The rice-planting opera "Brother and Sister Open the Land", with music based on folk music of northern Shaanxi, was developed according to the need to express the new mass life. This is the first rice-planting opera produced in the rice-planting movement. It reflected the new social life and developed the folk tradition of Yangge. After the Spring Festival performance, the liberation daily of Yan'an published the script and music in a full-page article. And on April 24 of the same year, it published an editorial entitled "The New Direction of Literature and Art from the Spring Festival Propaganda", which affirmed that "Brother and Sister Open the Land" was a "very good new type of song and dance skit". It had an important influence on the development of the rice-planting movement, the rice-planting opera and the subsequent creation of new operas.
Yangge was originally a kind of folk art popular in the rural areas of China, and it was created by the peasants. Among them, Yangge opera is said and sung, singing and dancing, lively and expressive, with a storyline, most of them are short and concise, so it is particularly welcomed by the peasants. The new rice-planting song movement in Yan'an and the Shanxi-Gansu-Ningxia Border Region started the earliest and had the greatest achievements and influence, leading to mass theater activities in the entire liberated area.
February 5, 1943, was the Spring Festival in the year of Kuiwei in the lunar calendar. During the Spring Festival of this year in Yan'an, especially in the square outside the south gate of the city, a sea of people, more than 20,000 people from all walks of life, both military and civilian, gathered to celebrate the conclusion of a new treaty between China and the United States, China and the United Kingdom, and the abolition of the unequal treaties with China in modern times. In the New Year and Spring Festival propaganda work, Lu Yi, contrary to the past practice of focusing only on large-scale programs and theater performances, studied and adopted the Shanxi rice-planting songs and folk art forms of other regions, creating programs such as "big rice-planting songs", "flower drums to support the army", "brother and sister to open up the land" and so on. The rice-planting song "Brother and Sister Open Land" performed by Lu Yi teacher Wang Dahua and first-grade student Li Bo was warmly welcomed.