This paper examines how regional xiqu (Chinese opera) production became a vehicle for cultural reformation and propaganda surrounding the first Marriage Law of the People's Republic of China in the 1950s. Focusing on the Shandong Provincial Lüju Company, I trace the activities and trajectories of cultural workers who created new performances to reform local marital norms and values during the national xiqu reform period (1949–1966). I argue that the constitution of marriageability and intimate life was inextricably interwoven with national policy, local histories, and individual experience within this propaganda project.

Following the national xiqu reform, state-owned troupes across China transformed regional performance traditions to align with national cultural standards and convey ideological messages through top-down initiatives. The Shandong Provincial Lüju Company gained particular prominence by adapting the revolutionary novel The Remarriage of the Widow Li Ersao (Wang 1950) for the national stage in 1954. National media frequently cited the production as a model for integrating folk traditions with "socialist realism" and state-promoted marriage patterns. The play reinforced the implementation of the Marriage Law and circulated widely through traveling troupes and opera films. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and archival research, this paper illuminates the paradoxical negotiations among local norms, institutional practices, and collective knowledge that shaped — and continue to shape — marital imaginaries and gendered patterns in Chinese society. In doing so, it contributes to interdisciplinary conversations on the cultural politics of intimacy, the performative dimensions of cultural reform, and the enduring legacies of socialist cultural production.