Literature the People Love

Reading Chinese Texts from the Early Maoist Period (1949-1966)

Kenneth A. Loparo, Krista Van Fleit Hang

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781137306982
• eBook ISBN: 9781137363220
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Languages
• Index: Literature

Examining the production of 'people's literature' in China, this study provides a new interpretive framework with which to understand socialist literature and presents a sympathetic understanding of culture from a period in China's history in which people's lives were greatly and obviously affected by political events.

C H A P T E R 1

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Introduction: Reading People’s Literature

The Song of Youth, a story of a young woman’s awakening to her sexuality, political identity, and social agency in prerevolutionary China, became one of the most beloved novels from the Maoist period. Female author Yang Mo wrote the book for educated readers; feminist film critic Dai Jinhua describes the journey of a young student from individualism to revolutionary activism as “a handbook for the thought reform of the intellectuals.”¹ Chapters 7 through 14 narrate the experiences of the main character, Lin Daojing, as she joins peasants in the countryside to revolt against a local landlord. These chapters were not present in the original 1958 novel; along with three chapters dealing with the organization of a strike in the end, they were added in 1960 in response to criticism of the petty-bourgeois nature of the book and particularly its main character. With these revisions, Yang Mo was able to satisfy the majority of her critics, convincing them that the representation of the main character’s journey contained sufficient evidence of her interactions with members of the peasant and working classes, the portion of the citizenry that held the privileged position of “the people” in Maoist China.² Critics writing today often dismiss these chapters, insisting they show the interference of a heavy-handed propaganda machine and disrupt the otherwise straightforward narrative of an individual’s maturity.³ Whether or not one finds literary merit in these episodes, they, like the rest of the novel, symbolize one path of literature from the beginning of the twentieth century into the Maoist period. Literature written in the 1950s and 1960s was composed with an imperative to be accessible to China’s peasantry and working class. This philosophy of literary production demanded the adoption of literary forms and subject matter that would generate a body of literature that, while inheriting some aspects of literary practice developed through early twentieth-century cultural criticism, would have to be remade to reflect a new consciousness, gained by interaction with the people who comprised the core of the Chinese citizenry.

The Song of Youth can be read as the narrative portrayal of the change in literary values with the triumph of communist revolution. In other words, Lin Daojing’s path in The Song of Youth can be seen as one representation of the transformations in the Chinese literary field. The novel tells of her escape from her family and the threat of an arranged marriage, her entrance into society, and the impetus to revolutionary action she gains when meeting with frustrations in the outside world. When we first encounter Lin Daojing in the novel she is Nora having just left home, and the society she enters resembles the dark, inhospitable world Lu Xun described in his talk, “What Happens after Nora Leaves?”⁴ Lin Daojing is portrayed as an isolated individual in the opening scene of her train ride away from home; leering eyes of the male passengers who surround her emphasize her separation from society. Dressed in white and surround by her musical instruments, Daojing is the quintessential image of the May Fourth student, popular in portrayals of new women penned by early twentieth-century authors such as Mao Dun, Ba Jin, and Ding Ling. Daojing’s initial love object, Yu Yongze, a charming May Fourth–type student who is enamored with foreign literature, also represents the experimentation with May Fourth literary codes in the beginning of the novel. Her relationship with this student does not last, as Daojing finds that her love for Yongze cannot substitute for her meaningful participation in social life, which he does not support.

Daojing’s turning point, and the symbol of a transition from a May Fourth aesthetic code to the adoption of the aesthetics of people’s literature, comes when she meets a group of revolutionary students at a New Year’s party. At this party, Lin Daojing finds herself surrounded by ardent young people who believe in the struggle for Chinese independence. She meets a young revolutionary named Lu Jiachuan, who explains for her the root of her problem: she is still struggling to find meaning and fulfillment on an individual level, but this cannot happen because she cannot accomplish her goals individually in their contemporary society. He tells her,

See, Daojing, it’s like this. The character mu is only a single tree, but two of them make a wood like your name, and three or more form a huge forest that no storm or wind can destroy. When you struggle along on your own, in isolation, naturally you meet with nothing but knocks and rebuffs; but when you pitch into the collective struggle, when you link your own fate with that of the people, you stop being like a single, helpless tree and become part of the great forest. (108)⁵

Here, we see the debunking of the May Fourth narrative of individuals using new ideals of freedom and democracy to change society; it is replaced with the idea of change through collective action. From this point on, we no longer see Daojing embroiled in intensive periods of inner reflection. Now her energies will be focused outward, to the task of awakening others. By starting the novel with the image of Daojing as a solitary individual separated from society and ending with a scene of her participation in a mass rally, the novel shows the path from individualism to collectivism, interiority to exteriority, and May Fourth values to socialist ideals.

The extended narration of collective struggle in the countryside does seem, on first inspection, to disrupt the focus on Lin Daojing’s personal growth, but this episode portrays a crucial stage in her development, giving her insight into the lives and beliefs of the peasantry she has vowed to help with her revolutionary activity. It is a crucial moment because it emphasizes the move of literary figures away from the cities and universities to become familiar with the lives of people living in the rural villages. This detour to the countryside became the main road for artists and authors working in the Maoist period. The practice of delving into life (深入生活 shenru shenghuo) was institutionalized in the cultural field of the 1950s and 1960s, as authors and artists spent time working and living among the peasantry or factory workers both in order to remold themselves, as Lin Daojing does, but more importantly to be able to renovate their literature.⁶ Intellectuals were sent to the countryside or the factories to study the peasants’ and workers’ ways of speaking, and also to learn from native storytelling, artistic, or dramatic traditions, which they would then import into their own work, thus making it more accessible to the people. While Lin Daojing stops in the village only briefly, the central energies of the cultural field would remain there for many years.

The abandonment of May Fourth codes of individuality and the adoption of socialist ethics of collective action portrayed in Song of Youth mirrors the path of literature in the first half of the twentieth century. Students of Chinese literature know that fiction has been intimately connected to national revolution ever since Liang Qichao’s 1902 call to remake the citizens with new fiction. In his essay, “On the Relationship between Fiction and the Government of the People,” he emphasizes the power of fiction to influence the minds of people, and thus to create a new social atmosphere.⁷ His call was soon answered by the May Fourth generation of writers and critics in the 1920s, who urged the use of the vernacular, explored political issues such as the struggle for individual freedoms, and also began to incorporate new subject matter, such as the lives of the peasantry, in their fiction. May Fourth intellectuals were soon criticized for their inability to effect substantial social change by Leftist critics like Cheng Fangwu and Qu Qiubai. In a call that demanded writers switch focus from a literary revolution to revolutionary literature, Cheng Fangwu demanded that writers take sides in the intensifying struggle between politically motivated fiction and literature for the leisure classes. He writes, “We must endeavor to acquire class consciousness, we must make our medium approach the spoken language of the worker and peasant masses, and we must take the worker peasant masses as our target.”⁸ Communist literary critic Qu Qiubai next advocated the adoption of a truly popular literature and art when in numerous articles he urged writers to go to the countryside and begin using “national forms” in cultural production in order to reach the workers and peasants.⁹ The next person to take up the call of a literature to serve the people (especially the workers, peasants, and soldiers) was Mao Zedong, primarily in his 1942 “Talks at the Yan’an Forum for Art and Literature.” As Bonnie McDougall has pointed out, in this text, the author’s position changes from that of an active transformer and educator of the people to a more passive recipient of education with contact with the people through literary activity.¹⁰

This brief literary history follows what John Fitzgerald has pointed out as a consistent theme in Chinese revolutionary discourse, the idea of awakening. Fitzgerald traces the usage of the idea of awakening in cultural and political texts as it changes from an intransitive form of a gradual, self-awakening to national consciousness, to that of a transitive call by revolutionaries to awaken their fellow citizens. He writes that “nationalists . . . were reluctant to let the nation awaken of its own accord. The country cried out to be ‘awakened’ by reformers and revolutionaries possessing an intense sense of purpose, a keen commitment to the dictates of reason, and a formidable capacity for political organization and discipline.”¹¹ In his study, he emphasizes the heavily didactic role of reformers and revolutionaries who were reluctant to let the nation awaken of its own accord. Prasenjit Duara also emphasizes the didactic tendencies in modern reformers and revolutionaries in his study of nationalism and modernity in twentieth-century China. He shows the constructedness of the idea of the nation as a coherent subject, which, as it is formed, privileges certain conceptions of the nation while silencing others. As part of the nation-building process, Nationalists and Communists alike had to develop an image of the ideal national subject, molding the representation of the citizenry into a coherent whole. As he writes when discussing a study of the American Revolution, and also modern Chinese and Indian nationalism, “The people would have to be created to serve as the people . . . The nation emerged in the name of the people, but the people who mandated the nation would have to be remade to serve as their own sovereign.”¹² The Maoist state was engaged in this project of creating the national subject—the people—but, unlike early reformers, definers of cultural policy between 1949 and 1976 were able to ensure that the main goal of cultural production was a representation of the people defined as the workers, peasants, and soldiers. While this is the main goal, the contours of the definitions were flexible, frequently changing as different policies or even literary trends gained favor over others.

Although the intellectuals were often responsible for directing literary policy, in the Maoist period the idea of transformation of the citizenry was broadened to include these same intellectuals, whose duty previously had been primarily to help awaken the nation. While the intellectuals who held key positions in the state cultural apparatus still claimed the authority to direct literary and cultural activity, they also had to undergo a process of personal transformation. This is a process that began well before Communist victory in 1949. McDougall describes this process in her introduction to Mao’s 1942 “Talks,” and Marston Anderson similarly traces this transformation in the intellectuals’ role in his study of the path of realist literature in the first half of the twentieth century, though he describes it as the move from critical realism, in which the author is separated from the crowd, to a more engaged form of social realism, in which the crowd becomes the main subject. He writes, “In calling for mass fiction and socialist realism, Chinese writers acknowledged a new imperative: they began erasing the distinction between ‘I’ and ‘they’—between the self and society—that had been an indispensable basis for the practice of critical realism, subsuming both in a collective ‘we.’”¹³ These studies explore the transformation of literary practice by emphasizing the changing position of the author in relation to the nation-people, and the increasing imperative for literature to have social value throughout the first half of the twentieth century.

Few studies move on to the People’s Republic of China (PRC) period and consider the formation and workings of a literary system that was governed by the dual principles of educating the people and also the transformation of the intellectuals through that contact. It was only with the creation of the PRC and the new literary establishment after 1949 that Liang Qichao’s dream was realized, and the Chinese state could ensure that the main goal of nearly all cultural production was the enlightenment of the people. The new literary establishment that came to power with the creation of the PRC was able to put into practice on a national scale cultural practices that had been in development over decades of warfare. The end of warfare and division on the mainland meant that writers, artists, playwrights, and filmmakers moved from the rural villages of the “liberated areas” back to the cities, where they could continue to develop cultural policy with the goal of producing “literature the people love,” (人民大众所喜闻乐见的文学 renmin dazhong suo xiwen lejian de wenxue). This phrase appears frequently in early 1950s criticism, a notable instance occurs in a statement published in the inaugural issue of the literary magazine People’s Literature written by Mao Dun, who had then taken his place as minister of culture and editor of the magazine.¹⁴ Ironically, a crucial element of the process of transformation in the literary field would be the intellectuals’ return to the villages in an effort to learn from the people.

The idea of the people would become a central concept in the development of literature during the early Maoist period. Indeed, it was central in almost all aspects of the organization of the country after 1949. The broad impact of this term as a tool for social organization in this period is seen in its use as a modifier of governmental positions and structures (e.g., the Great Hall of the People was where people’s representatives gathered to discuss policy), cultural institutions (reflected in the titles of magazines such as People’s Literature and People’s Art), and place names (to get to the People’s Bank you might take People’s Road past the People’s Park, etc.). For these authors, Chinese Communist Party (CCP) victory meant that China’s citizenry, the people, would be able to enjoy culture that was created for them, rather than as commercial profit making or leisure for the upper classes. The people were imagined as thirsting for cultural experiences, in the cinema, in the library, or at street performances, that represented their lives and the sense of optimism over the birth of new China. Writers produced stories that would both satisfy the entertainment needs of the people, and also teach them how to act as members of a communist society. As an integral part of the development of a socialist nation, literature in the early Maoist period did not just aim to move the citizenry, it aimed to create the people anew.

PEOPLE’S LITERATURE IN THE EARLY MAOIST PERIOD

The texts in this study were produced between 1949 and 1966, a period known as the seventeen years (十七年 shiqi nian) in Chinese language literary history. I refer to the period as the early M...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• 1   Introduction: Reading People’s Literature
• 2   People’s Literature and the Construction of a New Chinese Literary Tradition
• 3   Creativity and Containment in the Transformations of Li Shuangshuang
• 4   The Heart of the Party: Gender and Communist Party Ideals in Tracks in the Snowy Forest
• 5   Educational Laughter: Urban Cinema and Community Formation
• 6   Conclusion: More, Better, Faster—the Ming Tombs Reservoir and a Different Path for Maoist Culture
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index