History of Chinese Literature/Chapter 22

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History of Chinese Literature

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Chapter 22: Literature of the People's Republic I — Socialist Realism and Its Discontents (1949–1966)

1. Introduction: The New Order and Its Literary Consequences

The proclamation of the People's Republic of China on October 1, 1949, inaugurated a new era in the history of Chinese literature — an era in which the relationship between literature and political power was more intimate, more consequential, and more perilous than it had ever been before. The Chinese Communist Party, which now controlled the most populous nation on earth, was committed to a vision of literature as an instrument of socialist construction and class struggle — a vision articulated in Mao Zedong's "Yan'an Talks on Literature and Art" of 1942, which now became the official literary doctrine of the new state. Under this doctrine, literature was required to serve the workers, peasants, and soldiers; to reflect the realities of socialist construction; to portray the new society in a positive light; and to contribute to the political education and moral transformation of the Chinese people. Writers who fulfilled these requirements could expect official recognition, material rewards, and a mass readership; writers who failed to fulfill them — or who challenged them — risked criticism, marginalization, and, in the worst cases, persecution and imprisonment.

The seventeen years between the founding of the People's Republic and the eruption of the Cultural Revolution in 1966 — a period conventionally known as the "Seventeen Years" (十七年, shiqi nian) — were thus characterized by a fundamental paradox. On the one hand, the new government invested enormous resources in the promotion of literature and the arts: it established writers' associations, literary journals, and publishing houses on an unprecedented scale; it organized literary conferences and festivals; it sent writers to factories, farms, and military units to gather material; and it created a system of literary prizes and honors that conferred genuine prestige on favored writers. The result was a vast expansion of literary production and literary readership — by the late 1950s, China had more published writers, more literary journals, and more readers of literature than at any previous time in its history. On the other hand, the same government that promoted literature with such energy also controlled it with an iron hand: it determined which literary works could be published and which could not; it established the criteria by which literary works were to be evaluated; it rewarded conformity and punished dissent; and it subjected writers to periodic political campaigns that could destroy careers, shatter lives, and, in extreme cases, end in imprisonment or death.

The result of this paradox was a literary culture that was at once enormously productive and profoundly constrained — a culture that produced a substantial body of competent and occasionally distinguished work within the boundaries of official doctrine, but that also silenced some of the most talented and most original voices in Chinese literature and suppressed entire modes of literary expression that were deemed incompatible with the requirements of socialist construction. The history of the Seventeen Years is thus a history of both achievement and loss — of literature that was created and literature that was destroyed — and any assessment of the period must take both dimensions into account.

2. Institutionalization of Literature: Writers' Associations, Magazines, and Censorship

The first task of the new government was to create the institutional framework within which literary production would be organized and controlled. The key institution was the Chinese Writers' Association (中国作家协会, Zhongguo zuojia xiehui), established in 1949 as the All-China Federation of Literary and Art Workers and reorganized as the Chinese Writers' Association in 1953. The Writers' Association — which was modeled on the Union of Soviet Writers and which was, like its Soviet counterpart, an arm of the Communist Party rather than an independent professional organization — served multiple functions: it determined who was recognized as a "writer" (membership in the Association was both a professional credential and a mark of political reliability); it organized literary activities, conferences, and study sessions; it assigned writers to factories, farms, and military units to "experience life" (体验生活, tiyan shenghuo); and it administered the system of literary prizes and honors that constituted the official hierarchy of literary prestige. Membership in the Writers' Association also conferred material benefits — including a salary, housing, medical care, and access to publishing opportunities — that made it virtually impossible for a serious writer to function outside the system.

The new government also established a comprehensive network of literary journals and publishing houses that served as the primary channels for the dissemination of new literary works. The most important literary journals of the Seventeen Years — including Renmin wenxue (人民文学, People's Literature), founded in 1949, and Shikan (诗刊, Poetry Journal), founded in 1957 — were organs of the Writers' Association and were subject to the editorial control of the Party's propaganda department. The publishing houses — including the People's Literature Publishing House (人民文学出版社, Renmin wenxue chubanshe), the Writers' Publishing House (作家出版社, Zuojia chubanshe), and numerous provincial publishing houses — were similarly subject to Party control. The result was a publishing system that was at once remarkably efficient — new literary works could be printed in editions of hundreds of thousands or even millions of copies and distributed throughout the country — and remarkably restrictive, since every work had to pass through multiple layers of editorial review before it could be published, and works that were deemed politically unacceptable were simply not published.

Censorship in the People's Republic was not, for the most part, exercised through formal legal mechanisms — there was no official censorship bureau and no published list of forbidden topics (though certain subjects, such as criticism of the Communist Party or advocacy of political pluralism, were obviously taboo). Instead, censorship operated through a system of informal controls that was, in many ways, more effective than formal censorship: editors and publishers, who were themselves Party members or who were answerable to Party authorities, exercised "self-censorship" by declining to publish works that they judged to be politically risky; writers, who knew the boundaries of acceptable expression from experience and from the examples of those who had overstepped them, exercised their own "self-censorship" by avoiding topics and attitudes that they knew would attract criticism. The result was a literary culture in which the boundaries of acceptable expression were never precisely defined but were always present — a culture in which writers learned to navigate a complex and shifting landscape of political expectations, and in which the consequences of miscalculation could be severe.

3. Socialist Realism as Doctrine

The literary doctrine that the new government imposed on Chinese writers was "socialist realism" (社会主义现实主义, shehui zhuyi xianshi zhuyi) — a concept borrowed from the Soviet Union, where it had been established as the official literary doctrine at the First Congress of Soviet Writers in 1934 under the patronage of Andrei Zhdanov and with the authority of Joseph Stalin. Socialist realism — as defined by Zhdanov and as adopted by the Chinese Communist Party — required that literature depict reality not as it was but as it was becoming: that is, literature should portray the inevitable triumph of socialism, the heroism of the working class, the wisdom of the Communist Party, and the progressive transformation of Chinese society under Party leadership. The "typical" characters of socialist realist fiction were to be "positive heroes" (正面人物, zhengmian renwu) — workers, peasants, soldiers, and Party cadres who embodied the virtues of the new society — and the narrative arc of socialist realist fiction was to be a narrative of progressive development, moving from conflict to resolution, from darkness to light, from the old society to the new.

Socialist realism differed from the "critical realism" (批判现实主义, pipan xianshi zhuyi) of the May Fourth tradition in several crucial respects. Critical realism — the literary tradition established by Lu Xun and developed by the May Fourth writers — had been primarily a literature of exposure and critique: its purpose was to reveal the injustices, the absurdities, and the cruelties of Chinese society in order to inspire the desire for change. Socialist realism, by contrast, was primarily a literature of affirmation and celebration: its purpose was to portray the new society in a positive light, to demonstrate the superiority of socialism over the old order, and to inspire readers with the achievements of socialist construction. Where critical realism had focused on the dark side of Chinese life — poverty, oppression, corruption, superstition — socialist realism was expected to focus on the bright side: heroic labor, collective achievement, political awakening, and the triumph of revolutionary ideals.

This shift from critique to affirmation created a fundamental problem for Chinese writers. The most powerful and most enduring works of modern Chinese fiction — the stories of Lu Xun, the novels of Shen Congwen, the fiction of Zhang Ailing — had drawn their literary power from their unflinching depiction of human suffering, social injustice, and moral complexity. Socialist realism demanded a different kind of literary power — the power to inspire, to uplift, to affirm — and many writers found it difficult, if not impossible, to produce work of genuine literary quality within these constraints. The temptation to produce formulaic, predictable, and artistically lifeless fiction — fiction that checked all the political boxes but that failed to engage the reader's emotions or imagination — was enormous, and a great deal of the fiction produced during the Seventeen Years succumbed to this temptation.

In 1958, Mao Zedong modified the official literary doctrine by proposing a new formulation: the "combination of revolutionary realism and revolutionary romanticism" (革命现实主义与革命浪漫主义相结合, geming xianshi zhuyi yu geming langman zhuyi xiang jiehe). This formulation — which was meant to encourage a more imaginative and more emotionally engaging literature than the often wooden productions of orthodox socialist realism — reflected Mao's dissatisfaction with the literary output of the first decade of the People's Republic and his desire for a literature that would embody the utopian aspirations of the Great Leap Forward. In practice, however, the new formulation did little to liberate Chinese writers from the constraints of political orthodoxy; it merely added a requirement for "revolutionary romanticism" — enthusiasm, optimism, and visionary idealism — to the existing requirement for "revolutionary realism."

4. The "Hundred Flowers" Campaign and the Anti-Rightist Backlash

The most dramatic and most traumatic literary event of the Seventeen Years — and one of the most consequential events in the history of modern Chinese literature — was the "Hundred Flowers" campaign of 1956–1957 and the devastating "Anti-Rightist" campaign that followed it. The two campaigns — which together lasted less than two years but whose consequences would be felt for decades — demonstrated with brutal clarity the limits of literary freedom under the new regime and the terrible price that writers could pay for speaking their minds.

The "Hundred Flowers" campaign (百花运动, Baihua yundong) — named after the slogan "Let a hundred flowers bloom, let a hundred schools of thought contend" (百花齐放,百家争鸣, baihua qifang, baijia zhengming) — was launched by Mao Zedong in the spring of 1956 as an invitation to intellectuals, including writers, to offer their honest criticisms of the Party's leadership and its policies. The invitation was motivated, at least in part, by Mao's recognition that the rigid political control of intellectual life was stifling creativity and discouraging the kind of frank discussion that was necessary for the improvement of governance and the resolution of social problems. The invitation was also influenced by the events in the Soviet Union — particularly Khrushchev's "Secret Speech" of February 1956, which had exposed the crimes of the Stalin era and had encouraged a more open intellectual climate in the Soviet bloc — and by the uprisings in Poland and Hungary that had demonstrated the dangers of ignoring popular discontent.

Chinese writers and intellectuals — many of whom had been chafing under the constraints of political orthodoxy for years — responded to the invitation with an outpouring of criticism that was far more extensive and far more radical than the Party leadership had anticipated. Writers criticized the censorship system, the political control of literary production, the suppression of individual creativity, and the reduction of literature to propaganda. They called for greater artistic freedom, greater tolerance of literary diversity, and a more nuanced understanding of the relationship between literature and politics. Some went further, criticizing specific Party policies, questioning the Party's right to exercise ideological control over intellectual life, and challenging the fundamental assumptions of the socialist system.

The Party's response — whether it had been planned from the beginning as a trap to lure dissidents into revealing themselves, or whether it was a panicked reaction to criticism that had exceeded expectations — was swift and devastating. In June 1957, Mao declared that the "Hundred Flowers" campaign had exposed a dangerous nest of "rightists" (右派, youpai) who were seeking to undermine the socialist system, and he launched the "Anti-Rightist Campaign" (反右运动, Fanyou yundong), which targeted hundreds of thousands of intellectuals — including many of the most talented and most prominent writers in China — for political persecution.

Among the writers who were labeled "rightists" and who suffered devastating consequences were some of the most important figures in modern Chinese literature. Ding Ling — who had already been subjected to political criticism in the 1940s — was labeled a rightist, expelled from the Writers' Association, stripped of her publications, and sent to a labor camp in the remote northeast, where she would spend the next two decades. The poet Ai Qing (艾青, 1910–1996) — the most important Chinese poet of the mid-twentieth century, whose passionate, politically engaged verse had made him the laureate of the revolution — was similarly labeled a rightist and exiled to the remote northwest. The young writer Wang Meng (王蒙, born 1934), whose short story "The Young Newcomer in the Organization Department" (组织部来了个年轻人, Zuzhihu lai le ge nianqingren, 1956) had offered a mild and sympathetic critique of bureaucratic inefficiency in a Party organization, was labeled a rightist and sent to Xinjiang for more than two decades. In total, an estimated 550,000 intellectuals were labeled as rightists in the campaign — a catastrophe that silenced an entire generation of Chinese thinkers and writers and that created a climate of fear that would pervade Chinese intellectual life for decades to come.

5. Key Works of the Seventeen Years

Despite the constraints of political orthodoxy and the devastating impact of the Anti-Rightist Campaign, the Seventeen Years produced a substantial body of literary work — much of it competent, some of it distinguished, and a few works of genuine and enduring literary power. The novels and stories of this period, though they were required to conform to the principles of socialist realism and to portray the new society in a positive light, were not uniformly propagandistic or artistically lifeless; the best of them combined political commitment with genuine literary skill and achieved a quality that transcended the limitations of the official doctrine.

Zhao Shuli (赵树理, 1906–1970), a writer who had emerged from the Yan'an literary culture of the 1940s, was widely regarded during the early years of the People's Republic as the model of the kind of writer that the new society required. Born into a peasant family in Shanxi province, educated in both traditional and modern schools, Zhao Shuli drew on the oral storytelling traditions of the Chinese countryside — the folk tales, the pingshu (评书, "storytelling"), the kuaishu (快书, "rapid tales") — to create a style of fiction that was accessible, entertaining, and politically engaged. His novel Sanliwan (三里湾, 1955), which depicted the process of agricultural collectivization in a Shanxi village, was a successful example of socialist realist fiction: it portrayed the transformation of the countryside with a combination of documentary realism and comic vitality that made its political message palatable and its characters recognizable as real human beings rather than mere ideological abstractions. Zhao Shuli's ability to combine political orthodoxy with genuine literary skill made him the most celebrated writer of the early People's Republic — but it also made him a target during the Cultural Revolution, when his emphasis on realistic depiction of rural life was condemned as insufficiently revolutionary. He was persecuted and tortured during the Cultural Revolution and died in 1970.

Zhou Libo (周立波, 1908–1979) produced two of the most important novels of the Seventeen Years. Baofeng zhouyu (暴风骤雨, The Hurricane, 1949), which depicted the land reform campaign in a Manchurian village, was one of the first novels to emerge from the revolutionary experience and won the Stalin Prize for literature in 1951. Shanxiang jubian (山乡巨变, Great Changes in a Mountain Village, 1958–1960), which depicted the collectivization of agriculture in a Hunan village, was a more complex and more artistically ambitious work that combined political analysis with lyrical descriptions of the Hunan landscape and sympathetic portrayals of individual characters whose responses to collectivization were varied and sometimes resistant.

Yang Mo (杨沫, 1914–1995) produced one of the most popular novels of the Seventeen Years: Qingchun zhi ge (青春之歌, Song of Youth, 1958), a semi-autobiographical novel that traces the political awakening of a young woman, Lin Daojing, who moves from bourgeois individualism to revolutionary commitment through a series of romantic relationships and political experiences set against the backdrop of the student movement of the 1930s. The novel was enormously popular with young readers — it sold millions of copies and was adapted into a widely seen film — and its portrayal of a woman's political and emotional development resonated with the experiences of many of its readers. Yang Mo was criticized for the novel's emphasis on romantic love and individual psychology — which some critics considered incompatible with the requirements of socialist realism — and she was forced to revise the novel to strengthen its political message, a revision that most critics agree weakened rather than improved the work.

Liu Qing (柳青, 1916–1978) was widely regarded as the most talented novelist of the Seventeen Years. His novel Chuangye shi (创业史, The Builders, 1960) — which depicted the process of agricultural collectivization in a Shaanxi village — was the most ambitious and the most artistically accomplished novel to emerge from the socialist realist tradition. Liu Qing spent years living in a rural village, immersing himself in the daily life of the peasants he wrote about, and the novel reflects this immersion in its detailed and nuanced depiction of rural society — the complex social relationships, the economic calculations, the personal rivalries, and the genuine idealism that characterized the collectivization process. The novel's protagonist, Liang Shengbao, is one of the most fully realized "positive heroes" in Chinese socialist realist fiction — a peasant Communist who is both idealistic and practical, both principled and humanly fallible. The Builders demonstrated that socialist realist fiction, at its best, could achieve a literary quality that transcended its ideological framework.

6. Persistence of Classical Forms

One of the most surprising features of the literary culture of the Seventeen Years was the persistence — and, in some respects, the revival — of classical literary forms, particularly classical poetry. Despite the May Fourth Movement's radical rejection of the classical literary tradition and its insistence on the vernacular as the only legitimate medium of literary expression, classical poetry — written in the traditional forms, with the traditional patterns of rhyme, tone, and parallelism — continued to be composed and appreciated throughout the Republican era and into the era of the People's Republic.

The most prominent practitioner of classical poetry in the new China was, remarkably, Mao Zedong himself. Mao was a lifelong devotee of classical Chinese poetry — particularly the ci (词) form of the Song dynasty — and he composed poems in the classical style throughout his life. His poems — which were published intermittently during the 1950s and 1960s and which attracted enormous attention and admiration — combined the grandeur and sweep of the classical tradition with the revolutionary content of the new era. Poems like "Snow" (沁园春·雪, Qinyuan chun: Xue, composed 1936, published 1945) — with its sweeping panorama of the snow-covered Chinese landscape and its bold declaration that the great emperors of Chinese history were inferior in literary talent to the heroes of the present — and "Swimming" (水调歌头·游泳, Shuidiao getou: Youyong, 1956) — a meditation on the construction of the Three Gorges Dam composed while swimming in the Yangtze River — demonstrated that the classical poetic forms could accommodate modern content and revolutionary sentiment.

Mao's example gave classical poetry a legitimacy that it might otherwise have lacked in the literary culture of the People's Republic. If the Chairman himself wrote classical poetry, then classical poetry could hardly be condemned as a relic of the feudal past. A number of other prominent figures — including the revolutionary veterans Chen Yi (陈毅), Dong Biwu (董必武), and Ye Jianying (叶剑英) — also composed poetry in the classical style, and literary journals occasionally published classical poems alongside vernacular works. But the revival of classical poetry was limited and ambiguous: the official literary doctrine still regarded the vernacular as the proper medium of contemporary literature, and the classical forms were tolerated rather than actively promoted. The persistence of classical poetry during the Seventeen Years was thus a quiet assertion of cultural continuity in an era of radical political change — a reminder that the Chinese literary tradition, however battered by the storms of revolution, was not so easily extinguished.

The quyi (曲艺, "sung and spoken arts") — the traditional performance arts that included storytelling, ballad singing, cross-talk comedy (相声, xiangsheng), and various forms of regional narrative song — also flourished during the Seventeen Years, receiving active government support as a means of reaching the illiterate or semi-literate rural population with politically appropriate content. These forms, which had deep roots in Chinese folk culture, were adapted to carry revolutionary messages while retaining their traditional entertainment value — a combination that made them enormously popular with rural audiences.

7. "Revolutionary Romanticism" and the Great Leap Forward

The Great Leap Forward (大跃进, Dayuejin, 1958–1961) — Mao Zedong's catastrophic attempt to transform China into an industrialized socialist utopia through mass mobilization and sheer force of revolutionary will — had profound consequences for Chinese literary culture. The Great Leap Forward demanded a literature of unbounded optimism, heroic achievement, and revolutionary fervor — a literature that would inspire the masses to superhuman efforts and that would portray the Great Leap Forward as a triumph of the human spirit over material limitations. The doctrine of the "combination of revolutionary realism and revolutionary romanticism," which Mao had promulgated in 1958, was meant to provide the theoretical framework for this literature: writers were encouraged to depict not merely the reality of socialist construction but its revolutionary potential — to portray not merely what was but what could be, and to inspire readers with visions of the glorious future that was within their grasp.

The literary production of the Great Leap Forward period — much of which was produced by amateurs, factory workers, peasants, and soldiers who were encouraged to write poetry and fiction as part of the mass mobilization campaign — was, from an artistic standpoint, largely disastrous. The "new folk songs" (新民歌, xin minge) movement, which encouraged peasants and workers to compose and recite folk songs celebrating the achievements of the Great Leap Forward, produced millions of poems — most of them doggerel that celebrated impossibly inflated production targets and portrayed the Great Leap Forward as a paradise of abundance and joy. The gap between the utopian fantasies of the new folk songs and the grim reality of the Great Leap Forward — which resulted in the worst famine in human history, killing an estimated thirty to forty-five million people between 1959 and 1961 — was one of the most grotesque episodes in the history of Chinese literature.

The famine and the catastrophic failure of the Great Leap Forward created a crisis of conscience for Chinese writers — a crisis that was, however, largely suppressed by the political climate of fear and conformity that prevailed during the early 1960s. A few writers attempted, cautiously, to address the disaster. The satirist Deng Tuo (邓拓, 1912–1966), writing under the collective pseudonym "Wu Nanxing" (吴南星) in the Beijing newspaper column "Notes from Three-Family Village" (三家村札记, Sanjiancun zhaji), used historical allegory and oblique allusion to criticize the irrationality and the suffering of the Great Leap Forward — a strategy that allowed him to make his points without directly challenging the Party leadership. But even this oblique criticism proved too dangerous: during the Cultural Revolution, Deng Tuo was denounced as a counter-revolutionary and driven to suicide in 1966.

8. The Literature of Ethnic Minorities

One of the more positive aspects of the literary culture of the Seventeen Years was the attention that was given — at least in principle — to the literatures of China's ethnic minorities. The People's Republic officially recognized fifty-five ethnic minorities (少数民族, shaoshu minzu) in addition to the Han majority, and the new government's policy of "national unity" (民族团结, minzu tuanjie) included an effort to promote the cultural expression of these minority groups, including their literary traditions.

The government's support for minority literature took several forms. Writers from minority backgrounds were recruited into the Writers' Association and encouraged to produce literary works that depicted the lives, customs, and histories of their peoples. Oral literary traditions — including the great epics that had been transmitted orally for centuries, such as the Tibetan Gesar (格萨尔, Ge Sa'er), the Mongol Jangar (江格尔, Jiangge'er), and the Kyrgyz Manas (玛纳斯, Manasi) — were collected, transcribed, and published for the first time, often in both the original language and in Chinese translation. Literary journals in minority languages were established, and a corps of translators worked to make minority literary works accessible to Chinese readers and to make Chinese literary works accessible to minority readers.

The Tibetan epic King Gesar — one of the longest epics in world literature, with some versions extending to more than a million lines — was the subject of a major collection and transcription effort that began in the 1950s and that produced dozens of published volumes. The epic, which recounts the heroic deeds of King Gesar of Gling as he battles demons, conquers neighboring kingdoms, and establishes justice in the land, is a work of extraordinary narrative richness and mythological power that ranks among the great epics of world literature. Its collection and publication — however politically motivated — was a genuine contribution to the preservation of world literary heritage.

The Mongol epic Jangar — a cycle of heroic narratives that celebrates the warriors of the mythical land of Bumba, a paradise where the people are eternally young and the land is eternally prosperous — was also collected and published during this period. The epic, which has been transmitted orally for centuries among the Oirat Mongols of Xinjiang and other regions, is notable for its vivid depictions of battle, its celebration of martial virtues, and its evocation of a pastoral utopia that contrasts poignantly with the harsh realities of the nomadic life.

The literary work of minority writers during the Seventeen Years was, however, subject to the same political constraints as the work of Han writers — and, in some respects, to additional constraints, since minority writers were expected not only to conform to the principles of socialist realism but also to portray the relationship between their peoples and the Chinese state in a positive light. The depiction of ethnic tensions, historical grievances, or cultural practices that were deemed "backward" or "feudal" was strongly discouraged, and minority writers who strayed from the approved narrative risked the same political consequences as their Han counterparts. The result was a body of minority literature that was, for the most part, politically conformist — celebrating the "liberation" of minority peoples by the Communist revolution, portraying the "unity" of the Chinese nationalities, and depicting the transformation of minority societies under socialist modernization.

9. Literary Criticism and Theoretical Debates

The Seventeen Years were a period of intense — and often dangerous — literary debate. The official literary doctrine, despite its apparent rigidity, left room for genuine disagreements about the application of socialist realist principles to Chinese literary practice, and these disagreements often erupted into public controversies that had consequences far beyond the literary sphere. The most important of these debates concerned the nature of socialist realism, the role of the writer in socialist society, the permissible range of literary subject matter, and the relationship between political correctness and artistic quality.

The debate over the novel Hongloumeng (红楼梦, Dream of the Red Chamber) — which erupted in 1954 and which had consequences far beyond the literary sphere — was the most consequential literary debate of the early People's Republic. The immediate occasion for the debate was the publication of a critical study of Hongloumeng by two young scholars, Li Xifan (李希凡) and Lan Ling (蓝翎), who attacked the established Hongloumeng scholar Yu Pingbo (俞平伯, 1900–1990) for his "bourgeois idealist" interpretation of the novel. Mao Zedong personally intervened in the debate, endorsing the young scholars' critique and condemning the literary establishment for its failure to apply Marxist methods to the study of classical literature. The debate — which was orchestrated by the Party leadership as a means of asserting ideological control over the literary and academic establishment — resulted in the public humiliation of Yu Pingbo and sent a chilling message to the entire intellectual community about the dangers of deviating from the Marxist line.

The debate over Hu Feng (胡风, 1902–1985) — which erupted in 1955 and which was even more devastating in its consequences — was the most tragic literary controversy of the Seventeen Years. Hu Feng, a literary critic and disciple of Lu Xun, had long argued for a more flexible and more humane literary doctrine than the rigid socialist realism that the Party prescribed. In a series of essays and reports, Hu Feng criticized the mechanical application of political criteria to literary evaluation, defended the right of writers to draw on their own subjective experience, and argued that good literature required honest engagement with the complexities of human life rather than mere conformity to political formulas. In July 1954, he submitted a lengthy report to the Central Committee in which he outlined his views and proposed reforms to the literary system. The Party's response was devastating: Hu Feng was denounced as a counter-revolutionary, his private letters were published as "evidence" of a "counter-revolutionary clique," and he was arrested, imprisoned, and subjected to decades of solitary confinement that destroyed his mental health. He was not released until 1979 and was not fully rehabilitated until 1988. The Hu Feng case — which demonstrated that even a loyal Marxist who questioned the Party's literary policies could be treated as a political criminal — had a profoundly intimidating effect on the Chinese literary community and contributed to the climate of fear and conformity that characterized the literary culture of the late 1950s and early 1960s.

10. Literature on the Eve of the Storm

By the early 1960s, the literary culture of the People's Republic had reached a precarious equilibrium. The catastrophe of the Anti-Rightist Campaign had taught writers the consequences of open dissent; the disaster of the Great Leap Forward had discredited the most utopian claims of revolutionary romanticism; and the relative moderation of the post-Great Leap recovery period (1962–1965) had created a slightly more relaxed intellectual climate in which writers could, cautiously, explore themes and techniques that went beyond the narrow boundaries of orthodox socialist realism.

Some of the most interesting literary work of the Seventeen Years was produced in this brief period of relative relaxation. The historical drama Hai Rui Dismissed from Office (海瑞罢官, Hai Rui ba guan, 1961), written by the historian and deputy mayor of Beijing Wu Han (吴晗, 1909–1969), used the story of an honest Ming dynasty official who was dismissed for defending the common people against a powerful emperor as an allegory — or so its critics would later claim — for the dismissal of Marshal Peng Dehuai, who had been purged in 1959 for his criticism of the Great Leap Forward. The play was initially praised but would later be attacked in a famous article by Yao Wenyuan in November 1965 — an attack that is conventionally regarded as the opening salvo of the Cultural Revolution.

The novel Lin hai xue yuan (林海雪原, Tracks in the Snowy Forest, 1957) by Qu Bo (曲波, 1923–2002) — a thrilling narrative of a People's Liberation Army unit tracking down a band of Nationalist bandits in the forests of Manchuria — was one of the most popular and most widely read works of the Seventeen Years. Written in a style that combined revolutionary heroism with the narrative conventions of the traditional Chinese martial arts novel (武侠小说, wuxia xiaoshuo), the novel demonstrated that politically correct content could be combined with popular entertainment forms to produce a genuinely engaging literary work. The character of Yang Zirong — the brave scout who infiltrates the bandit lair in disguise — became one of the most iconic figures of People's Republic literature and was later adapted into one of the "model operas" (样板戏, yangban xi) of the Cultural Revolution.

The writings of the period also included works that, while conforming to the requirements of political orthodoxy, managed to achieve a genuine literary quality that transcended their ideological framework. The poet He Jingzhi (贺敬之, born 1924), whose long poem "Return to Yan'an" (回延安, Hui Yan'an, 1956) combined revolutionary sentiment with the folk song traditions of northern Shaanxi, produced work that was both politically acceptable and aesthetically effective. The essayist Yang Shuo (杨朔, 1913–1968), whose lyrical prose sketches of nature and rural life — influenced by the classical Chinese essay tradition — achieved a delicacy of expression that was unusual in the politically charged literary culture of the period.

But the equilibrium of the early 1960s was fragile and unstable. The political tensions within the Chinese Communist Party — between the pragmatists led by Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping, who favored a more moderate economic and cultural policy, and the radicals led by Mao Zedong and his allies, who demanded a return to revolutionary fervor — were intensifying, and literature was, as always in the People's Republic, one of the primary arenas in which these political tensions were expressed and contested.

11. Conclusion: The Gathering Storm

The seventeen years between 1949 and 1966 were years of enormous literary productivity but also of enormous literary loss. The institutional framework that the new government created — the writers' associations, the literary journals, the publishing houses, the system of literary prizes and honors — brought literature to a mass audience on a scale that had never been achieved before in Chinese history and produced a substantial body of work that, at its best, combined political commitment with genuine literary skill. But the same institutional framework also silenced some of the most talented voices in Chinese literature — Shen Congwen, who was driven from fiction; Ding Ling, who was exiled to a labor camp; Ai Qing, who was banished to the remote northwest; Hu Feng, who was imprisoned for decades — and suppressed entire modes of literary expression that were deemed incompatible with the requirements of socialist construction.

The fundamental problem of the Seventeen Years was the problem that had haunted Chinese literature since the late Qing: the relationship between literature and political power. The May Fourth Movement had established the principle that literature should serve the nation — but it had also insisted that literary quality mattered, that individual creativity was valuable, and that the writer's conscience was the ultimate arbiter of literary truth. The Communist revolution had taken the principle of literature's service to the nation and transformed it into a system of political control that left no room for individual creativity or literary conscience — a system in which the Party, not the writer, determined what was true, what was good, and what was beautiful.

The Cultural Revolution — which would erupt in 1966 with a violence that exceeded anything that had come before — would carry this system to its logical and catastrophic conclusion. In the decade that followed, virtually all literary production would be suppressed, virtually all writers would be persecuted, and the Chinese literary tradition — which had survived the fall of dynasties, foreign invasions, and the radical iconoclasm of the May Fourth Movement — would face its greatest existential threat. The literature of the Seventeen Years, with all its achievements and all its compromises, would be swept away by a storm of revolutionary fanaticism that recognized no literary value, no artistic achievement, and no human dignity that could not be sacrificed to the cause of permanent revolution.

References

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