History of Chinese Literature/Chapter 23

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Chapter 23: The Cultural Revolution and Its Literary Legacy (1966–1976)

1. Introduction: The Decade of Devastation

The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (无产阶级文化大革命, Wuchanjieji wenhua dageming), launched by Mao Zedong in the spring of 1966, represented the most thoroughgoing assault on literary and intellectual culture in the history of Chinese civilization. For a full decade — from the publication of the first Cultural Revolution manifestos in 1966 to the death of Mao Zedong and the arrest of the Gang of Four in 1976 — virtually every form of literary expression that did not serve the immediate political purposes of the Maoist radicals was suppressed, and virtually every writer of distinction was subjected to persecution, humiliation, imprisonment, or worse. The Cultural Revolution did not merely constrain Chinese literature, as the political campaigns of the Seventeen Years had done; it sought to annihilate it — to destroy the entire literary heritage of China, both classical and modern, and to replace it with a new "proletarian" literature that would serve as the instrument of permanent revolution.

The scope of the destruction was staggering. Libraries were ransacked and burned; private book collections were confiscated and destroyed; literary journals were shut down; publishing houses ceased operations; the Writers' Association was disbanded; universities were closed; and writers, scholars, editors, translators, and teachers were dragged before mass rallies, denounced as "ox-ghosts and snake-spirits" (牛鬼蛇神, niugui sheshen), subjected to public humiliation, beaten, imprisoned, and sent to labor camps in remote rural areas. The death toll among writers and intellectuals was appalling: the playwright and novelist Lao She (老舍, 1899–1966), one of the greatest writers of twentieth-century China, drowned himself in Taiping Lake in Beijing in August 1966 after being savagely beaten by Red Guards; the essayist and journalist Deng Tuo (邓拓, 1912–1966) hanged himself after being denounced as a counter-revolutionary; the literary theorist and critic Shao Quanlin (邵荃麟, 1906–1971) died in prison; the novelist Zhao Shuli (赵树理, 1906–1970), who had been the model socialist realist writer of the Seventeen Years, was tortured to death; the translator and scholar Fu Lei (傅雷, 1908–1966) and his wife committed suicide together after Red Guards ransacked their home and subjected them to brutal treatment. These were only the most prominent among the thousands of literary and intellectual figures who perished during the Cultural Revolution.

The Cultural Revolution was not merely a political campaign; it was a cultural cataclysm that threatened to sever the continuity of Chinese literary tradition — a tradition that had endured, in one form or another, for more than three thousand years. The fact that this tradition survived the Cultural Revolution at all — battered, traumatized, and diminished, but not extinguished — was a testament both to the resilience of the Chinese literary spirit and to the courage of those individuals who, at enormous personal risk, preserved books, continued to write in secret, and kept alive the memory of a literary culture that the radicals sought to obliterate.

2. The Near-Destruction of Literary Culture

The Cultural Revolution's assault on literary culture began with an attack on a literary work. In November 1965, Yao Wenyuan (姚文元, 1931–2005), a Shanghai literary critic who was closely allied with Mao Zedong's wife Jiang Qing (江青, 1914–1991), published a polemical article attacking the historical drama Hai Rui Dismissed from Office (海瑞罢官, Hai Rui baguan, 1961) by the historian and playwright Wu Han (吴晗, 1909–1969). The play, which depicted an honest Ming dynasty official who was dismissed by the emperor for defending the rights of the common people, was interpreted by Yao Wenyuan and the Maoist radicals as an allegorical defense of Peng Dehuai (彭德怀), the military leader who had been dismissed by Mao in 1959 for criticizing the Great Leap Forward. The attack on Wu Han's play — which may seem, in retrospect, like a minor literary quarrel — was in fact the opening salvo of the Cultural Revolution, and it established the pattern that would characterize the entire decade: literature was not merely a reflection of political reality but a weapon in political struggle, and any literary work could be interpreted as a political statement and used to destroy its author.

The attack on Wu Han quickly escalated into a wholesale assault on literary and intellectual culture. In May 1966, the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party issued the "May 16 Circular" (五一六通知, Wuyiliu tongzhi), which declared that the Party had been infiltrated by "representatives of the bourgeoisie" who were seeking to restore capitalism, and which called on the masses to root out these enemies wherever they might be found — including, and especially, in the cultural and intellectual establishment. In June 1966, Mao called on the youth of China to "bombard the headquarters" (炮打司令部, paoda silingbu) — to attack the Party establishment itself — and the Red Guards (红卫兵, Hongweibing), bands of radicalized students who took Mao's call as license for unlimited violence, began their campaign of destruction.

The Red Guards targeted literature with particular ferocity. In what they called the campaign to "destroy the four olds" (破四旧, po sijiu) — old ideas, old culture, old customs, and old habits — the Red Guards raided homes, libraries, bookstores, temples, and museums, destroying anything that they associated with the old order. Private libraries that had been assembled over generations were burned in bonfires in the streets. Classical texts — the Confucian classics, the Tang and Song poets, the great novels of the Ming and Qing — were pulped or destroyed. Even books by revolutionary writers were not safe: the works of Lu Xun, who had been canonized as the father of modern Chinese literature, were initially exempted from destruction (Mao himself had praised Lu Xun), but even Lu Xun's legacy was contested during the Cultural Revolution, as different factions claimed his authority for contradictory purposes. The destruction was not limited to books: paintings, calligraphy, sculptures, musical instruments, antiques, and other cultural artifacts were smashed, burned, or confiscated on a massive scale. The result was a cultural loss of incalculable proportions — a destruction that was compared, by those who witnessed it, to the burning of the books by the First Emperor of Qin more than two thousand years earlier.

The institutional infrastructure of Chinese literary culture was dismantled with equal thoroughness. The Chinese Writers' Association ceased to function. All literary journals were shut down; Renmin wenxue (People's Literature), the flagship journal of Chinese literature, stopped publication in 1966 and did not resume until 1976. The publishing houses — with the exception of those that produced the works of Mao Zedong, political propaganda, and a handful of approved "model" works — ceased operations. The universities, which had trained generations of writers and literary scholars, were closed from 1966 to the early 1970s, and when they reopened, their curricula had been gutted of literary content. The entire system of literary production, dissemination, and education that had been built up over the previous decades was effectively destroyed.

3. The "Model Operas" (Yangbanxi)

In the cultural wasteland of the Cultural Revolution, only one form of officially sanctioned literary and artistic production was permitted to flourish: the "model operas" (样板戏, yangbanxi), a small collection of theatrical works that Jiang Qing personally supervised and that were held up as the supreme examples of proletarian art. The yangbanxi — which eventually comprised eight canonical works, though the number varied at different periods — were the only theatrical works that could be performed during the Cultural Revolution, and they were performed, broadcast, filmed, and reproduced in every conceivable medium — from live theater to film to radio to picture books to postage stamps — until they became the most ubiquitous cultural artifacts in the history of the People's Republic.

The eight canonical yangbanxi included five Peking operas, two ballets, and one symphony. The Peking operas were The Legend of the Red Lantern (红灯记, Hongdengji), which depicted the heroism of a railway worker's family during the Anti-Japanese War; Taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy (智取威虎山, Zhiqu weihushan), which depicted a People's Liberation Army unit's infiltration and destruction of a bandit stronghold; Shajiabang (沙家浜), which depicted the collaboration between wounded New Fourth Army soldiers and local villagers during the Anti-Japanese War; Raid on the White Tiger Regiment (奇袭白虎团, Qixi baihu tuan), which depicted a Chinese volunteer army unit's attack on an enemy headquarters during the Korean War; and On the Docks (海港, Haigang), which depicted class struggle among dockworkers in Shanghai. The two ballets were The Red Detachment of Women (红色娘子军, Hongse niangzijun), which depicted a peasant woman's liberation through joining a revolutionary women's army unit on Hainan Island, and The White-Haired Girl (白毛女, Baimao nü), which depicted a peasant girl's suffering under feudal oppression and her rescue by the Communist army. The symphonic work was the Yellow River Piano Concerto (黄河钢琴协奏曲, Huanghe gangqin xiezouqu), an adaptation of Xian Xinghai's Yellow River Cantata.

Jiang Qing's principles for the yangbanxi — which she articulated in a series of speeches and directives — represented a radical simplification and politicization of theatrical aesthetics. The central principle was the "three prominences" (三突出, san tuchu): among all the characters, give prominence to the positive characters; among the positive characters, give prominence to the heroic characters; among the heroic characters, give prominence to the central heroic character. This principle produced a dramaturgy of radical Manicheanism: the heroes of the yangbanxi were uniformly brave, selfless, politically enlightened, and physically imposing; the villains were uniformly cowardly, selfish, politically benighted, and physically repulsive; and the dramatic conflict was always a struggle between revolutionary good and counter-revolutionary evil that ended in the inevitable triumph of the revolution.

The yangbanxi were works of considerable technical sophistication — the choreography of the ballets, the musical arrangements of the operas, and the cinematography of the filmed versions all reflected the skills of the talented artists who created them, many of whom had been trained in the pre-revolutionary period and who brought genuine artistic ability to their work. But the political constraints under which they worked — the requirement that every element of every work conform to the ideological specifications laid down by Jiang Qing — produced a body of work that was, despite its technical polish, artistically sterile. The characters were not human beings but ideological abstractions; the conflicts were not dramatic but schematic; the emotions were not felt but prescribed. The yangbanxi were, in the end, not works of art but instruments of propaganda — brilliantly crafted instruments, in some cases, but instruments nonetheless.

For the hundreds of millions of Chinese who lived through the Cultural Revolution, however, the yangbanxi were not merely propaganda: they were the only officially available form of dramatic entertainment, and they were experienced, for better or worse, as the cultural soundtrack of an entire decade. Many Chinese who grew up during the Cultural Revolution knew the arias from the model operas by heart — could sing them from memory decades later — and the yangbanxi became, paradoxically, a source of genuine aesthetic pleasure and emotional connection for a generation that had been deprived of virtually all other forms of artistic experience. The cultural legacy of the yangbanxi was thus more complex than their propagandistic content might suggest: they became embedded in the collective memory of an entire generation and continued to resonate — sometimes with nostalgia, sometimes with irony, sometimes with ambivalence — long after the Cultural Revolution had ended.

4. Underground Literature and Hand-Copied Manuscripts (Shouchaoben)

The Cultural Revolution may have succeeded in shutting down the official institutions of literary production, but it could not entirely suppress the human desire to write, to read, and to share literary experiences. Throughout the decade, an underground literary culture survived and even flourished — a culture of clandestine writing, secret reading, and hand-copied manuscripts (手抄本, shouchaoben) that circulated from person to person, from hand to hand, in defiance of the official prohibition on all unapproved literary expression.

The shouchaoben — literally "hand-copied books" — were manuscripts that were copied by hand and passed from reader to reader in a chain of clandestine transmission that was reminiscent of the samizdat literature of the Soviet Union. The shouchaoben included a wide variety of texts: novels, stories, poems, political essays, translations of foreign works, and even pornographic fiction. The most famous shouchaoben novel was The Second Handshake (第二次握手, Di er ci woshou), a romantic and political novel by Zhang Yang (张扬, born 1944) that told the story of Chinese scientists who chose to return to China from the United States despite personal sacrifice. The novel, which Zhang Yang wrote in the 1960s and which circulated widely in hand-copied form during the Cultural Revolution, was eventually published officially in 1979 and became an enormous bestseller. Other widely circulated shouchaoben included adventure stories, martial arts tales, detective fiction, and romantic novels — genres that had been suppressed by the revolutionary literary establishment but that continued to satisfy the appetite of readers hungry for entertainment and emotional engagement.

The shouchaoben culture was not limited to fiction. Poetry — which could be composed, memorized, and transmitted more easily than prose — was perhaps the most vital form of underground literary expression during the Cultural Revolution. Young people who had been sent to the countryside as part of the "rusticated youth" (知识青年, zhishi qingnian, commonly abbreviated as 知青, zhiqing) program wrote poems that expressed their disillusionment, their loneliness, their longing for home, and their search for meaning in a world that seemed to have lost all meaning. These poems — which were shared among friends, copied into notebooks, and sometimes assembled into informal anthologies — constituted a body of literary work that was remarkable both for its emotional authenticity and for its literary sophistication. The young poets of the Cultural Revolution, deprived of formal literary education but possessed of keen sensibilities and an urgent need to express their inner lives, drew on whatever literary resources they could find — scraps of classical poetry, fragments of translated Western literature, the rhythms and images of folk song — to create a poetry that was intensely personal, emotionally powerful, and aesthetically original.

The underground literary culture of the Cultural Revolution was sustained by the paradoxical fact that, while the radicals had destroyed the official institutions of literary production and had sought to confiscate and destroy all "bourgeois" and "feudal" literature, they had not succeeded in eliminating all books. Many families had hidden books — concealing them in walls, burying them in gardens, storing them in the homes of trusted friends — and these hidden books became precious treasures that were shared, lent, and borrowed in networks of secret readers. Young people who discovered a copy of a foreign novel — Balzac, Tolstoy, Dickens, Jack London — would read it in a single night and pass it on to the next reader in the chain. The experience of reading forbidden books during the Cultural Revolution — an experience that was shared by millions of young Chinese — became a formative intellectual experience for an entire generation, and many of the writers who would dominate Chinese literature in the 1980s and 1990s traced their literary awakening to the clandestine reading of their Cultural Revolution youth.

5. The "Rusticated Youth" (Zhiqing) Experience

One of the most consequential policies of the Cultural Revolution — and one that would have a profound and lasting impact on Chinese literature — was the "Down to the Countryside" movement (上山下乡运动, Shangshan xiaxiang yundong), which sent millions of urban young people to live and work in rural areas. Between 1968 and 1980, an estimated seventeen million young Chinese — mostly middle school and high school students who were unable to continue their education because the universities had been closed — were sent from the cities to the countryside, where they were expected to learn from the peasants, to be "reeducated" through manual labor, and to contribute to the development of the rural economy. For most of these young people — who were known as "educated youth" (知识青年, zhishi qingnian) or simply zhiqing — the experience was one of profound dislocation, hardship, and disillusionment.

The zhiqing were sent to some of the most remote and impoverished regions of China — to the plains of Manchuria, the grasslands of Inner Mongolia, the mountains of Yunnan, the rubber plantations of Hainan, the border regions of Xinjiang and Tibet. They were expected to live as peasants lived, to eat as peasants ate, and to work as peasants worked — planting rice, harvesting wheat, digging irrigation ditches, hauling manure — under conditions that were often brutally harsh. Many suffered from malnutrition, disease, exhaustion, and exposure; some were injured or killed in accidents; others were subjected to sexual exploitation or physical abuse by local cadres. The idealism that many zhiqing had initially felt — the genuine desire to serve the people and to participate in the revolutionary transformation of China — was gradually eroded by the reality of their situation: they were not revolutionaries transforming the countryside but displaced young people trapped in a life of grinding poverty and physical hardship, with no prospect of returning to the cities and no hope for a future.

The zhiqing experience became one of the defining subjects of post-Cultural Revolution Chinese literature. The "educated youth" literature (知青文学, zhiqing wenxue) that emerged in the late 1970s and 1980s drew on the memories and experiences of the millions of former zhiqing who were now returning to the cities and who needed to make sense of the years they had lost. The genre ranged from straightforward autobiographical accounts to sophisticated literary works that used the zhiqing experience as a lens through which to examine larger questions of identity, meaning, and moral responsibility. Among the most important zhiqing writers were Zhang Xianliang (张贤亮, 1936–2014), whose semi-autobiographical novels depicted the physical and psychological suffering of intellectuals in labor camps; Liang Xiaosheng (梁晓声, born 1949), whose stories and novels portrayed the lives of zhiqing in the remote northeast with a combination of realism and compassion; and Shi Tiesheng (史铁生, 1951–2010), who was paralyzed in an accident during his time as a zhiqing and whose later essays and stories, written from his wheelchair, explored the relationship between suffering, memory, and the will to create.

The zhiqing experience also played a crucial role in the development of "scar literature" (伤痕文学, shanghen wenxue) and "root-seeking literature" (寻根文学, xungen wenxue) in the post-Mao era — genres that will be discussed in the following chapter. For the moment, it is sufficient to note that the Cultural Revolution's policy of sending millions of young urban Chinese to the countryside — a policy that was designed to destroy their bourgeois consciousness and to integrate them into the revolutionary masses — had the unintended consequence of creating a generation of writers who had experienced, at first hand, both the beauty and the brutality of rural China, and who would draw on this experience to produce some of the most powerful and most original literature of the post-Mao era.

6. Poetry of Personal Suffering

The Cultural Revolution was an era of immense personal suffering, and poetry — the most intimate and the most portable of literary forms — became the medium through which many of its victims gave voice to their pain. The poetry of the Cultural Revolution era, much of which was written in secret and circulated only among trusted friends, constitutes one of the most moving and most authentic bodies of literary work to emerge from the decade — a body of work that stands in stark contrast to the bombastic propaganda verse that was the only officially sanctioned form of poetic expression.

Among the most remarkable poets of the Cultural Revolution era were several whose work would not become widely known until after the end of the decade. Mu Dan (穆旦, 1918–1977), born Zha Liangzheng, was one of the most talented Chinese poets of the twentieth century — a modernist whose early work, influenced by Auden and Eliot, had been among the most sophisticated Chinese poetry of the 1940s. After 1949, Mu Dan had been labeled a rightist and had been forced to abandon poetry for translation work; during the Cultural Revolution, he was subjected to further persecution. In the last years of his life, between 1975 and 1977, Mu Dan composed a series of poems — published posthumously — that are among the most powerful expressions of the experience of suffering and endurance in modern Chinese literature. Poems like "Wisdom's Arrival" (智慧之歌, Zhihui zhi ge) and "The Years Gone By" (曾经的岁月) combined a mature philosophical vision with a formal mastery that reflected decades of artistic development conducted in silence and secrecy.

Huang Xiang (黄翔, born 1941) was another poet whose work during the Cultural Revolution years anticipated the "Misty poetry" (朦胧诗, menglong shi) movement that would emerge in the late 1970s. Huang Xiang wrote poems of fierce intensity and surreal imagery that expressed his rage against political oppression and his yearning for spiritual freedom. In October 1978 — just before the Democracy Wall movement — Huang Xiang traveled to Beijing and posted his poems on a wall near Tiananmen Square, becoming one of the first poets of the Cultural Revolution underground to bring his work to public attention.

The most significant development in Chinese poetry during the Cultural Revolution period, however, was the emergence of a new generation of young poets — many of them zhiqing — who would eventually form the core of the Misty poetry movement. Bei Dao (北岛, born Zhao Zhenkai, 1949), Mang Ke (芒克, born Jiang Shiwei, 1950), and Duo Duo (多多, born Li Shizheng, 1951) began writing poetry during the Cultural Revolution, sharing their work among a small circle of friends in Beijing. Their poems — which drew on sources as diverse as classical Chinese poetry, translated Western modernism, and the imagery of their own daily experience — were markedly different from anything that had been written in China before: they were intensely personal, linguistically experimental, philosophically skeptical, and politically subversive in their insistence on the primacy of individual consciousness over collective ideology. Bei Dao's famous poem "The Answer" (回答, Huida), written in 1973 (though not published until 1979), with its opening line "Baseness is the password of the base, / nobility the epitaph of the noble" (卑鄙是卑鄙者的通行证 / 高尚是高尚者的墓志铭), became the anthem of a generation that had been betrayed by the revolution and was groping its way toward a new understanding of truth, beauty, and human dignity.

The young woman poet Shu Ting (舒婷, born Gong Peiyu, 1952) also began writing during the Cultural Revolution, composing poems that expressed the emotional experiences of a young woman caught up in the turmoil of the times. Her poem "To the Oak Tree" (致橡树, Zhi xiangshu), written in 1977, with its declaration that love should be a relationship between two equal and independent beings rather than a relationship of dependence and subordination, became one of the most beloved poems of the post-Mao era and a landmark of feminist consciousness in modern Chinese poetry.

7. Hao Ran: The Sole Permitted Novelist

The Cultural Revolution's destruction of literary culture was so thorough that, for much of the decade, only one novelist was permitted to publish new fiction: Hao Ran (浩然, 1932–2008), born Liang Jinguang, a writer of peasant origin who had established himself during the Seventeen Years as a prolific and politically reliable author of fiction about rural life. Hao Ran's survival during the Cultural Revolution — his ability not merely to avoid persecution but to continue publishing at a time when virtually all other writers were silenced — was a consequence both of his impeccable political credentials (he was of genuinely poor peasant background, had joined the Communist Party as a young man, and had never been associated with any literary "deviation") and of his willingness to conform to the ideological requirements of the Cultural Revolution leadership.

Hao Ran's two major novels of the Cultural Revolution era — Bright Sunny Skies (艳阳天, Yanyangtian, first volume 1964, second and third volumes published during the Cultural Revolution) and The Golden Road (金光大道, Jinguang dadao, 1972–1974) — were works of considerable narrative skill that depicted the process of agricultural collectivization in terms that were entirely consistent with the ideological requirements of the Cultural Revolution. Bright Sunny Skies told the story of class struggle in a northern Chinese village during the period of agricultural collectivization, centering on the conflict between a heroic village Party secretary and a scheming landlord who seeks to undermine the collective. The Golden Road extended this narrative into the 1950s, depicting the establishment of a people's commune and the struggle between the socialist road and the capitalist road in the Chinese countryside.

Hao Ran's novels were not without literary merit. His descriptions of the North China countryside — the landscapes, the seasons, the rhythms of agricultural labor — had a vividness and a specificity that reflected genuine familiarity with the world he depicted. His characters, though they were designed to embody ideological categories, were drawn with enough individual detail to be recognizable as human beings rather than mere abstractions. And his narrative technique — the ability to sustain a long and complex plot, to manage a large cast of characters, and to maintain the reader's interest over hundreds of pages — was genuinely accomplished.

But Hao Ran's novels were also, inevitably, works of propaganda. They conformed rigidly to the "three prominences" principle; their heroes were uniformly virtuous and their villains uniformly despicable; their plots followed the prescribed pattern of class struggle leading to revolutionary triumph; and their ideological message — that the socialist road was the only road, that class enemies were everywhere, and that eternal vigilance was the price of revolutionary purity — was relentlessly hammered home. The fact that Hao Ran was the only novelist permitted to publish during the Cultural Revolution made his work the de facto standard of Chinese fiction for an entire decade — a standard that was both technically competent and ideologically suffocating, and that the post-Mao generation of writers would react against with passionate intensity.

Hao Ran's fate after the Cultural Revolution was ambiguous. He was not persecuted — unlike many of those who had been associated with the Cultural Revolution leadership — but he was marginalized, and his literary reputation declined sharply as the post-Mao literary establishment rejected the aesthetic and ideological principles that his work embodied. He continued to write, but his later works attracted little attention, and he died in 2008, largely forgotten by the literary world that had once celebrated him as the sole standard-bearer of Chinese fiction.

8. The Toll on Writers: Persecution, Suicide, and Survival

The human cost of the Cultural Revolution for Chinese writers and intellectuals was catastrophic. No comprehensive accounting of the toll has ever been made — and given the chaotic and decentralized nature of the persecution, a complete accounting may never be possible — but the available evidence suggests that the suffering was immense. Virtually every writer of any distinction in China was subjected to some form of persecution during the Cultural Revolution — ranging from public criticism sessions and forced self-criticism to physical beating, imprisonment, exile to labor camps, and death.

The playwright and novelist Lao She, whose works — including the novel Rickshaw Boy (骆驼祥子, Luotuo Xiangzi, 1936–1937) and the play Teahouse (茶馆, Chaguan, 1957) — ranked among the finest achievements of modern Chinese literature, was one of the earliest and most prominent victims. On August 23, 1966, Lao She was dragged to a mass struggle session at the Temple of Confucius in Beijing, where he was beaten and humiliated by Red Guards. The following day, his body was found in Taiping Lake. Whether his death was suicide or murder has never been definitively established, but its impact on the literary community was devastating: if a writer of Lao She's stature — a writer who had been honored by the government and who had held official positions in the literary establishment — could be treated with such savagery, then no writer was safe.

The poet and translator Bian Zhilin (卞之琳, 1910–2000), one of the finest poets of the 1930s generation, was subjected to years of persecution and forced labor. The novelist Ba Jin (巴金, 1904–2005), whose trilogy Turbulent Stream (激流三部曲, Jiliu sanbuqu) had been one of the most popular works of modern Chinese fiction, was denounced, paraded through the streets, and forced to endure years of humiliation; his wife, Xiao Shan, died in 1972 after being denied medical treatment. The critic and essayist Hu Feng (胡风, 1902–1985), who had already been imprisoned since 1955 for his opposition to the literary policies of the Mao era, was subjected to additional persecution during the Cultural Revolution and was not released until 1979. The novelist Shen Congwen (沈从文, 1902–1988), who had abandoned fiction after 1949 and had devoted himself to the study of Chinese material culture, was forced to clean toilets at the Palace Museum during the Cultural Revolution — a fate that, while humiliating, was mild compared to what many others suffered.

Some writers survived the Cultural Revolution by finding ways to continue their intellectual work in secret. The poet Zheng Min (郑敏, 1920–2022), one of the finest poets of the "Nine Leaves" (九叶, jiuye) group, survived the decade by keeping a low profile and writing poetry that she did not attempt to publish. The translator Yang Xianyi (杨宪益, 1915–2009) and his British-born wife Gladys Yang (戴乃迭, 1919–1999), who had together produced some of the finest English translations of Chinese literature, were imprisoned for four years during the Cultural Revolution; their son committed suicide. The scholar Qian Zhongshu (钱钟书, 1910–1998), author of the brilliant satirical novel Fortress Besieged (围城, Weicheng, 1947), survived the Cultural Revolution in relative obscurity, continuing his scholarly work in secret and emerging after 1976 to resume his position as one of the most erudite and most original minds in the Chinese intellectual world.

9. Legacy of Trauma on Subsequent Generations

The Cultural Revolution ended with the death of Mao Zedong on September 9, 1976, and the arrest of the Gang of Four — Jiang Qing, Zhang Chunqiao, Yao Wenyuan, and Wang Hongwen — in October 1976. But the trauma that it inflicted on Chinese literary culture did not end with the political events that brought the decade to a close. The Cultural Revolution left a legacy of psychological, moral, and aesthetic devastation that would shape Chinese literature for decades — a legacy that included not only the memories of suffering and loss but also the profound questions about human nature, political power, and the meaning of civilization that the experience of the decade had forced upon an entire society.

The first literary response to the Cultural Revolution — the "scar literature" that emerged in 1977–1978 — was primarily a literature of testimony and mourning: writers who had suffered during the decade gave voice to their pain, their grief, and their anger in works that were often raw, emotionally powerful, and artistically unpolished. But the deeper literary engagement with the Cultural Revolution — the attempt to understand what had happened, why it had happened, and what it meant for the future of Chinese civilization — took much longer to develop and produced some of the most significant literary works of the post-Mao era.

Yu Hua (余华, born 1960), whose childhood had been shaped by the Cultural Revolution, drew on the experience of the decade in novels like To Live (活着, Huozhe, 1993) and Chronicle of a Blood Merchant (许三观卖血记, Xu Sanguan maixyue ji, 1995), which depicted the suffering of ordinary Chinese people under successive political campaigns with a combination of dark humor and stoic compassion. Mo Yan (莫言, born 1955), who grew up in rural Shandong during the Cultural Revolution, drew on his memories of the decade in novels that combined hallucinatory imagery with unflinching depictions of violence and suffering. Wang Anyi (王安忆, born 1954), a former zhiqing, explored the intersection of personal memory and historical trauma in a series of novels and stories that constituted one of the most sustained and most penetrating literary engagements with the Cultural Revolution experience.

The Cultural Revolution also left a profound mark on the aesthetic and philosophical orientations of post-Mao Chinese literature. The experience of the decade — in which language had been degraded into a tool of political manipulation, in which words had been used to destroy rather than to communicate, and in which the gap between official rhetoric and lived reality had become an unbridgeable chasm — produced a generation of writers who were deeply suspicious of grand narratives, official truth claims, and the political instrumentalization of language. This suspicion found expression in the experimental and avant-garde literature of the 1980s and 1990s — in the fragmentary narratives of Ma Yuan, the cool detachment of Yu Hua's early fiction, the linguistic playfulness of Ge Fei, and the surreal nightmares of Can Xue — all of which can be understood, at least in part, as aesthetic responses to the linguistic and moral catastrophe of the Cultural Revolution.

The trauma of the Cultural Revolution also raised fundamental questions about the relationship between memory and forgetting, between bearing witness and moving on, that continue to preoccupy Chinese writers and intellectuals to this day. Ba Jin, who survived the Cultural Revolution and lived to the age of 100, devoted the last decades of his life to calling for the establishment of a Cultural Revolution museum — a place where the memories of the decade would be preserved and where future generations could learn the lessons of that terrible time. His call was never heeded by the authorities, who preferred to consign the Cultural Revolution to a brief and formulaic acknowledgment of "mistakes" rather than to encourage a thorough and unflinching examination of the decade's horrors. The tension between the desire to remember and the pressure to forget — between the imperative of bearing witness and the temptation of historical amnesia — remains one of the central tensions of Chinese literary and intellectual life, and the Cultural Revolution continues to cast its long shadow over the literature of contemporary China.

10. Conclusion: The Paradox of Destruction and Creation

The Cultural Revolution was, by any measure, the greatest catastrophe in the history of Chinese literary culture — a decade of destruction that silenced an entire generation of writers, obliterated the institutional infrastructure of literary production, and threatened to sever the continuity of a literary tradition that stretched back three millennia. The toll in human suffering — the writers who were driven to suicide, tortured to death, imprisoned, exiled, silenced, and broken — was incalculable, and the cultural losses — the books burned, the manuscripts destroyed, the artistic traditions disrupted — can never be fully recovered.

And yet, paradoxically, the Cultural Revolution also planted the seeds of the extraordinary literary flowering that would follow it. The underground literary culture of the decade — the hand-copied manuscripts, the secret poetry circles, the clandestine reading of forbidden books — nurtured a generation of writers who were more original, more adventurous, and more deeply committed to the autonomy of literary expression than any Chinese writers before them. The experience of suffering and disillusionment — the loss of faith in political ideology, the confrontation with the darkest aspects of human nature, the discovery of the individual self in the wreckage of the collective — gave these writers a depth of vision and a moral seriousness that would inform the greatest works of post-Mao Chinese literature. The Cultural Revolution did not destroy Chinese literature; it transformed it — and the literature that emerged from the crucible of the decade was, in many respects, more powerful, more diverse, and more artistically ambitious than anything that had come before.

References

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