Wang Shiwei and Wild Lilies

Rectification and Purges in the Chinese Communist Party 1942-1944

Dai Qing

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9781000149739
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political Parties
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This work investigates a case of political persecution that occurred over 50 years ago (the Wang case), but which still raises profound issues for the relationship between revolutionary regimes and the intellectuals who serve them. Song Jinshou has compiled a list of the documents of the Wang case.

Introduction: "The Trial"

DAVID E. APTER AND TIMOTHY CHEEK

Imagine a Marxist militant holed up in the caves in Yan'an during the most difficult days of the period, beginning a devastating critical analysis of the situation with a prose poem to the woman he loves: "As I walked alone on the river bank, seeing the old fashioned cotton shoes of a female comrade in front of me reminded me of one who used to wear this type of shoes, comrade Li Fen—the oldest most beloved friend in my life. Whenever I think of her, my heart pounds and my blood quickens." So begins "Wild Lilies" with a personal lament for a revolutionary martyr. In the best Lu Xun tradition, it is a cry from the heart. It personalizes the world of stylized public experience. It punctures the language of political illusion. It breaks through the conspiracy of personal silences and by so doing deliberately challenges the official position on virtually every aspect of social and political life in Yan'an, not least of all the role of literature and art, and the critical responsibilities of the revolutionary intellectual.

Yan'an made extravagant claims to egalitarianism, between officers and men, and men and women. In 1942, Wang Shiwei punctured such claims and exposed the differences between those in and out of power, particularly the habitual and unequal access to (and use of ) women, food, uniforms, and shelter. Wang asserted that in a society in which equality is a chief moral claim, the principle on which the nature of truth itself is to be re-rendered, transformed, and redeemed, cannot— indeed must not—be compromised by such hypocrisies. Extending his critique further, to the heartland of socialism—the Soviet Union—he cast doubt on the validity of the Moscow trials. He flatly said that the Kirov murder was a frame-up, Radek innocent, Zinoviev not guilty, and Stalin a highly dubious character. In so doing he exposed the Stalinist aspects of Maoism, despite Mao's separation from Stalin's views about China.

Finally, Wang Shiwei claimed moral and ideological autonomy within the communist movement to criticize abuses of power and to offer, publicly, alternative policies. Wang claimed this authority on the basis of the romantic and pure motivations of the artist. He compared the qualities of the artist to the limitations of the politician in his 1942 essay, "Politicians, Artists." In this and other writings, Wang claimed, and by most reports attracted, the support of idealistic youth. Wang confronted the party with its own ideals and its hypocrisy.

Wang Shiwei was to pay for this with his life. His was one of the four celebrated "cases" that box the compass of Mao's monopoly of power (the others being Zhang Guotao, Liu Zhidan, and Wang Ming). Wang Shiwei embodied the Lu Xun tradition by representing a radical critical view of daily life at odds with a radical conformism. Wang also embodied the fundamental cosmopolitanism and international world-view of the New Culture Movement.

Yet at the beginning, rectification was not targeted at such a relatively insignificant person as Wang Shiwei. According to Dai Qing, the real targets were Mao's major political competitors, the Russian Returned Students (Internationalists)—Wang Ming, Zhang Wentian, and Qin Bangxian, whose political theories and organizational ideas directly challenged Mao's growing personal autocracy. "Wang Shiwei and his lot had nothing whatsoever to do with this campaign: they were neither its target nor its chief supporters. Their task was simple: all they had to do was listen to the relevant reports, applaud on cue, and write an ideological report or two on demand. That was all."¹ But once Wang Shiwei took the CCP's call for speaking out seriously and provoked popular reaction in Yan'an with his cutting "critical essay" (zawen), the party, Mao stated, now had a "target" for its "ideological struggle." This translator of Trotsky's works, a cultural worker at the Academy for Marxist-Leninist Studies (the very place where the documents and procedures for the campaign were being prepared) had gone far beyond the role of gadfly to argue that so great were the discrepancies between theory and practice in Yan'an that the entire revolutionary enterprise was becoming (especially for the young) an exercise in illusion. It was not accidental that Wang Shiwei began his critique in a personalized, intimate, and individualized way (indeed, the way of liberalism) just at the moment when the party leadership had decided to enforce a radically depersonalized system, substituting discipline for intimacy and collective self-sacrifice for individual choice, within the tutelary environment of rectification. Like the student standing up against the tank in Tiananmen Square so many years later, Wang Shiwei in his time stood—stubbornly, and almost alone—against the apotheosis of the collective spirit and in principled terms.

Wang Shiwei was undoubtedly an irritating man. Those who knew him describe him as abrasive. He was one of the "four eccentrics" who, like the "five olds" and the "nine beauties," had already become distinctive in their differences. Moreover, he was stubborn, and when friendly colleagues pointed out the error of minding the flaws of other people's ways, he refused to listen. In the end he tried to resign from the party, but this would have been such a slap in the face that it was not allowed. Instead he was made to stand trial. The trial itself was a foretaste of things to come—not once but many times, in the People's Republic.

It was said that Mao had considerable respect for Wang Shiwei and personally read Wang's essays (even though he was infuriated by Wang), and that he ordered that Wang not be killed. During his imprisonment Wang was, from time to time, allowed to be interviewed by reporters. It was not until 1947 that he was executed (probably on orders from Kang Sheng, who could hardly have acted on his own initiative) either by Li Kenong as Guilhem Fabre would have it or, as Dai Qing and Wen Jize suggest, by Xu Haidong or He Long.²

Dai Qing's book, in effect, memorializes Wang Shiwei in several ways. First, it makes him into a symbol for the sacrifice of China's intellectuals to Mao's version of the truth. There is a sense in which the trial of Wang Shiwei was the first attempt to orchestrate the ideas laid down in the Yan'an Forum on Literature and Art in May 1942 and other of Mao's crucial texts, elevating them into a form of truth that could tolerate no others. Wang Shiwei's resistance became the focal point for an attack so carefully orchestrated that it created its own terminology, discourse, and demonology. Wang became the stylized foil to the party's final solution for outspoken intellectuals—democratic centralism.

What did he do wrong? Well, nothing and everything. He was candid in his belief about what a good communist was, a subject of great moment and discussion during this period. All who defined the good communist mentioned a certain stalwart integrity. But also required was a certain kind of discipline, so that part of what it meant to be a good communist was keeping your mouth shut against your own judgment in the interests of the higher truth. It was that second aspect that did not stick with Wang.

Wang Shiwei was outraged by false pieties. He saw inequalities and took them personally: sexual inequality, the differential access of senior leaders to younger women, social inequality, the differential access to food, uniforms, sleeping quarters.³ He wrote about these things elegantly and passionately. Even the title of his polemic "Wild Lilies," which caused such a furor, was carefully chosen, for the wild lily is both beautiful and also bitter, a medicine.

On one level, the case of Wang Shiwei is an example of one of the few genuine intellectuals in Yan'an (best known as a translator) who became a symbol of resistance to Mao's definition of how the intellectual's role should be subordinated to the revolution as laid down in Mao's Yan'an Forum. Wang Shiwei, stalwartly rejecting subordination, became something of a hero. The putative representative of the Lu Xun intellectuals (one of the few such intellectuals who went to Yan'an rather than to Chungking or Kunming, Yunnan), his activities coincided with a preliminary phase of ideological purification, from 1939 to 1941, extending as well into the first phase of the rectification campaign.

The latter began on February 1, 1942, with a speech by Mao ("Reform in Learning, the Party, and Literature") and culminated in June 1942 with a series of anti-Wang Shiwei meetings.⁴ This period became known as the "expose one's thoughts" period, or "the exposure phase." Emphasizing openness, encouraging wall posters and bold speaking, this period (like that of the "hundred flowers" a decade and a half later) eventually led to a crackdown. For Kang Sheng, head of the secret police, "half-heartedness" and "two-heartedness" (i.e., a lack of genuine revolutionary fervor and antirevolutionary feelings, respectively) were suddenly revealed and he moved against both kinds of backsliders as well as spies, enemies, and "Trotskyites." Where such enemies were, in fact, lacking, Kang created them. Wang Shiwei, and his purported "Five Member Anti-Party Gang" revealed in Dai Qing's book were among the first to be pressed into such "service" for the sake of the revolution.

Wang had joined the party in 1926, working mainly in Shanghai, He became involved with some of the Trotskyist opposition, translated some of Trotsky's writing, and thus gave some substance to the later charge that he was a "Trotskyite" (a charge now recognized as an "error" by the Central Committee).⁵ He went to Yan'an in 1936 to become a research officer in the Academy for Marxist-Leninist Studies (which subsequently became the Central Research Institute), and worked mainly as a translator.

Wang became embroiled in a dispute with Chen Boda (later to become one of Mao's personal secretaries) over the nature and content of revolutionary literature. This debate followed the publication of Mao's revolutionary blueprint, "On New Democracy," in January 1940. In view of the importance attached by Mao in this essay to literary texts, this touched an extremely sensitive nerve. Moreover, it evoked an early conflict over the same issue between the party and China's greatest modern writer, Lu Xun.

Lu Xun, by far the most outstanding among the radical intellectuals representative of the New Culture Movement and also a source of inspiration to "real" intellectuals, had never taken kindly to the "discipline" the party wanted to impose on intellectuals. In Shanghai where he lived he ran afoul of the local party cultural czar in the CCP, Zhou Yang. Indeed, in an article Lu Xun wrote in Shanghai he characterized Zhou Yang as a dandy, a fop, and a vain man who liked fast cars and was ignorant of culture and literature. Zhou attacked Lu (who by this time was very ill), removing him from the Left-Wing Writers Association which Lu himself had founded. Shortly afterward Lu Xun died and Zhou Yang repaired to Yan'an. When Mao established an academy for artists and writers, he named it after Lu Xun and made Zhou Yang the director. It was a gesture not lost on Wang Shiwei.

Wang was a dissenter from the start. He associated himself with Ding Ling and Liu Xuewei, both editors of the Literature and Art Column in Liberation Daily.⁶ Liu Xuewei wrote an article on "Revolutionary Literature," published in June 1941, in which he criticized revolutionary literature as coarse, dull, direct, and inferior and urging a higher artistic level. This article was followed up by another on June 7, calling for freedom of thought as the basis of the New Democracy. On September 22 another article argued that too much emphasis on politics lowered the development of the arts.

In October 1941, Ding Ling called for the revival of zawen in Yan'an. In a Liberation Daily article entitled "We Need Critical Essays" she said: "I think it would do us the most good if we emulate his [Lu Xun's] steadfastness in facing the truth, his courage to speak out for the sake of truth, and his fearlessness. This age of ours still needs critical essays, a weapon that we should never lay down."⁷

Shortly after the rectification campaign began in February 1942, Ding Ling published her famous article "Thoughts on March 8" (International Women's Day), that attacked the party for its treatment of women. Mao was quite upset by the article. A few days later Ding Ling was dismissed as an editor of the Literature and Art Column, and a few days after that Wang Shiwei took up her call and published "Wild Lilies."

It proved to be a bombshell. Published in two parts on March 13 and 23 in Liberation Daily, it was (according to Cheek) modeled after Lu Xun's 1926 satirical essay "A Rose Without Blooms."⁸ Attacking Mao's taste for beautiful women, it offered as an alternative to Jiang Qing (Mao's controversial new young wife) an exemplary model of a woman revolutionary executed in 1928. Wang attacked dancing and the parties that the leadership became noted for, while soldiers died at the front. He parodied Mao's style. He implied that the three classes of clothing and five classes of food, which differentiated people at different levels of rank, represented unjustified privilege, indeed class, a charge that struck Mao's rawest nerve.

Coming as it did in the context of other criticisms of party policy in Yan'an, "Wild Lilies" represented the rebellion of the intellectuals, a subversion of rectification away from Mao's planned attack on rival Wang Ming. It invoked the spirit of Lu Xun, arousing great concern on the part of the senior party cadres. All the more because Wang had already become something of a local hero by having already been thrust into the rectification campaign in its first p...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Translators' Note
• Preface
• Introduction: "The Trial"
• PART II: SELECTED DOCUMENTS Compiled and Introductions
• Appendix A: Namelist
• Appendix Β: Research Materials on the Wang Shiwei Question, Selected Documents (Complete List)
• Index