This book of Red Chinese poetry in the classical and semi-classical style illustrates the complex relationship between Communist revolution and Chinese cultural traditions. Revolutionaries seeking to break from traditional ways were, at the same time, heir to them, both culturally and politically. To varying extents, they preserved past political traditions and cultural heritages – of peasant rebels, imperial rulers, and the literati, as the poems in this volume show.
The book begins with Chen Duxiu, founder of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and leader, together with the philosopher Hu Shi, of the New Culture Movement of the late 1910s, which is generally seen as a prelude to China’s revolution; and ends with Mao Zedong, Chinese Communism’s most famous political leader and poet. The best Red poet after Mao in the consolidated leadership of the official Party was probably Marshal Chen Yi. Chen Yi was in many ways an odd man out in the Party’s leading core, and had a habit of acting and thinking independently. This was perhaps in part because of his anomalous political and military career as leader of the Red guerrillas in the Three-Year War in the South starting in 1934 (when Mao went on the Long March) and of the New Fourth Army born of it in the south in 1938 (when Mao was with the Party’s mainstream Eighth Route Army in the north).
Interposed between the sections on Chen Duxiu and Chen Yi, the centrepiece and biggest chapter belongs to Zheng Chaolin, the poet, Communist veteran, and Trotskyist political leader who was persecuted under two Chinese regimes (Nationalist and Communist) and spent more than a third of his long life behind bars. Zheng’s courage and human decency would, under a less cruel and repressive regime, have brought him great distinction. Unsurprisingly, however, because of his imprisonment and the eradication of his Trotskyist party, he is the least known of the four. This book was originally conceived as an act of homage to him.
The book therefore presents a relatively rounded picture of some of the best classical Red poetry in China, including the writings of a poet in the early days of the revolution, a poet in power, a poet who spent most of his adult life in jail, and a poet sometimes on the margins, who wrote in forest bivouacs or on the battlefield. The four belonged to a Party in which opposition was wherever possible extinguished and where Mao as the ‘Red Sun in the Hearts of the People of the World’ eclipsed all other contributions to the revolution, pictured as a monolithic event in which difference was branded as ‘splittism’ or disruption. But, beyond their differences, the four poets had much in common. All dedicated their lives to revolution, and were connected to one another in various ways. Mao confessed himself to be Chen Duxiu’s pupil (though he later opposed him and abandoned his teachings). Zheng Chaolin was Chen Duxiu’s loyal lifetime follower, both in the official Party and in the Trotskyist opposition. Zheng Chaolin and Chen Yi both joined the Chinese work-study scheme set up by anarchists in Paris around 1920, from which numerous important leaders of the CCP later emerged; Zheng worked in the Central Committee at the same time as Mao, in the mid 1920s (though Mao later imprisoned him). Mao and Chen Yi fought shoulder to shoulder on the battlefield in the late 1920s and the early 1930s, and Chen Yi helped lead the new regime under Mao after 1949 (though he got into trouble in the 1960s for adopting maverick positions).
Between the late 1930s, when Mao’s ascent to unchallenged leadership of the CCP began, and the late 1970s – and even for a couple of years after his death in 1976 – Mao’s persona dominated Party politics and its history as written in the Party’s history schools. This Maocentric view has been reflected in studies of Chinese communism by non-Chinese historians of the revolution, some of whom for years promoted Mao’s role in the events with a diligence little short of that of their Chinese colleagues. Not so much because they were pulled by the same tide, but because the flow of information was systematically censored by Chinese authorities – even many of Mao’s works were made available only in heavily edited form. The history of the revolution was distorted to magnify Mao’s role in it and to put the contribution of other leaders into deepest shade.
Historians subjected Party institutions to the same process of rewriting and concealing as they did individuals. The role of institutions connected with Mao was grossly inflated, while that of institutions in which Mao played little part, whose true history might have contradicted the Mao cult, was neglected or ignored. A case in point, relevant to this book because of Chen Yi’s prominence in it, was the Communists’ New Fourth Army, the history of which was consistently neglected until after Mao’s death, in favour of the Eighth Route Army under Mao.
Work on the dismantling of Maocentrism in Chinese Communist historiography began in China in the late 1970s. It was both anticipated and replicated in non-Chinese scholarship starting in the 1970s and 1980s, for example with the new attention to leaders other than Mao (including Peng Pai, Li Dazhao, and Chen Duxiu), to revolutionary base areas in the 1930s and the 1940s other than the central Jiangxi and Yan’an bases in which Mao operated, and to political traditions like anarchism and Trotskyism that had long been taboo in China. Figures as obscure as Wang Shiwei, the CCP’s first literary martyr (arrested in 1942, executed in 1947) and Zheng Chaolin came into view. After Zheng Chaolin’s release from prison in 1979, his role in the Party in Paris, Moscow, and Shanghai in the 1920s became a serious object of study, and his memoirs and other writings – including the prison poems at the centre of this book – were published in successive editions.
Was Mao a good poet? Maomania dominated the view of Red poetry in the classical style in China for years, and still largely does, even abroad. But despite the praise that admirers heaped on him, Mao himself was perhaps less confident of the quality of his work. In a letter to his editor in January 1957, when he finally decided to publish his poems at the age of sixty-five, he wrote: ‘Until now I never wanted to make these things known in any formal way, because they are in the old style and I was afraid this might encourage a wrong trend and exercise a bad influence on young people. Besides, they are not up to much as poetry, and there is nothing outstanding about them.’1 In a letter to Chen Yi in July 1965, explaining why he was not qualified to revise Chen’s poems (which Chen had asked him to do), Mao confessed that he was not familiar with the basic rules of the wulü and qilü rhyme schemes.2 Self-deprecation is an accepted part of Chinese face-work, and there is no reason to think that this was Mao’s settled view of himself. However, knowledgeable observers have tended to agree that his poetry was middling. For example, the poet and sinologist Arthur Waley declared that ‘if poetry were painting, I would say that Mao was better than Hitler but not as good as Churchill.’
Many Chinese Communist leaders wrote classical poetry that was as good as or better than Mao’s, but their work has for decades been overlooked and even suppressed. This is because classical poetry was seen as retrograde, hence Mao’s proscription of it in 1942 at the Yan’an Forum on Art and Literature – a proscription applicable to everyone but himself, as it transpired. Other Communist leaders (apart from those in this volume) who wrote poems in the classical style included Dong Biwu (1886–1975), Lin Boxu (1886–1960), Xie Juezai (1884–1971), Ye Jianying (1897–1986), and Zhu De (1886–1976), but all were denied the opportunity to publish their work while Mao lived. Like Chen Yi, Ye Jianying and Zhu De earned the title of ‘poet generals’, fighting men who were good at poetry. They were prolific – Chen left behind 700 poems, Ye 179, and Zhu 550.3 Lin Boxu, Xie Juezai, and Dong Biwu were pillars of the Huaian Poetry Society established by the CCP in Yan’an in September 1941, a forum for Communist leaders to swap poems.4 Their poetry typically expressed political aspirations in heroic and solemn language. However, it also expressed the authors’ innermost feelings, especially before their Communist conversion. Red poetry in the classical style exhibited a multiplicity of themes and forms, so that its eventual fate under Mao was no different from that of radical Chinese politics in general: both were reduced to a set of Maoist stereotypes.
In China, far more than in the West, poetry has always been a communal and collaborative activity, a main thread in the fabric of society and politics, such that the poet Bai Juyi declared China ‘poetry’s country’ (shiguo). Educated men, and some women, celebrated events, friends, and heroes (past and present) and commemorated loss in ‘exchange poems’, invoking someone either remote in time or space or with whom the writer was personally acquainted.5 In the West, poetry has long been a vehicle of mainly personal expression, abstracted from society, whereas in China – where poetry rather than fiction has been ‘the accepted mode of serious reflection’6 – the link between poetry and social concerns was always strong. In many respects, only poetry and non-fictional prose were considered serious literature, and fiction and drama were regarded with less esteem.7
Chinese poetic composition, ‘the expression, in rhymed words, of thought impregnated with feeling’,8 has, from the very start, mixed poetry and song – shige (‘poem-song’) is a standard designation for all forms of poetry. China’s poetic tradition dates back to the Shijing (Book of Songs), the oldest existing collection of Chinese verse from the eleventh to seventh centuries BCE and one of the Five Classics said to have been compiled by Confucius. It begins:
Poetry is for the expression of emotions. An aspiration felt in the heart is, when expressed in words, called poetry. Feelings well up and take shape in words. When language is not enough to convey feelings, we voice them in sighs. When sighs are not enough, we resort to song. When song is not enough, unconsciously the hand begins to move and the feet to dance.
This linking of poetry and song in the lyrical and musical expression of thoughts and emotions was described as follows in the Shangshu (Book of Documents), another of the Five Classics: ‘Poetry expresses purpose, songs intone language, they echo forever, the law of harmony.’
In the dynasties, the manner of classical composition underwent a long process of evolution, until it more or less settled down during the Song Dynasty (960–1279). Up until the Han Dynasty (206 BCE–220 CE), attention was paid mainly to rhyme and the number of characters in each line. Poems in the Shijing used lines of four characters with looser rhymes. Six-character lines predominated in the Chu ci (Songs of the South) in the Warring States period (475–221 BCE). In the Han, poems consisting of five-character and seven-character lines with strict rhyme schemes started to become the norm.
Some Communist poets, such as Chen Duxiu, Ye Jianying, and Dong Biwu, wrote gelü, using strict tonal patterns and rhyme schemes that had started to take shape during the Southern and Northern Dynasties (420– 589), when rules about tones and verbal parallelism (the matching of syntactic functions and of the meanings and tones of characters across lines) were first created. During the early Tang Dynasty (618–907), rules about poetic composition were developed and refined. During and after the Tang, poems with a strict tonal pattern and rhyme scheme were known as ‘poems of the modern genre’, while those that did not follow the new rules were known as ‘poems of the ancient genre’.
Other Communist poets, including Mao, preferred ci, which are much more complex in terms of tonal patterns, rhyme schemes, and the length of poems and lines. By expanding the tonal patterns and rhyme schemes of the ‘modern genre’ and borrowing from folk verse set to music, a new and more diverse variety of ci evolved during the late Tang Dynasty, the Five Dynasties (907–960), and the Song. A ci poem is composed in accordance with a given tune that determines its structure – the number of lines and characters, the rhyme scheme, and the tonal pattern. More than 1,600 such tunes are in existence.
Classical Chinese poetry depends to a considerable extent on analogy (bi) and association (xing), including allusions to and quotations from classical works. To compose a ci using strict tonal patterns, rigorous rhyme schemes, verbal parallelism and so on demands not only a grasp of these techniques but a huge vocabulary from which to draw the necessary sounds and meanings. Since the start of the poetry revolution in the late Qing, rules about tonal patterns have no longer been followed in the same way as in the past, since poems were no longer written for singing. The rhetorical techniques of analogy and association have also declined in importance, and are now generally seen as outdated. This tendency to do away with inflexible rules is already evident in most Red poetry, especially since 1949.
As to content, the Chinese lyric tradition is generally no less personal, intimate, and autobiographical than the Western. However, as Eugene Eoyang pointed out in his comparison of Western and Chinese poetry, reading Tang poems
one doesn’t have the feeling one expects from reading a lyric, that one is overhearing a first-person speaking to himself. The poet is addressing another poet, not unlike himself, often identified in the inscription; as readers, we are assuming the role of a contemporary sharing the experience, the contextual reality that gave birth to the poem. Far from ‘overhearing’ the poem, the reader is asked to engage in the dialectic of the poem, to supply the allusion, to recall the circumstances enshrined in the poem, to respond with his (or her) reactions (often in the form of an ‘answering poem’).10
Under the Confucian system of rule, poetry was usually a preserve of the scholars and literati who helped run the court and staffed the agrarian bureaucracy, and who through their writings, including their poems, informed virtuous rulers of popular needs and opinion. Poetry served a moral as well as a directly political purpose, expressed in the canonical Confucian maxim shi yan zhi (‘poetry verbalises aspirations’). Poetry played a role in almost every sphere of Chinese governance, including the imperial examination system that recruited new officials, and the ability to write it could make or break a man’s career. Among scholars, ‘exchange poetry’ grew out of the heavily ritualised practice of ‘pure talk’, in which the exchange of poems established alliances in society and the state and promoted social cohesion and collective identities.11
These practices, carried over into the twentieth century, played a role in twentieth-century radical politics. Poetry figured in two main ways in the Chinese Revolution. In most revolutions, poetry serves as a mirror, medium, and venue of revolutionary activity, either overt or covert, for, as Shelley said, ‘poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.’ This happened in the Chinese Revolution too, where poetry in revolution came close on the heels of revolution in poetry, launched by late-nineteenth-century reformers and revolutionaries. The term ‘poetic revolution’ was coined in 1899 by the leading thinker and recently converted revolutionary leader, Liang Qichao (1873–1929), who introduced European poetry as a potential guide for the new Chinese poetry and called for the injection of fresh terms, concepts, and ideas along with a new mood into Chinese poetry. However, as the leader of the ‘poetic revolution’, Liang only advocated a half-way version, one that would use modern vocabulary and concepts in the composition of poems in the ancient style.13 The more radical wing of the ‘poetic revolution’ took a more iconoclastic stand, casting aside many of the conventions of traditional Chinese poetry and advocating a poetry written not only in an oral or vernacular idiom (rather than in the classical language), but also in a free and modern style.
This revolution in poetry paralleled that in Chinese fiction but was much harder to bring about, for some fiction had been written in the vernacular in China for centuries. Whereas new-style prose writers could build on a rich tradition that included the four great Chinese classical novels – Romance of the Three Kingdoms, Journey to the West, Water Margin and Dream of the Red Chamber – new-style poets had little or nothing Chinese to use as models. The vernacular poets of the Chinese Revolution included Guo Moruo (1892–1978), Zhou Zuoren (1885–1969), Lu Xun (1881–1936), Yu Dafu (1896–1945), Xu Zhimo (1896–1931), and many other patriotic intellectuals. Like their Confucian predecessors, they wrote poems that served a social end, but the end was new – to free the common people from feudal bonds and superstition.13 Their work is sometimes seen as flat and shallow, lacking the depth, originality, anarchic excess and experimental zeal of Soviet poetry in the first decade after 1917. The Chinese Communists’ interest in vernacular poetry also led them, in the regions of China they controlled during the Anti-Japanese War, to promote folk songs and ‘street poetry’, inspired in part by Soviet examples.14
Some Chinese Communist poets followed in the footsteps of Liang Qichao by combining revolutionary spirit with old poetic forms, rather than rid themselves entirely of ‘the bondage of the past’ by adopting a new vernacular style. Chen Duxiu, the leader (together with Hu Shi) of China’s ‘literary revolution’ and champion of the switch to vernacular literature during the May Fourth Period, insisted that spoken language did not suit the mood, sentiments and taste of poetry.15 The best-known recusant of this sort was Mao Zedong, who, despite insisting to others that literature must serve the masses and be ‘popular’ in form, wrote poetry in the classical style, both before and after coming to power.
In his study of Mao Zedong Thought, the Trotskyist leader Wang Fanxi uses Mao’s poems to peer into his soul. There he finds not a modern-day revolutionary but an imperious chieftain in the ‘great man’ style – self-aggrandising, devoid of the compassion displayed by poetry-writing rebels in dynastic times, and moved not by altruism, or the desire to end human suffering and bring about universal enlightenment, but by personal ambition. Wang argues that Mao’s poems ‘bring to mind antiquity, not modernity; emperors, kings, generals, and ministers, genius and beauty, not the common people,’ and that the formal properties of classical poetry encourage this focus.16 Wang’s conclusions are confirmed by an analysis of the tone and themes of Mao’s poems. Some are deeply personal in nature, about Mao’s relationships and friendships and the loss of them, revealing human vulnerability and intensity of feeling; but even these personal poems are usually openly or implicitly political. Most are impersonal, and shot through with a tone of hubris, triumphalism, absolute self-assurance, and confidence in the inevitable victory of the cause and his own centrality to it. In the opinion of one translator, Ma Wen-yee, they are above all concerned with themes of ‘nature, history, the universe, world revolution, and China’s destiny’.17
The second way in which poetry figured in the Chinese Revolution was through the networks and alliances that poets formed. This activity was usually confined to the intellectual elite. That goes both for the poetry societies set up after the May Fourth Movement, by poets who adopted the vernacular and tried to follow Western or non-traditional models; and for Communist poets who clung to the classical style. The modern-style poetry societies that mushroomed in the 1920s served as sites of political bonding and debate. Only after 1937, during the Anti-Japanese War and the Civil War, when poems in the demotic style were recited in public in the towns and villages to promote patriotism and resistance, were they linked to a mass movement.18 These societies must be distinguished from the elite poetry clubs set up by Communists like Chen Yi, the New Fourth Army commander in Jiangsu in central China, and by his counterparts in Yan’an in the northwest.19 Through these clubs, Communist poets writing mainly in the classical style used poetic exchange to forge links with prominent local gentry and intellectuals during the wartime multi-class united front (1937–45). Such exchanges followed many of the conventions of ‘exchange poetry’ as practised in pre-modern China.
Mao Zedong’s classical poetry was also drawn into this literary politics. In 1945, the left-wing Nationalist Liu Yazi, himself a poet in the classical style, used Mao’s ‘Snow’, his best-known poem, written in the voice of a self-proclaimed hero, to promote Mao as a hero in Chongqing (then still Chiang Kai-shek’s capital), just as Mao was heading there to negotiate a post-war settlement with Chiang Kai-shek. On Mao’s arrival, Liu wrote a poem welcoming him as an ‘old friend’. He later wrote another poem matching the length and intonation of each line and reusing all the rhyme-words of Mao’s ‘Snow’, in an ancient form of poetic exchange called chouchang. The resulting creation accentuated Mao’s image as a military hero of great talent and bold vision. Over the next two months, more than thirty further matching poems were published in Chongqing, some supportive but over half of them critical of Mao, whom they compared to a low-born, failed rebel. Even so, the publicity confirmed Mao’s status and authority as a ‘cultural insider’ destined to lead China.20
It is true that the Communist revolutionaries and rulers had an equivocal and at times contradictory relationship with classical Chinese poetry. On the one hand, they were radical revolutionaries vowing to break away from ‘feudal traditions’, in poetry too. On the other hand, they belonged to a generation that had received a mixed education in traditional Chinese learning and modern Western learning. Classical Chinese poetry had for centuries been regarded as the embodiment of accomplishment, sophistication and cultivation, the epitome of Chinese high literary culture. Some Chinese Communist leaders could not resist the temptation to use this prestigious genre to express their own thoughts and aspirations.
The present volume introduces a narrow but representative selection of Red poetry in the classical style. Each poet has his own personal style and concerns. Deeply emotional, profoundly learned, and well versed in classical skills and language, Chen Duxiu’s poems are closest to those of the traditional literatus. Mao’s work is skilfully and gracefully executed, vigorous, rich in style, and pregnant with complex imagery and ideas, but it is self-aggrandising and overweening. Zheng Chaolin’s is equally skilfully and gracefully executed, yet it can often be tragic, poignant, self-questioning, intimate and complex. Chen Yi is flamboyant, practical and descriptive, commemorating military exploits and celebrating events in revolutionary history; he is less fond than Mao and Zheng of classical allusions and traditional devices. Chen Yi also liked to write free verse in the vernacular. However, the poems of all four share common themes: aspiration for political and national renewal, mourning for the loss of comrades and loved ones, and celebration of the ubiquity and inevitability of change. All were bold, fearless, and prepared for self-sacrifice, and these traits shine through in their poems.