MA FENG (1922–2004). Fiction writer. Ma Feng was one of the so-called potato school writers, all from Shanxi Province, known for writing about and for the rural masses. Throughout his career, Ma closely followed Mao Zedong’s call to use literature as a tool to serve the people. With this mission in mind, he set out to write stories that would be appreciated by ordinary peasants. For Ma, folk literature was an inexhaustible source of artistic creation, and it played an important role in the formation of his literary style: plain, humorous, and easy to understand. Lüliang shan yingxiong zhuan (Heroes of Mount Lüliang), coauthored with Xi Rong, another potato school writer, is Ma’s best-known work, written in a style reminiscent of traditional chapter novels, particularly Shuihu zhuan (The Water Margin). His later works are better representations of the realist mode in terms of artistic vision and narrative technique. In the 1950s and early 1960s, Ma’s reputation was at its peak. Many of his stories were household names, such as “Women cun li de nianqing ren” (The Young People in Our Village) and “Wode diyige shangji” (My First Boss). All his life, Ma loved the peasants and never forgot his responsibility to represent their interests and speak to them in their language. Whether in characterization, choice of expression, or the organization of the interwoven details, Ma displays the best of his skill in the combination of realistic content with a form inspired by folk traditions. His humorous style also finds its fullest expression in the short story. Ma was also a screenplay writer, having turned several of his own stories into popular movies.
Of his publications, Ma once said, “If judged separately, no story of mine is good enough in terms of thematic development or characterization, but taking all my stories as a whole, the reader can have a general view of what happened in the lives of the Chinese peasants in the course of more than thirty years.” See also SOCIALIST REALISM.
MA JIAN (1953– ). Fiction writer and essayist. Born in Qingdao, Shandong Province, Ma Jian is one of the most independent writers in modern Chinese literature. Throughout his career, Ma has been noted for his defiant acts against authority. In the early 1980s, he attracted the government’s attention for his nonconformist paintings and “freewheeling” lifestyle. He took his vows in 1983 with the Beijing Buddhist Association. The following year he quit his job as a photojournalist for the state-owned magazine, Chinese Workers, to travel to Tibet through the Chinese hinterland. He came to prominence in 1987 with the publication of his controversial “Liangchu ni de shetai huo kongkong dangdang” (Stick Out Your Tongue) in People’s Literature, which partially caused the author’s eventual exile. The story records Ma’s close encounters with Tibetan culture, which both fascinated and horrified him. Unable to publish his work in China, he left for Hong Kong, and when the British colony was handed over to China in 1997, he went to Germany and later to England, where he still resides.
Widely reputed as a dissident writer, Ma believes that the soul of modern Chinese literature is a profound political consciousness and that the core of his own writing is a strong conviction in individualism and in the emancipation of the self. His works are critical of the lack of freedom in China and the debilitating effects of totalitarianism on the lives of ordinary people. Hong chen (Red Dust), winner of the 2002 Thomas Cook Travel Book Award, is an insightful and moving account of his three-year trek from Beijing to Tibet in the wake of a personal crisis that involved a divorce and a political purge. More than a travelogue, the book reveals the author’s skepticism about everything from communism to Buddhism. His novel Lamian zhe (The Noodle Maker) consists of a series of stories about people living in the shadows of an authoritarian government after the 1989 crackdown on the Tian’anmen Prodemocracy Movement. The tone of the book is satirical, targeting the bizarre and cruel realities in contemporary Chinese society. Based on the same political event is his most recent book, Beijing zhiwuren (Beijing Coma), a novel that centers on a student demonstrator who remains in a coma for 10 years after being shot in the head during the Tian’anmen crackdown. When he wakes up, he is faced with a country that has changed beyond recognition: a nation suffering from a collective amnesia about what happened 10 years ago and consumed with the pursuit of material wealth. The novel is full of black humor, a prominent feature in Ma’s work, mocking the absurdities and capriciousness in an oppressive society. Ma’s other fictional works include Yuan bei (The Stele of Lamentation), Jiutiao chalu (Nine Crossroads), and Ni la goushi (Dog Shit).
MA LIHUA (1953– ). Poet, prose and fiction writer. Her writing career is built entirely upon her 25-year experience living and working in Tibet, where she went in 1976 immediately after graduating from Lingyi Teachers’ College in Shandong Province. Along with other Chinese college graduates recruited by the government to serve as teachers, technical experts, doctors, and government officials, Ma was assigned to work first as an administrator and then as an editor for Xizang wenxue (Tibetan Literature), a journal publishing literary works written in Chinese. She traveled extensively on assignments, eventually covering every county (over 70) in the Tibetan Autonomous Region. Since 2003, she has been working as general editor for Tibetan Studies Press in Beijing.
In the initial phase of her encounter with Tibet, Ma belonged, in her own words, to “the last generation of Chinese romantic poets.” Tibet provided a fantasy world into which she projected her own dreams. Later when she became interested in anthropology, Ma turned to prose writing. As she traversed the Tibetan plateau and met a wide spectrum of Tibetan people, she became one of the region’s best-known spokespersons and advocates. Her cultural reportages and travel notes, which resulted from solid field research, portray Tibetan customs in vivid details. Because of the unique literary sensibility displayed in these works, Ma is credited for having built a bridge between anthropology and literature and has been called a “literary anthropologist.” Her most important prose works include Zangbei youli (Glimpses of Northern Tibet), Xixing Ahli (Journey Westward to Ali), Linghun xiang feng (The Soul Is like the Wind), and Zangdong hong shanmai (The Red Mountains in Eastern Tibet). Her poems are collected in Wo de taiyang (My Sun) and her essays in Zhui ni dao gaoyuan (Following You to the Tibetan Plateau). She is also a noted scholar on Tibetan literature, having published Xueyu wenhua yu Xizang wenxue (The Culture of the Snow Land and Tibetan Literature). Ma’s recent publication, Ruyi gaodi (The Highland of Dreams), is a fictional work inspired by the personal account of Chen Quzhen, a Qing military officer sent into Tibet in the early 20th century. Chen wrote the memoir in 1936 to record his extraordinary ordeal in Tibet. In her book, Ma mixes real historical events with fiction, and past with present, creating a postmodern work in which fictitious contemporary characters are cast as reincarnations of historical figures to recover a deeply buried past laden with mystery, violence, courage, ambition, geopolitics, and romantic love. See also WOMEN.
MA YUAN (1953– ). Fiction writer. After graduating from Liaoning University in northeast China, where he studied Chinese literature, Ma Yuan went to Tibet to work as a journalist. The experience proved to be pivotal for his literary career. Lhasa in the 1980s was a lively place of artistic fermentation, and in Tibetan culture Ma found the perfect launchpad for his fictional experiment.
Regarded as one of the most important pioneers of China’s avantgarde literature, Ma is credited for helping to turn the writer’s focus from what stories to tell to how to tell a story. His writings, inspired by Tibetan religion and mysticism, are among the most influential works from the 1980s. Reacting against the dictates of socialist realism, which had dominated China’s literary discourse for decades, Ma experimented with literary forms and narrative strategies, thanks in part to the availability of modern Western literature in Chinese translation, among them works by Jorge Luis Borges, which exerted a strong influence on Ma. He is noted for his labyrinthine narrative style, with the narrator, often identified as “Ma Yuan, the Chinese, who writes fiction,” working to expose the fictitious nature of storytelling. His texts have complex, multileveled structures, mixing the fantastic with realistic elements. Ma’s stories are concerned less with Tibet than with his personal vision of fiction and his Borgesian metafiction style accentuates a new awareness of narrative technique. “Lasa he de nüshen” (The Goddess of the Lhasa River), “Die zhiyao de sanzhong fangfa” (More Ways Than One to Make a Kite), and “Gangdisi de youhuo” (The Lure of the Gantise) are among his best-known stories. Since he left Tibet in 1989, Ma has made television shows and taught creative writing. Although he has not produced more fictional work, he has published two collections of essays, Xugou zhi dao (The Knife of Fiction) and Yuedu dashi (Reading the Masters), on his views on literature and his approach to creative writing.
MANDARIN DUCKS AND BUTTERFLIES SCHOOL (YUAN-YANG HUDIE PAI). This term, coined in the May Fourth era, refers to middlebrow romantic fiction writers at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century, a time that witnessed great debates about the role literature played in society. While the Mandarin Ducks and Butterflies school saw literature as purely a venue of entertainment, the May Fourth leaders regarded it as a serious expression of the self and a realistic portrayal of life, ideals advocated by the Creation Society, the Literary Research Society, and the Left-wing Association of Chinese Writers. Although rejected by the elite, the Mandarin Ducks and Butterflies school writers enjoyed popular success. With their journal, Saturday (Libailiu), for which they were also called the Saturday school (Libanliu pai), they were able to flood the streets with their laid-back, entertaining tales of love and betrayal. Zhang Henshui, Zhou Shou’ou, and Bao Xiaotian were some of the most popular writers of the group.
MANG KE, PEN NAME OF JIANG SHIWEI (1950– ). Poet and painter. Born in Shenyang and raised in Beijing, Mang Ke was sent to rural Hebei at the age of 16, riding in the same horse carriage with Duo Duo. It was in the countryside that he began to write poetry. In 1976, Mang Ke returned to Beijing and two years later joined forces with other young poets including Bei Dao and Duo Duo to found Jintian (Today), an important venue for experimental poetry, which would become known as Misty poetry. Later on, as most of his friends and colleagues settled down one after another, Mang Ke continued his vagabond life in Beijing, making short and frequent trips abroad to participate in poetry festivals. Some 30 years after he published his first poem, Mang Ke turned to painting and achieved remarkable success in his new medium.
Mang Ke is a natural poet who relies almost exclusively on instinct rather than on learning. Abundant with natural imagery and pulsating with the rhythm of the earth and waters, many of his poems reflect his years in the countryside, which inspired him and nurtured his romantic view of life. Even his political poems, such as “Yangguang zhong de xiangrikui” (The Sunflower in the Sunlight) and “Tiankong” (The Sky), which boldly challenge absolutism and ideological tyranny, exude the smell and the sound of nature. Other than poetry, Mang Ke has written a novel based on his experience in rural Hebei as well as many essays, including his most recent work, Qiao! Zhe xie ren (Memories), which reminisces about his generation and some of its vivid characters. See also CULTURAL REVOLUTION.
MAO DUN, A.K.A. MAO TUN, PEN NAME OF SHEN DERONG (1896–1981). Fiction writer and literary critic. A forerunner in the New Culture Movement in early 20th-century China and a proponent of literary realism, Mao Dun made significant contributions to the development of modern Chinese literature. Through his own writings and his work as a translator, editor, and publisher, as a literary critic and theoretician, and finally as the minister of culture from 1949 to 1964, he left indelible marks in nearly every aspect of the literary and artistic endeavors of modern China.
Like the rest of his generation, Mao Dun received an education in a mixture of classics and modern thought. After graduating from Beijing University in 1916, Mao took a job as a translator and editor at the Commercial Press, where he stayed until 1925. His main achievement there was the transformation of the journal Xiaoshuo yuebao (Fiction Monthly), making it a major force in promoting a “literature for life,” in direct opposition to what was advocated by the members of the Mandarin Duck and Butterflies school and the Saturday school, who held the view that the main purpose of literature was to entertain. Mao Dun’s essay “On Proletarian Art,” published serially in Wenxue zhoukan (Literature Weekly) in 1925, established his reputation as a Marxist theoretician. It asserts that art must faithfully reflect reality and meet the needs of its time. In a class-based society, a proletarian writer must identify with the lot of the common people, to educate and inspire them in their struggle for social justice and national independence. He or she must understand the unity of form and content, which requires that new ideas be expressed in new forms, an example of which is Maxim Gorky, whose works, Mao Dun believes, perfectly combine aesthetics and the aspirations of the proletariat. In this essay, Mao Dun delineates a form of realism for modern Chinese literature and art that influenced a whole generation of Chinese writers.
The trilogy Mao Dun wrote in the late 1920s, Huanmei (Disillusionment), Dongyao (Wavering), and Zhuiqiu (Aspirations), describes the experience of Chinese youth during the different stages of the revolution that aimed to unify a China ravaged by civil wars among its warlords. The 1930s saw the best of Mao Dun’s writings, including Ziye (Midnight), a milestone in his literary career. The story takes place in 1930 when Chinese industrialists found themselves in direct conflict not only with foreign imperialist interests but also with workers’ strikes and peasants’ riots. The broad scope of the work, with its numerous characters from a wide spectrum of social classes and several plot lines, makes the novel Mao Dun’s most ambitious undertaking. Mao Dun is noted for his skill at depicting the psychological depth of his characters with a few strokes. This baimiao style is reminiscent of the classical novels the author was extremely fond of as a child. In the same year, Mao Dun published Linjia puzi (The Lin Family Shop), “Chun can” (Spring Silkworms), “Qiushou” (Autumn Harvest), and “Can dong” (The Last of Winter), all conceived to show sympathy for the oppressed and to cry for social justice. Linjia puzi, a tightly structured story, is about the bankruptcy of a small shop in a small town. Mr. Lin, an honest, hardworking man, is forced out of business by corrupt government officials and greedy creditors. “Chuncan,” “Qiushou,” and “Candong” are three independent but consecutive short stories about village life. They portray a family of silkworm raisers headed by Old Tongbao and trace their fall from financial stability to bankruptcy, from self-sufficient peasants to poor farmhands. The stories present a vivid picture of economic distress and unrest in rural Chinese communities. “Chuncan,” which focuses on the tragic lot of Old Tongbao, is a flawlessly crafted story. The moving descriptions of the family tending silkworms from hatching eggs to harvesting cocoons are some of the finest moments of the story.
Mao Dun’s most influential work during the Sino-Japanese War is Fushi (Corruption). The political novel is severely critical of the Nationalist government, exposing the maliciousness and cunning of the special agents working for the government who suppress the democratic movement while indulging in a depraved lifestyle. Despite its overtly political tone, Fushi contains some interesting formalistic innovations. It is written in diary form, narrated by a minor female secret agent of the government. This unique perspective allows the author to concentrate on psychological exploration rather than the minute descriptions and plot expositions commonly found in his writings. Mao Dun also employs the narrative style of stream of consciousness with its characteristics of free association, inverted time order, and dreams or hallucinations. These techniques enrich the psychological realism of the novel.
After his death, a memorial fund in Mao Dun’s honor was established to recognize notable achievements in Chinese literature. It is the most prestigious literary prize in China.
MAY FOURTH MOVEMENT (WUSI YUNDONG). The treaties of the Versailles Conference, signed on 28 April 1919, awarding Japan the former German leasehold of Jiaozhou, Shandong Province, triggered protests by university students in Beijing on 4 May. More demonstrations and strikes soon spread to other parts of China, followed by a nationwide boycott of Japanese goods. What began as a patriotic and anti-imperialist mass protest evolved into a national movement to reevaluate the entirety of Chinese civilization. Intellectuals attacked traditional values, identifying them as reasons for China’s backwardness, and looked to the West for ideas with which to transform their nation. The movement later split into two factions: the leftists and the liberals. The former, represented by Chen Duxiu and Li Dazhao, favored political action and established the Chinese Communist Party while the latter advocated a gradual change, emphasizing “enlightenment” as promoted by Columbia University graduate Hu Shi.
The May Fourth Movement left a profound impact not only on Chinese social and political life but also on Chinese intellectual, cultural, and literary thought. It is fair to say that modern Chinese literature was born in the May Fourth Movement and generations of Chinese writers came under its direct influence. The two writers who most represent the May Fourth spirit are Lu Xun and Ba Jin, Lu Xun for his strong indictment of the “man-eating” Confucian culture and Ba Jin for his portrayal of rebellious youths trying to break away from the confines of the traditional family and embrace social changes. See also AI QING; AI WU; BING XIN; CHEN BAICHEN; DING LING; FENG XUEFENG; FENG ZHI; HONG SHEN; HU YEPIN; JIAN XIAN’AI; JIANG GUANGCI; LAI HE; LAO SHE; LI JIEREN; MAO DUN; NEW CULTURE MOVEMENT; WANG JINGZHI; WANG LUYAN; WANG TONGZHAO; WEN YIDUO; XIA YAN; XU DISHAN; XU ZHIMO; YANG HANSHENG; YE SHENGTAO; YU DAFU; YU PINGBO; ZHAO SHULI; ZHENG ZHENDUO; ZHOU LIBO; ZHU ZIQING.
MEI NIANG, PEN NAME FOR SUN JIARUI (1920– ). Fiction and prose writer. In the 1940s, Mei Niang was as famous as Zhang Ailing, one based in the north (Changchun and Beijing) and the other the south (Shanghai) and both living in the Japanese-occupied territories during the Sino-Japanese War. Mei Niang was born in Vladivostok, where her father, a successful businessman fluent in three foreign languages—Russian, Japanese and English—was working for a railway company. Her parents had met in Vladivostok and after Mei Niang was born they moved to Changchun, where his father’s first wife lived. Though Mei Niang’s parents doted on her, they soon passed away, leaving her in the care of the unkind first wife. Growing up as a daughter of a concubine, Mei Niang understood the nature of traditional society, particularly the position of young women within a large extended family. Her pen name “Mei Niang” (literally, Plum Blossom Girl) is a homophone for “having no mother,” bearing testimony to the pain she suffered in her childhood. Later, she would repeatedly revisit this theme in her stories. While Mei Niang was an elementary school student, the Japanese army occupied northeastern China, making the young Mei Niang vaguely aware of a national tragedy. Most of the characters she created in her writings are women caught in the chaos of war, victims of misfortunes at both the personal and national levels. Mei Niang achieved her literary success at a very young age. Her first collection of short stories, Xiajie ji (Young Ladies), was published when she was merely 16 years old. At 24, she won the Japanese-sponsored Greater Asian Literature Prize for “Xie” (Crab), a semiautobiographical novella about the disintegration of a traditional family, a common theme in the May Fourth literature written by Ba Jin, Lao She, Lu Ling, and others. Mei Niang’s writings reflect the realities of China in the 1930s and 1940s, often seen through the eyes of a sensitive, educated young woman. Her stories on the fate of women such as “Yu” (Fish), “Bang” (Clam), and “Chun dao renjian” (Spring Has Arrived) render vivid portrayals of the changing world in which “the consciousness of women” was beginning to emerge as a social and cultural phenomenon, despite the oppressive restraints imposed on them by society. By the time “Zhuru” (The Midget) appeared, Mei Niang was a well-known writer who had perfected the art of short story writing in the realist mode and whose vision had gone well beyond the confines of marriage and romance. In addition to short stories and novellas, Mei Niang also attempted full-length novels, Ye hehua kai (Night Lily) and Xiao furen (Little Women), both unfinished, deal with women’s search for security and love in their relationships with men.
In many ways, Mei Niang’s life was emblematic of the upheavals of 20th-century China. As a new woman growing up in the aftermath of the May Fourth Movement, she received a good education in Changchun and later in Japan, opportunities unavailable to her mother’s generation. She became a young widow in 1948 when her husband’s ship capsized on the way to Taiwan, leaving behind Mei Niang and their three young children. Instead of staying in Taiwan or going to Japan, Mei Niang took her children back to Beijing, which was now under the control of the Communists. She was assigned to work for the Agricultural Film Studio as a scriptwriter and editor. In the 1950s, she produced some children’s picture books. During the subsequent political campaigns, Mei Niang managed to survive all kinds of appalling treatment, but two of her children died. Even as she was warmly welcomed into the circle of writers in the early 1950s, Mei Niang had already come under suspicion as “a traitor writer,” an unsubstantiated allegation thrown at those who kept working in the Japanese-occupied territories during the war. Mei Niang’s writings, like those of the other authors accused of collaborating with the Japanese, were largely ignored, for they did not fit in the national narrative of patriotism and resistance. For decades, the name Mei Niang was erased from the history of modern Chinese literature. When she resurfaced in the early 1980s, most readers had never heard of her. Since then, not only have her old works been reissued, but her new writings, mostly essays, reminiscing about the past and sharing her travels and knowledge about the world, have also been published.
METSO (1966– ). Poet, prose and fiction writer. One of the rising stars of Tibetan writers writing in Chinese, Metso grew up in Qinghai Province. Although her writings began to appear in the late 1980s, it is her 1997 novel Taiyang buluo (The Sun Tribe) that made her a national name. The novel depicts two Tibetan tribes in Amdo when the northwest was under the warlord Ma Bufang’s control during the early decades of the 20th century. In the past, historical or literary discourses that dealt with this region and this period tended to focus on the Hui Muslim and the Han population, pushing the Tibetans out to the margin. With this novel, the author reclaims her people’s history by placing the Tibetans at the center of this turbulent era to examine the Tibetan national character as well as issues such as education and modernity and their effect on cultural traditions. Another novel, Yueliang yingdi (The Moon Camp), describes life in a small Tibetan town, highlighting the romantic relationships of several residents. Like Taiyang buluo, Metso sets the story in the 20th century when the outside world began to crack open the isolated Tibetan society. History, however, is always kept in the background in Metso’s romantic novels. Nevertheless, through the stories of love and desire, Metso unravels the tragic history of the Tibetan nation, as she has done in Taiyang buluo and Yueliang yingdi.
Metso’s short stories and novellas, on the other hand, feature contemporary middle-class Tibetan women. Into these love stories she injects a dose of religiosity, turning them into quests for the meaning of life. Borrowing from the Buddhist concept of reincarnation, Metso creates characters that live in multiple manifestations, each adding a layer to the existence of another and further complicating their psychological depth. The author’s dexterous play of different voices against one another departs from the realist mode adopted in her novels and gives the stories, such as “Shexiang” (Muskiness) and “Chujia ren” (Those Who Have Taken the Buddhist Vow), a measure of experimentalism.
MISTY POETRY (MENGLONG SHI), MISTY POETS (MENGLONG SHIREN). Menglong, which could also be translated as “obscure” or “enigmatic,” implies that the meaning of a poem is not transparent, and that the poet’s intention is not spelled out clearly for the benefit of the reader. The emergence of Misty poetry in the late 1970s marked a major literary breakthrough in post-Mao China with profound ramifications. Nearly all of the Misty poets were urban youths who had been sent to the countryside during the Cultural Revolution. The harsh realities of rural life led them to question their faith in authority and the isolated countryside stimulated their literary sensibilities. To express their aspirations for freedom and spirituality in their writing, they were the first to protest against authoritarianism and ideological tyranny in the thaw of the post-Mao era. Bei Dao’s 1972 poem “The Answer” represented the voice of skepticism and the defiance of his generation. The political relaxation in the late 1970s made it possible for the underground poets to have an open forum where they could publish their own work. Bei Dao and Mang Ke established Jintian (Today), a literary journal for experimental work.
To break away from the literary practices defined by Maoist doctrine, the Misty poets emphasized the individual and the private over the political and the collective. Influenced by Western literature, they wrote imagistic, elliptical, and often ambiguous poetry, without the didactic messages and political slogans that had dominated the literature of the Mao era. In the Antispiritual Pollution Campaign of 1983, Misty poetry was singled out for criticism by the authorities. Subsequently in the aftermath of the crackdown on the Tian’anmen Prodemocracy Movement, Jintian was banned and many of the Misty poets went into exile. Years later, Jintian resumed publication abroad. Prominent among the Misty poets are Bei Dao, Duo Duo, Gu Cheng, Jiang He, Mang Ke, Shu Ting, Yan Li, Yang Lian, and Yu Jian.
MO YAN, PEN NAME OF GUAN MOYAN (1956– ). Novelist. Born in Gaomi, Shandong Province, Mo Yan received a B.A. from the Literature Department of the People’s Liberation Army’s Academy of Arts and Literature in 1981 and an M.A. from Beijing Normal University. He is undoubtedly one of the most creative and most prolific Chinese writers today. Noted for his magical realist style that takes astonishing, imaginative flights, Mo Yan has acknowledged his debt to Gabriel García Márquez and William Faulkner, whose art invoking the power of a specific locale with its own mystical norms and logic offers Mo inspiring models. In many ways, Mo Yan’s success lies in his extraordinary talent for transforming the crude and earthy into something sublime, through prose just as precise, to achieve a kind of lyric joy that permeates his works. The otherwise disconcerting dichotomy between the sublime and the grotesque is thus obliterated, producing an aesthetic experience that is both uplifting and challenging. Mo Yan’s sensibility is often characterized as grandiose and masculine, for his literary world is filled with larger-than-life heroes who flaunt their primeval personalities. Bawdy language, violent sexual conquests, relentless revenge, and savage behavior all mingle to form epic-scale sagas. Matching his strong themes, his language, with its characteristic intensity and exuberance, cascades downward like a torrential stream mingled with fantastical flights of imagination. Beginning with his first short story, “Touming de hong luobu” (The Translucent Red Carrot), Mo Yan has consistently exhibited an uncanny ability to move at ease in and out of two modes of narrative: the realist and the surrealist. This trademark can be found even in his most realist stories. He continues to push the limits of narrative innovation in his more recent novel Tanxiang xing (Sandalwood Torture) in which he uses a large amount of colloquial expression and rhymed prose, lending the text well to oral recitation. He has a unique style completely his own, easily recognizable.
The most successful of Mo Yan’s works are his historical romances, including Hong gaoliang (Red Sorghum), set during the Sino-Japanese War, Tanxiang xing (Sandalwood Torture), a love story rendered with descriptions of horrific tortures during the Boxer Rebellion of 1900, and Feng ru fei tun (Big Breasts and Wide Hips), a celebration of the female through the chronicle of the life of a sexually potent, fertile, and wise woman who lives from the end of the Qing to the post-Mao era. Mo Yan is also known for his surrealist novels, such as Jiu guo (Republic of Wine), which pokes fun at the Chinese obsession with food and the “cannibalistic” culture vehemently denounced by Lu Xun 40 years before, Tiantang suantai zhi ge (The Garlic Ballads), set in rural China of the 1980s, when a bumper harvest of garlic precipitates a series of disastrous events, and Sishi yi pao (Forty-one Bombs), a story told by a butcher’s son about growing up in a village and the moral and social problems brought about by modernization and commercialism in contemporary China. Mo Yan extols the primordial forces that, in his opinion, have been suppressed by two thousand years of Confucian civilization. He celebrates the unbridled natural forces within man; he considers the libido the essential drive for survival. His search for a primitive self in the memories of his native Gaomi is thought to be a metaphorical search for the Chinese national spirit. Termed an “explosion of life’s energies,” Mo Yan’s works resonate with the prevalent view held in China that the ancient Chinese race has degenerated, suffocated by layers of restrictions, its blood flow clogged and its life force exhausted. What the Chinese badly need, Mo Yan suggests, is the strong pulses of life, the awakened primordial forces, the “red sorghum,” the “big breasts and wide hips,” in order to rejuvenate itself.
Mo Yan’s most recent book, Shengsi pilao (Fatigue of Life and Death), an examination of the relationship between the peasant and the land, departs from his previous works in that it contains much less violence and is more contemplative. Considered by many as his best work, the story is narrated by a former landlord executed during land reform in 1950. Unwilling to admit that he committed any crime other than being rich, he is reincarnated into various domestic animals who observe up close the changes in his home village during the subsequent 50 years. See also ROOT-SEEKING LITERATURE.
MODERN POETRY MOVEMENT IN TAIWAN. In the decade from the mid-1950s to the mid-1960s, Taiwan saw the emergence of four major poetry societies that played significant roles at different junctures of the modern poetry movement: the Modernists, the Blue Stars led by Tan Zihao, Yu Guangzhong, and others; the Creationists, represented by Zhang Mo, Luo Fu, and Ya Xian; and the Regionalists, also called Li (Bamboo Hats). The modernist movement was spearheaded by Ji Xian, who founded Xiandai shi (Modern Poetry) in 1953. Three years later, the Modernist Society (Xiandai pai) was formally established, drawing a membership of more than a hundred poets. In their mission statement, the Modernists proclaimed their avant-garde position, emphasizing “horizontal transplantation” (learning directly from Western literature) rather than vertical transmission (inheriting from Chinese traditions), and the discovery of new content, form, tools and methods. They advocated wholesale Westernization and looked for inspiration in Western poetry since Charles Baudelaire. The modernist movement could be regarded as a continuation of the cause pursued by Dai Wangshu and his colleagues, including Ji Xian, two decades earlier in Shanghai. The radical departure from Chinese tradition, along with the exclusive emphasis on intellect rather than emotions, made the Modernists easy targets for criticism. In 1959, Ji Xian left the Modernist Society and the journal he founded, Xiandai shi, was closed down in 1964, ending a decade of its influence in Taiwan’s poetry movement.
Another group, the Blue Stars Society, was founded in 1954 and disbanded in 1964. In the course of 10 years, it attracted many promising poets and published several dozen poetry collections. Less radical than the Modernists, the Blue Stars were apposed to indiscriminate adoption of Western traditions, choosing instead to emphasize the creation of “pure poetry” based on personal perceptions of life. While the Blue Stars also adopted Western modernist techniques, they perceived poetry as the expression of the individual self in concert with national spirit and cultural heritage.
The third influential poetry society was the Creationists, most of its members coming from the military in southern Taiwan. The society was established in 1954 and its journal, Chuang shiji (Creationists), was founded in October of the same year. Intended as a correction to the Modernists, the Creationists rejected absolute “intellectualism” or absolute “emotionalism” in favor of imageries and symbols. In the late 1950s, when the influence of the other two societies began to wane, the Creationists abandoned their earlier positions and opted for “surrealism” in an attempt to move poetry from relying on reason and rationality to a focus on aesthetics. In 1969, financial difficulties forced them to close down Chuang shiji, which would be revived in 1972 with a renewed emphasis on tradition and reality.
While the above three societies were more or less drawn to the idea of pure poetry, the few regionalist groups, most prominently Li, the Bamboo Hats, tried to call attention to the social realities of Taiwan. The emergence of the Bamboo Hats marked the rising of a unique Taiwanese consciousness and identity. Its bimonthly, Li, from which the name for the group was derived, was one of the most influential poetry publications in Taiwan during the time. With its emphasis on Taiwan’s history, geography, and reality, the journal published poems that contained social messages, regional flavor, and colloquial language. Other prominent members include Lin Hengtai, Fei Ma, Du Guoqing, Huang Hesheng, and Zheng Chouyu.
MODERNISTS (XIANDAI PAI). In 1931, the publisher Xiandai shuju (Modern Books) put out Xiandai yuekan (Modern Monthly) and shortly after Dai Wangshu founded Xin shi (New Poetry). These two journals became the main venues for modernist writings. Authors whose works were published in these two journals became known as belonging to the modernists (xiandai pai). Poetry was by far the dominant genre in modernist literature and characterized by symbolism, graceful language, and romantic sentiments. Among its representative poets were Dai Wangshu, Li Jinfa, Ai Qing, He Qifang, and Li Guangtian. The term also refers to the literary movement in Taiwan some 30 years later, when a group of faculty and students at the Foreign Languages Department of the National Taiwan University launched Xiandai wenxue (Modern Literature), a magazine that systematically introduced Western modernist writings and published works by Taiwan’s own modernist writers. Bai Xianyong and Wang Wenxing are among the founders of the movement. See also CHEN RUOXI; OUYANG ZI.
MU DAN, PEN NAME OF ZHA LIANGZHENG (1919–1977). Poet. Born in Tianjin, Mu Dan studied Western literature at Qinghua University. When Japan invaded China, he followed his university to the southwestern city of Kunming to continue his studies. After receiving his bachelor’s from the National Southwestern Associated University in 1940, he joined the Chinese Expedition Force to Burma to aid the British troops fighting against the Japanese Imperial Army, a traumatic experience that nearly cost him his life. In 1949, he enrolled in the University of Chicago and three years later he was awarded a master’s degree in English literature. A year after that, he returned to Tianjin to teach at the Foreign Languages Department of Nankai University. During the Anti-Rightist Campaign in the late 1950s, Mu Dan was stripped of his teaching responsibilities and assigned to work as a librarian, a post he held until a heart attack took his life in 1977.
Mu Dan’s literary reputation rests solely on three poetry collections published in the 1940s: Tanxianzhe (The Explorer), Mu Dan shi ji 1939–1945 (Collected Poems by Mu Dan 1939–1945), and Qi (Flags). Influenced by T. S. Eliot, W. H. Auden, and William Butler Yeats, Mu Dan’s poetic voice is meditative, philosophical, ironic, and at times abstract, questioning the meaning of life and dealing with issues concerning the self, the soul, and the spiritual. Although he did write some patriotic poems such as “Zan mei” (A Song of Praise), he was much more adept at treating existential subjects such as alienation and tragic human existence. Mu’s poetic persona is often portrayed as lost, alienated, and fractured, as shown in “Cong xuwu dao chongshi” (From Nihilism to Substantiation). “Fangkong dong de shuqing shi” (Lyrics of an Air-raid Shelter), a poem written during the Sino-Japanese War, while expressing compassion, patriotism, and hope, does not echo the heroic, indignant sentimentalism of much of the Chinese poetry produced at the time.
Mu Dan understood the anxiety Chinese intellectuals felt as their country transitioned from the established order in which they were firmly anchored to the new, unpredictable world. While the sense of alienation expressed in his poems is firmly grounded in Chinese reality, he saw the Chinese experience as part of a human dilemma. In “She de youhuo” (The Seduction of the Snake), a parody of the Biblical story, Mu Dan readily embraces the Christian notion of original sin to convey both the Chinese intellectual’s spiritual crisis and the universal human condition. As a poet experimenting with a new form and a new language, Mu Dan did not attempt to bridge the old and the new. Indeed, his poems, whether in form or content, show little influence from the Chinese poetic tradition.
Like Shen Congwen, Feng Zhi, and many others who gave up creative writing after 1949 and turned instead to the politically safer academic writing or translation work, Mu Dan wrote only a few poems after he returned to China from the United States. He devoted his energy to translating Russian and English literature. Among the authors he translated are Alexander Pushkin, Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and John Keats. His translation of Byron’s Don Juan, which he finished in the 1970s, is widely considered a masterpiece in its own right. Mu Dan’s literary accomplishment was largely ignored in the People’s Republic of China until the 1980s, when the rediscovered poet was hailed as the most innovative modernist poet in 20th-century China.
MU SHIYING (1912–1940). Fiction writer. Born in Zhejiang, Mu Shiying spent his childhood in Shanghai with his banker father. While a student at Guanghua University majoring in Chinese language and literature, Mu was deeply engrossed in modern Western literature as well as works by Japanese New Sensibility school writers, especially those by Yokomitsu Riichi, which informed much of his work. He published his first story “Zanmen de shijie” (Our World) in 1930. Another story, “Gong mu” (Public Cemetery), made the pages of the first issue of Xiandai (Modernity), a literary journal that advocated for Chinese modernism, establishing Mu as one of the prominent writers in the Chinese modernist movement, now often mentioned in the company of Shi Zhecun and Liu Na’ou as a prominent New Sensibility (Xin Ganjue pai) writer. The stories in his first collection of fiction, entitled Nan bei ji (The North and South Poles), explore the rough world of pirates, salt merchants, gang members, cabbies, beggars, and other such figures who talk dirty and act tough. In his second collection, Gong mu (The Public Cemetery), he turns to the subtle feelings and emotions of urban bourgeois life, a central subject for all New Sensibility writers. He put great emphasis on the exploration of the individual psyche and the perception of reality through the senses and thus won critical acclaim. His stories feature Freudian psychoanalysis, focusing on love, marriage, and sexuality as a medium through which to explore the theme of alienation in modern city life. His stories collected in Baijin de nüti suxiang (The Platinum Female Statue), Yezonghui li de wuge ren (The Five People in the Night Club), and Shanghai de hubuwu (Shanghai’s Fox Trot) represent some of the best New Sensibility writings. Many of Mu’s stories feature the femme fatale who represents the lethal eros of the modern city that abandons middle-class men after it has seduced them, leaving them in a state of confusion and despondence.
In the aftermath of the Japanese invasion, Mu went to Hong Kong but soon returned to Shanghai in 1939 to work for a newspaper run by the puppet government of Wang Jingwei, who collaborated with the Japanese. The following year, Mu was assassinated, allegedly by Chiang Kai-shek’s secret service. His name was not cleared until the 1970s, when new evidence surfaced that he had been sent by the Nationalist government to infiltrate the puppet administration.
NATIVISTS (XIANGTU PAI). Wang Luyan (1901–1944) is widely considered the first of the Chinese nativist writers to explore the unique culture of his native land and to write about the effects of industrial forces that threatened the survival of rural communities in prerevolutionary China. After the 1920s, Chinese nativist literature evolved into several different forms. In sharp contrast to Lu Xun, who portrayed the countryside as the bastion of traditional values that inflicted serious damage to the Chinese national spirit, Shen Congwen depicted rural western Hunan as a pastoral refuge against modernization and Westernization. Meanwhile, the Communists promoted peasant literature, resulting in a number of writers whose works are characterized by their unique regional flavors. Zhao Shuli and his Shanxi Potato school and Sun Li and his Hebei Lotus Lake school were two of the most influential regional literary groups. In Taiwan after 1949, there was a group of writers emerging from the countryside who stood up against the influential trend of Westernization in Taiwanese literature by writing about traditional rural communities pushed to the fringes by Taiwan’s modernization process. Their work met with strong resistance, and in some cases ridicule, from the elitist camp, which was dominated by pro-Western and modernist writers. The 1977 debates on nativist literature carried out between Peng Ge, Zhu Xining, and Yu Guangzhong on one side and Ye Shitao, Chen Yingzhen, and Wang Tuo on the other highlighted the differences in the two groups’ aesthetic and political views. In the years that followed the debates, the nativists gradually gained a strong foothold in Taiwan, producing among the group such prominent names as Huang Chunming, Wang Zhenhe, and Chen Yingzhen. The nativist movement in its various forms and manifestations has influenced the root-seeking literature on the mainland since the 1980s.
NEW CULTURE MOVEMENT (XIN WENHUA YUNDONG). Associated with the May Fourth Movement and motivated by an urgent sense of cultural endangerment, the New Culture Movement was born in 1915 when Chen Duxiu founded Qingnian zazhi (Youth Magazine), renamed Xin qingnian (New Youth) a year later. In its first issue, Chen urged the nation’s youths to throw away the “feudalist” shackles that had restricted the Chinese mind for more than a thousand years and to adopt Western concepts of democracy and science. He challenged them to be “independent instead of slavish,” “progressive instead of conservative,” “outgoing instead of withdrawn,” “down-to-earth instead of pretentious,” “scientific instead of imaginary,” and “open instead of unreceptive to the rest of the world.” When Chen accepted the offer of Cai Yuanpei, president of Beijing University, the center of the New Culture Movement shifted from Shanghai to Beijing. Cai, a liberal-minded administrator, recruited some of the nation’s best minds for his university, including Hu Shi, Li Dazhao, Qian Xuantong, Liu Bannong, Zhou Zuoren, and Lu Xun. These and other prominent intellectuals helped make Beijing University a breeding ground for the New Culture Movement.
In addition to the campaign for social reforms based on “Mr. Democracy” and “Mr. Science,” which included educational reforms and the emancipation of women, the New Culture advocates waged a literary campaign to promote a new literature written in the vernacular instead of classical Chinese, which had a stranglehold on Chinese political, intellectual, and literary discourses. This linguistic reform, advocated by Hu and others, went far beyond the restructuring of the language; it had profound ramifications for the Chinese society as a whole. With classical Chinese taken down from its lofty pedestal, the authority of the classics and their intellectual and moral hold on the Chinese consciousness were loosened. The modernization of the country, the New Culture proponents argued, demanded a new written language and a new literature that was accessible to the broad masses not just the intellectual elite. In the 1917 February issue, Chen published “Wenxue geming lun” (On Literary Revolution), in which he defined the new literature as being “unassuming and expressive,” “fresh and honest,” and “plain and popular,” a people’s literature that was realistic and socially engaged. Xin qingnian was the chief venue for publishing new literary works. Pioneering writings such as Hu’s vernacular poems and Lu Xun’s short stories made their first appearances in Xin qingnian. These and other progressive writings offered critical examinations of age-old Chinese traditions, especially Confucianism, and advocated learning from the West, some going so far as to call for total Westernization.
Extremely popular among the educated youths, Xin qingnian inspired many reform-minded political activists such as Mao Zedong, who was introduced to Marxism by the magazine, as well as literary youths such as Ba Jin, who came into contact with it in the remote southwestern city of Chengdu. Largely confined to the intellectual elite, the New Culture Movement nevertheless brought widespread changes to Chinese society. In the beginning, the movement focused on attacking traditional thoughts and practices and bringing in new ideas and concepts from abroad. As some of the leaders became increasingly radicalized and opted for political action, as exemplified by Chen and Li, who went on to become founders of the Chinese Communist Party, the movement branched off in two separate directions: with Hu, Zhou, and others interested in gradual and intellectual enlightenment and Chen, Li, Lu Xun, and others pushing for political radicalism.
NEW GENERATION WRITERS (XIN SHENG DAI ZUOJIA). A term used for young writers who were born in the 1970s or 1980s, the latter also called “the post-1980s generation” (bashi niandai hou zuojia). Many among the group became famous at a young age, often while still in high school. In many ways, this is the generation of the Internet, which launched many careers by publishing works online and attracting a sizable following among Web surfers. It is also the generation of market economy, with youth magazines such as Mengya (Sprouts) promoting and marketing literary stars. The works by this new generation of writers are known for explicit, sometimes sensationalist, sexual content, distinctly unabashed exhibition of materialism, and self-absorption. Initially rejected by the mainstream literary establishment, the best among them have gradually gained recognition from critics for their increasingly sophisticated treatment of youth culture in contemporary society. The best known and most commercially successful among this generation of writers are Wei Hui and Han Han. See also HU JIAN; LI SHASHA; SU DE; XIAO FAN; YAN GE; ZHANG YUERAN.
NEW SENSIBILITY SCHOOL (XIN GANGJUE PAI). Active in the 1930s and 1940s, the New Sensibility writers, most prominently Shi Zhecun, Mu Shiying, and Liu Na’ou, wrote about the lives of the young and flamboyant generation in the bustling metropolis of Shanghai, exploring the workings of the individual psyche and the perception of reality through the senses. Their focus on sensual experiences and the musicality of language set them apart from other modernist writers who shared their obsession with modern urban life with its dance halls, cafés, and movie theaters.
NI KUANG, A.K.A. NI YIMING, NI CONG, WEI SILI, AND SHA WENG (1935– ). A prolific writer of science fiction, fantastic tales, martial arts novels, and popular romances, Ni Kuang was born in Shanghai and moved to Hong Kong in 1957. Since 1992, he has been living in San Francisco. In the early 1960s, encouraged by Jin Yong, he began writing science fiction, becoming arguably the best-known science fiction writer in the Chinese-speaking world. His Weisili Xilie (The Wellesley Series) and Shentan Gaosi xilie (Goss the Great Detective) have won him a large following among Chinese readers. As movies turned into a major entertainment venue in Hong Kong, Ni embarked on a successful career writing for the film industry. He has written more than 300 film scripts. Known also for his anti-Communist stance, Ni is believed to have said, “To be patriotic, one must be opposed to Communism and to be opposed to Communism is patriotic.”
NIE GANNU (1903–1986). Essayist, poet, and short story writer. Known for his wit and extraordinary talent, Nie Gannu spent his youth in the 1920s working as a secretary in the Nationalist army, teaching school in Malaysia, editing newspapers in Burma, training as a cadet in the Huangpu Military Academy in Guangzhou, and studying at Sun Yat-sen University in Moscow. In the 1930s, he joined the Left-wing Association of Chinese Writers and the Communist Party and spent several months in prison in Japan for his anti-Japanese activities. In the 1930s and 1940s, while editing progressive newspapers and journals, he wrote political essays, satirizing the Nationalist government and its attacks on the Communists. He also wrote about social injustice and the plight of women. For his sharp and biting language, Nie is widely considered the number two essayist, after Lu Xun, in modern Chinese literature, writing in the genre of satirical essay. After 1949, Nie worked as editor for the Wenhui Daily in Hong Kong and the People’s Literature Press in Beijing. A proud and independent man, he was considered by the authorities as “unruly” and “liberal” and suffered a great deal during the various political campaigns of the People’s Republic of China, despite being a veteran party member and having a long-standing friendship with many of the top leaders. In his later years, Nie wrote many poems in the classical style. Because of his personal integrity and the acute political insights he expressed in his writings, his work has attracted renewed interest in recent years. Other than his essays, Nie also wrote short stories and critical essays on classical Chinese novels.
NIE HUALING (1925– ). Fiction and prose writer. Born in Hubei Province, Nie Hualing graduated from Central University with a degree in English. She moved to Taiwan in 1949 to work as a literary editor for Ziyou Zhongguo (Free China), a bimonthly journal that promoted liberal ideals, and soon after began to publish stories. In 1964, Nie went to the United States to participate in the Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa. In 1967, Nie and her future husband, Paul Engle, established the International Writing Program, which attracted many writers from all over the world. During the 21 years the couple ran the program, hundreds of writers were invited to Iowa City, including more than 80 from Hong Kong, Taiwan, and the mainland. For their tireless effort to promote exchange among writers of different cultures and countries, Nie and Engle received numerous awards, including the Award for Distinguished Service to the Arts from the Governors Association. Nie retired from the University of Iowa in 1988.
Nie’s best-known work is a fictional piece entitled Sangqing yu Taohong (Mulberry and Peach: Two Women of China) about a woman’s transformation from innocent youth to hardened middle age. Mulberry and Peach, two different aspects of the same person, represent self-alienation of the individual, calling into question the meaning of self-identity. Told in the form of journal entries and letters, the story centers on the theme of exile, underscoring the attempt to flee from various kinds of predicament, both external and internal. Another work, San sheng san shi (Three Lives in Three Worlds), is an autobiographical account of the author’s life in China, Taiwan, and the United States. For her portrayals of strong female characters, Nie is regarded as one of the forerunners of Taiwan’s feminist movement.
OUYANG JIANGHE (1956– ). Poet and poetry critic. Like many of the Generation III poets, Ouyang Jianghe grew up in Sichuan. He is from a military family and served for nine years in the army. Ouyang is deeply indebted to classical Chinese poetry, having committed to memory hundreds of poems. Prior to “Xuan guan” (Cliff Burials), published in 1985 and which he regards as the watershed in his career, his early poetry pays homage to his cultural heritage, with an emphasis on the dichotomy between Sichuan’s ancient shamanist heritage and centralized imperial power, as well as the interplay between modern and classical Chinese. The change after “Xuan guan” to contemporary themes without the weight of history opened for the poet an outlet to explore the relationship between word and object. “Shouqiang” (The Handgun), which brings into focus the temporal and conceptual quality of the physical entity, is representative of these later poems.
Ouyang’s view of poetics is articulated in Zhan zai xugou zhe bian (On the Side of Fabrication), a collection of essays on contemporary Chinese poetry, including critiques of Bei Dao and fellow Sichuanese poets Zhai Yongming and Bai Hua. Echoing American poet Wallace Stevens, Ouyang asserts that the highest form of reality can be achieved only through the intervention of creative agency and that poetry, because of its total dependence on the perception of the individual mind, contains more truth than any other genre.
OUYANG SHAN, PEN NAME OF YANG FENGQI (1908–2000). Novelist. Ouyang Shan is often compared with Lao She, for they began their literary careers at about the same time, with Ouyang writing about urban life in the southern city of Guangzhou and Lao She, the northern city of Beijing. This is, however, where the similarities end. Ouyang Shan, because of his membership in the Left-wing Association of Chinese Writers, had strong Marxist leanings and his writings clearly reflect his political orientation. Most of the fictional works he published in the 1920s and early 1930s were romantic tales with a revolutionary theme.
Ouyang’s first novel, Meigui can le (The Roses Have Faded), a sentimental tale influenced by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther, tells of the tragic love between a university student and a young woman, interspersed with indignant outcries against imperialism. Ai zhi benliu (The Current of Love) shows greater artistic merit in depicting a young man’s entanglement with two women, one poor and the other rich. This tragic story exposes the cruelty of high society and shows sympathy for the lower class, an ideological preoccupation that continues into his later works, such as Gao Ganda (Gao Ganda) and Yidai fengliu (A Whole Generation of Heroes). Gao Ganda, which records the agricultural cooperative movement in the Communist-controlled northwest, was his first novel written in response to the directives issued by Mao Zedong at the Yan’an Forum on Literature and Art in 1942. The voluminous Yidai fengliu, consisting of five parts, is his most ambitious project. It portrays the complicated relations among three families during the period from 1919 to 1949. San jia xiang (The Three-Family Lane), the first volume of the series, is generally considered the best of Ouyang’s work for its panoramic view of Chinese society at the beginning of the 20th century and its successful portrayal of distinctive characters.
Ouyang considered his writings after the mid-1930s, when he joined the Left-wing Association of Chinese Writers, “new realism,” and those published after 1942, when he attended the Forum on Literature and Art, “revolutionary realism.” Both advocate a seemingly self-contradictory principle: “Characters must not be separated from reality and they must be made to stand higher than they really are.” This approach, taken by many other Communist writers, dominates much of Ouyang’s work. See also SOCIALIST REALISM.
OUYANG YUQIAN (1889–1962). Play and screenplay writer. One of the founders of modern Chinese theater and cinema, Ouyang Yuqian often acted in the plays he wrote and directed and his impact on Chinese performing arts is profound. Ouyang spent his teenage years studying in Japan, where he joined a theater club. In 1906, he began training to be a Peking opera actor at the age of 17 and launched his professional acting career nine years later. His success at playing the female role earned him eminence comparable to that of Mei Lanfang, the legendary Peking opera actor who also impersonated women onstage. Ouyang expanded the Peking opera repertoire with several of his own pieces, including Pan Jinlian (Pan Jinlian: A Seductress), Daiyu zang hua (Flower Burial), and Yuanyang jian (A Pair of Swords), as well as offering performance techniques and stage installations shaped according to his own aesthetics.
From the opera stage, Ouyang moved on to transform the Chinese theater, introducing huaju (spoken drama), a new form influenced by the Western genre of play. He wrote and directed historical plays such as Mulan cong jun (A Woman Warrior) and Tao hua shan (The Peach-Blossom Fan). Having established his reputation in the theater, Ouyang entered the film industry, again writing, directing, and sometimes acting in his own films. Tianya genii (A Female Street Singer), Qingming shijie (At the Qingming Festival), Xin taohua shan (A New Version of the Peach-Blossom Fan), and Yehuo chunfeng (Blustery Wind and Wildfire in Spring) are among his most memorable films. In keeping with the spirit of the times, these films promote progressive agendas such as the emancipation of women and national salvation. After 1949, Ouyang held several positions in the Chinese theater and academia, including president of the Chinese Academy of Theater and chairman of the Chinese Dance Association. See also LEFT-WING ASSOCIATION OF CHINESE WRITERS; SINO-JAPANESE WAR; SPOKEN DRAMA.
OUYANG ZI, A. K. A OUYANG TZE, PEN NAME OF HONG ZHIHUI (1939– ). Fiction writer and literary critic. Born in Japan, Ouyang Zi went to National Taiwan University. Along with fellow students Bai Xianyong, Wang Wenxing, and Chen Ruoxi, she edited a literary magazine called Xiandai wenxue (Modern Literature), which was the main venue for Taiwan’s modernist writings. Most of Ouyang’s creative endeavors are short stories of an experimental nature that make liberal use of modernist techniques such as stream of consciousness, multiple perspectives, and symbolism. Her best critical writing is a study of Bai Xianyong’s Taipei ren (Taipei Characters). See also MODERNISTS; WOMEN.
PAN JUN (1957– ). Fiction writer. Born in a small town in Anhui Province, Pan Jun had a difficult and lonely childhood. His artist father, labeled a rightist one year after Pan was born, was sent to live in the countryside separated from his family for the next 18 years. Pan became known as an avant-garde writer in the late 1980s when his experimental fiction was first published, including “Nanfang de qingxu” (The Mood in the South), “Xianjin” (Trap), and “Sanyue yiri” (March the First), all about humanity’s fear and anxiety about surviving in the world. Other notable works written during this period include Baise shalong (A White Salon), “Liudong de shatan” (Moving Beach), and most important, Feng (Wind), which culminates his innovative effort with narrative techniques. Feng is written in three different narratives, representing respectively the historical perspective, the imagined world, and reality. Interlocked, they deconstruct one another, destroying the illusion that each has painstakingly created.
At the height of his success, Pan put his writing career on hold to join the business rush in the south, and in 1996, when he was financially secure, Pan resumed writing. In the second phase of his creative endeavor, Pan has produced an impressive range of works, from experimental plays to historical novels. The most significant is an autobiographical novel entitled Dubai yu shoushi (Soliloquy and Hand Gestures), in which the author and the narrator collapse to create a confessional narrative. In this tale about a writer who returns to his hometown after a long absence and reminisces about the past 30 years of his life, Pan explores self-imposed exile and historical imperative, themes that have preoccupied much of his work. The novel also manifests the author’s fascination with formalistic features through the integration of verbal narration with visual images of his own art, a talent developed during the years Pan spent in the countryside after high school. Other such innovative stories include novellas Lan bao (Blue Castle), Chong tong (Two Pupils in the Eye), Qiusheng fu (Ode to Autumn), and Taohua liushui (Peach Blossoms and Flowing Water).
Pan’s most recent book, Sixing baogao (A Report on the Death Penalty), as its title indicates, examines tradition, law, and practice with regard to the death penalty. Pan cites many international cases, including the O. J. Simpson trial in the United States, to provide a comparative framework for the Chinese cases he focuses on. Inspired by an incident in which an innocent man was beaten to death while in police custody, the book represents the author’s concern over the lack of justice and compassion in China’s legal system.
PING LU (1953– ). Fiction writer. Born in Gaoxiong, Taiwan, Ping Lu studied psychology at National Taiwan University and statistics at the University of Iowa. While working as a statistician for the United States Postal Service, Ping published stories in Taiwanese newspapers. One short story, “Yumi tian zhi si” (Death in a Cornfield), won first prize in a fiction competition sponsored by the United Daily News. Ping has worked as editor and professor of journalism and creative writing in Taiwan, and since 2002 she has been living in Hong Kong. Of her prose fiction, the 1995 novel Xing dao tianya (Marriage Made in Revolution), about Sun Yat-sen and Song Qingling, and her 2002 novel about the pop singer Deng Lijun, are the best known.
QIAN ZHONGSHU (1910–1998). Born in Wuxi, Jiangsu Province, Qian studied literature at Qinghua University. In 1935, he went to England with his bride, Yang Jiang, and two years later earned a baccalaureus litterarum (bachelor of literature) degree from the University of Oxford with a thesis on the image of China in English literature of the 17th and 18th centuries. Soon after, the couple moved to France for further study and research. They returned to China in 1938 and began a long career in academia. Called “the most learned man in 20th-century China,” and famous for his extensive knowledge of both Western and Chinese literature and thought, Qian acquired the reputation of an erudite scholar bent over books in his study, showing no interest in the outside world.
Qian saw himself foremost as a scholar and devoted his entire career to studying literary works, both Chinese and Western. His scholarly publications include an exegetical book on Song dynasty poetry, Song shi xuan zhu (Annotated Poetry of the Song), a study of poetry Tan Yi Lu (On the Art of Poetry), and the voluminous Guan zhui bian (Studies of the Classics), which evaluates the Chinese classics from a comparative perspective, drawing contrasts with Western classics. Written in classical Chinese in the style of reading notes, Guan zhui bian represents the author’s accumulated wisdom resulting from a lifetime study of literature, history, and philosophy. Qian’s creative endeavors, on the other hand, resulted in a relatively small body of works: a novel, several short stories all written before 1949, a collection of essays, and poems composed in the classical style. Hardly prolific, Qian is nevertheless a household name, thanks to the television movie based on his novel, Wei cheng (Fortress Besieged). The novel makes fun of Chinese intellectuals, particularly those who have returned to China from abroad, for their lack of self-awareness and their failures at everything from marriage to career in a tumultuous country struggling for survival under Japanese occupation. In the protagonist, a college professor, Qian casts an image of the Chinese intellectual with good intentions whose downfall is assured because of his selfish, lowly, and petty nature. See also NEW CULTURE MOVEMENT; SINO-JAPANESE WAR.
QIDENG SHENG, PEN NAME OF LIU WUXIONG (1939– ). A Taiwan native, Qideng Sheng graduated from Taipei Normal College with a degree in art. He is noted for his controversial modernist writings, most published in the 1960s and 1970s and known for their loose structure and idiosyncratic, abstruse language. With little attention to plots, his stories, told often in the first-person subjective voice, read like lyrical essays. His protagonists, loners standing at the edge of society, tell the reader the minute details of their lives and innermost feelings, appealing directly to the reader’s sympathy. Letters and interior monologues as used in Tanlang de shuxin (Letters from Tanlang) and Simu weiwei (Whispers of Love) are typical of Qideng’s narrative style. Other works include Wo ai hei yanzhu (I Love Black Eyes), his best-known work about the alienated youth in modern Taiwanese society, and Shahe bei ge (Sad Songs of the Sha River), recollections by a disillusioned musician suffering from acute lung disease. Other than fiction, Qideng has also written poetry.
QIONG YAO, PEN NAME OF CHEN ZHE (1938– ). Romance novelist. Born in Chengdu, Sichuan Province, Qiong Yao arrived in Taiwan with her family in 1949. Her first collection of short stories, Chuang wai (Outside the Window), was published in 1963 and since then she has written numerous novels, many of which have been adapted into popular movies or television series. Arguably the most popular romance novelists in the Chinese-speaking world, Qiong Yao places the development of a romantic relationship between the protagonists at the heart of all her novels, focusing on falling in love and the courtship, as well as the encounter and resolution of conflicts that are presented in the form of a triangular relationship, parental rejection, or misunderstanding between the lovers. Nearly all her novels emphasize the feelings of the female protagonist, often an innocent and beautiful girl, who makes unconditional commitment to the romantic relationship; her faith and good behavior are always rewarded in the end. In celebrating romantic love, Qiong Yao’s novels tend to neglect sociopolitical considerations. In her novels, both the conflict and the climax are directly related to the core theme of love. In 1970s Taiwan under martial law of the authoritarian government, and in 1980s mainland just coming out of the political and ideological tight control of the Mao era, her novels, with their unequivocal emphasis on the true emotions shared by a young couple, were a breath of fresh air for teenagers learning about love and romantic relationships. See also WOMEN.
QIU MIAOJIN (1969–1995). Fiction and prose writer. Despite a short life, Qiu Miaojin has left behind a notable legacy in contemporary Chinese literature. Her writings, along with her tragic death, have shed new light on the predicament gays and lesbians faced in Taiwanese society despite the significant gains in the perception and acceptance of homosexuality made in urban Taiwan in recent decades. Qiu graduated from National Taiwan University with a bachelor’s degree in psychology. While studying in Paris, she committed suicide. She left behind four books: Gui de kuanghuan (Revelries of Ghosts), Eyu shouji (Notes of an Alligator), Jimo de qunzhong (A Solitary Crowd), Mengmate yishu (Letters Written in Montmartre before Death), and a diary, Qiu Miaojin riji (Diary of Qiu Miaojin), the last two items posthumously published. Of these works, Eyu shouji is the best, generally considered a Chinese classic on lesbian culture, whose reputation is so widespread that the name of its main character, Lazi—coined from Les(bian)—has been adopted as a self-reference by Chinese lesbians. The allegorical, semi-autobiographical novel traces the four undergraduate years of Lazi’s life, as she ponders the dubious integrity of the self in relation to sexual identity and the role of writing—ideas that function for her as a means to explain away her emptiness and self-doubt as well as a way by which she can derive meaning out of a confused life. Lazi’s propensity for dark ruminations over her homosexual and homoerotic feelings is juxtaposed with the humorous, self-effacing disposition of the other main character, Alligator. Throughout the novel, Lazi’s first-person mythopoeic voice is frequently intersected by the lighthearted tone of Alligator, who represents an entity at odds with society, unsure of its sexual orientation and uncomfortable with its appearance, a strange species on the verge of extinction now being chased and gazed at by the public, a mirror image of Lazi. Both characters fade away after having been repeatedly persecuted, indicating that death and destruction are inevitable outcomes of a precarious existence.
Mengmate yishu contains 20 letters and journal entries Qiu wrote in France shortly before she took her own life. They are distressed professions of her strong feelings for the woman who betrayed her. The outpouring of her innermost emotions and the description of her tortured experience trying to come to terms with her lover’s betrayal reveal her views on the meaning of love, life, and art, and paint a self-portrait of the author as she struggled desperately between salvation and destruction. Similarly, Qiu Miaojin riji is also self-writing at its most candid. On the other hand, both Gui de kuanghuan and Jimo de qunzhong are collections of short stories about an alienated and rebellious population rejected by mainstream society. At the heart of Qiu’s work lies the author’s recognition that the nature of passion and love intensifies human existence in both its most beautiful and most monstrous moments.
ROOT-SEEKING LITERATURE (XUNGEN WENXUE). A literary movement that began in the early 1980s, root-seeking has been the most pervasive and influential literary trend in post-Mao Chinese literature. The poet Yang Lian was perhaps the first to express the need for Chinese literature to come to terms with China’s cultural heritage. In his poems written around 1982, such as “Banpo” (Banpo: the Neolithic Age) and “Dunhuang” (The Dunhuang Caves), Yang sets out to discover the nation’s past buried deep in the ancient lands and to examine its implications for the Chinese literary imagination. At around the same time, Wang Meng published his Xingjiang stories Zai Yili (In Yili), which, while recounting his experience in exile in the remote northwest, introduces the unique cultures of the Uygurs and the Kazaks. Wang Zengqi creates in “Da nao jishi” (Notes about the Great Mire) a pastoral world steeped in Chinese traditional virtues. Soon after, many writers, particularly those who had spent years during the Cultural Revolution in rural China as educated youths, eagerly joined the movement. Jia Pingwa’s “Shangzhou chu lu” (Stories of Shangzhou), Zhang Chengzhi’s Beifang de he (The River in the North), Ah Cheng’s Qi qang (The King of Chess), Wang Anyi’s Xiao Bao zhuang (Bao Town), Li Hangyu’s “Zuihou yige yulao’r” (The Last Fisherman), and many other works all came out at once, creating a phenomenon that caught the immediate attention of literary critics. A conference was held in Hangzhou in 1984 to discuss the significance of this cultural and literary phenomenon and explore new methods in fiction writing. In the following year, several writers, including Ah Cheng, Zheng Yi, Han Shaogong, Zheng Wanlong, and Li Hangyu, published their “root-seeking proclamations.” Among them, Han’s article, “Wenxue de gen” (Roots of Literature), which gave the movement its name, was the most influential and widely regarded as the unofficial “manifesto” of root-seeking literature. Using the example of the rich ancient Chu culture known for its highly imaginative and mystical shamanistic traditions, Han urged his fellow writers to “transcend reality” and to explore “the mysteries that define the development of a nation and of human existence.” In the view of Han and his colleagues, there was a gap between the ancient past and the present, and in the 20th century, China had experienced a period of amnesia, in which the nation’s rich past was erased from the collective memory of the Chinese. The responsibility of a writer, they believed, was to help the nation reconnect to its past, to “sort out,” in the words of Li Hangyu, the cultural roots. Only by doing so, they argued, would Chinese literature be able to “dialogue” with the rest of the world. The goal of the root-seekers, therefore, was to search for authentic Chinese national roots in order to claim a spot in the global literary scene.
The primary locus of root-seeking literature is the Chinese countryside, where the political winds that swept China during the past century had only limited success. Agrarian society is thought to be the heart of Chinese culture, uncorrupted by Western influences and therefore retaining the primordial energies of humanity. Unlike the earlier nativists (xiangtu pai), the root-seekers were not satisfied with realistic representations of rural life and regional customs. Influenced by a wealth of literary traditions from the West and particularly by Latin American magic realism, they identified ancient Chinese traditions as a source of a new literature that addressed profound, universal issues while expressing a subjective vision of art and life. Mo Yan’s Gaomi stories celebrate the exuberant primordial energies and affirm the masculine vigor as opposed to the physical inferiority of the meek and “civilized” Confucian tradition; Tashi Dawa’s Tibetan tales unfold a world of mysteries and religious practices, and Han Shaogong’s Bababa (Pa pa pa) depicts an isolated community in the remote mountains of Hunan where the villagers’ behavior is controlled by irrational, superstitious beliefs, unaffected by the events in the outside world. Although the ancient roots that inspired the root-seekers were most often found in remote rural China, they also existed in the cities and were uncovered by “the urban root-seekers.” Deng Youmei of Beijing and Lu Wenfu of Suzhou were the most representative of the group. Deng’s portraits of the Manchu descendents and Lu Wenfu’s stories about the history and customs of Suzhou not only record in vivid detail the vanishing or vanished cultures but also examine their impact on the people and the society they left behind.
Although the root-seeking movement reached the height of popularity in the 1980s, its impact is still felt at present. From its ranks have emerged some of the best writers in China today and the ancient cultures that inspired the root-seekers to continue to provide inspiration for Chinese writers. See also CHEN ZHONGSHI; LI RUI; LIN JINLAN; FENG JICAI; JIA PINGWA; LIU HENG; SU TONG; NATIVISTS; YU HUA; YE ZHAOYAN; ZHENG CHENGZHI; ZHANG WEI.
ROU SHI, PEN NAME OF ZHAO PINGFU (1902–1931). Poet and fiction writer. Born in Zhejiang, Rou Shi attended Hangzhou Number One Teachers’ College, where he became a member of Chen Guang She (The Morning Sun Association), a progressive literary organization. After graduating, he taught at various schools and continued to write in his spare time. The short stories he wrote expressed his frustration with the state of the country. In Shanghai, he became acquainted with Lu Xun, who invited him to edit Yu si (Words and Language). He was a founding member of the Left-wing Association of Chinese Writers and the Chinese Communist Party. He was arrested by the Nationalist government and executed in prison along with four other left-wing writers. Of his fictional works, “Wei nuli de muqin” (Slave Mother) is best known. It describes a peasant woman’s sad life and calls for the liberation of the working poor. Other works include “San jiemei” (Three Sisters) and Jiu shidai zhi si (Death of the Old Era) as well as a poetry collection, Zhan (Fight). He also translated literature from Denmark, the Soviet Union, and Eastern Europe. See also CIVIL WAR.
RU ZHIJUAN (1925–1998). Fiction writer. Ru Zhijuan belonged to the generation of writers who were nurtured by the Communist revolution. Born into a poor family in Shanghai, Ru lost her parents at a young age. She received some schooling in Christian missionary schools until her elder brother took her with him to join the Communist army in 1944. She was a performer and a playwright in the army’s art troupe and worked as a nurse during battles. After she left the army in 1955, she was an editor for a literary journal in Shanghai until 1960, when she became a professional writer. She was the party secretary of the Shanghai Writers’ Association before her death at the age of 73.
Ru is best remembered for her short story “Baihe hua” (Lilies on the Quilt) published in 1958. The story is based on the author’s experience in the late 1940s when the Communists were fighting the Civil War with the Nationalists. Instead of the battlefield, the story focuses on what happens in the background. The simple plot involves a young soldier going to a village to borrow quilts for the wounded solders and meeting a family’s young bride. It is an innocent romantic story, with its subtle juxtaposition of a beautiful young woman enjoying the sweet love of her new marriage and a naive 19-year-old man ignorant of sexual matters. Treating a war story in such a fashion is uncharacteristic of Communist literature and it is no surprise that the story was singled out in the 1960s as an indication of the author’s bourgeois sentimentality. Ru wrote other stories but none captured the same kind of attention as “Baihe hua.”
Among Ru’s works published after the Cultural Revolution, the best known is “Jianji cuole de gushi” (The Incorrectly Edited Story), an exposé of the mismanagement of rural economy during the Mao era, focusing on two characters in an agricultural commune who represent the opposing forces within the party between the self-serving ideologues and the truth-seeking realists. Ru’s writings tend to pay more attention to characterization than plot development. She is a writer of subtle emotions and her language is straightforward but vivid and fresh. See also WOMEN.
SAN MAO, PEN NAME OF CHEN PING (1943–1991). Born in Chongqing, the wartime capital of the Republic of China, San Mao moved to Taiwan with her parents. A precocious child, she had trouble fitting into the public school of Taipei and was subsequently home-schooled. She began publishing stories in her teens, but did not gain fame until the release of her first book, Sahala de gushi (The Sahara Tales), which records her personal experience in the African desert. Most of her later works are also based on her own experiences abroad. Wan shui qian shan zhoubian (Trip to South and Central America) is a travel journal commissioned by the Lianhe Daily after San Mao returned to Taiwan in the wake of her Spanish husband’s sudden death in a drowning accident. San Mao taught creative writing at the Chinese Culture University and delivered guest lectures all over Taiwan. Her popularity reached new heights after she committed suicide in a Taipei hospital. See also WOMEN.
SCAR LITERATURE (SHANGHEN WENXUE). Derived from the title of a short story written by Lu Xinhua and published in 1978, the term refers to literature written in the late 1970s and early 1980s that treats the devastating effects of the Cultural Revolution—the “scars” it left on the minds and souls of the Chinese youth. Liu Xinwu’s “Ban zhuren” (The Homeroom Teacher) is another work that helped define the humanistic literary movement. While the mainstream of scar literature exposes the negative impact of political movements in the past decades, others focus on the moral and spiritual rectitude of the individual and the compassion of ordinary people. Cong Weixi’s “Da qiang xia de hong yulan” (The Red Magnolia under the High Wall) and Zhang Xianliang’s “Tu lao qinghua” (Love in a Prison) reflect the fortitude of the political prisoners as they endure trauma and torture; Zhang Jie’s “Senlin li lai de haizi” (A Boy from the Forest) and Ye Weilin’s “Zai meiyou hangbiao de heliu shang” (On the River without a Navigation Mark) shed light on the triumph of the human spirit and love despite difficult circumstances. See also WANG MENG; FENG JICAI.
SEBO (1956– ). Fiction writer. Born in Chengdu, Sichuan Province, Sebo spent his childhood in Fenghuang, Hunan Province. In 1973, he went to the northeastern province of Liaoning to study medicine, and after graduation in 1975 he worked for several years as a medic in various parts of Tibet. Sebo started writing in the early 1980s. His short stories, such as “Yuanxing rizi” (Circular Days) and “Zai zhe shang chuan” (Getting on the Boat Here) portray capricious characters at odds with both Tibetan culture and outside influences. The illusive world created by Sebo reflects the predicament of modern-day Tibet as well as his philosophical views about life. Some critics consider Sebo an existentialist for his pessimistic characters engaged in a perpetual search on a lonely, circular journey. Sebo’s works, firmly anchored in Tibetan culture, explore the clash of civilizations and cultures and what that clash means to the survival of indigenous traditions. His Tibet is full of contradictions and complexities, different from the utopian world portrayed by some of his fellow Tibetan writers. Like many young writers in the post-Mao era, Sebo is influenced by Western literature, such as works by Italo Calvino, Jorge Luis Borges, Milan Kundera, and William Faulkner. Sebo currently lives in Chengdu, Sichuan Province.
SHA TING (1904–1992). Novelist. Born in northwestern Sichuan, Sha Ting is best known as a chronicler of the agrarian society of his hometown. His works can be roughly divided into two categories: the ideological stories, written in response to Communist Party policies, and the hometown stories, based on people and events he personally encountered. From the very beginning of his career, Sha tried to fit his writing to the templates of the proletarian literature advocated by Mao Dun and others in the Left-wing Association of Chinese Writers, which he joined in 1932. His eagerness to embrace its ideology may have contributed to the dogmatic and moralizing style found in some of his writings. Yet, throughout his life, Sha struggled to stay close to his birthplace, repeatedly abandoning a promising political career, often to the chagrin of party leaders and his friends, in order to return to his roots for creative inspiration. Deep in his heart, he did not see himself as a politician and he got greater satisfaction from writing novels than from being a bureaucrat. His best works are those inspired by the real people of his hometown, who serve as prototypes for his characters. He was less of an imaginative writer than a keen observer and superb portraitist.
The characters that populate his hometown stories are peasants, local gangsters, landlords, government officials, and small-town intellectuals: the wide spectrum of people he met while growing up and through his uncle, the leader of the Society of Brotherhood, a well-known gang in Sichuan. The tone he often adopts in these tales is humorous and at times satirical. His satire is subtle; he never lashes out directly but lets his characters speak for themselves. “Zai qixiangju chaguan li” (In the Teahouse), a short story written in 1940, exposes the collaborations between the local gangsters and military officers. The political purpose of the story is to expose and satirize behaviors that hinder social reforms and the war effort. The message is conveyed not through moralizing and explicit propaganda, but through the words and acts of the characters. Sha does not rely on lengthy descriptions or psychological analysis to portray his characters; rather, his stories consist mostly of vivid dialogues in colloquial speech.
Tao jin ji (Gold Rush), written in 1942 and considered his best work, is the first of his many novels. The story revolves around a piece of land that is the center of a fight among local gentry, gangsters, and officials. Tao jin ji is a consummate study of local customs, language, and social networks, as well as the author’s understanding of his own roots. Sha laments the ignorance and selfishness of small-town Chinese, whose energy and cleverness are misplaced. Instead of uniting to fight against the Japanese, they go to extreme lengths to destroy each other in order to protect their own interests. The inspiration for Kun shou ji (Caged Animals), a novel about elementary school teachers in rural Sichuan, came from his brother-in-law, whose elopement with the concubine of a wealthy landlord, leaving behind a wife and three children, caused a stir in town. Sha was intimately familiar with rural schoolteachers, his wife and his mother-in-law having taught in the country for many years, and was sympathetic to what they had to endure in such an isolated environment. Huanxiang ji (Homecoming), finished during the Civil War, focuses on the negative consequences of the Nationalist government’s conscription campaign in the countryside.
After 1949, Sha tried to keep up with the times by writing about the accomplishments and transformations taking place in the country, but his work failed to achieve the same force and appeal as his hometown stories. In the 1980s, he refocused his attention on Sichuan, resulting in Hong shi tan (The Red Rock Beach), a novel regarded as the sequel to Tao jin ji. While the older book describes an old order essentially untouched by external events, the new book rings its death toll. In Hong shi tan, those who used to rule the insulated agrarian world make their last desperate attempt in the 1950s to hold on to power. Sha was much more at home and much more enthusiastic about portraying the old era than the new one he helped to usher in.
SHEN CONGWEN (1902–1988). Fiction writer. A self-described “country bumpkin,” Shen Congwen hailed from the backwaters of a mountain town in western Hunan. Following the local tradition, he enlisted in the army at the age of 14, hoping to succeed in the military like his paternal grandfather who had risen through the ranks to become a general. Disillusioned by military life and uninterested in spending the rest of his time in small towns, he left the army and went to Beijing to seek a new life. With only an elementary school education, he could not pass the college entrance exams, so he audited classes. While attending lectures at Beijing University and devouring books in the city library, he began to write pastoral stories. By the end of the 1930s, he was one of the most respected Chinese writers. Fiercely independent, he was wary of political interference, which, he maintained, would rob literature of its soul. In the 1930s, at the height of his career, he infuriated his colleagues by criticizing the lack of individuality and frivolous pursuits of modern writers, which catapulted him to the center of a heated debate. He was denounced by both the left and the right; the left accused him of misleading the youth by encouraging them to withdraw from society; the right found his call for a literature of “flesh and blood” too ideological.
For his writings, Shen drew mostly from the wealth of his early experiences, the host of people he had met as he roamed western Hunan as a soldier and the old customs and street scenes that fascinated him as a child, to illustrate a world in direct contrast to modern urban life. This pastoral landscape is simple, but not simplistic. The world of the mountain villages in western Hunan that appears in some of his stories seems timeless, untouched by Confucian morality or modern concepts, and runs according to a different set of rules and values. The child bride in “Xiaoxiao” (Xiao Xiao) escapes a severe punishment when her out-of-wedlock pregnancy is discovered by her in-laws. Shen does not depict Xiaoxiao as either a victim of or a rebel against traditional morality, however, as a progressive writer would do: her life is spared partly because the head of her family “has not read Confucius.” In “Bian cheng” (Border Town), another masterpiece of Shen’s, he depicts an idyllic world inhabited by characters, the rich and the poor alike, who are kindhearted, generous, and trustworthy.
Other than the stories reminiscent of his hometown, Shen also wrote about city life, including “Shengshi de taitai” (The Gentleman’s Wife) and “Ba jun tu” (A Portrait of Eight Steeds). Unlike the sincere, nostalgic tone in his hometown stories, a satirical voice describes the urban scene, making fun of the lack of morality in the polite society of high officials, university professors, and college students who maintain an exterior of propriety and intelligence underneath which hides their mean and vulgar nature. While exposing the sordid side of high society, the author also depicts the lives of the lower classes, particularly the struggle of folks from the countryside, like himself, for dignity and respect. In general, his city stories never reached the same degree of achievement as his rural tales.
After a painful period of soul-searching, Shen concluded in 1949 that his pen was out of date and he could not transform himself fast enough to keep up with the new society. He stopped writing fiction and sociopolitical essays altogether and reinvented himself as an expert in the field of antiquities. His work resulted in several groundbreaking scholarly books on ancient Chinese silk, costumes, lacquer, mirrors, and other cultural relics. Shen made a successful career as a scholar of antiquities but is best remembered as one of the greatest writers of 20th-century China. See also NEW CULTURE MOVEMENT; NATIVISTS.
SHEN RONG (1936– ). Fiction writer. Shen was born in Hankou, Hubei, and had an eventful childhood due to the wars and political upheavals that surrounded her. She moved with her parents from one place to another and eventually settled in Chongqing. After 1949, she worked as an assistant in a publishing house and studied Russian at the Beijing Institute of Russian Studies. Shen began writing in the 1970s under the influence of socialist realism. Her best work in the 1970s is “Yongyuan shi chuntian” (The Eternal Spring). Set against the background of the decades between the Sino-Japanese War and the Cultural Revolution, the story portrays a female revolutionary cadre. Shen’s breakthrough, however, did not come until the publication of Ren dao zhongnian (At Middle Age), a story about the difficulties faced by middle-aged professionals as a result of the collusion of political ideology with pervasive bureaucracy. When the story was turned into a movie, Shen became an instant celebrity.
After Ren dao zhongnian, Shen continued to write about the damages the Cultural Revolution did to the nation. Rendao laonian (At Old Age) was published in 1991 when Chinese society had undergone fundamental changes since the late 1970s. The three main characters, all professional women who were college classmates in the 1950s, experience a sense of loss and disillusionment in the midst of a rapidly commercializing society. Unable to fit into the new world, they have only one consolation: their memories of the idealistic 1950s when they, like the newly founded country, were optimistic and full of energy.
SHI SHUQING, A.K.A. SHI SHU-CH’ING (1945– ). Novelist. Born and educated in Taiwan, Shi Shuqing, whose influence crosses the geographical and political boundaries separating Taiwan, Hong Kong, and the mainland, began her literary career with stories about her native Lugang, a small town in Taiwan. Tales such as “Bihu” (Gecko), “Ci Guanyin” (The Porcelain Guanyin), and “Nixiangmen de jidian” (The Fiesta of the Clay Statues) are teeming with characters who are physically and psychologically disfigured and whose world is rampant with madness, psychosis, morbidity, and death. With these gothic stories, Shi was recognized as an experimental, avant-garde writer interested in exploring the alienating effects of modern society on the lives of the individual, a theme that would make recurring appearances in her later works. After Shi moved to New York to study theater at the City University of New York, she wrote a series of stories on immigrants’ lives in the global capitalist economy.
In 1979, Shi settled in Hong Kong, which became the setting for some of her major works, including stories collected in Xianggang de gushi (Hong Kong Stories) such as the novella “Weiduoliya julebu” (The Victoria Club). Her most celebrated books on Hong Kong are her Xianggang sanbuqu (The Hong Kong Trilogy). This ambitious project traces four generations of one family from the late 19th century, when the British took possession of Hong Kong, to 1997 when the city was handed over to the Chinese. The protagonist is a woman named Huang Deyun, whose metamorphosis from a village girl, kidnapped and sold into prostitution, to a powerful businesswoman serves as a representation of Hong Kong during its turbulent century of colonial possession, as it changed from its humble beginnings as a plague-ridden port to a gleaming metropolis, the “pearl” on the crown of the British Empire. Grand in its epic scale, the novel is also a rich study of race and gender, providing interesting material for postcolonial and feminist studies.
In Weixun caizhuang (Blush of Intoxication), her first novel since her return to Taiwan, Shi turns her attention to the process of Westernization. The novel treats the business of importing Western wine and its consumption in Taiwanese society during the late 1990s, delivering a powerful exposé of the culture of a wine market created and manipulated by a group of imaginative but shady business dealers.
SHI TIESHENG (1951– ). Fiction writer and essayist. After middle school, Shi Tiesheng left Beijing and went to work in a village in Shaanxi, where he stayed until an illness brought him back to the capital. For 10 years after that, he worked in a small factory. Shi gained fame in the early 1980s with a series of lyrical stories, including “Wo de yuaoyuan de qingpingwan” (My Far Away Qingpingwan), which is based on his life in the village. Shi casts an affectionate eye on his characters: the honest farmers who know nothing but hard work and suffering and the equally innocent city youths who have come to accept the harsh realities of the northwestern loess. In a controlled but loving tone of voice, Shi calmly relates the small aspirations of rural people.
Laowu xiaoji (Record of an Old House), an autobiographical novel, relates the first few years of his life in the factory after he was paralyzed from the waist down. The straightforward narrative style Shi uses for this work has been adopted in many of his other stories. The novel Wuxu biji (Notes of Discussions of Impractical Matters), published in 1996, is widely considered his best work. Other writings include prose pieces about his personal struggle with illness, such as Bing xi suibi (Fragments Written between Illnesses) and “Wo yu ditan” (In the Temple of the Earth), a touching confessional essay that records how little scenes in the park changed his perspective on life and prevented him from committing suicide. Years of living in a wrecked body made him prone to melancholic ruminations but his illness also made him more philosophical with regard to the meaning of life and death, a frequent theme in his writings.
SHI TUO, A.K.A. LU FEN, PEN NAMES OF WANG CHANGJIAN (1910–1988). Fiction and screenplay writer and essayist. Shi Tuo spent his childhood in the backwaters of the eastern Henan countryside. In 1931, he went to Beijing and his involvement in the protests against Japanese aggression led to the publications of his first short stories. Encouraged by Ding Ling, Shi continued writing stories that exposed the evils of the government and the bitter sufferings of the poor. In 1937, his story “Gu” (Rice) won the Dagong Daily Prize, marking the beginning of the most productive period of his career, which saw the publications of three more collections of short stories: Limen shiji (Notes of Limen), Yeniao ji (Wild Birds), and Luori guang (Light of the Setting Sun). Shi’s stories contain vivid descriptions of scenery, a distinct local flavor, and a biting satirical tone, but, lacking in plot development, they are essentially lyrical prose. In the 1940s, Shi, living in the Japanese-occupied Shanghai, began to work on longer pieces, producing one novella and two novels, Jiehun (Getting Married) and Ma Lan (Ma Lan), which are considered his representative works. He also wrote screenplays during this period.
After 1949, Shi worked as a screenplay writer and editor for the Shanghai Film Studio and became a member of the Shanghai Writers’ Association. He published one novel, Lishi wuqing (History Is Unsympathetic) and some historical plays, including Ximen Bao (Ximen Bao), before the outbreak of the Cultural Revolution. See also SINO-JAPANESE WAR.
SHI ZHECUN (1905–2003). Fiction writer, poet, essayist, translator, and scholar. As an artist, no one among his contemporaries was more inventive than She Zhecun. From composing classical poetry to creating modern verses, from his Mandarin Ducks and Butterflies (Yuanyang hudie) tales, to his New Sensibility (xin ganjue) stories, he put his energy to narrative innovations and is credited for having spearheaded the modernist movement in 20th-century Chinese literature. Best remembered for his psychoanalytical fiction, Shi was one of the first Chinese writers to use Western modernist techniques such as stream of consciousness and montage in his writings. Among his fictional work, “Jiangjun de tou” (The General’s Head), a historical tale, and “Meiyu zhi xi” (One Rainy Evening), a languorous story about a chance meeting between a man and a woman, are some of the best illustrations of modernist literature. With their exquisite descriptions of the psychological interiors of the characters, Shi’s works depart in a significant manner from the mainstream of modern Chinese literature.
After 1937, Shi gave up creative writing altogether for an academic career, becoming a prominent scholar on classical Chinese literature. In the Mao era, his name was erased from books on modern Chinese literature. He resurfaced in the 1980s, however, and his books were put back on the shelves of libraries and bookstores. Shi was equally at home inside the “four windows” (in his own words) he had opened: the study of classical literature, creative writing and editing, foreign literature translation and introduction, and ancient tombstone inscriptions. See also CULTURAL REVOLUTION; MODERNISTS.
SHIZHI, PEN NAME OF GUO LUSHENG (1948– ). Poet. Born into a military family, Shizhi began writing verses when he was in the third grade. Considered the most influential poet in the underground poetry movement during the Cultural Revolution, Shizhi expressed the spirit of defiance as early as the late 1960s. A forerunner of post-Mao poetry, he has influenced Bei Dao, Yan Li, and many others of the Misty generation,. His exuberant poems, such as “Xiangxin weilai” (Trust the Future), “Yu’er sanbuqu” (Fish Trilogy), and “Si dian ling ba fen de Beijing” (Beijing at 4:08) were hand-copied and circulated widely among the educated youth, showing them the dark realities of the era and giving them hope for a better future. In 1973, Shizhi was diagnosed with schizophrenia and has spent much of his time institutionalized since the 1980s. He began using the pen name Shizhi (forefinger) in 1978, signifying his indifference to the public’s finger pointing because of his mental illness. He continued to write after being institutionalized, and his poems appeared in the underground poetry journal Today, founded by Bei Dao, Mang Ke, and others. He became a member of the Chinese Association of Writers in 1997 while still in the Beijing No. 3 Social Welfare House, a mental ward outside the city. Shizhi attributed his intellectual and political independence to his illness: “Since I wear the hat of being insane, I can do whatever I want to: to be absolutely independent in thought and spirit, like a horse in the sky traveling at its own speed and direction without any restraint, all because I am insane.” He is indeed known as the “mad poet.”
SHU TING (1952– ). Born in Fujian, Shu Ting rose to fame in the early 1980s as the most prominent female poet among the Misty poets. Shu began to write in the years of the Cultural Revolution when she was working among peasants. Compared with the poems written by other Misty poets, her work is much more accessible and less abstruse. Shuangwei chuan (The Double-masted Boat), Hui changge de yiweihua (The Singing Iris), and Shizuniao (Archaeopteryx) are some of her poetry collections. She has also published several collections of essays.
For her association with the underground literary journal Jintian (Today), Shu came under attack during the Antispiritual Pollution Campaign in the late 1980s. While many other Misty poets have left China and obtained foreign citizenships, Shu has remained in China. See also WOMEN.
SHU XIANGCHENG, PEN NAME OF WANG SHENQUAN (1921–1999). Poet, novelist, essayist, and painter. A native of Hong Kong, Shu began publishing vernacular poetry and short stories in the 1930s while still a college student. When Hong Kong fell into the hands of the Japanese in 1942, Shu went to the mainland and stayed on till after Japan surrendered. The difficult experiences he suffered during these years while traveling through the Chinese hinterland provided rich material for a novel, Jianku de xingcheng (An Arduous Journey), and other works. In 1948, Shu returned to Hong Kong and soon reached the most productive period of his career. While working at his daytime job in the office of various businesses, he wrote at night, resulting in a large number of stories, poems, and essays, published under more than a dozen pen names to avoid jeopardizing his job and to protect his identity when researching for new stories. Shu’s work also benefited from his many trips abroad, including his participation in the 1977 International Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa.
A realist writer, Shu was a true believer in the representational mode. He practiced an art that sought to reflect life truthfully. Born and raised in Hong Kong, he was familiar with the history and environment of the city, and the thoughts and customs of its residents, and tried to re-create them in his works. For many years, Shu remained Hong Kong’s favorite writer, whose works were appreciated by a wide spectrum of readers. Most of his fictional works deal with life in the lower echelons of society with its squalid conditions as well as its energy and humanism. “Liyu men de wu” (Mist over the Carp Gate) is a nostalgic tale about a man returning to his hometown with fond memories of the past. Bali liang’an (On the Banks of the Seine), inspired by his trip to Paris, features a French artist whose aspirations are repeatedly dashed by a materialistic society. Although set in a foreign land, this story resonates with the feelings Shu had about the fate of artists in Hong Kong, where true art found no sympathetic audience and all artistic forms were in danger of being commercialized. Taiyang xiashan le (The Sun Has Set), serialized in a literary journal in 1961, was published in 1984 on the mainland under the new title Gangdao dajie de beihou (Behind the Main Streets of Hong Kong). It tells the story of a poor but ambitious man who succeeds in life through perseverance and hard work.
Shu applied the techniques of realism to his painting as well as his poetry. His poems illustrate slices of Hong Kong life, expressing the poet’s love and affection for the island. A fan of Cantonese opera and folk music, Shu transfers its rhythm and cadence to his poetry, which depicts the grotesque vulgarity of modern existence, denounces its morbid dehumanization, and calls for a return to the embrace of Mother Nature.
SIMA CHANGFENG, PEN NAME OF HU XINPING (1922–1980). Born in the northeast, Sima Changfeng left the mainland for Hong Kong on the eve of the Communist victory. He worked as an editor and taught literature in colleges and published mostly essays and some short stories from the mid-1950s to the late 1970s. He died in Canada. His early works are reminiscences of his childhood and youth, and in the latter part of his career, he focused on creating belles lettres that appealed to sophisticated sensibilities. Sima also wrote scholarly works, including a three-volume history of modern Chinese literature.
SINO-JAPANESE WAR (1937–1945). In the 19th century while the Qing dynasty was deeply mired in its domestic and international problems, Japan was strengthening its modernization project and expanding its imperial army. By the end of the century, it had become the most powerful nation in Asia. Following the examples of Western colonial powers, Japan set out to conquer China and the rest of Asia in an effort to fulfill its own imperial ambitions. When the Europeans marched into China after the Boxer Rebellion and proceeded to carve up the country and divide the bounty among them, Japan was an active participant. Having been defeated in the first Sino-Japanese War (1894–1895), the Qing was forced to cede Taiwan to Japan. After the Russo-Japanese War (1904–1905), Japan replaced Russia as the dominant force in southern Manchuria. When World War I (1914–1918) ended, Japan took control of Qingdao, in the Shandong peninsula, from Germany. In addition to these territories, Japan acquired concessions in Tianjin and Shanghai.
In 1931, the Manchurian Incident or Mukden Incident, which involved the bombing of the Japanese-controlled railroad near Shenyang (then known as Mukden), gave Japan the pretext to set up a puppet government, called Manchukuo, headed by Puyi, the deposed last emperor of the Qing. Japan then pressured Chiang Kai-shek’s government to recognize Manchuria as an autonomous entity. Preoccupied with consolidating his power, Chiang Kai-shek was initially reluctant to engage the Japanese in military confrontations, and Japan, using the security of Manchukuo as justification, soon moved in to occupy Rehe (Jehol), Chahar, and the areas surrounding Beijing. Growing anti-Japanese sentiments in the country led to Chiang’s kidnapping in Xi’an by General Zhang Xueliang in December 1936, forcing Chiang to form a coalition with the Communists. In 1937, the Japanese army pushed toward Beijing and was met with resistance from the Nationalist army at what is known as the Marco Polo Bridge in the southern suburb of Beijing. The Marco Polo Bridge Incident marked the beginning of a full-scale war between China and Japan. In no time, large Chinese territories fell into Japanese hands, and the Nationalist government was forced to retreat to Chongqiing, where they set up the war capital. From 1937 to 1941, China fought the Japanese alone. After Japan attacked Pearl Harbor in December 1941, the Sino-Japanese conflict folded into the larger theater of World War II and the Chinese military began to receive aid from the Allied forces.
The full-scale Sino-Japanese War lasted for eight years, costing immeasurable human and economic loss. It also changed the political landscape of China, leaving a lasting impact on the future of the country. Faced with an outside enemy, the ruling Nationalist Party and the Communists put aside their differences and built a united front against the Japanese. By the end of the war, the Communists had gained enough strength to pose a real threat to the Nationalists. The ink of the peace treaty was barely dry before the two sides plunged into a civil war that would continue for four years.
During the Sino-Japanese War, literary production reached an all-time high, both at the battlefront and in the Japanese-occupied territories. The antiwar sentiments merged into the leftist movement and became the mainstream of Chinese literature. Writers such as Xiao Hong, Xiao Jun, and Duanmu Hongliang, refugees from war-torn Manchuria, and Communist writers such as Zhao Shuli, emerged as new stars. The “national defense literature” (guofang wenxue), so termed by Zhou Yang and Zhou Libo to highlight the patriotic spirit, spread to film and theater, which were nearly taken over by the left-wing camp spearheaded by Tian Han, Xia Yan, Ouyang Yuqian, Yang Hansheng, and others. At the other end of the spectrum, writers in the Japanese-occupied territories such as Zhang Ailing, Su Qing, Mei Niang, and others pursued a path separate from the mainstream by focusing on the self, the family, romantic love, and social mores.
SOCIALIST REALISM. Endorsed by Mao Zedong in 1942 at the Yan’an Forum on Literature and Art, this aesthetic doctrine guided Chinese writers for nearly four decades, from the 1940s through the 1970s. A combination of realism and romanticism, socialist realism requires writers to treat subject matter that is in the mainstream of the national agenda. It holds the view that literature should reflect reality in a true-to-life fashion (which explains the popular practice of living with peasants in order to write about the countryside). Furthermore, it must articulate predetermined ideological objectives, leading to the creation of stereotyped and romanticized heroes. See also DING LING; SUN LI; ZHAO SHULI; SHA TING; HAO RAN; LIU BAIYU; OUYANG SHAN; SHEN RONG; ZHOU ERFU; ZHOU LIBO.
SPOKEN DRAMA. As precursors to spoken drama, xin ju (new play) and wenming xi (civilized drama), which were popular at the beginning of the 20th century, acted as bridges between traditional Chinese opera and the modern spoken genre, containing somes features of the older form such as improvisation and all-male casting but without the singing and music. The collegiate aimei ju (amateur play), which reached its height of popularity in the 1920s, was performed by students in school assembly halls. Fully scripted and often with an all-female cast, it was one step closer to spoken drama. Hong Shen is credited for naming the modern theatrical form hua ju (spoken drama) in 1928, when it began to be performed professionally in public theaters. It is the dramatic form of William Shakespeare, Henrik Ibsen, Molière, George Bernard Shaw, and other Western playwrights, which was transplanted to the Chinese stage.
The Chinese spoken drama is generally believed to have started in Japan, where in 1907 a group of Chinese students led by Li Shutong performed Chahua nü (The Lady of the Camellias), an adaptation of the French play by Alexandre Dumas, fils. Later in the same year, another drama society staged Uncle Tom’s Cabin in Shanghai. The early practitioners of the spoken drama were progressive youths inspired by Ibsen, whose plays, conceived to reflect social reality, became models for the Chinese playwrights. A Doll’s House was especially influential in its call for the emancipation of women, a significant component in the New Culture Movement. The popularity of the spoken drama was closely connected to the agenda of national revival and modernization the May Fourth intellectuals put forward to address what they believed to be a critical national crisis. For the survival of the nation, ordinary Chinese had to be enlightened and educated. Theater as a popular form of entertainment was seen by the reform-minded intellectuals as one of the most effective means to get their message to the masses directly and expeditiously. Chen Duxiu, founder of the Chinese Communist Party and the progressive journal New Youth, advocated transforming the traditional theater into a revolutionary venue, “a big classroom” with actors working as “important teachers.”
Changing the traditional Chinese theater, however, proved to be a nearly impossible task. Entrenched in its own conventions and styles, the operative form relied heavily on old tales and historical romances for material. Therefore, what the audience focused on was the art of the performance, not the message of the play, as they were already familiar with the stories and moral lessons. To be able to go on the stage, the actors had to have received rigorous training, often from a young age, in a highly stylized form that involved singing, dancing, acrobatics, and acting. The props and costumes were also specialized. These features intrinsic to the traditional theater posed serious challenges to the reform-minded dramatists, who were faced with an ancient art form loaded with specific stylistics and preconditioned expectations. What the New Culture Movement looked for was a nimble form that required no particular professional training and easily adapted to different stage settings and social issues. The Western play met the needs of the progressive intellectuals perfectly. It was no accident that most of the early works of the new genre were staged in schools by amateur student actors, before a professional theater emerged in the late 1920s.
From translations or adaptations of Western plays, the Chinese playwrights moved to creating some memorable works of their own. Among the trailblazers were Tian Han, Hong Shen, Guo Moruo, and Cao Yu, and together with the professional troupes led by Ouyang Yuqian, Xia Yan, and others, they successfully transplanted a Western theatrical form and ensured for it a permanent place in the Chinese theater. A century later, the spoken drama still shares the stage with traditional operas. See also CHEN BAICHEN; CHENG FANGWU; DING XILIN; DUANMU HONGLIANG; GAO XINGJIAN; LAI SHENGCHUAN; LAO SHE; LEFT-WING ASSOCIATION OF CHINESE WRITERS; LI JIANWU; LIN JINLAN; LU LING; LU XING’ER; WEI MINGLUN; WOMEN; WU ZUGUANG; XU XU; YANG HANSHENG; YANG JIANG; YE LINGFENG; YU JIAN; YU LING; ZHANG XIAOFENG.
SU DE, PEN NAME OF WANG YI (1981– ). Fiction writer. Born and raised in Shanghai, Su De began writing short stories and essays at the age of 14. She attended the Young Writers’ Workshop at the Lu Xun Institute of Literature and graduated from East China Normal University. Like Xiao Fan and many other post-1980s generation writers, Su De’s career was launched by Mengya (Sprouts), a literary journal for young readers. Her first story, “Wo shi Lanse” (I Am Blue), a sentimental tale about a girl named Blue, appeared in 2001 in Mengya, which put out more of her stories in the following years. Her work also appeared on the Internet, mostly on www.rongshuxia.com, a popular literary website that has published several of her stories. After she had attracted a sizable following among online readers, Su De was then embraced by the mainstream literary establishment. In 2002, Zhishi Press issued Yan zhe wo huangliang de e (Along My Desolate Forehead), a collection of short stories. The following year saw the publication of another short story collection, Ci malu shang wo yao shuo gushi (I Want to Tell Stories in the Streets). Ganggui shang de aiqing (Love on the Rails), hailed as her best work so far, came out in 2004. In 2005, Shu (Atonement) was published.
Nearly all of Su De’s stories are about urban youths and their emotional ups and downs. Most of her characters come from broken families and lead lonely lives; they are vulnerable and cynical, sensitive and cruel, with deep psychological scars. “Yan shi” (Gone like Smoke), for example, addresses passionate love and the confusion, inner turmoil, and depression associated with sexual desire. Ganggui shang de aiqing is a tragic story of two star-crossed lovers who grew up as brother and sister but share no blood relations. Their “incestuous” affair drives their parents to death. Feelings of guilt force the lovers apart, like two rails traveling in the same direction but never connecting. In the end, depression drives the young man to suicide and the young woman into self-imposed exile. Su De is noted for the skillfully woven labyrinthine plots and the sophisticated language that represent her narrative style, as well as the nuanced portrayals of distrustful and insecure teenage characters who are featured prominently in her writings. See also WOMEN.
SU QING, PEN NAME OF FENG YUNZHUANG (1914–1982). Essayist, fiction writer, and playwright. In Japanese-occupied Shanghai, Su Qing was as well known as her friend, Zhang Ailing. Jiehun shi nian (Ten Years of Marriage), a novel based on her own unhappy marriage, made her famous in Shanghai. In both her fiction and her newspaper columns, she wrote about the difficulties of everyday life for women, particularly career women like herself. She also talked about women’s sexual desire in undisguised language. Stories such as “Liang tiao yu” (Two Fish), “Xiong qian de mimi” (Secrets), and “Fei e” (Moth), all told in the first-person narrative and drawn from her personal life, represent some of the most audacious expressions of sexuality found in Chinese literature of the 1940s. A divorced single mother raising children on her own, she distrusts marriage as an institution and proposes that it should not be the only viable option for women or men and that cohabitation should be socially acceptable. Her style of writing is plain and straightforward, painting her characters with bold, simple strokes. In addition to her autobiographical novel Jiehun shi nian, her other well-received books include the novella Qi lu jia ren (A Beauty on the Wrong Path), and the short story collection Tao (Waves). She depicts the pragmatism of career women, their self-consciousness, and their anxieties. After 1949, Su stayed on in Shanghai and wrote plays for the Shanghai Yueju Opera Troupe. The changed political environment, however, made it difficult for her to continue her creative work and she underwent a series of political persecutions until she finally died in poverty and sickness, unable to witness the revived interest in her writings.
SU TONG, PEN NAME OF TONG ZHONGGUI (1963– ). Novelist. Su Tong began writing in the early 1980s while a student in the Chinese Department of Beijing Normal University. Although he had published several experimental works before, it was Yijiusansinian de taowang (The Escapes in 1934) that established his reputation as an avant-garde writer. He is better known for his “neohistorical” fiction. Yingsu zhi jia (The Poppy Growers) is a dark tale about a family whose downfall is brought about by lust and murder, symbolized by the crop they grow. Qiqie chengqun (Raise the Red Lantern) details the fate of women in a traditional household. Mi (Rice) is an engrossing story of a farm boy who amasses a fortune and loses it all through sexual conquest and murder. Hongfen (Rouge), about two former prostitutes and their entangled relationship with a man, portrays the social transformations that take place in the early years of the People’s Republic. Wo de diwang shengya (My Life as Emperor), tells the account of an emperor’s meteoric life in a fictitious dynasty, from supreme ruler to a poor acrobat, making a living on the streets. In these neohistorical dramas, Su Tong gravitates toward the past, taking advantage of the unfamiliarity provided by temporal distance to exercise his fertile imagination. In these texts, Su Tong proposes a new interpretation of history, one that is driven by forces of sexual synergy and mysterious transgressions.
Su Tong’s other preoccupation is his childhood memories, which has resulted in a series of stories centered on a fabricated neighborhood, called Xiangchunshu Street, in a southern city. The brutal realities of this place include illicit sex, dark secrets, insanity, and inexplicable deaths, as presented in such stories as “Shujia xiongdi” (The Shu Brothers), “Nanfang de duoluo” (The Degeneration of the South), “Ciqing shidai” (The Era of Tattoos), “Chengbei didai” (The Northern Part of the Town), and the loosely structured novel, Fengyangshu shange (The Song of Maple and Poplar Trees). In these works, Su keeps the official history of the Cultural Revolution in the background and focuses on creating a personal history of the 1960s, a time of his own coming of age. What is real is the palpable memory of inexplicable violence, the colors and smells of the neighborhood river, the desolation, the loneliness, the poverty, the chaos, and the vague awakening of sexual desire that make up a sad but innocent childhood. In his recent novel She weishenme hui fei (Why Can Snakes Fly), Su examines contemporary life. This allegorical story centers on a local bully hired to collect debts for a company. The tale begins with the mysterious appearances of a young woman and trainloads of snakes that invade the city. Human corpses mingled with snake skeletons are juxtaposed with the fate of the woman, whose dreams of becoming a star end in a life of prostitution.
One of the most creative voices in modern Chinese literature, Su Tong is noted for his profound analysis of human nature and for his memorable portraits of women. The lyricism, sensuality, and allegorical nature of his work are also frequently cited as evidence of his gift as a writer. See also ROOT-SEEKING LITERATURE.
SU WEIZHEN (1954– ). Fiction writer. Born in Taiwan, Su Weizhen graduated from a school of film and theater run by the military in Taipei and received her Ph.D. from the Chinese University of Hong Kong. She currently teaches literature at the Chinese University of Culture in Taipei. Su spent more than 10 years in the army, which provided material for her early work. Her best stories, however, are not about soldiers but about young lovers, focusing especially on female desire and sexuality. Her stories, such as “Pei ta yiduan” (Accompany Him Awhile), “Hongyan yi lao” (Lost Youth), and “Shijian nüzi” (Women in the World), often portray women entangled in passionate romances that end tragically. Psychosis, insanity, disappearance, and death permeate her stories, enveloping them in darkness. Her female protagonists willingly and unregretfully throw themselves into the passions and perils of relationships with abandonment, and their single-mindedness accentuates the power and darkness of sexual love. Su’s aesthetic of passion is most powerfully expressed in Chenmo zhi dao (An Island of Silence), which depicts the female mind and body as a proud and aloof island, silent on the surface but turbulent underneath. Although Su’s subject is passion of the heart, her tone is invariably controlled and ironic. Her other main works include Fengbi de daoyu (An Island in Isolation), Moshu shike (Magic Moment), and Likai Tongfang (Leaving the Residential Compound for Military Families).
SU XUELIN (1897–1999). Fiction and prose writer. Educated in Beijing and France, Su Xuelin spent the last 47 years of her life in Taiwan. Su had a long list of publications, mostly scholarly work on classical and modern Chinese literature. Her creative writings include Lütian (The Green Sky), a collection of essays, Ji xin (The Thorn Heart), an autobiographical novel, and Chantui ji (Cicada’s Exuviae), a collection of historical tales. Her critical essays on her contemporaries such as Lu Xun, Yu Dafu, Lu Yin, Xu Zhimo, Bing Xin, and many others offer unique perspectives into their lives and their works. See also MAY FOURTH MOVEMENT; WOMEN.
SUN GANLU (1959– ). Fiction writer and essayist. Based in Shanghai, Sun Ganlu is arguably the most radical practitioner of China’s avantgarde literature. His stories, especially those published in the late 1980s, including “Wo shi shaonian jiutanzi” (I Am a Young Drunkard), “Xinshi zhi han” (A Mail Carrier’s Letter), and a novella Qing nüren caimi (Inviting Women to Solve a Puzzle), show strong indications of influence by Jorge Luis Borges. With no beginnings or endings other than seemingly free streams of impressions strung together, these texts defy fundamental rules that govern traditional storytelling. Qing nüren caimi, for example, contains a secondary text, “Tiaowang shijian xiaoshi” (Looking from a Distance at the Disappearance of Time), which moves in and out of the main text, serving as its narrative content and at the same time mocking and deconstructing its premises. There is also the absence of character development in the story, usually considered an essential feature of fictional art. Like pieces in a jigsaw puzzle, the characters are movable and can replace one another and even the roles of reader and narrator are interchangeable. Qing nüren caimi is metafiction, intended primarily to provide a self-exposition of the narrative construct. Such a narrative posture is a defiant reaction to the dominance of socialist realism in Maoist literature, which privileges content over form. However, having served its historical purpose, this kind of purely formalistic exercise is impossible to sustain. Indeed, many of the writers who began their careers as experimentalists quickly moved on to incorporate at least some elements of traditional storytelling into their later work; Su Tong and Yu Hua are two good examples. The transition has proved more arduous for Sun, however.
Sun’s first novel, Huxi (Breathing), published in 1997, though still retaining some of the experimental features of his earlier work, has a traceable plot and a story to tell. His latest work, another novel, Shaonü qunxiang (Portraits of Maidens), part of which has been published, relies on a sharply tuned language to depict and ponder identifiable contemporary issues. Sun is a writer with an enormous talent for inventing a discourse that is deliberate, intricate, uniquely his own, characterized by its long-winded syntax and its epigrammatic phrases. A long-time resident of Shanghai, Sun was a farmer and a postal worker before becoming a member of the Shanghai Writers’ Association. He currently lives in the city.
SUN LI (1913–2002). Novelist and essayist. The Baiyangdian Lake area where Sun Li spent much of his time before and after the Sino-Japanese War formed the backdrop for many of his stories. Sun joined the Communist army in 1942 and thus began his long association with the Communists. Many of his stories were written during the war, depicting the villagers of the Baiyangdian Lake area in their heroic struggle against the Japanese army. He later wrote about the land reform policy. When the People’s Liberation Army took Tianjin in 1949, Sun went to the city with the troops, and in the years that followed he worked at the Tianjin Daily. In the 1950s he published some of his major works, including Fengyun jishi (Stormy Years), a novel about Chinese peasants’ resistance against the Japanese, and Tie mu qianzhuan (Blacksmith and Carpenter), a novella portraying the waxing and waning of the friendship between two men over a period of 20 years.
The general tendency of Sun’s art is to lean heavily toward creating positive characters to inspire his readers and to offer them stories that glorify the spirit of the nation, which fit the templates of socialist realism. In the 1950s, Sun’s aesthetic was influential among young writers and helped form the so-called Lotus Lake school, consisting of a group of writers based in northern China who emphasized the use of poetic language to extol the beauty of the land and the admirable qualities of the peasants.
TAI JINGNONG (1903–1990). Essayist, fiction writer, and calligrapher. While studying literature at Beijing University, Tai Jingnong published his first collection of short stories, Di zhi zi (Son of the Earth), about the tragic lives of the peasants, which placed him among the pioneers of the so-called rural writers (xiangtu zuojia), although he was by then a member of the intelligentsia. Friends with Lu Xun, with whom he shared a penchant for ironic detachment and for the use of imageries, Tai devoted a good portion of his professional career to assessing Lu’s contribution to Chinese literature. In 1946, he accepted a position at National Taiwan University. When the Nationalist government retreated to the island in 1949, he found himself unable to return to the mainland and consequently spent the rest of his life in Taipei. His friendship with Lu Xun, whose works were banned in Taiwan, and his association with progressive forces in the 1930s and early 1940s compromised Tai’s sense of security, resulting in his decision to shift his creative energy to calligraphy, which led to impressive successes and public recognition. In the final years of his life, Tai resumed his writing career, producing mostly essays that record his thoughts on history and friendships, among other matters.
TAIWAN. After the first Sino-Japanese War (1894–1895), Taiwan was ceded to Japan and remained a Japanese colony until 1945 when Japan was defeated at the end of World War II and ordered to surrender the island to the Republic of China controlled by Chiang Kai-shek’s Kuomintang (KMT) party. The military occupation created tensions between the newcomers and the Taiwanese, culminating in the February 28 Incident of 1947, during which the KMT administration in Taipei brutally suppressed the Taiwanese demonstrators who were protesting against its enonomic policies, ushering in the era of White Terror. In 1949 after the KMT lost the Civil War against the Communists, Chiang Kai-shek and his government retreated to Taiwan and moved the capital from Nanjing to Taipei, while continuing to claim sovereignty over the whole of China and planning to take back the mainland from the Communists in three years. Martial law was declared, giving the KMT absolute power to rule the island. The international community continued to recognize Chiang’s Republic of China (ROC) as the legitimate representative of China until 1971 when the ROC lost its seat in the United Nations to the People’s Republic of China (PRC). When Chiang died in 1975, his son Chiang Ching-kuo assumed the presidency. Under his leadership, Taiwan experienced a great economic boom, rising to become one of the so-called little Asian tigers, and political liberalization that resulted in the lifting of martial law in 1987.
The younger Chiang’s handpicked vice president and successor Lee Teng-hui, whose proindependence position later caused his expulsion from the KMT, was the first democratically elected president of Taiwan. Under Lee, Taiwan underwent greater democratization and localization. Laws and practices with a bias against the Taiwanese were changed and local culture, history, and language were promoted to cultivate a Taiwanese, rather than a Chinese, identity. In 2000, Chen Shui-bian, of the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), was elected president, the first president outside the KMT. At present, Taiwan remains extremely polarized, with the pan-green coalition of parties pushing for official Taiwan independence and the pan-blue coalition of parties favoring status quo or eventual reunification of China.
The first generation of modern Taiwanese literature emerged during the Japanese occupation and conveyed a sense of national pride in addition to anti-Japanese sentiments. Many of the works were influenced by the May Fourth Movement from the mainland. When the KMT lost the Civil War, a large number of intellectuals and writers retreated to the island with the Nationalist government, pumping fresh blood into the literary vein of the island. Mirroring the political divide that gripped the island, Taiwanese literature witnessed a heated debate between the nativists and the modernists, which raged for nearly two decades from the mid-1960s to the end of the 1970s. While the modernists were largely pro-KMT urbanites and intellectual elites from the mainland with Westernized literary sensibilities, the nativists represented the discontented local population and rural consciousness. These two strands competed for supremacy in the literary development of Taiwan and each delivered some remarkable performances. See also BAI XIANYONG; CHEN RUOXI; CHEN YINGZHEN; FEI MA; HU LANCHENG; HUANG CHUNMING; HUANG FAN; HUANG JINSHU; JI XIAN; LAI HE; LAI SHENGCHUAN; LI ANG; LI YONGPING; LIAO HUIYING; LIN HAIYIN; LIN YAODE; LUO FU; LUO YIJUN; MODERN POETRY MOVEMENT IN TAIWAN; NIE HUALING; OUYANG ZI; PING LU; QIDENG SHENG; QIONG YAO; QIU MIAOJIN; SAN MAO; SHI SHUQING; SU WEIZHEN; SU XUELIN; WANG WENXING; WANG ZHENHE; XI MURONG; XIAO LIHONG; XIE BINGYING; YA XIAN; YANG KUI; YANG MU; YU GUANGZHONG; YU LIHUA; YUAN QIONGQIONG; ZHANG DACHUN; ZHANG GUIXING; ZHANG XIAOFENG; ZHANG XIGUO; ZHENG CHOUYU; ZHONG LIHE; ZHONG ZHAOZHEN; ZHU TIANWEN; ZHU TIANXIN; ZHU XINING.
TANG REN, PEN NAME OF YAN QINGSHU (1919–1980). Novelist. Born in Jiangsu, Tang Ren was a journalist during and after the Sino-Japanese War. He moved to Hong Kong in 1950 and continued to work for newspapers. Tang Ren was a prolific writer, and during the 30 years of his career he published more than 50 books and many essays and articles in newspapers and journals. His best-known work is a historical novel based on the life of Chiang Kai-shek. His Jinling chunmeng (Spring Dream at Nanjing) and its sequel Caoshan canmeng (The Unfinished Dream at the Grass Mountain) remain two of the most popular books in modern Chinese literature. Other books of his, similar in theme and style, include Jiang houzhu milu (Secret Records of the Ex-Emperor Chiang) and Beiyang junfa yanyi (The Historical Romance of the Northern Warlords). His novels about life in the mainland before 1949 include Funiushan enchou ji (Love and Hate at the Crouching Cow Mountain). He also wrote about Taiwan in two novels, Zai hai de nabian (On the Other Side of the Sea) and Huoshao dao (Fire Island). Tang Ren depicts the lives of former officials of the Nationalist government who choose to stay in Hong Kong in Ren zha (Human Dregs) and Xianggang wuyan xia (Under the Hong Kong Eaves). Among his novels about Hong Kong society are Xianggang daheng (A Hong Kong Tycoon) and Wo shi yike yaoqianshu (I Am a Money Tree). His stories are set against important historical and political backgrounds, full of drama and legends. Tang has also written several screenplays, some of which have been made into movies.
TASHI DAWA (1959– ). Fiction writer. Born in Batang, a Tibetan region in Sichuan Province, to a Tibetan father and a Chinese mother, Tashi Dawa grew up in Chongqing and had a typical Chinese education. He published his first story in 1978 and has since made Tibet the central focus of his work. He currently lives in Lhasa and is the vice president of the Tibetan Writers’ Association. He is one of the most recognized names among Tibetan writers in China, noted for his magic realist stories.
As the root-seeking movement spread over Chinese art and literary circles during the 1980s, Tibet became a mecca for artists and writers seeking inspiration, and Tashi joined the pilgrimage. Unlike Ma Yuan, a Chinese writer famous for his Tibetan stories who used Tibet as a background for his innovative fiction, Tashi searched for the religious and mystic traditions of Tibetan culture and recreated them in his tales. In many of the stories collected in Xizang: Ji zai pishengkou shang de hun (Tibet: A Soul Knotted on a Leather) and Xizang, yinmi de suiyue (Tibet: The Hidden Years) realistic narrative and fantasy are seamlessly intertwined, a style he likened to Tibetan storytelling traditions influenced by Buddhism in which time and action are nothing but an illusion. In two of his stories, he borrows from Tibetan cultural practice by building the plots on the number 108, alluding to the number of Tibetan prayer beads: Xizang: Ji zai pisheng shang de hun tells stories that happen in 108 days and Xizang: yinmi de suiyue, a novella, chronicles events that take place in Tibet from 1877 to 1985, 108 years in total. Tashi’s later works are more concerned about contemporary Tibetan life. Yemao zouguo manman suiyue (A Wild Cats’ Long Journey) presents a Tibet that is on the march to modernity. No longer mysterious, it is a world full of incongruities and absurdities brought about by modernization and economic reforms. The urban Tibetan youths, descendants of former serfs and serf owners, have joined the force of capitalist globalization, leaving behind their traditional way of life. Saodong de Xiangbala (Turbulent Shambala), a more complex narrative and arguably his best work, deals with confrontations, negotiations, and compromises between two cultural paradigms in Tibetan society, represented by two types of characters: the ones who operate within the bounds of a realistic world and the ones with supernatural powers who transcend time and space. The second group acts as a mediator in the lives of the first group, leading them to a spiritual but illusive realm. In the act of embracing or rejecting the other, they reveal a Tibetan society caught in a tug-of-war between the old and the new, the local and the global. See also AVANT-GARDE.
TIAN HAN (1898–1968). Playwright, poet, and filmmaker. A pioneer of the modern Chinese play, Tian Han made significant contributions to modern Chinese theater and the impact he left on Chinese cultural life is well documented. The numerous plays and films he wrote and directed should guarantee him a prominent position in the history of modern Chinese theater, not to mention the number of art organizations and societies he cofounded. Tian came from a poor family in Changsha, Hunan Province. While studying in Tokyo, he helped found the Creation Society with Guo Moruo and others. After he returned to China in 1924, Tian, with the help of his wife, founded the literary journal Nan guo banyue kan (South China Biweekly). Later with Xu Beihong, a painter, and Ouyang Yuqian, a playwright and actor, he founded Nan guo she (South China Society), which energized and guided the movement to modernize the Chinese theater. A founding member of the Left-wing Society of Chinese Writers and the Left-wing Association of Chinese Playwrights, Tian was also a political activist. During the Sino-Japanese War, he and his troupe toured cities in the interior to boost national morale, performing Lugou qiao (The Marco Polo Bridge), a play he wrote and directed, and other patriotic plays. After the Communist victory in 1949, Tian was appointed director of arts in the Ministry of Culture, a position he held until the Cultural Revolution abruptly and brutally ended his life.
Tian was a prolific writer, having created some 100 works, including Kafei dian zhi yi ye (One Night at the Café), written in 1920 while he was studying in Japan, Ming you zhi si (The Death of a Famous Actor), based on the real life of a Peking opera actor, and Suzhou ye hua (One Evening in Suzhou). Several of Tian’s early plays feature artists who make the pursuit of artistic perfection the ultimate goal in life. Liu Zhensheng in Ming you zhi si refuses to compromise his art in a society full of people willing to sell their souls in exchange for wealth and influence; the poet in Gu tan de shengyin (The Sound of an Old Pond) jumps into an ancient pond in despair because its malevolent spirit has seduced the dancing girl he saved from materialist corruption; Bai Wei in Hu shang de beiju (A West Lake Tragedy) commits suicide after she finishes reading the tragic story written by her former lover. Through these plays, Tian tells his audience that true art is worth dying for, as, in the words of his character, “life is short but art is timeless.” As his involvement in progressive literature deepened, Tian began to produce plays that dealt less with abstract concepts but more with real sociopolitical issues. Suzhou ye hua, Jiang cun xiao jing (A Vignette of a Village by the River), Nian ye fan (New Year’s Eve Dinner), and other critical realist plays seek to locate the roots of poverty and broken families in the sociopolitical system. Further signs of his political commitment are seen in his “revolutionary” plays such as Gu Zhenghong zhi si (The Death of Gu Zhenghong), Yijiusan’er nian de yueguang qu (The Moonlight Sonata of 1932), Mei yu (The Rainy Season), Wufan zhi qian (Before Lunch), and Baofeng yu zhong de qi ge nüxing (Seven Women in a Thunderstorm), all focusing on the working class and its organized uprisings against exploitation and oppression. Tian also worked with historical materials, turning the lives of memorable characters into plays such as Guan Hanqin (Playwright Guan Hanqin) and Wencheng gongzhu (Princess Wencheng).
Modeled after Western plays such as those by William Shakespeare, Henrik Ibsen, and George Bernard Shaw, the modern plays by Tian and his colleagues aspire to reflect real life and address contemporary issues, with actors speaking a language understood by the average person on the streets, in order to inspire the audience into action. The result is a mode that combines realism with romantic zest, a style that dominated Chinese plays and, to a lesser extent, movies until the 1980s and is still evident in Chinese theater today. See also MAY FOURTH MOVEMENT; SOCIALIST REALISM; SPOKEN DRAMA.
TIAN’ANMEN PRODEMOCRACY MOVEMENT (1989). Triggered by the death of Hu Yaobang, a liberal-minded Communist Party leader who had been forced to resign in January of 1988 as the secretary of the Chinese Communist Party, the protest movement started with Beijing college students and intellectuals who were dissatisfied with the pace of the reforms initiated by Deng Xiaoping in the late 1970s. The movement quickly gained the support of urban industrial workers angry about inflation and government corruption. In large numbers, the students gathered in Tian’anmen Square in the center of Beijing, demanding that the party revise its judgment on Hu and political, not just economic, reforms be instituted to bring democracy to China. An editorial in the Renmin ribao (People’s Daily), the official newspaper of the government, which accused the protesters of “plotting civil unrest” and causing “turmoil,” sent the students into a hunger strike to demand that the newspaper retract its statement and that a dialogue between their representatives and the party leaders be held to address their concerns.
There were different opinions within the leadership as to how to deal with these demands. The liberal faction, represented by party secretary Zhao Ziyang, who made an appearance in the square to urge students to stop their hunger strike, preferred dialogue while the hardliners, represented by Premier Li Peng, pushed for military crackdown. Deng Xiaoping, the paramount leader, and other party elders who feared that a lenient approach would encourage “bourgeois liberalism,” which would in turn challenge the Communist Party’s stranglehold on power, sided with the hardliners. Tanks rolled onto the square and soldiers fired at the protesters. The bloody crackdown was followed by a political cleanup throughout the country. The violent suppression of the prodemocracy movement outraged the international community and the Chinese government found itself the target of widespread condemnation. The leaders of the protest movement were either put in jail or forced to flee to the West. Many writers who expressed sympathy for the protesters or were protesters themselves went into exile, including most of the Misty poets. Except for a few who eventually returned to China to live, most of these writers have chosen to stay in the West but continue to write in Chinese. The experience of exile has no doubt enriched their understanding of life and literature, and furthermore, their presence in the West has helped broaden the appeal of Chinese literature in the West. See also BEI DAO; GU CHENG; YANG LIAN; DUO DUO; GAO XINGJIAN; MA JIAN; YAN LI; YO YO; ZHENG YI.
TIBET. As part of the People’s Republic of China, Tibet is situated in the western part of the country and is known as the “roof of the world,” a nickname that comes from the majestic Himalayan mountains and the high altitude of the region. The Chinese word Zang (Tibet/Tibetan) generally refers to two entities: the first is the Tibetan Autonomous Region, which covers what is historically known as U-Zang or central Tibet; the second is U-Zang plus Amdo and Kham in Qinghai, Gansu, Sichuan, and Yunnan provinces, where ethnic Tibetans also live. The Tibetan cultural influence stretches also to Sikkim and Ladkh in present-day India as well as Bhutan and Nepal. What constitutes Tibet is a hotly debated issue between the Chinese government and the Tibetan government in exile, which was set up in Dharamsala, India, in 1959, when the 14th Dalai Lama and his followers fled Tibet after a failed revolt against the Chinese Communists. To Tibetan exiles, Tibet encompasses all Tibetan cultural spheres, excluding the communities in Bhutan, India, and Nepal; to the Chinese government, Tibet means the Tibetan Autonomous Region, while the Tibetan communities in Gansu, Qinghai, Sichuan, and Yunnan are given autonomous status under the jurisdiction of the named provinces.
Tibet has a long and rich history. Songtsan Gampo (617–650) was the first Tibetan leader to unite the different warring tribes into one of the most powerful kingdoms in Asia and established a centralized government in Lhasa. During his reign, Buddhism took root in Tibet and replaced the indigenous religion, the Bön. In the reign of Lang Dharma (815–843), the Bön made a brief and bloody comeback, resulting in widespread persecutions of Buddhists. In 846, when Lang Dharma was assassinated, the Tibetan kingdom disintegrated into an assortment of principalities headed by various nobilities of the old kingdom. For the next four centuries Tibet remained divided, until the 13th century when the Mongol empire extended its influence and control to Tibet.
During the centuries of political instability in Tibet, Buddhism, however, had the opportunity to recover and grow. Various sects emerged, Nyingma (the ancient sect), Kagyu (the oral sect), and most important, Sakya (the grey earth sect), whose fifth-generation master, Phagpa (1235–1280), became the spiritual teacher of Kublai Khan (1215–1294), the ruler of the Mongol Yuan dynasty (1279–1368). With the support and protection of Kublai Khan, Phagpa and Sakya rose to the top of political power in all of Tibet. Phagpa is also credited with having invented the Mongolian written language. The Ming (1368–1644), which succeeded the Yuan, generally administered Tibet in a similar fashion as the Mongols, adopting a policy that emphasized a respect for its religion and a reliance on conferring honorary titles and other appeasement measures to keep Tibet nominally within the empire.
In the Qing dynasty (1644–1911), the Manchu rulers tightened their grip on Tibet through several measures that included incorporating Amdo and eastern Kham into neighboring Chinese provinces, installing a resident commissioner to Lhasa, and supporting Guluk (the way of virtue or the yellow hat sect) in the feud among various Tibetan Buddhist sects, requiring that the reincarnations of its major lamas, including the Dalai Lama and the Panchen Lama, be approved by the central government in Beijing, a practice that began in the reign of Qianlong Emperor (1711–1799). Despite these interventionist measures, the Manchus by and large allowed Tibet to remain an autonomous entity. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, Tibet was unwittingly dragged into the “Great Game,” a power struggle among Great Britain, Russia, and China. In 1904, a British army led by Colonel Francis Younghusband invaded Lhasa with the pretext that Russia was increasing its influence in Tibet. The British succeeded in annexing to British India 90,000 square kilometers of traditional Tibetan territory in southern Tibet, which is in the present-day Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh, while recognizing Chinese suzerainty over Tibet.
The Guluk school, with its emphasis on the Vinaya and scholarly pursuits, was funded by Tsongkhapa (1357–1419), whose legacy continues into the modern age. From the time when Qianlong decreed the supremacy of the Guluk sect to the Chinese Communist takeover in the 1950s, Tibet had a system of theocracy in which all political and economic power was concentrated in the hands of the clergy and the aristocracy it supported. In the late 1950s, the Chinese government instituted socialism and Tibet was fully brought under the centralized rule of Beijing, forcing the 14th Dalai Lama and his followers to flee in 1959 to India, where they set up the Tibetan exile government in Dharamsala. The political standoff between the Chinese government and the Tibetan exile government is yet to be resolved.
While there was a great deal of interest in Tibet in the West, shown in the many travelogues, memoirs, and fictional accounts written by missionaries, adventurists, scientists, military officers, and spies disguised as pilgrims or businessmen, Tibet, curiously, did not register in the literary imagination of the Chinese, except for a handful of cases. All that changed in the early 1980s, when Beijing started recruiting college graduates to work in Tibet as government officials and professionals. The move attracted people with wanderlust from Chinese cities, looking for exotic life and adventure. Tibet became the ultimate destination for aspiring writers and artists who would later depict their experience in literature and paintings. Following this wave, Tibetan writers who had received a Chinese education began to write about their own culture in the Chinese language, which eventually led to the creation of a new narrative literature written in Tibetan. Traditionally, Tibetan literature consists of Buddhist tales translated from Sanskrit texts as well as a rich body of oral legends and chronicles, the most famous of which is the Tale of Gesar, said to be the longest epic in the world. The new Tibetan literature, which is still in its infancy, attempts to reflect Tibetan life in a realistic manner while taking inspiration from its rich heritage of oral and religious literature.
Influenced by magic realism of Latin America, Chinese fiction from Tibet explores the mysteries of its culture in a multitude of styles. Ma Yuan, an avant-garde writer, treats Tibet as a background against which to unfold his experiments in storytelling; Tashi Dawa mixes history with legends; Ah Lai deals with some of the major events in modern history that affected Tibetans living in western Sichuan; Fan Wen traces the spiritual and religious paths of eastern Tibet; Ma Lihua chronicles Tibet’s social and economic changes. Chinese literature from Tibet unfolds a brilliant canvas, rich with colors and textures, occupying a major spot in the literary imagination of contemporary China. See also BI SHUMIN; MA JIAN; METSO; SEBO; WOESER; YA GELING; YANG LIAN; YANG ZHIJUN; YANGDON.
TIE NING (1957– ). Novelist. Tie Ning grew up in the turbulent years of the Cultural Revolution and worked for four years among peasants in a village. In her early writing career, Tie focused on the northern countryside with which she is intimately familiar. “Oh, Xiang Xue” (Ah, Fragrant Snow), a sentimental tale published in 1982, made her a national name. This short story describes the coming of modernity to the Chinese countryside during the post-Mao era, as represented by the arrival of a train at a remote village. While selling fruits and eggs to passengers when the train stops at her village, Xiang Xue, along with other young girls, gets a glimpse of what the outside world looks like. Encouraged by Sun Li, a veteran writer also based in Hebei who liked the lyricism and the optimistic tone of the story, Tie published in the following year “Meiyou niukou de hong chenshan” (A Red Shirt without Buttons), one of her best-known works. Once again, with a young girl as her protagonist, the author portrays an independent youth who, after some mental anguish, gives up being a model student to wear a red shirt among the uniformity of blues and greys. The story captures the spirit of the new era, when nonconformist behavior was beginning to emerge.
Three other works published in the 1980s marked the beginning of Tie’s long engagement with the subject of feminine subjectivity. “Maijie Duo” (Haystacks) concentrates on the fate of women in a village and the tragedy of their failed marriages. “Mianhua duo” (Cotton Stacks), another of her stories about rural women, centers on three female characters in the 1930s whose tragic fate is tied to the traditional world defined by male agendas. Meigui men (Gate of Roses), her first full-length novel, pays attention to female sexuality while depicting the dark side of human relationships. Most characters in these works survive in a male-centered society in which a “good” woman fulfils her maternal role while a “bad” one lets her sexuality get out of control. Tie is adept at exploring the restricted world inhabited by tradition-bound rural women, the small pleasures they extract from monotonous everyday life, and the enormous sacrifices they make for their families and communities.
Tie’s focus on women and their role in society continued into the next two decades. Yongyuan you duoyuan (How Long Is Forever), published in 1999, shifts the spotlight onto a woman born and bred in the city who finds her traditional virtues, such as honesty and kindness, unsuited to the changing times of commercialism. Da yu nü (A Woman of Experience), published in the following year, examines the personal life of a middle-aged woman who has been abandoned by her film star husband. In both novels, the protagonists are treated as victims not just of men but also of other women, an indication that the author believes that the age of innocence, of mutual trust that she wrote about at the beginning of her career, is gone forever.
Tie’s best work, Ben Hua (Native Cotton), is set in the chaotic early Republican period. The story centers on a family in a village where the main crop is ben hua, a low-yielding but resilient local cotton. The patriarch is a peasant boy whose meteoric rise to the powerful position of a high-ranking military officer is a local legend. Because of its ties to the outside world, the village is at the crossroad of tradition and modernity. While Christian missionaries introduce new water pumps to the villagers, girls from poor families continue the age-old custom of sleeping with strangers in exchange for cotton during harvest season. The peaceful lifestyle is disrupted by the entry of the superior cotton introduced from Japan, which is closely followed by the Japanese Imperial Army’s invasion of China. The novel ends with the family losing two of its members to Japanese brutality.
Tie was president of the Hebei Writers’ Association and in 2006 was elected president of the Chinese Writers’ Association, the first woman to hold that position. See also SINO-JAPANESE WAR.
WANG ANYI (1954– ). Novelist. Daughter of Ru Zhijuan, also a writer, Wang Anyi grew up in Shanghai. In 1970, after graduating from middle school, she went to the countryside of Jiangsu to be reeducated by the peasants. Two years later, she joined a performance troupe in the industrial city of Xuzhou. By the time she returned to Shanghai to work as an editor of a children’s magazine, she already had several stories to her name. One of the most diverse and influential writers in contemporary China, Wang has continued to reinvent herself, evolving from a sentimental storyteller to an experimental writer and astute commentator on social mores. It is hard to categorize her work in one or another representational mode. Her love stories, best represented by Xiaocheng zhi lian (Love in a Small Town), subscribe to the realist mode. Xiao baozhuan (Baotown), on the other hand, mixes legends with reality to create a sense of permanence that transcends time and space, giving the story an allegorical dimension. Likewise, Fuxi yu muxi de shenhua (Patrilinial and Matrilineal Myths) is told with a similar ironic detachment, despite its professed autobiographical content. The most imaginative of Wang’s writings is Jishi yu xugou (The Real and the Fictitious), in which the author traces her family history by mixing historical record with her own imagination. In the process of locating her maternal ancestry, Wang examines her own sense of place in the metropolis of Shanghai. As metafiction, the work is not only a highly fictionalized account of clan history but also a self-conscious commentary on the act of writing, which is equated to mythmaking.
In between the popular and the experimental narrative modes lies Wang’s most ambitious project: reinventing Shanghai, where she grew up and still resides. In Changheng ge (The Song of Everlasting Sorrow: A Novel of Shanghai), Meitou (Meitou), Fuping (Fuping), Tao zhi yaoyao (The Dazzling Peach Blossoms), and other works, Shanghai becomes a character with a soul of its own, both shaping and shaped by the lives its residents lead. Despite its size, the Shanghai in Wang’s works is surprisingly intimate, approachable, a city characterized by its bourgeois taste and material culture as seen in its architecture, mannerisms, and etiquettes. Her mundane Shanghai is comforting and alluring despite the social and political changes to its appearance, like the protagonist of Changhen ge, whose downward spiraling life spans several decades of modern Chinese history, from when she was a glamorous winner of a beauty pageant in the 1940s to her ordinary life in the 1980s. Critics see some similarities between Wang and Zhang Ailing, who wrote about Shanghai in the 1940s. Both are captivated by the city and its social manners. They represent the so-called Shanghai school of writing, whose characteristics include detailed descriptions of daily life, a focus on the middle class, a fascination with urban existence, and an obsession with the pragmatic side of living.
With her most recent novel, Qimeng shidai (The Era of Enlightenment), Wang revisits her early days as an educated youth in the countryside by re-creating the experience of several urban youths in the heyday of the Cultural Revolution. Hailed as a record of a “spiritual odyssey” of a generation of Chinese, the novel captures the idealism and the confusion associated with the 1960s. Laden with discursive commentaries and observations, it highlights the author’s perspective on history and the individuals trapped in it. See also ROOT-SEEKING LITERATURE; WOMEN.
WANG DINGJUN (1927– ). Prose writer. One of the most influential and prolific prose writers in contemporary Chinese literature, Wang Dingjun was born in Shandong and spent his early youth in the Nationalist army, which he joined during the Sino-Japanese War. At the end of the Civil War, he followed the government to Taiwan and worked as a writer and editor for radio and newspapers. He has been living in the New York City area since emigrating to the United States in the 1970s. Wang’s creative oeuvre consists of mostly essays. For an essayist, the best source of inspiration is life experience of which Wang has had an abundant amount. He has gone through earthshaking events in modern Chinese history, fought two wars, and having been uprooted several times in his life, endured long separations from his family, friends, and cultural environment. In addition to these painful but valuable life-changing experiences, he possesses a curious mind that enjoys probing into history, society, and human behavior.
Many of his essays express a strong sense of nostalgia. Ever since he left his home in Shandong more than half a century ago, Wang has never returned to it in person but has never stopped writing about it. To Wang, home is a “piece of art” that he has “imagined, carved, polished and embellished” during more than half of his lifetime. It is his spiritual anchor. The concept of home in his writing is not just the village in Shandong but has extended to encompass China with its rich history and culture, including its beauty and its sufferings. Jiaoyin (Footprints), Shan li shan wai (Inside and Outside the Mountains), Zuo xin fang de xuanwo (Swirls of the Left Atrium of the Heart), Hai shui tian ya Zhongguoren (The Ocean, the Edge of the Sky, and the Chinese) are all expressions of his love for his home and his home country. Another prominent theme of his writings is humanity. He enjoys “people watching.” Every human being, according to Wang, is a slide of “scenery” that he never tires of observing and describing. From these observations, Wang derives lessons about society, human nature, and the psyche of a nation. Works such as Zhongnian (Middle Age), Qingren yan (The Eyes of a Lover), Sui liuli (Broken Colored Glaze), Women xiandai ren (We the Modern People), and Rensheng (Life) belong to this category. Taiwan also features prominently in his writings in which he bears witness to the island’s march to modernization and its impact on the environment and the people.
Wang has worked with all genres of prose writing, including the lyrical essay, narrative essay, and satirical essay. In his essays, he employs the techniques commonly used in poetry, fiction, and drama. His language is colloquial and succinct. In addition to a long list of publications of prose work, Wang has also written short stories collected in Danshen wendu (Body Heat of Unmarried Men) and Toushi (X Ray).
WANG HAILING (1952– ). Novelist. Born in Shandong, Wang Hailing joined the military at the age of 16 and spent 14 years stationed on a tiny island. To help pass the time, she took up writing. Her breakthrough came in the 1990s with the family drama Qian shou (Holding Your Hands), which was made into a television series, earning Wang national fame. She followed it with two more best sellers, Zhongguo shi lihun (Divorce: Chinese Style), a novel about marital problems encountered by three couples, which was also turned into a popular television series, and Xin jiehun shidai (The Era of New Marriage), which centers on the members of an intellectual family and their unconventional romantic relationships, such as the widowed father with a young, uneducated maid from the countryside and the son with an older woman. Wang writes in a realist style and deals with love and conflict in contemporary Chinese families. With a unique understanding of interpersonal and familial relationships in Chinese society, she has become a popular writer widely considered “the number one interpreter of Chinese marriage.” See also WOMEN.
WANG JIAXIN (1957– ). Poet. Born in Hubei, Wang Jiaxin graduated from the Chinese Department of Wuhan University. From 1985 to 1990, he edited Shi kan (Poetry), the main poetry journal in China. After spending two years in England in the early 1990s, Wang returned to China to teach literary theory and comparative literature at Beijing Educational College. A representative of the so-called academic poets mostly based in Beijing, Wang has been writing poetry since the 1980s, when the influence of Misty poetry was at its height. For this reason, he is considered, by some literary critics, one of the Misty poets. However, Wang’s reputation as a poet was not widely recognized until his sojourn in and return from Europe. One of the recurring subjects in his poetry written during this period is the émigré experience. In a series of poems paying homage to, or in dialogue with, poets such as Ezra Pound, William Butler Yeats, Joseph Brodsky, Boris Pasternak, Czeslaw Milosz, and others, Wang identifies with them in feelings of alienation and rootlessnesss. Chinese poets who have influenced his work include Feng Zhi, also a scholar-poet of an older generation. See also GENERATION III POETS.
WANG JINGZHI (1902–1996). Poet and a member of the Lakeside Poetry Society. Born in Jixi, Anhui Province, Wang attended a trade school before enrolling in the Number One Hangzhou Teachers’ College. As the May Fourth Movement unfolded, Wang was attracted by its call for personal emancipation and freedom. His best-known poem, “Hui zhi feng” (Hui’s Wind), which is also the title of his first collection of poetry, is a self-confessing poem about his first love. Never before had anyone been so honest and unashamed about expressing sexual desire. This defiant act against established Confucian decorum reverberated in Chinese society. As Zhu Ziqing later described it, he “threw an extremely powerful bomb into the middle of old social morality.” At the age of 20, Wang became an influential poet, mentored by prominent figures such as Lu Xun, who helped him revise his work, Hu Shi, who wrote the preface for his first collection of poetry, and Zhou Zuoren, who graced the book with calligraphy. When Wang was attacked by conservative moralists, these flag bearers of the May Fourth New Culture Movement rose in his defense. Lu Xun called Wang’s poems “sounds of nature.” After the success of Hui zhi feng, Wang published Jimo de guo (The Lonely Country), another collection of love poems, and three fictional works: Yesu de fenfu (Advice of Jesus), Fu yu nü (Father and Daughter), and Cuiying ji qifu de gushi (The Story of Cuiying and Her Husband), all written in 1926. Swept up in the wave of revolution of the 1920s, Wang began work in the propaganda department of the Northern Expedition Army, but soon left. Unlike the other Lakeside poets, he lacked an enthusiasm for politics. He later taught literature at various schools and universities.
After the founding of the People’s Republic of China, Wang worked as an editor for the Classics Department of the Beijing People’s Press and became a member of the Chinese Writers’ Association on the payroll of the state. However, the new society required poetry for the masses, while Wang’s forte was expressions of personal passion and emotions. He managed to produce a meager pamphlet of 21 poems. On the eve of the Cultural Revolution, Wang returned to Hangzhou where he lived an anonymous life until the end of the 1970s. In 1982, when the Lakeside Poetry Society celebrated its 50th anniversary, Wang was elected chairman of the newly revived organization. Liu mei yuan (Encounters with Six Beauties), poems about his relationships with six women in his youthful days, was published four months before his death. To the very end of his life, Wang believed that the central subject of poetry should be love and passion.
WANG LUYAN, A.K.A. LU YAN (1902–1944). Fiction writer. One of the early nativist writers in modern Chinese literature, Wang Luyan was born in a village in eastern Zhejiang and left home for Shanghai at the age of 15 to work as a shop apprentice. Three years later, he joined a work-study group in Beijing where he audited classes at Beijing University and taught himself Esperanto while trying to make a living by selling small wares and washing clothes. Attracted to the leftist literary doctrines in the 1930s, Wang became a member of the Left-wing Association of Chinese Writers.
Wang began his career by writing romantic tales. Later, as he became increasingly captivated by Marxist ideas, he adopted some of the leftist tendencies in his works. The novel Ye huo (Wildfire), renamed Fennu de xiangcun (The Enraged Countryside), foregrounds class struggle in line with the Communist Party’s interpretation of social hierarchy. While his works written during this phase have more or less gone out of fashion, his stories about his hometown, all written in the late 1920s and early 1930s, have secured him a place in the history of modern Chinese literature.
Inspired by the memories of his childhood, these stories paint a vivid picture of rural Zhejiang with realistic details describing customs and habits of village life and capturing the beauty and complexity of the countryside. The most prominent characters in these stories are small merchants who struggle to stay solvent as industrial forces and local powers nibble away at their traditional way of life. “Huangjin” (Gold) is about such a middle-class character whose respected status in his village is compromised when he does not receive money his son is supposed to have wired to him. Once the money does not materialize, he becomes the laughingstock of his fellow villagers. Clearly, in this society, a man is judged by the amount of wealth he possesses. “Qiao shang” (On the Bridge) tells the story of a small businessman, like Lao Tongbao in Mao Dun’s “Silkworm,” driven to bankruptcy by big companies with foreign machines and investments. Several of Wang’s hometown stories describe the customs of the seaside communities of eastern Zhejiang. “Juying de chujia” (Juying’s Wedding) portrays the local tradition of marrying a woman to a dead man; “Cha lu” (Fork in a Road) tells about a fight between two villages as they carry the deity Guandi in a procession to purge evil spirits. “Shu ya” (The Teeth of a Mouse) describes the local custom of “mice giving away daughters for marriage” to drive rodents to the neighbor’s house. These stories invoke a sense of nostalgia for a bygone world with all its attractions and imperfections.
In addition to these hometown stories for which he is best remembered, Wang also wrote essays and translated literature written originally in Esperanto. During the Sino-Japanese War, Wang drifted from place to place and finally died in Guilin from tuberculosis.
WANG MENG (1934– ). Fiction writer. In the early 1950s, Wang Meng, a young, idealistic Communist, wrote “Zuzhibu laide nianqing ren” (A Young Man from the Organization Department), the story that got him into trouble in 1957 during the Anti-Rightist Campaign. He was exiled to Xinjiang in 1963 and lived there for more than 15 years before being allowed to return to Beijing in 1978. Since then, he has turned out more than 20 volumes of works, with varying degrees of critical success. He has held many official positions in the government, including minister of culture.
Before his exile, Wang had only a handful of short stories to his name. A novel, Qingchun wansui (Long Live Youth), begun in 1953, did not come out until 1979; its publication delayed, apparently, by its author’s political troubles. His best works were completed after 1978. In many ways, Wang has been a trendsetter. He is widely credited with leading the way in the late 1970s and early 1980s in appropriating Western modernist techniques such as stream of consciousness and the expression of the absurd, and his Xinjiang stories are believed to have helped open up the field of root-seeking literature.
One of his experimental stories is “Hudie” (The Butterfly), in which Wang examines social, political, and personal transformation by focusing on how his characters lose and regain their self-identity. The bulk of the narrative is sustained by the internal musings of the protagonist, who returns to Beijing after a long political exile in a remote mountain village. While the length of time covered by the novel is only two days, the character’s mental activities, set off by external events, cover a span of 30 years of his life. Huodong bian renxing (Movement Shapes Human Figures) is arguably Wang’s best work. Unlike his many experimental stories, the novel is written in the mode of psychological realism. Through the tragic saga of four generations of the Ni family, Wang ponders issues such as the meaning of revolution and history, personal destiny, the clash of civilizations, and tradition as opposed to modernity.
Wang’s series of four novels, Lian’ai de jijie (The Season of Love), Shi lian de jijie (The Season of Lost Love), Chouchu de jijie (The Season of Hesitation), and Kuanghuan de jijie (The Season of Revelry), took him less than a decade to complete. They chronicle the journey of a Chinese intellectual from the founding of the People’s Republic to the end of the Cultural Revolution, representing the author’s view on the relationship of the intellectual to the Communist revolution. Essentially, these novels are semiautobiographical in nature, in that they mirror the author’s own trajectory from an ardent supporter of the revolution in the early days of the People’s Republic to a victim of its political campaigns. They were conceived, in the words of the author, as the “spiritual history of [his] generation.” The author examines the price one has to pay for decisions made at various crucial junctures in history. Whether one chooses to cooperate with those in power or remain independent ultimately determines the state of one’s soul. Qing hu (The Green Fox), a novel portraying the meteoric rise of a middle-aged woman writer and her failed quest for love in the midst of a male-centered literary circle, is a tragic story told in a playful, satirical language. In this novel, Wang intensifies the facetious narrative voice used in some of his short stories. The dominant syntax, built by repetition and parallelism, results in a hyperbolic style and heightens the cynical tone. In writing about the absurd behaviors of his fellow writers, Wang turns the Chinese literary circle into a ludicrous circus.
WANG PU (1950– ). Fiction and prose writer. Born in Hong Kong, Wang Pu went with her parents to the mainland at the age of one. She received her Ph.D. in literature from China Eastern Normal University in Shanghai. In 1989, she moved back to Hong Kong and worked as a newspaper editor and a college professor. She currently lives in Shenzhen.
Wang’s writing career began in the early 1980s when her stories appeared in literary journals in Changsha, where she lived. Her first collection of short stories, Nüren de gushi (Women’s Stories), was published in 1993 after she had moved back to Hong Kong. Told in the first-person point of view, these stories deal with the elusive nature of love and how an emotionally deprived childhood intensifies the desire for intimacy and romance. Wang’s prose work Xianggang nüren (Hong Kong Women) invokes the heady, glamorous fusion of East and West in the ordinary lives of women of Hong Kong. Her award-winning novels Buchong jiyi (Supplementary Memories) and Yao Jiu chuanqi (The Story of My Uncle) are set against the background of mainland China and inspired by the memories of her childhood and youth. Another novel, Xiang Meili zai Shanghai (Emily Hahn in Shanghai), looks at the colorful life of the American writer, particularly her romantic entanglement in the 1930s with Shao Xunmei, a Chinese poet and publisher. Wang uses a refined language in both her prose and fiction. While her fiction contains the characteristics of her graceful prose, her essays read like short stories with well-developed plots.
WANG SHUO (1958– ). Novelist. Born and raised in Beijing, Wang Shuo, known for his so-called hooligan literature, has written stinging satires with real moral implications. Wan’r de jiushi xintiao (Playing for Thrills), one of his early novels, is a tour de force of psychological realism. The protagonist, an unsuccessful writer, becomes the prime suspect in a murder case that took place 10 years earlier. Unsure if he indeed committed the crime, he searches for old friends for verification. The sense of guilt he feels, coupled with the burden of not knowing the truth, places the protagonist in a moral dilemma. Qianwan bie ba wo dang ren (Please Don’t Call Me Human), a dark satire about Chinese nationalism, delivers a timely remonstration against misplaced national pride. The story describes the search for and the absurd training of a man groomed to win back China’s national pride by defeating an American in a wrestling match. These early successes made Wang a darling of the media. He began churning out, in quick succession, television scripts that led to great commercial success.
WANG TONGZHAO (1897–1957). Fiction writer. A Shandong native and graduate of the University of China in Beijing, Wang Tongzhao worked all his life teaching literature and editing magazines and journals. He participated in the May Fourth Movement and was one of the founders of the Literary Research Society. His early stories, mostly romantic and sentimental outpourings, revolve around the theme of love and beauty, describing youthful passion and despair. Yi ye (One Leaf), his first novella published in 1922, features a young man from an old gentry family. Poor health and a sensitive disposition make him acutely aware of social injustice and misery around him. At college he is antisocial, distrustful of his peers. Although a pessimist and fatalist at heart, he eventually discovers love: love for his mother and sisters and the love he and his friends have for one another, which brings him hope and gives him faith in the world. Another novella, Huanghun (At Dusk), is about a college graduate hired by his uncle to run a textile manufacturing company in their hometown where he meets the uncle’s two young concubines. Sympathetic to their predicament, he helps them escape their bondage. One of the women commits suicide upon reading her husband’s search announcement in the newspaper and the other strikes out on her own and eventually becomes an opera star. In many ways, the story reflects the sense of obligation the May Fourth intellectuals felt toward their countrymen, as illustrated through the young man’s effort to liberate the women from an unhappy marriage as well as through the clash between generations in the same family and the pertinacity of traditional practices.
Wang’s later works focus on the sufferings of the working class, reflecting the influence of critical realism on Chinese writers. His 1932 novel Shan yu (Rain in the Mountain), set in rural northern China in the 1920s and 1930s, focuses on the disintegration of the agrarian way of life, as a result of civil unrest, exploitation, and heavy taxation at the hands of the government, and on the awakening of the peasants as they discover the source of their plight. Toward the end of the novel, the protagonist, a destitute farmer, leaves the countryside to seek his fortune in the city where he is faced with more challenges. The protagonist comes to grips with reality by joining the revolution. Another novel, Chun hua (Spring Blossoms), portrays the impact of the May Fourth Movement on the educated youths. In addition to fiction, Wang also published several collections of essays, poems, and plays, including Ye xing ji (Night Travel) and Qu lai xi (Leaving and Returning).
In 1934, Wang went to Europe and spent several months studying literature in London. After he returned to China a year later and through the years of the Sino-Japanese War, Wang worked as an editor and continued to pursue his literary career. When Japan surrendered, Wang returned to his native Shandong and taught Chinese literature at Shandong University. After 1949, he held several official positions, including director of Shandong Provincial Cultural Bureau.
WANG WENXING, A.K.A. WANG WEN-HSIN (1939– ). Fiction writer and critic. Wang Wenxing was born in Fujian and grew up in Taiwan. He received his B.A. from National Taiwan University, then a bastion of Taiwan’s modernist movement, and an M.A. in creative writing from the University of Iowa. Besides several collections of short stories, Wang has also published two novels, Jia bian (Family Catastrophe) and Bei hai de ren (Backed against the Sea), which are major works in Taiwan’s modernist literature. Wang is noted for his bold stylistic and linguistic experimentations.
When Jia bian was published in 1972, it caused a great controversy. It was considered an assault on traditional Chinese family values, particularly its long-held Confucian tradition of filial piety. Its stylistic peculiarities also came under fire. The story dramatizes stresses on the modern Taiwan family by highlighting the problems between husbands and wives and between parents and children. It starts with the unexpected disappearance of the father and continues through the various attempts that his wife and son make to bring him home. The novel’s focus is on the son’s guilty feelings about his mistreatment of his father, unfolding the tormented psychology of a rebellious young man who strives to break free from the controlling grip of traditional ethics. Bei hai de ren is an even more audacious revolt against the realist tradition of storytelling. Characterized as a Joycean novel in its absolute disregard for readability, it is the most radical departure from the standard form of the novel in modern Chinese literature. See also MODERNISTS.
WANG XIAOBO (1952–1997). Fiction writer and essayist. Born in Beijing, Wang Xiaobo spent several years as an educated youth in the countryside of Shandong and Xishuanbanna, a tropical region in remote Yunnan, and later attended the University of Pittsburgh. He went back to Beijing in 1988 with a master’s degree and for the next few years taught sociology and statistics in Beijing universities. His sudden death from a heart attack at the height of his career was widely mourned and considered a great loss to Chinese literature.
Wang’s sardonic wit, his ironic narrative style, and his profound examination of the interplay between power and sex are brilliantly captured in his Xishuanbanna stories, set in the lush landscape of the border region of Yunnan during the Cultural Revolution. Huangjin shidai (The Gold Times), Baiyin shidai (The Silver Times), Qingtong shidai (The Bronze Times), and the unfinished novel Heitie shidai (The Iron Times) are his main fictional works. In his characteristically satirical tone, Wang mocks the absurdities of life in Maoist China, where ideology trumped basic human needs and stifled creativity. Of these works, Huangjin shidai and Qingtong shidai are the best in representing Wang’s style. Huangjin shidai is based on his personal experience as an educated youth in Xishuanbanna and later as a worker in a small factory in a Beijing suburb. Qingtong shidai, on the other hand, is a fictitious novel in which the narrator makes frequent references to fantastic classical Chinese tales within a story about contemporary life. Other than these novels, Wang also wrote short stories and many essays. He made a foray into the movie industry with his screenplay Donggong xigong (East Palace West Palace), a movie about homosexuality and power, which won the Best Screenplay Award at the 1996 Mar del Plata (Argentina) International Film Festival. As an independent thinker who preferred to remain on the periphery of society, Wang waged a lonely and courageous battle through his essays in his declarations against the power of the state and the seduction of the market.
WANG XIAONI (1955– ). Poet, fiction and essay writer. Born in Changchun in northeast China, Wang Xiaoni worked as a literary editor after receiving her B.A. from Jilin University. She moved to Shenzhen in 1985 and is currently on the faculty of Hainan University. Wang is widely recognized in China for her poetry; among the honors she has received is the 2002 Poetry Prize sponsored by the country’s three most influential poetry journals. Her early poems are devoted to the expression of agrarian life. As she moves to include a wider spectrum of themes, she maintains a fascination with the rural spirit of innocence and simplicity. She is particularly interested in the details of everyday life and much of her imagery is drawn from the world around her. Wang’s poetry, written in a plain but precise language, expresses a gentle and graceful sensibility, a personal voice that emphasizes intimate feelings and emotions. The most important of her fictional works is Fangyuan sishi li (Twenty Kilometers Radius), which tells, in a fragmented style, a realistic story of educated urban youth living in the countryside, where the dire conditions of extreme poverty and lack of hope force young people to resort to cruel measures in order to survive. See also WOMEN.
WANG XIAOYING (1947– ). Fiction writer. Born in Zhejiang Province, Wang Xiaoying spent several years on a tea farm in Anhui as an educated youth. She entered East China Normal University in 1978 to study Chinese literature. Upon graduation, she was assigned to work as an editor for a Shanghai literary journal. Since 1985, she has been a member of the Shanghai Writers’ Association. Her major works include the novellas Xinghe (The Milky Way), Suiyue youyou (Times in the Past), and Yilu fengchen (A Journey of Hardships), and the novels Ni weishui bianhu (Whom Are You Defending), Wemen cengjing xiangai (Once Upon a Time We Were in Love), and Danqing yin (Inspired by Art). Wang’s style of writing is realistic and her works primarily deal with contemporary life, issues such as love, marriage, and work, as well as changes in human relationships during the age of globalization. See also WOMEN.
WANG XUFENG (1955– ). Novelist. Winner of the Mao Dun Literature Award, Wang Xufeng is known for the “tea trilogy,” a project that took her 10 years to complete. She grew up in Zhejiang, which has a long tea-growing history, and has worked in a tea museum in Hangzhou. An expert in tea culture, from its growing to its appreciation in high society, Wang has turned her knowledge into a saga of a Hangzhou family’s relationship with tea for the past 150 years. Part 1 of the trilogy, Nanfang you jiamu (Quality Tea Grows in the South), focuses on the sociopolitical changes affecting the tea growers in the late Qing dynasty; part 2, Bu ye hou (The Marquis of the Night), is set against the background of the Sino-Japanese War, and part 3, Zhu cao wei cheng (A City Surrounded by Plants), deals with the tumultuous years of the Cultural Revolution. The main theme of the trilogy is how civilization conquers brutality and culture survives violence. Tea represents the human spirit. Well researched and rich with details about growing, picking, making, and drinking tea, the tea trilogy is considered more than a fictional work; it is regarded also as a scholarly work written by a specialist in the field. See also WOMEN.
WANG ZENGQI (1920–1997). Fiction writer and playwright. Born in Gaoyou, Jiangsu Province, Wang attended Southwest United University in Kunming during the Sino-Japanese War and studied with Shen Congwen, who greatly influenced his writing. Wang was one of the very few writers whose career spanned nearly half a century. He published his first story in the 1940s, and continued to write during the Cultural Revolution and into the 1980s. From 1962 until his death, his official job was writing librettos for the Beijing Opera Troupe. He was one of the main writers of Shajia bang (The Shajia Creek), a revolutionary opera promoted by Mao’s wife Jiang Qing. Wang reached the height of his creative career in the post-Mao era, with the publication of numerous short stories and essays. He is noted for his graceful style and lyrical sensibility, a legacy seen as passed down from Shen Congwen. A kind of godfather figure in the root-seeking movement of the 1980s, Wang also shared Shen’s interest in cultures far removed from modernity, which were further explored by younger writers such as Han Shaogong and Zheng Wanlong.
Wang grew up in a landed family that was deeply rooted in Chinese traditions. His father was an easygoing man of many talents, a lover of literature and an accomplished musician, painter, calligrapher, and athlete, who greatly influenced his son. Like the rest of his generation, young Wang received both the traditional and modern forms of education. Toward the end of his career, however, it was Chinese traditions that had the greatest impact on his writing. His stories and essays are permeated with traditional sentiments. Many of his characters, such as the friends in “Suihan sanyou” (Three Friends in the Cold of Winter) exhibit the Confucian ideals of social engagement, moral uprightness, and human benevolence. The characters with Taoist inclinations are portrayed as having no ambitions other than living peacefully in the world and tending their personal interests: growing flowers, fishing, and cultivating artistic tastes. The laborers in “Da nao jishi” (A Tale of the Big Lake), an award-winning story, demonstrate contentedness with life and tolerance of others. “Fuchou” (Revenge), based on an account from the Buddhist sutras, tells how a fatal revenge is averted. “Youming zhong” (When the Death Bell Tolls), another story of Buddhist themes, conveys the compassion of monks. “Shoujie” (The Love Story of a Young Monk), which also won an award, portrays a monastic life without rigid rules. In the temple, the monks sing love songs, play cards, and even get married and have children. Leading a natural life of simplicity and freedom, they represent the ideals of Zen Buddhism as advocated and practiced by men of letters in ancient China. It was precisely this attitude toward life that helped Wang survive the decades of political vicissitudes. His personal convictions, which include kindness to others, living in harmony with society and nature, and a strong belief in humanity, are themes explored in his fiction and essays.
WANG ZHENHE, A.K.A. WANG CHEN-HO (1940–1990). Fiction writer. Born and educated in Taiwan, Wang Zhenhe is considered a nativist writer whose concerns for the lives of ordinary, downtrodden people feature prominently in Taiwan’s realist tradition. He is also a superb satirist; humor runs through nearly all his works. “Jiazhuang yi niuche” (An Oxcart for Dowry) relates how a man gets an oxcart from a small garment merchant with whom his wife has been having an affair. All three characters live on the fringes of society, left behind by rapidly modernizing Taiwan. Wang depicts in a satirical language, but with great compassion, the tensions that exist in their everyday lives and their wretched conditions, including physical deformity as well as an apparent lack of morality. The comic voice is put to its full use in his novel Meigui meigui wo ai ni (Rose, Rose I Love You). Wang employs an alternately riotous, sardonic, and serious tone to address the issue of moral degradation in Taiwanese society. The novel sheds light on the exploitation of women in the prostitution industry boosted by the arrival of American G.I.s.
WEI HUI, PEN NAME OF ZHOU WEIHUI (1973– ). Novelist. Born in Yuyao, Zhejiang Province, and graduated from Fudan University, Wei Hui is a representative of the New Generation Writers (Xin sheng dai zuojia). A self-described exhibitionist writer whose works deal with urban, materialistic life in contemporary China, Wei Hui is best known for her sexually explicit novels, Shanghai baobei (Shanghai Baby) and Wode chan (Marrying Buddha). Her books provide a window into the hedonistic lifestyle of modern materialistic youths obsessed with money, sex, and brand names, a far cry from the revolutionary idealism embraced by the older generations of the Mao era. See also WOMEN.
WEI MINGLUN (1941– ). Playwright and essayist. Born and raised in small towns in Sichuan, Wei Minglun began making a living as a Sichuan opera actor when he was only nine years old. With virtually no formal education, he taught himself how to read and write and moved his way up to become a leading playwright in modern Chinese theater. He has won numerous prestigious awards and is widely known as a “wizard of the theater.” Wei rose to prominence in the 1980s when he wrote and directed several influential Sichuan operas, including Yi Dadan (The Fearless Yi), Pan Jinlian (Pan Jinjian: The History of a Fallen Woman), and Bashan xiucai (The Talented Scholar of Sichuan). He continued to bring out more box office successes in the 1990s with the productions of Xi zhao Qishan (Sunset at Mount Qi), Zhongguo gongzhu Dulanduo (Dulanduo: A Chinese Princess), and Bianlian (Masque Changing).
Wei divides his plays into “women’s plays” and “men’s plays.” The most important among the former is the controversial Pan Jinlian, generally characterized as the pinnacle of the absurd in Chinese theater. Pan Jinlian is Wei’s attempt to reexamine a despised woman from classical Chinese popular literature and give her a new interpretation. The play crosses boundaries of time and space and gathers, on the same stage, famous characters, both historical and fictional, including Empress Wu (624–705) of the Tang dynasty, author Shi Nai’an (1296?–1370?) of the Ming dynasty, Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, Cao Xueqin’s Jiao Baoyu, a county magistrate of ancient China, a present-day judge, and others. The interaction of these diverse characters results in “absurd” circumstances, such as 20th-century hooligans colluding with Ximen Qing, who is Pan’s nemesis in Shi’s novel, and Anna Karenina taking Pan Jinlian with her to commit a double suicide. Of the “men’s plays,” Xi zhao Qishan is the most representative of Wei’s art. It once again shines critical light on a well-known figure, Zhuge Liang, of the classical novel Sanguo Yanyi (Romance of the Three Kingdoms). Through this beloved character, the play reassesses the moral attributes of the traditional Chinese literati. See also SPOKEN DRAMA.
WEN YIDUO, PEN NAME OF WEN JIAHUA (1899–1946). Poet. Before entering Qinghua University, Wen received a traditional education in Hubei, his home province. In 1922, he went to the United States to study fine arts and literature at the Chicago Art Institute. It was during this time that his first collection of poetry, Hong zhu (Red Candle), was published in China. He returned to Beijing in 1925 and became a literature professor. In 1928, his second collection, Si shui (Dead Water), was published. In the same year, he joined the Crescent Society. When the Japanese invaded China, Wen moved with his university to Kunming, Yunnan, where he became politically active. His public denounciation of the Nationalist government eventually cost him his life, when he was assassinated in 1946.
Wen’s poetry reflects two aspects of his life. As a scholar and professor of Chinese literature, he paid attention to intrinsic elements of literary form. As a politically engaged intellectual, he showed a deep concern for his country and people. For these two reasons, he was regarded as both a “formalist” and “patriotic” poet. In reaction to the trendy practice of showing total disregard for form, he wrote essays to advocate “formal properties” for the new poetry. These essays as well as his poems established his position as a leader of modern poetry. See also NEW CULTURE MOVEMENT; SINO-JAPANESE WAR.
WOESER (1966– ). Poet and prose writer. Woeser was born in Lhasa. Her father, a military officer with mixed Chinese and Tibetan parentage, joined the People’s Liberation Army at the age of 13 and rose to be an army officer stationed in various places in Tibet, a position that afforded his daughter the opportunity to be educated in Sichuan Province from a young age. Woeser graduated from Southwestern College for Minorities, where she majored in Chinese language and literature. In 1990, she returned to Lhasa to edit Xizang Wenxue (Tibetan Literature) and began writing poetry. She was reconnected to her Tibetan heritage and became interested in Buddhism. In Lhasa, she had access to books smuggled into Tibet, including In Exile from the Land of Snows: The Dalai Lama and Tibet since the Chinese Conquest by John F. Avedon, which opened her eyes to a historical narrative about Tibet contrary to what she had received in her formal education. Such books transformed her into an activist, a public speaker for the suppressed Tibetan collective memory. Shajie (Revolution), an oral history of Tibet during the Cultural Revolution, publishes more than 300 photos taken by her father and the eyewitness accounts from her interviews, providing testimony about the widespread destruction of Tibetan culture. Her outspoken criticism of the Chinese government and her open admiration for the Dalai Lama jeopardized her position at Xizang Wenxue and her ability to publish in China. She has, however, been able to find publishers in Taiwan and Hong Kong.
Woeser’s literary works, both poetry and prose, center on one theme: the eternal as represented in Tibetan Buddhism. In Xizang: Jianghong se de ditu (A Crimson Map), the author talks about the monasteries, the lamas, and the pilgrims and expresses her nostalgia for the disappearing Tibetan civilization. In Xizang biji (Notes of Tibet), a collection of essays and her best-known work, she explores the Tibetan consciousness. Her works document suppressed history, memorialize forgotten sufferings, and retrieve erased footprints. While recording her travels in Tibet to visit various sites and interview various personalities, she indulges in a personal and internal wandering, immersed in a world of dreams and memories. Her poetry is romantic and surreal, enhanced by the pathos of the Tibetan nation and by her own sense of loss and sentimentality. Her other works include a poetry collection, Xizang zai shang (Tibet: The High Plateau), Ming wei Xizang de shi (Poems Written for Tibet), and Xizang jiyi (Memories of Tibet). See also WOMEN.
WOMEN. In 20th-century China, the women’s emancipation movement began as part of the modernization agenda of the May Fourth Movement, which sought to transform China into a modern nation. The May Fourth intellectuals called for the education of a whole generation of “new women,” physically fit and mentally strong, to join the nation-building project. In order for women to participate in social reforms, traditional institutions that had subjugated them to practices such as foot-binding, arranged marriage, deprivation of education, and other forms of institutionalized discrimination against women had to be dismantled. On the political and legal front, reform-minded activists argued that since women’s equality was predicated on economic independence, laws should be passed to guarantee women legal rights to inherit property, a privilege only sons could enjoy in previous societies. In the campaign to give women economic independence and freedom, consensual marriage and women’s right to divorce their husbands were also put on the table. Based on the principles of gender equality and property ownership, the new legal codes passed in 1928 and 1929 granted Chinese women inheritance rights and freedom in marriage and divorce. The goals to acquire equal rights for education were also achieved. By the end of the 1920s, modern educational institutions at all levels were open to girls.
In the initial stage of the women’s emancipation movement, progressive male intellectuals were major advocates and they used literature as an important tool to embolden and mobilize women. Henrik Ibsen’s play A Doll’s House, for example, was translated into Chinese and introduced by Hu Shi in the progressive journal Xin qingnian (New Youth) in 1918. Its main character Nora became synonymous with awakened and liberated women. Many characters modeled after Nora appeared in plays written by Chinese authors. Ouyang Yuqian’s Pofu (The Shrew) and Pan Jinlian (Pan Jinlian the Seductress) and Yuan Changying’s Kongque dongnan fei (Southeast Flies the Peacock) all feature female characters who fight for personal independence. Encouraged by these examples, many Chinese women ran away from home to become free agents in their own right.
In no small measures, women’s writings in the early 20th century appropriated the male discourse on women’s emancipation, but soon they developed a voice of their own. While the writings of Xie Bingying, Bing Xin, Lu Yin, Xiao Hong, Mei Niang, and others clearly subscribe to much of the emancipation ethos promoted by male authors, embracing the struggle against arranged marriage, the right to education, and gender equality, works by Ling Shuhua and Ding Ling, while deploring the gender-specific confinements imposed on women by traditional societies, insisted that women’s claim to subjectivity and intellect be accompanied by an emphasis on the development of strong female emotional and sexual desires. Later in the 1940s, Su Qing and Zhang Ailing brought women’s writings to a whole new level. Su’s prose, imploring her readers to understand the challenges faced by career women in the workplace as they struggled to make a living while defending their dignity and freedom, is surprisingly still relevant in today’s society. Zhang Ailing, while depicting urban trivia, delves deep into the psyche of women and men as they engage each other in the game of love and desire.
In modern Chinese literary discourse, the women’s emancipation movement that started in the early 20th century has never truly concluded to this day, and women’s struggle for autonomy has been a recurring theme in women’s writings. From Yuan Qiongqiong, Li Ang, and Shi Shuqing to Chen Ran, Xu Xiaobin, Hong Ying, and Lin Bai, the spotlight is focused on the female body in the belief that the raw intensity of female sexuality embodies women’s sense of self and is therefore a crucial component of the female identity. If the emphasis on the female body is narrowly and internally focused, the fascination with the matrilineal found in the works by such writers as Wang Anyi, Tie Ning, Zhang Jie, and Zhao Mei is by definition grand and epical. Wang’s Jishi yu xugou (The Real and the Fictitious) engages in mythmaking that takes the female narrator to where her maternal ancestry began—the grassland of the northern prairie; Tie’s Meigui men (Gate of Roses), Zhang’s Wu zi (No Written Word), Xu’s Yu she (Feathered Snake), and Zhao’s Women jiazu de nüren (Women in my Family) all trace back to their female ancestors to uncover the spring of strength or roots of madness that contribute to the current mental state of the female protagonists. By reclaiming or recreating the matrilineal records, which have been suppressed or erased by the male-dominated history-making enterprise, these women writers have attempted to rewrite not only individual clan history but also the history of the nation.
It goes without saying that not all women writers prefer to deal with women’s bodies or matrilineal history, or the domestic scene, and every good writer possesses a highly individualized autonomous aesthetic. So characterizing women’s writings in one way or another is no doubt risky. Nevertheless, there seems to be a remarkable consensus among critics with regard to the so-called feminine aesthetic of Zhang Ailing’s writing—known for its meticulous focus on social trivia and its exquisite descriptiveness of the sounds and sights of the urban scene, a style much imitated, even by male writers. The notion of the domestic as the privileged topos for women writers, for better or for worse, is widely accepted as a trademark of the so-called Zhang (Ailing) style. Wang Aiyi, Yuan Qiongqiong, Zhu Tianwen, Zhu Tianxin, Zhong Xiaoyang, and Bai Xianyong are all considered heirs to this feminine aesthetic. See also AN QI; BI SHUMIN; CAN XUE; CAO ZHILIAN; CHEN RUOXI; CHENG NAISHAN; CHI LI; CHI ZIJIAN; FAN XIAOQING; FANG FANG; FENG YUANJUN; HUANG BIYUN; HUO DA; LI BIHUA; LIAO HUIYING; LIN HAIYIN; LIN HUIYIN; LIU SUOLA; LU XING’ER; MA LIHUA; METSO; NIE HUALING; OUYANG ZI; PING LU; RU ZHIJUAN; SAN MAO; SHEN RONG; SHU TING; SU DE; SU WEIZHEN; SU XUELIN; WANG HAILING; WANG PU; WANG XIAONI; WANG XIAOYING; WANG XUFENG; WEI HUI; WOESER; XI MURONG; XI XI; XIA YI; XIAO HONG; XIAO LIHONG; XU KUN; YAN GE; YAN GELING; YANG JIANG; YANGDON; YE GUANGQIN; YI SHU; YO YO; YU LIHUA; ZHAI YONGMING; ZHANG ER; ZHANG JIE; ZHANG KANGKANG; ZHANG XIAOFENG; ZHANG XIN; ZHANG XINXIN; ZHANG YUERAN; ZONG PU.
WU ZUGUANG (1917–2003). Playwright, and fiction and prose writer. A legendary figure in Chinese art and literary circles, Wu Zuguang was one of the last generation of Chinese men of letters who distinguished themselves in more than one area of Chinese cultural life. His career stretched across several disciplines: theater, film, poetry, calligraphy, and scholarly pursuits. Born in Beijing to a well-established family that prided itself for learning and literary accomplishments, Wu earned a reputation as a dramatist in the 1930s and 1940s with several critically acclaimed plays, including Fengxue ye gui ren (Returning at a Snowy Night), generally regarded as a masterpiece. Influenced by the May Fourth New Culture Movement, the play accentuates the conflicts between the pursuit of personal happiness and traditional values that choke individualism. The main characters, a Peking opera star and a concubine of a judge, fall in love with each other despite social pressures. When they muster enough courage to elope, they are dealt a fatal blow and their dreams for a happy life together end tragically.
Wu also adapted stories from classical Chinese literature and history into stage plays. Zhengqi ge (Song of Righteousness), about the 13th-century patriot Wen Tianxiang who fought the Mongols, the mythical love story Niulang Zhinii (The Cowherd and the Weaving Maid), and Lin Chong ye ben (Lin Chong Leaving at Night), based on the classical novel Shui hu (Water Margin), are all taken from existing sources. He also wrote opera scripts such as San da Tao Sanchun (Tao Sanchun Receives Three Beatings), San guan yan (Banquet at Three Passes), and Hua wei mei (Match-Making Flowers). After the Cultural Revolution, Wu wrote Chuang jianghu (Crossing Rivers and Lakes), a play based on the eventful life of his wife, a famous opera star.
Although disinterested in politics, Wu got embroiled in a variety of political events. As early as the 1940s while working as an editor for Xin min wanbao (New Citizen Evening Post) in the war capital Chongqing, he published Mao Zedong’s poem “Qin yuanchun: Xue” (Snow: To the Tune of Garden in Full Spring), an act that irritated the Nationalist government. Wu was forced to flee to Hong Kong to evade capture by secret agents and found a job working as a screenplay writer and director of film production companies. He made Hong Kong’s first color film, Guo hun (The Soul of the Nation), which is based on his play Zhengqi ge. He turned another play of his, Fengxue ye gui ren, into a film as well. In 1949, Wu returned to Beijing to work as a screenplay writer and director at the Central Film Bureau.
Throughout the Mao era, Wu, an outspoken critic of bureaucracy and tyranny, became a target at every political campaign, starting with the Anti-Rightist Campaign in 1957 to the aftermath of the Tian’anmen Prodemocracy Movement in 1989. He was publicly insulted, beaten, exiled, and imprisoned; his house was ransacked and his wife reduced to life in a wheelchair. Through these ordeals, Wu refused to succumb to political expediency, as many others did, insisting on a life of moral conviction, which earned him much admiration. See also SPOKEN DRAMA.
WU ZUXIANG (1908–1994). Fiction writer and essayist. Born in Jingxian, Anhui Province, Wu Zuxiang became known in 1932 when his short story “Guanguan de bupin” (Young Master’s Tonic) was published. He was then a student at Qinghua University. In the following years, Wu wrote more short stories collected in Xiliu ji (Western Willow) and Fanyu ji (After Meals). Wu’s stories are characterized by their sardonic wit and satirical attacks on social evils, such as exploitation, corruption, and hypocrisy. During the Sino-Japanese War, he wrote a novel, Shanhong (Landslide), portraying the Chinese people’s struggle against Japanese aggression. In the three decades after 1949, Wu taught at Beijing University and turned his attention to scholarly work on classical Chinese literature, especially the fiction of the Ming and Qing dynasties. In the post-Mao era, Wu resumed his creative work, producing several collections of essays.