressing room in Wuhan when soldiers appeared to demand she cease her performances of Cheng Yanqiu's Spring Boudoir Dream.
[n 12] Amid the Korean War, they thought the dramatisation of a Tang-era poem by Du Fu was completely inappropriate and supported American imperialism.
Though it has a minimal story, she appreciated that it was full of dance and movement showing "every phase of the heroine's changing feelings: from sober to drunk, from arrogant and joyful to disappointed to sad to furious".
It seemed as if we had a censor in our minds and we voluntarily gave up many plays, which were not on the banning list, because we felt they did not reach the ideological standard that we had learned... and they would not be good for our audiences".
[n 14][15] Having "successfully adapted to the contemporary political climate", she began to earn a monthly salary of more than 1,000 RMB[22] and to enjoy much better social status than in pre-war China.
[8] Since her school days, Li had supported certain revisions of the traditional Peking opera repertoire, particularly the removal of "pink scenes"[n 15] with overt sexual content.
[18] There was also call for more contemporary plays but Li's experience acting in four of them left her uncomfortable, as the playwrights made little accommodation for the conventions she had been trained to use: "I had nowhere to place my hands, I did not even know how to walk, or what to do on stage".
[25] Several times, she supported the idea of reserving older genres like Peking and Kun opera for their traditional canon and restricting contemporary plays to newer dramatic forms.
[25] At the onset of the Cultural Revolution in 1966, her mother Li Yuxiu confronted a gang of Red Guards who were destroying statues in her house's courtyard.
[1] In December 1979,[28] Li married Cao Yu, a Chinese dramatist now known as "the most significant figure in the development of modern drama in China[29] and sometimes compared to Shakespeare, Ibsen, and Chekhov.