Introduction to the Revolutionary Era
The founding of the People’s Republic of China in October 1949 led to the creation of a socialist literary system. Borrowed from the Soviet model, Chinese bureaucracy established “central and provincial literary magazines, editorial boards of prescribed political composition, a National Publication Administration that reviewed publishing plans and rationed paper, and a Writers’ Association that set down rules about writers’ pay and privileges.”* Mao’s views on literature, which he had expressed explicitly in his famous Yan’an speech in 1942, provided the reigning ideology. Quoting Lenin, Mao had stated that literature and art are “the cogs and screws in the whole machine” of revolution; “therefore, the Party’s literary and artistic activity occupies a definite and assigned position in the Party’s total revolutionary work and is subordinated to the prescribed revolutionary task of the Party in a given revolutionary period.” In other words: literature serves politics. Mao’s speech became the blueprint for the party line on literature in new China.
Due to its subservience to politics, literature under communism has often, perhaps rightly, been dismissed as propaganda, as mere formulaic expressions that have little or no aesthetic value. But although literature was subordinate to politics in this so-called “Revolutionary Era,” it is essential to recognize that there was, as Perry Link reminds us, a widespread assumption of literature’s importance to the rest of life. Such an assumption was predicated on faith in social engineering, which Mao and his followers believed capable of reshaping a person’s moral character. Writers were therefore regarded as “engineers of the soul.”
Literature occupying such a central position in the great Communist machine of social engineering comes at a price, as Chinese writers would soon find out. In 1956 and 1957, Mao, himself a highly accomplished poet, encouraged writers and intellectuals to speak their minds on public issues. Mao famously declared, “Let a hundred flowers blossom and a hundred schools of thought contend.” In response, Wang Meng, Liu Bingyan, and others published critical pieces about bureaucratism, corruption, and inefficiency. Wang’s story “The Young Man Who Has Just Arrived at the Organization Department” (1956), in particular, drew nationwide attention. Reneging on his own policy, Mao ordered a witch hunt, condemning those who had spoken out as “Rightists.” The “hundred flowers” that had dared to bloom were now regarded as “poisonous weeds.” The Rightists were publicly humiliated, deprived of their party memberships, and sent to the countryside for reform through hard labor.
The infamous Anti-Rightist Campaign, which claimed about half a million victims and left a deep and lasting psychic wound, was soon followed in 1958 by the “Great Leap Forward,” a campaign aiming to boost China’s economy. In order to overtake Britain in steel production in fifteen years, the whole country was mobilized: Families turned in their cooking pots, farming tools, doorknobs, or anything that could be melted down for iron. People’s communes were established with the stated purpose of rapidly realizing a truly Communist society built on the Marxist notion, “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.” Zhao Shuli, a highly exalted writer in this period, captured well the spirit of communal sharing and collective responsibility in his story “The Unglovable Hands” (1960). The three-year-long utopian campaign ended in a disaster, with millions of people starved to death, housing turned into rubble, and the land savaged in the maniacal pursuit of useless, low-grade iron produced by uneducated peasants in their makeshift backyard furnaces.
No devastation, however, could surpass the catastrophe wreaked by the Cultural Revolution. Set in motion by Mao in 1966, this sweeping movement was allegedly intended to defend “true” Communist ideology from the threat of “backward” elements in Chinese society through violent class struggle. With youthful Red Guards spearheading the revolution, a spasm of violence spread into all walks of life and turned the country upside down: Millions were persecuted, homes ransacked, schools and universities closed, books burned, students sent down to the countryside to receive “reeducation” by the peasants, factories shut down. Factious battles broke out in the streets. The socialist literary system, which had held sway since 1949, also collapsed, and all branches of the writers’ associations and their sponsored literary journals ceased to exist. In this turbulent period, the main literary output came from “the people” (workers, peasants, and soldiers) mobilized to compose, often collectively in committees, panegyrics for Mao the Great Helmsman and praises of the ongoing proletarian revolution. The few writers who did publish in these years wrote under strict guidelines and followed closely Mao’s new mandates that literary works “should combine revolutionary realism and revolutionary romanticism” and “never forget the class struggle.” These doctrines found exemplary expressions in the Model Modern Revolutionary Peking Operas, which replaced traditional opera plots with episodes in the struggle for Communist victory. In these modern operas, like The Red Lantern, social realism is combined with romantic characterization that exhibits the prescribed “three prominences”: “among the masses, positive characters should stand out; among positive characters, the heroes should be apparent; and among heroes, there should be no doubt who the superheroes are.”†
The death of Mao in September 1976 put an end to the ten-year turmoil that had rendered China a cultural wasteland. The ice in the frozen river might have cracked, but would take a long thaw before the currents of literary imagination could again run freely—or, at least, less impeded.
* Perry Link, The Uses of Literature: Life in the Socialist Chinese Literary System (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), p. 5.
† Link, p. 115.