Milestones on a Golden Road: Writing for Chinese Socialism, 1945-80 0774823747, 9780774823746

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Milestones on a Golden Road

Contemporary Chinese Studies

This series provides new scholarship and perspectives on modern and contemporary China, including China’s contested borderlands and minority peoples; ongoing social, cultural, and political changes; and the varied histories that animate China today. A list of titles in this series appears at the end of this book.

Milestones on a Golden Road Writing for Chinese Socialism, 1945-80

Richard King

© UBC Press 2013 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without prior written permission of the publisher, or, in Canada, in the case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from Access Copyright, www.accesscopyright.ca. 21 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13    5 4 3 2 1 Printed in Canada on FSC-certified ancient-forest-free paper (100% post-consumer recycled) that is processed chlorine- and acid-free. Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication King, Richard, 1951 Milestones on a golden road [electronic resource] : writing for Chinese socialism, 1945-80 / Richard King. (Contemporary Chinese Studies) Includes bibliographical references and index. Electronic monograph. Issued also in print format. ISBN 978-0-7748-2374-6 (PDF); ISBN 978-0-7748-2375-3 (EPUB) 1. Chinese literature – 20th century – History and criticism. 2. Socialism in literature. 3. China – In literature. I. Title. II. Series: Contemporary Chinese Studies (Online). PL2303.K55 2013

895.1’090052

C2012-903640-4

UBC Press gratefully acknowledges the financial support for our publishing program of the Government of Canada (through the Canada Book Fund), the Canada Council for the Arts, and the British Columbia Arts Council. This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, through the Awards to Scholarly Publications Program, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Printed and bound in Canada by Friesens Set in Futura and Warnock by Artegraphica Design Co. Ltd. Copy editor: Deborah Kerr Proofreader: Jonathan Wilson Indexer: Noeline Bridge UBC Press The University of British Columbia 2029 West Mall Vancouver, BC V6T 1Z2 www.ubcpress.ca

Contents

List of Illustrations / vii Acknowledgments / ix Introduction: The Road and the Writer / 1

Part 1: The War Years and the Search for Form, 1945-48



1

Ma Feng and Xi Rong, Heroes of Lüliang, and “Revolutionary Popular Literature” / 15



2

Zhou Libo, Hurricane, and the Creation of a Chinese Socialist Realism / 46



Part 2: The Great Leap Forward and the Stuff of Heroism, 1959-62



3

Li Zhun’s “A Brief Biography of Li Shuangshuang”: A Fast-Talking Vixen Creates a Village Canteen / 71



4

Hu Wanchun’s “A Man of Outstanding Quality”: Pavel, but Not Rita, and Certainly Not Ingrid, in the Shanghai Dockyards / 93



Part 3: The Cultural Revolution and the Spirit of Struggle, 1972-76



5

Hao Ran on The Golden Road: Transformations in Rural China / 111



6

Zhang Kangkang at The Dividing Line: Urban Youth at War with Nature / 136



Part 4: After Mao: Reversing Judgments, 1979-80



7

Chen Guokai’s The Price: The Flood of  Tears / 161



8

Zhang Yigong’s The Story of the Criminal Li Tongzhong: Work with the Spade / 180

vi Contents

Epilogue: A Golden Road to Nowhere / 198 Notes / 210 Bibliography / 253 Index / 266

Illustrations



1 Illustration from Jinguang dadao (The golden road), comic-book version / 3



2 “Old Liang’s three paintings,” illustration from Sanliwan / 7



3 Illustration from the comic-strip “Li Shuangshuang Xiaozhuan” / 88



4 Illustration from Li Shuangshuang, comic-book version / 89



5 Illustration from Longjiang song (Song of the Dragon River), comic-book version / 149

6 Chairman Mao’s Red Guard – Study from Comrade Jin Xunhua / 151

7 What Have We to Fear with the Morning Sun in Our Hearts / 152



8 Illustration from Zhengtu (The journey) / 154



9 Illustration from the comic-book Zhang Zhixin / 177

Acknowledgments

This is a manuscript that has been far too long in the writing, and over the years I have been indebted to many people for their help. The following authors discussed with me the works that are considered below: Hao Ran, Hu Wanchun, Li Zhun, and Ma Feng (all now deceased), Chen Guokai, Zhang Kangkang, and Zhang Yigong. Colleagues and friends who provided assistance, information, advice, and inspiration include Daniel Bryant, Roy Chan, Tina Mai Chen, Paul Clark, Ralph Croizier, Gao Hua, Gao Wangling, Ted Huters, Vivian Li, Kimberley Ens Manning, Bonnie McDougall, Pan Ling, Michael Schoenhals, Irmy Schweiger, Krista van Fliet Hang, Rudolf Wagner, Ban Wang, Yifan Wang, Felix Wemheuer, Philip Williams, Wu Guoguang, Yang Kuisong, Ye Jiaying, Serhy Yekelchyk, Shengtian Zheng, and Zhou Xiaoyi. I have learned much from all my graduate students; for this project in particular, from Sulan Dai, James Keefer, Yen-kuang Kuo, Kai Zhang, Zhang Hu, and Zhou Kefen. Three anonymous readers invited by UBC Press provided valuable comments on the manuscript. I received library assistance from Jean Hung, Liu Jing, and Liu Ying; logistical support from Liu Zengyue; help with locating illustrations from Naomi Sawada and Annette Wooff; and in seeing this project through to publication, guidance from Emily Andrew, Megan Brand, and Deborah Kerr. Translations from Heroes of Lüliang appear with the permission of the coauthor Ma Feng’s widow Duan Xingmian; translations from my interviews with Li Zhun appear with the permission of his widow Dong Bing and their son Li Kewei; translations from The Dividing Line and my interview with its author Zhang Kangkang appear with her permission; and the painting Chairman Mao’s Red Guard Jin Xunhua appears with the permission of the co-artist Xu Chunzhong. Translations from “A Brief Biography of Li Shuangshuang” and The Story of the Criminal Li Tongzhong, and commentary on those works, that appeared in Richard King ed., Heroes of China’s Great Leap Forward (2010) are reproduced by permission of the University of Hawai’i Press; and a section revised

x Acknowledgments

from my chapter in Kimberley Ens Manning and Felix Wemheuer ed., Eating Bitterness: New Perspectives on China’s Great Leap Forward and the Famine (2011) is reproduced by permission of UBC Press. Chapter 5 is revised and updated from an article that appeared in the journal Modern Chinese Litera­ ture in 1993, and is reproduced by permission of the editor of that journal, Howard Goldblatt, and the editor of its successor publication, Modern Chinese Literature and Culture, Kirk Denton. To all of the above, I offer my sincere thanks.

Milestones on a Golden Road

Introduction: The Road and the Writer

I thought; hope cannot be said to exist, nor can it be said not to exist. It is just like roads across the earth. For actually the earth had no roads to begin with, but when many men pass one way, a road is made.

– Lu Xun, “Guxiang”

“Back in the days when we met in Tianmen hiding out from the [Japanese] devils, Chairman Mao was already pointing out the Golden Road that we are walking today. On we go, my friend!” Facing the sun, shoulder to shoulder, the two friends strode along the great road east. – Hao Ran, Jinguang dadao

It was the middle of an autumn day. Sun Fu sat beside a fruit stand, squinting in the bright sunshine. He leaned forward, hands on his knees, and his grizzled hair seemed gray in the sunlight, gray like the road that lay before him, a wide road that extended from the far distance and then stretched off in the other direction.

– Yu Hua, “Huanghun li de nanhai”

In a moment of visionary optimism as a boat carries him and what remains of his family from their ancestral home toward a new life in the city, the melancholic narrator of Lu Xun’s 1921 story “My Old Home” (Guxiang) permits himself to believe that future generations will transcend the divisions between social classes that have asserted themselves between childhood and maturity. His own childhood playmate Runtu, now beaten down by poverty, has shocked him by addressing him on his return as “master,” acknowledging the gulf between peasant and intellectual, but the narrator hopes that the gap can be narrowed in the next generation between the peasant’s son and his

2

The Road and the Writer

own nephew. Lu Xun, a writer inclined to alienation and despair, may have appended this hopeful fragment, and others in his first collection of fiction, in deference to calls for activism by the leftist “commanders of those days.” Whatever his reasons, his words offered a ray of hope to readers at a time when the revolution that brought the Republic of China into being appeared to have stalled.1 The metaphor chosen by Lu Xun for his narrator’s guarded optimism is that of the road trodden by many that would lead to a better place. Lu Xun’s cautious projection was turned into a triumphal teleology by the authors of the first three decades of the People’s Republic, following the determined and deterministic optimism learned from the Soviet Union. For them, the road symbolized a glorious journey, ideally eastward into the rising sun, toward the eventual goal of communism pointed out to them by the ruling Communist Party and its leader Mao Zedong. This image of the sunlit road into the future provides the title for the major fictional work of the Cultural Revolution, Hao Ran’s The Golden Road (Jinguang dadao). The novel’s title is mentioned for the first time in the passage quoted above, almost five hundred pages into the opening volume, and is charmingly illustrated by Figure 1, taken from the comic-book adaptation of the work. The moment comes after a pivotal meeting between the novel’s hero, Gao Daquan, and the speaker, one of his mentors in youth and adulthood, the soldier and later administrator Tian Yu. Their re-encounter, and its significance for the development of the era’s most celebrated (and subsequently most reviled) literary hero, will be discussed at length in Chapter 5 below. The structuring device of the road to an ideal though unknown destination was abandoned, along with the social policies that were to be the means to reach it (in the case of The Golden Road, agricultural collectivization), in the free-market economy of the reform era and the more diverse and uncertain environment of late-twentieth-century Chinese culture. Thus, in his 1995 story “Boy in the Twilight” (Huanghun li de nanhai), Yu Hua, an author whose roads can lead in uncertain and unsettling directions, depicts a point on a road, grey this time, where a fruitseller has stayed for three years, on which dust raised by passing cars periodically plunges him into darkness.2 Now the sun is setting, and the fruitseller, far from seeing the glimmer of hope offered by Lu Xun to the younger generation, takes out his pain and frustration on a young boy in a vindictive act of punitive justice, breaking his finger to punish him for the theft of an apple. The road no longer promises progress or a better life. It merely runs from a grey past to the equally grey future, through a present that is no more than a wretched existence in which the protagonist is stuck.

Introduction 3

1  “Tian Yu said, ‘This road is one that Chairman Mao pointed out to us a long time ago. Let’s go, you can come with me to Yanshan, Secretary Liang is carrying out Chairman Mao’s directives there, guiding everyone in investigating the road to socialism.’ When he had spoken, the two friends walked due east towards the sun.” Source: Hao Ran, Jinguang dadao [The golden road] (Beijing: Renmin meishu chubanshe, 1975), 3:94, the comic-book retelling of Hao Ran’s novel by “Commune-member Zhang Youming,” illustrated collectively by the People’s Arts Publishers and the Revolutionary Committee of Shunyi County.

In this study, I follow the metaphor of the road through the second of the three phases outlined above, along the Golden Road destined eventually for the utopia of communism. This section of the road stretches from the imposition of Communist Party control in the revolutionary base areas centred on Yan’an to the years immediately following the Cultural Revolution, a period covering some four decades from the early 1940s to 1980. This is the age of a grand narrative of progress, of the Communist Party leading the Chinese people along the road to a prouder, more modern, and materially better future. Along this Golden Road, I have plotted a series of milestones, two significant works of fiction from each of four periods of particular political and ideological intensity. These are the civil war (1945-49), the Great Leap Forward (1958-60), the latter stages of the Cultural Revolution (1972-76), and the post-Mao catharsis (1979-80). An epilogue looks back at the Golden Road and its foremost chronicler through a reading of the final two volumes of Hao Ran’s masterwork, written in the mid-1970s but not published until 1994.

4

The Road and the Writer

By focusing on these four key moments in the Chinese revolution, and eight texts selected to represent them, I am of necessity passing over many other significant examples of Chinese socialist fiction and other periods of momentous conflict reflected, however allusively, in literary works. Of the major novels written between the late 1940s and the early 1960s and now canonized as “red classics” (hongse jingdian), only the first two, written before the establishment of the People’s Republic in 1949, are considered at length. Works of the red classic canon are the objects of increasing attention from scholars in China and the West, and much of that scholarship is cited here. At the time of writing, however, the major English-language study of these novels as a group, written long before they were labelled “red classics,” remains Joe C. Huang’s 1973 Heroes and Villains in Communist China.3 Some significant moments of debate and contention between the arbiters of orthodoxy and the members of the managerial and intellectual classes likewise fall outside the main focus of this book. To give only the most obvious example, the Hundred Flowers movement of the mid-1950s, which is analyzed elsewhere, is mentioned briefly in Chapter 3, as a precursor to the backlash against those perceived as rightists and the launching of the Great Leap Forward later in that decade.4 Marking the Road

Each of the chapters that follow takes one work, viewed in the context of history and prevailing cultural policies, drawing on the intellectual biography and, where possible, the memory of its author. In the erection of literary milestones, each studied in the context of both history and literary influences, I am travelling the road forged by Marián Gálik in his Milestones in SinoWestern Literary Confrontation (1898-1979).5 Like Gálik, I am interested in the sources of inspiration and models for modern Chinese writers in the creation and structuring of their works. In the case of the authors considered below, many of whom flourished during the gap left by Gálik between the mid-1950s and the late 1970s, I explore their creative confrontation with the West (which was less than that of the writers in Gálik’s study), with the Soviet Union, and with varying aspects of the Chinese literary tradition, influences that they themselves were often unable or unwilling to admit to at the time. All the works considered below were officially published, the two novels first released during the civil war being republished after 1949 and gaining canonical status in the People’s Republic. All fall within the prevailing Communist Party historiography and literary policies of their days, though the two from the immediate post-Mao period can be seen to have stretched

Introduction 5

the limits of both. None of the authors would have claimed to transgress the guidelines established for the arts under socialism by Mao Zedong in his Yan’an Talks of May 1942 (discussed in Chapter 1), which, albeit with varying interpretations, remained the official line on the arts until well after the period covered here.6 Thus, all the works discussed here were created in the service of socialism as perceived by the writer at the time. Not all can be said to adhere completely to the conventions of the socialist realism inherited from Stalin’s Soviet Union (introduced in Chapter 2), or its Chinese successor, the combination of revolutionary realism and revolutionary romanticism (discussed in Chapter 3), a formulation dating to the Great Leap Forward and in force when the works considered in Chapters 3 to 6 were being created. Nonetheless, they share many of the features of the Soviet canon: a view of history as the progression from the darkness of an earlier society toward the light of an eventual communist future and a concomitant “party-mindedness” (Russian: partiinost; Chinese: dangxing), or belief in the capacity of the Communist Party and its leaders to guide the nation forward to better times. The irony surrounding the enterprise, implicit throughout, is made explicit in the final parts of this book: once seen as the route to a communist future, the golden road of the titles (Hao Ran’s and my own) is now a thing of the past, abandoned since the reforms initiated in the early 1980s, with subsequent leaderships guiding the nation on a very different path. The first three decades of Communist Party rule appear in subsequent historiography, literature, and film as a time not of progress toward shared goals, but of irrationality, arbitrary rule, and suffering. The literary works studied here that date from the civil war, the Great Leap, and the Cultural Revolution, with their unwavering faith and optimism, attempt to preclude a contrary reading, but to no avail. The sense of irony that pervades post–Cultural Revolution writing has simply intensified in later works that look back on the lurid images of joyful socialism. The Golden Road has led nowhere. Creating the Glories of Future Past

Writing for a Communist Party leadership required an incorrigible, sometimes even perverse, optimism. “Communism,” as George Steiner observed in 1961, “even where it has gone venomous, is a mythology of the human future, a vision of human possibility rich in moral demand.”7 The communism Steiner was referring to was that of the Soviet Union, but his comments would have applied equally to communism in China, especially at the time of his writing, as wild ambition and excessive demands were leaving a legacy of exhaustion and starvation in China’s countryside.8 The mythology of the future had drawn

6

The Road and the Writer

Chinese intellectuals to the Communist Party in its earliest years, and those intellectuals were indispensable in perpetuating the mythology as the communists fought for and achieved power. Following communist victory in 1949, the task for China’s writers and artists, as assigned by their rulers, was to reinvent the mythology, mapping the road to a glorious future. The socialist dream factory of the Mao era created a world as it should be, and would be, if the Chinese people would but trust in the wisdom of the Communist Party leadership, fulfill the often superhuman demands placed on them, and delay their expectation of the rewards of their labours. At times, most painfully as Steiner was writing the passage quoted above, socialism as it appeared in the official literature, film, and visual arts of China existed in a separate, if parallel, universe to the one we read of today in history and memoir, stubbornly inspirational at a period of desperation. The Great Leap and the fiction written about it are the subject of Chapters 3, 4, and 8. In the chapters below, I deal with the theories that guided authors at various points along the road. Here, by way of introduction, I offer a brief but elegant demonstration from fiction of the “mythology of the human future” alluded to above as characteristic of the arts produced under communist rule. It is drawn from the work of the Communist Party’s first “peasant writer,” Zhao Shuli (of whom more in Chapters 1 and 3). Zhao had come to prominence in Yan’an during the early 1940s and was still a major literary figure in the late 1950s, before criticism of both him and his work led to a disastrous fall from grace, incarceration, and death during the Cultural Revolution, as one among many Chinese authors, artists, and intellectuals to suffer appallingly for their service to a mercurial and vindictive regime.9 In Zhao Shuli’s 1959 novel Sanliwan (the title is the name of the place where the action occurs), the artist Liang, commissioned by the leaders of the newly formed cooperatives to paint a portrait of the village, produces a first version for inspection, to the delight of its residents (Figure 2).10 Then he is asked if it is possible to paint things that do not exist, in this case a planned canal and a network of irrigation ditches in Sanliwan. The artist says that this is certainly possible and proposes a second painting with these features added; he is then asked by the leaders of the cooperative for a third image, complete with a highway, agricultural machinery, electrification, and modern housing, to demonstrate the benefits of further collectivization. Comrade Liang completes his triptych; the paintings are titled Sanliwan Now, Sanliwan Tomorrow, and Sanliwan in the Age of Socialism. Looking at the second picture, set in a future almost close enough to touch, local women think of the convenience that a ready supply of water will bring them, and children make plans to catch frogs and fish; the third is perhaps too far away

Introduction 7

2  “Old Liang’s three paintings.” 

Source: Chao Shu-li [Zhao Shuli], Sanliwan Village, trans. Gladys Yang (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1964), facing 192. In the translated version, the artist’s name is given as Wu Ching-po. Reprinted in Zhao Shuli, Zhao Shuli quanji [Complete works of Zhao Shuli] (Beijing: Dazhong wenyi chubanshe, 2006), 4: facing 302.

for the ordinary villagers to grasp, though it is within the vision of their leaders.11 It is easy to imagine these paintings: we have only to look back at the Cultural Revolution–era work of the peasant painters of Hu County in Shaanxi Province (adjoining Zhao Shuli’s native Shanxi Province) for an idealized image of life in the socialist countryside, as a place of harmony, abundance, and modernity.12 The Hu County painters, like Comrade Liang in Sanliwan, depicted life as it should and would be, in line with the instructions given by Mao at Yan’an for all the arts, “even more lofty, even more

8

The Road and the Writer

intense, even more concentrated, even more typical, even more ideal, and thus even more universal than actual everyday life.”13 The same injunction also guided the authors of the eight works considered in the chapters that follow. Although all drew on their own experiences in their work, the world they portrayed in their fiction was not quite the world as they observed it, but one rendered typical and adapted to accommodate the official version of the unfolding of history. Their task was to show the present, or in the case of Hao Ran as he wrote The Golden Road, the recent past, in its place on the trajectory from a dark past to a bright future. Where present reality was much less than ideal, in terms either of material conditions or popular concurrence with official policy, they were responsible for indicating a way to transcend hardships and reservations, and for encouraging the reader to trust in enlightened and concerned leadership to bring what they described to reality. As component parts in the machinery of the state, the role they implicitly accepted was to present the Communist Party’s vision of the future in its development, suppressing any desire they may have felt to act independently, recount tragedies, or expose inequities. Their loyalty, and their inventiveness in promoting the policies of the state, might lead to official patronage and financial security, but their enjoyment of these was not uninterrupted. Most successful authors of Mao-era China, both those who had achieved fame in the Republican era and those who had risen to prominence during the seventeen years between the communist victory and the beginning of the Cultural Revolution, found themselves subjected to criticism or persecution, many in the anti-rightist campaign of the late 1950s and more, with authors considered in this study well represented, in the Cultural Revolution. The Artist and the State

Authors’ preparedness to offer such an optimistic portrayal of their society in return for publication and official support does not, in my view, make them hypocrites or quislings. The older writers among them, Ma Feng and Zhou Libo, whose works are considered in Chapters 1 and 2, were enthusiastic participants in the revolution that brought the communists to power, and they dedicated themselves to the success of that revolution, hoping, sometimes against hope, that it would deliver the new society it had promised. Those who were beneficiaries of the state’s practice of nurturing new writers from village-dwellers and the industrial working class, a group that includes Li Zhun, Hu Wanchun, and Hao Ran, wrote works designed to entertain and inspire, even as the disaster of the Great Leap was under way, in the belief,

Introduction 9

however ill-founded, that things would improve, at a time when the Com­ munist Party could still claim to be the provider of stability and future prosperity. This does not mean that all were happy with the roles assigned to them. In conversation, both Li Zhun and Hu Wanchun asserted that, had they not been burdened by the constraints placed on them, they would have produced much finer works. Both, however, are best remembered for their Great Leap writings rather than for those produced in later life under much less limiting circumstances. By contrast, Hao Ran, who enjoyed official favour in the Cultural Revolution when most other writers were condemned and ostracized, remained unapologetic for works written during the mid1970s at the behest of cultural authorities condemned soon afterward. Had he not written in those days, he argued, what would there have been to read?14 Of those represented in this study, only the neophyte Zhang Kangkang, now a successful author but in 1973 a city girl from Hangzhou languishing on a state farm close to the Soviet border, deliberately set out to create a world where the dominant attitudes ascribed to her generation were the opposite of her own and those of her contemporaries. She depicted the young urbanites in the northeast as resolved to continue their lives on the state farm, when what she and they most wanted was to return home. As is shown in Chapter 6, she used a later work of fiction as a recantation of that first heroic presentation. The authors Chen Guokai and Zhang Yigong, who are considered in Chapters 7 and 8 respectively, were interviewed more than two decades after producing works in the sentimental genre of post-Mao writing that essentially exonerated the Communist Party and its leader from the most terrible misjudgments in the second half of the twentieth century. They ascribed the excesses of those days to an aberrant strain within the leadership, remained proud of works published with some difficulty in an uncertain environment, and expressed contentment with what they had been able to achieve within the limited freedoms of their day. The Word of the Author

Except for Chapter 2, on Zhou Libo’s novel Hurricane (Baofeng zhouyu), all chapters include material from conversations or more formal interviews with the authors (in the case of Zhou Libo, who died in 1979, the conversation was with his son, Professor Zhou Xiaoyi). I believe that authors can have useful things to say about what they have written, though such is not invariably the case. Even though several decades may have passed since the creation of a work (I interviewed Ma Feng almost sixty years after he co-wrote the

10

The Road and the Writer

novel Heroes of Lüliang), they may still recall the context and conditions within which they wrote, recollections that can contribute to a reading of their work. Interviewing authors is often unproductive: some prefer to talk about the difficulties of publication, the obduracy of editors, and their dislike of the writings of others rather than discussing their own work or tolerating attempts at analysis of it. I am aware of the fallibilities of memory, the desire to present oneself in a positive light, the need to justify achievements that younger generations have forgotten or now belittle, and the courtesy of indulging a guest, all of which are familiar to practitioners of oral history for their potential to distort the record. There is the additional complication that authors of fiction have as their profession making things up, and authors of socialist fiction prospered to the extent they did by embellishing the heroic and placing unpalatable truths in a favourable light. These reservations notwithstanding, I have found it valuable to speak to authors, at greater or lesser length, and at varying levels of formality, while writing about their work. I confess to having been impressed, though I believe not seduced, by their openness and candour, and I regret that I was unable to pose additional questions, following further reading of their works, to the older writers among them, who died during the long process of completing this project. The readings of their fiction are mine and not theirs. To provide the reader with a sense of each work (inasmuch as this is possible in translation), I have provided extracts from them, longer where no satisfactory translation exists. The Milestones

Following this introduction, the book is structured in four parts, each of which takes two works to explore different aspects of an issue prominent in each of four historical moments. Part 1 looks at two alternative ways of presenting a new mythology of nation building to a mass audience in the 1940s on the eve of communist victory. First, I explore the tradition of storyteller narratives enshrined in the vernacular fiction of late medieval China, which was updated in support of the communist cause and represented by Heroes of Lüliang, the serialized novel of guerrilla warfare by Ma Feng and Xi Rong. Second, I read a Chinese variant of the Soviet style of socialist realism, Zhou Libo’s novel Hurricane, which describes in normative terms the process whereby peasants dispossess the landlord class and take ownership of the land. These two novels were written shortly after Mao’s pronouncements on the arts in his 1942 Yan’an Forum Talks and are the two earliest red classics. Part 2 takes two longish Great Leap short stories by celebrated authors, one of rural and the other of industrial fiction, to look at the different ways

Introduction 11

of depicting heroes to be emulated in an age of mass endeavour. Of particu­ lar interest here are the sources from which the authors drew in creating these exemplary characters – not just from observation of meritorious citizens in contemporary society, as required by literary policy, but also from the Chinese tradition and the Soviet novel. The first of these Great Leap stories, with a heroine who emerges from a life of household drudgery to run a canteen and become a model for her village and beyond, is “A Brief Biography of Li Shuangshuang,” by the “village writer” Li Zhun, a work with antecedents in popular and literary traditions as well as the realities of the moment. The second – “A Man of Outstanding Quality,” by the “worker-writer” Hu Wanchun – features a Stakhanovite dock worker in Shanghai who achieves the impossible by feats of inspiration, persuasion, and management. Hu’s hero owes much to Pavel Korchagin, protagonist of the Soviet classic How the Steel Was Tempered and an officially sponsored model for Chinese youth in the 1950s. Part 3 looks at the novel in the Cultural Revolution and offers analysis of the first two volumes of Hao Ran’s The Golden Road, and of another novel of the period, Zhang Kangkang’s The Dividing Line, both written and published during the early 1970s. Both The Golden Road and The Dividing Line are seen as exercises in transformation – transforming both the past and the present to accommodate changing orthodoxy, and, in the first case, transforming an earlier writing style and view of society insufficiently belligerent for sterner times. Hao Ran’s epic work redrafts the history of agricultural collectivization during the 1950s (already the subject of a substantial literary record) in the light of the revised historiography of the Cultural Revolution, presenting the past as an ongoing struggle between opposing lines on rural development. In the process of the hero’s journey along this road, everything is transformed: the land, its ownership, the people who farm it, and the fiction that dramatizes it. By contrast, The Dividing Line is set at the time of writing and transfers the political struggles at the centre of power to a state farm in the northeast, adding a thrilling battle against the forces of nature with an operatic climax and transforming, at least within the world of the novel, the attitudes of those who doubt the value of their rustication in the process. Part 4, which examines two short novels published in 1980, shows that the view of history has reversed itself, albeit in a style that is highly reminiscent of the earlier heroic narratives, the Great Leap and the Cultural Revolution now being seen not as triumphs for the Communist Party and its leader, but as disasters for the Chinese people. The political struggles are the same as those represented in Zhang Kangkang’s novel and other fiction of the mid1970s, but the heroic activists of earlier literature are now portrayed as cynical

12

The Road and the Writer

opportunists. By contrast, those whom the state condemns for resisting its initiatives are depicted as sympathetic figures. Both works are set at the time of writing but look back at past tragedies and exemplify the briefly prevalent tear-soaked genre known as “wounds” literature. Chen Guokai’s The Price laments the chaos caused to industry by the political upheavals of the Cul­ tural Revolution. His heroes are research scientists, and his villain is the communist operative who persecutes them for spite and personal gain; the price of the title refers to the sacrifices made by the wife of a scientist to preserve his work. The final novel, The Story of the Criminal Li Tongzhong, by Li Zhun’s fellow provincial Zhang Yigong, looks back to the Great Leap. It focuses on the sacrifice made by a village official who is designated a criminal for leading peasants in a raid on a grain station to save them from a famine ignored by his superior. It can be read as a refutation of “Li Shuangshuang” and other Great Leap official writing. In both their content and style, these two short novels, written as the reform era was beginning, constitute a bridge between the writing of the first three decades of Communist Party rule and the more cosmopolitan and experimental literature that followed. They retain the former professions of faith that the Communist Party will provide enlightened leadership whatever the atrocities recently performed in its name but with a sentimentality and irony that had not existed in the austere writings of revolutionary realism and revolutionary romanticism. The epilogue takes a last look at the final two volumes of The Golden Road, as they appeared in a new complete edition of the novel in the mid-1990s. I read them as historical anachronism: the most socialist of novels appearing in a post-socialist age, looking forward with absolute confidence to a future already long abandoned.

PART 1 The War Years and the Search for Form, 1945-48

1 Ma Feng and Xi Rong, Heroes of Lüliang, and “Revolutionary Popular Literature”

At the end of the twentieth century, People’s Literature Publishers launched the first volumes in a series of “red classics,” novels written between the mid1940s and early 1960s, most set against the background of the midcentury military struggles that brought the communists to power.1 The coining of the collective title in the late 1980s, and the re-release of these novels together in the late ‘90s, signalled a revival of interest in the novels of Chinese socialism as the new century approached. The red classics have been the subject of renewed scholarly enquiry in China, and some have been turned into television series celebrating the wartime exploits of China’s soldiers and resistance fighters in the wars that brought the communists to power in 1949.2 A number of other novels were soon added to the initial titles in the red classics series, depicting Republican-era revolutionary struggles, including Yang Mo’s socialist bildungsroman The Song of Youth (Qingchun zhi ge), Luo Guangbin and Yang Yiyan’s resistance and prison drama Red Crag (Hong yan), and post-1949 agricultural collectivization novels such as The Builders (Chuangye shi) by Liu Qing and Great Changes in a Mountain Village (Shan­ xiang jubian) by Zhou Libo. Together they present to contemporary audiences, as they did on their first appearance, an eventful story of a nation founded and developed by heroic sacrifice and shared endeavour under the leadership of an enlightened vanguard, without the factional and personal battles in the Communist Party that became the focus of later fiction.3 The earliest of the works in the canon, and the subject of this chapter, is Heroes of Lüliang (Lüliang yingxiong zhuan) by Ma Feng and Xi Rong, which was serialized for publication in a small regional newspaper in their native Shanxi Province during the mid-1940s as the events it describes were un­ folding: the occupation by the Japanese army of the Lüliang Mountains in the western part of the province and the subsequent resistance by local partisans to the invaders and their Chinese collaborators.4 It is a milestone of Chinese socialist literature in that it was the first novel to be written at the communist base areas beyond Yan’an after the Forum on Literature and Art of May 1942.5 It was also the first to work communist agitational content into

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The War Years and the Search for Form, 1945-48

a storytelling style with antecedents in the classic seventeenth-century epics of rebellion and intrigue.6 Writing forty years after the serialization of Heroes of Lüliang, the critic Li Tuo coined the term “revolutionary popular literature” (geming tongsu wenxue) to describe works of drama and fiction produced in the years after the Yan’an Forum that followed regional folk and traditional literati styles. As Meng Yue makes clear in her study of one of the most celebrated of these, the local opera (and later film, Beijing opera, and ballet) The White-Haired Girl (Baimao nü), these ostensibly homespun entertainments were the product of painstaking collaboration between the Communist Party and the artists of the communist-controlled base areas during the civil war. In their production, traditional forms were collected, studied, and reinvented, infused with the message of the Party, and disseminated as broadly as possible for the entertainment and political edification of the peasants and soldiers of the region.7 Ma Feng and Xi Rong were farther from the political centre than the creators of The White-Haired Girl had been and thus less subject to supervision. For them, the imperative was to fill the back page of their newspaper with twice-weekly instalments that would deliver the desired message in a manner accessible to the paper’s audience. Ma Feng, describing the writing process in an interview conducted more than half a century later, recalled that the popular (tongsu) language and format was chosen by the authors and their editor and mentor as being in keeping with the style of the newspaper, while much of the content was provided by the exploits of communist guerrillas recounted at meetings held to honour heroes of the resistance attended by the young reporters. These inspiring tales (which might, of course, already have gained in the telling by the time Ma Feng and Xi Rong heard them) were adapted to fit the outline agreed on with their editor and to incorporate the novel’s main characters.8 Heroes of Lüliang was completed before the end of the war and the defeat of Japan, and concludes with a local victory – the capture of a Japanese stronghold by the partisans – rather than the final expulsion of the invaders. In his pioneering, if rose-tinted, study of the drama, poetry, and fiction of the communist liberated areas, The Literature of Liberated China and Its Popular Traditions, the Czech sinologist Jaroslav Průšek devoted considerable attention to Heroes of Lüliang, concluding that the young authors had turned their material into “a great epic of the heroic struggles of the Chinese people, reworked as once were the stories of the heroes of Shuihuzhuan [Outlaws of the marsh/All men are brothers].”9 The classic tale of rebellion and banditry to which Průšek refers, set at the end of the Song dynasty, is one of China’s best-loved premodern novels and provides the basis for many subsequent works of fiction, film, and opera in the martial arts genre. For

Ma Feng and Xi Rong 17

Průšek, Heroes of Lüliang is a worthy heir to the tradition of the great seventeenth-century novels: “With its abundant, colourful and fascinating content, the Heroes of Lüliang is in no way inferior to the great novels of earlier days, such as Shuihuzhuan or Three Kingdoms.”10 Průšek’s appreciation of the novel may have been enhanced by his sympathy for the Chinese revolution, at a time when the Warsaw Pact, of which Czechoslovakia was a member, was China’s ally; though his evaluation of Ma Feng and Xi Rong’s work tends to hyperbole, his identification of its formal antecedents is entirely accurate.11 As the title of Průšek’s study indicates, the road forward for Chinese literature following the Yan’an Forum initially led backward, to medieval traditions of writing, storytelling, and balladry. This constituted a remarkable divergence, both from the Western modernity of the urban Chinese writers of the May Fourth period in the earlier part of the twentieth century, and from the new works being created beyond the liberated areas during the period of the war of resistance and the civil war.12 This formal experiment (which was, as Meng Yue suggests, more sophisticated and complex than it might at first have seemed) was in the ascendant while the Communist Party and its Red Army were confined to poor and largely rural areas, and the influence of storytelling traditions persisted in some fiction written during the decade and a half after communist victory. Not all the literary intellectuals in the liberated areas saw the future of Chinese socialist fiction in these popular forms; there is some evidence of condescension toward the creators of these humbler works on the part of the authorities and established writers. The Party’s principal literary authority, Zhou Yang, of whom more in Chapter 2, is reported to have remarked in a tepid aside to his praise of the fiction of Yan’an’s most celebrated author, the “peasant writer” Zhao Shuli, that straw sandals (rustic stylings) were better than bare feet (nothing at all), but when the Communist Party took over the cities, leather shoes (more advanced craftsmanship) would be needed.13 This chapter will examine the factors in Mao’s Yan’an Forum Talks that proved conducive to the tongsu style of Heroes of Lüliang. A reading of Heroes of Lüliang will be followed by a comparison with another red classic heroic novel, New Son and Daughter Heroes (Xin ernü yingxiong zhuan), which was written in a slightly more refined tongsu style and at a slightly later date by Kong Jue and Yuan Jing, a pair of authors with considerably more education than Ma Feng and Xi Rong. Thereafter, revolutionary popular literature produced in the years that followed communist victory will be briefly reviewed. Finally, the twenty-first-century television adaptation of Heroes of Lüliang, a more elaborate process than the rushed production of the original

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The War Years and the Search for Form, 1945-48

novel, will be seen to hold remarkably true to both the narrative and myth making of Ma Feng and Xi Rong’s work.14 Virtue and Terror in Yan’an

For those who lived, worked, and studied in the capital of the revolutionary base areas, many of whom went on to hold positions of authority in the Chinese state after communist victory in 1949, the years in the mountain stronghold in Shaanxi exerted a powerful and protracted influence. There was certainly vicious infighting at Yan’an, and the rectification of 1942-43 and subsequent “rescue campaign” served notice of the Communist Party’s intolerance of any dissenting views. Nonetheless, the Party was still remarkably successful in its cultivation of an image of righteousness, not only to foreign visitors such as Edgar Snow and Agnes Smedley and their Western readers, and those in Nationalist-controlled areas sympathetic to the communist cause, but also, perhaps more surprisingly, to the residents of  Yan’an.15 The enduring impression left in the minds of the veterans of the liberated areas appears to have been one of idealism and unity in a great patriotic cause. Yan’an, with a charismatic and accessible Mao at its centre (a far cry from the remote and arbitrary autocrat of his later years), built a mystique on which the Party was able to capitalize when it came to power and was to continue to cultivate thereafter. In his study of the Yan’an discourse that produced the orthodoxy of the Mao era, David Apter recovers the memory of this idealism; he asserts that, for the survivors of that era, “Yan’an was the total and totalizing experience, the moral moment of the revolution and in their own lives.” Apter sees Yan’an as the “simulacrum of the Chinese revolution ... one in which occurred a miniaturization and intensification and a moral redefinition of truth.” “From the start,” he writes, “Yan’an was never just a base or a border area sanctuary or bastion, but a utopian community, an expression of intense political desire, a yearning for political change as much engaged in political learning as in conducting war and revolution.” And, at the centre of this utopian community was Mao, “story-teller, mythmaker, logician, and philosopher-king.”16 Both for members of the Shanghai leftist intelligentsia, who had made the arduous journey there, and for the poorly educated Party journalists and propagandists of the liberated areas, Yan’an, and particularly the Lu Xun Academy of Art and Literature (Luyi, of which more in Chapter 2), established shortly after the arrival of the long marchers, provided unique opportunities for contact and collaboration as well as education. The intellectual migrants from the great cities were given a chance to develop their revolutionary credentials by familiarizing themselves with the local population, and thus, potentially at least, shedding the

Ma Feng and Xi Rong 19

anxiety and self-doubt brought about by their alienation from the working classes whose interests they had long sought to advance. For the “rustic scholars” (tu xiucai), local writers, performers, and propagandists, the leftist intellectuals who wrote and taught in Yan’an offered a window on a world of culture and ideas that would not otherwise have been seen or known in one of the more impoverished areas of the country.17 The enlightenment represented by the Lu Xun Academy was accompanied by a much darker side: savage reprisals against those unwilling to submit to the authority of the Party leadership when called on to do so. The struggle for political ascendancy between Mao and the veterans of the Long March, on the one hand, and Moscow-trained “bolsheviks” who had come to Yan’an with the intent of taking charge of the Chinese revolution, on the other, was paralleled by a struggle for cultural supremacy between Mao and those with dissenting views on the role the arts should play in the cause of the revolution. In both cases, condemnation on political grounds, couched as it might be in terms of principle, was often accompanied by brutal retribution. Repression as practised in Yan’an may have been brought back to China from Stalin’s Soviet Union by Kang Sheng, who was to remain Mao’s ally and chief of security for the next three decades.18 Kang Sheng appears to have been principally responsible for a brutal though euphemistically named “rescue campaign” in the latter stages of the rectification. Yan’an was to be the crucible for the enforcement of discipline by the Party leadership over those in positions of authority and influence, and the means to that end was the combination of appeal to virtue and threat of terror, both ever-present throughout the Mao era, though explicit and implicit to varying degrees at different times.19 The practice of the Chinese Communist Party in the Chinese revolution put into effect the memorable articulation by Maximilien Robespierre in the French Revolution a century and a half earlier: “The springs of popular government in revolution are at once virtue and terror: virtue, without which terror is fatal; terror, without which virtue is powerless.”20 The Yan’an Rectification Campaign of 1942-43, of which Mao’s Forum Talks were the major public statement, was an exercise in this principle of inspiration and threat. The campaign, the writings of the Yan’an “literary opposition” that Mao sought to refute in his second, concluding, speech to the Forum, and the two principal versions of the text of Mao’s speeches have been analyzed in considerable detail elsewhere and need not be rehearsed at length here.21 Of particular interest to a reading of the literature under review below (Ma Feng and Xi Rong’s novel initially, and then the works of the four decades or so that followed the Yan’an Forum) are the constraints that Mao imposed on artistic creativity and, to the extent it can be extrapolated, his

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The War Years and the Search for Form, 1945-48

vision for the arts in a future communist state. Since much of what Mao had to say drew on earlier pronouncements – especially those of Qu Qiubai in the 1930s, and cultural practices in place at the time of the Jiangxi Soviet, on the Long March, and in the years immediately after the Red Army’s arrival in Yan’an – that context will be established first. Prelude to the Talks

Qu Qiubai, a leading intellectual in the May Fourth new culture movement of the early Republican era, had studied in Moscow and was briefly chairman of the Communist Party.22 By the early 1930s, he had reached the conclusion that the new culture movement had failed to produce a genuinely popular literature.23 Instead, he saw the new generation of revolutionary writers as a Westernized elite, producing works only for their own kind and alienated from any mass audience due to their class (petty-bourgeois), their language (Europeanized vernacular), and the inaccessibility of their writings. Qu called for a “proletarian May Fourth” that would require a transformation of the artists, from bourgeois to proletarian revolutionaries, and their works, from elite to popular. In the case of the artists, this would involve abandonment of patronizing attitudes toward the proletariat and protracted experience of the life and language of the popular audience. As for their works, the literature of the proletarian May Fourth was to be written in the common language (putonghua) of the people, an urban street vernacular already in existence, which “contains aspects of a variety of local dialects while having eliminated the obscure localisms of these dialects, and … has been receptive to foreign phraseology.”24 Its content was to be the revolutionary struggles of the day, and its form was to be derived from popular styles with which the audience was already familiar. A dozen years before the serialization of Heroes of Lüliang began, Qu Qiubai envisaged that tales of the Song dynasty general Yue Fei and stories from Shuihuzhuan could be recycled to dramatize the exploits of contemporary heroes.25 Qu had an opportunity to put his ideas into action as commissar of education to the Jiangxi Soviet, the communist base following the communists’ disastrous urban insurrections of 1927 and the subsequent virtual destruction of the Party in the major cities. Qu’s tenure was brief, lasting from January of 1934 until he was left behind on the evacuation of the Soviet the following year, imprisoned, and executed by the Nationalists. During that short time, however, he played a major role in shaping the literary policies of the Soviet. To the extent that the scanty source materials permit conclusions, it can be seen that a popular agitational literature did in fact emerge. The inhabitants

Ma Feng and Xi Rong 21

of the Soviet were presented with works arising out of their struggle for survival, in forms ranging from spoken drama to local folk-songs. In an early manifestation of revolutionary popular literature, new words were set to traditional love-songs to tell of wives sending their husbands off to war, and a policy statement by Mao (then political commissar) and army commander Zhu De was composed in doggerel.26 The organization of artists in Jiangxi, which Qu had not anticipated in his Shanghai writings, was based on Soviet practice: in drama, for example, instruction was given at the Gorky Drama School and performed by “blue-denim troupes” modelled on similar groups in the Soviet Union. Most of the writer-performers were young, had no previous reputation, and were not identified with the May Fourth movement.27 Cultural propaganda activities continued even during the Long March, with troupes performing music and drama to inhabitants of the areas through which the Red Army passed.28 Following the arrival in Yan’an of the first contingent of revolutionary intellectuals, cultural initiatives continued, with a “street poetry” movement in 1938. In this case, however, the poetry, which was declaimed, distributed in leaflets, painted on rocks, and posted on village walls, was in the style of the May Fourth “new poetry” against which Qu Qiubai had railed. As Ellen Judd observes, it was written “by youths whose most valued possession might be a volume of Pushkin or Mayakovsky.”29 The “proletarianization” of artists and their art that Qu Qiubai had demanded was to prove more of an issue in Yan’an than it had been in Jiangxi. In his summary of the background to Mao’s Talks, Kirk Denton observes a process for dealing with literary intellectuals that was to repeat itself following the establishment of the People’s Republic, whereby writers were encouraged to air dissenting views, were then criticized for those views in the Party media, and were punished, typically by being sent to the countryside for labour reform.30 Considerable latitude was permitted in the journals of Yan’an, including the literary page of the Liberation Daily, during the months leading to the Forum, and the writers later identified as the “literary opposition” exploited this latitude to voice their observations of the situation at Yan’an and their views on the role of the artist in the revolution.31 This group included Ding Ling, Xiao Jun, Ai Qing, and Wang Shiwei, the first three of whom had arrived in Yan’an from areas under Nationalist control with considerable literary reputations, Ding Ling as a short-story writer, Xiao Jun as a novelist, and Ai Qing as a poet. They believed, first, in the right of artists to express themselves without fear of political intervention: “Apart from creative freedom,” Ai Qing wrote in his essay “Understand Authors, Respect

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The War Years and the Search for Form, 1945-48

Authors,” and “authors demand no privileges.”32 Second, the separation of the roles of politicians and artists was demanded by Wang Shiwei. Wang maintained that politicians should concern themselves with human society, artists with the human soul, and that neither group should meddle in the other’s territory.33 (Wang’s argument is disingenuous in that, while decrying the meddling of politicians in the arts, he reserves for himself the right to intervene in politics.) Wang suggested that politicians who gained control of the arts would be liable to use them for self-aggrandisement, whereas artists could be relied on to act with integrity. Third, it was the duty of the artist to expose the “darkness” (hei’an), such things as harmful practices and social inequities, as both Wang and Ding Ling had done in their criticisms of Yan’an life. Wang Shiwei maintained that it was more important for artists to purge the uncleanliness of the individual and their own society than it was to “turn the guns outwards” (qiangkou xiang wai) by criticizing the enemy. In this context, Ai Qing saw the artist as a surgeon of the soul, wielding the scalpel of the critical essay to operate on spiritual ills rather than soothing his patients with palliatives.34 Although the Party might have tolerated, or even encouraged these positions in the Nationalist-controlled areas where many of Yan’an’s intellectuals had gained their revolutionary credentials, they were to prove unacceptable to Mao in Yan’an. By 1942, the year of the Yan’an Forum, Mao Zedong, then in his late forties, had firmly established himself as the leader of the Communist Party. He had been actively engaged in revolutionary war for fifteen years and had been Party chairman for seven. At Yan’an, he had begun the synthesis of the theoretical system that was to become known as Mao Zedong Thought by combining his own experience as a revolutionary with the Marxism he had read (largely in translations of the work of Lenin and Stalin) and learned from colleagues, notably Chen Boda and Ai Siqi, at Yan’an.35 This combination of the empirical and the theoretical, with a preference for the former, can be observed in Mao’s 1937 essay “On Practice” (Shijian lun), in which he defended himself against those who were returning from their education in the Soviet Union (he called them dogmatists), believing they were better qualified than he to lead the Chinese revolution.36 A similar balance can be seen in his pronouncements on the arts, where his own reading preferences and literary practices were combined with Soviet ideas learned from Qu Qiubai in Jiangxi and Zhou Yang and Chen Boda in Yan’an. Though Mao acknowledged the May Fourth movement and praised its anti-imperialism, he appears to have been, like Qu Qiubai, unimpressed with the literature that it produced, finding it insipid, self-indulgent, and

Ma Feng and Xi Rong 23

removed from the realities of Chinese society. His own preference, as expressed in the autobiography dictated in Yan’an to the visiting American journalist Edgar Snow, was for the classic tales of intrigue and adventure in Shuihuzhuan and Three Kingdoms (Sanguo): “What I enjoyed were the romances of old China, and especially stories of rebellions ... I believe that perhaps I was much influenced by these books, read at an early age.”37 In terms of writing, Mao composed poetry in classical style in addition to his considerable body of political essays. His most celebrated poem, “Snow” (Xue), written on the Long March, ended with a rhetorical flourish in which he declared that his combined mastery of both the martial and the cultural was superior to that of the great warrior-emperors of antiquity: But alas! Qin Shihuang and Han Wudi Were lacking in literary grace, And Tang Taizong and Song Taizu Had little poetry in their souls. And Ghengis Khan, Proud Son of Heaven for a day, Knew only shooting eagles, bow outstretched. All are past and gone! For truly great men Look to this age alone.38

Mao came to the Yan’an Forum as the political and organizational master of Yan’an, and by implication for himself and his audience, the leader of the struggle for national liberation; he also addressed his audience as its fellow intellectual.39 The Talks: Setting the Rules

The convening of the Yan’an Form was an acknowledgment of the importance placed by Mao on culture as a means of winning and maintaining support for the communist cause from the disparate groups at Yan’an, the population of the liberated areas, the nation, and beyond, and of the key role that the intellectuals would be expected to play. At the same time, it also indicated that Mao believed that the time had come for a change in the behaviour of the intellectuals at Yan’an: past practices would no longer be accepted, and the Party now demanded that the urban leftists transform themselves to meet the goals assigned to them. Mao’s anecdote about his own transformation in his introductory speech struck a conciliatory note: speaking as one

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intellectual to others, he confessed that he had been disdainful of manual work and remote from the people who did it (a characteristic, as Bonnie S. McDougall points out, that the May Fourth intellectuals inherited from their predecessors in imperial China).40 Only after protracted contact with workers and peasants had he come to recognize their superiority to untransformed intellectuals. We may infer from the sterner tone of his concluding speech, delivered three weeks later, that his implicit invitation to his audience to follow his example did not meet with the enthusiasm he expected. “What then is the crux of the matter?” Mao asked near the beginning of his concluding speech. “In my view it consists fundamentally of the problems of working for the masses and how to work for the masses.”41 Mao defined “the masses” as workers, peasants, and soldiers, adding to these groups the revolutionary cadres in his introduction and the petty-bourgeoisie in his conclusion. In terms of how these groups were to be served, Mao emphasized political criteria: the arts were to be subordinate to politics and should serve goals defined by political leaders. This is, of course, in direct contrast to the role of the artist as distinct from that of the politician, as members of Mao’s audience were doubtless aware. The vital fourth section of Mao’s conclusion, ostensibly on the importance of political criteria in literary criticism, was also a refutation of many of the views of the “literary opposition,” particularly of Wang Shiwei’s “Politicians and Artists.” Mao rejected humanism and love of mankind as starting points for artistic creation, insisting that, in a class society, class differences must override abstract considerations. With respect to the dialectic of praise (gesong) and exposure (baolu), Mao demanded that the former be directed at the Party and the masses, despite their shortcomings, and that the latter should be almost exclusively reserved for their enemies. In a second dialectical pairing, that of accessibility (puji) and refinement (tigao), terms translated elsewhere as “popularization” and “raising standards,” Mao opted for the former, citing the limited education of the popular audience, while admitting the need for immediate refinement of works directed at cadres and students, and the future large-scale refinement to meet the needs of a better-educated audience. Implicit in the Talks is the recognition that, for the time being at least, literature and art were to be provided for the mass audience by an educated but ideologically transformed elite, reshaping the life of the masses into a language and an artistic form accessible to their audience. For one whose views on the role of the arts are generally so utilitarian, Mao’s sense of the relationship of art to life is surprisingly romantic. It is seen in the resounding passage quoted in the Introduction, which became known as the “six even

Ma Feng and Xi Rong 25

mores,” and was later used to justify the move toward revolutionary romanticism and the portrayal of pre-eminent heroes. The creation of such works of art was a task for which authors accustomed to May Fourth styles of writing were not qualified without a combination of study of Party-approved texts and extended exposure to the people they were supposed to write about and for. In a stern reprimand to writers who thought that they could continue to write in Yan’an as they had elsewhere, Mao insisted that he would like to see destroyed all creative impulses that were “feudal, bourgeois, petty-bourgeois, liberal, individual, nihilist, art-for-art’s sake, aristocratic, decadent, pessimistic,” epithets that might be applied to much of May Fourth writing.42 The passage just quoted from the Talks is an indication of Mao’s hostility to the Westernized writing of the new culture movement of the earlier part of the century, an attitude that offended critics writing in the West. For C.T. Hsia, “in repudiating the Western tradition in modern Chinese literature, [the Talks] ... reversed the course of that literature and killed its potential for future development.”43 Hsia had scant sympathy for the popular writing (popular either in the sense of dazhong, “for the masses,” or tongsu, “based on indigenous forms”) that would displace the Western tradition in the next four decades of communist rule. When the Talks were delivered, Mao had little authority beyond the boundaries of the liberated areas (though, as Denton notes, texts of his speeches were published in Chongqing in 1944 and were used in the attack on independent leftists in Nationalist-controlled areas). Within Yan’an, they could take immediate effect.44 The most prominent literary celebrities at Yan’an at the time of the Forum were Ding Ling and Xiao Jun. Both had come to Yan’an with distinguished revolutionary credentials and records of achievement in the Nationalist-controlled areas, both had been members of the “literary opposition” in the months leading up to the Forum, and both were inevitably affected by Mao’s pronouncements. Ding Ling had famously presented the ennui and sexuality of the urban new woman in her 1927 “Miss Sophie’s Diary” (Shafei nüshi de riji), a story influenced by Flaubert’s Madame Bovary and one to which many of the epithets in Mao’s list of undesirable creative impulses might be applied. She had also written fiction in 1941 that dwelt on the hardship suffered by women and on their lower status in the liberated areas.45 Xiao Jun’s exercise in proletarian revolutionary literature, his 1935 novel Countryside in August (Bayue de xiangcun), seems to have been pointedly excluded from positive comment by Mao in his Talks in favour of one of the canonical Soviet novels that inspired it – Fadeyev’s The Rout. Mao may have praised the Russian work because it was translated by Lu Xun.46 Countryside in August follows a detachment of the revolutionary army whose

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members are conflicted between the grand goals for which they are fighting and the gratification of more immediate needs, such as food, tobacco, sex, and love. The author’s focus on the (often despairing) mental state of his characters and the absence of any grand narrative of national salvation place the novel within the May Fourth tradition, which was characteristically subjective and doubting rather than loyalist and triumphal. With their undeniable literary talent and attainment, coupled with the subjectivism and lack of revolutionary optimism in their published works, Ding Ling and Xiao Jun were prime candidates for the ideological remoulding demanded by Mao. Both were “sent down” to witness and participate in the revolution, and both later wrote novels based on their experiences. Ding Ling was spectacularly successful in this venture: her stint as a land-reform cadre resulted in the Stalin Prize–winning novel The Sun Shines over the Sanggan River (Taiyang zhao zai Sanggan he shang).47 Whatever ideological transformation they achieved was not enough to erase the memory of their opposition in Yan’an, of which both (but Ding Ling in particular) were to be reminded, and for which both were to suffer, in the Anti-Rightist Campaign of the late 1950s and the Cultural Revolution. The removal of experienced authors and the prohibition of the writing styles of the May Fourth movement left the way open for different literary forms and new writers. The Talks made passing reference to “proletarian realism” (in the earlier text) or “socialist realism” (in the revised version).48 Mao also commended “budding literature and art” (mengya zhuangtai de wenyi), a designation that explicitly included wall newspapers, wall-paintings, folk-songs, and folk tales (a further item, popular speech, was omitted in the revised version).49 Socialist realism, the Soviet formulation championed by Zhou Yang, will be considered in the next chapter. Of particular interest here is the “budding literature and art” and its manifestation in revolutionary popular literature. Mao’s advocacy of indigenous cultural traditions, emptied of their Con­ fucian or feudal content and reinvented as vehicles for a communist message, adopted the practice of the Jiangxi Soviet, the Long March, and the early Yan’an years, and reflected a debate among some of his closest advisors, among them Chen Boda and Zhou Yang, on the subject of “national forms” (minzu xingshi). Before the Talks, Zhou Yang had discussed national forms in terms of the dialectic between accessibility and refinement, arguing that folk idioms were, for the time being, an acceptable base from which to build a more refined proletarian culture.50 For Chen Boda, national forms were the means whereby the masses could contribute, albeit through the intermediacy of intellectuals, to the creation of a revolutionary culture during the transition

Ma Feng and Xi Rong 27

to socialism. He rejected the argument (put forward by Wang Shiwei and resulting in a sharp rhetorical exchange) that popular forms were irrevocably tainted by their origins in a backward feudal culture and should be dispensed with altogether.51 As studies by Průšek, David Holm, Chang-Tai Hung, and others make clear, the significant feature of literature produced immediately following the Rec­ tification Campaign was the reinvention of traditional forms. A mass movement was launched to transform the comic and often bawdy local dramatic form of yangge opera into a medium for mass education and the promulgation of Party policy.52 A Beijing opera with a historical setting but a contemporary message, Forced to Ascend Liangshan (Bishang Liangshan), showed the righteous rebellion of Shuihuzhuan to the latter-day rebels of Yan’an and won Mao’s praise for opening a new era in drama.53 It was followed by The White-Haired Girl (Baimao nü), the dramatization of a contemporary story in which the sufferings of the central character are brought to an end by the arrival of communist troops.54 Audience reaction to the latter drama witnessed by the American journalist Jack Belden attested to its effectiveness as propaganda.55 The familiarity of its formal conventions must also have contributed to its popularity. The vocabulary used at Yan’an to describe the forms and the language of the culture envisaged by the Party’s leadership was new and political: this was to be a worker-peasant-soldier (gongnongbing), mass (dazhong) culture, designed for an audience drawn from the classes deemed most amenable to revolution. The word not used, but evidently inferred by his audience, to describe this new popular culture, was the indigenous term tongsu. In her parsing of the word, Xu Xueqing explains that, as used in the Han dynasty, tongsu meant understanding and connecting (tong) with the customs and tastes (su) of the common people. It was first used to describe histories, and then, from the Song dynasty, fiction. The late Ming writer and critic Feng Menglong endorsed tongsu writing, of which he was himself a practitioner, for its appeal to the ear of the ordinary reader. In the May Fourth period, “tongsu” was used derisively (similar in tone to the pejorative Mandarin Duck and Butterfly), to mean popular in the sense of lowbrow or trashy, but it still seems to have conveyed a desirable quality to the authors of civil war literature aimed at a large audience with limited education.56 The Rise of the “Rustic Scholars”: The “Peasant Author” Zhao Shuli

Confronted as they were by the military might of formidable adversaries – the Japanese invaders and the Nationalist government – the “literature and art workers” of the liberated areas were generally amenable to the demands of

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the Yan’an leadership that the arts should be incorporated into the struggle for the nation and should serve the agitational or educational purpose of the Communist Party. The arts of  Yan’an both encouraged and exploited popular sentiment against the enemies of the communist enclave, the invaders and their supporters, pillars of the system of rule and order that the communists were committed to destroy. With many of the established artists and literary intellectuals remoulding themselves into the service of the Red Army and its hosts, the majority of the cultural workers were rustic scholars (tu xiucai) from the liberated areas, a group well placed to represent a peasantry still prevented by illiteracy from speaking for itself. The interests of Party propaganda were better served by representing these literature and art workers as having had minimal education before the establishment of the liberated areas and thus being beneficiaries of Party instruction. As a result, many are recorded as “peasant authors,” even though many in the countryside had had some years of traditional education, knew the most famous stories of the Chinese tradition, quite possibly having heard them recounted by storytellers, and possessed extensive knowledge of local cultural practices, prior to attending classes in Yan’an, either at the Lu Xun Academy or at a less exalted training programs, where they would have been introduced to literatures of the wider world, principally Western and Eastern Europe. The first of the rustic scholars of the liberated areas to achieve celebrity was Zhao Shuli, who became in 1943 the most prominent literary figure in Yan’an and, according to Jack Belden, its third-most famous person.57 As Yi-tsi Mei Feuerwerker demonstrates in an analysis of Zhao’s writing, part of her study of the relationship between China’s intellectuals and the peasantry in the twentieth century, Zhao’s emergence as a peasant writer (a concept seemingly invented for him) was the product of a collaboration between the writer and Party ideologues. Feuerwerker’s account of Zhao Shuli’s biography demonstrates that, though he certainly rose from the ranks of the rural poor, he was not the archetypal peasant that early Party propaganda sought to construct. Educated in the Chinese classics at a school run by his grandfather in the family’s native Shanxi village, he learned divination and geomancy from his father and was introduced to works of May Fourth and European writers at a provincial normal school. Feuerwerker notes that “in many respects, Zhao Shuli’s background and training – a gentry family in decline, albeit declining farther than most, early education in the classics, followed by introduction to foreign literature, teaching, clerking, and other ‘intellectual jobs’ – conforms to the pattern of many other modern Chinese writers.”58 She quotes a Chinese biographer who judged Zhao to be a writer

Ma Feng and Xi Rong 29

who “changed into a peasant” (nongminhua le de zuojia).59 In other contexts, the matter of Zhao’s social and class origin might seem of little importance, but in the Rectification Campaign, when authors were expected to write what they were and therefore knew, both their history and they themselves had to be groomed to conform to desired norms. Zhao’s promoters saw fit to suppress those details of his background that did not accord with the construct that he was to become. With his intimate knowledge of different strata of rural society, his experience in traditional performing arts, and his formidable storytelling skills, he came as close to perfect material as was then available to be fashioned into the writer imagined in Mao’s Talks. Zhao’s tragedy was that, once his persona and writing style were formed, he was not sufficiently malleable to meet the changing demands of the authorities in subsequent years: his commitment to stating the case of the peasant as he saw it led to him being sidelined, then ostracized and condemned, in the political movements of the People’s Republic.60 In the two most celebrated stories of the Yan’an period, “The Marriage of Young Blacky” (Xiao Erhei jiehun) and “Rhymes of Li Youcai” (Li Youcai banhua), Zhao Shuli and his Party mentors established the literary style of the times.61 In the stories, the problems of peasants victimized by landowners, local thugs, and bullying parents are resolved by the timely intervention of well-informed and astute Party officials, leading to comfortably happy endings. The dramatis personae of these two stories – comically superstitious or traditional older peasants, resilient and progressive youngsters, wise Party officials – were to provide the stock characters for much of Zhao’s subsequent fiction of the 1940s and ‘50s. His most memorable creation, the bard Li Youcai, represents the author’s own role (whether or not the character is autobiographical in its provenance) as local activist in a new socialist society, voicing plausible local concerns for a sympathetic leadership to deal with, in a voice that is clear as to its regional origins and in popular form but still in a standard language comprehensible to the widest possible audience. Through his adaptation of popular literature and regional speech to Party literature, Zhao was, Edward Gunn proposes, “the single most important stylist of the 1940s and 1950s.”62 Zhao Shuli’s proximity to, and his supervision and nurturing by, the Yan’an intellectual elite – represented in much of the official writing of the time by Zhou Yang – distinguishes him from other writers of the period. His public visibility as a model new writer, and the attendant scrutiny, forced him further into the role that the Party had created for him. By contrast, writers who began their careers beyond Yan’an, however influenced they had been by

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Mao’s Talks, had both the freedom and the obligation to craft their works away from the intensive sponsorship and direction that were Zhao’s privilege and his bane. Ma Feng and Xi Rong: Rustic Scholars and the Revolutionary Popular Novel

Like their fellow provincial Zhao Shuli, Ma Feng and Xi Rong, the authors of Heroes of Lüliang, were better educated and better read than the model of village or peasant author would imply. More information is available for Ma Feng, who had a more successful writing career following communist victory and held higher rank in the literary bureaucracy than his friend and coauthor.63 Ma Feng (1922-2004) was the son of a holder of the xiucai degree who had practised medicine, taught school, and served as a local magistrate before his death when the author was five years old, leaving Ma Feng’s mother to raise her two sons with assistance from the Ma clan and other relatives, one of whom paid for Ma Feng to complete an elementary school education. Following the Japanese invasion of 1937, Ma Feng joined the guerrilla army commanded by Bo Yibo, where his higher-than-average level of education qualified him for propaganda work in the war effort with the army’s cultural div­ision (wengongtuan) when it was established in 1938. Ma became a Com­ munist Party member during that year. By the winter of 1940, he was in Yan’an, where he enrolled in the Army Cultural Cadres’ Training Group (Budui wenyi ganbu xunlianban). Although not affiliated with the Lu Xun Academy, its students were allowed to use the library there and to attend lectures, including those given by Zhou Libo on the great works of European literature.64 At Yan’an, Ma continued to write propaganda pieces and published his first fiction. He was not invited to the Yan’an Forum, but he heard Mao give a summary of his closing address in a presentation to the Training Group shortly after the Forum closed. Ma recalled that Mao emphasized the importance for authors of practical military and revolutionary experience, referring to the life of the liberated areas and the anti-Japanese war as a “greater Lu Xun Academy” (da Luyi). Both Ma Feng and Xi Rong returned to Shanxi before the end of 1942 and were soon assigned to a small communist newspaper Shanxi-Suiyuan Masses (Jin-Sui dazhongbao). The newspaper staff, of fewer than ten people, was headed by Zhou Wen, a comparatively experienced author who had also been at Yan’an and had written popular versions of Soviet novels.65 The young reporters’ duties included attending meetings to publicize the achievements of those designated people’s heroes, particularly in the war effort against Japan, and writing reports of them for publication. Zhou Wen suggested to

Ma Feng and Xi Rong 31

them that these heroic exploits could provide material for a novel that could be serialized in the paper, which was invariably short of material to fill its pages. The immediacy of the need, and the distance from the literary authorities in Yan’an, provided latitude for improvisation; adviser and authors were obliged to interpret Mao’s Talks for themselves rather than have the various aspects of the novel’s creation become a test case for debates and conflicts at the centre. After Zhou Wen approved a draft outline of Heroes of Lüliang prepared by Ma Feng and Xi Rong, the authors were required, in addition to their journalistic duties, to produce a chapter every three days, of sufficient length to fill one page of the paper. The two took it in turns to write the chapters from the outline, each editing the other’s work. The novel appeared in more than ninety instalments during two years; a first volume was published in 1945, with the present eighty-chapter version appearing in 1948. The limited space available for each instalment and the serialization of the novel explain the brevity of the chapters (five to seven book-length pages) and the relatively self-contained nature of the incidents in each chapter. As passages translated below will show, the tongsu language and narrative style of the novel adopt a traditional storyteller posture in the introduction of characters, often beginning with details of dress and deportment reminiscent of Shuihuzhuan, and deliver exciting action. Such a combination of accessibility and popularization, the qualities deemed by Mao’s Talks to be most immediately necessary for the liberated areas, proved remarkably successful with the readers of Jin-Sui dazhongbao. Ma Feng believes that the serialization of the novel was largely responsible for a ten-fold rise in the paper’s circulation (from one to ten thousand). Průšek claims that the novel’s chapters were further transmitted by the very means that the authors had imitated: the incidents were recounted orally by literate students to their parents and other villagers, and so reached a much wider audience, even before their appearance in book form. Průšek cites Zhou Wen’s introduction to the 1946 Dongbei Shudian edition – that, in addition to its depiction of heroic adventures, the novel’s presentation of the organizational role played by the Communist Party in the war of resistance educated, guided, and aroused its readers.66 “Progressive Consciousness” and the “Feudal Unconscious” in Heroes of Lüliang

Heroes of Lüliang is one of a succession of novels that would write, and then obsessively rewrite, the history of the national struggle against the Japanese occupation and the communist victory in the subsequent civil war. In fiction written under communist control during the civil war, as in the subsequent

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grand narrative of the early red canon, certain assumptions remain constant: that the major story of the occupation is one of brave and protracted resistance, that the Nationalist government did nothing to oppose the Japanese, and that the interests of the Communist Party and the nation were then, and were to remain, identical. Although later revisions in Communist Party historiography, resulting from internal struggles that considerably postdated the events described, were to affect the evaluation of existing fiction and the retelling of historical events, the official narrative of the war with Japan remained largely intact.67 By presenting the exploits of communist guerrillas in a form reminiscent of earlier tales of righteous resistance to oppression, the authors of Heroes of Lüliang also called to mind the moral and cultural imperatives of the Chinese martial fiction tradition, a list that includes unquestioning loyalty to leaders and sworn brothers, an implacable desire for revenge against those who harm family or friends, and Confucian notions of social and gender hierarchy. In his study of the war fiction of the late 1940s, David Der-wei Wang finds what Wang Shiwei and Hu Feng would have predicted in their interventions in the debates over national forms: that these novels “initiated their readers into ‘progressive consciousness’ by refamiliarizing them, instead of detaching them, from the ‘feudal unconscious’ inherent in traditional fiction.”68 In the case of Heroes of Lüliang, the audience for which the novel was originally intended would have been little affected by the Sturm und Drang of the new culture movement in the early part of the century and thus needed very little refamiliarizing with the feudal unconscious. Instead, as had been the case with the yangge movement in Yan’an, a new political message was served in a form with which the consumers were familiar and comfortable. These familiar vessels would have been less the texts of Shuihuzhuan and the tradition of martial fiction it spawned than the oral retellings of these heroic tales, where the physical descriptions and anecdotes used to introduce characters, among other aspects of the narration, were embellished by performers for audiences who had time to listen and needed ample entertainment before parting with their money. The action of Heroes of Lüliang begins as the invasion makes its impact on the fictional Kang family village. Japanese troops seize the village and take hostages. The occupation divides the village between collaboration and resistance: siding with the Japanese, the landlord Kang Xixue and other members of his clan set up a quisling local council and defence committee (weichihui). Villagers who oppose the occupation coalesce cautiously around the young hunter and Communist Party member Lei Shizhu. When the landlord’s men demand both taxes levied by the Japanese and rents due Kang Xixue, the

Ma Feng and Xi Rong 33

peasant Liu Erze kills his wife, his baby, and himself in an act of despair. Lei Shizhu organizes an anti-Japanese militia, in which he is guided by Wu Demin, an advisor sent by the communist Eighth Route Army. These two are the central figures of the novel, respectively the bold village rebel and the wise counsellor. They are pitted against forces of evil represented by the Japanese invaders and their one-eyed interpreter Wang Huaidang, the landlord family of Kang Xixue, his sons Jiabai and Jiabi, his distant cousin Kang Shunfeng and the inept defence committee militiamen under him, and an assortment of traitors, including Lei Shizhu’s father-in-law. The supporters of the heroes are a cast of militiamen, villagers, and, as the novel progresses, members of the communist underground in the nearby Japanese stronghold at Hanjiashan. The communist partisans are poorly armed by comparison with the invaders; much of their firepower is derived from homemade landmines that, though unreliable and easily sabotaged, are deployed to considerable effect. In the tradition of popular fiction, the chapter titles are in matched couplets, typically seven characters per line, though occasionally eight or nine, with a promise, not always delivered, of two storylines per chapter. Chapters are mostly self-contained, though exciting episodes can run to more than one chapter.69 Characters can be introduced by distinguishing features and a nick­ name, sometimes followed by a biographical anecdote, in the style of fiction modelled on the art of the storyteller. For a prototype from the storyteller tradition, consider the first appearance of Lu Zhishen, one of the most memorable characters of Shuihuzhuan. Lu is first introduced with a formal description in Chapter 3, prefaced by the storyteller cliché “just look” (dan jian). The incomparable, if occasionally impressionistic, Pearl Buck translation reads in part, “His face was round, his ears were very large, his nose was straight and his mouth square. He wore a fan-shaped beard clean around his jaws. His body was eight feet in height, and his girth was enormous.”70 An example of this technique among the minor characters of Heroes of Lüliang is the demobilized soldier Zhao Desheng, who is described as “twentyeight or -nine, stocky and fleshy-faced (rou tuantuan lian) with two bushy eyebrows that met in the middle, and a nose like a garlic bulb. He held a gun (niuqiang) in one hand, and the other sleeve hung empty.” After explaining how he lost his arm in battle, the text adds, “People gave him the nickname yibashou ‘Leading Hand,’” a play on words referring to both his authority and his lost arm.71 Characters who will take a larger part in the action are introduced at greater length. The gathering of villagers at Liu Erze’s house following the death of Liu, his wife, and their child allows the authors to bring in some of the main characters; the extracts that appear below introduce the hero Lei Shizhu and

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the minor landlord Sir Second (Er Xiansheng). The first of these offers a model of a civil war militiaman; in the second, the ponderous diction of an old-style low-ranking scholar is amusingly parodied. First, two young men returning from forced labour on Japanese fortifications decide that their only hope lies with Lei Shizhu: “There’s nothing else for it, the two of us will have to go and see Brother Shizhu, he has to come up with a plan! He’s the head of the Party cell.” “Right!” the other replied. The two of them then headed off to Lei Shizhu’s house. Lei Shizhu was the squad leader of the Kang Family Village militia, and was twenty-three years old. Though born to a family in desperate poverty, he was fine-featured and extremely handsome, intelligent and capable, courageous and decisive. His family was poor, and from an early age he had shot wild boars and hunted deer in the Hualin Mountains. In seven or eight years he had become an expert hunter: he could run like the wind, and could scale mountains and cross hills as easily as walking a level road. As for his marksmanship, it was even more exceptional – he had only to catch sight of a wild boar or a mountain sheep, and it would not get away. From a hundred and fifty paces, he could hit the head or the stomach, whichever you told him, a hundred times out of a hundred. His parents died when he was eighteen, leaving him alone to make do as best he could. When the weather was warm, he would hire himself out as a labourer, and in the winter he would head off into the Hualin Mountains to dig coal in the pits. That was in the days of the former authorities, when the poor had nothing to fall back on, and suffered their fill of exploitation by the wealthy, when taxes were high and income scarce; furthermore, the Tyrant of Hualin [Kang Xixue] owed him two years back wages which he kept refusing to pay, so that even supporting himself meant that there was less to eat year after year. After the new authority was established and carried out rent reduction and raising of wages, he managed to buy a dozen or so shang of land, and his circumstances gradually improved. The villagers chose him as the squad leader of the defence force. In the course of last year’s rent reduction movement, he also joined the Communist Party. The Party had just established itself in the village, with four members including himself. He was the leader of the Party cell; that winter he married a girl from Hanjiashan called Wu Xiuying, and the young couple lived happily together.72

Lei’s good looks, prodigious capabilities (speed and accuracy with a rifle), impeccable class origins (for a communist hero), record of suffering and resistance, and membership of the Communist Party all qualify him for the

Ma Feng and Xi Rong 35

role of hero, though his youth and relative inexperience require the mentorship of Wu Demin. Sir Second, as the member of a class from which the com­munists sought support, is treated with respect but is still a figure of fun, with his odd appearance and eccentric ways. Sir Second makes his entrance as Liu Erze’s peers (tenant farmers and part-time miners) lament their situation: At that moment, an old man with a white beard pushed his way in and said: “Alas! In days such as these, forbearance is a primary necessity. Did not the ancients say ‘When the eaves are low, who durst not keep his head down’?” Everyone recognized him as Sir Second. This man’s name was Bai Wenkui, he was in his sixties, and a holder of the xiucai degree. His clothing was immaculate, clean and tidy: an old-style gown with side-fastenings, complemented by an oldish black cotton skull-cap; his legs were wrapped in puttees, and on his breast was the tooth-pick he had carried for years, to which was fastened an inch-long beard-comb. When he was at his ease, he would put on his brassrimmed reading glasses and pore over ancient block-print volumes, all the while combing away with that little beard-comb. Because he was a straightforward sort of man, recognized around the village for his impartiality, and because he was quite well-educated, and was given to prolixity in speech, in years past when villagers had bought land or drafted contracts, or been involved in arbitration, they would invite him along as middle-man. Because he was the second son in his family, people addressed him as “Sir Second.” He and his wife had no son, only a daughter called Bai Meiying. As for his property, he was among the village’s lesser wealthy, with about 100 shang of land out to rent. When the new [communist] authority put out the order to reduce rents, he perused the document twice through, believed it to be reflective of the trend of the times, and that it was a tide that could not be stemmed, and after some explanation and persuasion on the part of the cadres, he reduced the rents of his own accord, and his tenants did not let him down.73

Sir Second is a sympathetic figure (it is inconceivable that a novel written later in the Mao era could portray a landlord in this way), and is significantly involved in one of the story’s most memorable incidents, the aborted forced marriage plot involving his daughter, which is considered below. As the example of Sir Second illustrates, the authors had greater liberty for entertaining characterization, or caricature, the farther away they got from heroic stature. Lei Shizhu’s father-in-law is a another case in point, a compendium of undesirable qualities. A gambler and opium-smoker perpetually short of cash, he visits his daughter while Lei Shizhu is away and tries to

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persuade her to move with him to the Japanese-occupied area. He then steals Lei’s notebook to sell it to the Japanese, poisons Lei’s food, and abducts his own daughter with a view to selling her, presumably as a “comfort woman,” to cancel out a gambling debt.74 The novel proceeds with a series of tales of resistance by the village militia against the occupiers and their quislings. Repeated atrocities (a raid by the Japanese to abduct local women, a full-scale attack on the village, horrific torture of imprisoned militiamen) refresh the motivation for acts of vengeance. Carelessness, greed, venality, or ineptitude on the part of militia members, and sabotage by the landlord Kang family, allow for setbacks that require further acts of heroism. Battles are described in detail, including one that spreads over two chapters. Plot elements recur that should be familiar to readers of the Chinese martial tradition and to readers of military pulp fiction anywhere: the rescue of comrades trapped in apparently impregnable fortresses and raids on strongholds by small detachments that succeed through infiltration, impersonation, and tunnelling. The narrative cycles of Heroes of Lüliang typically lead from atrocity to a plan for resistance, then a setback and various complications, before an armed confrontation and final victory. Two high points in the struggle are the arrest and execution of Kang Xixue and Kang Shunfeng midway through the novel (Chapter 44) and the capture of the enemy stronghold at Hanjiashan at the end. But even this latter triumph is seen not so much as a climax to the narrative as a prelude to further warfare: the novel ends with a drive to recruit soldiers for the continuing war against Japan, still ongoing as Ma Feng and Xi Rong completed their serialization. As with Shuihuzhuan, it is the individual stories, rather than the plot as a whole, that make Heroes of Lüliang memorable. Weddings, Feudal and Enlightened

The incident selected by Cyril Birch for his demonstration of the debt owed by Heroes of Lüliang to Shuihuzhuan, in terms of both plot and language, is the ninth chapter of the novel, the tale of an aborted traditional wedding.75 It is the most polished and entertaining of all of the novel’s incidents and the closest that Heroes of Lüliang comes to fulfilling the claims made for it by Průšek. The plot runs as follows: when the daughter of Sir Second (“Second Teacher” in Birch’s translation) is spotted by the collaborator Village Snake (Ditoushe; Birch: “Snake-in-the-grass”), he demands her as his bride and is prepared to take her by force. The response is directed by Wu Demin: the offer is accepted, and an elaborate wedding is staged at Sir Second’s house, with the groom and his entourage being liberally plied with drinks while Sir

Ma Feng and Xi Rong 37

Second delays the proceedings with rambling disquisitions. As the wedding party returns to Village Snake’s residence, the convoy is ambushed by the militia, who rescue the girl. Village Snake’s horse shies, and to the horror of his entourage and the delight of the other villagers, he is dragged to his death.76 Birch links this story to the tale early in Shuihuzhuan in which the prodigious Lu Zhishen impersonates the unwilling bride of another local tyrant (this one a bandit chief ) and beats the unsuspecting groom when the latter comes to the bridal chamber to demand his conjugal rights. Birch also connects the episode to the related story in Journey to the West (Xiyouji), where the Monkey King Sun Wukong impersonates the bride of the pig-spirit Zhubajie. In the Heroes of Lüliang story, however, the bride really is Sir Second’s daughter, and the groom’s comeuppance takes place not in the bridal chamber but by a patch of woodland between the two residences. This exploit calls to mind not only the violent incident at the Liu mansion in Chapter 4 of Shuihuzhuan, but also the theft of the birthday convoy in Chapter 16 of the same novel, in which rebel heroes steal treasure in a cunning ruse masterminded by the “Clever Star” Wu Yong (whose surname Wu Demin shares) and executed by a similarly motley group of heroes.77 The story in Heroes of Lüliang is not lifted as self-consciously from Shuihuzhuan as is the case with a similar incident in New Son and Daughter Heroes, considered below. The similarities in expression and incident suggest that the authors adapted a story they might have heard from the rebels of their own day or invented for themselves in the style of their novel’s great antecedent. There is a further reason that an unwilling bride rather than birthday gifts and money constitutes the treasure being taken by the convoy, one that returns to the novel’s role as propaganda for the communist government of the liberated areas: the Communist Party’s introduction of the Marriage Law (the first law to be enacted by the communists at Yan’an) and its opposition to the practice of forced marriage. The best-known drama of the liberated areas, The White-Haired Girl, begins, in early versions at least, with the abduction and rape by a local landlord of the village girl Xi’er, whom he wishes to take as a concubine.78 The free marriage policy provided the happy ending for the two young protagonists of Zhao Shuli’s first post–Yan’an Forum story “The Marriage of Young Blacky,” when the interfering parents are scolded by the local Party official and mocked by the local residents for their attempts to control their children’s marriages.79 Traditional marriage is linked, in the communist fiction of the period, with feudal superstition (in comic stories) and tyranny (in adventures), and contrasted with the new model of free marriage. In Heroes of Lüliang, the contrast to the attempted forced marriage is provided by a chapter devoted to the “enlightened marriage” (wenming jiehun)

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of two minor characters, the militiaman Zhang Youyi and a local girl who nurses him back to health after he is injured in action against the Japanese.80 The girl Qiaoqiao is the ideal peasant wife, “eighteen, sturdily built, darkcomplexioned, large-eyed, and with even white teeth.”81 She has withstood all her family’s attempts to arrange a marriage for her, preferring to wait and choose her own mate as she is now permitted to do. She is aware of Zhang’s former reputation as a malingerer as well as his present status as resistance hero, and demands that he demonstrate a capacity for hard work before she will agree to marry him. He becomes a paragon, to the delight of his mother, his militia colleagues, and Qiaoqiao, and the “enlightened marriage” goes ahead without bride-price, sedan-chair, or veil, in the courtyard of what had been the landlord’s house. The point is hammered home as a guest remarks, “Look at Zhang Youyi’s happy face and you know how great free marriage is!”82 Other Heroes, Other Marriages

The same matched plot elements, of an aborted forced marriage and a wholesome free marriage, appear in the second of the communist guerrilla “heroes” novels of the war of resistance serialized before communist victory. New Son and Daughter Heroes (Xin ernü yingxiong zhuan) has much in common with Heroes of Lüliang.83 The zhuan of the title likewise points the reader to the conventions of the traditional story, though the reference is more specifically to the nineteenth-century female knight-errant romance Son and Daughter Heroes (Ernü yingxiong zhuan). Like Heroes of Lüliang, New Son and Daughter Heroes is a wartime novel of guerrilla conflict, with heroic communist underground militiamen, odious enemies (Japanese occupiers and their collaborators), and daring exploits. It was first serialized in the much more prestigious People’s Daily between May and July of 1949 before being released in book form. This novel is also the work of a two-person writing team, this time the husband-and-wife team of Kong Jue and Yuan Jing. Unlike Ma Feng and Xi Rong, Kong and Yuan were highly educated: both were college graduates, and they had written in a number of literary forms (stories, spoken dramas, and yangge plays) before producing their Heroes novel. Kong Jue was first a student, and then a research fellow and assistant professor, in the Literature De­part­ment of the Lu Xun Academy at Yan’an, placing him much closer to the creative, political, and theoretical centre than the two young Shanxi journalists. In the fashion recommended by Mao for intellectuals in the Talks, both Kong and Yuan also spent considerable time among the peasant populations of the liberated areas, where, as émigrés from the Jiangnan region, they were obliged to learn local patterns of speech as well as observing life and struggle. The creative process, as described in contemporary interviews and

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writings about the novel, seems to have been equally shared between the co-authors. Průšek treats Kong as principal author; however, in China his name was omitted, and Yuan Jing was credited with sole authorship, after Kong was condemned for his sympathies for Gao Gang and Liu Zhidan, wartime comrades of Mao’s who were the victims of early struggles within the leadership after 1949. In the New Son and Daughter Heroes version of the forced marriage story, the unwilling intended bride is Yang Xiaomei, the romantic interest of the novel’s hero, Niu Dashui, and the former wife of the collaborator Zhang Jinlong. The groom is the Japanese officer Iino, who has already raped the girl chosen for Dashui by his father, leading to her suicide.84 Xiaomei’s place is taken at the wedding ceremony by the hero’s younger brother Xiaoshui, wigged, high-heeled, and lipsticked in the bridal sedan-chair. As Robert E. Hegel points out in his study of borrowings from the tradition in the communist novel, this is a highly conscious adoption of the original story from Shuihuzhuan and Journey to the West as cited by Cyril Birch, to the point where the groom gets to touch the “bride” before the trick is revealed. Both the bandit chief and the pig-spirit Zhubajie had been able to do so in the seventeenth-century versions before enduring a beating; in New Son and Daughter Heroes, the officer is shot by Xiaoshui.85 The romance and “enlightened” marriage in New Son and Daughter Heroes concerns the protagonist, Niu Dashui, and Yang Xiaomei. Dashui is first rejected as a suitor by the Yang family because of his poverty. After her divorce from the worthless Zhang Jinlong, the communist official Old Black Cai, who is Dashui’s cousin and a former blacksmith, takes the initiative in proposing the marriage that the couple are too bashful to arrange for themselves. Relations between the sweethearts remain almost comically chaste and comradely (an exchange of letters discusses work and Dashui’s hope that they can “meet more often and help one another in study, in work and in understanding of politics”).86 The wedding is as “enlightened” as, though more elaborate than, the one in Heroes of Lüliang, with the principals bowing to pictures of Mao Zedong and communist army commander Zhu De, and speeches recounting, with appropriate embarrassment, the story of their romance. After their wedding night, they return to battle for several more chapters of adventure before the novel concludes. Sources of Inspiration

Authors writing under communist jurisdiction throughout the Mao era were punctilious in ascribing their writing style to their adoption of the principles enunciated in the Yan’an Talks. Thus, they emphasized their study

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of the lives of the masses, rather than any prior mastery of the May Fourth or earlier narrative traditions, as the sole source for their fiction. This might have been especially necessary for intellectuals such as Kong Jue and Yuan Jing, who had been in Yan’an and gone through the re-education process before writing their novel. During an interview reported in an early volume of articles on New Son and Daughter Heroes, Yuan Jing made the expedient claim for realism. When asked by the interviewer Yang Heling, “Is it the case that if you hadn’t been a participant in the actual struggles, it wouldn’t have been possible for you to write so successfully?” Yuan replied, “That’s so. If you don’t take part in the real struggles, then you can’t write realistic flesh-and-blood works. Literary and artistic workers have to go into the army, the factories and the villages, and live together with the masses, struggle together and gradually acquire a flesh-and-blood relationship with the masses, and only then will they understand them, be familiar with them, and describe them.”87 What the authors pointedly fail to admit is their adoption of the popular (tongsu) style, perhaps uncertain as to how acceptable this would be in the literature of a modern nation-state rather than the more remote and rural liberated areas. Among Chinese critics writing about the novel in the years following its publication, only the poet and playwright Guo Moruo, one of the most senior members of the communist literary establishment, felt sufficiently confident of his position to state the obvious and name the novel’s antecedents. His essay “On Reading New Son and Daughter Heroes” immediately notes the novel’s links to the indigenous literary tradition, comparing it to the Qing novel from which it takes its name, and to Shuihuzhuan. Even so, he cites their shared popular appeal rather than any technicalities of writing and plot borrowings, and he is careful to credit adherence to Mao’s instructions as the key to the novel’s success.88 Průšek, writing shortly after Guo Moruo, likewise notes the strength of the tradition in the writing of the novel, though he dismisses Son and Daughter Heroes (a picaresque novel for whose lack of realism he exhibits some contempt) as the source of anything much more than the title. Průšek feels that the adventures in small boats featured in New Son and Daughter Heroes are close to Shuihuzhuan, some of whose most colourful heroes, the Ruan brothers, are fishermen, but does not comment on the explicit borrowing of plot elements from Shuihuzhuan, as Birch and Hegel do in their later studies. Revolutionary Popular Literature after Heroes of Lüliang

In recognition of popular fiction’s potential appeal to a mass audience, practitioners of popular literature from the cities that had until recently been under Nationalist control and from the former liberated areas (a group that

Ma Feng and Xi Rong 41

included Ma Feng and Zhao Shuli), were brought to Beijing in 1949 for discussions, with a view to continuing the traditions represented by Heroes of Lüliang and giving the old-style novelists a chance to contribute.89 Although the influence of traditional narrative can be seen in many of the red classics written after 1949, only one comes close to the levels of appropriation of the popular novel seen in the two Heroes novels discussed above. This is Qu Bo’s autobiographical military romance Tracks in the Snowy Forest (Linhai xueyuan), likewise set in the warfare that preceded communist victory.90 Qu Bo largely eschews the tongsu language used by Ma Feng and Xi Rong, and by Kong Jue and Yuan Jing. His practice is more a matter of borrowing structure and incident.91 Tracks adopts a simplified version of the structure of Shuihuzhuan, with a linear narrative of resistance and revenge being told in a series of interlocking cycles, each featuring one of the latterday haohan (stout fellows or heroes). The novel’s central hero, Shao Jianbo, a romanticized version of the author himself, is more Three Kingdoms’ Liu Bei than Shuihuzhuan’s Song Jiang. He is the wise and inspirational leader under whom more violent heroes (such as Yang Zirong and “Tank” Liu) are honoured to serve, and by whom they are kept firmly on track. For all the carnage that takes place around him, Shao Jianbo kills only once, at the end of the novel, in what is both an act of personal revenge for the horrific killing and mutilation of his sister and the culmination of his guerrilla band’s battle against bandit desperados nominally affiliated with the Nationalist forces. In a consciously literary novel, Qu Bo lifts one of the most beloved stories of Shuihuzhuan, Wu Song’s killing of a tiger, and rewrites it for the new-age haohan Yang Zirong; the process of adoption has been analyzed by Robert Hegel and need not be repeated here.92 The tiger killing survived into the operatic versions of the Tiger Mountain cycle of Tracks, a process that ended with the creation (after a decade of polishing and tinkering) of the model theatrical work (yangbanxi) Taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy (Zhiqu Weihushan).93 In the final version, the one preserved on film, the tiger-killing scene becomes a showcase for the dancing talents of Tong Xiangling, the actor portraying Yang Zirong. The tendency toward fiction intended to be more serious, or more adult, saw the tongsu style lose out to one based more on the socialist realism of the Soviet Union, the subject of the next chapter. This did not result in the end of borrowing of classic incident, however: the story of the aborted wedding, for example, was too much fun to be abandoned completely. It resurfaced in the 1964 opera Sparks in the Reeds (Lutang huozhong), where communist guerrillas, masterminded by the teahouse proprietress Sister Aqing, provide the cooks, musicians, and sedan-chair bearers for the marriage of a Nationalist

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commander to a local girl. In this version, the “bride” does not appear, and the commander and his retinue are captured before the ceremony. (When the opera was turned into the Cultural Revolution model work Shajiabang – the title is the name of the location where the action takes place – the wedding-scene finale was abandoned for a more conventional guerrilla attack, to the detriment of the entertainment.)94 A variant of the substitute bride story can even be found in the 1960s, in the first of Hao Ran’s epic novels of the countryside, Bright Sunny Skies (Yanyangtian). Here a marriage is to be arranged rather than consummated. As in the Son and Daughter Heroes version, the girl, Jiao Shuhong, is the ideal match for the novel’s hero, Xiao Changchun. She is courted by the bookish and unreliable Ma Liben. Learning that Jiao Shuhong will be taking her turn to guard unharvested crops at night, Ma lends her a large straw hat to wear. That night, seeing the wearer of the hat squatting at the assigned spot, Ma delivers his prepared words of love. Then, emboldened by the listener’s silence, he risks a kiss and comes up against the bristly cheek of Jiao Shuhong’s father, earning himself a punch in the mouth and an earful of insult.95 This is the most comedic version of the story: the reader discovers at the same time as Ma Liben who is under the hat, since the author has led up to the incident by describing Ma’s excited anticipation. This single motif shows the durability of the popular style, even in more austere times for the arts. The tongsu novel, with its combination of the folksy, the romantic, and the miraculous, fell out of favour in the 1960s and ‘70s but was one of the many domestic and imported flavours at the disposal of authors in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. One novel that proclaims its tongsu affiliations is Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out (Sheng-si pilao), 2012 Nobel laureate Mo Yan’s tragicomic saga of village revolution and rebirth in the second half of the twentieth century, which will be considered in Chapter 2 for its deconstruction of the evil landlord mythology enshrined in Hurricane. Mo Yan’s combination of the shocking, the burlesque, and the supernatural harks back to popular traditions, and his novel simultaneously appropriates and parodies the tongsu form to lighten the often sombre family history of its principal narrator, the executed and reincarnated landlord. Heroes of Lüliang for a New Century

The strength of its story, in combination with a chronicling of resistance to Japanese occupation, which remains crucial to the narrative of the establishment of the People’s Republic, made Heroes of Lüliang a suitable choice for a television series, filmed in the forbidding landscape against which the novel was set.

Ma Feng and Xi Rong 43

A twenty-five-part series, shown in 2005 in celebration of the sixtieth anniversary of the defeat of Japan (and thus just over sixty years after the original novel was serialized in the Jin-Sui dazhongbao) presents the war of resistance in a manner consistent with the novel and with other Chinese filmed versions of the war throughout the sixty intervening years. A cruel but courageous Japanese commander, a duplicitous landlord collaborator, and quislings ranging from the sinister (the interpreter Wang Huaidang, no longer one-eyed, but now with removable gold teeth) to the clownish (the defence-force stalwarts Chouchou and Rourou, respectively “Stinky” and “Flabby”) are lined up against a sage communist strategist, a valiant leader, and brave militiamen who can also be gullible, fractious, and impetuous. The women in what is predominantly a male world (as military novels tend to be) are also ranged into two camps. On the side of wickedness are a scheming landlord’s wife with a penchant for theatrical grief and anger, and her second daughter-in-law, who takes readily to the task of seductress demanded by Kang Xixue. On the side of good are an upright village girl, Sir Second’s daughter Meiying, who becomes a victim, and the forbearing and supportive wife of the militia head Lei Shizhu. The television series clearly benefited from more detailed advance planning than the original novel and kept the principal characters together to the end. Thus, Kang Xixue and Kang Shunfeng survive to the final episode, rather than being killed halfway through, allowing for further intrigue and more dramatic deaths. Of the two marriages related above, only the first, the aborted marriage of the local tyrant to Sir Second’s daughter Meiying, is retained, less elaborate and with significant changes to the personnel and the plot. Sir Second is much less of a comic figure than in the novel, without quirks of dress, behaviour, and speech. He and his daughter are entirely sympathetic characters (in keeping with their later victimization). The place of the groom is taken by Qiu Deshi, the commander of Chinese forces serving the Japanese rather than the local tyrant, and the comic scene in which Sir Second rambles at length to delay proceedings is cut down. The raid on the wedding party (which Qiu, unlike his counterpart in the novel, survives) allows for one of the many battle scenes in the television series, with more explosions and less of the Shuihuzhuan-inspired trickery of Ma Feng and Xi Rong’s novel. After Xiuying is saved from the arranged marriage, the prospect of a free marriage with the militiaman Shitou is thwarted when father and daughter are brutally killed by the Japanese commander in an attack on the village. Their deaths serve as one of the atrocities that must be avenged by the militia. The producers of the television series opted for the epic qualities of the story, featuring military hardware and battle scenes common to war films,

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played out in the magnificent open spaces of the Lüliang Mountains. This epic quality is reinforced by a musical soundtrack with a sweeping orchestral theme that would not be out of place in a Star Wars film, interspersed with melodies played on bowed and plucked Chinese strings at lighter moments, as, for example, when the inept Chouchou attempts to court Meiying.96 The folksiness associated with the tongsu origins of the novel is seen in the adoption of dialect (largely comprehensible to the Mandarin-speaking viewer but sufficient to warrant subtitles throughout) and the interjection of aphorisms, often introduced with “su hua shuo” (as the saying goes). The televised version presents a spectacle that encourages continued patriotism, unity, and confidence in the leadership of the Communist Party. If the Party is presented as having a fault, it is that of being too indulgent toward the collaborators in contrast to the cruelty of the invaders – Kang Xixue, Kang Shunfeng, and Wang Huaidang all appeal for mercy and are released to continue their sabotage of the resistance. The story contains none of the moral ambiguity surrounding collaboration that is seen in Jiang Wen’s 2002 film Devils on the Doorstep (Guizi laile), which occasioned the disapproval of the authorities and resulted in a lengthy directing ban in China for the director. The Tongsu Novel: A Road Less Travelled

The inexperienced first-time novelists Ma Feng and Xi Rong are unlikely to have considered their effect on the future of the communist novel when they agreed to provide mass entertainment in short order for the readers of the Jin-Sui dazhongbao. Returning from their sojourn in Yan’an and their exposure to the literature of the West and the May Fourth movement, the two “rustic scholars,” after consultation with their editor Zhou Wen, fell back on the tongsu style most accessible to their audience. Their approach was less to copy the incidents of the traditional novel than to recast the stories of the moment into a familiar narrative form. Birch comments of Heroes of Lüliang that it is “very clearly for mass consumption, new wine in an old and wellloved bottle.”97 The resulting novel is nevertheless effectively told, moving at a swift pace and artfully blending the cruel and the comic. Although it is hard to accept Průšek’s evaluation, made in the excitement of first discovery of the literature of the liberated areas, of the novel as the equal of Shuihuzhuan, neither would it be fair to accept Birch’s evaluation of Heroes of Lüliang and its contemporaries as “mere entertainments of an unsophisticated order.”98 Meng Yue’s more recent claim for a greater degree of complexity in the revolutionary popular literature of the liberated areas is persuasive: the reinvention of tongsu fiction as a vehicle for a revolutionary message, like the reinvention

Ma Feng and Xi Rong 45

of the yangge drama, in Yan’an during the months following Mao’s Talks, was a considerable achievement. Heroes of Lüliang was not to become a model for the subsequent development of the Mao-era socialist novel. Its narrative style was ideally suited for fiction about modern-day outlaw heroes, and its folksy diction was appropriate for a minimally educated audience. Elements of traditional writing were to survive into the fiction of the People’s Republic – the retelling of familiar stories in Tracks in the Snowy Forest, or storyteller clichés and nuggets of folk wisdom in the later work of Ma Feng, Zhao Shuli, Li Zhun, and others writing about peasants – but artists did not choose, or were not encouraged, to repeat both the style and the content of the wartime Heroes novels. If, to return to the metaphor reputedly used by Zhou Yang, Heroes of Lüliang is the literary equivalent of straw sandals, rustic and loose fitting, this kind of footwear was to be replaced by more tightly constructed leather shoes of Russian manufacture.

2 Zhou Libo, Hurricane, and the Creation of a Chinese Socialist Realism

Following six months as a land-reform cadre in a county recently freed from Japanese occupation, Zhou Libo (1908-79) spent the late spring and early summer of 1947 at a friend’s house in Harbin writing as a self-contained work of fiction what was to become the first half of the novel Hurricane.1 In doing so, he provided a model for future endeavours in Chinese socialist fiction based on Soviet socialist realism, as opposed to the more subjective style that had developed from the writing of the May Fourth movement and the revolutionary popular fiction discussed in the previous chapter, which had flourished in the base areas of Shaanxi and Shanxi. Zhou Libo was uniquely qualified among writers of his generation for this initiative by reason of his humble background, his experience of leftist cultural politics in Shanghai, his familiarity with Chinese and European cultural traditions (the latter including the nineteenth-century classics that had inspired the May Fourth writers and some of the Stalin-era socialist realist canon), and his own participation (a credential de rigueur for socialist writers of his era) in the events against which his novel is set, in this case land-reform struggles in newly liberated areas of Manchuria.2 With Hurricane, Zhou Libo established himself as a major novelist for the new People’s Republic, a position secured with the publication of his second novel, Great Changes in a Mountain Village (Shanxiang jubian), set against the collectivization process in his native Hunan, a movement in which he was also a participant.3 With these, Zhou Libo is the only author to have two works in the canon of red classics. Although he regarded Great Changes in a Mountain Village as his finest piece, it is the earlier novel that represents the greater milestone in the development of modern Chinese literature, with its conscious adoption of the Soviet model. The Stalin Prize and Socialist Realist Fiction

Hurricane was one of only two Chinese novels to win the Stalin Prize, the early Soviet Union’s premier literary award, the other being Ding Ling’s The Sun Shines over the Sanggan River.4 They were among the final group of

Zhou Libo 47

honourees for 1951, the awards being made in 1952, the year before Stalin’s death.5 The awards were probably made at the recommendation of Zhou Yang, then concurrently vice-minister of culture and propaganda, and a longtime devotee and promoter of Russian literature and Soviet literary theory in China.6 By implication, the awarding of the Stalin Prize elevated the recipients to the canon of indigenous socialist realism; as in the Soviet bloc, the awards would show “each of us working in the field whom we should emulate.”7 The novels of Ding Ling and Zhou Libo thus became early exemplars of China’s new socialist fiction for readers elsewhere in the Soviet sphere of influence, as well as models for literary creation at home in the years immediately following the establishment of the new Chinese state.8 Even when Ding Ling was condemned in the Anti-Rightist Campaign, also by Zhou Yang, The Sun Shines over the Sanggan River was exempted from attack, even as its author was castigated for inordinate pride in her personal success with her book.9 Any such courtesies were absent in the Cultural Revolution, when both authors endured extensive incarceration.10 In a piece written at the end of 1952, initially for Soviet readers, to celebrate the awards to Chinese authors, Zhou Yang quoted a passage from Mao’s 1949 essay “On the People’s Democratic Dictatorship” in which Mao says that after the October Revolution, Chinese progressives came to the conclusion that they should “follow the path of the Russians.” Zhou Yang added, “‘Follow the path of the Russians’ – it is so in politics, and it is also so in literature and art.”11 Zhou Yang defined the strengths of Soviet literature as follows: “It examines and represents life from the standpoint of communist ideology, and is good at uniting the reality of today with the ideals of tomorrow – in other words, its strength is the method of socialist realism.”12 This essay was published in China in January 1953; later that year Zhou Yang was to repeat his praise of socialist realism, this time with reference to film, describing it as “the highest pinnacle of human literature and art.”13 Socialist Realism from the Soviet Union to China

Zhou Yang’s endorsement of socialist realism followed other socialist states in promoting it as an official discourse. Socialist realism had been a state orthodoxy in the USSR since its formal introduction by the novelist Maxim Gorky (who modestly attributed its coinage to Stalin) at the First Congress of Soviet Writers in 1934.14 The concept had been some years in the making, but by 1934, the Soviet official with the greatest influence on the arts in Stalin’s Soviet Union, Andrei Zhdanov, was ready to tell writers what was expected of them under the new dispensation. Socialist realism was defined in the

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Statute of the Union of Soviet Writers as “the truthful, historically concrete representation of reality in its revolutionary development. At the same time, truthfulness and historical concreteness of artistic representation and reality must (or should) be combined with the task of ideologically remaking and training the labouring people in the spirit of socialism.”15 As Leonid Heller points out in his study of socialist realism and its aesthetic categories, at the core of Zhdanovite socialist realism as defined in the Soviet Union, and arrived at through polemical debate, was “the famous triad of ‘ideological commitment,’ ‘Party-mindedness,’ and ‘national/popular spirit.’” Heller expands: “These three tightly intertwined concepts necessarily entailed several others: ‘ideological commitment’ proposed a unity of content and form, but one in which content dominated, given that mastering of Marxist-Leninist teachings was the only way to apprehend reality, ‘Party-mindedness’ pre­ supposed the social activism and optimism of art; and as for the national/ popular spirit, it could flourish only by feeding on universalism and humanism.”16 Although the term “socialist realism” may not have been in official use before 1934, many of the works in the socialist realist canon, as later extrapolated by the Soviet literary authorities, considerably predated the Soviet Writers’ Congress.17 There was always a tension between the socialist and the realist components of socialist realism, though not necessarily more irreconcilable than the tension between belief and observed reality in other genres. The “socialist” part commits the writer (or painter, sculptor, musician) to a position of loyalty to the Communist Party and its determination of history as moving from a state of feudal or colonial oppression to a glorious future under socialism and eventual communism, whereas the “realist” part implies continuity with the great tradition of nineteenth-century European realism, the reflection of things and people as they are. The “reality” of socialist realism is not, how­ ever, the portrayal of the realities of the moment, but those of the socialist future to which the present will shortly give way. Gorky was happy to admit that socialist realism was in effect a form of romanticism and also made it clear that socialist realism was an exercise in myth making: “Myth is invention. To invent means to extract from the sum of a given reality its cardinal idea and embody it in imagery – that is how we got realism.”18 Socialist realism was introduced to cultural circles in China during the 1930s by Zhou Yang and others, first in writings for the cosmopolitan intellectual milieu of Shanghai and then in classes at the Lu Xun Academy in Yan’an.19 It did not become the required method for Chinese authors until the articles quoted above were published in the early 1950s; in China, as in the Soviet Union, some works that were to define the socialist realist novel

Zhou Libo 49

were published before the term was officially endorsed.20 For the authors of the Chinese red classics, however, there were ample opportunities to read translations from the Soviet canon before undertaking fictional accounts of their own heydays in the manner of Fadeyev, Sholokhov, or Ostrovsky. Adherence to the term “socialist realism” was so closely associated with the USSR that it did not survive the falling-out between the Chinese and Soviet Communist Parties that followed Khrushchev’s 1956 condemnation of Stalin. It was modified in 1958 to the indigenous Chinese formulation of “the combination of revolutionary realism and revolutionary romanticism,” of which more in Chapter 3. Zhou Yang, who had been the strongest proponent of socialist realism, was also the one to introduce this new “creative method” at the time of the Great Leap Forward. The formulation survived his fall in the mid-1960s and was required of literature until the end of the Mao era, though the balance between the two components tilted in favour of the revolutionary romantic during the Cultural Revolution.21 Zhou Libo, Zhou Yang, and Socialist Realism

Zhou Libo was born Zhou Shaoyi in 1908, the son of a Hunan village schoolteacher. He is wrongly described in some reference works as being from a “farming family.”22 Although he spent his childhood away from the big cities, he was not a rustic scholar (tu xiucai) in the manner of the authors of Heroes of Lüliang. Zhou was to transform himself into a Westernized Shanghai intellectual, a left-wing activist, a translator and teacher of  Western literature, a soldier, a land-reform work-team cadre, and a leading novelist.23 The most influential figure in his political and intellectual life, for better (in Shanghai and Yan’an) or worse (in the Cultural Revolution), was his fellow provincial and slightly older contemporary Zhou Yang (Zhou Qiying). The two were close friends from their youth, despite the reservations of Zhou Libo’s father over the disparity in their class status – Zhou Yang was the scion of a landlord family, with wealth and social position far above that of the younger man. Following secondary school (and, in Zhou Yang’s case, a period of study in Japan while Zhou Libo stayed home as a teacher), the two young men set out for the intellectual ferment of Shanghai in 1928. In Shanghai, both continued their study of English and their reading of Western literature and criticism; they also involved themselves early in the politics of the literary left, contributing to, and doing editorial work for, a number of literary journals. Zhou Yang rapidly assumed positions of leadership in leftist circles, a role he was to continue in Yan’an and at the national level in the years following communist victory. In Shanghai, he was secretary of both the Party branch and the Youth League within the League of Left-wing Writers (Zuolian), and

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editor-in-chief of its journal. A 1933 article by Zhou Yang introduced Soviet notions of realism and romanticism to Chinese readers, and other writings presented the views of the influential Russian literary theorists Belinsky and Chernyshevsky.24 During those years he also published a number of trans­lations of fiction, most notably Anna Karenina, which he translated from English. Following the Japanese occupation of Manchuria, Zhou Yang was among the Party leaders vigorously promoting the wartime slogan of   “National Defence Literature” (Guofang Wenxue) and denouncing those who op­posed it, leading to a celebrated altercation with Lu Xun and Hu Feng in the last year of Lu Xun’s life.25 The younger Zhou’s adoption of the new name Libo, a Chinese approximation of the English word liberty, during the early 1930s is testimony to the influence of Western enlightenment thinking on him at the time. Some of the translations he completed during this period were of Western European works. However, his longest and most celebrated translation (and the only one to be included in his 1984 Selected Works) was of a classic of Soviet socialist realism, Mikhail Sholokhov’s Virgin Soil Upturned, which he translated from English, first using the Robert Daglish translation published in Moscow and then revising his draft against Stephen Garry’s 1935 rendition.26 Sholokhov’s novel, one of a series about the countryside around the Don River that would make the author the only socialist realist Nobel laureate (for 1965), is the Soviet urtext of the struggles around land reform, as the trans­ lator’s own first attempt at the novel form was to be. Not all of Zhou Libo’s time in Shanghai was spent in literary pursuits: he took university courses in economics before being expelled for his communist activities, and his further education was continued (as he recalled it later) by a year and a half spent in prison, jailed for a crime committed by someone else. His cellmates included several underground communists, who gave lectures to fellow inmates.27 On his release, Zhou Libo was reunited with Zhou Yang, who assisted him with his admission into the Communist Party, and he joined the campaign for National Defence Literature with a series of articles published between December 1935 and June 1936.28 Zhou Libo’s Luyi Lectures and the Purpose of Literature

Zhou Yang and Zhou Libo left Shanghai for Yan’an in 1937. The two men parted company in Xi’an, where Zhou Libo was assigned to accompany the American writer Agnes Smedley as her interpreter, finally arriving at Yan’an in the winter of 1939.29 Zhou Yang succeeded Mao Zedong as principal of the Lu Xun Academy in November of that year.30 Between 1940 and 1942, in

Zhou Libo 51

one of the most pluralistic intellectual environments in the history of Chinese communism, Zhou Libo delivered a series of lectures titled “Selections from Famous Works” (Mingzhu xuandu) to students at Lu Xun. Among those students who attended his lectures was his future wife, Lin Lan.31 A later partial compilation of Zhou Libo’s lecture notes by Lin Lan reveals that the famous works in question were Western and largely focused on fiction from nineteenth- and twentieth-century France and Russia.32 French authors included in the lectures are Balzac, Stendahl, Merimée, Gide, and Maupassant; the Russians included Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Pushkin, Gogol, and Lermontov, with Gorky and Fadeyev representing the Soviet novel. Although a wide variety of Western views of literature are cited, Zhou’s lectures indicate his preference for Soviet theories. Zhou’s comments on realism, enunciated in a lecture on Guy de Maupassant’s 1880 story “Boule de Suif,” present a view of the purpose of literature in line with those of Gorky or Zhdanov in their advocacy of socialist realism. The title of Maupassant’s story means “ball of lard” and is the nickname of the plump female protagonist. Set at the time of the Franco-Prussian War of 1871, the story features a group of travellers in a coach crossing Prussian lines. Among them is the prostitute Boule de Suif, whom her snobbish companions initially shun, acknowledging her only when she provides them with food. Then, when a Prussian officer demands sex with her as a price for their safe passage, her companions urge her to acquiesce. Her initial patriotic refusal contrasts with the attitude of the other passengers, whose only concern at a time of national crisis is their own convenience and safety. Boule de Suif is persuaded by an aristocratic fellow passenger to sacrifice herself for the good of all by giving in to the officer’s demands. But once they are safely through Prussian lines, the passengers treat her with renewed contempt.33 When Zhou Libo addressed his students at the Lu Xun Academy, China was similarly at a time of national crisis and facing the military might of an occupying power. The selfishness that Maupassant so clinically portrayed ran counter to the Soviet requirement that the arts inspire loyalty to the national cause, a requirement that Zhou had endorsed in his essays on National Defence Literature and that Mao was to repeat at the Yan’an Forum. In a letter to Gustave Flaubert, Maupassant justified this story and the others in the volume in which it was to appear by saying that “it will not be antipatriotic, but simply true.”34 For Zhou Libo, however, more than simple truth was required, a higher aspiration that he expressed with considerable eloquence. In her transcription of Zhou Libo’s lecture notes, Lin Lan emphasizes the distinction he made between the realism of the French naturalist school and his own:

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In talking about Maupassant’s “Boule de Suif,” when discussing the question of so-called “pure objectivity” and “writing the truth,” Comrade Libo gave this exposition: “Great art certainly guides the reader forcefully; it is certainly not a [mere] transcription of human existence, but involves selection, excision,” because “the realistic is not [the same as] the truthful.” He developed this idea further: “And where we differ further from Maupassant is that we not only wish to demonstrate ‘conforming to life as it really is’ but ‘conforming to life as it is going to be,’ because we are transforming the boundaries of human souls.”35

Zhou’s views on the relationship between life and art essentially replicate those of Gorky and Zhdanov in the mid-1930s. Lin Lan also notes, perhaps to confirm the non-transgressive nature of her husband’s thought and thus protest the treatment he was to receive later, that the positions he took gen­ erally anticipated those of Mao in his Talks.36 Nonetheless, the May Fourth cosmopolitanism, and the breadth of knowledge and appreciation of West­ ern literature evident in the lectures, went very much out of fashion after the Talks. The humanistic style represented by Zhou Libo’s Luyi lectures was to end with the Rectification Campaign: as David Holm notes in his study of the intellectual life of Yan’an, Kang Sheng masterminded a 1943 “confession movement” in which almost a quarter of the personnel at Yan’an University, of which Luyi was a part, were forced to admit to forms of treachery that included Trotskyism and affiliation with the Nationalists.37 Zhou Libo appears to have escaped the purges, or to have left before they began. Zhou Libo attended the Yan’an Forum, though there exists no record of any contribution he made there (as is the case with all but one of the participants). Later, he took part in the military campaigns of 1945-46 against the Nationalists. In late 1946, he was one of twelve thousand Party cadres sent to villages in post-occupation Manchuria in land-reform teams. Assigned to Yuanbao village in Shangzhi County southeast of Harbin, he remained there for six months, before leaving for Harbin to take up a newspaper job and write his novel. Zhou’s own account of writing the first half of Hurricane, published in 1948, not surprisingly emphasized lessons learned from Mao at the Yan’an Forum. He stressed the need for authors to have personal experience of the events and people they portray in their work, and the importance of understanding the language of the peasantry, a summary strikingly similar to the one offered by the authors of New Son and Daughter Heroes in the interview quoted in the previous chapter. Hurricane puts the lessons of the Forum into practice: the novel results from exposure to the peasants of North China, a group with which, as an intellectual from the southwest, Zhou would

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have had no contact but for his land-reform work-team assignment; the successful incorporation of some Manchurian dialect has been noted by critics. Zhou modestly pronounces his novel inadequate in the aspects of its emotional range, its content, and its language.38 For all its confessed deficiencies, however, the novel masterfully fulfilled the Yan’an demands for a socially en­gaged and politically useful literature. It also showed how to transform the people and events of recent history into a myth of nation building. The Mythology of Rural Revolution

In the introduction to their anthology of Soviet cultural documents, Katerina Clark and Evgeny Dobrenko note the extreme importance placed on culture by the Soviet leadership and thus (for that leadership) the necessity to regulate it. They explain the purpose of writing in Lenin and Stalin’s Soviet Union as being “to systematize reality – Bolshevik experience – and also to manufacture subjects.”39 In Hurricane, Zhou Libo, like many of his Soviet predecessors, was creating order from chaos, locating the historical moment in a teleological master-narrative predicted by the Party, its violent conflicts reassuringly played out between representatives of designated classes and functions acting in character toward a preordained conclusion in which an arduous task is successfully completed and history moved forward. Hurricane takes its title and its theme from a passage in Mao’s 1927 “Report on an Investigation of the Peasant Movement in [Mao and Zhou Libo’s native province of ] Hunan.” “In a very short time,” Mao wrote, “in China’s central, southern and northern provinces, several hundred million peasants will rise like a mighty storm, like a hurricane, a force so swift and violent that no power, however great, will be able to hold it back.”40 This prophecy is assumed as a truth, which the novel plays out in a different part of China two decades after Mao’s essay was written. History is predetermined: the overthrow of the landlord class by peasants inspired by the Communist Party to turn their pent-up anger into violent and purposeful action. The task of the novelist is to present this process in a form that will be both persuasive and instructive to the reader. Mao’s report was both an analysis and a construct, with its invention of normative roles for the peasantry, particularly the poor peasantry: “Leadership by the poor peasants is absolutely necessary [Mao wrote]. Without the poor peasants there would be no revolution.”41 Readers of Mao’s report who were also acquainted with the fiction of the May Fourth writers would be aware of a striking difference between Mao’s forces for revolution and the long-suffering victims trodden down by feudalism and capitalism that appear in the fiction of the time, such as the careworn middle-aged peasant Runtu in Lu Xun’s “Homeland” or the bewildered masses of Ye

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Shengtao’s “Three to Five Bushels More.”42 These are hardly potential leaders of rural uprisings to overthrow their oppressors; new archetypes of the peasantry were needed for such a role. As Zhao Shuli had invented the peasant subject for the liberated areas in the months following the Yan’an forum, so did Zhou Libo for the next phase of the revolution.43 In Hurricane, the capacity to resist (though not yet to command) is a defining quality in the new peasantry: the leader of the land-reform team, Xiao Xiang, points out a young man – “a genuine farmer” (zhengzhuang zhuangjia ren) – who has spoken up at a meeting to denounce the landlord. That young man, Guo Quanhai, is destined to fill the role of successor to the revolution.44 The action of the novel takes place in the fictional Manchurian village Yuanmao at the same time that Zhou Libo was in Yuanbao village, beginning in the summer of 1946. It starts with the journey into the village of the Communist Party work-team and concludes with its departure, in both cases driven by the garrulous carter Old Sun (Lao Suntou). The task of the team is to arouse the peasant masses to overthrow the landlords, thus bringing about the hurricane of the title, and to reassign the landlords’ property among the peasants. The landlord in Yuanmao is Han Fengqi (known as Han Sixth), who maintains his power in the village even after the withdrawal of the Japanese army of occupation has ended his highly profitable collaboration. Work-team leader Xiao Xiang and his colleagues must not simply identify the landlord and deal with him; they must persuade small landholders, tenant farmers, and hired hands who have suffered the landlord’s tyranny to rise against him themselves and thus destroy the feudal system he personifies for them. Confrontations with the landlord before the villagers are sufficiently motivated are doomed to failure, as the peasants and work-team are outmanoeuvred by Han’s landlord allies and henchmen, and the women of his family. Most of the novel traces the efforts of the work-team to arouse peasant activists against Han Sixth, even as the landlord marshals his own considerable resources in an ultimately futile defence. After the landlord has finally been denounced at a public meeting, condemned, and executed, the workteam and villagers must combine to repel an armed attack by his younger brother Han Seventh, in a battle that provides the village with its first revolutionary martyr. In his first attempt at the novel form, Zhou Libo stayed true to the vision of the role of literature that he had enunciated in his lecture on Maupassant to the students of the Lu Xun Academy: in Hurricane, he is “conforming to life as it is going to be” and “transforming the boundaries of human souls.” The story takes place at a point in the trajectory of a history that, for the

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author as for the Communist Party theorists of his day, was preordained. Human society had advanced to the stage of feudalism, and the peasant revolution predicted by Mao would lead to the establishment of a socialist order. The nature of Chinese socialism was still unknown and the final goal of communism a mystery, then as now, but the novel presupposes that these stages will be reached and that the transformations of land ownership, and more importantly, peasant consciousness that Zhou dramatizes are historical inevitabilities. In this respect, Hurricane differs from its fellow Stalin Prize winner The Sun Shines over the Sanggan River, which is more detailed in its characterization and incident but less focused on the task and its completion in time to push history forward. Zhou’s novel comes much closer to Zhdanov’s prescription for socialist realism in 1934, that it should be “reality in its revolutionary development,” the process proceeding through various set­backs to the desired outcome, in this case the channelling of peasant anger into the violent overthrow of the landlord.45 The author of Hurricane achieved such a satisfactory resolution of the tasks he set his heroes that the sequel (now part 2 of the novel) seems contrived and superfluous. Dual Narratives and Two Voices in Hurricane

The combination of contemporary or historical realities with a heroic vision of the future is a hallmark of socialist realism. Achieving this double goal is difficult, however, a fact that led Régine Robin to conclude that, as the title of her study puts it, socialist realism is “an impossible aesthetic.”46 In writing Hurricane, Zhou Libo was to address the parallel demands of the difficult present and the utopian future by devising a form that was by turns both mimetic, recording the land-reform process as he had witnessed and experienced it, and mythic, conveying an inspirational vision of the future as the Party predicted it.47 The two principal heroic figures of the novel, team leader Xiao Xiang and the peasant activist Zhao Yulin, are at the forefront of the mimetic and mythic narratives respectively. The former, known almost exclusively by his title, is minimally characterized to allow him to function as the model representative of the Party in fulfilling its mission, whereas the latter is a more elaborately developed hero arising from a popular tradition. In his formulation of the relationship between these two figures, Li Yang sees Xiao and Zhao as the “two voices” of the novel, Xiao as the voice of modernity bringing the Party’s vision of the future to the peasants, and Zhao as the peasant voice in a discourse that is concerned with revenge and liberation from oppression. Two brief passages from the opening paragraphs of the novel illustrate the different styles of the mythic and mimetic narratives. The

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opening sentences of the book employ the mythic mode: “Early one morning in the seventh month, the sun had just risen. The green leaves of the maize and the sorghum in the fields were touched with the colour of gold. Beads of dew on the leaves of the beans and amaranth plants were like countless eyes flashing silver.”48 This is pure pastoral idyll, an eternal scene without any historical context, of a Manchurian landscape (the location being suggested by the dialect name of the vegetable crop qianmangu, glossed by the editors as being xiancai, or amaranthus tricolor), richly coloured and fecund. The impression of wealth is reinforced by sunlight “the colour of gold” (jinzi de yanse) and by the silver of the dewdrops. The scene is lit by the rising sun, symbolizing the promise of rebirth, and out of the rising sun the representatives of the work-team come to transform the village and its inhabitants.49 Indications that the new arrivals have the potential to disrupt this apparent tranquillity are provided as a cowherd is distracted by the passage of their cart, and his charges eat the crops by the road. Nature cannot remain for long undisturbed by the forces of history.50 Once the work-team has been associated with the sun and inserted into the pastoral scene, the narration switches from the mythic to the mimetic. The cart bearing the team is stuck in the mud: Cursing at his animals, Old Sun jumped down to the ground to look. The wheels were bogged down in the mud, [so deep that] even the axles had sunk in. With a sigh, he climbed back onto the cart and started to whip the horses for all he was worth. The passengers all jumped down and went round the back of the cart, to help push. Just at that moment, a cart with rubber tires on its wheels pulled by a team of four horses came up from behind, and the driver of that cart, seeing a cart bogged down in front of him, put on speed and swept through a puddle on the other side of the road. With the extra speed and the rubber tires, his cart didn’t get stuck. The muddy water stirred up by the rubber tires splashed into Old Sun’s face and onto his hand and sleeve. The driver turned to look and laughed when he saw it was Old Sun, but then turned back again to drive on without offering any acknowledgment. Old Sun wiped the mud from his face with a sleeve, grumbling, “Why the hell can’t you look where you’re going?”51

The interaction between Old Sun and the driver of the other cart (owned by the landlord Han Sixth) establishes the class struggle that propels the narrative. The different quality of the carts places Old Sun and his passengers squarely in the ranks of the poor peasant masses, whereas the rubber-tired cart and its supercilious driver belong to the class of exploiters. By riding in

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Old Sun’s cart (and getting out to help when it is bogged down), the workteam identifies itself from the outset with the poor, and against Han Sixth. Thus, the political struggle, the substance of the mimetic text, is established, again before the action enters Yuanmao. The introduction of the landlord Han Sixth, not in person but through work-team leader Xiao’s first view of his compound, returns the plot to the mythic mode, as a battle between light and darkness rather than political classes. Han’s compound, even viewed early in the day, is black and sinister, as befits the home of one who represents the powers of darkness: “The high black gateway was like a four-pillared pavilion with a dragon-shaped ridge to the roof, the door encased in sheet iron and studded with nails. Beneath its high grey walls were clumps of willow and a moat. At the four corners four gun-turrets towered up, with deep black gun-slits like the eyes of demons keeping watch on the huts and tracks of the whole village, and all the cart traffic and passers-by.”52 Appropriately, most of Han’s dealings in the novel are conducted at night, whereas Xiao and the work-team visit the peasants’ houses by day. Zhou Libo’s personal experience as a work-team cadre added authority to his portrayal of the opposing classes in the village in the late 1940s. This authority provided the appearance of authenticity when he selected what he would have seen as realistic or typical according to the history required by the Communist Party, over the actual situation as he might have witnessed it. Such appears to have been the case with Han Sixth. During a visit to Yuanbao village more than half a century after Zhou Libo’s residence there, historians from East China Normal University researching the land-reform movement were given a less absolute picture of the village’s primary landlord. According to their local informants, the historical figure on whom Han Sixth was based did not actually own the land himself. Instead, he rented it from a wealthy landowner living in Harbin, subletting to tenant farmers in the village and working part of the holding himself. And his wife was not a scheming harridan but a village schoolteacher who was well liked by her students.53 The exigencies of myth making required a more powerful and malign adversary for the team leader and the oppressed peasant, however, and Han is the archetypal landlord villain for socialist fiction in the late 1940s. Collaborator with the Japanese, ally of the Nationalists, opium addict, exploiter, murderer, rapist, thief, and torturer, Han appears to have harmed everyone who has come into contact with him and has most of them cowed into submission. Those who oppose him are killed or persecuted, yet he acts obsequiously toward the work-team and pretends neighbourliness with the villagers when he senses danger. Both the work-team and the villagers want

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to see Han destroyed, but their motivations differ. For the work-team and its leader, Xiao Xiang, the elimination of the power of the landlords is a matter of policy, of bringing about a transformation in landownership that marks historical progress, in a necessary precondition for the establishment of the new socialist order. For the villagers and their leader, Zhao Yulin, initially at least, the issue is one of revenge. Han must be killed to atone for the atrocities he has committed on the peasant inhabitants of Yuanmao. In the terms associated with socialist realism, these initial positions for the two leading figures of the novel represent the dialectical opposites of consciousness (Xiao) and spontaneity (Zhao). In contrast to the dim view of peasant ideology taken by some Soviet socialist realists, Zhou Libo represents Mao’s view that in the Chinese context, the peasantry is ripe for rebellion against oppression. For Lenin, writing in 1902, it was the working class whose spontaneous action (in that case, workers’ strikes) “represents nothing more nor less than consciousness in an embryonic form.”54 In Hurricane, team leader Xiao is prepared to wait until the spontaneous wrath of the villagers can be transformed into concerted, conscious action. In this, he exhibits considerably more patience than the bookish and dogmatic Liu Sheng and the impetuous Little Wang, the only two members of the work-team to be described in any detail. As he explains to Little Wang, when the latter is frustrated at Han’s release from custody after his first arrest, “I could easily have kept Han in custody – or even put a bullet through him. But the problem is that the masses have not risen up; is it appropriate for us to deal with him? If we don’t work patiently to arouse the people so that they completely destroy all feudal strongholds, the forces of feudalism can never be toppled. We can kill one Han Sixth, but there will be other Han Sixths as well.”55 A significant weapon used in persuading the peasants to unite against their oppressors (and, by implication, to be applied by other work-teams and by activists in later mass movements) was a narrative and rhetorical device that would be employed throughout the Mao era and in socialist realist fiction in China: the recalling of bitterness.56 In Hurricane, there are several extended accounts of suffering, in the case of the Yuanmao villagers mostly at the hands of Han Sixth. Some are recounted by the narrator, whereas others are addressed to members of the work-team or to Han Sixth himself before assembled villagers at public meetings. As well as the peasant hero Zhao Yulin, those whose stories are told include the tenant farmer Old Tian and his wife (whose house was expropriated by Han for his horses and whose daughter was abducted and flogged to death for resisting his attempts to seduce her), the young farmhand Guo Quanhai (whose father, as well as himself, was

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cheated by the landlord), and the swineherd Wu Jiafu, treated as a slave by Han Sixth but spying on his master and reporting as Han moves his valuables out of the village. When Han captures and flogs Wu Jiafu, the critical mass of the villagers are finally moved to action: “The activists who were constant­ ly increasing in number were flaring up everywhere like pine torches; for this reason, Han Sixth’s thrashing of the little swineherd, which was only one small crime among thousands, ignited a great conflagration of vengeance among the masses.”57 Team leader Xiao Xiang and the peasant activist Zhao Yulin are the two heroic figures in the novel, but, as befits their different functions, their characters, their literary origins, and the forms of their heroism are distinct. Zhou Libo’s son recalls his father telling him that he modelled the character of Xiao on himself. If this is a self-portrait, it is restrained one, contrasting sharply with the indulgence with which Qu Bo, the author of the military romance Tracks in the Snowy Forest mentioned in the previous chapter, glamourized the character he modelled on himself.58 Xiao is minimally described: he is “of medium height and in his thirties,” and we learn nothing of his background or family status.59 In addition to his position as head of the work-team, he is also the senior Party member in the group. He is presented on first appearance as a thinker and a planner, focused on the task before him; while the other members of the team banter with the carter Old Sun, Xiao ponders the Party directive that has set the land-reform process in motion. He seldom shows emotion, though he is said to have a tendency to become excited and almost breaks down at Zhao Yulin’s death. He is mentor and guide to the less experienced members of the group and, more importantly, to the peasants who will take leadership roles after the work-team leaves the village. Xiao represents consciousness, command of the Party’s policy, and the means to be used in its realization. As the representative of historical progress, he is also a symbol of modernity – he carries more sophisticated weaponry than the peasants possess and has access to a telephone, which enables him to call his Party superiors and have them authorize the execution of Han Sixth and the posthumous Party membership of Zhao Yulin. (The telephone does not always work, however, and Xiao is reduced to sending a messenger to appeal for reinforcements when Han Seventh and his men attack the village.) Like Han Sixth and team leader Xiao, Zhao Yulin is also said to be based on a real-life figure, in this case a Party activist from another village who was killed by a landlord.60 Although, like Xiao, Zhao is an archetypal figure, he is much more elaborately introduced than his Party mentor: there is fuller

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physical description, a nickname, a family, and a tragic personal history. During his exploration of the village, the work-team member Little Wang sees Zhao for the first time: “At that moment, a man bare to the waist pushed open the dilapidated door of his thatched hut and came out into the courtyard. He stood there with a short-stemmed pipe in his hand. He looked about thirty-two or -three years old, of medium height and size, with an inky-black beard. This was Zhao Yulin, nicknamed bare-arsed Zhao [Zhao Guangding].”61 This introduction links Zhao to an earlier heroic tradition, that of the seventeenth-century novel. Zhao’s beard recalls two other famous blackbearded warriors, the bandit Li Kui of Shuihuzhuan and General Zhang Fei of  Three Kingdoms. Both Li Kui and Zhang Fei are celebrated for their courage, impetuosity, and loyalty. Both are also quick-tempered, and Little Wang is warned in advance by Zhao’s son Suozhu that this is a characteristic of his father as well. The violent heroes of the great novels need a level-headed mentor to curb their excesses (Song Jiang for Li Kui, and Liu Bei for Zhang Fei), and Zhao is no different in this respect, needing the leadership of Xiao. Zhao’s nickname, which emphasizes his poverty, is hardly as distinguished as that of Li Kui (Hei xuanfeng, Black Whirlwind) or others of Li’s fellows among the band of heroes in Shuihuzhuan. Nonetheless, he is linked to them in that he alone has this additional title; with his appearance and nickname, he is placed by the author into a mythical pantheon with these legendary figures. Zhao’s tale of injustice and suffering is told to a village meeting at the request of Xiao, and it has the power to reduce members of the work-team and peasants alike to tears: abject poverty, exploitation, forced labour conscription, his family reduced to begging after his wife refuses Han Sixth’s advances, the death by starvation of his daughter, and the torture of being made to kneel on shards of pottery. His recounting of this story and the showing of the scars on his knees inspire the first attempt by the villagers to arrest the landlord. Xiao and Zhao can be located in symbolic roles extrapolated from the Soviet socialist realist canon. In her analysis of the conventions of the positive hero in Soviet socialist realism, Katerina Clark links the relationship between “consciousness” and “spontaneity” to a line of succession between “fathers” and “sons”: The political parable of the socialist realist novel was also patterned by the basic myth of Stalinist political culture, in which the working out of this dialectic [between consciousness and spontaneity] accorded with the myth of the “Great Family.” This myth described Soviet society and history in terms of

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an ongoing hierarchy of “fathers,” or highly “conscious” members of the vanguard, and “sons,” or highly “spontaneous” figures who were nurtured to political consciousness by the “fathers.” The myth confirmed symbolically both the purity of the line of succession from Lenin, the original “father,” and the assured progress towards Communism, or universal “consciousness.”62

Although both Xiao Xiang and Zhao Yulin are to some extent modelled on historical figures, when fitted into the scheme outlined above, they become “symbolic media,” distinguished by the roles they play in the unfolding drama of history.63 Though they are more or less the same age (their early thirties), Xiao clearly occupies the superior position in their relationship. The symbolic father-son association is confirmed when Xiao takes Zhao Yulin for a walk to suggest to him that he apply for membership in the Communist Party. The novel returns to the mythic mode in this passage, the conversation taking place in an idyllic scene of pastoral beauty and agricultural abundance similar to that portrayed in the opening lines, distinct from the struggles occurring in the village. Xiao’s assessment of Zhao, as he writes the recommendation for his admission to the Party, is that he is of “poor peasant status, honest and capable, resolved to sacrifice all in the cause of the liberation of the workers and peasants.”64 Zhao is thereby confirmed as the real hero of Hurricane. Xiao’s emphasis on Zhao’s willingness to sacrifice sets the stage for the novel’s second climax. The “Ritual Sacrifice” of the Peasant Hero Zhao Yulin

The execution of Han Sixth, demanded by the villagers and ratified by the Party, provides the fulfillment of the task of the work-team, allowing the triumphant distribution of land and property that had belonged to the landlord. The closing drama is still to be played, however; the time has come for sacrifice, mourning, and succession – for the climax and finale of the socialist realist “Master Plot,” as extrapolated by Katerina Clark from the novels of the Stalin era. Of the climax, Clark writes, “At some point, usually in the course of the hero’s encounter with a dramatic/heroic type of obstacle, an actual, symbolic, or near death occurs. This usually involves the hero.” In the finale, “A funeral is held for the tragic victim killed during the climax (this funeral may occur earlier, but it is often postponed, to enhance the finale). Alternatively, the protagonists may visit their fallen comrade’s grave and make speeches.”65 The battle with Han Seventh places the two major heroic figures of the novel, the “father” Xiao and the “son” Zhao, together for the last time. First Xiao is shot in the hand, then Zhao’s rifle-butt is hit by a bullet.

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Still prone to misguided spontaneous action, Zhao rushes forward in the direction of the enemy fire and is shot. The younger peasant activist Guo Quanhai takes the cartridge belt from the dying man, sticky with his blood, as others prepare to get Zhao medical assistance. After Han Seventh is defeated, the next day begins with celebration. In a microcosm of the novel’s movement away from the folksiness of earlier fiction (such as the Yan’an writings of Zhao Shuli or the Heroes novels), the local singer is chided for singing saucy traditional lyrics and performs a song in praise of Chairman Mao, before the work-team intellectual Liu Sheng rounds off the singing with the celebrated opening song from The White-Haired Girl. The merriment is disrupted by the news of Zhao Yulin’s death, the arrival of his coffin, the anguish of the widow and general grief, and a melodramatic report of the martyr’s final words: “Nothing to be said. If I die then I die, can we fear death when we make revolution?”66 Speeches and slogans follow, and then it is the turn of team leader Xiao, the only character who has both the stature to deliver the eulogy and the authority (transmitted from above by his Party superiors) to reward Zhao’s sacrifice with elevation to the ranks of the vanguard: As everyone was shouting slogans, team leader Xiao strode solemnly up to stand before them. This stern-willed man battled to control his grief as he mourned his comrade-in-arms, speaking slowly: “Comrade Zhao Yulin was a fine leader from our Yuanmao village, we should all learn from his unselfishness, his courageous spirit of sacrifice; he has sacrificed himself gloriously for our sakes in the battle with the bandits. In his memory, those households that have not joined the Peasants’ Association should do so. In his memory, we should strengthen our revolutionary organization, unite until it is as strong as an iron cask, so that nobody can overturn it. There is something else I can let you know – Comrade Zhao Yulin was a probationary member of the Communist Party, and there are still two months to go before his probationary period is over. Now he has given his life for the people. Just now, the workteam’s Party committee held a meeting and decided to advance Comrade Zhao Yulin to full membership of the Communist Party. This decision has been ratified by the revolutionary committee of Shangzhi County, and I announce this publicly on behalf of the Party.” After thunderous applause, the trumpets struck up the celebratory tune “The General’s Command.” Zhang Jingxiang led three others on percussion. Someone raised the red banner of the Peasants’ Association, and the red banner fluttered in the breeze against the azure of the sky and the brilliant green

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of the poplars and elms. Children and women sang in unison the song “Without the Communist Party There Would Be No New China.”67

This scene returns the action once more to the mythic mode in which the novel began, this time with communist red added to the vibrant colours of nature. In death, Zhao becomes a symbolic figure, his mantle passed to the “genuine farmer” Guo Quanhai (who received the bloodied cartridge belt) and also to his son Suozhu and the swineherd Wu Jiafu, who has been adopted by Zhao’s widow into the martyr’s revolutionary family. With succession assured, the work-team can leave the village. As demonstrated above, Hurricane closely follows the Soviet socialist real­ist novel in its view of history, its presentation of heroism, and its adoption of many features of the “Master Plot.” This is not to suggest that it is a copy of any work in the Soviet canon. Clearly, there are resemblances to Virgin Soil Upturned, which Zhou had translated a decade before he wrote his own novel. In the Soviet novel, a representative sent to enforce Party policies (Davidov, acting alone rather than as the head of a team) must overcome landowner resistance and a threat from the side defeated in the civil war, and persuade the peasants of the benefits of collectivization. Hurricane is a much shorter novel than Virgin Soil Upturned, and it has a smaller cast of characters, most of whom have an assigned role in the action, as hero or villain, victim or lackey, but one character may be at least partially derived from Sholokhov’s novel. This is the carter Old Sun, who brings the members of the work-team to the village and subsequently takes them away. With his comic bluster and his cowardice in times of danger, Old Sun resembles the comic peasant characters of Zhao Shuli less than he does Shchukar, the source of comic relief in Virgin Soil Upturned. Both men are given to boastfulness and prone to misadventure (such as the incident in Virgin Soil Upturned in which Shchukar cooks soup with pondwater and somehow manages to include a frog).68 Zhou Libo was to create a more fully realized version of this character type in his later novel Great Changes in a Mountain Village, with the peasant Sheng Youting (nicknamed Ting Mianhu, or Flour-paste Ting), an invention that was later to be criticized as an insufficiently socialist “middle character.”69 In Hurricane, however, he does what the “worker in the arts” was required to do at the Yan’an Forum: base characters that play normative roles in historic struggles on those he could identify in real life and produce a story that was, as he had demanded of literature in his lecture on Maupassant, “conforming to life as it is going to be” and “transforming the boundaries of human souls.” Although clearly indebted to the Soviet tradition, Hurricane is not a simple

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transposition of Sholokhov’s urtext of collectivization fiction, but a first attempt at a Chinese socialist realist novel and, as such, an important milestone in the development of literature under communism. Hurricane and the Future of Chinese Film

A similar Soviet influence can be seen in the film version of Hurricane, the directorial debut of Xie Tieli, made in black-and-white and released in 1961.70 This is evident as early as the scene that accompanies the opening credits, which tracks a large steam locomotive through a snowy Manchurian landscape as it brings Xiao from the battlefront to join his work-team, the title and the names of the film’s creators and cast appearing through billowing clouds of alternating black and white steam. Also indicative of Soviet influence is the musical soundtrack by Li Huanzhi, who had been at the Lu Xun Academy in Yan’an while Zhou Libo and Lin Lan were there.71 Li was trained in Chinese traditional and operatic music, and some of the score is for Chinese instruments – a wailing erhu solo marks the death of Zhao Yulin – but the main orchestral theme, scored for Western strings and reminiscent of Shostakovich, dominates the film’s major dramatic sequences. The filmscript, by Lin Lan, largely follows the first half of the novel and takes few liberties with her husband’s original text. Obsequious and unrepresentative village leaders are transferred from the second half of the novel Hurricane to the beginning of the film, greeting the work-team as it arrives and allowing Xiao to show that he can distinguish false activists from the genuine ones. The execution of Han Sixth is delayed until after his brother’s attack on the village is repulsed. And a subplot is added with the relationship between the militiaman Guo Quanhai and a mistreated young woman brought into another landlord family as wife to its young (and predictably odious) son. The film also stresses the civil war context of the novel, with Xiao summoned from the battlefront at the beginning and returning to it as the film ends, and a military parade through the village. The character modelled on the author cannot be as lightly drawn in the visual medium of film as in the novel; Xiao becomes more clearly defined as a humane and populist leader. Although he may be an intellectual transformed into a team leader, he displays none of the faults of which Yan’an intellectuals were to be cured. The dogmatism, impatience, and lack of understanding of the peasant mind associated with the intellectuals is transferred (along with the glasses in which Zhou Libo was always photographed) onto Liu Sheng, the well-intentioned but out-of-touch intellectual on the work-team. At the end of the film, the focus is on Xiao rather than the successors to the martyr, as the villagers congregate

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reverently to see him off, altering the balance between the symbolic “father” Xiao and the “son” Zhao Yulin in favour of the former. Viewing the film on its release, the American leftist filmmaker Jay Leyda, then based in Beijing, praised it for breaking free of what he saw as the recurrent problems of Chinese film in that period: “The conformity, the self-satisfied and defensive insularity, the almost scientific reduction of personal interpretation to the minimum, the rigid stratification of social groups (classes?! [sic]), the fixed place for each individual and the molding of people to types that we find in medieval arts.”72 In a report for Soviet readers, Leyda commended the film because it made it possible “to believe in the actuality of those people, in the possibility of their change and development of character, in the bitterness of their struggle, and in the fullness of their triumph.” He compared the film favourably to Xie Jin’s The Red Detachment of Women (Hongse niangzi jun), released the same year, which he found to be merely “one more superficial film.”73 His belief that, of the two films, Hurricane represented the Chinese cinema of the future, was misplaced: Xie Jin went on to enjoy the most successful career of any of his generation of directors, whereas Xie Tieli’s progress stalled following criticism of his second feature, Early Spring in the Second Month (Zaochun eryue), from the novel by Rou Shi. It is Xie Jin’s film, a precursor to cinematic versions of the Cultural Revolution opera and ballet of the same name, rather than Xie Tieli’s, that remains a classic of Mao-era cinema. The Case against the Red Canon

Although they adopt different narrative styles, Heroes of Lüliang and Hurricane share with the later red classics the qualities of “ideological commitment,” “Party-mindedness,” and “national/popular spirit” observed in the Soviet socialist realist canon. Simply stated, the Chinese red classics present the Communist Party’s version of its own and the nation’s history, from the founding of the Party in the 1920s to the time of writing, as a linear progress from the darkness of an “old society” dominated by exploiting classes to a new world of socialism and eventual communism to be enjoyed by members of the worker, peasant, and soldier classes that were the constituency of the Party in those years. The novels are intended to be both entertainment and education, instructing readers in a normative understanding of past and present, even as they offer tales of adventure and achievement. Like all literature written from the standpoint of one side in a conflict (such as devotional works of any religion, traditional war fiction, western/cowboy novels), this kind of writing assumes the concurrence of the reader with the

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views of the author (and the ideological or political authority behind the author). Thus, it can be offensive to the reader who does not share the author’s ideology or who belongs to the nation, race, class, or religious group demonized in the text. T.A. Hsia’s critique of Hurricane, written in the early 1960s from an anti-communist position, demonstrates this point. Here is his reading of the passage quoted above in which team leader Xiao explains why he must postpone the death of Han Sixth until the landlord’s tenants and former victims are ready to assert themselves and take revenge: The Communists, who could stop this mental torture and dispose of him without too much ceremony, are postponing his death because they are aiming at the destruction of something much bigger than the life of the landlord: the basis of Chinese society. They are working hard to fan mob fury which leads to the lynching of the man some 200 pages after his arrest – 200 pages of fast action, precise scheming and mounting tension. They revive old memories of hatred, spread gossip, put words into the peasants’ mouths, give them a false image of themselves, encourage their hostility and subject them to regimentation. And they are doing this with a self-assurance, cynicism, tenacity and persuasiveness that may be said to be diabolical.74

Some forty years later, an evaluation of the historical novels that comprise the majority of the Chinese red classics found them wanting in a more literary sense. In his study of groups of modern Chinese writers, Huang Weilin devotes a chapter to the red canon, extending to its creators the criticism made by Lin Manshu of Du Pengcheng, the author of the war novel Protect Yan’an, that he was able only to present the action from a political viewpoint.75 Huang notes that most authors of the red canon participated in the events they described (as, for example, military officers or land-reform cadres) and thus had ample personal experience, but that they lacked two qualities that would have enabled them to create great literature: an independent authorial viewpoint and sufficient literary training. Huang is also critical of the emphasis on the glories of the revolutionary struggle and the overwhelming optimism that pervades the novels. For Huang, the distinction between “pure” (chun) and “popular” (su) art was lost in the fiction that followed the Yan’an Forum (the period he is considering here is 1949-66, but his critique would apply to all Mao-era fiction). In this, he is correct, and it was that way by design: novels like the ones considered above play to popular conventions in the service of the audiences designated in the Yan’an Talks. Thus, they are consciously different from the fiction of the May Fourth era and the works being produced at the same time in areas outside communist control by more

Zhou Libo 67

experienced and better-educated authors such as Qian Zhongshu and Ba Jin, which might be included in Huang’s classification as “pure” literature.76 Even works such as Hurricane, which adhered more to the imported conventions of socialist realism than to a revolutionary tongsu style, were still “popular” in their attempt to appeal to a mass readership. Průšek rightly includes Hurricane among works of the civil war period influenced by indigenous traditions; as demonstrated above, the characterization of the “spontaneous” peasant revolutionary has antecedents in the great novels of the seventeenth century. Not until well after the end of the Mao era did writers emerge with the independence and training (to which one might add relative freedom from the threat of reprisal) that Huang Weilin lamented as lacking in the authors of the red classics. Many leading authors of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries have felt obliged, as their predecessors did, to retell the history of Chinese socialism, but they have had considerable choice regarding which style to adopt, with China’s virtually unlimited access to world literature. Interestingly, however, Mo Yan, one of the most inventive and sophisticated of contemporary writers, chose to play with the tongsu traditions in his 2006 village saga Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out (Sheng-si pilao). The story follows the dysfunctional Ximen family from the execution of its patriarch Ximen Nao in 1950 to the telling of the story by his reincarnation, the millennium child Lan Qiansui, at the time of the novel’s creation.77 The trappings of tongsu fiction, announced by the paired sentences that form the chapter titles of the novel proper, prepare the reader for a fiction that will be by turns realistic, romantic, and supernatural, to an even greater degree than is Mo Yan’s custom, in a conscious blurring of the distinctions between the “pure” and the “popular.”78 In his retelling of the first half-century of communist rule, Mo Yan is at pains to subvert conventional history, nowhere more so than in the case of the executed patriarch. Ximen Nao is the literary reincarnation of Han Sixth of Hurricane, and he offers a counter-discourse to the mythology of the evil landlord (albeit an unreliable one, since he is our narrator). The biographies of the two characters are much the same: Ximen Nao has built the family’s holdings of land, livestock, and possessions, including a large rubber-tired cart like the one that appears early in Hurricane, and he has a wife and concubines as well as reserves of wealth. During land reform, he is condemned as a local tyrant and executed on the outskirts of his village, the list of his crimes standard for the day: “You plundered the people’s property, you were a master of exploitation, you ran roughshod over men and had your way with women, you oppressed all the people, you are the epitome of evil, and only your death will quell the people’s anger.”79

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The posthumous narrator Ximen Nao offers a very different version of himself, as hard working, successful, deserving, philanthropic, and respected by all.80 By his account, even Hong Taiye, the person who executes him, admitted to his innocence of the crimes for which he is punished. “As a man,” allows Hong Taiye, “I respect you. More than that, you’re a man I’d be happy to share a bottle with, even become sworn brothers with. But speaking as a member of the revolutionary masses, you and I are irreconcilable foes and I am obliged to eliminate you. This is not personal hatred, it’s class hatred.”81 Mo Yan’s undermining of the mythology of nation building laid by Zhou Libo is the more effective in that his narrator casts doubt on the veracity of anything he says. The reader is left with the chaos that the authors of the red canon had systematized into a purposeful metanarrative. The works of the red canon are not epics that transcend their time: Zhou Libo was no Sholokhov, and Sholokhov (the evaluation of the Nobel committee notwithstanding) was no Tolstoy. By the same token, Heroes of Lüliang, for all the praise lavished on it by Průšek, was no Shuihuzhuan. These were works designed for their own place and time, and for the edification of a modestly educated audience, particularly in the case of the tongsu style of Heroes of Lüliang. This is not to say that the novels are unreadable or unentertaining to the contemporary reader, even one appalled by the path the Chinese revolution was to take in the ensuing years; more importantly, they are also of significance for any study of the novel in modern China. Heroes of Lüliang and Hurricane were bold attempts at inventing narrative forms to tell stories of military and social movements in which the authors were partisan protagonists, in obedience to guidelines articulated but still not fully explained or understood. The task they and their successors undertook was the creation of persuasive and entertaining fiction that would satisfy both the guardians of ideology and a Chinese readership. By the late 1950s, the time of the next pair of milestones on the road of China’s socialist writing, the degree of supervision was more stringent, and the political requirements more pressing, than had been the case for the wartime writers. The test of authorial inventiveness was to provide heroes for the Chinese people to emulate as they tried to meet the impossible targets of the Great Leap Forward, while still creating fiction interesting and plausible enough that it would be read. Authors who were once again called on to fashion their experience of the life of the masses into works of fiction would find themselves looking farther back, and farther afield, than they might wish to admit, to craft a new generation of socialist heroes.

PART 2 The Great Leap Forward and the Stuff of Heroism, 1959-62

3 Li Zhun’s “A Brief Biography of Li Shuangshuang”: A Fast-Talking Vixen Creates a Village Canteen

The beginning of the Great Leap Forward in the late 1950s was the moment in modern Chinese history when the utopia of communism seemed tantalizingly closest to the Communist Party, to its leaders, and through the media, to the people of whom superhuman efforts were to be demanded by the un­ compromising visionaries who led them. The aim of the Great Leap was to catapult China into the ranks of the major powers by building an atom bomb, modernizing industry, and breaking away from the Soviet Union – all of this to be achieved in the shortest possible time. Impractical goals loyally romanticized and zealously pursued led to absurd expectations, mendacious claims, impossible demands, and squandered efforts, resulting within a matter of months in exhaustion, disillusion, and a famine that was to last into the early 1960s and cost tens of millions of lives.1 In literature, the Great Leap Forward emerged with a burst of national pride and naive optimism, a flood of poetry, a cadre of authors drawn from outside the intellectual classes, a new brand of peacetime heroism, and a new “creative method,” the “combination of revolutionary realism and revolutionary romanticism.” This chapter and the next present two milestones of Great Leap fiction, short stories by leading authors of the period, about two segments of the Chinese population most affected by the movement. The focus of this chap­ ter is on “A Brief Biography of Li Shuangshuang” by Li Zhun, the most widely read of all Great Leap fiction, a tale first written in 1959 and revised in 1960, then revised again in a film version that appeared in 1962 and also retold in comic-strip and comic-book formats variously following the plot of the revised version of the story and the film, as well as a number of local dramatic forms. The next chapter concerns “A Man of Outstanding Quality” by Hu Wanchun, the most successful “worker-writer” of the Mao era. The authors of these stories were not revolutionary intellectuals “sent down” to experience the lives of the peasantry and the proletariat, as had been the Yan’an model, but people writing about their own societies. Li Zhun depicted

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the villages of his native Henan, and Hu Wanchun portrayed the Shanghai industrial working class of which he was a member. The title characters of the two stories are exemplary figures for a new heroic age, created to inspire extraordinary contributions and sacrifices in the national interest. The two authors rose to public attention in the mid-1950s in different ways: Li Zhun was discovered and welcomed by the highest authority after an early story was published in a provincial newspaper, and Hu Wanchun was the product of assiduous nurturing by the Shanghai cultural authorities. Both enjoyed long careers as state-sponsored writers (though Li Zhun spent a decade in disgrace during the Cultural Revolution), but for both, the Great Leap was their finest hour. Their skill was in creating heroic figures that embodied the utopian adventure of the Great Leap, unquestioningly loyal to the whims of the Party (as positive fictional characters in the immediately preceding years had not necessarily been), resourceful and inexhaustible but with a sufficiently human face that readers could identify with them. The two chapters examine the materials from which these new heroes were constructed. The guidelines provided for authors by the Writers’ Federation as the Great Leap began were essentially a restatement of Mao’s “six even mores” quoted on pages 7-8. Those working in the new creative method were expected to “produce the most realistic and at the same time the most idealistic literature and art, literature and art which are loyal to reality and at the same time even more lofty than reality.”2 But this alone is not a formula for the creation of vibrant and memorable characters, for more was needed than simply the observation of life, however authentic, infused with the spirit of the age and the guidance of the Party. As the two following chapters will demonstrate, authors looked beyond their own experience, into elite and popular national traditions in the case of Li Zhun, and imported literature and film with Hu Wanchun, without necessarily announcing the sources from which they drew for their heroic subjects. The star of fiction, film, and popular forms of live entertainment, Li Shuangshuang was the greatest cultural success story of the Great Leap. According to her creator, she was even State Premier Zhou Enlai’s humorous nomination as the ideal candidate for his job. The story was (again, according to the author) read by hundreds of millions in numerous editions of its various forms. But even Li Shuangshuang was forced to adapt to the times in an age of rapid change, retreating from her wholehearted endorsement of one of the major innovations of the Great Leap, the communal kitchens, when that was abandoned, and dedicating herself to a different cause, the equitable distribution of work-points in the newly established People’s Communes, for the film version.3 Throughout, the character of Li Shuangshuang remained

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unchanged, meeting different challenges with a stubborn will, a fast tongue, and a gale of raucous laughter. New Folk-Songs and the Spirit of Revolutionary Romanticism

The Great Leap Forward came at a time of crisis in China’s external relations and of upheaval and disruption at home.4 Beyond China’s borders, the relationship between the Communist Parties of China and the Soviet Union was deteriorating following the condemnation by the new Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev of his predecessor Joseph Stalin, which began the transformation between the neighbours from an uneasy alliance into a cold war and a bitter rivalry for influence in the developing world. Mao may have felt insulted by Khrushchev’s treatment of him when he visited Moscow and sensitive to the risk that condemnation of Stalin’s “personality cult” might threaten his own supremacy at home. He may also have seen the USSR as a potential military threat and thus felt greater urgency in his plans to make China an industrial and military power in the shortest possible time, by accelerating the production of steel and developing the technology for the atom bomb that the Soviet Union had refused to provide. At home, the Anti-Rightist Cam­paign was under way as the Great Leap began in 1958. The leadership of the Communist Party was still smarting from the criticism of the Party that it had invited, but not fully expected, in the Hundred Flowers of 1956. Many of the nation’s intellectuals – scientists, academics, and artists – had complained that the heavy hand of Party leadership was suppressing the initiative of those who could move the country forward, by implication challenging the right of the Party to absolute control. By 1958, the backlash had begun, and the Party was in the process of purging large numbers of real or imagined dissenters, particularly among the intellectuals.5 Mistrust of intellectuals meant that the peasantry and the industrial proletariat were required to make additional contributions in the push toward China’s military and industrial development.6 The greatest demands were placed on the peasants, who were called on to produce prodigious quantities of grain to pay off China’s debts to the Soviet Union, provide food aid to other Third World countries, and feed the burgeoning proletariat. They were presented with impossible targets for production based on projections even more fantastic than those concocted for Stalin by the pseudo-science of the Soviet agronomist Lysenko and reported as fact by regional authorities eager to endear themselves to the leader.7 In addition, they were required to produce, in hastily constructed, wasteful, and inefficient furnaces, iron that would be sent as raw material to the urban factories. These demands combined to deplete resources, both material and human, leading to the famines that were to follow.

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With the condemnation of many of China’s established writers and artists and their works, an art form untainted by Hundred Flowers liberalism was needed by the state to promote its goals, as had been the case in Yan’an when the Party launched the movement to create revolutionary versions of the traditional yangge dramas. Poetry, based on indigenous rural forms that owed nothing to twentieth-century or classical intellectual traditions, was chosen for the Great Leap, to reflect and inspire the determination and optimism needed to vault China into the ranks of powerful industrialized nations. Mao Zedong had been impressed by “new folk-songs” presented to a plenary session of the National People’s Congress in February 1958 and had called for large-scale collection of such verses, a call repeated in a People’s Daily editorial the following month.8 Praise was immediately lavished on the new verses by the political and literary authorities; the poet Xiao San, for example, proclaimed them “the best of poems.”9 The utopian fantasy (or revolutionary idealism) of state policy was best expressed in short verses, which could con­ vey excitement and faith without the need for elaboration. One of the greatest fallacies of the rural Great Leap was neatly summed up in a rhyming couplet of two five-character lines: “However bold people can be,/the earth will bear that high a yield” (Ren you duo da dan/Di you duo gaochan).10 This new spirit of optimism that the impossible could be achieved at any moment necessitated a new creative methodology that went beyond the socialist realism that had been imported from the Soviet Union and was now, following a cooling of relations with the Soviet state, less attractive to the Chinese Communist Party as a methodology to be promoted. The new formulation was “the combination of revolutionary realism and revolutionary romanticism” proposed by Mao and said to be embodied in his poetry.11 Zhou Yang, who had been the principal agent for the introduction of Soviet socialist realism to China, now introduced its homegrown replacement in an essay celebrating the new folk-songs. He explains the new formulation, saying that without romanticism, realism would degenerate into naturalism, which he describes as a “distortion and vulgarization of realism.” In an anti-rightist sideswipe at the intellectuals, he adds that without realism, romanticism could be mere “revolutionary noise-making, or intellectual-style self-indulgent fantasy.”12 Zhou praises the new folk-songs for their bold fancy, their fiery passion, and their light-hearted humour; with a metaphorical flourish worthy of the age, he likens the poets to horses untethered and galloping freely.13 The combination of revolutionary realism and revolutionary romanticism was to be official doctrine until the end of the Cultural Revolution, surviving the fall of Zhou Yang in the mid-1960s and being used to explain the refining

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of the model theatrical works under Jiang Qing. A 1973 university textbook on Marxist literary theory (Cultural Revolution style) defined the two components as follows: What we mean by revolutionary realism is the concrete manifestation in literature of the revolutionary scientific search for truth of the proletariat, which requires that [artistic] creation should adhere rigorously to the Marxist theory of reflection, enter deeply into life, and starting from the true facts of life, profoundly reflect the objective process of the historical development of revolutionary reality. What we mean by revolutionary romanticism is the revolutionary idealism of the proletariat which requires that creation should express the great ideals of communism, the militant spirit of revolutionary heroism, and the revolutionary optimism of the proletariat as the struggle to realize this ideal.14

Throughout the ascendancy of the new formulation, revolutionary romanticism predominated; to judge from the relatively small number of survivors of the millions of new folk-songs, this was never more the case than in the late 1950s.15 In a book charting the changes in the definitions of realism in China since 1949, Zhang Dexiang suggests that the reason for emphasizing revolutionary romanticism was a mistrust of the kind of literature that had gone by the name of realism in the preceding years: “The root of the problem lies in the belief that traditional realism cannot express ideals, and if it is to express the greatest ideals and revolution in human history, it cannot but draw support from ‘revolutionary’ romanticism; and because these ‘ideals’ are scientific and represent the ‘rules’ and ‘essence’ of human history, and must therefore be expressed through ‘real[istic]’ development of revolution, [this] causes realism and romanticism, which are distinct but complementary to be artificially ‘combined two into one.’”16 The suspicion of realism to which Zhang Dexiang refers can only have been heightened in the period after the Hundred Flowers as the Party reacted to the suggestion made by Qin Zhao­ yang that socialist realism should give way to the new and more ambiguous “realism of the socialist age,” a formulation that would have moved writers away from Party control (and thus the obligation to endorse wildly optimistic policy initiatives) and closer to the critical realism of an earlier period.17 “New folk-songs” were composed in their millions and continued to be published into the early 1960s. The definitive collection, however, was the 1959 anthology Red Flag Ballads, three hundred poems (the same number as appear in China’s earliest poetry collection The Book of Songs and the

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best-known collection of  Tang poems) selected by Zhou Yang and Guo Moruo, senior poet of the People’s Republic.18 The themes of the poems match those of other Great Leap propaganda, print and visual. They include the victory of humanity at war with nature, the superiority of socialist humanity to heroes of the past, a celebration of Great Leap achievements, the emergence of women as an equal force in production, and equality and shared purpose as a basis for romantic love.19 An example of the poems of triumph over nature (in this case, celebrating the interminable and mandatory shifts that were to exhaust the workforce) is “Challenge to the Sun,” a poem quoted admiringly by Zhou Yang: Hey Sun! Dare you take us on? We’re out at work for hours While you’re still snug abed; We grope our way home in the dark Long after you down tools and hang your head. Hey sun! Dare you take us on?20

The songs collected in Red Flag Ballads, as the first new works in the newly announced spirit of the combination of revolutionary realism and revolutionary romanticism, set the tone for the arts of the Great Leap. In the visual arts, village wall-paintings flourished briefly in the late 1950s; these are described by Maria Galikowski, in terms that might equally be applied to the “new folk-songs,” as having “great optimism and vivid imagery that is exaggerated almost to the point of absurdity, consonant with the idealistic ethos of Great Leap Forward aspirations.”21 Artists, writers, critics, and translators alike were required to set targets for increased productivity and to work at a ferocious rate.22 In fiction, as with everything else in the Great Leap, swift production was demanded, allowing no time for the creation of full-length novels; the fiction of the Leap comprised short stories, a form in which Li Zhun had already distinguished himself.23 In “A Brief Biography of Li Shuang­ shuang,” we see the great themes of the new folk-songs: mass mobilization for the battle with nature (a project to provide water for agriculture); constant praise for the Great Leap; women in command, frequently transcending human frailties with days and nights of consecutive endeavour; a lesser character who calls to mind one of the martial heroines of Chinese mythology; and, in most versions, a touching love story.

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More Than Just a “Village Writer”: Li Zhun

The writers who were prominent in the Great Leap Forward, like the rustic scholars of the liberated areas following the Yan’an Forum sixteen years ear­ lier, were those who could be clearly distinguished from the suspect intellectuals. In Yan’an, the intellectuals had been sent down to acquaint them with the masses they were to serve, but in the late 1950s, some at least were undergoing an altogether harsher form of re-education. Many of the leading leftist intellectuals whom the Communist Party had inherited from the May Fourth movement settled comfortably into nonproductive administrative and ceremonial roles following the victory of 1949. However, by no means all of them had abandoned the traditional self-image of the intellectual as the conscience of the nation (and critic of authority) that had been championed in 1941-42 at Yan’an by Ding Ling, Ai Qing, and others. Younger writers who had joined the communist ranks during the civil war were among those whose exposés of stultifying bureaucratism, invited as they had been by the “double hundred” slogan of 1956, had occasioned alarm, anger, and a vindictive backlash the following year, consigning them to as much as two decades in obscurity. This had led the authorities to look to writers of humbler origins to advance the cause of state-directed socialist literature. The official summary of the Hundred Flowers, delivered by Zhou Yang in the spring of 1958, contained detailed condemnation of those designated rightists or members of an “anti-Party clique” and hearkened back to the military metaphors of civil war polemic in this call for replacements: “The work of clearing away the old enemy strongholds is not something that can be completed in one year. But the way is basically open for large forces of proletarian writers and artists to advance quickly. We need to build an army and train soldiers in the field of culture too. A completely new army is now being forged for proletarian literature and art. This must coincide with the building of an army of proletarian individuals, and we will reap the benefits of both at approximately the same time.”24 The Great Leap advanced the careers of writers who were qualified both to be and to create members of this new army of “proletarian individuals.” These included industrial workers, chief among them the Shanghai dock worker Hu Wanchun (of whom more in the next chapter), and those who could lay claim to peasant origins, notably Hao Ran (of whom more in Chapter 5 and the Epilogue). Also included were the liberated areas’ “rustic scholar” Ma Feng, co-author of Heroes of Lüliang and by now acclaimed as representative of the rural “potato school” (shanyaodanpai), as well as “village fiction writers” (xiangtu zuojia) such as Li Zhun. The designation of “village fiction

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writer” was one that Li Zhun was prepared to live with if it enabled him to publish his fiction, though in later life he felt it had demeaned him. Li Zhun, who was born in 1928 just outside Luoyang to parents of Mongolian nationality, thought of himself as being half a peasant and half an educated man.25 His grandfather, a holder of the xiucai degree, was a teacher for forty years, and his father both taught and ran a post office; an uncle was also a teacher, and the branches of the family lived together, so Li Zhun grew up in a three-teacher household. With his grandfather, he studied classical literature, memorizing hundreds of poems, practised calligraphy, and learned the history of the region of Henan Province, where he was born. At his father’s post office, he read newspapers and journals before delivering them to subscribers. He also watched operas and local performing arts, learning libretti and mastering the singing styles associated with them; later in life he composed works in a number of operatic and performing arts styles. His reading preferences were for foreign novels in Chinese translation, choosing these over works of popular Chinese writers such as Zhang Henshui. By the time he was nineteen, and had completed junior high school, he had read all the translated fiction he could find at local libraries, particularly enjoying the novels of Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Turgenev, and Dickens. His disdain for Zhang Henshui was part of a more general distaste for tongsu fiction; his own writing was “popular” in the sense of minjian (in styles drawn from “among the people”) or dazhong (designed for a mass readership) rather than tongsu (adhering to storyteller conventions).26 Before attracting nationwide attention in 1953 with his story “Can’t Take That Road,” Li Zhun had published ten short stories in local newspapers, many of them on historical themes. The first, written when he was only sixteen, was a reworking of the Song dynasty story of Qin Hui’s betrayal of Yue Fei.27 “Can’t Take That Road” presented an image of historical transition that accorded with the Party narrative of the nation’s past and future. The story, reflecting changing patterns of landownership in the years after land reform, was first published in the provincial newspaper Henan Daily. The central character, Song Laoding (whose given name means “old certainties”), resolves to buy a plot of land from a neighbour whose incompetence and shiftlessness have bankrupted him. Laoding is persuaded by his son Dongshan (Eastern Mountain), a communist activist, to assist the neighbour rather than exploiting him. Dongshan and his wife represent the forces of progress, but it is the transformation of the stubbornly traditional peasant Laoding that is the focus of the story. Devices that were to become staples of Mao-era village fiction are used to bring about this transformation – articulation of exploiter

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mentality by a character Laoding holds in contempt, the spontaneous generosity of another poor peasant, the recalling of past suffering when his family was landless, and the presentation of the Party’s policy by a figure of authority.28 To this formula, Li Zhun added what were to become his trademarks – a liberal smattering of folk aphorisms, a humorous take on family squabbling, and a sympathetic view of less progressive peasants (the last of which was to bring him some grief in the Cultural Revolution). Laoding, a character based in large part on the author’s father-in-law, resists his son’s entreaties before embracing a more collective outlook at story’s end in a splendid moment of socialist metaphor, walking “with firm steps towards the east where the red sun was rising.”29 Song Laoding may be, as his author claimed, the first of the so-called middle characters (characters neither good nor bad, sympathetically portrayed) in the literature of the People’s Republic and is certainly the story’s only plausible character. By contrast, as the author admitted, Dongshan is an abstraction, a construct (gainian). Shortly after the story came out, it was brought to Mao’s attention; Li reported that Mao approved of it, saying that “we shouldn’t take the attitudes of autocrats in dealing with the peasants.”30 This endorsement was sufficient to see it reprinted in fifty-four newspapers. The author claims that 30 million copies of the story were published and that it was used as a high-school text to illustrate history as it should then have been unfolding, much as Hurricane had been a decade before. Li’s rise to fame was, therefore, a case of being plucked from obscurity at a word from the leader, not the result of Party “nurturing.” Li proudly claimed that he had been untutored in communist ideology when he began to write. Even without this training, he showed an uncanny ability to produce palatable fiction embracing the message the Party wished to see put out. He was to repeat that feat even more successfully with “Li Shuangshuang,” a story that makes the case for women leaving the home to join the workforce and promotes one of the short-lived innovations of the Great Leap, the public canteens. The Ideal Great Leap Heroine

The version of “A Brief Biography of Li Shuangshuang” that appears in post1976 collections of Li Zhun’s stories is dated March 1959. In it, the eponymous heroine, newly literate after attending night-classes, puts up a poster in doggerel proposing a village canteen so that women can be free of cooking and participate in the Great Leap Forward. This follows an argument in which she had come to blows with her overbearing husband, Sun Xiwang, who refuses to help her at home even when she is working outside. After local officials approve the canteen idea, Xiwang becomes its first cook but is a poor

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manager and is misled by a kinsman, for whom he caters a private event using public supplies. Shuangshuang then takes charge, improves service, devises a new kind of noodle made in part from sweet potatoes with the help of Xiwang and their female colleagues, and designs a better stove and an insulated cart, enabling her to deliver freshly cooked food to the fieldworkers. Her achievements are announced on the local public-address system. Xiwang expresses his admiration for her and addresses her by her name, rather than as the mother of his children or the family’s cook. He de­ clares that “young people fall in love first and then marry, we got married first and then fell in love.”31 When the story appeared in the premier national literary journal Renmin wenxue early the following year, a number of changes had been made to the plot. In the original version, Li Shuangshuang wrote notes to her husband, using a combination of characters and pictures, and left them around the house for him to find, a detail that was omitted in the Renmin wenxue version. Also, Xiwang leaves the canteen after his misuse of its supplies, trading jobs with his wife, going to the piggery where she had previously distinguished herself, and training the pigs to come to and leave the trough at the sound of different tunes played on his reed-pipe. With Xiwang gone, the transformation of the canteen, achieved in long night-shifts, is all the work of women, Shuangshuang and her friends Guiying and Fourth Aunt, with unnamed others. More attention is paid to Shuangshuang’s noodles, which are named for the Great Leap. The romantic ending, the declarations of love, and Xiwang’s new habit of addressing his wife by her name are gone, and the author has added a more political dimension to Shuangshuang’s achievement: she joins the Communist Party and is selected for a trip to Beijing as a model worker, as Xiwang vows to emulate her. The fictional Li Shuangshuang joined the pantheon of the “first women” (nüjie di’yi), pioneers in fields of previously male endeavour promoted in magazines directed to female readers in the 1950s.32 Li Shuangshuang was a model for other women in that the Communist Party sought to enlist the participation of the largest possible workforce in the construction projects of the Great Leap and thus needed the labour of the women who were then staying home. In the story, working outside the home makes Shuangshuang healthier, more confident, and more loveable. She also finds a way to make inferior food palatable, at a time when heavy government levies of grain were affecting the peasant diet. A social transformation imposed from above, the mobilization of the female peasant workforce becomes, in its fictional manifestation, one that is proposed from below, with the leadership responding to peasant initiatives rather than forcing women out of their homes

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to dig irrigation canals or do fieldwork in place of the men who are smelting iron or working on construction projects. “A Brief Biography of Li Shuang­ shuang” can be seen as part of an official discourse of female emancipation and empowerment articulated, here as in almost every case, by male authorship. A much earlier generation of heroic women in traditional male roles, the Song dynasty female generals of the Yang family, is recalled in the story: Li Shuangshuang’s confidante and ally at the canteen is called Guiying and thus shares a given name with Mu Guiying, the most famous of the Yang family widows who repel barbarian incursions after their husbands have been killed.33 Li Zhun’s achievement is to enliven the political message of the moment with humour, both in the squabbling between Shuangshuang and Xiwang, and in verbal comedy about the attempts of the newly literate to master political as well as practical language: Shuangshuang’s oft-repeated determination to “leap forward” (yuejin) in the spirit of the day and her naming of her new noodles after the political campaign. The humour can be seen in this exchange between husband and wife, after Shuangshuang explains the merits of the canteen in freeing up labour for construction: “Xiwang nodded and thought: She’s got a point. He thought a little while longer and remarked carelessly: ‘Little Whistle [their son]’s mother, I heard someone say today that Ma Kesi [the phonetic rendering of “Marx” in Chinese] said we ought to operate canteens, have you read that book?’ Shuangshuang said: ‘No. But I heard it was Lie Ning [the phonetic rendering of “Lenin”]!’ Xiwang said: ‘No, I’m sure it was that Ma guy.’”34 It does not undermine the sincerity of the characters’ resolve to support the Great Leap that they have not realized that Marx and Lenin are not Chinese. Sources from Life and Literature

Li Shuangshuang, interfering, humorous, combative, resourceful, energetic, public-spirited, and good-hearted, is the character for which Li Zhun is best known, and she has retained her popularity above any other heroine of the Great Leap. What continues to attract readers and viewers is an emotional volatility unique among positive characters in Mao-era fiction. Li Shuang­ shuang is temperamental and unpredictable, moving rapidly between frustration and enthusiasm, fury and laughter. Questioned about the sources for Shuangshuang’s character almost forty years after her creation, Li Zhun first emphasized her origins in his own experience, as would have been the only possible explanation at the time of writing and the appropriate one to support his credentials as a realist, revolutionary, socialist or otherwise, in subsequent years. He cited two real individuals, a young village woman whom he met at

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a local office and his own wife, Dong Bing. The former had gone to the offices of Nanyang County (now Nanyang Township) in Henan to complain about her husband. As Li recalled it in 1998, forty years after the event: There was a young wife, she was very pretty. She had a flower in her hair, and her shoes were pure white. The phone rang, and as I had just come in, I didn’t answer it. She shouted at the phone, “Don’t you make that noise, there’s no­ body here.” I thought she was fun ... that village woman was straightforward and feisty ... I asked her, “What brings you here?” She said, “I’ve come to complain about my husband, he’s been elected accountant by the village, but he won’t do it, he’s too timid. He’s a good man, but if a leaf falls down he’s afraid it will hurt his head. I insist he gets the job!”35

This forthright young woman, Li claimed, was the first source of material for Li Shuangshuang. The author’s wife is a much quieter type of person than Li Shuangshuang, but she supplied Li Zhun’s fictional character (called Li Xiuying in a first draft) with a name and a passion for self-improvement. Dong Bing, whose childhood name was Shuangshuang, was married to her husband by arrangement of their families when both were sixteen years old, meeting him for the first time on the day of their wedding. Afraid that Li Zhun would leave her because she was illiterate, Dong Bing taught herself to read and write. Using a mixture of pictures and characters, she left messages around the house to complain about her husband and anything else that displeased her, a practice that was replicated by Li Shuangshuang in the first draft of the story.36 Li Zhun was convinced that the peasant women of North China were less downtrodden and oppressed than they were often portrayed as being: in an address to the Fourth World Conference on Women, held in Beijing in September 1995, he claimed that though many parts of the country were economically backward, this did not mean that the women of those regions were also backward.37 Delightful as Li Zhun’s anecdotes were in chronicling the sources for the character of Li Shuangshuang, they hardly seemed adequate. There is an element of ritual in the claims by authors who wrote in the Mao era to have drawn their characters entirely from real life, which allows them not to mention other sources. When I suggested to Li Zhun in 1993 that his heroine, with her forthright nature and sharp tongue (kuaizuizi), was highly reminiscent of an earlier celebrated fictional kuaizuizi, Li Cuilian, he readily admitted that she was indeed a model for Li Shuangshuang. Surprisingly, he said that the likeness had not been noted by anyone else who had written, or spoken to him, about the story or film.

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The character of Li Cuilian has her origins as a “quarrelsome bride” in a Tang dynasty transformation tale (bianwen) preserved among the manuscripts in the Dunhuang caves. In a later version of the tale, she is introduced as follows: The quarrelsome bride in our tale Was one so made by nature. She engaged in duels of the tongue; To argue was her chief concern. Being too audible, she fails to please her new relations: If annoyed, she bellowed like a wounded buffalo; And when she laughed, you heard a creaking windlass.38

Li Cuilian makes a cameo appearance with her husband, Liu Quan, in Chapters 11 and 12 of the Ming masterwork Journey to the West (Xiyouji), when, after an untimely death, she is brought back from the underworld in the physical form of the sister of Emperor Taizong.39 The fullest form of her story, and the one in which her qualities are shown at their comic best, recounts the young bride’s wedding day. It appears in the sixteenth-century collection of storyteller-type tales Qingping shantang huaben (Huaben [vernacular storyteller tales] from the Qingping Studio), which is the version translated by H.C. Chang and quoted here. Li Cuilian is beautiful, capable, garrulous, irascible, and not at all the demure bride idealized in tradition and expected by the groom’s family. Though admonished by her parents to hold her tongue, she orders everyone around, scolds and threatens all who displease her (including her brother- and sister-in-law, the matchmaker, the groom, and his parents), threatens her husband with violence if he misbehaves, and instructs him in bedroom etiquette. Then, when the groom’s infuriated parents send her home, she announces that she will become a nun. Li Zhun was charmed, as readers down the centuries have been, by Li Cuilian’s robust humour, and saw her qualities in some of the peasant women of his own day. In his story, it is the husband Xiwang who urges Shuangshuang to discretion, with the same lack of success as Li Cuilian’s parents. To add to the sharp-tongued Li Cuilian, Li Zhun volunteered another source for his character from a later point in the Chinese tradition: Yingning, the giggling heroine of one of the better-known stories of Strange Tales from Liaozhai (Liaozhai zhiyi) by the Qing author Pu Songling.40 In the story, a young scholar falls for the beautiful, childlike, and mysterious Yingning, whom he believes to be a distant relative. Her incessant laughter continues at their wedding and after marriage, though she is otherwise the model

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daughter-in-law: “She always presented herself at the break of day to ask after the mother’s health. She surpassed all her peers in her cleverness at sewing. The only thing was her predisposition to laughter, which she could not stop even when forbidden. But there was a winning beauty in her laugh, an abandon that did not detract from her charm. Everyone found it delightful.” 41 When she is accused of witchcraft, Yingning becomes serious, confesses to her hus­ band that she is a fox-spirit, and quietens down, though she bears him a son as mirthful as she herself once was. What the characters of Cuilian and Yingning share, in addition to their beauty, youth, humour, and charm, is that both are dangerous to men who cross them. Cuilian instructs her husband to keep his feet to himself in bed after completing his conjugal duties, adding, “If by chance you give even one kick,/Then know it’s death for you!”42 In Yingning’s case, a neighbour tempted by what he mistakes for forwardness on her part presses himself against a wall for a tryst, only to be stung by a giant scorpion, which results in his death. Both women, the appeal of their laughter notwithstanding, are thus a threat to male dominance, just as the women of the Great Leap, emerging from their homes to play their full part in the nation’s advance, put men like Sun Xiwang in their place. If there is a single scene that shows Li Shuangshuang’s indebtedness to both Li Cuilian and Yingning, it is in the mercurial quality she shows during her quarrel with Xiwang over domestic responsibilities, where her mood swings abruptly from vexation to anguish, then to tears, fury, and hilarity. The scene ends with a humiliated Xiwang on his backside and Shuang­ shuang striding out to work. When Xiwang refuses to help her cook, Shuangshuang’s eyes flared. She threw down the knife with a clang: “Eat! You won’t get to eat!” And with that, she slumped down furiously on the doorstep and began to cry. While Shuangshuang sat there in tears, Xiwang acted as though nothing had happened [and began to prepare noodles for himself ] ... Inside the house, Shuangshuang’s wailing became more anguished as Xiwang pounded away at the garlic. Shuangshuang ground her teeth as she watched him prepare the noodles so casually, thinking to herself: “Here I am here crying while you’re there eating. You won’t get your fill!” At that point, she rushed over and delivered two vicious punches to Xiwang’s spine. After taking these two blows, Xiwang yelled: “Fine! You asked for it!” Grabbing the garlic pestle, he turned and was about to hit her back when Shuangshuang grabbed hold of him and gave him a shove that pushed him out of the house and left him sprawling on the ground in the courtyard.

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Once she’d pushed Xiwang to the ground, Shuangshuang couldn’t help herself from bursting out laughing. She laughed so hard she shook the tears off her face and onto the ground.43

This is a passage that shows its indebtedness to the literary sources originally unacknowledged by Li Zhun and unexpected from someone pigeonholed as a “village writer.” Creating a village wife with the volatility of Li Cuilian and the hilarity of Yingning demonstrated an erudition in which Li Zhun took pride and that he believed set him apart from his contemporaries. Flexible Noodles and a Malleable Plot

Li Shuangshuang, a heroine for a new age of collectivization and female emancipation, is a product of both the author’s observation of the changing world around him and his reading from the Chinese tradition: village character, emancipated peasant, sharp-tongued bride, and mirthful vixen. Although she and the transformation in her relationship with Xiwang remain constant, the plot is as malleable as one of the heroine’s celebrated Great Leap noodles. The noodles are created in response to a problem: the patrons of the canteen are not eating much of a porridge made of sweet potatoes, and a man at the canteen (Xiwang in the early version, the former landowner’s son in the later version) says they are just being picky because they are not hungry enough. Resolving to make the sweet potatoes more interesting, Shuangshuang and her female colleagues devise a flapjack, and Xiwang designs a modified stove that will allow them to produce these new delicacies at greater speed. Additionally, in the later version, Shuangshuang and Xiwang stay up all night to perfect a recipe for her new noodle made half from wheat flour and half from sweet-potato flour, which she predictably calls Great Leap noodles. When these are taken out to the field in the canteen’s new insulated food cart, they arouse a delighted response from the consumers: After the food cart was opened, all she could hear was the din of their excitement. One person said: “What kind of noodles are these? They’re like vermicelli!” “Try them, they’re so fine, they’re better than flour noodles.” “You’d never be able to tell these are sweet potato noodles!”44

Quick work, inventiveness, and flexibility were similarly required when Li Zhun revised his own story for the 1962 screen version, retaining and embellishing the characters of Li Shuangshuang and Sun Xiwang and their occasionally stormy relationship, while omitting plot elements no longer part of

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the socialist future, or indeed its present.45 The abandonment of the canteens around 1960, as the story was being published in Renmin wenxue, led Li Zhun to celebrate instead another innovation of the day: the allocation of workpoints under the People’s Communes, a system that was to endure until the disbanding of the communes in the reforms of the early 1980s. Shuang­ shuang’s big-character poster in verse is retained, but it now focuses on this new subject rather than the need for a canteen, and at the mass meeting during which Xiwang is selected for public service, his new job is work-point recorder rather than communal cook. The comic reference to the revolutionary forbears is retained, but Marx and Lenin are now believed to have made pronouncements on work-points rather than canteens. Li Zhun also added two significant plotlines to the film version. In the first, Xiwang joins members of his wealthier kinsman Sun You’s family in a money-making (and thus, in the terms of the film, unsocialist) transportation venture. Leaving Shuang­ shuang in tears after their disagreements, he departs for business trips and returns home to joyful reconciliation. In the second subplot, Guiying is rewritten as the daughter of Sun You. With Shuangshuang’s help, she rejects a marriage planned for her by her parents with a truck-driver from the town, choosing instead the young peasant Erchun, whom her parents felt was beneath her. The parallel between this romance and the love story that develops between the married couple is emphasized in a final idyllic scene where Guiying and Erchun disturb Shuangshuang and Xiwang as they enjoy a picnic together. Xiwang extols his wife’s capability, intelligence, and beauty since she has become a “fine new person” (xinhaoren, in contrast to his own former persona as a weak but obliging laohaoren, “good ol’ boy”). In words taken from the 1959 text of the story, he jokingly chides the youngsters for thinking that only they can be in love: “What’s that, only you can love? You fall in love first and then get married, we got married first and then fell in love!”46 In this scene, and elsewhere, the film adaptation favours the March 1959 text: Li Shuangshuang is a local celebrity but does not attain the national status or the Party membership of the Renmin wenxue version, and Xiwang professes love for her rather than a resolution to emulate her political and ideological advances. The film came out in 1962 at a period of less tension in the arts than was the case in 1959 or 1960, one of the more frenzied moments in the history of the People’s Republic, and was among the comedies produced for popular enjoyment in an interlude before the onset of the Four Clean-ups movement in 1964 and the Cultural Revolution two years after that.47 Though the historical setting remains the Great Leap, the name of the movement is barely mentioned, in contrast to the repeated reference to leaping forward in the Renmin wenxue text. And there are no successive nights of work, allowing

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for an atmosphere in the village relaxed enough for the women to indulge in matchmaking, gossip, and squabbling. Li Shuangshuang, produced in 1962, filmed in black-and-white, and dir­ ected by Lu Ren, was an altogether lighter confection than the story on which it was based. Its charm comes from the natural beauty of the part of Henan where the exteriors were filmed, from a lively musical score by Xiang Yu played on Chinese instruments and incorporating local tunes, and most importantly, from the performances of the established actors Zhang Ruifang, playing the young peasant wife while herself in her early forties, and Zhong Xinghuo as Sun Xiwang.48 The countryside portrayed in the film is fecund, idyllic, and uncrowded; the interiors of the village courtyards and houses are replete with the details of peasant life, with farming tools, patterned fabrics, and kitchen implements, creating an impression of comfort, sufficiency, and elegance. Food is not in short supply, though Li Shuangshuang’s time to prepare it still is; the solution to this problem, however, is a cooperative husband rather than a communal canteen. In the musical score, Xiwang plays a bamboo flute rather than the more piercing suona, and an opera scene is added, along with a cheerful work-song sung by Shuangshuang and other women as they march through fields carrying wheatsheaves on shoulderpoles. In keeping with the romantic and comic nature of the film, Xiwang’s bullying of his wife is toned down, with Shuangshuang the stronger figure throughout. In his comments on the film, Jay Leyda noted that Li Zhun’s adaptation, “probably through no fault of his, lowered the dramatic level of his idea and the political effectiveness of his story.”49 The film is indeed less about empowerment and more about romance, with the focus more than ever on the couple at the centre.50 Li Shuangshuang’s emotional volatility is emphasized in Zhang Ruifang’s portrayal, never more so than in the pivotal argument over domestic responsibilities, in a swift progression from tears (as Xiwang makes noodles for himself to eat), to fury (as she punches him on the back), to sudden braying laughter worthy of her literary antecedents Li Cuilian and Yingning (at the sight of him lying prostrate). During the course of the film, Li Shuangshuang laughs more than twenty times. Xiwang’s departures with Sun You’s transportation business also have her crying with a similar lack of restraint. It is easy to believe the report that the film was unpopular with Mao’s wife, Jiang Qing, the leading figure in Cultural Revolution cultural policy, whose preferred cinematic emotional outburst was righteous indignation. She is said to have reviled the film and its central character’s “sobbing and laughing” (kuku-xiaoxiao).51 Jiang Qing might also have dis­ approved of the affectionate glances that Zhang Ruifang’s Li Shuangshuang directs toward the returning Xiwang as he chops wood in the family courtyard,

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3  Frame 77 from part 2 of Hua Sanchuan’s illustrated “Li Shuangshuang xiaozhuan.” The caption reads, “Through several days of arduous endeavour, Li Shuangshuang and the canteen cooks combined white flour and sweet-potato flour to make Great Leap noodles. In addition, they came up with a multi-level six-plate flapjack stove. The stove was mainly to save person-power and fuel, one person could make 400 flapjacks in an hour.”

Source: Li Zhun, “Li Shuangshuang xiaozhuan,” text by Bai Zi and illustrations by Hua Sanchuan, Lianhuan huabao 218 (21 June 1960): 21. Reproduced from a photograph taken by Yin Hongbiao of the copy of the journal in Beijing University library.

and their final romantic moment. The film is an entertainment, set in a pastoral socialist future where equitably distributed rewards create conditions for romance for courting couples and married couples alike. With its straightforward narrative and uplifting music, it is tailored to the viewing preferences of a rural audience who might be shown the film in a village threshingground by one of the peripatetic projection teams of the 1960s and ‘70s.52 The comic-strip (lianhuanhua) version of the story, which was illustrated by Hua Sanchuan and serialized in 1960 in two issues of the journal Lianhuan huabao, follows the Renmin wenxue text, complete with Xiwang’s musical pigs. He Youzhi’s 1964 pictorial book is based on the filmscript, though the characters as they are drawn do not resemble the film’s actors, and the secondary love story of Guiying and Erchun is left out. Unlike the bold lines and simple style adopted in Hua Sanchuan’s illustrations (which may, like other

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4  Illustration from the comic-book Li Shuangshuang. The caption reads, “Shuangshuang snatched the bundle and said: ‘You can’t go! I’m the team-leader now, and I need your help, you’re not thinking about me, I can’t [manage].’ She leaned her head on Xiwang’s shoulder and began to cry, sobbing and moaning.” 

Source: Li Zhun, Li Shuangshuang xiaozhuan, text by Lu Zhongjian and illustrations by He Youzhi (1964; repr., Shanghai: Shanghai renmin chubanshe, 1977), 95.

Great Leap cultural products, have been completed at speed), He Youzhi’s illustrations follow the film in their plethora of detail, drawn in fine lines, frequently against a blank background.53 A frame from each serves to illustrate the differences in style, each depicting a moment that does not appear in the other. In Figure 3, from Hua Sanchuan’s version, a jubilant Shuangshuang demonstrates the texture of her Great Leap noodles. Figure 4, from He Youzhi’s Li Shuangshuang, is of a tearful Shuangshuang pleading with Xiwang not to leave. The bold vigour and heavy lines of the first contrast with the meticulous drawing of the patterned wall, the teapot, Shuangshuang’s jacket, and Xiwang’s travel-bundle in the second. In a reading of the story and the film that focuses on the folk elements of Li Zhun’s work, Chen Sihe reaches the following conclusion about their relative merits: “In comparing the story ‘A Brief Biography of Li Shuangshuang’ and the film Li Shuangshuang, though both are the work of the same author, and both similarly carry the subjective intent to praise the new people and new things of the Great Leap Forward in the villages, the former is a lifeless piece of ephemeral propaganda, while the latter transcends the limitations

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of its time, becoming an excellent film comedy with a long life as a work of art.”54 Chen attributes this to a greater influence of folk traditions in the film; for example, he cites the banter between Shuangshuang and Xiwang, which he says is based on a folk performance known simply as erren (two persons), where a comic dialogue is carried on between dan (female) and chou (comic male/clown) characters, with the dan having the upper hand.55 I recognize the extremely ephemeral nature of the public canteens, and the sour taste their memory has left, and also the excellence of the principals playing Li Shuangshuang and Sun Xiwang in the film. Nonetheless, I would maintain that both story and film are equally propaganda for a lost cause (though work-points outlasted the kitchens by two decades), and yet both retain the capacity to arouse and amuse because of the mercurial nature of the central character. Combining as she does antecedents from Li Zhun’s own family and personal experience with certain characters from the Chinese tradition, Li Shuangshuang possesses individuality and unpredictability, at least by comparison with other characters created during the Mao era, and was flexible enough to survive with her charm intact the changes imposed on her by the vagaries of history. The Morality of Revolutionary Romanticism

How was it possible for Li Zhun, an author with deep roots in rural Henan, to have produced, well into the Great Leap, such an unambiguously loyalist and optimistic picture of an initiative that led to the largest famine of the twentieth century? Was he a mere hack, turning out propaganda on command, or, worse, a coward who knew better but wrote what was expected of him to avoid trouble? Or was he taken in by the state propaganda surrounding the Great Leap and persuaded that the tales he must have heard of hunger, begging, and death were rumours and exaggerations, or if true, unfortunate potholes on the broad road to a glorious future? As Li Zhun presented himself later (and here again I acknowledge that memory and vanity can play tricks with the best of interview subjects), he was no blind Party loyalist, had received little or no political education, and was not instructed regarding what he should write. He would have been too proud to accept the role of “cog and screw in the revolutionary machine” assigned to “workers in the arts” by Mao at Yan’an. Li Shuangshuang is the product of his imagination and his experience, both literary and personal. That being said, Li Zhun had seen what happened to the rightists, had faced criticism himself in 1957, and was aware both of the kind of fiction the Party wanted and of what happened to authors who incurred its wrath. He certainly took the path that would allow him to continue in his chosen career.56

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One writer at least did speak against the excesses of the Great Leap, though not in fiction. In 1959, true to the persona created for him at Yan’an as the spokesman for the peasantry, Zhao Shuli wrote a series of reports and letters in which he criticized the management of the newly formed People’s Com­ munes and the communal kitchens, and drew attention to the suffering of the peasants in the Great Leap. He sent these to local and provincial leaders, to Chen Boda, editor of the Party journal Red Flag (Hongqi), and to Shao Quanlin, head of the Writers’ Association. Zhao was harshly attacked for his temerity, notably at a meeting held at the Writers’ Association in November of that year, where the case against him was summarized by his fellow author Shao Quanlin. Shao’s final point (as reported in Chen Tushou’s presentation of documents relating to Zhao’s case) was a chilling reminder of the limits that authors faced in the Anti-Rightist Campaign: “There is only one truth: is the Party right or are you right? Is the Central Committee wrong or are you wrong? This is a penetrating question that Zhao Shuli must articulate and address, [he] must submit to the truth.”57 During a briefly more liberal period in 1962, Shao Quanlin was reportedly preparing to retreat from his denunciation of Zhao Shuli, to commend his independent thinking, and even to praise his 1959 writings as a “victory of realism.” But another sharp change in political climate, following Mao’s injunction “never forget class struggle,” meant that he did not inform Zhao of any change of heart.58 Knowledge of subsequent events makes it difficult to understand the euphoria expressed by the early Red Flag balladeers and fiction writers, and shared by many as the Great Leap began. William Hinton’s informants in Hebei and Shanxi recalled a time of excitement, shared endeavour, an enthusiastic workforce, and plenty to eat in the public canteens: “Those were great days! Great days!”59 For most in the villages, it seems, the Party and its leader still had sufficient credibility that they were prepared to accept the improbable vision of the future and the plausibility of the steps taken to achieve it.60 Li Zhun’s eulogy of the canteens was not the only story by a leading writer in those heady years to praise a short-lived but eventually disastrous rural initiative: both Ma Feng and Hao Ran wrote stories set against the background of village iron smelting, though these are not among the authors’ more memorable works. There is no reason to doubt Li Zhun’s enthusiasm for the canteen movement in its early months, though by the time he revised the story for Renmin wenxue in early 1960, many of the canteens had already closed.61 What is harder to accept are the images of contented, purposeful, and well-fed peasants going about their productive, social, and romantic business in the 1962 film Li Shuangshuang, after three years of

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famine. Li Zhun was more of a loyalist than he cared to admit, and his acceptance and promotion of the “revolutionary idealism” (or utopian fantasy) of the Great Leap drew him as far from realistic portrayal of life in the Chinese countryside as he was ever to go.

4 Hu Wanchun’s “A Man of Outstanding Quality”: Pavel, but Not Rita, and Certainly Not Ingrid, in the Shanghai Dockyards The “army of proletarian individuals” summoned forth by Zhou Yang as replacements for those identified as rightists in 1958 comprised, by implication, both new subjects (willing subjects of the state and suitable subjects for the arts) and the artists who would portray them. To village writers like Li Zhun fell the task of producing models for achievement in the initiatives of the rural Great Leap – the canteens, construction projects, iron smelting, and increased output of the grain that would pay the nation’s debts, provide international aid, finance industrial development, and nourish the growing urban population. As the works of fiction considered in the first three chapters show, the Chinese literary tradition provided rich materials for authors prepared to draw on them as they contrived to create characters and plots that would reflect the life and struggles of the moment in ways that would accord with the cultural policies of their days. The situation was different for those with a lesser grasp of cultural traditions, who were instead dependent on Party educators for their literacy and cultural training. These included young writers drawn from the ranks of the industrial proletariat, who were assiduously cultivated, or “nurtured” (peiyang), after the communists took control of the cities. There had been few proletarians in the Red Army or the communist base areas during the civil war, and the opportunity to train a cohort of writers from what was supposed to be the politically most advanced class did not present itself until after 1949. Once selected, these young writers were provided with sustained instruction as well as the time needed to create their works. Supervision of the worker-writers was much closer than was the case for their village counterparts, nowhere more so than in Shanghai, a city both suspect for its cosmopolitan recent past and vital for the development of the People’s Republic as an industrial power. This chapter focuses on the leading Chinese worker-writer of the 1950s, the Shanghai steelworker Hu Wanchun, and his Great Leap story “A Man of Outstanding Quality” (Teshu xingge de ren), identified by Lars Ragvald as “the first successful piece of movement-literature ever to be written by a [Chinese] worker-writer.”1 It also discusses the relationship of that work with

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the novel in the Soviet canon that was used to inspire several generations of socialist youth, Nikolai Ostrovsky’s How the Steel Was Tempered.2 The Romance of Industry

The totemic goal of the Great Leap Forward in industry was the production of steel, the marker by which Mao Zedong had vowed to surpass the United Kingdom in fifteen years, the same deadline that Soviet president Nikita Khrushchev had set for the USSR to outproduce the United States in the same commodity. In the second half of 1958, Mao, believing wrongly that an ample supply of grain was assured, became obsessed with steel, demanding a doubling of production for that year and envisaging a further doubling in 1959 and yet another tripling, or even quadrupling, by 1962.3 This fantasy was fed by the Shanghai Communist Party secretary Ke Qingshi, whose baleful influence on Chairman Mao regarding the question of steel production resembled that of his Henan counterpart Wu Zhipu in setting unattainable targets for grain. The Great Leap had an effect on the cities, though much less than the countryside: in recognition of the importance of industrial production, and perhaps mindful of the greater potential for volatility among the urban proletariat, the Communist Party largely insulated the cities from the famines that beset much of the countryside during the Great Leap. Food supplies were reduced, though these reductions were nowhere near the catastrophic declines in nutrition suffered in the poorer provinces. Shanghai fared best among the great cities, due in part to its proximity to the wealthier provinces of Jiangsu and Zhejiang; welfare payments to the urban unemployed continued during the famine years, though at lower levels, and more people were pressed into employment in the service of the Great Leap. Shanghai death rates for the period were lower than those for Beijing and Tianjin, the other two cities under direct central control.4 In the cities, as in the villages, the Great Leap was ushered in with “new folk-songs.” Of the new folk-songs selected by Zhou Yang and Guo Moruo for the 1959 collection Red Flag Ballads, only forty are found in the volume’s third section, “Songs of the Great Leap Forward in Industry,” less than a third of the number in the second section of “Songs of the Great Leap Forward in Agriculture,” an indication of the greater importance placed by the editors on the rural poets. However, there were plenty of verses with urban and industrial settings: following the call to collect folk-songs in early 1958, “several million pieces were collected” in Shanghai alone, of which two thousand were published.5 Later that year, the Shanghai authorities released a collection of poems in the new folk-song style from the city and its environs with an introduction by Ke Qingshi, anticipating the nationwide selection made

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in 1959 by Zhou Yang and Guo Moruo.6 The poems from Shanghai cover themes recognizable from the village verses of Red Flag Ballads. They depict conquest of the forces of nature, as canal-builders infuriate the Dragon-king by digging into his palace to claim water for rice-cultivation; superiority to the heroes of legend, with the harnessing of rivers by the sage-emperor Yu no match for the feats of the moment; women competing with men in contributing labour to the Great Leap; and the courtship of young people too busy for traditional niceties, the girl offering a red flag as her trousseau to her model worker beau.7 Themes particular to the Shanghai collection are the overtaking of the United Kingdom in steel production and, in a selection of “songs from the alleyways” (lilong geyao), a celebration of Soviet ascendancy in the space-race.8 The Shanghai collection ends with a brief three-poem section of sheer euphoria, celebrating achievements too numerous to be captured in words. The first poem in this group calls to mind the drums and gongs, frequently mounted on the backs of trucks, used to make triumphs generally known: Eight drums broken every day, Ten gongs shattered every night; Not that they were poorly made, There is just so much good news! 9

The final poem in the volume presents the worker-poets overwhelmed by the magnitude of their celebration: We set down our hammers and take up our pens, All of us promoting the General Line; We could write till the Huangpu waters run dry, The joy in our hearts never fully set down.10

The aesthetic wonders of heavy industry are elaborated in “The Chim­ ney,” a verse from the Shanghai volume also selected for Red Flag Ballads. In the poem, the factory chimney is likened to the brush of the painter or calligrapher: High, high it stands against the brim of the clouds, The black smoke curls its way through the blue sky. Which tree is as tall as you? Which bamboo is as tall as you? You are an iron arm

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Raised towards the sky as slogans are shouted. You are the writing-brush Depicting the spring-like fatherland. 11

This ballad was singled out for praise by Yao Wenyuan, then a young critic who was fast becoming a rising star in the cultural politics of his native city. Like Zhou Yang in his praise of the new folk-songs as a whole, Yao used this poem both to heap praise on the new proletarian forces in the arts and to heap abuse on the intellectuals (a class in which both Yao and Zhou could legitimately have claimed membership) in the anti-rightist spirit of the moment: “It is work that creates beautiful objects. The working people create the world through labour. All natural resources and objects containing the imprint of labour are beautiful in the eyes of the labouring people and can give rise to aesthetic imagination. Therefore the beautiful objects in the folksongs by far transcend the narrow circle of the life of the intellectuals.”12 Yao, who was to become a major national political figure during the Cul­ tural Revolution, and one of the “Gang of Four” purged in 1976, had distinguished himself while in his midtwenties with a vitriolic attack on Hu Feng, then the target of a campaign orchestrated by Mao.13 For Yao, aesthetics was subsumed within political utility, and he had no patience for the subjectivism of Hu Feng or the humanistic values of the “rightists” of the Hundred Flowers period. His career advanced in times of political extremism on the part of the Communist Party, in the Great Leap Forward, and then more spectacularly at the beginning of the Cultural Revolution. During the Great Leap, he functioned principally as a literary and cultural critic but also assumed additional responsibilities in the Youth League and the Shanghai Writers’ Union.14 Like activists in other fields, Yao felt obliged to set himself production tar­ gets for the Great Leap: in his case, to write 100,000 characters of literary criticism in 1958-59.15 His purpose in this period was to introduce and promote not only the new poetry, but also writers of the kind that would replace the intellectuals as creators of fiction in the Great Leap, and the first piece he wrote in pursuit of his goal of advanced productivity was an introduction to the second volume of short stories by Hu Wanchun. While admonishing Hu Wanchun for his insufficient enthusiasm for the movement, and recommending greater romanticism, Yao nonetheless compared the spirit of Hu Wanchun’s works favourably with those of the European realists Stendahl and Romain Rolland.16 For Yao, in his judgment of fiction as well as of poetry, the political was paramount, and as long as he approved of a work’s political stance, he was prepared to pronounce it great art.

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Hu Wanchun as the Model Worker-Writer

Like Yao Wenyuan, Hu Wanchun (1928-98) was well positioned for advancement in the Great Leap. Biographies invariably present him as a worker groomed by the authorities as a writer, from first attempts at reportage to clumsy early stories that were “not much above the level of newspaper reporting.”17 Hu was born to desperately poor parents in Shanghai and received little or no formal education. As a child he showed some talent for drawing: one contribution to the family income was the design of floral patterns for his sister’s embroidery and for sale to other girls who made their living through needlework. In the early 1940s, Hu began work at a steel-mill; after 1949, he received literacy education and was trained to write short propaganda pieces. A first brief story was published in the Shanghai newspaper Wenhuibao in 1952. Hu Wanchun was one of the young writers selected for nurture by the authorities. Unlike Li Zhun, he was not given a salary to write full-time; instead, he was moved from the shop-floor to an administrative position, with time allowed for study and creative work, and further coaching in the craft of writing. In 1955, Hu was invited to a workshop for authors in the resort town of Beidaihe, where he wrote “Flesh and Bone” (Gu rou), the story that established him as a writer and received a literary award in the Soviet Union. In 1956, Hu attended a conference for young writers in Beijing and on his return was assigned to an editorial position at a literary magazine. One further element can be added to the formative influences in Hu Wanchun’s cultural education. When I arranged to speak to him in 1990, he chose to begin our meeting at the door of Shanghai’s Ping’an Cinema on Nanjing Road, a place that held special significance for him. The Ping’an, known in the Republican period as the Uptown Theatre and located on what was then called Bubbling Well Road, was the cinema into which Hu Wanchun had sneaked without paying as a youth, and where, he claimed, he had seen almost all the Hollywood movies that had played in Shanghai.18 Even in 1990, he recalled many of the films he had seen, and he retained a nostalgic longing for the Swedish actress Ingrid Bergman. It is hard to see how this aspect of his cultural education influenced his narrative style, but for him it was sufficiently significant in his growth as a writer to make it the starting point for the narrative of his artistic development.19 His fondness for the beautiful star of Casablanca was probably something he chose not to share with his writing coaches in the 1950s; his Mao-era biography and fiction adhere strictly to the codes of the time. “Flesh and Bone,” the author’s most successful work prior to the Great Leap, is an exercise in the “bitter past” genre, the tale of a poor couple forced

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to give their daughter to a childless creditor in payment of a debt when the father loses his job.20 The story was partly autobiographical: the author was indeed separated from a younger sister in childhood and reunited with her later in life. The father in the story (none of the family members is named) is too ground down by his poverty and failure to fight back, merely predicting a revolution and expressing the hope that the world will get better. It is left to the narrator, the son, to launch a courageous but futile attack on the family’s oppressors. The story is affectingly told: the little sister is convincingly portrayed as an innocent victim, and the plot is revealed gradually as the boy becomes aware of the tragedy that is overtaking his family. The story was part of the project of writing the history of the Shanghai proletariat for the age of socialism; the past is a tale of poverty, oppression, and suffering, and the communist revolution is the answer to the longings of the oppressed for a better life. Since the story is set before 1949, the future is only dreamed of by the characters, to be inferred by its readers as having already arrived. Hu Wanchun’s later fiction, though set in a happier present, is similarly oriented toward an ideal future. Steel on the Waterfront

Like Li Zhun’s Li Shuangshuang, the protagonist of Hu Wanchun’s “A Man of Outstanding Quality,” Wang Gang, was a model for a great age, this time on the industrial front. Wang’s given name means “steadfast” and is homophonous with the word for “steel,” the national obsession of the moment. Lest the implications of his name be lost, his nickname is Alloy Steel (Hejingang). Wang is an experienced stevedore, a Party member, a mighty physical specimen, a tireless worker, a crafty negotiator, a brilliant planner, and a caring and inspirational leader. He is also a renaissance man, a painter and a visionary, the embodiment of the revolutionary realist and the revolutionary romantic, just as the story that features him follows the “creative method” of the combination of revolutionary realism and revolutionary romanticism introduced by Zhou Yang for the Great Leap. For a story and a hero new to China, Hu Wanchun and his advisors drew extensively on Soviet antecedents, though the powerful black-bearded Chinese outlaw hero Li Kui is also cited in the physical description of the protagonist. The story’s title recalls Stalin’s speech at Lenin’s funeral, as much a eulogy of the speaker as of the departed: “We, the communists, are people of a special mould. We are made of special stuff.” 21 In his title, his hero, his theme – the successful completion of an impossible task – and the model cited for youthful endeavour, Hu Wanchun stays remarkably close to Soviet models.

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The narrator first encounters the dock worker Wang Gang by chance, as he visits the docks prior to taking up an administrative position there. Noticing a man painting a picture of Shanghai’s industrial waterfront, he engages him in conversation without learning his name. The painting manifests the same romanticism about industry as the new folk-song about the factory chimney, or indeed as the story in which it appears: It was a Sunday afternoon, and the docks were not as bustling as usual. The sun was hot as burning coals, so that my skin felt scorched under its glare. As I went past Number Four Dock, I noticed in the distance a well-built man, stripped to the waist, sitting on the wooden piling and painting. Out of curiosity, I went over to this “painter.” When I got closer to him, I realized what a powerful physique he had! I thought only weight-lifters had such muscular bodies. His upper body was bare, revealing rippling muscles on broad shoulders and a back strong as a bear. Around his sturdy waist was a length of blue cloth of the kind used by dock workers as a pad between their shoulder and their carrying-poles. His nut-brown skin glistened under the scorching sun. Strangely enough, the painter paid no attention to the baking heat, but concentrated intensely; with his palette in one hand and a brush in the other, he was applying water-colour to a large sheet of paper. So intensely was he concentrating that it seemed as if his whole life-force was focused on his work. He did not even turn when I stood behind him, so I had a chance to evaluate his painting. And what a fine painting it was! Not only had he represented the busy and clamorous scene of the Huangpu waterfront, he had also captured the beauty of the Huangpu River itself. The reflection of the cranes in the water was particularly well done, with the colours splendidly chosen, so that the scene was both realistic and poetic. I could not prevent myself from gasping with astonishment and amazement ... With this, I disturbed the “painter,” who suddenly wheeled to face me. His face was craggy and robust, with thick black eyebrows. He was deeply tanned, and his cheeks and chin were steely grey from his stubbly whiskers. I thought to myself, this hardly looks like [my idea of ] a painter! If he let his beard grow, he’d end up looking like the Black Whirlwind Li Kui. I sensed his piercing eyes glowering at me with an expression of some dislike. I hastily and tactfully avoided his look and said nothing. When I looked again, he seemed to understand what I had been thinking, for he flashed the slightest of smiles, then shot me a stern questioning look, as if to ask, “Not a bad painting, huh?” Feeling less tense, I plucked up my courage to ask him, “Excuse me, where are you from?”

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With a ringing voice, he said, “Me? I’m a worker here!” He spoke casually and then turned back to his painting and paid me no further attention. Only then did I notice calluses the size of bread-rolls on both his shoulders, the defining characteristic of dock workers and others who work carrying shoulder-poles. From this I deduced that he must have been working here twenty years or more. He did not say anything else to me. In order not to disturb his painting any more, I moved quietly away. But I still had trouble reconciling the bread-rollsized calluses with the beautiful water-colour. I was a bit puzzled.22

We are to learn more about Wang as painter in one of the many flashbacks used to fill out the portrait of the new socialist man, this one supplied by the factory manager. Before arriving at the Shanghai docks, Wang is said to have worked at the Summer Palace in Beijing, where he was moved to paint the beauty he observed. Later, lying stranded and destitute by a railway line, Wang looks up through a burn-hole in his overcoat at the night sky and is again inspired to re-create the scene: “Dammit (caodande), it’s so great! If I could paint these beautiful stars, how fine that would be! One of these days I’m going to paint the loveliest things!”23 The quest for beauty and perfection is an essential part of the makeup of the hero of the industrial Great Leap. The story’s narrator takes over responsibility for transportation at the docks just as heavy rains destroy the foundation of railway lines at the docks, threatening the supply of materials to steel-mills struggling to meet their increased quotas (and the nation’s doubled quota) for 1958. The task set for the story is the removal of a pile of slag and the repair of rail-lines under adverse con­ ditions in a limited time. As the situation becomes ever more serious, the narrator asks for assistance and is assigned an experienced worker by the name of  Wang Gang. Even before Wang takes up his duties, events and stories combine to build up his image as a proletarian superman: first, still recognized by the narrator only as the dockside painter, he uses a massive beam as a lever to lift a damaged section of track to allow others to lay solid material underneath it; then others tell stories of his resourcefulness in getting needed materials and motivating workers to perform difficult and unpleasant tasks. One of his exploits, persuading labourers to leap with him into cold water to repair the infrastructure of the docks, is a precursor to the legendary heroism of the Daqing oil-worker “Iron-man” Wang Jinxi, whose celebrated leap into liquid concrete would be re-created by Hao Ran in The Golden Road as a model of proletarian behaviour for peasants to emulate.24 When he shows up, Wang predictably turns out to be the artist. The narrator is put off by his apparent over-confidence in his ability to

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achieve the impossible in the battle against time and nature but becomes persuaded as Wang trades off favours with managers to get the materials and rolling stock he needs. When one manager resists, Wang Gang, taking advantage of the same Great Leap innovation as Li Shuangshuang, threatens to put up a big-character poster criticizing him. Wang is concerned for the welfare of his colleagues, insisting that they rest while he tirelessly makes arrangements. He also co-opts a group of students sent to help at the docks. The climax of the story comes on the final day of the time allowed to mend the rail-lines. With locomotives, railcars, materials, and personnel in place, Wang Gang prepares the Party and Youth League members of his workforce with an inspirational speech. For this, he draws on the Soviet fictional hero presented to Chinese youth as their model in the 1950s: Pavel Korchagin, the central figure in Nikolai Ostrovsky’s novel How the Steel Was Tempered. The Soviet Model for the Man of Steel

Ostrovsky’s novel, of which the first draft was written and lost in the mail in 1928 when the author was twenty-four years old, was rewritten and published in two volumes in 1932 and 1934, coming to national attention when a biography of the author was published in the Soviet Communist Party newspaper Pravda in 1935. The novel draws heavily on the life of its author, who was born in Ukraine, fought with the Red Army in the civil war, and was severely wounded in 1920, at the age of sixteen. He then became sick while taking part in the building of a railway to Boyarka Station, close to Kiev. After his health deteriorated further, he began to write his novel in response to a call from the Central Committee of the Soviet Youth League for fiction with heroic images of the revolution, writing in Russian rather than Ukrainian. The novel is a heroic, even mythic, biography of Pavel Korchagin, from a childhood of poverty, through commitment to the revolution and participation in the civil war, to his sanatorium death-bed, blinded and crippled by war-wounds and illness but determined to complete the manuscript of his own novel. During the course of How the Steel Was Tempered, he has two great unconsummated romances, the first with the bourgeois Tonya, whom he leaves because of their political incompatibility, and a second, more memorable relationship, with his comrade and teacher Rita, before marrying another young woman to save her from her bullying father. The novel, initially scorned by critics as being crudely written, became one of the most significant works in the canon of Soviet socialist realism, principally because of its author’s personal history and its hero’s exemplary life of achievement despite suffering. Katerina Clark notes that “from the mid-thirties on, the consensus of Soviet criticism [was] that Korchagin is the positive hero in Soviet literature,

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the model figure for the Soviet people to emulate.”25 The author’s celebrity was established when he was awarded the Order of Lenin in 1935, the year before his death, the first Soviet writer so honoured. How the Steel Was Tempered was translated into Chinese, first from the Japanese in 1937 and then from the English during the early 1940s. The latter translation, by Mei Yi, was the more popular with Chinese readers and was among the most read books in the country following the establishment of the People’s Republic in 1949 – more than 2 million copies were sold between 1949 and 1953.26 The novel was dramatized in China for stage and radio, and two Soviet screen versions were shown. The second of these, produced in 1956 and titled Pavel Korchagin, was dubbed into Chinese and distributed widely in 1957.27 The popularity of the film was enhanced by a much-publicized visit to China by Ostrovsky’s widow, Raisa, in January 1957. How the Steel Was Tempered was regarded as both great literature and instructional manual throughout the Soviet Union, where it was taught in elementary school (unexpurgated, despite the sexual tension that pervades the book). Schools, clubs, and other youth-oriented organizations were named after Pavel. In Ukraine, students were taken on school trips to Boyarka Station, the site of the railway line built in the novel by Pavel and his comrades to bring wood for fuel to Kiev during the civil war. Since this was a heroic exploit supposedly based on the life of the author, the characters of Ostrovsky and Korchagin became conflated in activities of this kind, as they did in the study of the novel as a model for behaviour.28 Ostrovsky’s novel had a Chinese inheritor in the fictionalized autobiography by the coal-miner and civil war military hero Wu Yunduo, Everything for the Party (Ba yiqie xian gei dang), published in 1953.29 Hospitalized after be­ing wounded in battle late in the book, Wu recalls his earlier experience of reading How the Steel Was Tempered and resolving to live a life worthy of its hero. In Moscow for medical treatment, he visits the Ostrovsky Museum and meets the author’s widow, writing his own story at her urging.30 Wu Yunduo was feted by China’s leaders in 1951 and hailed as “China’s Pavel Korchagin.”31 Al­ though his book never challenged Ostrovsky’s in popularity, it became a motivational text for youth. The story “What Instructor Bu Gao Thought,” another sample of Hu Wanchun’s Great Leap output, concludes with a copy of Wu Yunduo’s book being presented by the title character to his headstrong former apprentice, moving the young man to tears.32 Thus, both Ostrovsky’s original and its Chinese imitator serve as subtexts for Hu Wanchun’s Great Leap fiction, an indication of the importance of How the Steel Was Tempered in China during the 1950s.

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In China, How the Steel Was Tempered was, as Rudolf Wagner explains, “translated into a behavioural model for young cadres, and an administrative handbook for organization departments dealing with these youths ... The readers were required to live their lives as a quotation of Pavel’s.”33 Pavel’s status as a model for Chinese youth declined in the 1960s, due both to the Sino-Soviet split and the development of homegrown models in the persons of martyred boy-soldiers such as Ouyang Hai, Wang Jie, and most importantly, Lei Feng. At the time of the Great Leap Forward, however, Pavel was still the pre-eminent prototype for youthful endeavour, and thanks in part to the steel metaphor of the title, How the Steel Was Tempered constituted the ideal subtext for a story set against a background of heavy industry at a time of steel frenzy. A general Chinese readership in the late 1950s would also have had its youthful memories of the story revived by viewing the new film version.34 In “A Man of Outstanding Quality” Wang Gang refers to the Boyarka Station episode of How the Steel Was Tempered but so briefly that Chinese readers of the day were clearly expected to be familiar with it and able to fill in the details for themselves. The account of building the railway line from Boyarka Station to Kiev was one of the most celebrated parts of the novel and had been included in Chinese school textbooks.35 Pavel’s situation at that point is strikingly similar to that of Wang and his co-workers: in the unfavourable weather of the Ukrainian winter, Pavel and his comrades must complete a stretch of railway track to permit the transportation of timber. They triumph against all odds; an onlooker exclaims, “What on earth is it with these people? Where does this extraordinary strength come from? ... These folk are breaking all standards and reckonings in their work.”36 Here is the passage in which Wang Gang employs the heroic example of Pavel Korchagin to good effect: At 10 a.m., with the help of the Party branch general secretary, he [Wang Gang] called a meeting of the Party and Youth League members of the transportation detachment. At the meeting, I outlined the overall situation. Then he gave a motivational speech, and told them a story, the section of How the Steel Was Tempered where Pavel builds the railway line. He spoke crisply and forcefully. It was stirring stuff, and the people in the meeting-hall soon got pretty inspired. Finally, he asked: “Each of us, Party and Youth League members, should we act like Pavel?” “Act like Pavel!” came the answering roar from the whole hall. When his speech was finished, everyone in the hall applauded fervently.37

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Wang Gang’s citing of this extraordinary achievement motivates his audience, and its task is likewise completed. Soviet workers in the 1930s had been presented with the legend of Alexei Stakhanov, a miner who had massively overfulfilled his quota for coal extraction; workers who produced comparable feats in different industries were known as Stakhanovites in his honour. In “A Man of Outstanding Qual­ity,” the dockers and students become by implication Chinese Stakhanovites, or­ dinary proletarians who transcend human frailties and achieve even the most ambitious goals. In the Soviet Union, such models had been the subjects of a series of hagiographic biographies launched by Maxim Gorky in 1933, The Lives of Remarkable People.38 Hu Wanchun’s man of outstanding quality, in­ dus­trial worker, Party member, visionary artist, crafty operator, and charismatic leader, a combination of Chinese reality and a foreign mythology, is the encapsulation of the Party’s dream that the leap into communism could be achieved by the proletariat and without the intellectuals. Toward the end of “A Man of Outstanding Quality,” the hero, mission accomplished, remarks to the narrator, “I was just wondering, when we get to communism, what the taste of work will be like? Will it be even more beautiful? Eh?”39 Wang Gang is allowed by the author to be exhausted – the last paragraph of “A Man of Out­standing Quality” has Wang mumbling incoherently as he falls asleep – but only after the task is completed.40 So, though Wang Gang is not entirely “excluded from the everyday cycle of human passions and weaknesses” (as Slavoj Žižek says the heroes of Soviet fiction are), human frailties do not interfere with his personal leap forward.41 At the end of the twentieth century, another Chinese writer of proletarian origins returned to How the Steel Was Tempered to refashion Pavel Korchagin for a new generation. By the time he wrote the screenplay for a ChineseUkrainian television serialization, Liang Xiaosheng was an older, bettereducated, and more accomplished writer than Hu Wanchun had been in the late 1950s, and he was working in an environment when appeal to the market, rather than to the Party, was the way to reach an audience.42 For Liang Xiaosheng, as for many Soviet-era readers of the original, the novel was most memorable as a love story, beginning with the romance between Pavel and Tonya in the early chapters. However, Liang Xiaosheng writes, “I confess that in the book How the Steel Was Tempered, the character I truly love is not Pavel or Tonya, but Rita,” a reference to Pavel’s second love, his comrade and teacher.43 Liang Xiaosheng’s refashioning of the novel for Chinese audiences at the turn of the century, with the love story restored, was a very different creation from Hu Wanchun’s. The writers of Great Leap urban fiction, like the industrial poets of Red Flag Ballads, have revolutionary romanticism

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rather than romance on their minds; the heroes for emulation by young readers are seen at the workplace, a much more austere milieu than the villages of Great Leap rural stories. There is no place for Tonya or Rita (let alone Ingrid Bergman) in Hu Wanchun’s Great Leap dockyard. Revolutionary Romantics at Risk

The heroic images of the stories in this chapter and the previous one, and the irrepressible optimism expressed about the Great Leap, stand in stark contrast to the historical record. Although the fiction shows a time of joyful shared endeavour, we now remember the Great Leap for its mismanagement and catastrophic results. Hu Wanchun is less culpable in terms of painting an unrealistically rosy portrait of Great Leap China than was Li Zhun when he wrote the screenplay for Li Shuangshuang. “A Man of Outstanding Quality” was written earlier in the Great Leap, before the worst was felt or known, a defence that cannot be offered for Li Zhun. Hu Wanchun and his story were located in Shanghai, which was insulated by government subsidy from the sufferings of rural China; and as a worker-writer he was much less an independent actor than were the village authors, and thus his literary output was closely controlled. For all the creators of Great Leap art, be it fiction, poetry, painting, or film, it is important to bear in mind that, given the nature of socialist realism (or revolutionary romanticism), these inspiring images were not designed to be an accurate picture of the realities of the day. The Great Leap stories considered above are set at a moment that never happened, in the transition to a future that never came, the product of a fantasy on the part of the Party leadership passed down through the media and the apparatus of Party control to writers whose task was to share the leaders’ vision with their audience. With his hero Wang Gang, Hu Wanchun was said to have created “a real person endowed with the qualities of the future,” a formulation that is reminiscent of Zhdanov’s requirement of literature that it combine “the most quotidian and concrete of realities and ... the most heroic and grandiose vision of the future.”44 Factors far beyond Hu Wanchun’s control rendered that particular version of the future unattainable, though the nation was well on the way to achieving the status of an industrial power within his lifetime. From their knowledge of rural Henan and industrial Shanghai, two very significant areas in the history of the Great Leap Forward, the authors Li Zhun and Hu Wanchun wrote inspiring fiction and created heroic figures for emulation in the campaign. Li Zhun, as a more educated author with a stronger background in literature, appears to have been relatively free to write what he chose, though he was clearly careful to adhere to Party orthodoxy.

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His determination to be a full-time writer in the socialist system led inevitably to residence in the “velvet prison” of official sponsorship, though he was to exchange those quarters for a much less comfortable enclosure in the mid-1960s. Whatever he wrote was liable to Party scrutiny and might be subject to rewriting if it did not fit the current official view of how the life of the countryside should be presented (as happened with the reincarnations of Li Shuangshuang), but the author appears to have been left to make the changes for himself. Li Zhun is reported as having lamented, in an exchange that took place after the Cultural Revolution, that little he had written was of any lasting value and that writers of village fiction had been particularly hard pressed by the authorities: “In our country, works of art on rural subjects receive the greatest vulgar political interference ... If they let me write what I’ve seen for myself and believe to be true, even if I make mistakes, I’d be happy to criticize myself.”45 When I interviewed him in the 1990s, Li Zhun maintained that he had been misrepresented in the recording of the conversation quoted above, though he accepted the general sentiments ascribed to him. Hu Wanchun, and the other worker-writers who had been selected when barely literate and groomed by Party instructors, were subject not so much to “vulgar political interference” as outright control. As Lars Ragvald writes, “They were all raised by the Party for the purpose of making propaganda. The pressure to conform to the various campaigns and movements was always higher on them than on other writers and authors.”46 Hu Wanchun’s task may have been simply to work local colour into a plot prescribed for him by his mentors. Certainly, in the case of at least one significant story from the next generation of Shanghai worker-writers, who flourished briefly in the Cultural Revolution, the author may well have been unaware of the background to the story for which he wielded the pen.47 The danger that writers like Li Zhun and Hu Wanchun faced, even as they provided the authorities with exactly the fiction they wanted at a crucial time, was that the Party’s view of history, its requirements of the arts, and its leading personnel were subject to unpredictable change, and thus the message their works dutifully transmitted might not be deemed correct for long. The humorous and sympathetic portrayal of the middle character Song Laoding in Li Zhun’s “Can’t Take That Road,” which had delighted Mao in the early 1950s, was anathema to his wife, Jiang Qing, when she held power during the mid-1960s.48 For his literary offences, Li was jailed, forced to write numerous confessions, and humiliated by being paraded three times for public condemnation. He claimed to have survived because his accusers, remembering his stories, laughed at him rather than cursing him. He was rehabilitated with other victims of the Cultural Revolution during the late 1970s. Hu

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Wanchun fared better in the Cultural Revolution: his chief advocate in the Great Leap Forward, Yao Wenyuan, who had praised his fiction and written the introduction to a collection of his short stories, took control of much of the Chinese media after the fall of Zhou Yang and remained in power until the coup that saw him, Jiang Qing, and the rest of the Gang of Four overthrown in October 1976. So, though Hu may have been subjected to additional political instruction during the early years of the Cultural Revolution, he was able to write again in the 1970s, publishing a short novel with Shanghai’s radical Zhaoxia series.49 Both Li Zhun and Hu Wanchun returned unscathed, their status as leading writers intact, after the Cultural Revolution ended.50 By the time I met them in the 1990s (and, I am convinced, throughout their careers), Li Zhun and Hu Wanchun regarded themselves as having been considerably more than servile hacks writing propaganda to order, mere cogs and screws in a malfunctioning machine. In their own estimation, they were creative writers responding as best they could to the changes in their society, who could have written fiction of more lasting value if they had been allowed to, loyal and capable servants of a system that turned out to be a fickle and foolish master.

PART 3 The Cultural Revolution and the Spirit of Struggle, 1972-76

5 Hao Ran on The Golden Road: Transformations in Rural China

The political history of the Cultural Revolution is copiously documented.1 Outside China, the Cultural Revolution is, like the Great Leap Forward, invariably and inextricably linked with the biography of the man who set it in motion: thus the title of Roderick MacFarquhar and Michael Schoenhals’s study of the period, Mao’s Last Revolution.2 An earlier account by Yan Jiaqi and Gao Gao similarly focuses on events at the centre and at the elite level.3 Within China, scholars have been discouraged from writing about Mao’s great­er errors and the merciless internecine battles within the nation’s ruling elite; the mass of material available includes case studies or accounts of events away from the centre.4 The mass rustication of urban middle- and high-school graduates to state farms and villages between 1968 and 1979, the subject of the next chapter, has also been amply recorded: memoirs by members of this generation and others, typically those who can present themselves as victims of the movement, have been produced in considerable quantities for domestic and foreign consumption.5 Of the official culture of the Cultural Revolution, the visual and performing arts have attracted the most attention in recent years, in China and out­side.6 The visual arts have shown a durability and a commercial value in their post–Cultural Revolution afterlife that could scarcely have been anticipated in the late 1970s, as contemporary artists have appropriated the iconography of the Cultural Revolution as nostalgia and kitsch, and some of the operas and ballets among the model theatrical works have enjoyed revivals to new audiences.7 By contrast, though the Cultural Revolution has provided material for fiction since its conclusion, the literature of the period itself has been largely ignored as scholars and translators turn their attention to more recent work. The pre–Cultural Revolution red classics have been reissued and remain generally available, but the novels of the Cultural Revolution are largely out of print, and none has been included in any version of the red pantheon. Even The Golden Road (Jinguang dadao), the subject of this chapter and the major novel of the Cultural Revolution decade, could hardly be found in bookstores

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from the end of the Cultural Revolution until the revised complete fourvolume edition was published in 1994.8 Only one book-length study of Cultural Revolution literature has been published in English.9 Studies of modern literature in China tend to jump from the early 1960s to the immediate post–Cultural Revolution writing of the late 1970s, with little comment on what came in between.10 The authors of a ten-volume Com­ prehensive History of Chinese Literature published in 2000 deal summarily with the period: “Few works were created, and those that can survive the scrutiny of history are fewer still.”11 The writing of the period that does receive more attention from Chinese scholars is not the officially and generally available literature of the day, but the unofficial or underground work, passed secretively from one person to another in handwritten or mimeograph form, which critics see as a precursor to immediate post-Mao writings.12 The officially published literature has largely been abandoned by readers, and most authors who published maiden works in the late Cultural Revolution years but made their names in the subsequent period have chosen to disavow or forget their earlier works.13 The general lack of interest in the fiction of the Cultural Revolution, particularly the novel, on the part of later readers and scholars can be explained by a number of factors. In terms of quality, the novels of the first half of the 1970s represent, with the exception of the two novels considered here and a very few others, a low-point in the history of writing for Chinese socialism. Many novels were produced by committees of amateur writers overseen by Party officials and coached by a literary professional, packed with slogans and quotations from Mao, with little in the way of drama beyond political intrigue.14 Some works by accomplished writers, including Hao Ran’s last two Cultural Revolution novels, were produced to order in support of the partisan goals of national leaders and completed in haste.15 Another factor in the rejection of Cultural Revolution writings was that they appeared at a time when almost all of China’s leading pre-1966 authors were enduring shocking and undeserved ill-treatment, for their former celebrity and their association with deposed authorities as much as for the ideological or artistic crimes of which they had been accused. Writers and critics returning to public life in the post-Mao years were unlikely to prove sympathetic to works published during the period of their own incarceration. Of the authors whose works are considered in previous chapters, Ma Feng and Xi Rong were confined with their fellow provincial Zhao Shuli at the Shanxi Writers’ Association, Zhou Libo was imprisoned, and Li Zhun was banished to a village in Henan, from which he was summoned on three

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occasions for public humiliation. Only Hu Wanchun, who had remained in Shanghai, escaped with a period of “re-education” and later resumed his writing. Alone among the established authors of the 1950s and early ‘60s, Hao Ran, thanks to his sponsorship by the new cultural authorities, flourished in his literary career during the Cultural Revolution. Between 1971 and 1976, he published three novels (including The Golden Road) and several volumes of short stories, youth fiction, and reportage, and his earlier work remained in print, most notably the three-volume novel Bright Sunny Skies (Yanyangtian) and an anthology of his earlier stories collected as Spring Songs (Chunge ji). His privileged position, with his advocacy of new policies in the arts and his ritual condemnations of the writing that had preceded the Cul­ tural Revolution, was the cause of considerable resentment among his colleagues when they returned to public life and creative work in the late 1970s.16 This resentment was shared by scholars and critics who were keen to put the “ten year disaster” of the Cultural Revolution behind them and who saw Hao Ran as its major literary figure: he was the “one author” referred to in the often repeated disparagement of the culture of the period as restricted to “eight model works and one author.”17 The literature of the Cultural Revolution should not be so lightly dismissed, however, either by a “comprehensive history” of Chinese literature or (much less) by a study of writing for socialism. The arts of the Cultural Revolution were an attempt, however misguided it may now seem, to create a new national culture in the service of socialism untainted by the past and the West. In its tendentiousness, even greater than that of the writing that preceded it, its absolute adherence to benighted state policies that would shortly be abandoned, and its creation of towering heroic figures determined to sacrifice themselves and those around them for the future of the nation, the fiction of the Cultural Revolution represents the final segment of the golden road, before that road was washed away by the flood of tears in the post-Mao catharsis of the late 1970s. Part 3 of this book plots two further milestones, both from the first half of the 1970s: this chapter examines The Golden Road, and the next discusses Zhang Kangkang’s first novel, The Dividing Line (Fenjiexian), set against its young author’s experience as a rusticated youth in Northeast China, her first step on the road to a distinguished career as a writer in the age of reform and opening. Both are long novels, and these two chapters pay particular attention to one pivotal moment in each. Both novels are read as exercises in transformation. The Golden Road is about transforming the relationship between the land and the peasants who

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live on it, by moving from individual to collective ownership and farming practices. In The Dividing Line, the land itself is transformed to make nature bow to human will. Both novels also seek to transform the reader’s view of massive social movements. The collectivization movement, which had been resisted by many of China’s peasants, was presented in writings of the 1950s and ‘60s, including two of the red classics, as being the means whereby the poor peasants could become masters of their land and achieve a better life. For the 1970s revision of the past in The Golden Road, it becomes an opportunity for redoubled efforts and increased sacrifices to make greater contributions to the state, to be achieved not in a spirit of harmony, but of internecine struggle, an austere and forbidding message for the reader who could recollect the upheavals and famines that had blighted the villages in the intervening years. The author of The Dividing Line faced an equally difficult task, in that the struggles her novel described were set at the time of writing: to transform the rustication movement, for many a hated internal exile, into a noble and fulfilling enterprise. The Dividing Line portrays educated urbanites whose highest goal is to become lifelong farmers, and in doing so, it seeks to persuade a generation of rusticated youth to stay voluntarily in a situation most (including the author herself ) were desperate to leave and to encourage younger high-school graduates to join them. For both authors, all of this was to be achieved in novels using literary guidelines newly in place, following the creative experience of operas and ballets honoured with model status from the mid-1960s, in what was itself said to be a transformation of previous cultural practice. In short, the novels depict a transformation of land, of society, of the peasantry, of human nature, and of art itself. The project was short-lived: authors who followed have rewritten the history of land reform and collectivization in a radically different way, reinventing the mythology of nation building to meet the interests and tastes of a new generation. And members of Zhang Kangkang’s generation have generally rewritten the story of the rustication of youth as disillusionment and waste, leaving these two milestones of Cultural Revolution literature abandoned beside a road that would never reach its destination.18 “Haoran the Peasant Novelist”

In Hao Ran, the Communist Party’s cultural authorities finally had the peasant writer they had been searching for since Yan’an, as distinct from the rural scholars and sent-down intellectuals who had provided rural fiction in previous years.19 Hao Ran’s was an archetypal story of peasant hardship and gratitude to the new socialist society. He was born Liang Jinguang in 1932,

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the son of dispossessed peasants, in a landlord’s manure shed near the Kailuan coalmine in Hebei.20 After his father’s death, the family went to live with relatives of his mother, where he had the chance to enjoy a variety of China’s performing arts, including storytelling and shadow-puppetry. He also received three and a half years of schooling, which allowed him to start reading China’s classic novels, before his mother’s death in 1945. As the war with Japan ended, he came into contact with the communist Red Army, becoming a Youth League cadre and, in his sixteenth year, a Communist Party member. His first writing was for the army, a short skit dramatizing land reform; the young author appeared in a female role, as the local peasant women were too shy to act on stage. Thereafter he wrote plays and reports, his first printed article published in 1950. After taking part in land reform in his own village, Hao Ran worked as a reporter for the Hebei Daily and the Russian-language Friendship Magazine before moving to the editorial staff of the Party journal Red Flag (Hongqi). His first short story was published in 1956, and several volumes of stories flowed in quick succession. These early stories were celebrations of China’s new socialist society, consisting of vignettes of village life, character sketches, and simple love stories, with, the veteran writer Ye Shengtao judged, young peasant women most adeptly described.21 Although conflicts exist between old and new customs, the author is sympathetic to peasant conservatism, and the overall impression is one of social harmony, which prompted the criticism from Yao Wenyuan, in a 1962 review, that among Hao Ran’s stories there were “too few concerned with class relationships and class struggle in the countryside.”22 With his peasant background, Hao Ran had impeccable credentials for writing about the countryside and always insisted in articles, speeches, and interviews that the situations and characters he portrayed in his rural fiction were true to life. For all his pretensions to realism, however, he was perceptively remembered in the funeral address by the novelist Liu Heng as a romantic writer (langmanzhuyi zuojia).23 I take Liu Heng’s assessment to refer to the number of love stories among his early works, the unrealized romance between the widowed hero Xiao Changchun and the young peasant woman Jiao Shuhong in Bright Sunny Skies (the novel that Liu pronounced his greatest achievement), and the interest throughout his work in affairs of the heart. But it is also true to say that Hao Ran, especially early in his career, romanticized village life, and that later, in the cause of revolutionary romanticism, he was able to create in The Golden Road an idealized image of peasants transformed in difficult times. From 1962, in response to Mao’s post–Great Leap reminder of the necessity to maintain vigilance to class struggle, Hao Ran moved away from his

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reassuring vision of rural harmony among a new peasantry. In his novel Bright Sunny Skies, written between 1962 and 1966, the emphasis is on conflict between classes, with the former landlord and rich peasant classes resentful of their treatment during land reform and determined to sabotage the achievements of socialism, kidnapping the son of the novel’s hero in the process. Hao Ran’s emergence as chronicler of class struggle in Bright Sunny Skies, like Yao Wenyuan’s reservations about Hao Ran’s inadequate coverage of class relationships in his short stories, came as a result of Mao’s re-emphasis of class struggle in 1962 at the Eighth Party Congress, signalling the chairman’s return after a period of depression and retrenchment following the famines visited by the Great Leap on the Chinese nation. A contemporary Western review described Hao Ran’s first novel as being also the nation’s first to portray collectivization against the background of class struggle.24 Hao Ran’s amenability to ideological instruction, his peasant background, and his popularity with readers may all have been factors in his Cultural Revolution ascendancy. For all the favourable reviews he received from senior writers and his presence in literary circles, he suggested that he was not particularly close to, or respected by, the leading authors and cultural officials who were condemned as the Cultural Revolution began, many of whom disparaged his lack of literary attainment and psychological insight.25 A five-year hiatus in fiction production nationwide, from 1966 to 1971, saw the author in the countryside preparing materials for a hagiography of the model peasant cadre Wang Guofu. His version of the life of the selfsacrificing collectivist pioneer was never published, falling victim to a Party prohibition on writing about “real people and real things,” but it did serve as a basis for Gao Daquan, hero of The Golden Road.26 Myth and Epic for the 1970s

The Golden Road is a monumental work – the full four-volume novel is just under 2,700 pages long – recounting the story of agricultural collectivization in one village on the North China Plain between 1951 and 1955, from the first steps toward cooperative farming to the formation of an agricultural collective. Thus, it takes over at the point where Hurricane finished, with the landlords dispossessed and tenants and hired hands being given land of their own to farm and a share of confiscated property. It is a story told on a grand scale, with a large cast of characters, principally peasant villagers and the local and regional officials who lead them. Through the microcosm of one village, the author presents a history of the whole collectivization movement, dramatizing conflicting strategies for the development of Chinese agriculture and social organization. Only two of the novel’s four volumes were published

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during the Cultural Revolution, in 1972 and 1974; the most read fiction of the Cultural Revolution, they will be the focus of this chapter. The third and fourth volumes, written in the mid-1970s, remained unpublished until 1994 and will be considered in the Epilogue. In a study of the novel published after it was released in full, Zhang Dexiang, one of the few literary critics to retain an interest in Hao Ran’s writing after the Cultural Revolution, described The Golden Road as both myth and epic: epic for its grand scale and myth for its reinvention of what was still regarded as a glorious past. As Zhang notes, it presented the 1950s through the perspective of the 1970s, giving the Cultural Revolution version of what had happened in the early years of the People’s Republic. It was reinvented by an author who had been there and could claim the same degree of authenticity for his novel as the authors of the red classics could for works set in periods of the Chinese revolution in which they had participated.27 A previous mythology of collectivization, created in the 1950s and early 1960s, presented the process as a struggle between tradition (faith in individual farming and family loyalty above all) and modernity (collective endeavour and the greater good), modernity being promoted by the Communist Party and espoused by the young. Although landlords and rich peasants, the members of classes disadvantaged by land reform, might attempt to halt the progress of history, the more significant opposition came from conservative older peasants for whom the ownership of land represented security and continuity. The myth of collectivization was one of enlightenment of doubters by Party leaders and peasant activists of the younger generation (as, for example, in Li Zhun’s story “Not That Road,” referred to in Chapter 3), allowing even those with initial reservations to share in the narrative of progress toward socialist modernity and a better life. By the time of the Cultural Revolution, the face of the past had changed again: the Communist Party had recently been torn apart to rid it of those seen as having challenged Mao’s authority and was now portrayed as having been divided from the early days of the People’s Republic between Mao’s followers and those of the deposed, disgraced, and destroyed former head of state Liu Shaoqi. In this revised mythology of the countryside, the dominant conflict became a “line struggle” between those who had supported collectivization and those advocating enrichment of individual families. Struggles between modernity and tradition (no longer contested along generational lines) and between the poor peasants on the one side and the landlord, a rich peasant, and an assortment of “bad elements” on the other, are set in the context of line struggle in The Golden Road. The author systematizes the conflicts by creating matching hierarchies of officials, activists, and supporters on both sides to play out the

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struggles between the collectivists (who have the author and the Party’s view of history on their side) and their opponents. Also in keeping with the political and cultural official climate of the 1970s, the favoured side is led by a prodigious hero, an altogether taller, larger, and more complete figure than the proponents of collectivization in earlier works. A New History and New Rules for Artistic Creation

The Golden Road, as a collectivization novel written in the 1970s, is an act of historical transformation. Early novels of land reform and collectivization, written during or just after the stirring events they describe, were designed both as entertainment and instruction, giving definitive versions of the movements and serving as manuals for cadres and activists dealing with brutal landlords, wily rich peasants, and timid or conservative farmhands and peasants. 28 Such works include the urtext of land-reform fiction, Mikhail Sholokhov’s 1932 Virgin Soil Upturned, and the Chinese novels Hurricane by Sholokhov’s translator Zhou Libo (considered in Chapter 2) and Ding Ling’s The Sun Shines over the Sanggan River, both published in 1948. Collectivization novels such as Zhou Libo’s Great Changes in a Mountain Village and Liu Qing’s The Builders (Chuangye shi) take the history forward, offering a more conciliatory approach to those who oppose the Party’s development initiatives. By the time Hao Ran wrote The Golden Road, a more divided version of the collectivization process had emerged; the author’s first-hand experience was refracted through the prism of Cultural Revolu­ tion historiography and shaped by the vision of revolutionary heroism enshrined in the libretti and films of the model theatrical works. To take the historiography first – rural development in the 1950s appears in texts dating from the Cultural Revolution as a stage set for melodrama, a titanic battle between the forces of good and evil.29 To the left, arrayed in red, stand Mao Zedong and his followers, the champions of collectivization; on the right, in black, skulk Liu Shaoqi and his henchmen, hell-bent on the en­ richment of the advantaged and the consequent impoverishment of every­ one else. In The Golden Road, the battles are fought by surrogates, principally in the village of Sweet Meadow (Fangcaodi), which serves, as do the villages of the other collectivization novels, as the microcosm for rural China. This is a version of history that reflects genuine conflicts within the Communist Party leadership over the most appropriate route for rural development during the early years of the People’s Republic.30 But there is an element of anachronism as well, in that it is also coloured by Mao’s disillusionment with his long-serving lieutenant in the mid-1960s and what Frederick C. Teiwes characterizes as his “pitiless determination to destroy Liu [Shaoqi].”31 Early

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in the Cultural Revolution, the record of Liu’s revolutionary activities was revised wholesale to show him as a traitor to the cause of Chairman Mao at all points, collectivization included. Hao Ran goes about this business with more restraint than did others of his contemporaries but does not stray from orthodox historiography.32 In the opera model, the correct portrayal of heroism was the overriding concern of Cultural Revolution literary theory from the beginning of Jiang Qing’s association with modern revolutionary Beijing opera. It was also the focus of her major contribution to Maoist literary theory, the “three prominences,” whereby the principal hero should stand out from (in descending order) the secondary heroic character, the masses, and the enemy.33 By 1974, the depiction of such heroes was to become the “basic task of socialist literature and art.”34 A concentration on heroism, even an obsession with it, is evident in the revisions to the opera texts from the mid-1960s to their final versions (a process that could take as much as ten years) and in the accounts written by or for the troupes that performed them, interviews given to Jiang Qing’s American biographer Roxanne Witke by the stars of two of the operas, and directives addressed by Jiang Qing to the performers.35 Jiang Qing’s writings and public statements from the period reveal that she regarded it as her responsibility to create a new culture for the Chinese people, complete with its own ideology, mythology, and aesthetics, to replace the decadent culture she had helped to destroy, and that the model operas and their model heroes were a first step to the achievement of that noble goal.36 In the words of a Cultural Revolution textbook on literary theory, the new heroic characters “embody the unity of revolutionary ideals with reality, of revolutionary nature with scientific nature, of universality with individuality, they are the refined and concentrated crystallization, true, good and wonderful, of the proletariat.”37 The protagonists are designed to be heroes without flaws; they inhabit a world of easily identifiable absolutes, both good and evil. The moral choices they face are clear, and the solutions to all problems can be found in the works of Mao. The role of the hero is to confront the external threat, introduce the appropriate Mao text, unite the masses, disabuse the confused, expose the enemy, and gain the victory. The reader or viewer, inspired, emulates the hero (or heroine).38 The prospective author, casting around for a central character, can begin with a question such as “If Yang Zirong [hero of Taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy] were in our factory, what would he be like?” and come up with an appropriate protagonist.39 The texts are designed to be precise, unambiguous, and absolutely non-ironic, precluding any reading but the one intended by the author and his or her Party sponsors, though such attempts to frustrate alternative readings invariably prove futile.

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In The Golden Road Hao Ran exercised himself to follow that example, most notably with his hero Gao Daquan, whose name means “lofty,” “large,” and, by homophony, “complete” (gao, da, quan).40 However, even for a professed devotee of Cultural Revolution aesthetics, the opera model does not easily resolve the questions that the grand design of The Golden Road addresses, the transformation of both society and humanity.41 Transformation is, as Katerina Clark observes, the theme of the Stalin-era socialist novel: of society, from its past or present form toward the eventual utopia of communism, and of humanity, from unreconstructed spontaneity to socialist consciousness.42 Collectivization novels are a case in point, portraying as they do the transformation of social organization and farming methods, as well as ingrained beliefs about ownership, heredity, and dignity. Two questions concerning the depiction of transformation in the Cultural Revolution novel will be considered below with reference to The Golden Road. First, how is the author to transform a hero patterned on operatic models without flaws and thus in no apparent need of transformation? Second, how is he to make such a hero accessible to readers who in all likelihood approach the subject of collectivization (practically or vicariously) with a considerably lower level of socialist consciousness than does Gao Daquan and must learn to identify with him if they are themselves to be transformed? To consider the first question, I will focus on a critical period in the cognitive development of Gao Daquan, which begins with “a chance encounter at New Cross­ roads” and ends with a fire in a courtyard, to examine the transformation of both the hero and the author’s hero building.43 For the second, I will suggest the character-splitting device that allows Hao Ran to maintain Gao Daquan’s loftiness, largeness, and completeness while simultaneously bringing him closer to the level of those lesser mortals over whom he must exert influence. How to Transform a Heroic Archetype

Gao Daquan’s development as a heroic archetype is well underway as we join him, literally and figuratively, at the crossroads. In mapping out this development from the hero’s childhood, Hao Ran could not rely solely on the opera model, which presents heroes who are mature and ready-made. He draws also on figures from Chinese mythology old and new: Gao Daquan resembles the self-sacrificing sage emperor and flood-controller Yu the Great in his denial of family in the greater cause. Like Yu the Great, he walks past his house after a long absence from home to attend to others’ business. Similarly, the contemporary peasant model Wang Guofu (about whom Hao Ran was writing in the late 1960s) refused to repair his own family’s tumbledown

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dwelling until all his neighbours were satisfactorily housed. Implausible as it may seem, Hao Ran insisted that he had met such heroes himself, though Gao Daquan, unlike Xiao Changchun, the central figure of Bright Sunny Skies, is not based on a personal acquaintance. Although Gao Daquan is rooted in his own place and time, and is the creation of an author with little knowledge of the outside world and its literary traditions, his character and the course he takes during the novel, from the prologue (in which he first appears as a child) to the end of the second volume, demonstrate many of the typical qualities extrapolated by Joseph Campbell from his studies of North American, European, Middle Eastern, and South Asian literatures and mythologies in his mid-twentieth-century study The Hero with a Thousand Faces.44 Campbell inherited and developed Jung’s formulation of the collective unconscious: a combination of archetypal images shared by all, rather than being derived from an individual’s sense perception or dependent on personal experience. Jung explains, “We must therefore think of these images as lacking in solid content, hence as unconscious. They only acquire solidity, influence, and eventual consciousness in the encounter with empirical facts, which touch the unconscious aptitude and quicken it to life. They are, in a sense, the deposits of all our ancestral experience, but they are not the experiences themselves.”45 Jung proposed that the similarities between heroic myths from different ages and cultures suggests that they originate from common psychological structures. To gain a coherent sense of self, the hero must integrate his consciousness with the unconscious elements of his psyche, represented by a series of archetypes.46 In The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Campbell identified a series of archetypal steps along what he called the hero’s journey, a recurrent myth (or, in Campbell’s term, “monomyth”) across cultures. According to Campbell, “The standard path of the mythological adventure of the hero is a magnification of the formula represented in the rites of passage: separation-initiation-return: which might be named the nuclear unit of the monomyth.”47 Gao Daquan’s story replicates that of Campbell’s archetypal hero: already exceptional in childhood (as a bold resister of landlord oppression), the boy leaves home (Shandong) and survives in an extremely hostile environment (on the road and in Sweet Meadow, at the home of his mother’s kinsman Feng Shaohuai) by virtue of his own fortitude and the assistance of mentors and father-figures (the farmhand Tian Yu and his adoptive father, Lü Changle). He is again removed (to the civil war battlefront) and further tested before he can return home (to Sweet Meadow). He is prodigious in his capacity for self-sacrifice and has a noble mission (to lead his poor peasant neighbours to eventual shared prosperity). He is temporarily stymied (as we meet him)

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by forces he instinctively opposes but does not understand (Liuist Party superiors who are against collectivization). At this point in the hero’s journey, Campbell’s and Hao Ran’s, it is time for a heroic deed, a trip up the mountain, guidance from on high, and a text to take home. And so indeed it proves. Gao Daquan leaves Sweet Meadow on a quest for enlightenment. It is the right quest, but he is headed for the wrong place – the headquarters of the Liuist officials – as he stops at a roadside tea stall for an early breakfast of cornmeal pancakes and a bowl of boiled water: He finished his food and took his bowl back to the tea-stall. Then he adjusted his socks and shoes, rolled up his pant-legs, fastened the bag of provisions at his waist and straightened up. No sooner had he stepped on the road that led northeast than he heard a shout behind him: “Help! Help! Save her!” Gao Daquan looked west along the highway. Through a cloud of dust and with an almighty din, a heavy cart hurtled towards them like a tree uprooted and tossed in a flash flood. A powerful roan horse was harnessed to the cart. Something must have startled it, sending it galloping and bucking like a mad thing. The cart was bouncing up and down, veering precariously from side to side. Baskets of fodder had been shaken off, scattering hay over the ground. A water-bucket jolted loose and clattered away. Up on the cart, a girl of seven or eight in a patterned jacket clung onto the side for dear life and screamed in terror. Far behind an old man chased after the cart with a whip, shouting as he ran. Screams and shouts alike were almost drowned out by the thundering of hooves and the pounding of the cart. The people at the tea-stall were horror-struck. They surged out, shouting wildly in their terror.48

Hao Ran was in familiar territory here. To trace the antecedents for this incident, we leave New Crossroads and travel back in time, not through this novel, but to an earlier point in Hao Ran’s career. We are in “Early Evening” (Bangwan), a love story written by the author in 1959 when he was in his mid-twenties, before opera reform, before Mao’s 1962 injunction never to forget class struggle, and before the disaster of the Great Leap was fully apparent.49 Hao Ran’s fictional world is an idyllic place of sufficiency and optimism, peopled by exemplary commune members, comic old-timers, and bashful young lovers. High-school graduate Chen Yuqin has rejected the man whom her mother has chosen to be her husband, the “mysterious and mischievous” Gao Xiushan, as frivolous and unreliable.50 Early in the evening, as she draws water from the village well, Yuqin suddenly sees a “cloud of yellow

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dust at the western end of the road. There was a deafening racket, and those on either side of the road cried out in alarm. Then she saw it clearly: the tall grey horse, head back, tail aloft, galloping towards them like the wind.”51 The crisis is the same, though details vary: the time of day, the horse’s colour and its load (this one is pulling a battered plough), and the potential victims (here we see children who have been playing in the road and are now rooted to the spot in terror). But help is at hand: At that crucial moment, as life and death hung in the balance, a figure burst forth like lightning to try and restrain the horse. Before he had even reached it, the beast reared snorting back and lurched towards him like a towering wall collapsing. An iron hoof crashed into his leg as the horse leaped by him ... The young man lay on the ground, gravely injured. The horse was within yards of crushing the children ... In that instant, he launched himself once more, and sprang like a fierce tiger in front of the shying horse, arms outstretched, grasping the horse’s neck and clinging on grimly. With the extra burden on its neck, the horse neighed in anguish and used every means it could to throw him off, and was thus slowed down. Taking advantage of this brief respite, Yuqin and some others dashed over and carried the children in their arms to the side of the road. When they turned back, the runaway horse, still carrying the young man, was pounding over the spot they had just left, kicking away the piles of earth and pebbles where the children had been playing, flecking the earth with fresh blood. Only then did Yuqin realize [what anyone who appreciates romantic fiction has known for a while, namely] that this young man who, regardless of his own safety, had so capably and courageously restrained the horse was none other than Gao Xiushan, whom she had so wronged.52

Xiushan’s act of heroism, fortuitously witnessed by Yuqin, has the required cathartic effect: the girl recognizes his finer qualities and is thus (we infer from a final scene of reconciliation at the young man’s experimental vegetable patch) disposed to accept that mother knows best when it comes to selecting a marriage partner. Such a simply romantic denouement would be out of place in the sterner world of the Cultural Revolution epic. The runaway horse incident was too good a piece of plot business not to be recycled, but in The Golden Road, it must be transformed and incorporated into Gao Daquan’s immediate quest and archetypal journey. To return to the crisis at the crossroads,

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Gao Daquan saw the situation, and with barely a pause for thought, he sped like an arrow to the centre of the road and stretched out his brawny arms. When the runaway horse saw this obstacle only a few dozen feet away, its bloodshot eyes dilated and its mane bristled. It reared up its head, ready to continue its headlong charge and leap past the man ahead of it. The people by the stall screamed at Gao Daquan: “It’s no good! You’ll never hold it!” “Get clear, quick, get clear!” Heedless of their cries, never turning his head, Gao Daquan braced for action and hurled himself towards the maddened horse. At that instant a voice boomed out from the left: “Look out!” With that call, Gao Daquan’s arm was seized by a powerful hand, then pulled forcefully, thrusting him to the side of the road. By the time he knew what was happening, he saw that another had taken the place where he had just been standing. He was a stocky figure in army green. He didn’t stand in front of the cart as Gao Daquan had done, but dodged to one side of it. Fists clenched at his hips like a sprinter, he raced beside the beast with light and measured strides. Then as he drew level with the shafts of the cart, he sprang onto the horse’s back and seized the reins. This enraged the horse still more. It neighed wildly and reared up. The soldier was shaken loose and suspended in mid-air. But, composed as ever, he reached out and grasped the bridle, skillfully manipulating the bit in the horse’s mouth, hauling back on the reins with all his might. The horse immediately brought his front feet to the ground, and it dug in its rear hooves, snorting and whinnying. Dust and pebbles sprayed up from the road into the bodies and faces of the bystanders. Gao Daquan had followed the soldier anxiously, looking for a chance to help. Now that the horse had been reined in, Gao Daquan dashed up to the cart and pulled the little girl to safety. By the time her feet touched the ground, the horse had raced on, dragging the cart and the soldier twenty feet further on. Suddenly they noticed a wheelbarrow lying in the road. It had been coming from the other direction. The man pushing it had slipped as he was trying to get away, and now lay sprawling as the great cart bore down on him. In that instant, the soldier hauled mightily on the bridle, heaving to the side as he did so. The horse staggered, the cart veered across the road. The soldier grabbed for the brake and pulled it. With a screech, the wheels locked and the cart came to a halt.53

There are two additions of plot detail as compared with the “Early Evening” version: the gratuitous wheelbarrow and, later, the patriotic identification of the little girl as the daughter of a soldier serving in Korea. Much more

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importantly, there are morals to be drawn and a way ahead to be pointed. The ideology of the man who ultimately restrains the horse, not an issue in “Early Evening,” is crucial in The Golden Road. In rewriting the runaway horse incident for the 1970s, Hao Ran used this triumph of consciousness over spontaneity as an object lesson for his protagonist and a key element in Gao Daquan’s transformation from instinctive to informed collectivist: if the threat posed to cooperative farming by the quest for personal enrichment is to be countered, conscious thought, not well-intentioned spontaneity, must carry the day. An uneasy metaphor begins the task of incorporating the incident into the novel’s thematic design, as Gao Daquan resolves to “find and take home the method for restraining the cart of Sweet Meadow, to struggle as valiantly as with the runaway horse.”54 But, as he confesses to the soldier, he recognizes his inadequacy for the task: “We both wanted to save lives, but my way of doing it was no good. I just rushed in blindly, and if it hadn’t been for you, there would almost certainly have been loss of life. You had the method, you had a plan as well as valour, steadiness as well as speed. That’s the only way to be sure of getting things done.”55 Gao Daquan is now aware of his need and ready to receive the word from on high, and the mysterious soldier will guide him to it, for he is none other than the former farmhand Tian Yu, who had left Sweet Meadow nine years (and 458 pages) before to “look for another road to take” with the communist guerrillas.56 Now it is Gao Daquan who is “at a loss for a road to take,” allowing Tian Yu to place Gao’s dilemma in the allegorical perspective of the struggle between two lines/roads (luxian) and to redirect him along the “golden road” to collectivist socialism that gives the novel its title and its theme.57 The “chance encounter” ends with three of the archetypal symbols of Chinese socialism, the sun, the east, and the road, as “facing the sun, shoulder to shoulder, the two friends strode along the great road east.”58 The new road takes Gao Daquan, not to the county seat, but to Red Date Village, a model of collectivization here as elsewhere in Hao Ran’s work, to hear a political lecture (the second thus far) delivered by Liang Haishan, the highest-ranking leadership figure to appear in The Golden Road.59 Liang is a voice of authority in a novel that lacks the hectoring homiletic narrator of much Cultural Revolution fiction, and by implication an authorial voice as well, sharing as he does a place of birth and a surname with Hao Ran, whose original name was Liang Jinguang.60 Liang Haishan’s sermon on the mount has as its text Mao’s 1943 essay “Get Organized” (Zuzhiqilai), which serves as the blueprint for collectivization in Sweet Meadow throughout the remainder of the novel.61 Like the best of sermons, Liang’s speech is strong on metaphor, and the metaphor he emphasizes most strongly in his conversation

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with Gao Daquan and Tian Yu after his address is that of digging out roots (wa gen). If the peasantry is to dig out the roots of poverty, Liang tells his listeners, it must also dig out the roots of “peasant mentality” (nongmin yishi, of which more below) and private ownership.62 Six chapters elapse between Gao Daquan’s ascent to Red Date Village and his return to Sweet Meadow, an interval that allows the forces of individual enrichment to work their devilry without the hero being on hand to confront or outwit them. When Gao Daquan returns to transmit Liang Haishan’s message to his followers in Sweet Meadow, he begins by making the metaphor concrete. His brother Erlin has erected a wall across the Gao family compound, taking possession of (among other things) the family woodpile. Daquan resolves his material needs, while at the same time reviving the spirits of his disciples, by chopping up for firewood an old tree-root that the brothers had dug out of their fields after land reform. Gao Daquan presents the rootdestroying metaphor first and then the text to his followers, the other way around from Liang Haishan, in a concession to peasant practicality. Only when the root is cut and a fire is blazing does he bring out his copy of “Get Organized,” read it aloud, and apply it to the situation in the village. The transformation that began with the hero’s failure to restrain the runaway horse concludes as we leave Gao Daquan sharing his epiphany in his family’s courtyard, its division symbolizing the political and psychological divisions that afflict the village and its inhabitants, to which we now turn. How to Transform a Peasant Archetype

To restate the second of the questions raised above: When an author presents his readers with an outstanding socialist hero, how is he also to make that hero accessible enough to bring about the transformation both of the lesser characters in the novel and of the reader? The set patterns or frames (kuangkuang) imposed on Cultural Revolution literature precluded the portrayal of weaknesses in a hero, which would tarnish his exemplary image but might also endear an otherwise remote figure to those of lower consciousness. Although Gao Daquan does himself undergo transformation (as shown above), he does so from a plateau of instinctive resistance to ownership that already places him apart from his neighbours. If he is plausibly to lead them along the “golden road” that his Party mentors have signposted, he must somehow be brought down to a level at which there can be empathy between him and his constituents. The simple answer to this problem, from the point of view of Cultural Revolution polemicists, would be that the problem itself does not exist, since the ideal

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hero or heroine is of solidly proletarian background (industrial worker, poor peasant), combines universality (gongxing) with individuality (gexing), and is “based in life” (genyu shenghuo) as well as “higher than life” (gaoyu sheng­ huo), all of which go to show that there can be no alienation of hero from masses.63 However, at the stage of his career when he wrote The Golden Road, Hao Ran was just too much of a socialist realist and not quite enough of a revolutionary romantic to rely on this assumption and was thus obliged to find the means to bring his hero to the level of the other villagers without compromising his pre-eminence. Hao Ran’s dilemma is not one that is limited to the creator of modelinfluenced agitational mass fiction in 1970s China. It is shared, for example, by authors of popular fiction who create heroes of superhuman prowess but still have pretensions to realism. The Western genre in which we see this most clearly is detective fiction, in which the solution to the archetypal question “whodunit?” must unfold more slowly on the page than it does in the mind of the genius whose deductions we follow. The necessary delay is often engineered by pairing the genius with an assistant of humbler intellect, through whose eyes (since that assistant may also be the narrator) we follow the plot and with whom we have things explained to us at the end. Holmes and Watson are the classic pairing, Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin an American example. The two are complementary to the point where one would be inconceivable without the other, to the point where they become the components of a single complex personality that is both outlandish and accessible, both austere and humane.64 The exemplary hero and slower-witted narrator formula is one that is well suited to socialist fiction; it was used to good effect in Hu Wanchun’s story “A Man of Outstanding Quality,” considered in Chapter 4. In many of his short stories, Hao Ran also used the device of having local villagers explain events to the narrator, often a visiting journalist, Hao Ran’s own role in the late 1950s and 1960s, addressed by the author’s surname as “Old Liang.” A more common splitting device in the fiction of socialist transformation is the generational split between progressive son and conservative father.65 In Liu Qing’s The Builders, the young collectivist cadre Liang Shengbao is initially opposed by his stepfather, Old Liang the Third, who sees land reform as an opportunity to establish his family as a prosperous landowner after generations of poverty. Old Liang the Third is the image of the traditional peasant in the transitional period of the early 1950s: laoshi (hard-working/ long-suffering), tied to the land, and desperately unwilling to part with his land-reform allocation to the collective. Liang Shengbao is the peasantry

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as (from the socialist realist perspective of the late 1950s) it should and would be: far-sighted, self-sacrificing, collectivist. The psychological conflicts between the old ways and the way of the future (as then perceived), between family and public benefit, which preoccupied millions of peasants, are externalized into two characters and are resolved by discussion and persuasion, as Old Liang moves from outright opposition through grudging acquiescence to loving acceptance of his stepson’s chosen path.66 When that same split is presented in The Golden Road, it is between members of the same generation, and the traditionalist must be brought to the side of the collectivist not only by persuasion, but also by class struggle. Four pairs of brothers appear in The Golden Road, and in each case one opts for the Liuist/individualist path of “building family fortunes” (fajia zhifu), whereas the other takes the Maoist “golden road” of collectivization offered by Mao’s essay “Get Organized.” The poor peasant Liu Wan decides against joining Gao Daquan’s cooperative due to his reluctance to share his ox and ends up losing his wife when she works with him in the rain too soon after childbirth; her deathbed entreaties force him to admit to his error. By contrast, his elder and more impoverished brother Liu Xiang joins the co-op and is narrowly saved by Gao Daquan and other co-op members from selling his land to the middle-peasant Qin Fu in a deal brokered by Feng Shaohuai with a view to sabotaging the cooperative. In Liu Xiang’s case, his bedridden wife receives the care she needs and survives. No such resolution is seen in the case of two pairs of brothers in different generations of the middle-peasant Qin family, at least in the first two volumes of the novel.67 Received wisdom, in this case Mao’s 1926 essay “Analysis of the Classes in Chinese Society” (Zhongguo shehui ge jieji de fenxi), has them prone to lusting for wealth but capable of redemption, and so they are portrayed, but a decisive conflict between them is not evident as the second volume ends.68 The fourth pairing, which provides the major plotline for the first two volumes of The Golden Road, involves Gao Daquan and his brother Gao Erlin, who had been parted when Daquan left Shandong for Hebei as a boy but who were reunited at the founding of the People’s Republic and had settled together in Sweet Meadow. Brothers they may be, but their approaches to life are radically different. Gao Daquan aspires, not to traditional peasant ideals, but to the qualities of internationalism and unconcern with property ascribed to the industrial proletariat, which Mao, following the Soviet sages of MarxismLeninism, nominated as “the most progressive class in modern China” and “the leading force in the revolutionary movement.”69 Gao Daquan has seen these sterling qualities at first-hand during a stint of casual labour in Beijing

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in the winter of 1950-51, loading trains with supplies for the Korean front. This significant moment in the proletarianization of the peasant hero occurs just after he and his neighbours arrive for work in Beijing and are visiting the station. There they witness a commotion at the site where foundations are being prepared for a new warehouse: An old worker explained: “It’s master-worker Chen from Team Two. He hasn’t slept since the day before yesterday; whenever he’s through with the loading and unloading, he comes straight over here to work, without a break in two days and nights. This morning he got a fever, but he hid it from his comrades. When he ate a bit of thin gruel he brought it up. Look, now he’s jumped into the freezing water and he’s working in there!” Master-worker Chen was in his thirties, gaunt-faced, lank-haired. His eyes were red-rimmed, his face blotchy red and white, either from the freezing or from his fever. The upper part of his body was covered in mud, the lower part was submerged in the freezing water; blood oozed from cuts in his hands, which others were holding tightly. Not looking at them or at group-leader Ma, he shook his head and said: “We’re putting in a foundation, and if it’s not firm the warehouse won’t be secure. I won’t rest until we get this water away ... Let me work a bit longer. We can have it a bit tough, get a bit tired, it’s nothing compared with the volunteers in Korea. In making revolution, you have to give your all! ... I can keep going. With the nation in my heart, my body has inexhaustible strength.” Gao Daquan stood in the mass of onlookers, his eyes wide, his fists tightly clenched as he gazed on this moving scene, and heard the passionate words of the worker elder brother. His body flushed, and his heart pounded.70

Chen is a peasant’s fantasy of a model worker, and his exemplary image stays with Gao Daquan as he returns to Sweet Meadow.71 Gao’s tendency to selfproletarianization is shown later in the same volume, where he can joke about Erlin’s appropriation of most of the family’s possessions: “Now we’re really the proletariat/unpropertied class (wuchanjieji). Ha ha!”72 Erlin, by contrast, is the archetypal peasant: “Physical labour [laodong] was a habit with Erlin. He loved the trifling tasks of tending a plot and the effort of working in the fields, in just the same way that Daquan adored his [political/ organizational] work (gongzuo).” 73 His outlook is similar to the elder Liang’s in The Builders; he longs, by dint of honest toil, to gain the best possible harvest from the land allocated to his family at land reform, to establish his own family, and to prosper. Consequently, though he tolerates his brother’s

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sporadic appearance in their fields, he shows signs of displeasure when Gao Daquan, without consulting anyone, prepares to give a sack of their corn to Liu Xiang: Erlin looked at his brother and frowned: “How much is there [in the sack]?” Daquan seemed not to have heard him: “What?” Erlin said: “We have to find out how much it weighs.” He dropped the plough he had been carrying, went over and grabbed the sack from his brother and took it inside. Daquan had never imagined his brother would react like this; never had he seen Erlin look or act so strangely. Dumfounded, he stared at his brother’s retreating form. Erlin came back out and dropped the sack at his brother’s feet. “Thirty-eight and a half pounds, we’ll call it thirty-eight.” He picked up the plough and yelled at the donkey as he led it out of their courtyard.74

Erlin weighs the grain in the expectation that the loan will be repaid; his disinclination to give freely of his labour and produce to poorer families is symptomatic of the pragmatic self-interest that is derided in The Golden Road as “peasant mentality.” It is the barrier that stands between the poor peasants and the benefits of collectivization. Of all Sweet Meadow’s poor peasant villagers, Erlin is the most afflicted with peasant mentality and Daquan the least. Yet in his meeting with Liang Haishan after the runaway horse incident, Daquan confesses, “I also perceive that there is an extraordinary amount of peasant mentality in my body, and that I fall far short of the industrial working class.”75 Even if we account for a proper degree of deference from a peasant activist toward his proletarian “older brothers,” the confession still makes little sense unless Gao Daquan’s “own body” includes Erlin. If we understand it thus, the Gao brothers present a composite picture of the conflict between individualism and altruism that the opera model and the traditions of popular fiction alike prevent the author from revealing within a single individual. In their personal lives, specifically in their finding of wives, the two brothers represent alternatives in the transitional period between traditional and modern China. It is a marital, rather than a material, consideration that precipitates the rift between the two men. Unlike Xiao Changchun, hero of Hao Ran’s pre–Cultural Revolution epic Bright Sunny Skies, Gao Daquan has no time for romantic distraction, though he is a family man.76 Rather, his own marriage is a response to the deathbed pleas of his protector Second Uncle Le (Lü Changle) that he return to Shandong and find his daughter Ruifen: “When you’ve found her, take care of her, walk the new road with her, so that

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in death I can close my eyes.”77 Their marriage, which takes place between the prologue and the novel proper, is thus both a revolutionary and a filial obligation, and Ruifen is a traditional wife, supporting her husband’s initiatives unconditionally. Erlin, however, is unmarried as the novel begins, and he falls in love with the young divorcee Qian Caifeng, who is propelled in his direction by her relative, the scheming middle-peasant Feng Shaohuai.78 Romantic love, in the austere world of the Cultural Revolution, is a snare and a delusion. Erlin’s first meeting with Caifeng ends with a premonition of danger, as he prepares to walk her to Feng’s house from the village youth club: “Erlin hastily turned out the lights, took a flashlight, escorted Qian Caifeng quickly down the long stairway, and turned toward the darkness.”79 Erlin’s choice of darkness contrasts with the light of his brother’s “golden road.” Daquan’s time-honoured duty, as head of the Gao family, is to arrange the marriage of his brother, but it is an indication of his heroic qualities (perverse and unendearing as some readers might now find them) that he puts his class brothers before his younger sibling. The preoccupations of the brothers are revealed in a scene that begins as they work together on their land. Erlin pleads with Daquan to approach Caifeng’s family, insisting that “the sooner it’s done, the sooner I’ll stop worrying” (zao banle zao sheng xin).80 Daquan, distracted, virtually ignores his brother’s entreaties; he is more concerned that Liu Xiang should have access to draught animals for ploughing. When the brothers return home, Daquan rushes off to ask Qin Kai to help Liu, speaking the identical words that Erlin had used of his marriage: “The sooner it’s done, the sooner I’ll stop worrying.” When Erlin hears his brother utter these words, “it felt like a blow to the heart. Dejectedly he thought, ‘when it comes to people outside the family (shuangxing pangrenjia) having animals to use, you worry your guts out, but you don’t even listen when it’s something affecting your own brother’s whole life, you sure are some activist.’”81 The conflict between the brothers, which arises from Daquan’s heroic dereliction of his traditional duties, is skilfully manipulated by Feng Shao­ huai, the strongest of the enemies of collectivization. While Daquan is away at New Crossroads and Red Date Village, Feng has Caifeng persuade Erlin to split (fenjia, divide households) with his brother, which results in the wall across the Gao compound that Daquan confronts on his return. Erlin’s wall symbolizes the divisions within the extended family of the poor peasantry regarding the issue of collectivization versus individual farming. The division is in essence an internal or psychological one, but it is externalized into a manifestation of the class and line struggles of the novel by the fact that its construction results from the machinations of a class enemy.

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In the terminology of model work literary appreciation (“criticism” is hardly the appropriate term here), Erlin is a “turnabout character” (zhuanbian renwu), one whose doubts concerning the path of the hero are fuelled by the concealed class enemy. In the operas, the transformation of turnabouts is effected by a combination of recalling past suffering by an older revolutionary stalwart, persuasion by the hero, and the bitter realization that they have been duped by the class enemy.82 The process by which Erlin is brought back from the enemy camp to the poor peasant fold where he rightly belongs is the longest of the interlocking story-cycles of which The Golden Road is composed. Where it differs from the precedent set by the operatic turnabouts is that Erlin’s conversion is solely the result of his own experience. Appeals to Erlin by his sister-in-law and his friend Zhu Tiehan fall on deaf ears, and his move to the Feng compound places him out of earshot for political lectures. Only by seeing how Feng mistreats his employees and suffering similar exploitation himself does Erlin reach his own epiphany in a feverish state while sick and abandoned far from home. In a dream, Erlin sees himself fighting with Feng Shaohuai over a bag of grain in the latter’s storehouse. As Caifeng tries to separate them, Erlin shouts, “Get away! Get away! He’s a treacherous wolf who harms everyone, today I’ll fight him to the death.”83 Erlin’s ideological transformation is thus complete before Daquan and Tiehan, alerted, rush to his aid, and is proved as Erlin furiously rejects the money with which Feng tries to placate him. The convincing presentation of Erlin’s transformation is crucial to the novel’s exposition of its theme that collectivization is both politically desirable for, and in the material interest of, that majority of peasants who fall within the range of political acceptability. Thus, though Gao Daquan may be the model in the operatic sense of exemplar (yangban), Erlin’s example may present the more practical guide for peasant readers (Hao Ran’s intended audience), who can first empathize with Erlin’s family-centred materialism and his rejection of his brother’s utopianism, and then follow his disillusionment with “establishing family fortunes” and espouse collectivization instead. It is Erlin’s empirical choice of the “golden road” as much as his brother’s ideological leap onto it that is calculated to realize the novel’s agitational intent. From Novelistic to Operatic: The Golden Road Onscreen

Three films were made from novels by Hao Ran in the mid-1970s, all of them at the Changchun Film Studios. The 1973 film version of Bright Sunny Skies was the first feature film made in China since the beginning of the Cultural

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Revolution, preceded only by newsreel documentaries and screen versions of some of the operas and ballets among the model theatrical works. It was followed in 1975 by the first (shang) of a projected three films from The Golden Road, directed by Sun Yu, this one drawing from the first two volumes of the novel. Part 2 (zhong), based on the as-yet unreleased third volume of the novel, was completed in 1976 and was still being screened the following year; the projected third film (xia) was never made. Only the first film of The Golden Road will be considered here.84 The collective that produced the screenplay preserved the background of the conflict, or line struggle, between the two development strategies “Get Organized” and “Increase Family Fortunes” represented at the local level by Party Secretary Gao Daquan and Village Head Zhang Jinfa respectively. The film begins as Feng Shaohuai, with Zhang’s support, shows off a mule he has bought to position himself better for enrichment. It ends with Gao Daquan and his colleagues celebrating the formation of the first cooperative. Two of the novel’s storylines predominate: the attempted entrapment of Liu Xiang, who is saved from selling his land to the middle-peasant Qin Fu (a deal arranged by the scheming Feng Shaohuai), and the breakup of the Gao brothers (also instigated by Feng) and their final rapprochement, as Gao Daquan rescues a feverish Erlin from the shed where Feng abandoned him. Erlin’s denunciation of Feng provides a climax to the film and a chance to condemn both Feng Shaohuai’s attempts at using the enrichment policy to exploit his neighbours and Zhang’s gullibility in allowing him to do so. The line struggle remains unresolved at the elite level, however, so Feng and Zhang are set to renew the battle in the upcoming sequel. The film shows the influence of the operatic model much more clearly than does the novel. Two aspects of that further transformation will be considered here: the development of the hero (or more properly, the lack of it) and the scene in which the word from on high is introduced to the peasants of Sweet Meadow. The film dispenses with the prologue; thus, the first sight of Gao Daquan is as an adult. He is fully formed and resolute, without the need for the catharsis provided for him at the crossroads in the section of the novel discussed above (the runaway horse incident is omitted) or master-worker Chen’s exemplary proletarian behaviour at the Beijing railyards. He does, however, still need the Mao text that will prove him correct in his resistance to Zhang Jinfa and his allies, though more to persuade the other peasants than to educate himself. In the film, as in the novel, Gao Daquan returns from his travels to find Erlin gone, but the metaphor of digging roots is declaimed

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rather than enacted, and that scene, which takes place with Gao Daquan’s supporters sitting in his house rather than outside, develops into a melodramatic veneration of a sacred object connected to Mao as much as the delivering of a message. Gao Daquan announces that Liang Haisheng has given them a gift, and when he adds that it is a book written by Chairman Mao (Mao zhuxi de shu), the soundtrack delivers the first bars of “The East Is Red,” with a number of the peasants repeating or mouthing the words Gao has just spoken, directly facing the camera. Then all cluster around as Gao Daquan reverently removes the book from its cloth wrapping and hands it to Zhu Tiehan. The camera first focuses on the book and its title (Get Organized), and then again on faces in ecstasy, this time in twos and threes. It is left to Gao Daquan to reveal the book’s significance in the clearest possible terms: “This is the Golden Road which Chairman Mao points out to us.” The scene, with the central hero surrounded by adoring supporters as he invokes the name of the leader, recalls the ecstatic reading of Mao’s “In Memory of [Dr. Norman] Bethune” in the model theatrical work Song of the Dragon River more than it does Hao Ran’s fiction.85 Hao Ran’s novel The Golden Road was the most noteworthy literary product of an age when the history of the People’s Republic was revised into a two-line struggle between an all-wise Mao Zedong and a series of wicked opponents of whom the worst was Liu Shaoqi. It was a reading of history that bore the indelible stamp of Mao in his dotage and his intimates of that time, and as such could not survive his death and their arrest in the fall of 1976. Predictably, Hao Ran’s novel was an early casualty in the next round of historical revision. The third volume, which was completed and in galley proofs, suddenly became unpublishable and might well have been destroyed had not the author reclaimed his proofs from the publisher.86 The first two volumes, by common consent the only major Chinese novel written for ten years, were either ignored completely or mentioned only as evidence that “in the ‘Cultural Revo­ lution’ when Lin Biao and the ‘Gang of Four’ were in the ascendant and the nation’s literature was at its nadir, Hao Ran went for a time down a blind alley ideologically and creatively.”87 When the Deng-era leadership came to rewrite the history of the Communist Party once again in 1981, the reputation of the initiatives of the early 1950s, in which the returned leaders had themselves participated, was spared. Only after the Anti-Rightist Campaign were the Party and its leader seen to have lurched along a misguided path of ultra-leftism that culminated in the ten-year disaster of the Cultural Revolution.88 Many of the literary rightists, returning to prominence in the late 1970s, also saw the early 1950s as halcyon days of common purpose and goodwill before the witch hunts

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began that saw them consigned to two decades of oblivion. This is certainly the interpretation of history that appears in the politically orthodox, if technically adventurous fiction of the one-time rightist and later minister of culture Wang Meng during the years following his rehabilitation.89 Stories from the post-Mao period set in the countryside abound with heartless cadres bullying peasants into inappropriate farming practices or harassing them with capricious and exploitative policies, but these were largely set in the Great Leap and the years following it. Collectivization had some time to wait before the appearance of a more robust and chaotic version of events from authors unafraid of devising another transformation of the past.90

6 Zhang Kangkang at The Dividing Line: Urban Youth at War with Nature

The spirit of struggle pervades Chinese socialist literature, never more than in the fiction of the Cultural Revolution. Ongoing political campaigns are enacted, previous campaigns are reworked in the light of later developments, concealed class enemies are miraculously uncovered and furiously denounced, and policy disagreements past and present are portrayed as line struggles between adherents of a correct line and opponents who are at best deluded and at worst determined to sabotage and undermine socialism (as seen with The Golden Road in Chapter 5). The language of battle is constantly used, even (or perhaps especially) when there is no apparent danger of military conflict.1 In fiction set in the countryside, there is additionally a struggle with the elements, and this struggle is frequently presented in both military and political terms. The Cultural Revolution saw a continuation of the rhetoric, and the practice, of the Great Leap Forward in the relationship between the Chinese people and the environment: the natural world was not to be adapted to, but conquered, forced to bow to the will of socialist man, and transformed to practical and productive use. The battle against nature was presented as a continuation of the wars against imperialist aggression and native feudalism in midcentury, and it frequently served as a metaphor for current political movements, the cultivation of new land or an increase in agricultural production marking victories against the pernicious influence on the Chinese body politic of Liu Shaoqi or Lin Biao.2 In considerable part, the determination of the Chinese socialist state to subject nature to human will can be attributed to Mao Zedong, and it is significant that the hostilities against nature were at their most intense in times when Mao was on the offensive, in the political ferments of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution. In her book Mao’s War against Nature, Judith Shapiro quotes a celebrated poetic fragment from Mao’s youth to illustrate not only his obsession with struggle, but also his adversarial view of nature:

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To struggle against Heaven is endless joy, To struggle against the earth is endless joy To struggle against people is endless joy.3

Shapiro cites a number of factors that led to environmental degradation in Mao-era China, including deforestation, accelerated extraction of resources, intensive farming in areas that could not sustain it, and massive transfer of people into environmentally sensitive areas as arising from his confrontational approach.4 Urban Youth as Warriors against Nature

Much of the Cultural Revolution–era assault on nature was carried out by the educated youth (zhishi qingnian, usually abbreviated to zhiqing), middleand high-school graduates of city schools who were sent “up to the mountains and down to the villages” in a mass rustication movement launched by Mao in late 1968, at least in part to rid China’s cities of the Red Guards.5 He had championed the Red Guards in 1966, using them to purge the Communist Party of his real or imagined enemies, but two years later, with the country in a state of anarchy and Red Guard factions at war with each other, Mao challenged China’s high-school graduates with his directive of 22 Decem­ber 1968: “It is very necessary for educated youth to go to the countryside and receive re-education from the poor and lower-middle peasants.”6 Although Party officials had previously been encouraged to “go down to the lower or­ ders” (xiafang), and some urban high-school graduates and former Red Guards had already gone to work in rural China prior to the directive quoted above, Mao now indicated that all were required to go. A small number were excused service, but all urban high-school graduates were expected to volunteer, and some of those who initially failed to do so were subjected to persuasion by gong-beating, slogan-shouting propaganda teams until they resigned themselves to the inevitable and declared themselves ready to volunteer.7 For a decade after Mao’s directive, until the chaotic flight of the urban youth back to the cities in early 1979, as many as 30 million were sent, not only to villages, but also to state farms established in the border regions of Heilongjiang (an area known as Beidahuang, the Great Northern Wilder­ ness) and Inner Mongolia, charged with converting uncultivated grassland and marsh into fields of grain. They were also sent to Yunnan, where forest was to be cleared and the land used for rubber plantations. The young urbanites had been schooled principally in political struggle and had little or no experience of agriculture or life in the countryside.8 They had no knowledge

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of local farming conditions or traditions and were not told that they needed it. Rather, their task was to force the land to produce the commodities the state demanded of them, even as they became worthy successors of the peasantry. The commonly cited model for their endeavours was Dazhai County in Shanxi Province, where intensive farming, including the laborious building and rebuilding of terraced fields, was said to have resulted in bountiful harvests. The lessons of Dazhai were applied nationwide, more or less mechanically, regardless of local differences in natural conditions and farming traditions.9 In the first writings about the experiences of the zhiqing, life in the countryside was presented as arduous but rewarding, providing opportunities for excitement and fulfillment. Thus, Zhong Weihua, the Red Guard leader turned zhiqing hero of Guo Xianhong’s 1973 adventure novel The Journey, fights fire and flood, outwits a concealed class enemy, overcomes the reservations of con­servative opponents of the rustication policy, convinces a reluctant peer to commit herself to a lifetime in the countryside, and wins the love of local peasant stalwarts. The novel, written to order by professional authors a generation older than the zhiqing, was calculated to inspire subsequent high-school graduates to volunteer for the countryside (as they were obliged to do), at a time when word was coming back to the cities about the sufferings of the zhiqing on the farms, and opposition to the rustication movement was growing. Many of the same struggles that appeared in The Journey – with a concealed class enemy, with conservative managers, and with hostile forces of nature – appear in Zhang Kangkang’s 1975 debut novel The Dividing Line. To them are added the conflict of the moment, required for all fiction in the final months of the Cultural Revolution, the struggle between those concerned solely with political criteria (presented as heroes) and those who saw the need for state enterprises to balance the books (stigmatized as “capitalist-roaders”).10 Written when the author was in her early twenties, The Dividing Line was among the first fiction about the rustication experience actually produced by one of the zhiqing themselves, and it was the starting point for a long and distinguished literary career.11 While eschewing the more extravagant fantasies of The Journey, the author nonetheless offered her readers ample incident and adventure, with the drama focused on the clearing of new land to increase grain production. The novel’s transcendent moment, a substantial extract of which is translated below, comes at the climax of a battle with the elements, as the hero and his friend leap into flood waters.

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The Young Writer on the Farm

By the time Zhang Kangkang began work on The Dividing Line, she had been in the Great Northern Wilderness for four years; she was a member of one of the early groups composed of the three high-school graduating classes of 1966, ‘67, and ‘68 to volunteer to leave Hangzhou for the northeast. While there, she had married another member of the urban youth cohort and given birth to a child who was taken by her husband’s family when the marriage broke down shortly afterward.12 Like many of her contemporaries, Zhang Kangkang had gone willingly, but by 1973, however idealistic they might have been about the prospect of re-education, defending the border with the Soviet Union, or transforming China’s countryside, the majority had become disillusioned with the movement and wanted to go home. In later memoirs and interviews, many zhiqing cited the report of an attempted coup by Mao’s former heir apparent Lin Biao as a critical moment in their loss of belief. Many became preoccupied with finding a way to escape the villages and state farms via a job transfer or admission to college or university. However, since rustication remained state policy, and was constantly promoted in the state media, plans to get away had to be made surreptitiously. The tension between the desire to leave (zou) or stay (liu) could be admitted, but only one choice was acceptable, that being the decision to stay. Thus, ironically, since recommendation for higher education was based at least in part on the criterion of political activism, only those who professed a determination to stay would be eligible to take the path leading away from the farm. In a memoir on the composition and publication of The Dividing Line, Zhang Kangkang recalls that her desire to become a writer had already led to the publication of a few short pieces before she decided to start working on her novel.13 Reluctance to appear ambitious and self-aggrandizing (and therefore open to accusations of unwillingness to remain) led her to plan the work, and draft a first outline, in secret.14 Though writing alone and away from the agencies of official nurture, the young author was well aware of the demands of the times: the hero must be elevated above the other characters as mandated by the “three prominences” principle, and must be “lofty, large, and complete” (gao, da, quan), an implicit reference to Gao Daquan, protagonist of The Golden Road.15 Though her memoir does not say so, she would also have known that such a hero, palpably drawn from her own recent experience (and thus bearing the stamp of authenticity and more likely to convince the reader), would have to be determined to stay on the farm him­self and able to persuade others to make the same choice. Thus, whereas Hao

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Ran’s task a few years earlier had been to transform the past, Zhang Kangkang needed to transform the present, endorsing a policy most participants no longer believed in and creating characters embracing a future that she and most of her contemporaries were anxious to avoid at all cost. Zhang Kangkang would have known that Cultural Revolution requirements for literature meant that her hero must be opposed by both a concealed class enemy and an antagonist within a divided Communist Party. She might not have been aware, as she began to write her novel on the farm, that the hero’s antagonist in their line struggle should be in the capitalist-roader mould, in which case she would have been advised of this by her publishers during the revision stage. An extended period of sick-leave at home in Hangzhou gave her the opportunity to complete and submit a first draft, which was then revised with the assistance of editors from her publisher in Shanghai. The author is unforthcoming on the extent of the revisions made at their recommendation; she does make clear, however, that though one of her advisors was politically suspect (still carrying the “rightist” stigma fifteen years after the Anti-Rightist Campaign), they were very astute as to what message a work of fiction must carry to be published.16 The novel came out in October 1975. An Exemplary Character in a Contrived Situation

The story is set at the time the author was composing her first draft: the spring and summer of 1973, four years after the arrival of a group of Shanghai zhiqing at the Number Five Farm by Reclining Dragon River (Fujiaohe) in the Great Northern Wilderness. Led by their peasant mentor, the demobilized war hero Li Qingshan, the zhiqing have started to cultivate the Great Eastern Lowland (Dongdawa), a seventy-hectare patch of low-lying land by the river, and now plan a watercourse, the Great Eastern Channel (Dongdaqu), to drain away excess water and ensure reliable production of grain for the state. The leader of the urban youth, and the hero of the novel, is Geng Changjiong, whose name, literally “light constantly burning,” suggests that he will be associated with images of heat and fire. He is supported in his endeavours by Li Qingshan and his idealized peasant family, by the farm’s Party secretary Zhou Pu, and by the young wife Zheng Jingdan, a university graduate who has chosen to marry the tractor-driver Ji Suozhu and settle on the farm. Chief among the opponents of Geng’s initiatives is Huo Li, the leader of a workteam supervising production. Both she and the Party secretary Song Wang are keener on consolidating revenues and balancing the books than on rapid and risky expansion of arable land, and they propose to improve the farm’s finances with the cultivation of cash crops. These attitudes represent the opposite of the Maoist fixation with grain production and disdain for any notion

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of profit as a legitimate goal. The villain You Fa unsurprisingly sides with Huo Li, who has promoted him to leadership of the ploughing team. Geng Changjiong returns dramatically from Shanghai as the novel begins: his father had recently died on a construction site in the city, and though Geng would have been permitted to stay home and care for his mother, he has chosen instead (as few would have done) to return to the farm, even bringing his younger brother with him in a demonstration of his commitment to the rustication policy. In describing her protagonist, the young author draws on an established, and extremely limited, lexicon for the portrayal of the central heroic characters in Cultural Revolution fiction. In his study of the characterization of these figures based on an extensive sample, Lan Yang enumerates and provides examples of recurring qualities: strong constitution and vigorous air, unsophisticated features and expression, dignified manner and awe-inspiring bearing, big and bright piercing eyes, and a sonorous and forceful voice.17 Not mentioned by Lan Yang, but familiar to readers of this fiction and viewers of the painting and statuary of the period, is that these heroes also have large and strong hands and feet. As the two brothers (initially unidentified) head for the farm at the beginning of the novel, the elder is described as having “long thick eyebrows” and “jet-black pupils.” Geng Changjiong’s first appearance at the farm is as “a pair of mighty hands” lifting a tractor that has become bogged down in the mud.18 In crafting the scene during which his admirers welcome him, the author offers an exemplary portrait of a model city youth matured by rustication: Geng Changjiong stood before them, dressed in a well-worn blue jacket and green army pants. A shock of bristling hair showed his resolute character. He was robust and solid, with broad shoulders, bushy eyebrows, a round face that was tanned and ruddy, and eyes that burned with vitality [ jiongjiong you shen – the jiong of his name]. The vestiges of childish youthfulness persisted, and when he looked at you, he still retained an air of innocence. It was only when he smiled that the fine lines by his eyes made you realize that he was already a young man of twenty-five.19

Geng is thus presented as fully formed, without the possibility for development that Hao Ran allowed himself with Gao Daquan by introducing his hero as a child; the older peasants who back Geng Changjiong are supporters rather than mentors of the young leader. Although Geng may not be representative of his real-life peer-group – his ardent longing to remain on the farm is certainly at odds with the yearning for a return to the city felt by most of the urban youth – he is absolutely typical

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of the heroes of late Cultural Revolution fiction. By the last three years of the Cultural Revolution, the standard requirement of literature, that it portray “typical characters in typical circumstances” (dianxing huanjing zhong de dianxing renwu) – the much-quoted formulation from Friedrich Engels’s letter to Margaret Harkness – had been considerably refined. Discussion of typical characters was limited to the principal heroic figure of a given work, and the depiction of such characters became the “basic task” of the arts.20 Instructions for these creations drew their examples from the model theatrical works, but each literary exemplar was expected to have a modicum of individuality (gexing) to complement the universality (gongxing) of the opera model.21 In Geng Changjiong’s case, the individual characteristic might be a desire (not always achieved) for self-effacement, which is even more modest than Lei Feng’s famous desire to be no more than an unrusting screw, tirelessly turning in the revolutionary cause. The quality is inherited from Geng’s father, whose ambition was to be like one of the stones used to build a dam, “never out for itself for a single moment.”22 The son’s model exceeds that of the father in its humility: “What a lofty spirit there is in a piece of road-gravel!” Geng Changjiong couldn’t help but think. “Though it’s too small for anyone to notice, still it has great practical application. It makes people’s lives easier, yet it remains silent; isn’t that a quality worth emulating?” Geng Changjiong had long had a particular fondness for road-surfacing gravel.23

The “typical circumstances” in which the hero was supposed to exist varied considerably over the course of the literary history of Chinese socialism. In the mid-1970s, the situation portrayed in villages, factories, offices, and other settings was a projection of the succession battle being played out at the centre as the nation’s first generation of leaders (Mao Zedong, Premier Zhou Enlai, and army commander Zhu De) neared death. At the Party’s Tenth Congress in September 1973, the group that, following Mao’s death, was to be condemned as the Gang of Four, launched an attack on its rivals for succession, which included Deng Xiaoping and other members of a managerial class restored after being removed from office in the mid-1960s. During the final months of the Cultural Revolution, they were to be called “capitalist-roaders.” At the point in history where Zhang Kangkang and her editor-advisors were revising her novel for publication, the “typical circumstance” required for fiction was a struggle between a pugnacious young hero and an older and

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more experienced Party official. That official would propose to take a misguided path of profitability over revolutionary zeal and would suppress youthful initiative backed by mass support. Class enemies were still required to commit acts of sabotage and show the hero’s perspicacity, but the conflict with them was subordinate to the struggles within the revolutionary ranks. Thus, the most significant adversary to the hero and those who take the Maoist line on agricultural production in The Dividing Line is Huo Li, who represents a style of leadership that had been condemned at the beginning of the Cultural Revolution and was re-emerging as the novel was being written. Huo Li is one of very few negative female characters in late Cultural Revolution literature, at a time when the local rivalries in fiction mirrored that of Jiang Qing and Deng Xiaoping at the centre, making the ideal combination a young heroine and a male antagonist a generation older. Perhaps to ensure that no improper inferences would be drawn, Huo Li is highly reminiscent of Wang Guangmei, wife of the deposed president Liu Shaoqi. Wang had been the leader of a work-team in the mid-1960s, which she held up as a model for others to follow and which was denounced following her fall with her husband in the first months of the Cultural Revolution. Like Wang Guangmei before her fall, Huo Li has her own fiscally responsible model unit that she expects others to copy. She is shown bullying those who will not take direction and using all means at her disposal to promote her policies against what she sees as Geng Changjiong’s rash adventurism.24 The author provides a varied group of urban youth to complement the hero. Shidai Hong (“Red Era,” a Cultural Revolution sobriquet), hopes to be a stock-herder, a groundbreaking ambition for an urban youth as well as for a young woman. The robust and popular Niu Lujiang, like Geng Chang­jiong, has chosen to remain in the countryside rather than stay with his parents in the city. And the mischievous Dong Gang’er is persuaded by Geng to show a serious side and apply for Youth League membership. The desire that many of the urban youth actually felt to return to the cities is shown in a less-thanfavourable light in two of the novel’s supporting characters: Geng’s boyhood friend Xue Chuan plans to apply for entrance to university, and the young woman Yang Landi wants her parents to find her a marriage partner in Shanghai. In the terms of the novel, desire to leave the farm is evidence of political and moral weakness (as it was in The Journey), which can be exploited by the novel’s obligatory class enemy You Fa.25 You Fa befriends the two misfits and encourages them in their discontent; he also does what he can to use their wavering to cause disruption. He steals a letter in which Xue Chuan’s father urges him to apply for university entrance, something that Xue had wanted to keep secret, since desiring to leave the farm for university is enough

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to indicate that the potential applicant is lukewarm toward the rustication policy and thus not eligible to be selected as an activist and sent to university. You Fa is able to dupe Xue into thinking that Geng has stolen the letter and thus temporarily drives a wedge between the two friends. He also arranges for Yang Landi to meet an undesirable from Shanghai who is visiting the neighbouring township, a man she hopes will help her get back to the city; she unwittingly serves as a courier between You Fa and the young man. You Fa attempts to sabotage agricultural production by supplying adulterated seed, and he also tries to discredit Shidai Hong’s bid to be a herder by releasing a pregnant cow. You Fa’s reasons for this sabotage and interference are never made clear – the author was evidently persuaded of the need for a class enemy in any work of fiction that was to have a hope of being published, without having any real sense of what would motivate him beyond simple wickedness. The Climactic Battle with the Elements

The conflict between Geng and his superiors Huo Li and Song Wang is precipitated when Geng orders a start to work on the Great Eastern Channel before the project has been officially ratified. In “shock troop” style reminiscent of the Great Leap Forward, the urban youth resolve to work extended hours of unprecedented productivity. Huo Li is outraged by Geng’s impetuosity and his neglect of more lucrative farming activities. For Geng, as for the author and her mentors, these disagreements are indications of political divisions, and they place the adversaries on different sides of the dividing line of the title: Geng accuses Huo Li and Song Wang of “only grasping money and not grasping the [political] line” (zhi zhua qian bu zhua xian).26 The political line that Geng grasps requires him to subdue nature, to make the swamp “obey them meekly” (guaiguaide tinghua), to “fight against the floods until Heaven bows its head.”27 Geng is predictably tireless, going without sleep for days on end as he directs the work. He is admitted to the Communist Party in recognition of his efforts (a previous application had been blocked by Huo Li) and offered a place at Qinghua University by recruiters who come to the farm to select the most deserving zhiqing. Such is his dedication to the rustication policy that he refuses to sign the application papers that would ensure his admission. Instead, he delivers a stirring extemporized speech to a Youth League meeting, which results in his fellow zhiqing signing a pledge to remain in the countryside, their resolution indicating that they too have “drawn a dividing line” between the current definitions of socialism and revisionism. The novel’s climax comes in the summer of 1973, as floods swell the river and threaten Farm Five’s harvest. When Huo Li demands that the Great

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Eastern Lowland be flooded to divert the flood waters from the rest of the farm’s lands, she is opposed by Geng and his supporters on what appear to be purely political grounds: that criticism of Lin Biao and of the revisionism that Huo Li represents is sufficient to guarantee the security of the entire area under cultivation. Li Qingshan concurs: “Of course the revisionist line in running the farm can’t control floods, but now we have Chairman Mao’s revolutionary line to guide us, and what’s more we have all these educated youths, what do you say to that?”28 The stage is set for what Party secretary Zhou Pu describes as a “grand battle with the Reclining Dragon River.”29 Over Huo Li’s objection, Zhou places Geng in charge of the struggle to shore up the banks, maintain the sluice gates, save the harvest on both sides of the river, and “defeat the flood waters.”30 The spirit of battle that permeates Geng’s attitude to the elements prepares the reader for the rhetoric of sacrifice and comradeship in the purple prose that follows, a passage worth quoting at length: “The floods are coming down from the mountains!” warning cries came from comrades on all sides. The flood waters were the enemy! The river embankments were the battleground! Without a moment’s hesitation, Geng Changjiong strode forward into the wind and rain, leaving Huo Li standing to one side ... Geng Changjiong stood where the storm was fiercest, commanding wind and rain, his manner composed, bold and heroic, resolute and calm, as he issued a string of battle-orders. Gripping his flashlight firmly, he kept his eyes focused on the surface of the water, searching for the slightest change that might appear on the embankments. He inspected several sluice gates and found them safe and secure, but when he came to the northernmost sluice gate, he could see something along the beam of his flashlight – the wooden frame of the gate was creaking under the onslaught of the flood waters, as most of the earth into which the supports were sunk had been washed away by the floods. The boards couldn’t withstand the force of the water; and a corner of the sluice gate had already broken off, pouring water onto the low-lying land to the east ... Swiftly, Geng Changjiong thought: “The sluice gate is vital to the grainharvest of the Great Eastern Lowland, is vital to our victory in the battle with the flood waters; we absolutely must not let it suffer the slightest damage, even if it means risking our lives we must repair it!” Waves whipped up a foot high by the wind splashed as they launched themselves to the bank. With no time for further thought, Geng Changjiong glanced around him and snapped off a long strand of willow, with which he bound his

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flashlight securely to a clump of bush nearby, and was about to go into the water, when he was restrained by an arm holding him around his waist. “You can’t go down! It’s too dangerous!” the person shouted. Geng Changjiong widened his eyes and saw it was [his backsliding friend] Xue Chuan. Xue Chuan had also been inspecting the sluice gates and had made his way here. When he saw Geng Changjiong about to go into the water, he shouted out again: “The water’s moving too fast, I’ll get some comrades to bring over some stakes and sacks of twigs.” “A panel on the sluice gate is cracked,” said Geng Changjiong anxiously. “If we don’t shore it up, the whole of the Great Eastern Lowland could be affected.” “You direct things here, I’ll go down.” Xue Chuan took off his rainboots. “No, I’m stronger than you are, I should go down.” “Changjiong.” Xue Chuan’s eyes sparkled with tears. “No more delay!” shouted Geng Changjiong, and pushing Xue Chuan aside with his mighty hands, he slid resolutely down the dike. Xue Chuan was speechless. Could he abandon a comrade-in-arms at such a crucial time? He cupped his hands together as a megaphone, yelled into the storm for all he was worth, and slid down after Geng Changjiong towards the sluice-gate. Geng Changjiong stood in the icy waters, his body sucked in by the force of the waters and crammed against the break in the sluice gate, blocking the water from flowing out. Rain was pelting down on to his neck, and the swirling waters came up to his neck. Sometimes the wind would whip up huge waves that covered heaven and earth, sealing him inside from head to toe, sometimes it was like a vast hand pushing him, attacking him, trying to drag him away, to knock him down. The storm rained down on him like sharp arrows, his face and eyes hurt as if they were being cut by knives and lashed by whips. But his whole body held fast to the sluice gate, his hands like iron clamps holding fast to the wooden structure, his feet pressed deep into the mud of the river-bed. Like a nail rivetted into a sheet of iron, like a pine deeply rooted in the soil, he stood tall in the channel. The comrades had heard the shouting and hurried over, quickly throwing in the heavy sacks of twigs. Xue Chuan stood shoulder to shoulder with Geng Changjiong in the swirling stream, arms entwined, battling together in the rushing torrent. Each could feel the other’s breathing, the other’s heartbeat, each giving the other inestimable strength. A long flash of lightning rent the heavens. In the lightning’s glare, Xue Chuan saw Geng Changjiong’s martial visage, like the outline for a mighty statue. Yes,

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indeed, thought Xue Chuan, this is the way in which revolutionary successors are tempered. At this moment, some words that he had heard Geng Chang­ jiong say flashed unbidden into his mind, and he realized that he understood them more deeply than he had before: “What class’s successors should we mould ourselves as? If not the proletariat, then it will be the bourgeoisie; if not Marxism, then it will be revisionism. There is no middle ground between these two extremes, still less is there a natural air-raid shelter where we can weather the storms of the age. We may think we’ve done all right over the past few years, and have achievements to be proud of, and give ourselves full marks, but when meet the storm, we find out that we don’t make the grade.” Then, suddenly, he heard Geng Changjiong’s cheerful voice: “Hey, Xue Chuan, we haven’t been to the pool for a swim in years, are we making up for what we’ve missed today?” “We’re not just making up, we’re having a good time as well!” “This is what they call ‘Paying no heed to tempest and storm.’” Xue Chuan finished the quotation: “Better than strolling in a courtyard!”31 “Ha ha!” The two comrades let out a burst of understanding laughter. The sluice gates were finally secured by the comrades with stakes and sandbags.32

This victory over nature precipitates other victories in the political struggles: Geng’s determination, first to cultivate and then to save the Great Eastern Low­land, is vindicated, and You Fa’s sabotage and Huo Li’s conservatism are exposed. Furthermore, Xue Chuan’s leap into the waves symbolizes his resolve to commit himself to a lifelong immersion in rural China – in all cases the mandatory outcome to the typical struggle. Artistic Antecedents for the Heroic Plunge

The image of young heroes, motivated by Mao and his works and determined to save state property at all costs, leaping into dangerous waters is a staple of Cultural Revolution inspirational propaganda. A memorable instance, which would have been known to all readers at the time, occurs in the revolutionary Beijing opera Song of the Dragon River (Longjiang song), the only one of the model theatrical works to be set in the countryside. As flood waters approach Dragon River Brigade, threatening to destroy an unfinished dam, the heroine and brigade Party secretary Jiang Shuiying proposes a solution: Shuiying (climbs higher): Comrades, the only way is for people to jump into the gap and block the flow with their bodies while the stakes are being driven.

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All: That’s the answer. Shuiying (climbs still higher): Our great leader Chairman Mao teaches us: “Will the Chinese cower before difficulties when they are not afraid even of death?” All: We’re not afraid of anything! [Old peasant] Uncle: We are Communists ... [Brigade leader] Li: So we will go! P.L.A. Man A (steps forward): We are the Chinese People’s Liberation Army ... All the L.A. Men: So we will go! Alian: We are Communist Youth Leaguers ... Ageng: We are poor and lower-middle peasants ... All Brigade Members: So we will go! Shuiying: To snatch the link-up of the dam from the teeth of danger, we pledge our hearts to the service of the people! All: We pledge our hearts to the service of the people! Shuiying: Let’s go!33

And go they do, leading to a memorably gymnastic and balletic scene of battling the flood. The stage directions at the beginning of the scene place a banner above the characters that reads “People Can Certainly Conquer Heaven” (ren ding sheng tian), the Mao slogan that encapsulated the spirit of the war against nature.34 The banner and its slogan are also displayed in the comic-book version of the opera (Figure 5). Artists creating images of early urban youth heroes at war with the elements (including those who died and were venerated as martyrs) consciously or unconsciously adopted the iconography of Song of the Dragon River in their work. An early model for youth was the zhiqing hero Jin Xunhua, who drowned in an attempt to save a wooden pole. In the conventional portrait of Jin Xunhua during his last moment of life (Figure 6), he is shown with one hand raised, turning back to call final inspirational slogans to his comrades. The pole is barely visible at the top of the picture. An equally familiar image was an oil painting of eleven urban youth plunging to their deaths, a painting that was placed in a national exhibition in 1972. It was the work of the then seventeen-year-old Liu Bairong, the first zhiqing to achieve success as a painter of youth in the countryside. The work, cumbersomely entitled What Have We to Fear with the Morning Sun in Our Hearts, We Dare to Offer Our Youth for the People (Figure 7), was subsequently reworked in water-colours for a mass-produced poster with the additional subtitle Study from the Eleven Urban Youths of the Huangshan

Zhang Kangkang at The Dividing Line 149

5  Illustration from the comic-book Longjiang song (Song of the Dragon River). The heroine Jiang Shuiying is in the centre, with arm raised.

Source: Longjiang song. Illustrations by Zou Yuefei, Qian Shengfa, Li Shaoran, Luo Pan, and Han Min (Shanghai: Shanghai renmin chubanshe, 1974), 81.

Tea Plantation Who Feared Neither Hardship nor Death. The apparent leader of the group, the young man at the left, has an arm raised, this time with the fist clenched, while the youths behind, many of them with arms linked, follow him into the waves.35 Where the natural enemy is fire rather than water, the heroic resolve, and thus the composition, remains largely the same, as in the illustration of an incident in the earlier zhiqing novel The Journey (Figure 8), where the hero Zhong Weihua (in the centre with arm raised) leads a group of zhiqing in fighting a blaze. In fictional accounts dating from the Cultural Revolution, victory is the final outcome; in the historical record, and in the post-Mao works of zhiqing authors, many valiant but impetuous and ill-prepared attacks on the forces of nature ended tragically. Images such as those described above, and the spirit they embody, of determination to overcome the forces of nature at any cost, thus producing more for the state or saving state property, were part of the official record of the cultivation of the Chinese countryside, in particular the exploits of the urban youth. The passage of The Dividing Line quoted above refers back to

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Zhang Kangkang at The Dividing Line 151

those images and seems drawn as much from the mythology as from any reallife experience the author may have had. The incident in the novel is remarkably similar to the scene from Song of the Dragon River quoted above: both passages include a storm, uncompleted preparations, the need to shore up a barrier with wooden stakes, the interference of a class enemy, the hesitancy of a manager, the intervention of a heroic Party member, the leap into the water, the willingness of others to follow that lead, the quoting of Mao at crucial moments, victory in the struggle, and the drawing of a political moral from practical experience. For the author, as for her hero, the enterprise was a bold leap into unpredictable and dangerous waters: in this, her first foray beyond short fiction, she portrayed one of the Communist Party’s most unpopular pieces of social engineering in positive, even heroic, terms. Furthermore, she was writing at a time of considerable volatility in China’s political life, as opposing factions competed for advantage in the impending struggle to succeed an ailing generation of octogenarian leaders, and she was obliged to represent the case of the group that wielded power over the media. She had to present a world identifiable as, but actually sharply at variance with, the one in which she lived, the experience of the urban youth in the countryside as it should have been from the point of view of the authorities. The majority of her characters had to be seen endorsing the policies of the faction closest to Party chairman Mao Zedong and enthusiastic at the prospect of spending the rest of their lives as peasants, with only a deluded few misled into seeking a return home. The author’s leap of faith proved as successful in its way as her hero’s. The novel enjoyed only brief celebrity, its political orientation and its professed support of the rustication movement falling seriously out of fashion within months of its appearance. It warrants only the most cursory of mentions in Hong Zicheng’s recent A History of Contemporary Chinese Literature, and even that was probably included because of the author’s subsequent success.36 However, its publication resulted in a college place for the author and nurturing by the new cultural authorities in the late 1970s, paving the way for an illustrious literary career.

◄ 6  Chairman Mao’s Red Guard – Study from Comrade Jin Xunhua, Model for Revolutionary Youth, gouache, exhibited 1972. Painter’s name given as Yi Zhong, a collaboration by Chen Yifei and Xu Chunzhong.  Source: From the private collection of Wang Mingxian. Reproduced by kind permission of Xu Chunzhong.

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7  What Have We to Fear with the Morning Sun in Our Hearts, We Dare to Offer Our Youth for the People – Study from the Eleven Urban Youths of the Huangshan Tea Plantation Who Feared Neither Hardship nor Death. Water-colour version of an oil painting by Liu Bairong.  Source: From the private collection of Wang Mingxian.

Zhang Kangkang at The Dividing Line 153

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8  Illustration from Zhengtu (The journey). 

Source: Guo Xianhong, Zhengtu [The journey] (Shanghai: Shanghai renmin chubanshe, 1973), 2, facing 476. Illustration by Wang Chunxin.

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Looking Back at the Rustication Experience

In an interview conducted almost thirty years after she wrote The Dividing Line, Zhang Kangkang was asked about the extent to which the images of the day, including Song of the Dragon River and Liu Bairong’s painting, influenced her in creating the scene in which Geng Changjiong and Xue Chuan leap into the floodwaters. She responded, I should first say that I had forgotten that I had written such a story. It comes towards the end of the novel, right? In the literary theory of those days, a work had to have a climax at the end, and the climax needed to be dramatic. But just think about it – I was twentyfour when I wrote The Dividing Line and had not myself experienced anything so significant. I had no way to come up with an appropriately climactic story. I would have had to draw on those propaganda paintings and the tales of heroes that were published in the papers of the time.37

Accounts of battles with nature remained a staple of fiction written about the zhiqing experience long after the majority of them returned to cities at the end of the 1970s. Where the later accounts vary from the stirring triumphs of The Journey and The Dividing Line is in the outcome of those struggles and, increasingly, in the value placed on human life, and therefore the spirit of sacrifice in the narratives. In post-Mao writing, with its emphasis on the worth of the individual, the loss of young lives for the production or preservation of relatively small quantities of state property is seen as a tragic waste rather than a glorious sacrifice, and the mood of the writing typically ranges from outrage to elegy.38 In his 1989 memoir Blood-Red Sunset (Xuese huanghun), Lao Gui (Ma Bo), recalling his experience as a zhiqing without a trace of revolutionary romanticism, describes the foolhardy courage idealized in The Dividing Line in tragic light, the young and naive rushing blithely into danger on the orders of the irresponsible and incompetent, unnecessary deaths subsequently spin-doctored into heroic sacrifices. In a shockingly graphic depiction of a firefighting fiasco in Blood-Red Sunset, he describes a large group of brave but ill-advised zhiqing ordered by their company commander into the wind toward a forest fire and their own immolation. The grandiose rhetoric of Cultural Revolution fiction is here loaded with tragic irony: “The flames are our orders,” [the company commander] declared. “The fire is our battleground. Charge, comrades!”39 Their deaths are later glorified in the customary language: “Everyone fought bravely, charging the fire and shouting slogans while saving one another.”40 The fighting of the fire is declared

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to be a triumph of Mao Zedong Thought, and the company commander is promoted on the strength of it, as if, the author concludes, “the greater the number of deaths, the greater the revolutionary victory.”41 Almost a decade after Blood-Red Sunset was published, in the elegiac mood of many later zhiqing memoirs, the Shanghai author Wang Xiaoying wrote a brief commemorative essay mourning eleven young women who drowned in a vain attempt to save communal food supplies. Wang Xiaoying may have written the essay as an act of contrition for an adolescent piece extolling those lost as martyrs for the cause, in the manner of Liu Bairong’s painting and poster of the young tea-plantation workers. In the later essay, Wang Xiaoying writes, “Modern values are vastly different. Today’s youth would feel that it was pointless for those eleven people to have given up their lives for a few sacks of grain and fertilizer. But when we think of the souls of those who died, calling to mind fresh faces that will never grow old, we feel a sense of solemnity, and it is this solemnity which will ultimately cleanse our hearts, which have been polluted by the air of the city.”42 Denying The Dividing Line: Zhang Kangkang’s Later Zhiqing Writing

After publishing The Dividing Line, Zhang Kangkang frequently wrote about the zhiqing who lived in the countryside during the decade between 1968 and 1979.43 In effect, much of her later work has been a refutation of that first novel, in her rejection of the heroic romanticism of her debut, in her evaluation of the worth and purpose of the individual, and in her treatment of the relationship between people and nature. Her second full-length novel, The Invisible Companion, published in 1986, presents a less romantic, and more autobiographical, view of the zhiqing in the Great Northern Wilderness.44 Two Hangzhou zhiqing, Xiao Xiao and her boyfriend, Chen Xu, move in together, marry, have a child, and split up. The child goes to the father’s family, as did the child born to the author during her own brief marriage in the Great Northern Wilderness. Xiao Xiao tries to sustain herself through the hardships of life on the farm with fantasies, drawn both from Maoist mythologies (which she perpetuates in the reports she writes for publication) and fairy stories heard (as was the case with the author) from her mother. Chen Xu is quickly disillusioned with the rustication campaign and is prepared to do anything he can get away with to achieve his goals, including subverting the political language of the day. When a local official seems unwilling to grant Chen Xu and Xiao Xiao their divorce, Chen gives him a pack of cigarettes and cynically expounds the dividing line theory that was taken so seriously in the author’s first novel: “He looked pained and troubled. He pointed to his chest and then his head. ‘I’m politically backward, and she’s one of the

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revolutionary younger generation. The divorce is due to a change in class relations, a reflection of class struggle. You can’t take that lightly; it has to do with the road we take in politics.’”45 In marked contrast to the young urbanites of The Dividing Line, those of The Invisible Companion are a sorry group, downtrodden and depressed, out of place and desperate to be away. The enthusiasm of Geng Changjiong and his heroic leap into the river would seem absurd in an environment where the needs and concerns of the individual overshadow duty to the collective and the state. Retreating from the Battle with Nature

Like some others of the zhiqing generation who witnessed, or contributed to, the degradation of the land during their time in the countryside, Zhang Kangkang has become an environmentalist. In the late 1980s, she came to believe that, though the emphasis on the individual during the period following the Cultural Revolution was a necessary corrective to the self-abnegation of the Mao era, humanity must now accommodate the needs of other species if all are to co-exist and survive.46 In her story “Sandstorm,” a group of zhiqing first offend the locals by cutting down the only sizeable trees on the grasslands. Then, when they learn that the talons of the magnificent grassland eagles are prized as a medicine in the South and can be given as gifts to officials with the power to get them back to the city, they shoot all the eagles. With the pred­ ators gone, the ecological balance of the grasslands is destroyed: a plague of mice ensues, eating the grass and burrowing through the topsoil into the sand beneath. The grasslands no longer produce the spring crop of grass needed by the sheep, and the quality of their wool declines. By the time of the story, desertification of the grasslands has led to increasingly severe sandstorms in Beijing.47 Following the publication of “Sandstorm,” Zhang Kangkang spoke against the view prevalent in the 1980s and ‘90s that the zhiqing were simply innocent victims of arbitrary and misguided policy, asserting that they must bear responsibility for the environmental devastation in the areas where they were rusticated.48 She affirms that she believed in the slogan, prevalent during the Great Leap and the Cultural Revolution, that “People Can Certainly Conquer Heaven,” as she believed that there was a “two-line struggle” threatening the future of the nation. The second belief was quickly dispelled following the end of the Cultural Revolution, but not until much later was she disabused of the first. As she explained, “In the ‘70s we all believed that people could transform nature, history, society. That attitude was shallow, confused, and turned out to be worthless. In the twenty years that followed, our views changed. People came to realize that the result

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of all this transformation was the destruction of the environment ... So I later understood about ‘People Can Certainly Conquer Heaven.’ People can’t conquer heaven. For a while we can impose ourselves on nature, we can do it with science, but in the final analysis, we can’t overcome it.”49 In her memoir on the writing of The Dividing Line, produced a quartercentury after the novel was published, the author considers questions of her participation in the generation of the socialist realist and revolutionary romantic literature of the Maoist age, in a novel that expressed support for a policy that had already brought her and her generation considerable grief, and had, at the time of writing, no end in sight. Seeking to reconstruct her beliefs at that time, she recalls that she truly believed in the existence of diametrically opposed socialist and capitalist lines, and that the revisionism against which the media were fulminating could indeed sabotage the socialist revolution and destroy everything that had been achieved to that point. Her beliefs, she claims, had been taken directly from newspaper and other reports that she neither analyzed nor understood. She was then, she acknowledges, a “worker in the arts” (wenyi gongzuozhe), in Mao’s Yan’an formulation, as opposed to the author (zuojia) she can be considered today, reworking received truths on the basis of her own very limited experience and understanding, and writing in the form then required of all who wished to be published.50 Even so, she must have been aware, however much she chose to suppress that awareness, of the compromises she was making and of the irony of her reward for creating heroes of rustication. Endorsing the movement in her novel, in which all the positive characters resolve to stay on the farm, was her ticket out, in her case to a place at college, followed by the life of a state-supported professional author, and later, with the policies of reform and opening, a lucrative profession. The Dividing Line, the first significant milestone in its author’s career, here marks the end of the golden road to the socialist future. The writing of the period that immediately followed would present a less triumphant picture, though invariably concluding with professions of similar hopes for a better future led by a rather different Communist Party.

PART 4 After Mao: Reversing Judgments, 1979-80

7 Chen Guokai’s The Price: The Flood of Tears

A skein of geese in flight, their V-shaped formation inscribing the character 人 (ren, humanity) across the sky, provides a forceful symbol of the new direction taken by the arts at the end of the 1970s. It is an image that recurs several times in the screenplay written for the film Unrequited Love (Kulian) by Bai Hua and Peng Ning, the text of which was published in 1979. Two years later, after the film had been shot, the principal author Bai Hua was the target of a hostile media campaign, the first against an artist since the Cultural Revo­ lution, signalling the end of a short-lived period of indulgence toward its critics on the part of the Communist Party. The flying geese appear to the central character of the piece, an artist who returns from success to contribute to the nation after the founding of the People’s Republic and who suffers persecution during the Cultural Revolution. He is said to have been based in part on the painter Huang Yongyu, who survived his own tribulations and whose works include at least one painting of geese in the ren formation.1 The last appearance of the geese comes at the end of the filmscript. They fly overhead as the artist dies in a winter scene in the northeast, his corpse marking the point of the giant question mark his final steps have drawn in the snow. The combination of the question mark and the ren character of the flying geese demands that the reader (and by extension the viewer, though release of the film was forbidden) ponder the inhumanity that had prevailed in the recent history of the nation. Reflecting some two decades later on early post–Cultural Revolution writing, her own and those of her contemporaries, Zhang Kangkang, who made her name post-Mao with stories of loss and disillusion among her fellow rusticated urban youth, asserted that the achievement of those years had been to restore humanity (ren) to a position of centrality in literature, a place that had been occupied for more than thirty years by the state and the ruling Communist Party.2 This change of focus led to a radical shift in genre: after years of class warfare, resolute optimism, and triumphant endings, literature was briefly dominated from 1978 to 1980 by tragic melodramas lamenting the humiliation suffered by those portrayed as the nation’s most loyal and

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deserving subjects, and the emotional and psychological damage endured by the survivors of that era. Two of those works, one set in the Cultural Revolution and the other at the time of the Great Leap Forward, will be considered in this and the following chapter. The victims portrayed in works like Unrequited Love were largely drawn from the peer-group of their creators – the literary, artistic, scientific, and educational intellectuals rejected by the Party and its leader in the mid-1960s and hounded by the Red Guards, the high-school graduates banished en masse to the farms and villages for a decade from 1968, and an official and managerial class ousted in favour of revolutionary committees during the early years of the Cultural Revolution and attacked as capitalist-roaders in the mid-1970s. Fiction, poetry, film, and memoir contributed to a national catharsis of anguish at the injustice of the recent past, the loss of life for those who did not survive their mistreatment, and, for those who returned, the loss of a decade or more and the contributions they might have made during that time. These early post-Mao works were known as “wounds literature” (shanghen wenxue), taking their collective name and their tone from the pioneering 1978 short story “Wounds” (Shanghen) by the Fudan University student Lu Xinhua.3 The story set the tone for much of the writing that followed in the next two years: the central characters are both victims, and both are women; the younger is of the urban youth generation and the elder a member of the official class. In the story, after a model official is condemned during the Cultural Revolution, her daughter severs all connection with her and leaves for the countryside. By the time the official is reinstated following the arrest of the Gang of Four, she is close to death from injuries suffered during her incarceration, and her daughter arrives too late to be reunited. A final letter from the mother likens the wounds on her body to those on the daughter’s spirit. “Wounds” stories are typically set largely in the last months of the Cultural Revolution and, like the fiction of the mid-1970s, depict a divided Party, though the sympathies toward the two sides are reversed. Whereas the stories of the mid-1970s champion the cause of the radicals against those accused of taking the capitalist road, the later stories portray a world in which power is seized by petty and vindictive opportunists who terrorize their betters in the name of the dictatorship of the proletariat. The victims’ devotion to the Party as they conceive of it (rather than what it has become) remains undiminished. Although they necessarily protest their loyalty to Chairman Mao, their true devotion is more often directed toward the recently deceased premier Zhou Enlai, himself seen as the victim of harassment and slander by his rivals in the Party leadership during the final months of his life. Zhou represents the opposite of Jiang Qing and her supporters, with Mao removed

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from contention. The stories, though tragic, are not quite without hope; even those that do not move into the post–Cultural Revolution period end with the promise of better things to come, a device known as the “bright tail” (guangming weiba).4 The former elites reinstated in the late 1970s by the post–Cultural Revolution leadership returned with a strong sense of entitlement to the prestige they had previously enjoyed, albeit with protestations of benign forbearance for their sufferings and declarations of continuing absolute loyalty to the Party and its leadership. Their revelations of past horrors were generally tolerated as long as they adhered to the orthodoxy that Party and nation were now securely back under enlightened management, having been temporarily hijacked by malevolent opportunists – those associated with Lin Biao, the heir apparent reportedly killed during a failed coup in 1971, and the recently purged group now stigmatized as the Gang of Four. The film made from Bai Hua and Peng Ning’s script for Unrequited Love and viewed by Party leaders in 1981 demonstrated the limits of that tolerance, and official criticism of it marks the end of the brief period under consideration here. A scene that apparently escaped notice by the authorities in its written form in 1979 suggested that the state had reneged on its unspoken contract with the educated classes to reward their patriotism. The critical moment occurs as the painter’s daughter, preparing to leave the country against her father’s wishes, questions the validity of his devotion, the unrequited love of the title. The celebrated line reads, “I know you, I know you all too well, Papa! You love this country of ours, you adore the country desperately ... but does this country love you?!”5 The question goes unanswered in the text, and though other authors did not raise it as explicitly, the campaign against Bai Hua en­ sured that it did not go away. The telling and retelling of tragic stories and the focus on ren, the human factor, led to an outburst of sentiment in Chinese public discourse and unleashed a flood of tears that undermined the foundations on which the Golden Road to the future had been so confidently built.6 This chapter views one of the most lachrymose of the period’s fictional works, Chen Guokai’s 1980 novel The Price (Daijia), for a look at what loyal socialist writing became as the Golden Road to communism was being washed away. Although it stayed within many of the conventions of the literature that preceded it, the novel exemplifies the new tendency toward sentimental tragedy and the new disposition of good and evil. It also offers a rewriting of gender roles in fiction, drawing on iconic images of women created in earlier times and displaced by the militant heroines of Cultural Revolution writing before making a comeback in the late 1970s.

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Tears on the Page: The Suicide’s Love-Letter

A long and melodramatic suicide note that comes toward the end of The Price is at once a catalogue of injustices and tribulations suffered by the novel’s central figure during the Cultural Revolution decade and a prime example of the wounds literary genre that flourished briefly from 1978 to 1980. The letter is addressed by the novel’s tragic heroine, Yu Lina, to her first husband, the metallurgist Xu Kewen, and is delivered to him after she has checked herself out of hospital, dressed herself in her wedding clothes, and drowned herself in a river due to remorse for actions she has been forced to take. It tells her version of the novel’s plot, one that the reader has to that point been told principally from the perspective of her two husbands. She describes how, following Xu Kewen’s arrest and imprisonment at the start of the Cultural Revolution on charges trumped up by a jealous colleague, she was tortured and humiliated for her association with him, determining to remain alive only for the sake of their three children. She then divorced her husband and married his betrayer Qiu Jianzhong, now a powerful official, in order to secure a university place for her son and preserve Xu Kewen’s research data on a new alloy, data that Qiu would otherwise have destroyed. Her two elder children, unaware of the sacrifice she has made, hate her for marrying the family’s enemy; the youngest daughter is left alone in a hovel, cared for by a compassionate teacher. With the Cultural Revolution over, her first husband reinstated, and her second husband struggling desperately to maintain his power, Yu Lina is able to entrust the children to Xu Kewen’s care, tell him where she has hidden his precious research notes, and end her life. Too ashamed to face her first husband and their children, she still protests her innocence: “Though my body has been defiled, my blood is pure.”7 Her tragedy, and the tragedies that befall her family, her factory, and her nation, are blamed on the activities of Lin Biao and the Gang of Four in the ten years of the Cultural Revolution. The letter ends in a barrage of self-sacrifice and self-pity, and a final expression of love: Kewen, forget me! I am not worthy of your memory. The past is gone, and what matters is the future. You are in poor health, and need someone to care for you. If you can, find a stepmother for the children, someone good-natured. When you are working, you sometimes forget to eat, and you need a woman to look after your welfare. The children will recognize this. If the children don’t understand things, you should instruct them patiently; they have also suffered a great deal, and you shouldn’t be too hard on them. As long as you and the children live happily, I will be able to close my eyes in death.

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Kewen, I have one final request to make of you: I ask you not to show this letter to the children, nor to let the children know of this nightmarish time of injustice in my life. In particular, do not tell [their son] Huixin how things really were. In those years, the mother he hates sold her body and her soul so that Huixin, being the kind of person he is, would not sink down, would not be destroyed, and would be assured of a place at university. If he were to know that this was the case he would feel ashamed and responsible about it for the rest of his life. Let the children hate their “vile and shameless” mother forever. That is the only way that their spirits can be released and set at peace over their mother’s death. Kewen, I am going now. By the time you read this letter, I will have left the human world, and the surging waters of the river will be my final resting place. It was the ten years of chaos that forced me to take this path. The waves of the river cannot cleanse the tears and blood that these ten years have left on people’s hearts, but they can at least carry away my bitterness and humiliation. Finally, let me tell you once more: I love you! I love you all, and I have failed you! Farewell forever, Kewen! Your once dear wife Yu Lina8

At the beginning of the letter, Yu Lina admits that she is crying as she writes; ten more times in the course of the letter she talks of tears, or “blood and tears” (xuelei), as she recounts her woes. The letter itself has the power to induce weeping: reading it, the factory manager Zhou Renjie, a stalwart proletarian, cries “large tears” that soak the paper.9 Like Yu Lina’s letter, the novel is awash in tears of grief, anger, and self-pity. The same could be said of much of the writing, documentary and literary, of the years that immediately followed the Cultural Revolution, with the posthumous rehabilitation or return to office of officials, professionals, and art­ists who had been condemned, humiliated, imprisoned, mistreated, and ostracized over the course of the previous ten years. In the case of Yu Lina, her ap­peal to her husband to forget her is incongruent with her act of cataloguing all she has suffered for his sake and their children’s. Her recording of her sacrifices cries out to be remembered and honoured, and she provides a photograph of herself at work, looking “indescribably beautiful,” as a focus for the family’s mourning.10 Similarly, much as the returning intellectuals might express their magnanimity toward those who condemned them, their

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devotion to the Party, and their willingness to endure whatever further sacrifices were needed to the cause of national construction, their detailing of the injustices they suffered was also a public appeal not only for reinstatement, but also for recognition and restitution. In Praise of China’s Intellectuals

In a long-standing tradition whereby the mistreatment of women by powerful men stands for arbitrary government of the nation by despots, the letter from the virtuous, victimized, and sacrificing Yu Lina can be read as a j’accuse on behalf of the technocrats, public servants, and intellectuals similarly oppressed during the course of the Cultural Revolution decade. Survivors’ accounts written for both Chinese and Western audiences, and tales (both romanticized documentary and purely fictional) of the sufferings of this group, characteristically portray them as having been unswervingly patriotic and loyal to the Party and its cause, even as that cause was sabotaged from within by wicked opportunists allied to those who betrayed it in their quest for power. Often with an idealism that defies logic, the intellectuals are described as remaining loyal and optimistic as they endure calumny and torture at the hands of their intellectual, moral, and social inferiors.11 The returning Xu Kewen, husband of Yu Lina and a scientific researcher of distinction before his condemnation on spurious charges, is truly astonishing in his magnanimity. His only concern is to make up the time he lost on refining his alloy and thus advance the nation’s aerospace industry. He is prepared to collaborate with the colleague who persecuted him, a junior who hit him at a public meeting, and the wife who divorced him and married his persecutor, if this will advance the research. That he does so whatever the cost to himself and the members of his family places him in a line of mythic heroes that includes the sacrificing proletarians and peasants of Mao-era reportage, fiction, and film, such as the collectivist peasant Wang Guofu and his fictional representation Gao Daquan. After ostracism as the “stinking ninth” (choulaojiu) category of enemies of the people in political life, and appearances as villains or impractical fools in fiction and film, the educated classes sought to restore their social status and their image with self-representations like Xu Kewen, thereby securing their claim to be guardians of public morality, the most loyal servants of the state, and the hope of the nation.12 After being condemned, rehabilitated during the late 1970s, and subsequently exiled to the United States, the journalist and fiction writer Liu Binyan explained Chinese intellectuals as follows: “An American reader ... needs to understand that, over the past hundred years, Chinese intellectuals have stood at the vortex of the

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swirling currents of their national history. They have taken on the heavy burden of responsibility for their nation’s destiny and, for every step of progress their country has made, have paid prices and accepted sacrifices far in excess of what is normal for intellectuals in most other countries.”13 These sentiments are echoed by the proletarian factory manager Zhou Renjie, a reliable voice in The Price. As he learns of Xu Kewen’s determination to collaborate with his ex-wife and his nemesis, he reflects, “What a fine technologist he is! Just released from gaol, he doesn’t bear grudges against Heaven or earth, he doesn’t try to make deals with the Party, he doesn’t bear any personal grudges, but dedicates himself whole-heartedly to work, what kind of a spirit is this! What other nation’s intellectuals have the generosity of spirit of our nation’s intellectuals?”14 And who, the writers imply, could be more deserving of the rewards they forbear to demand? The Price is a fine example of the works in praise of the intellectuals as they emerged from a period of ten, or in some cases twenty, years of ostracism, denunciation, and victimization. It also marks the reversal of the dominance in later Cultural Revolution literature and art of the more truculent and radical representatives of the proletariat.15 Chen Guokai and Factory Technologists

Chen Guokai, though experienced in factory life and a writer of some distinction, is not typical of the highly educated scientific intellectuals he is eulogizing. He was born in 1938 to a landlord family in the Hakka community of Wuhua County in Guangdong Province.16 He was educated there through junior high school and completed senior high in Guangzhou before being assigned to work at the Guangzhou Nitrogenous Fertilizer Plant in 1958, as the Great Leap Forward was beginning. Chen had written short fiction about village life while still in high school but considers his first “real” story to have been one composed in 1961 and set among factory workers, which won first prize in a competition sponsored by the Guangzhou newspaper Yangcheng ribao.17 Following this success, he was reassigned to propaganda work in his factory, writing reports, doing interviews, and designing wall newspapers. Chen laughingly described himself as having been the scholar (xiucai) of his factory, a designation reminiscent of the rustic scholars (tu xiucai) of the civil war era. Chen Guokai’s landlord background and his fiction-writing accomplishments made him a target for criticism when the Cultural Revolution started in 1966. He claims to have been the first in his factory to be designated as one of the “ox-demons and snake-spirits” (niugui-sheshen), his prize-winning

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story became a “poisonous weed,” and he was reassigned to manual work.18 However, because his job description was labour rather than management, he reports that criticism was short-lived and that he was well treated by the factory officials. He quickly resumed his propaganda work and was able to publish further stories in the early 1970s, which he characterizes as having been sympathetic to the technological intellectuals. He believes that this led to renewed criticism on big-character posters during the short-lived 1976 campaign to “beat back the right revisionist wind” (fanji youqing fan’anfeng).19 Chen Guokai came to national attention with “What Should I Do?” (Wo yinggai zenme ban), a story in the wounds genre. It was published in the Guangzhou journal Zuopin in early 1979, after the editors of the newspaper Nanfang ribao had refused to print it without revisions the author was unprepared to make.20 As Perry Link notes in his introduction to the story, “In the form of officially approved excoriation of the Gang of Four, the story provided an outlet for very intense feelings about personal and family tragedies that had directly affected many people during the Cultural Revolution.”21 According to the author, the story enjoyed immense popularity, obliging the journal to print more than half a million extra copies, and attracted intense reader response.22 “What Should I Do?” is the question posed rhetorically by the narrator and central character at the end of the story. Her first husband, an intellectual, has been arrested at the beginning of the Cultural Revolution and is reported dead; she is saved from a suicide attempt by a factory worker who cares for her and her son. After several years, she marries him and bears him a daughter. At the end of the Cultural Revolution, he too is imprisoned for political reasons and is released after the fall of the Gang of Four. While he is out buying wine for them to celebrate his freedom, the first husband returns, having “clawed his way back from the underworld,” leaving her and the reader with the impossible choice of the title.23 To the familiar wounds themes of injustice and victimization are added touches that Chen would develop later in The Price: veneration for the intellectuals combined with a somewhat condescending admiration for the proletariat and, most importantly, the use of a beautiful and sensitive wife and mother as the ground on which the political and factional battles of the times are contested, with the condemnation and loss of a first husband, a second marriage, and the emotional devastation of the woman caught between two husbands. Link notes that “the story broached the taboo subject of bigamy, and although the suggestion was barely made, this little irreverent fact accounted for much of the story’s fame among readers.”24 In fact, the story hinges

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on bigamy, and the thought of virtuous married women in unwitting adulterous relationships appears to have been an enthralling one for readers as well as a metaphor for a world gone wrong. On the strength of the success of his story, Chen Guokai was appointed a full-time writer in the state system. Rather than adapt his story for television, as he was invited to do, Chen chose to concentrate on his next work of fiction. The draft manuscript of The Price, then titled Living and Dead Souls (Huozhe he siqu de linghun) was completed in three months during the summer of 1979 and submitted by the author to the People’s Publishing House in Beijing. Chen was fortunate that Long Shihui, the editor reading the story, was sufficiently impressed to recommend it to Qin Zhaoyang, recently appointed to that publisher after more than twenty years of ostracism as a rightist and embarking for a second time on the grooming of bold new writers during a period of unanticipated and tenuous liberalization.25 Mindful of the price he and the young authors he promoted had paid for works that had tested the limits of Party tolerance in the mid-1950s, Qin Zhaoyang was initially unwilling to risk publication. However, eventually persuaded of the work’s merit by Long Shihui, he agreed to print it in Dangdai (Modern times), the journal of the People’s Publishing House. The only change Qin recommended was discarding the original title. Qin would later act as mentor to Chen Guokai when Chen was invited to attend a training class (peixunban) for promising authors in 1980, where his fellow students included the young female authors Wang Anyi, Zhang Kangkang, and Zhu Lin, as well as the Tianjin author and painter Feng Jicai, all of whom were to enjoy successful literary careers thereafter.26 Chen Guokai has written numerous works since The Price, including a further novel about the Cultural Revolution and several fictional pieces about the development of the new city of Shenzhen, where he now lives, though none of his later works has excited popular imagination to the same degree. Paying the Price for the Cultural Revolution

The action of The Price takes place in S city (which, despite the initial, is modelled on Guangzhou) over a few weeks in 1978, from the release of the scientist Xu Kewen from prison to the memorial meeting for Yu Lina. The story is told with numerous flashbacks involving the main characters, with a soap opera’s worth of betrayals, divorces and remarriages, heartbreaks, coincidences, and romantic and professional ups and downs. Xu Kewen is picked up at the prison gates by the factory manager Zhou Renjie, Xu’s adoptive father and himself recently rehabilitated and missing

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half an ear. Zhou is accompanied by his driver, Liu Zifeng, a former rusticated urban youth. As in the story that started the wounds genre, the characters are physically and spiritually damaged: Liu observes that Xu is “a man like a ghost,” his face deeply scarred by mistreatment in prison (and thus also similar to the returning first husband in Chen’s earlier story “What Should I Do?”).27 Xu returns to a family shattered and divided: his wife remarried, his elder daughter a delinquent, his son away at university and hating his mother, and his youngest daughter living alone in a shack in a migrant workers’ shantytown. Xu’s overwhelming desire is to return to work. Before his arrest he had led a research team tasked by the factory’s chief engineer, Liu Shiyi, to develop a new alloy, the “New Number 1” (Xin yihao) for the nation’s aerospace industry. (The alloy is not based in fact, but was a product of Chen Guokai’s imagination.) He is anxious to reassemble his team and recover lost ground, even if that means both working with those who brought him grief and causing pain to his former wife, believing as he does that “the pain of an individual is insignificant compared with the cause of the People.”28 Chief among his past tormentors is his former fellow student Qiu Jianzhong, who is Yu Lina’s current husband and now a leader at the factory. If Xu Kewen is the post-Mao archetype of a long-suffering patriotic intellectual, and Yu Lina the archetypal victim, Qiu Jianzhong is the complete villain for woundsera literature, the intellectually and morally deficient opportunist who turns radical activist to further his personal ambitions. Jealous of Xu from his university days, both for his academic superiority and his beautiful wife, Qiu resorts to factionalism and political scheming. When he and Xu are assigned to work in the same factory, Qiu dumps his girlfriend Li Wenyu (later Xu’s younger daughter’s teacher and protector) to marry Jenny (Zhenni), the unattractive daughter of the US-trained chief engineer Liu Shiyi and his American wife. However, Liu fails to practise the anticipated nepotism, promoting Xu Kewen rather than his son-in-law to head the “New Number 1” research institute because Xu is the better scientist, thereby fuelling Qiu’s resentment of himself as well as Xu. The disruption of the Cultural Revolution throws the factory into chaos and provides Qiu with his opportunity for advancement: he joins the “revolutionary rebels” and goes after those who have stood in his way. He clandestinely denounces his father-in-law as a CIA agent, for which Liu is arrested and tortured. Qiu plays the devoted son-inlaw, visiting him in jail and giving him the razor, purportedly to keep himself smart, that Liu uses to cut his wrists after a further bout of torture secretly ordered by Qiu. This leaves Qiu with Liu’s elegant villa and the research data for the new alloy prepared by Xu Kewen and copied out by Yu Lina. When he suggests to Xu Kewen that he write a poster attacking factory manager

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Zhou as having betrayed his comrades, Xu’s parents, and bringing about their deaths, Xu defends Zhou instead and is condemned for protecting a traitor. Before a meeting held to attack him, Xu drops a bust of Mao, for which he is jailed for life (a punishment Qiu hopes will cause more suffering than a simple execution). Qiu can then divorce Jenny, who is sent off to the countryside and has a nervous breakdown, and have Lina arrested, tortured, and humiliated before persuading her to marry him by agreeing to return Xu’s research notes to her and get her son a place at university. Qiu is thus revenged on Liu Shiyi, Xu Kewen, and Yu Lina for being his betters. Xu’s daughter Huiling is rusticated to a state farm where she meets Liu Zifeng (later the factory manager’s driver), is raped by a farm manager, flees, and sinks into a life of petty crime.29 Qiu is in the ascendant throughout the Cultural Revo­ lution as head of the research institute, maintaining his power by judicious participation in political movements, acting the model manager to impress his superiors, and ignoring the research program. With the Cultural Revo­ lution over and its victims returning, Qiu follows standard procedure by blaming everything on Lin Biao and the Gang of Four but recognizes the precariousness of his hold on everything the movement has brought him. When Jenny demands the return of her father’s villa, he tries to divorce Lina and remarry Jenny, but he is losing ground. When he weeps at Lina’s memorial, it is for himself; predictably, he hates the Party’s new leadership and the direction it is taking. The Price, like most of the literature of the period set in or just after the Cultural Revolution, presents a world turned upside down. The patriotic foreign-trained expert has been driven to suicide, the brilliant intellectual and the competent manager have been jailed, the virtuous wife is compromised, and the good daughter is defiled. The only winner is an opportunist motivated by professional and sexual jealousy and the desire for power and material gain. The charges on which good people are condemned are manifestly absurd, though not unheard of in memoirs of the Cultural Revolution, especially in its first months: Xu Kewen becomes a criminal for breaking a Mao bust, and during a cardgame, the father of Huiling’s school friend un­ wittingly sits on a newspaper bearing Mao’s portrait, which prompts savage retribution.30 As Huiling’s friend explains, “You know my father is an honest and straightforward worker, fair-minded, kindly, never did anything in his life to have a bad conscience about, and just because he sat on a newspaper he was tortured so much he was more dead than alive.”31 The situation provokes the narrator into periodic bursts of moral outrage and appeals to the reader characteristic of the emotional writing style of the period. In this case,

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If we use customary social attitudes, this girl [a fellow student of Huiling] is doubtless a hooligan, but who are the real hooligans? It is those who, in the Cultural Revolution, relied on plotting, beating, destroying, and looting, who used their power to take over people’s houses, steal people’s property, rape people’s wives and daughters, destroy people’s lives and then casually send them to their deaths. And having done those terrible things, they climbed to the top. These are the true hooligans, robbers, bullies, degenerates.32

Though the authority for all this evil comes from within the Communist Party, the narrator adheres to the wounds convention of blaming everything on now condemned leaders and expressing faith that the Party will repair the damage that has been done. Xu Kewen, barely out of prison, tells his younger daughter, “Lingling, with the [new] Party Central, everything will get better,” repeating the assurance for emphasis.33 Zhou Renjie suggests to Xu Kewen the improbable, but much-repeated, claim that the Party itself had suffered for a decade: “Kewen, don’t resent the Party, in the last ten years our Party has also shed blood and tears.”34 Those who have been misled or forced into error are given the possibility of redemption. This is symbolized by the book that Liu Zifeng reads and passes on to Huiling as they resume the relationship severed by her rape and subsequent delinquency: the autobiography of Aisin Gioro Pu Yi, the last Qing emperor, From Emperor to Citizen (the Chinese title is Wode qianbansheng, “The First Half of My Life”). If an emperor can be rehabilitated, Liu reasons, there is hope for all. Throughout, the narrator and the most reliable characters express their absolute faith in the new Party leadership. In Yu Lina’s case, this appears even in her suicide note. To establish a spirit of optimism, the book also begins with the weather imagery of dark clouds scattering and the sky brightening as the new era begins; more impressive is its ending, a “bright tail” of rhetorical excess equal to the most glowing prose of the Mao era, complete with the recurrent symbols of those days (dawn, the sun, the east, the road, the colour red), as Xu Kewen contemplates the future: All was quiet on the street, as a light early morning mist drifted like gauze on the air, and crystalline dewdrops twinkled in the grass on either side of the street, like tears on the faces of the day before. The sun was about to emerge over the mountains, and the clouds in the east were starting to turn from white to red, a dazzling loveable red, as the dark shadows left behind from the night before gradually dispersed in the brightening morning light. A new day was beginning!35

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The rhetorical excess is not the only thing recognizable from the novel’s revolutionary romantic antecedents. At this early stage of the post-Mao era, the author also subscribes to the concept that people behave according to their class. Xu Kewen, the model intellectual, is a child of proletarian revolutionary martyrs (Yu Lina’s status is unknown, as she is an orphan), and though Qiu Jianzhong is classified as belonging to the urban proletariat, he is actually the grandson of a capitalist and the son of a wastrel. The classbased behaviour of Xu and Qiu mirrors that of Cultural Revolution characters, the proletarian upright and the capitalist devious. Other ideas of the earlier period are reversed, however, among them the notion, seen in fiction such as Hu Wanchun’s “A Man of Outstanding Quality” considered above, that a politicized and uneducated proletariat can resolve all problems without the aid of experts. In a flashback we see Manager Zhou, a demobilized soldier, learning that he cannot direct a research project, which fails in the absence of Chief Engineer Liu and compels Zhou to seek technical education: “Thus science implacably punishes those subjectivists who barely under­ stand, causing them to come to grief in the face of reality.”36 A New Woman for a Changed World

The plot of The Price revolves around Yu Lina, whose romanticized feminine qualities – beauty, virtue, fecundity, and devotion to her husband and his work – make her the perfect target for the vengeful Qiu Jianzhong. Yu Lina has no power and is the victim and prize in the battles of others. The only decisions she makes are to sacrifice herself for her son’s future and her husband’s research, and to commit suicide. In this respect she stands in contrast to the dominant trend of women in the Cultural Revolution literary and performing arts. It can be argued that the strong characters of the opera heroines in three 1960s model theatrical works – Song of the Dragon River (Longjiang song), On the Docks (Haigang), and Azalea Mountain (Dujuanshan) – were the products of a state-sponsored feminism that might be attributable in part to Jiang Qing’s involvement in their development. The same can be said for the strong female characters in the two ballets among the models – The Red Detachment of Women (Hongse niangzi jun) and The White-Haired Girl (Baimao nü).37 These heroic characters, all without family commitments, were able to dedicate themselves to opposing class and national enemies, exhibiting valour and initiative in wartime, and leadership and sagacity in peacetime. Young heroines of late Cul­tural Revolution fiction and film are shown denouncing older male authorities to the delight of their comrades (and, their creators would have hoped, their readers) in what may have been

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an allegory for the hoped-for outcome of a leadership contest between Jiang Qing and her older adversaries, Zhou Enlai and Deng Xiaoping.38 Militant heroines of the Cultural Revolution model all but disappear from view in the late 1970s and early ‘80s, where the good women are mainly victims, with the activists becoming schemers and opportunists.39 In The Price, Yu Lina and the other two female characters of her age, the chief engineer’s daughter Jenny and the teacher Li Wenyu (all three of whom are involved with Qiu Jianzhong at some stage), are not the leaders and innovators of a few years before. They are judged by their looks and their value to their men’s advancement. Although Xu Kewen and Yu Lina may be a modernday scholar and beauty, there is no doubt as to which is the more important and which plays the supporting role: Lina is described as a leaf to Xu Kewen’s flower. Attractiveness is a more important part of female capital than ability; the narrator is at pains to remind the reader of Yu Lina’s beauty and charm, whereas Jenny, whom Qiu Jianzhong marries for her father’s position, is stigmatized for her unattractiveness and lack of femininity – she snores, talks too much, and has a slight moustache. Li Wenyu, the first of the women to be disposed of by Qiu Jianzhong, is the obvious candidate for the second wife and stepmother advocated for Xu Kewen in Yu Lina’s suicide letter, by virtue of her nurturing of their younger daughter. Women are used as pawns in battles for power and influence, or as trophies of victory. Most importantly, they are victims, divorced, abused, discarded, raped, and tortured, disposed by the author to reveal the characters of the men around them and gain the sympathy of the reader. Yu Lina, though the central figure of The Price, is largely passive, weeping and lamenting as disasters strike her. When asked about his heroine as tragic victim, Chen Guokai asserted that in reality, Chinese society was male-dominated and that his novel therefore offered a truthful picture of the powerlessness of women like Yu Lina. He further freely admitted to having a sentimental disposition himself, making it easy for him to use a staple of romantic fiction: creating a female character who is beautiful and virtuous, and then having terrible things happen to her. The destruction of beauty is, he claimed, the greatest of all tragedies, and readers everywhere sympathize most readily with a beautiful female victim. Chen’s response brings to mind the image of an earlier sentimentalist conjured up by Leo Ou-fan Lee in The Romantic Generation of Modern Chinese Writers: The late-nineteenth-century translator Lin Shu, working with his collaborator on a Chinese rendition of La Dame aux Camélias, one of the most popu­lar Western novels in the late Qing: “The two men wept repeatedly over Marguerite Gauthier’s miseries. When they came to the most maudlin

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passages, the sounds of their sorrow were reportedly heard even outside the house.”40 Chen himself offered an earlier model of sentimental writing to support his case for the emotive power of female grief – the Song dynasty poet Li Qingzhao, author of tearful lines of bereavement written after the death of her husband. He attributed to Li Qingzhao the popular expression of grief yi lei xi lian (washing my face with tears), a sentiment that certainly applies to his tearful heroine.41 The Imprisoned Heroine in Life, Myth, Reportage, and Fiction

In creating the image of a loyal female communist wrongfully imprisoned and enduring terrible mistreatment and indignity, Chen Guokai had material on which to draw from the civil war era and from his own day, in characters who had been elevated to mythic status in reportage, fiction, and other art forms. A real-life case that came to light in 1979, as Chen Guokai was planning and writing The Price, was that of Zhang Zhixin. Her story was first featured in the posters and art displayed, and the self-published unofficial journals sold, at Beijing’s Xidan Democracy Wall and then in the official media. And though the circumstances of her incarceration and the manner of her death differed from those Chen Guokai devised for Yu Lina, there are parallels in the stories of the two women that make consideration of the Zhang Zhixin case valuable for an understanding of The Price and its times. The tone of anguish and accusation that characterizes writing about Zhang Zhixin, and her elevation to the status of martyr, made her a major focus of the postMao emotional release and fit in with the wounds style. Zhang Zhixin worked in the propaganda department in the offices of the Liaoning provincial Party committee following university graduation and a period of service in the army. An amateur musician and composer, she is often pictured with a violin; she is also portrayed as a loving mother to her daughter (the husband is invariably absent from the accounts). Reports about her, and an early autobiographical essay discovered and published along with reports of her incarceration and death, also present a Communist Party member utterly devoted to the Party and the communist cause. Zhang Zhixin’s troubles reportedly started in 1968 when she began to express reservations about the Cultural Revolution and some of the people it had brought to prominence, including Jiang Qing and Ye Qun, respectively the wives of Mao and his “close comrade-in-arms” Lin Biao. For this perceived treachery, she was arrested in 1969, repeatedly tortured, and forced to write confessions. In April of 1975, after six years of imprisonment, she was executed, apparently on the orders of Mao Yuanxin, Mao Zedong’s nephew and a significant

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figure in Cultural Revolution Liaoning. On the day of her execution, her wind­pipe was cut to prevent her from speaking on the execution-ground; images of her in her last moments invariably show a white scarf around her neck. Hong Kong journals further reported that she was gang-raped by her jailers.42 The People’s Daily report that brought the case to national attention took its title “We Must Struggle for the Truth” (Yao wei zhenli er douzheng), from the Chinese text of the communist anthem “The Internationale,” to emphasize its heroine’s devotion to communism. Its descriptions of her prison experiences are reminiscent of those of historical and fictional communist partisans who defied their nationalist jailers in the Republican era. Two of the red classics written and filmed before 1966, unavailable during the Cultural Revolution but re-released shortly after it ended, feature heroic female characters jailed and tortured for their communist sympathies. These are The Song of Youth (Qingchun zhi ge) and Red Crag (Hong yan), the film version of which was titled Eternal Survival in Fierce Fires (Liehuo zhong yongsheng). The strongest of these heroic images, and the one implied in the reportage surrounding Zhang Zhixin, is Sister Jiang (Jiang jie), martyr-heroine of the 1962 novel Red Crag, by Luo Guangbin and Yang Yiyan. The action of the novel, one of the most popular red classics of the pre–Cultural Revolution years, takes place toward the end of the civil war, and for much of it the members of the Communist underground wage their campaign of resistance against the Nationalists from within the Zhazidong Prison just outside Chongqing. A final prison break results in the slaughter of most of the surviving communist fighters on the eve of communist victory, in a powerful scene of revolutionary sacrifice. Since its publication, the novel has been incorporated into the mythology of communist liberation and adapted in a number of forms including film, television series, opera, musical, and “symphonic suite,” many of the works titled Sister Jiang after the novel’s most memorable character. The site of the prison and the neighbouring Nationalist headquarters, the White House (Baigongguan), have been preserved as a museum; a testimony to the abiding power of the Red Crag mythology is that the museum, refurbished in the early years of the present century, has become one of the most popular “red tourist” sites in China. Sister Jiang, a romanticized portrait of the real-life communist resistance fighter Jiang Zhuyun, remains serene, elegant, and true to the cause in the face of appalling brutality graphically described. The image of Sister Jiang and the language used to describe her were ideally suited to the creation of a mythology surrounding Zhang Zhixin. Particularly striking is the People’s Daily’s emphasis on Zhang Zhixin’s deportment and composure, which reads considerably more like fiction than

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9  Illustration from the comic-book Zhang Zhixin. 

Source: Wu Wenhuan, Zhang Zhixin, illustrations by Han Min et al. (Shanghai: Shanghai renmin meishu chubanshe, 1979), 74.

reportage: “Before each interrogation, Zhang Zhixin would calmly adjust her clothing and straighten her short, thick black hair, then walk to the interrogation room with her back straight and head held high.”43 A memorable passage in Red Crag describes Sister Jiang in very similar terms as she is brought back from her torturers, who have again failed to make her name her contacts in the communist underground. As she makes eye contact with other prisoners, “She tried to steady herself, swayed a little, and by a great effort finally managed to stand erect. Then she threw back her head and tossed the bloodstained hair from her pale face ... Her head held high, she staggered unassisted towards the women’s cells.”44 The comparison is made explicit in the comic-book version of the Zhang Zhixin story (Figure 9). This time it is Zhang Zhixin who is pictured returning from interrogation and torture: “Her fellow-sufferers looked at Zhang Zhixin’s valiant and undaunted posture, and all venerated her, and praised her: ‘She is our Sister Jiang.’ Indeed, she was precisely a Sister Jiang for the 1970s, daring to do battle with the feudal fascists who wore the outer garb of the Communist Party.”45 Thus the iconography associated with one historical figure who had become a heroine of fiction and the performing and visual arts was in turn used to create a new mythology around the more recent historical figure Zhang

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Zhixin, whose story, like Sister Jiang’s, was adapted in a number of visual and performing art forms, though without the longevity that the heroine of Red Crag continues to enjoy. Zhang Zhixin was thus installed in the panoply of real and fictional martyrs to the communist cause and was in turn herself available to any who sought to craft their own reportage and fiction about latter-day communist heroines. The publicizing of Zhang Zhixin’s case in 1979 allowed for the expression of outrage that millions felt over events that had taken place during the Cul­ tural Revolution, while doing minimum damage to the Party in its post-1976 manifestation: Zhang had been jailed for her opinions about the most vilified of the Party leaders, who were already condemned by the time her story came out, and her death had been ordered by provincial authorities who had fallen with the Gang of Four. And since she was dead, she would not be returning with criticisms and demands of the present leadership. Some articles acknowledged that many of those attending the memorial for Zhang Zhixin and blaming her death on the Gang of Four had themselves colluded in her incarceration and condemned her at public meetings (a case paralleled in The Price by the presence among Yu Lina’s mourners of her tormentor Qiu Jianzhong in his capacity as grieving husband). However, the overwhelming impression left in the Zhang Zhixin case, in the official media at least, was that this tragedy could have occurred only in the Cultural Revolution and that, with a new and enlightened leadership, those dark days were being left behind. It is the same message offered by The Price and others of the wounds stories, though the flimsiness of the argument may well have been apparent to many readers before it was punctured by the reportage of Liu Binyan and the “exposure fiction” that succeeded the wounds genre.46 Questioned about resemblances between the portrayal of Yu Lina in his novel and the case of Zhang Zhixin, Chen Guokai explained that he had drafted his story, and come up with his central character, early in 1979, before the reports of the Zhang Zhixin case were revealed in the national press. If there were a model for the characters in his novel, he suggested, it was closer to home: a couple who had been colleagues of his, who joined opposing radical factions in the early years of the Cultural Revolution, leading to their separation and the destruction of their family.47 He was, however, writing The Price during the course of 1979, at a time when the Zhang Zhixin affair was receiving massive publicity, and he accepted that there were certainly parallels between Yu Lina in his novel and the story of Zhang Zhixin. Most obviously, both are portrayed as beautiful and virtuous women, loving mothers, and loyal to the Communist Party, who meet with tragic deaths at the hands of

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evil men in power during the Cultural Revolution. Although Yu Lina’s situation is more complex than that of Zhang Zhixin, who has a straightforward choice between the Party of her belief and the Party of her day, and is uncompromising in a way that Yu Lina cannot be, their stories are presented in much the same way. Like the authors of the documentary writings who focused on the cruel indignities endured by Zhang Zhixin, Chen Guokai exploited the sufferings of his tragic heroine to their full tear-jerking potential. One further coincidence in the stories of Zhang Zhixin and Yu Lina should be noted: when both were dramatized for television – two of the earliest serials to be produced after the Cultural Revolution – the roles of both Zhang Zhixin and Yu Lina were taken by the same person, the Shanghai tragedienne Xiang Mei. The 1981 six-part adaptation of The Price, under the title Times Gone By (Liushi de suiyue), was done in Shanghai without consulting the author, who received no royalties for his contribution to the script. The ending of the story was altered, with Yu Lina being saved from drowning and reunited with her husband, a change that displeased Chen Guokai but may be seen as a reflection of how times had changed for the arts in the year since his novel’s publication, a year that had seen the criticism of Bai Hua’s Kulian. The Price is very much a product of its times, the years 1979-80, with its focus on the tragedies of the Cultural Revolution, its romanticism about the intellectuals, and the sentimentality that reaches its climax in Yu Lina’s suicide letter. One final work to be considered, also from 1980, takes the revelation of national tragedy back another decade, undermining not the class struggles of Cultural Revolution fiction, but the Great Leap triumphalism of Red Flag Ballads and Li Shuangshuang; this is Zhang Yigong’s short novel The Story of the Criminal Li Tongzhong.

8 Zhang Yigong’s The Story of the Criminal Li Tongzhong: Work with the Spade

Like much of the fiction of the immediate post-Mao period, including the “wounds” literature described in the previous chapter, the short novel The Story of the Criminal Li Tongzhong, published in 1980, is concerned with the rehabilitation of officials condemned for political offences in the preceding years and the rewriting of history from their point of view.1 The story begins in April 1979, the time in which it was written, with a trip to attend a memorial ceremony at a remote and lonely grave during the Qingming festival, the traditional day for mourning the dead. Although it deals with the past, its first and last chapters are set in the present, a device that enables the reader to perceive its message as intended for the present day.2 The grave is that of the central character, the refugee, farmhand, militia leader, one-legged Korean War veteran, production brigade Party secretary, and convicted grainstore plunderer Li Tongzhong, and the visitor is Tian Zhenshan, Li’s former superior, first as army commissar in the civil war and then as Party secretary of the district in which Li’s production brigade Li Family Stockade (Lijiazhai) is located. Tian’s purpose is to acknowledge the wrongs of the past and to draw lessons for those who have survived them: “In order to make the living wiser, in order to straighten out the affairs of the world, he [Tian] wanted to go to the mountain hamlet he had left nineteen years before, to a grave overgrown with weeds, and free a shackled ghost of his chains.”3 Like The Price, The Story of the Criminal Li Tongzhong intends to revise the historical record, but it differs from the overwhelming majority of wounds fiction in that it addresses, not the recent past of the Cultural Revolution, but the famine years that followed the Great Leap Forward (as the nineteen-year gap mentioned in the quoted passage indicates). It is one of very few fictional works from the late 1970s to deal with the Great Leap, and just as Chen Guokai’s novel can be read as a refutation of the combative mood of the mid1970s, so Zhang Yigong is confronting the buoyant optimism of Great Leap fiction, particularly “A Brief Biography of Li Shuangshuang.”

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Revisiting the Great Leap

It is now evident that of all the disasters suffered by the Chinese people in the twentieth century, including the collapse of empire and the ascendance of regional warlords, the Japanese occupation and the Rape of Nanjing, the civil war between the Nationalists and the communists, and the political campaigns and purges that followed communist victory, the greatest loss of life was in the death by famine of tens of millions of China’s peasants during the late 1950s and early 1960s, starved by a leader and government whose ill-conceived and impractical policies took the nation to disaster and who then callously rejected the means to relieve the famine in the countryside until the residents of the great cities were threatened with similar deprivation.4 We will never know how many people died in the midcentury famines; the tentative figure of 30 million deaths arrived at by Western statisticians in the mid-1980s and quoted by Jasper Becker in his 1996 history of the fam­ ine has been attacked by some in the West as being too high but is regarded by Chinese and Western scholars now researching the period as a considerable underestimate. In his 2010 study Mao’s Great Famine, Frank Dikötter proposes a figure in excess of 45 million.5 The prolongation of the Great Leap after 1959, when it was clear that famine was already widespread, must be attributed principally to Mao, who insisted that his colleagues support him against the criticism of the Leap raised that year by Peng Dehuai when the leadership met at Lushan. His rural background and understanding of peasants notwithstanding, Mao was prepared to see tens of millions starve if that would advance his vision of the national interest.6 The greatest numbers of deaths occurred in Sichuan, then the most populous of China’s provinces. Millions also died in the poorer provinces of Henan, Anhui, and Shandong, but the highest proportion of lives lost was probably in the more sparsely inhabited northwestern province of Gansu, where as many as a third of the population may have perished. The Communist Party concealed the extent of the famine from its own people and the outside world, blaming such shortages as it would admit on bad weather and sabotage by the Soviet Union. Then, when it finally acknowledged some past errors after the Cultural Revolution, it absolved itself of moral responsibility, claiming that the policies that brought about the famines were well meaning if misguided and thus that the death of millions of peasants was “a tragedy of good intentions.”7 The full extent of the tragedy that had taken place two decades earlier may well have been unknown to the officials, intellectuals, writers, and artists who were rehabilitated in the years immediately following the Cultural Revolution.

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Only those with inside information or personal experience of the most affected rural areas could have been aware of the enormity of what had occurred there. Some of those condemned as rightists in the campaign that preceded the Great Leap had been banished to the poorer parts of the country for protracted periods (in a mid-twentieth-century variant of the internal exile suffered by disgraced imperial officials). One of these, the journalist and fiction writer Liu Binyan, spoke movingly to the Assembly of Writers and Artists (Wendaihui) in 1979 of the excessive (and occasionally ludicrous) demands placed on his peasant neighbours during the early years of his banishment.8 Incomplete knowledge of the famines may have been one reason for the newly rehabilitated to focus their attention on the more recent past when they returned to favour in 1978 and 1979. But there are other reasons for the preference for the Cultural Revolution as the setting for the usually tragic stories of the immediate post-Mao period: it was a massive recent trauma shared by a very large number of people, and those who suffered the worst humiliation and deprivation were precisely those who were the principal producers and consumers of the written word – recent high-school graduates, intellectuals, government employees, and other city-dwellers. Further­ more, a comfortable consensus existed between government and the returning officials and intellectuals as to who should be portrayed as the forces of evil: Lin Biao, the Gang of Four, and their representatives at lower levels. Even when the victims of the Cultural Revolution looked back a further decade to the mass movements of the late 1950s, they focused on the Anti-Rightist Campaign against the intellectuals that followed the Hundred Flowers movement. Writers of fiction and memoir about imprisonment, torture, hardship, and ostracism, first in the Anti-Rightist Campaign and then in the Cul­tural Revolution, were primarily interested in respect and redress for themselves, their families, and members of their peer-groups. Conspicuously absent were calls for redress for the tens of millions who had died of starvation in the famines. There were, to my knowledge, no demands for a Great Leap museum to parallel the museum of the Cultural Revolution demanded by the veteran author Ba Jin in the late 1970s and subsequently erected, first in virtual form by the webmasters of the North American Chinese-language network Huaxia wenzhai and, a quarter of a century later, in concrete form in Shantou, Guang­ dong Province. The famines remain both more difficult for writers to address and easier, and perhaps more necessary, for the government of China to keep out of the public eye, even half a century after the event. There is no visual record of the famines of the 1960s; there are no documentary films or photographs of the starving. There were no famine stories

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in the national or provincial media at the time, the only news reports being in bulletins intended for the highest national and provincial leaderships.9 The Chinese people were kept in ignorance of the national situation, however painfully aware they may have been of deprivations in their own localities. The official records that exist for the period are, as Jean-Luc Domenach says in his study of the Great Leap in Henan, “abundant and mendacious.”10 The image of the rural Great Leap presented within China, as to the outside world, was an invention, a portrait of things as they would have been if the leadership’s policies had been successful. Reports of magnificent achievements were illustrated by photographs, some falsified, of bountiful harvests, and charming propaganda images of well-nourished peasants in scenes of cheerful abundance. The literary record of the rural Great Leap comprises Red Flag Ballads and the revolutionary romanticism of fiction and film, none more delightful and inspiring than the many works featuring Li Shuang­ shuang. This glorious image of the countryside in the Great Leap was implicitly reinforced during the late 1970s by the post–Cultural Revolution re-release of Li Zhun’s stories and the film Li Shuangshuang, which were presented as casualties of Gang of Four suppression and thus beyond reproach.11 A further reason for the sensitivity of the Great Leap, as compared with the Cultural Revolution, in the late 1970s, was the awkwardness in finding someone to blame for the appalling hardships the movement had imposed on the Chinese people. With the notable exception of Peng Dehuai, whose fall was the result of his criticism of the Great Leap at the 1959 Lushan conference, the central leadership had fallen in behind Mao in the pursuit of his utopian objectives. (It is now clear that State Premier Zhou Enlai’s support of the policy in 1958 came only after initial reluctance followed by severe criticism from Mao, abject self-criticism on Zhou’s part, and a proffered resignation, but such internecine struggles were unknown outside the most elite circles.)12 To admit that policies promoted by the leadership on whose achievements the Party depended for legitimacy had been responsible for the death of tens of millions of China’s citizens would undermine, perhaps irreparably, the image of itself that the Party was assiduously cultivating. The above reasons notwithstanding, I believe that the status of the victims is the most significant factor in the failure of the immediate post-Mao wounds writers to address the famines that had ravaged the country during the early 1960s. Almost all the victims were from poor rural areas, had little education, and were without access to the media. With the communization of their land, and the outlawing of such enterprises as the growing of cash crops for market, many of them also owned nothing and essentially had no identity beyond their village or production team. In short, in the terminology adopted

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by Amartya Sen in his Poverty and Famines, they had no entitlement, no right of ownership even to the grain they had grown, which was locked in granaries or moved away under armed escort when they needed it most.13 When Jean-Luc Domenach tried to find the story of someone who had barely survived the famines for his study of the Great Leap in Henan, he became aware that “details are not available for any such individual, although it is clear that there were many peasants in that situation. They did not have the right to speak out, let alone the means to do so. Their silence is the silence of poverty, a silence that goes for nothing.”14 Even the rural “rightists,” many of them lower-level commune and brigade administrators, were far slower to demand reversal of the verdicts against them than were their urban counterparts. They had approved the government’s policy of “opposing rash advances” (fan maojin) when it had been in force during the mid-1950s.15 Later, they were censured for their caution when Mao, determined to outdo Khrushchev in the race to overtake the Western economies, had demanded ever greater impetuosity.16 The victims of the Great Leap were effectively dependent, as China’s peasants had been in earlier famines, on good officials at the local or central levels to save them from tyranny and on bold intellectuals to plead their case. But by the early 1960s, the local officials who might have spoken up for them were terrified into compliance, and the boldest of the intellectuals had either been punished for their earlier temerity or were lying low for fear of renewed reprisals. The economic innovations adopted after 1962 to allow a measure of private farming may have had the effect of rescuing the survivors from the brink of starvation, but the story of the famines remained untold, inscribed on the bodies of hundreds of millions of China’s peasants but suppressed from public record and shared memory.17 The Archaeology of Memory

Just over a century ago, Sigmund Freud made his first foray into literary criticism with “Delusion and Dream,” an extended analysis of the state of mind of the central character in a novella published three years earlier and recommended to Freud by his colleague Carl Jung.18 The story was “Gradiva: A Pompeiian Fantasy” by the otherwise little-known Danish author Wilhelm Jensen. In it, a young German archaeologist called Norbert Hanold acquires a copy of a classical Italian bas-relief of a young woman with a distinctive stride, whom he names Gradiva (the girl splendid in walking). The image inspires dreams that transport him to Pompeii at the moment of that city’s destruction in the volcanic eruption of AD 79. Hanold feels the need to travel to the site of the excavation of Pompeii. There he meets a young woman whom

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he takes to be Gradiva but who turns out to be a fellow German and a childhood playmate. The two fall in love. Freud’s focus was on the way that the protagonist’s repressed or unconscious memories were rekindled by an image and expressed in dreams. Following Jensen’s Pompeiian theme, Freud adopted the metaphor of archaeology in his description of the protagonist’s new­ found love as “the childhood friend excavated from the ashes”: this leads to his celebrated use of the archaeological dig as a symbol for the retrieval of repressed and unconscious memory: “There is no better analogy for repression, which at the same time makes accessible and conserves something psychic, than the burial which was the fate of Pompeii and from which the city was to rise again through work with the spade.”19 Freud’s insight has been used in reading works of memoir and fiction about trauma, where memories repressed as too terrible to live with are finally told and retold so that the victim can come to terms, and bring others to terms, with horrors witnessed or endured. The passage from “Delusion and Dream” quoted above is cited by Nicola King in her study of recent novels about the midcentury European Holocaust; she notes that “according to Freud, the analyst is in a much better position than the archaeologist because in the unconscious of the patient ‘all the essentials are preserved; even things that seem completely forgotten are present somehow and somewhere, and have merely been buried and made inaccessible to the subject.’”20 I would suggest that societies, like individuals, may try to bury the record of trauma but are also obliged eventually to perform similar acts of excavation when the pressure of the victims to speak their memories becomes stronger than the forces of repression. Repression in these cases may be exercised by states, which have reasons of their own for preventing revelations of atrocities and blunders. In the case of the Chinese famines, the mind in which the memories were at once inaccessible and preserved was more collective than individual: both the leadership that had caused the famine and those who had suffered it repressed their memories due to fear of punishment or reluctance to relive those terrible years. Thus, at the Qingming festival, the time to commemorate the dead, in the spring of 1979, Zhang Yigong’s writing was an act of archaeology in the national consciousness, excavating events that had been written only on the bodies of their victims and forcing them into public discourse. Though Zhang was alone in recalling the famines of the early 1960s in immediate post-Mao fiction, he was not the only author writing in 1979 to address the Great Leap and the harm it caused. Two short stories by veteran female authors published that year, Liu Zhen’s “The Black Flag” (Hei qi) and Ru Zhijuan’s “A Badly Edited Story” (Jianji cuole de gushi), both dealt with

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the political extremism of the Great Leap’s early months.21 In Liu Zhen’s story, set in 1958, a township unwilling to predict impossibly high grain harvests is punished with the award of a black flag for backwardness. The narrator, a Party official, is condemned as a rightist, and she and other local leaders are persecuted; the flag is used to make much-needed clothes for a local boy. The survivors reunite eighteen years later to celebrate the fall of the Gang of Four. In “A Badly Edited Story,” also set in 1958, a village is forced to report a grain harvest far higher than the fact and is taxed according to the report. Then its pear orchard is torn up just before the fruit is ripe to plant more wheat. An old Party activist who was once prepared to sacrifice everything for the communist cause now finds himself condemned as backward for protesting the foolishness of Great Leap policies. Both these stories dwell on the inflated targets and false reporting of the early months of the Great Leap as well as the bullying of peasants by officials determined to distinguish themselves to their superiors as activists. Both leave implicit the effects these actions would have on the peasants during the months and years that followed. The outrage they expose is the unconcern shown by regional Party officials for the well-being of the people in their care and those officials’ cynical efforts to further their own careers by imposing ideologically driven and completely impractical production goals. It was left to Zhang Yigong to take the story two years further, into the later tragic stage of the Great Leap, to perform the work with the spade, and to uncover the story of a famine long suppressed in the national memory. Heroism in Henan

The Story of the Criminal Li Tongzhong, like “A Brief Biography of Li Shuangshuang,” the most celebrated work of Great Leap fiction, is implicitly set in Henan, a province that was both a national model in the prosecution of the Great Leap and, later, one of the regions worst hit by famine.22 Support from Henan’s provincial leaders, in the form of bogus production figures and excessive projections, may have been a factor in persuading Mao Zedong to forge ahead with the Great Leap. A key figure in Mao’s willing self-delusion was Henan’s first Party secretary Wu Zhipu, introduced in Chapter 3, who had set unachievable targets for grain. In his memoirs, Mao’s doctor Li Zhisui recalled Wu as having been “small, fat and honest,” perhaps reflecting Mao’s own assessment, but honesty seems not to have been Wu’s forte, in the Great Leap at least.23 A visit led by Wu to a recently formed People’s Commune in August 1958 had gone a long way toward convincing Mao that “the problem of food production in China had been solved, and that the country was now producing more food than the people could possibly eat.”24 A similarly rosy

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picture reported by Wu to Mao the following June in the run-up to the confrontation with Peng Dehuai at Lushan inspired Mao to comment, “Your material is very useful to me, especially concerning the general situation [which is] stable, developing and prosperous. The whole province is without any panic over grain ... The whole situation looks good, public feeling is stable.”25 Wu’s report and the conclusion Mao drew from it were tragically at variance with reality. Production was nowhere near Wu Zhipu’s romantic projections, and state levies left the peasants with insufficient food and seed grain. The stable public feeling had been achieved by punishing those who resisted collectivization and those rightists who had adhered to the former state policy of opposing impetuous advance. As Jean-Luc Domenach describes the situation in 1958, “Protest had been crushed; people were being shot in sports arenas; one had to keep one’s head down.”26 Zhang Yigong was well positioned to observe the changes that took place in Henan village life during the 1950s.27 He worked through the decade as a reporter, first with Henan dazhongbao (Henan masses), a paper designed for peasant readers that he had joined at the age of fifteen, and then at the provincial daily Henan ribao. Almost all of his early assignments concerned rural issues, including land reform and the collectivization process. During the mid-1950s, Zhang observed peasants being forced by local officials to join cooperatives and to accept well below market value for the property and livestock they brought with them. He was struck by the choice many peasants made to slaughter livestock rather than see them collectivized. One such incident he witnessed, of a donkey killed and boiled for meat rather than being given up to the collective, stayed in his memory: he imagined the animal’s jaws, chattering together in the fiercely boiling water, as if protesting its unfair treatment.28 Echoes of the donkey’s complaint can be heard in two places in The Story of the Criminal Li Tongzhong: first in the protest the central character infers from the last bellows of an ox slaughtered to feed the hungry villagers, and then in an absurd tale of animal dental hygiene fabricated by the village official Zhang Shuangxi in an attempt to satisfy the leadership’s insatiable appetite for good news. During the period of the Hundred Flowers and the Great Leap, Zhang was away from the villages, based at the Sino-Soviet Luoyang Tractor Factory, but he was back reporting on rural events as the 1960s began. He was tasked with finding and reporting models (model canteens, model workers, and model cadres), but what he also saw, and could not report, was the extreme hardship faced by all those, principally peasants, who did not qualify for a state grain ration. Zhang still believes that even when starving, most peasants were convinced that Mao and the Party leadership

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were unaware of their plight and would come to the aid of the destitute if they only knew. The elderly peasant Uncle Gang in The Story of the Criminal Li Tongzhong is described as clinging to this belief, and Li Tongzhong has to reassure his father that the Party still cares about the peasants. In fact, as Zhang later discovered, letters addressed to the central leadership were intercepted and their authors punished, and travel to Beijing and other large cities was forbidden. There were simply no lines of communication available to those who lacked elite connections. Zhang believes that peasants were not as much outraged as they were mystified by what was happening to them. Zhang Yigong heard the account that was to provide the core of The Story of the Criminal Li Tongzhong during one of his reporting trips: a demobilized Korean War veteran (whose lungs, rather than his legs, were damaged) was made Party secretary at a home for the elderly; when his charges had no grain to eat, he arranged with local peasants to steal from the state granaries. Zhang offered to write a report praising the man for his concern for those in his care, but the editors of Henan ribao decided against this, and the story remained undisturbed in the reporter’s notebook and his memory, gathering dust and awaiting a propitious time to be uncovered. Like many of his contemporaries, Zhang returned to creative writing in the late 1970s, following an extended hiatus due to political criticism, determined to set the historical record straight. In terms of its content, much of The Story of the Criminal Li Tongzhong came from the author’s memory and the notes he took during the Great Leap and its aftermath. However, its style bears the stamp of the age in which it was written, the aftermath of the Cultural Revolution and the transition away from socialist realism and its Chinese variant, in its protestations of loyalty to the Communist Party and its eulogy of the wronged upright official. The Story of the Criminal Li Tongzhong stands at the border between wounds literature and the more complex and challenging writing that succeeded it. Sentimentality and Absurdity in the Great Leap

Like much of the writing of the late 1970s considered in the previous chapter, The Story of the Criminal Li Tongzhong is soaked in tears. The crying begins early in the proceedings with surreptitious tears of helpless frustration shed by the manager of the local canteens, who has nothing to offer his patrons but turnip gruel: At noon, “the master of the three halls” Uncle Gang, canteen superintendent for the three production teams, squatted in the corner of a store-room bereft

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of rice and flour and secretly began to cry: “God in heaven! Ai, ai, ai, ai ... open your eyes ... you can’t be making us pick up the begging bowls again, ai ai ai.” Crying too is a contagion. The sound of Uncle Gang’s crying slipped out through a crack in the door that wasn’t sealed tight enough; first it infected the old women who had come to the canteen bearing food-bowls to be filled with the watery gruel, then it spread to young wives whose children were complaining of hunger, and then later became a plague that even the men had no power to resist.29

The weeping continues, and the tears are predominantly male: Li Tongzhong’s father, Old Man Li Tao, now the brigade stockman, weeps at the prospect of slaughtering the ox that Li Tongzhong bought with his demobilization pay, and Li Tongzhong weeps as he promises his father that he will care for their neighbours. Uncle Gang weeps for shame as a convoy of peasants heads off to pick up the grain that Li Tongzhong steals from the state granary, and again as he apologizes to Chairman Mao’s portrait for his complicity in the theft of public goods. Following Li Tongzhong’s death, Uncle Gang is prominent among a chorus of weepers crowded around Li’s hospital bed. As brigade Party secretary at Li Family Stockade, Li Tongzhong takes responsibility for feeding the brigade’s peasants, and this duty brings him into conflict with his immediate Party superior, Yang Wenxiu, the “hot-shot Party secretary” of the Shilipu (Ten-Mile Store) Commune of which Li Family Stockade is a part. Yang Wenxiu is a character at once ridiculous and sinister, and thus the fictional equivalent of the chou (clown) figure of the operatic stage. A former elementary schoolteacher (his given name attests to his “literary attainment”), he is dedicated to doing whatever is necessary to get himself into a position of authority and keep himself there. The similarities between Yang and the historical figure of  Wu Zhipu (a distant relative of the author) are immediately evident, though a connection is never made explicit, and no historical figure other than Mao is mentioned by name. Yang Wenxiu embraces Wu Zhipu’s “philosophy of the Great Leap and Great Leap in philosophy” as well as the fatal fantasy that the earth will deliver as much as people have the audacity to demand of it. Like Wu Zhipu, he does everything he can to feed the delusions of his own superiors: For example, he had heard even before he went to Shilipu of a debate among Party theoreticians as to whether one country could achieve communism in advance of the rest of the world, and it immediately occurred to him that this was the same kind of thinking as Lenin’s proposal that socialist revolution might first be victorious in one country or a group of countries. Extrapolating

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from this, he came up with the theory that it would be entirely feasible for one commune to be the first to achieve communism. And this commune would, of course, be Shilipu. Therefore, on the day after he took office, he announced to everyone that Shilipu Commune would enter communism in two years. From that point on, he smoked two packs of cigarettes every day, and his eyes, so narrow that they looked as if they had been cut into his face with a knife, were forever squinting, blinking, flashing with a mystical gleam, as he figured out ways to make Shilipu stay out in front in all respects, selecting times when County Party Secretary Tian Zhenshan was not away on business to announce each item of good news to the County Party Committee.30

Yang’s enthusiasm for promoting himself and his commune as models prompts him to cultivate experimental high-yield plots by the roadside, where they can be seen by visiting dignitaries. In this, he resembles the real-life provincial Party officials who situated their plots near the railway tracks that would bear Chairman Mao’s train. Yang even sends peasants out to the fields in operatic costume, accompanied by gongs and drums, to illustrate the truth of a slogan from the newspaper – “Old men surpassing [the fierce] Huang Zhong [of The Three Kingdoms], Young wives outclassing [the woman warrior] Mu Guiying.”31 Yang forces those in charge of grain production to commit to impossible targets, incarcerating those who fail to do so in a shed at commune headquarters. When there is no grain, he promotes alternative foods supposedly made of corn-husks and sweet-potato leaves that call to mind Li Shuangshuang’s Great Leap noodles. Local officials realize that these ersatz foods are fraudulent or worthless but dare not expose them for fear of the punishment that such revelations would inevitably bring. These local leaders include the ironically named Liu Shitou (a weakling whose name means “stone”) and the wretched and guilt-wracked Zhang Shuangxi (“double happiness”). The bombast and triumphalism of official Great Leap pronouncements and literary propaganda like the Li Shuangshuang variants are bitterly parodied in the behaviour and pronouncements of Yang Wenxiu. Yang enthusiastically embraces all campaigns and accepts at face value any story, however absurd, that will promote his ambitions. In this, Zhang Shuangxi supplies him with ample materials. In support of a campaign for hygiene education, Zhang re­ lates a comical tale about a donkey that refuses to go out to work until its teeth are thoroughly brushed (perhaps invented by the author in memory of the chattering teeth of the stewed but uncollectivized donkey). Yang records such accounts without questioning their veracity; Zhang admits to Li Tongzhong that they are nonsense and is scolded by Li for his untruthfulness.

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The vocabulary of political progressiveness, seen twenty years earlier in the naive attempts by Li Shuangshuang and her husband, Xiwang, to master communist terminology and the naming of noodles after the campaign, is used to ironic purpose in The Story of the Criminal Li Tongzhong. When Yang Wenxiu escapes from Li Tongzhong, refusing either to admit to the famine or accept the complaints of the leading revolutionary classes in the peasantry, he leaves his office by “taking leaping forward strides (maizhe yuejinshi de bufa).”32 There is a heavy irony in the broadcast announcements of hollow triumphs such as the invention of substitute foods, which bring to mind the praise of Li Shuangshuang’s Great Leap noodles on the newly installed publicaddress system, and in the triumphant parades, which Li Tongzhong on his false leg is too slow to stop, celebrating abundance while the peasants starve. Much of The Story of the Criminal Li Tongzhong can be read as a parody of the Li Shuangshuang writings, dramas, performances, and films of two decades earlier. Zhang Yigong does not spare the new folk-songs in his parodies of Great Leap propaganda, and again it is Yang Wenxiu who comes up with a piece of doggerel to delight his superiors at a meeting. Like “Here I Come (Wo lai le)” the most famous of the Red Flag Ballads, the poem he quotes is a composite constructed from fragments.33 It is introduced with the ironic narration that accompanies Yang Wenxiu throughout, and the balloon of  Yang’s revolutionary romanticism is burst by a caustic aside from the floor: The “Hot-shot Party Secretary” Yang Wenxiu had long since divined the will of his superiors. In his speech to the meeting he immediately declared that Shilipu Commune would exceed targets in a single year, and usher in the era of communism. He quoted from what was said to be a folk ballad from Shilipu, which described the happy conditions under communism. Unfortunately, since the Ministry of Culture was promoting a mass movement for “A Whole Nation of Poets,” and since everyone was therefore now a poet, there was no way to authenticate the authorship of this particular ditty, and some of the lines had been submerged in the deluge of verse. Only these few aphorisms had been fortunate enough to survive and be transmitted by Yang Wenxiu: “We eat steamed buns, dipped in sugar, D’you think we’re doing well or not? We wear wool, and boots of leather, D’you think we’re doing right or not? We ride rockets, sit in spaceships, D’you think we’re doing great or not!”

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On the stage Tian Zhenshan nodded his head: “Great, great!” In the audience, Zhang Shuangxi whispered into Li Tongzhong’s ear: “Let’s get out of here and make ourselves scarce. That way when the roof gets blown down by all this hot air, we won’t be crushed!”34

At the end of The Story of the Criminal Li Tongzhong, it is Yang Wenxiu who is crushed when the structure of deceit and delusion he has so laboriously erected collapses around him. Fresh from a meeting at which he has extolled the food surplus at Shilipu brought about by the science of substitute foods, he joins the interrogation of Li Tongzhong following Li’s arrest for stealing state grain (a remarkably timely and judicious hearing for an age of official lawlessness). After he hears Li Tongzhong’s desperate pleas to Tian Zhenshan to alleviate the famines, he accompanies Tian to the station where hundreds of his commune members are huddled in the snow preparing to board a train to go begging anywhere that might have more to eat than they do. Yang is forced to listen to Liu Shitou’s confession that he lied about the efficacy of the substitute foods in order to avoid further punishment for rightism. The final description of Yang is as he sees his glorious hopes for advancement end in failure, not (in his opinion at least) because they have led to starvation, but because they have been sabotaged by his underlings: “Yang Wenxiu was squatting in the snow behind the food-stall. His cigarette lit up a face full of despair and terror, twitching convulsively. He was thinking: two years of work, all wasted, and it’s all because of that hothead Li Tongzhong and that troublemaker Liu Shitou!”35 In the final chapter, as Tian approaches the village for the much-delayed memorial ceremony, we learn that Yang has been diagnosed with schizophrenia and sent to a sanatorium to recuperate. Tian’s ironic gift to Yang is a copy of the best-known work by the most prominent target of attacks in the Cul­ tural Revolution, former head of state Liu Shaoqi, like Tian himself very recently rehabilitated; the book is titled How to Be a Good Communist. Yang’s schizophrenia (jingshen fenliezheng) is symbolic of the spiritual split in the Communist Party observed by many of the writers of the day, with those identified with the Gang of Four (and thus the villains of the stories in which they occur) still in place even as the true inheritors of the principles of the Party (represented for the authors by themselves and the heroes they portrayed) return to positions of authority. The black comedy of the passages that focus on Yang Wenxiu gives way to melodrama and sentimentality when the focus is on Li Tongzhong. He is the

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model hero for immediate post-Mao writing about the recent past, but his character borrows from earlier works cited above. Though he lacks the physical prowess of the heroes of Great Leap and Cultural Revolution fiction – his wooden leg, replacing a limb lost in Korea, being evidence of imperfection – Li Tongzhong is, like The Golden Road’s Gao Daquan, an infinitely self-sacrificing cadre. He remains loyal to his own idealistic vision of the Communist Party even when it is at odds with the dominant forces within the Party at the moment (though Li Tongzhong and Gao Daquan find themselves on opposite sides of the Party’s split personality). Like Gao Daquan, he is supported by a group of loyal villagers and a devoted and unquestioning wife whom he saved from hardship. He is, like the central figures of Li Zhun’s first widely circulated story “Not That Road” and Liu Qing’s collectivization novel The Builders, the filial son of a less enlightened father (though the nature of that enlightenment, like the idealized side of the Party, can change with the times). Li Tongzhong consistently takes initiatives on behalf of his brigade that aggravate or distress those to whom he owes respect, either as his elders or his Party superiors. When Zhang Shuangxi is bullied into predicting an impossibly large harvest in the early stages of the Great Leap, Li Tongzhong goes to commune headquarters to demand that the figure be lowered and is incarcerated in the commune lock-up (which he shares with Liu Shitou), charged with rightism on the orders of Yang Wenxiu. When food supplies at Li Family Stockade run out, he pesters Yang for support that Yang refuses to provide and even has the brigade clerk send a message to Yang’s superior Tian Zhenshan pleading for relief aid. When there is nothing to eat after his failed visit to commune headquarters, he orders the killing of the ox, now collectively owned, that he had bought with his demobilization pay and that is the cherished charge of his father, the brigade stockman. Ox and keeper both shed tears of grief and resentment at this decision, those of the animal accompanied by an imagined soliloquy recalling the complaint of the boiled donkey. Li Tongzhong’s decision to raid the grain-store where the brigade’s tax-grain is kept initially horrifies the store manager, his wartime comrade Zhu Laoqing, though Zhu is persuaded to become his co-conspirator in the theft of grain. It also distresses the former canteen manager Uncle Gang, who prostrates himself before an image of Mao to beg forgiveness and tearfully urges Li Tongzhong to call off the late-night convoy to the grain-store. Nonetheless, the convoy goes ahead. The image of peasants raiding grain from state granaries contrasts with that of the model theatrical work Song of the Dragon River, where peasants plead to contribute more of their bounty

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to the state, and with the second film made from The Golden Road, where Gao Daquan leads the peasants of Sweet Meadow in a similar convoy to relieve hunger in a nearby town.36 Li’s actions lead to his arrest and trial; he dies a criminal, though in hospital of exhaustion and malnutrition rather than on the execution ground. The sentimentality of the story is heightened by the frequent tears of Li’s supporters; the descriptions of his arrest and the final hospital scene are particularly lachrymose. The deathbed scene recalls the demise of the central characters in the pre–Cultural Revolution socialist realist film biographies of such diverse national heroes as the opium-war-era official Lin Zexu, the Ming dynasty pharmacologist Li Shizhen, and the Canadian doctor Norman Bethune, peasants crowding around in reverent devotion to lament the loss of a saviour. The narrator also makes periodic rhetorical interventions to address the central character and move the reader. Excessive as they now seem, these passages are typical of the heightened emotions of the writing of the day, like those seen in The Price in the previous chapter.37 The longest and most impassioned of these comes as Li Tongzhong realizes the fraudulent nature of the substitute foods and is making up his mind to take the state grain supplies: Li Tongzhong, after your commune-members haven’t had any grain at all for seven whole days, what are you going to do to save them from death? Can you make wheat seedlings grow overnight, ripen in the morning, and bear grain before noon? Can you make the hundred thousand pounds of grain that were taken away when they were “Opposing Concealing Production” grow legs and walk back to Li Family Stockade? Can you tell the commune members that the experience of the thirty-first year of the Republic [1942] proves that the sweet white soil of Trouser-crotch gulley on North Mountain can be used as flour to make food? 38 If not, you have to harden your heart, and tell them, villagers, friends, pity me on my one leg, I’m not up to the job, I can’t carry this burden, everyone take up your beggar’s staff and come up with a way to sur­ vive. Then you can put your disability certificate in a glass frame, hang it on a bamboo pole, and take your wife and child to the veterans’ sanatorium to beg for a bowl of food. No, you can’t, you can’t. If there was no cold and famine in the world, what need would there be for a Communist Party? Communist Party member Li Tongzhong, you crossed over the Yalu River to fight the enemy and came back with one leg missing; surely that wasn’t so you could turn tail and abandon your villagers just when they need you most? Party secretary Li Tongzhong,

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how many chances like today’s will you have in your life to examine your loyalty to the people, to test what kind of a Party member you are!39

Vestiges of Chinese Socialist Realism

The sentimentality and irony of The Story of the Criminal Li Tongzhong coexist uneasily with the sterner conventions of socialist realism in which Zhang Yigong and his contemporaries had been raised. Parodies of Great Leap rhet­oric and poetry have no place in the Chinese socialist realist tradition, which takes the revolutionary vanguard extremely seriously. And at no previous point in the cultural history of the People’s Republic could such sus­tained irony have been tolerated, particularly when the target is the Com­munist Party. Nowhere is the irony more pointed that in Li Tongzhong’s assurances to his father that the leadership did not know of their plight, something that author and reader would recognize as a statement of belief rather than truth: The father [who is sick in bed] lifted the upper part of his body up with his arm, stared directly at his son, and asked: “Tell your dad the truth ... does the Party want us [peasants] or not?” The father bit into the corner of his quilt, and his bony shoulders shook convulsively. “The Party wants us, the Party wants us.” Li Tongzhong suppressed the anxiety he was feeling, and added: “The Party doesn’t know we’re starving.”40

In this respect, The Story of the Criminal Li Tongzhong recalls the sustained irony of a celebrated contemporary work, the 1979 short story “Li Shunda Builds a House” (Li Shunda zao wu) by Gao Xiaosheng, which follows its credulous peasant protagonist through a series of political campaigns in which his modest ambition to build a house is thwarted at every turn in ways that the reader, with the benefit of historical knowledge, anticipates, but that take Li himself by surprise. However, Gao Xiaosheng’s story, though pointed in its revelations of the illogicalities and injustices of past policies, is a more gently humorous tale, one remarkable for its time in the relative lack of the wounds-style moral outrage and sentimentality in which Zhang Yigong indulges so freely.41 The Story of the Criminal Li Tongzhong shares with other groundbreaking works of the immediate post-Mao era, including “Shanghen,” which gave wounds fiction its name, both a debt of gratitude to a figure from the literary establishment who was bold enough to offer support and a history of publication opposed by conservative power-holders nervous that they would disturb the readership’s emotional well-being and confidence in the Communist

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Party with their exposure of the harsh realities of the recent past.42 Zhang Yigong’s novel found its champion in the veteran novelist Wu Qiang, without whose support it might not have been published. Even so, Zhang Yigong paid the price for his temerity in writing about his home province’s experience of the Great Leap when his household registration was transferred from the provincial capital to a village for a further three years from 1980 to 1983. Much as his descriptions of hunger and mismanagement may have irked the authorities, Zhang Yigong clearly held back from portraying the worst of the Great Leap famines, at a time when, by his own later account, entire villages in Henan were left virtually deserted, with the skeletal remains of the dead lying on their beds. Everyone goes hungry in the novel, but there is only one fatality, Li Tongzhong himself, dead of a combination of malnutrition and exhaustion in the service of the members of his brigade. The others are saved by the intervention of good officials, Li himself and then Tian Zhenshan, who is moved by Li’s sacrifice to open the granaries, an action that results in his own demotion. Zhang Yigong defends the modest body-count by saying that his story is set in the northern part of Henan, where casualties were fewer than in the south and east of the province. He must also have been aware that editors would not have accepted, nor readers have believed, the full horror of what had taken place.43 In The Story of the Criminal Li Tongzhong, Zhang Yigong remains true to many of the practices of Chinese socialist realist writing: His novel takes a remarkably optimistic view of history and the Chinese leadership, presenting an administration prepared to rehabilitate the wrongly condemned and face up to the errors of the past (the second of which has hardly proved to be the case in the thirty subsequent years). It is, like the works of the Soviet canon and the Chinese red classics of earlier decades, “Party-minded” in its repeated expressions of faith in the principles of communism and the traditions of upright leadership. And, perhaps most importantly, it is heroic: Zhang Yigong loves his hero as unreservedly as the creators of Li Shuangshuang and Wang Gang in the Great Leap or Gao Daquan and Geng Changjiong in the Cultural Revolution; he goes back further into the socialist tradition by offering him as a ritual sacrifice with the same tearful solemnity as Zhou Libo affords his martyred peasant rebel Zhao Yulin in Hurricane. Two tableaux show Tian Zhenshan and the villagers lamenting the fallen leader, the first at his deathbed and the second, following on in the narrative but set nineteen years later, at the memorial meeting in the mountain village. Unlike Xiao Xiang’s graveside speech in Hurricane, Tian Zhenshan’s valediction, with its promise of better times in the future (which is as close as the novel comes to the bright tail of wounds fiction), is spoken as a soliloquy in the back of his

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jeep. However, like Xiao Xiang’s civil war homily, it calls for the spirit of the dead to be emulated by those who follow: “‘Remember this lesson of history!’ Tian Zhenshan cried out in his heart. ‘Defeating the enemy requires a price in blood, and defeating one’s own errors also invariably requires a price in blood. The living must strive to keep the price low, and gain greater wisdom in exchange!’”44 Zhang Yigong had stretched the conventions of socialist realism as far as they would go, reaching the point where the portrayal of harsh reality and the romanticism inherent in the tradition could no longer co-exist. Just as his revelations of callousness and malfeasance could not have been written a couple of years before, the impassioned rhetoric of  The Story of the Crim­ inal Li Tongzhong would become an anachronism within a couple of years, as writers began to experiment with techniques learned from the translations of foreign works that were beginning to flood into China and to abandon the constraints of the past thirty years. The following decade would see the road divide and authors picking for themselves which path they would follow.

Epilogue: A Golden Road to Nowhere

By the time they became available to readers in 1994, the third and fourth volumes of Hao Ran’s novel The Golden Road were already an anachronism, the re-situation of milestones along a road travelled forty years earlier, in a novel written twenty years before, to suit an ideological remapping abandoned for more than a decade and the erection of signposts to destinations never again to be sought. Collectivization of agriculture – the golden road of the novel’s title along which the Party secretary hero Gao Daquan was leading (or perhaps dragging) his peasant neighbours – was summarily abandoned in the first reforms of the Deng Xiaoping leadership during the early 1980s in favour of the family farming against which Gao Daquan had inveighed. The style of literary writing had also changed forever: the conventions of Soviet socialist realism and its successor, the combination of revolutionary realism and revolutionary romanticism, which had survived the Cultural Revolution by a few years and can be seen in the tragic heroism and defiant optimism of the post-Mao writing discussed in the two previous chapters, had also fallen by the wayside. As Communist Party micro-management of the arts relaxed, authors and readers encountered, many for the first time, the literary works of the Chinese tradition and the outside world.1 The “high culture fever” that had gripped Chinese intellectuals in the mid-1980s had been brought to an end by the brutal suppression of student demonstrations on 4 June 1989; it had given way to a more commercially oriented writing that nonetheless saw serious authors rewriting the history of the People’s Republic. For example, in the year immediately preceding the publication of the four-volume edition of The Golden Road, Yu Hua’s novel To Live (Huozhe) had portrayed hunger and mismanagement survived solely because of a desperate determination to endure and the love of (often dysfunctional) family.2 The heroism and faith of the Cultural Revolution were nowhere to be seen in writings emanating from this less certain but more prosperous world. Following a public self-examination shortly after the arrest of Jiang Qing and her associates, including the Cultural Revolution minister of culture Yu

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Huiyong, Hao Ran’s own career had continued. In the self-examination as it appears in his “oral autobiography,” Hao Ran attempts to exculpate himself from atrocities committed against other authors, confesses to having written works on commission for Jiang Qing and Yu Huiyong, and regrets his public advocacy of the literary policies of the day.3 His first post–Cultural Revolution novel, the 1980 Countryside Romance (Shanshui qing), set at the end of the Cultural Revolution and portraying a young man unjustly stigmatized for his landlord ancestry who still finds love and redemption, was followed in 1988 by The Common People (Cangsheng), which took a group of rural residents through the first decade of the reform period. The latter was filmed for television and gave its title to a new magazine edited by Hao Ran, which featured writing by amateur authors in the rural (now suburban) counties west of Beijing.4 Hao Ran had also published shorter fictional pieces and started work on a projected six-volume autobiographical novel (zizhuanti xiaoshuo), of which only the first three, covering his early life, were ever completed.5 Al­ though he remained active as a writer and editor, by 1994 he was certainly not the leading figure of the early 1970s, when the first two volumes of The Golden Road had appeared, and the publication of the novel in full did not attract the attention it would previously have commanded. It did not pass quite unnoticed, however, and to some of its critics its reappearance was sinister as well as anachronistic. What, pondered a contributor to the Tianjin journal Literary Free Speech, was to be made of this novel, “which has been nailed to the pillar of infamy ... venturing forth once again when the people are inattentive?”6 For this critic, as doubtless for many others who had felt that the Cultural Revolution was safely behind them, the return of Hao Ran, his novel, and his favourite literary creation brought back memories of Mao-era policies in the countryside and the damage they were seen to have caused, the severe restrictions placed on the arts in the Cultural Revo­lution, and the ill-treatment of the great majority of artists and intellectuals during those years. In 1994, at least, it appears no harm was done: those who were sufficiently interested in following the inhabitants of Sweet Meadow a couple of years further into collectivization were able to do so without the novel generating too much in the way of nostalgia for those days. The Ending of The Golden Road

Volume 2 of The Golden Road ends with the creation of the East Is Red Agricultural Cooperative. For the benefit of any who are curious about how subsequent matters developed in Sweet Meadow, I offer the following summary: Volume 3 begins early in 1953, as Gao Daquan returns to the village

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during a blizzard and learns from the visiting Liang Haishan about the first five-year plan. With this, the demands, or opportunities for sacrifice, presented to the peasantry by the state are suddenly and steeply increased: Now collectivization is no longer principally the means to ensure the survival of the poor peasants, but a way for them to support the industrial proletariat in its building of socialism. To this end, the peasants of Sweet Meadow will be required not only to supply the state with increasing quantities of grain, but also to set land aside to grow cotton (something they have not previously done) and thereby provide the raw material for the textile factories that are under construction. The new demands exacerbate the “line struggle” between Gao Daquan’s obedience to the side of the divided Communist Party that he, the author, and the implied reader support, and that of his adversaries, the village head Zhang Jinfa and the prosperous peasant Feng Shaohuai. Gao Daquan sees increased collectivization as the only way to meet the demands of the state, whereas Zhang Jinfa seeks personal enrichment for himself and those who can achieve it while paying lip-service to current policy and maintaining his position and prestige in the village. With grain in short supply at the nearby Tianmen township, Gao Daquan and his cooperative plan ways to increase output. By contrast, Zhang Jinfa and Feng Shaohuai of the Competing (Jingsai) Cooperative plan to profiteer in grain with the help of the still (barely) concealed saboteur Fan Keming and the scheming grain-merchant Shen Yiren, manager of the Sanheshun grainstore, hoarding grain until prices rise and then cashing in. Gao Daquan designs a watercourse (xieshuiqu) for his cooperative, which can both irrigate their fields and divert flood waters. Initially, the watercourse is intended to go through land belonging to the middle-peasant Qin Fu and his family, but Qin refuses to cooperate, and a revised channel is constructed to circumvent his property. Much of the line struggle in Volume 3 is played out in the Qin family.7 Tension over the watercourse exacerbates divisions between them: Qin Fu’s daughter-in-law Zhao Yu’e is in favour of the project, but she is beaten by her husband, Qin Wenji, for her defiance of his father and leaves the Qin household to join the East Is Red Cooperative. Senior official Gu Xinmin supports Zhang Jinfa (and is thus implicitly aligned with State President Liu Shaoqi against Gao Daquan, his mentor Liang Haishan, and Chairman Mao). He disapproves of Gao Daquan’s actions, believing that he is coercing the villagers into carrying out his watercourse initiative and has caused the breakup of Zhao Yu’e’s marriage. When heavy rains at harvest time cause flooding on the North China Plain, those without access to the watercourse (including Qin Fu) lose part of their crop. Hearing that the people of Tianmen are critically short of food (because relief grain

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has not arrived and the merchants have closed their stores, waiting for prices to spiral), Gao Daquan leads a convoy of peasants through a storm and over a rickety bridge to deliver their tax-grain in advance. Feng Shaohuai and Zhang Jinfa seek to profit from Tianmen’s need, sending Qin Wenji shortly afterward by the same route to the town with a cartload of their hoarded grain to be sold at the Sanheshun grain-store. Cart, horse, grain, and driver are swept away as the bridge collapses, and Wenji is rescued by Gao Daquan. In a catharsis similar to that of Gao Daquan’s brother Erlin in Volume 2 (which also involved a family member placed in danger while driving Feng Shao­huai’s cart in pursuit of profit), Qin Wenji sees the error of his ways, the evil of Feng Shaohuai’s ways, and the merit of the collective way; he is also reunited with his wife. Meanwhile, Fan Keming, who was also part of the grain-profiteering scheme and other attempts to sabotage Gao’s initiatives, is revealed to be a former warlord (as Gao Daquan had suspected all along). After he kills the pathetic alcoholic Zhang Jinshou, in whose well some of the grain had been hidden, he is captured and executed, and Zhang Jinfa is dismissed from the office of village head for profiteering and supplying internal Party information to the grain-merchant Shen Yiren.8 Feng Shaohuai is also denounced, though he and Zhang Jinfa remain in the village, more resentful than ever. Grain stored by villagers in their homes is moved to a collective granary. On the romantic front, a friendship develops between Gao Daquan’s hot-blooded supporter Zhu Tiehan, who succeeds Zhang Jinfa as village head at the end of the volume, and a schoolteacher whose advice he seeks on cotton cultivation. Though she is of a city intellectual background, teacher Chen’s given name Ainong (love of agriculture) suggests that she may also be able to love a peasant. The second film of The Golden Road, made in 1976, essentially follows the plot, outlined above, of the third volume (which was not published at the time and had only recently been completed). It omits the romantic subplot, spending much time on the convoy to Tianmen and the dramatic rescue of Qin Wenji. Despite the association of the novel and its author with the Cultural Revolution, the film remained in circulation at least until the following spring, when it received a brief notice in the film magazine People’s Cinema (Renmin dianying).9 With Gao Daquan’s main enemies defeated, though not removed, by the end of Volume 3, new aspects of the line struggle were needed for the final volume. These are provided from both outside and inside the village: In the former, the government warns against moving too swiftly with collectivization, which is condemned as “impetuous advance” (jizao maojin), a conservative tendency associated in the novel with Liu Shaoqi and endorsed by the

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unsympathetic leader Gu Xinmin. Within the village, the “peasant consciousness” from which Erlin had suffered in the earlier volumes resurfaces among peasants who have become too comfortable with the benefits of cooperative farming. Volume 4 moves the story forward two years, to Spring Festival 1955, with Gao Daquan returning to Sweet Meadow from a period spent elsewhere (as was also the case in Volumes 1 and 3). This time, he finds that the relative prosperity engendered by collectivization has (by his austere standards) made the villagers complacent and self-indulgent. The volume is about the need for an ideological transformation that will bring about greater self-sacrifice, acceptance of gratification further delayed, and willingness to work harder for the public good, qualities seen to be at odds with the much maligned peasant consciousness.10 Zhu Tiehan, now village head, has ordered the slaughter of thirteen pigs to provide members of their cooperative with pork for the New Year festivities. Gao Daquan, appearing dramatically as the fifth pig is about to be killed, orders a halt, after which the remaining pigs are sold, and the proceeds are used to buy a horse for future work. This is particularly upsetting for Deng Jiukuan, one of the first and the poorest to join the cooperative. He had been expecting a pig’s head as the centrepiece at a meal for the family of the girl he has chosen to marry his son, and he feels that Gao Daquan has abandoned him. Deng Jiukuan joins Qin Fu as examples of peasant consciousness, Deng’s case demonstrating that the slightest comfort can lead to ideological backsliding. Gao Daquan now proposes that the villagers take silt from a riverbed to improve the quality of their soil (and thereby produce more grain and cotton for the state). Cutting the Spring Festival holiday short to start this project, he commandeers carts otherwise used for money-earning transportation work. To get more people working, he also proposes a change to his cooperative’s pay structure, with more money for time worked and less based on the land and other assets brought into the cooperative on joining, a move that angers founding members such as Deng Jiukuan, who fears that an influx of people as poor as he had been will drag the cooperative down. When the state suddenly demands 150 labourers (a sixth of the entire population of the village) for corvée duty, it is clear that the corvée work, the collection of silt, and spring sowing cannot be accomplished without herculean effort and a new, and larger, organization. Gao Daquan and Zhu Tiehan organize a “united brigade” (da liandui), with members of various cooperatives pooling their efforts. Following complaints orchestrated by Feng Shaohuai and Zhang Jinfa, Gao Daquan and Zhu Tiehan are accused by Gu Xinmin, abetted by his former guard Liu Wei, now a lower-level administrator and Tiehan’s

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rival in love, of impetuous advance, pushing collectivization along too fast and trying to reach the goal of communism before the Party is ready for it. The accusation extends to Gao Daquan’s mentor Liang Haishan and the head of the model cooperative at the nearby Red Date Village, both of whom are suspended from their positions. All the collectives are ordered by Gu Xinmin to disband, to the delight of Zhang Jinfa, who sees the imminent downfall of Gao Daquan and Zhu Tiehan as opening the way for his return to authority. When Gao Daquan becomes sick, other peasants, including his brother Erlin, vow to persist with the collective way, even at the risk of arrest. At a public meeting called by Gu Xinmin to condemn him, a recovered Gao Daquan denounces Feng Shaohui and Zhang Jinfa for sabotage, the former landlord Crooked Mouth sets fire to the cooperative barn in an attempt to destroy collectively owned livestock, and Chen Ainong arrives to declare her love for Tiehan. As the novel concludes, Gao Daquan is once again in the ascendant, his headlong dash toward communism endorsed by Mao (if not the current Party leadership), and the villagers united behind him. His final rousing speech points the way forward: “Comrades! No matter what difficulties we encounter in the future, we must certainly forge ahead on socialism’s Golden Road.”11 A Brighter Road, a Mightier Hero

Hao Ran wrote the third volume of The Golden Road between November 1974 and November 1975, a period of renewed factional struggle within the leadership of the Communist Party, which was reflected in the media and the arts. After spending a year away from the project, he wrote the fourth and final volume during the first half of 1977. At this time, the new leadership of Party chairman and state premier Hua Guofeng still endorsed policies associated with Mao, including collectivization and the rustication movement, while condemning the excesses of the Cultural Revolution and the leaders it had deposed in its October 1976 coup. Just as the first two volumes of Hao Ran’s novel used the historiography of the Cultural Revolution and the operatic model to retell the story of the early years of collectivization, the second half of the novel likewise bears the stamp of its times. This is seen in the intensification of the line struggle, with a greater emphasis placed on the danger of falling back into old ways already condemned (peasant consciousness) even after the victory of socialism and a reminder of the threat to the Maoist path (the Golden Road of collectivization) posed by conservative-minded managers opposed to increased demands supported by political rather than

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material incentives.12 The third and fourth volumes also see a further elevation in the portrayal of Gao Daquan (already the model for lofty, large, and complete characterization), in line with the emphasis in the final years of the Cul­tural Revolution on the “basic task” (genben renwu) of producing outstanding revolutionary heroes in all forms of art.13 The road metaphor recurs constantly in the third and fourth volumes of the novel, both in repetitions of the Golden Road of the title and in its variant sideroads, crossroads, and blind alleys. A few examples must suffice here. For Zhao Yu’e, preparing to leave the stifling confines of the Qin family for the East Is Red Cooperative, the “free and incomparably joyful Golden Road” of socialist collectivization is also the path to her liberation as a woman and full membership in society.14 As Gao Daquan sees the grain convoy heading off through the storm to relieve Tianmen, he reflects, “They were all of different ages and contrasting dispositions, and their ideological level varied. But the sacred text (fabao) ‘Get Organized’ had led them on to a bright and shining road.”15 Shortly afterward, when Qin Wenji has been saved from drowning and has denounced the blind alley, or road of death (si lu), down which Feng Shaohuai and Zhang Jinfa have led him, Gao Daquan advises him, “If you’re not going to take the road of death, you should courageously take the road of life. What’s the road of life for us peasants? There is only one road, and that is socialism.”16 And reflecting on the progress of collectivization at the beginning of Volume 4, Gao Daquan realizes, “This movement was the crucible of the age ... He and his companions had forged a Golden Road ahead towards a happy life for them and for their descendants.”17 His past failure to make a correct decision is lamented by Liu Wan (and echoed by the narrator) as Liu recalls the death of his first wife: “‘She was killed by the capitalist road, and by me’ ... even as a golden shining road stretched out before him.”18 Deng Jiukuan’s “peasant thinking,” reinforced by increased prosperity, places him at a different point on the road: “How could he have known that a crossroads, leading either to light or to darkness, was irrevocably spread out beneath his feet in their new rubber-soled shoes?”19 As Deng Jiukuan’s case shows, the road to socialism could also be used for retreat, a point emphasized by Gao Daquan in confronting the young local official Liu Wei, who, as Gu Xinmin’s ally, is one of Gao’s “negative superiors.”20 As Liu en­courages people to abandon the cooperatives, Gao gives the following warning: “Comrade, if anyone tries to make us take a step back on the road to socialism, we cannot allow even a step of an inch, or the tiniest fraction!”21 As the outstanding hero of the novel (and of Cultural Revolution literature), Gao Daquan is, for the peasants of Sweet Meadow, and for the reader learning

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or relearning the history of the early years of the People’s Republic, the guide along the golden road. By the time the third volume begins, he is thirty years old and a mature leader. He is therefore less in need of the kind of instruction that he received from Liang Haishan in Volume 2 and is better placed to resist instructions contrary to his view of socialism. Other characters’ reactions to him are tests of their own class or ideological status. The opposing views are brought into focus as a group led by Gao Daquan attends a meeting at county headquarters to discuss collectivization, and a leader from a neighbouring village tells the Sweet Meadow delegation, “Don’t laugh, but people in our village talk of Brother Daquan as a god.”22 Almost immediately, an exasperated Gu Xinmin complains, “I don’t understand what there is to admire in Gao Daquan, he doesn’t care for the leadership, doesn’t have the masses at heart, doesn’t care about policy, and acts impetuously.”23 Elderly poor peasants see Gao Daquan as a hero greater even than the stalwarts of traditional fiction or as a “joyful star come down to earth.”24 By contrast, when Deng Jiukuan, viewing an argument over riverbed silt, hopes for the first time that Gao Daquan will fail, the extent of his fall from grace is revealed.25 Gao Daquan’s capacity for self-sacrifice is emphasized in the second half of the novel, even as he insists that his neighbours defer their enjoyment of the benefits promised by collectivization.26 Whereas speculation in grain is compared to cannibalism, and Zhang Jinfa’s participation in it to “partnership to suck the blood of the people,” Gao Daquan’s own actions are the other side of the cannibalism coin, the offering of one’s own flesh to others.27 Even when they are upset at the reduced slaughter of pigs for the 1955 Spring Festival, his neighbours still recall Gao Daquan’s past generosity in giving his family’s grain to Liu Xiang: “That guy Daquan gave away his grain to the masses when he was going hungry himself, truly a case of not feeling grief as he sliced off his own flesh.”28 Deng Jiukuan, reluctant to share the bounties of collectivization, is distressed by Gao Daquan’s message of deferred gratification: “I don’t have your high level of awareness! I don’t have the heart of a Bodhisattva as you do! I can’t bear to slice the flesh of my family to patch the wounds of outsiders.”29 The relationship between Gao Daquan and the Communist Party also provides a way for the reader to re-evaluate the policies of the early 1950s. As the five-year plan is announced in Volume 3, the Party becomes a much harder taskmaster than was the case in the first two volumes. Demands for fields sown with cotton and corvée labourers for river control come to the village only days before they must be acted on, and Gao Daquan, as a Party member, must obey these and other orders as a soldier obeys his superiors.

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When Zhang Jinfa wants time to think about providing relief grain for the convoy to Tianmen, he is scolded for his hesitation: “The Party’s call is an order, the masses’ calamity is an order! Every Party member, you and me included, must carry them out without condition!”30 However, orders to go slow on collectivization or disband the cooperatives are seen (from a Cul­ tural Revolution perspective) as coming from an aberrant section of the leadership, as opposed to the Party in its ideal form, and are defied even at the risk of condemnation or imprisonment. Divisions within the Communist Party that featured in the first half of the novel, and appear in most of the fiction of the Cultural Revolution and the years immediately following, are very much in evidence here. The road on which Gao Daquan has embarked and remained is neither as broad nor as straight as might initially have appeared. Intervening History

The reader of the novel in its complete form, following its 1994 publication, cannot but reflect on the history into which Sweet Meadow and the rest of rural China were headed, both following the completion of the novel in 1977 and, perhaps more troublingly, between 1955, when the action of the novel ends, and the early 1970s, when Hao Ran set to work to write it. The disbanding of the communes and the return to family farming, which was under way within five years of the novel’s completion (and thus more than ten years by the time it was published in full), must have come as a cruel blow to those who had sacrificed so much for the cause of collectivization, not least the village leaders of the kind that Hao Ran had so affectionately portrayed, who had dragged their neighbours along the path they believed would lead to communism. In the reform era, their policies must have seemed inhuman, their methods bullying, and their sacrifices quixotic. Had the novel been rewritten with the historical hindsight of the 1980s or ‘90s, it might have presented Gu Xinmin as the wise and prudent manager, Feng Shaohuai as the resourceful farmer striving to raise production in the face of official interference, and Qin Fu as the salt-of-the-earth peasant doing his best for his family as collectivization destroys the fabric of village society. As for Gao Daquan, he might be the villain of the piece, trying to force the peasants to become agricultural labourers on what had briefly been their own land and, like the “Hot-shot Party Secretary” of Zhang Yigong’s novel The Story of the Criminal Li Tongzhong, driving himself and his charges to exhaustion in service of a state that was forever demanding more of them. As Zhang Dexiang observes in his 1995 reading of the novel, the mythology of heroic

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progress to a glorious communist future that The Golden Road expounds with such fervent revolutionary romanticism presages the collapse of the miracle it describes, in the fatigue of its heroic characters, Gao Daquan most of all, but also his superior Liang Haishan and his supporter Zhu Tiehan. Even to readers inspired by the mythology, Zhang argues, the superhuman efforts and self-denial were obviously unsustainable.31 Hao Ran could not have anticipated that collectivization would end abruptly in the early 1980s, but the later years of the collectivization process, which followed closely on the action of the novel, are a different matter. The events of that time impose themselves on a reading of the novel, especially the second half, and would have been all too familiar to the author. Two sections in Volume 3 point to a road ahead that is rutted with historical ironies. In the first, Gao waxes “mightily poetic” about the future: “If we can bring the first five-year plan to fruition, what will the appearance of this land be? If we then go through two, three, or four more five-year plans, how fecund, rich and strong it will become! By then I’ll be just fifty, in my prime, with more than ten years’ work left in me!”32 The second comes as Gao Daquan announces to the villagers that the state is creating a monopoly on grain: “Our nation is gathering grain, that greatest of all treasures, into its hands, taking authority for the distribution of grain. If wicked people want to make trouble again, want to harm people as they did when Tianmen was cut off by flooding, they won’t be able to!”33 And in the general celebration that follows, someone remarks that “if there are famine years, we’ll have state granaries to fall back on, and that road of ours will be even brighter, even broader!”34 Hao Ran wrote these two passages in 1975, just over twenty years after the events described, by which time his creation would indeed have turned fifty. For the reader now, as, one would think, for the author then, this vision of uninterrupted progress is disturbing. Gao Daquan’s leadership is characterized by constant urging to greater collectivization, culminating in the “united brigade” at Spring Festival 1955, to accommodate the demands of the state for labour, to carry out his own initiatives, and still farm effectively. The buildup to the formation of the People’s Communes and the Great Leap Forward is manifestly clear.35 Even the worksite kitchen, unwillingly managed by the deposed village head Zhang Jinfa, is a harbinger of collective eating to come. Few can have known how disastrous the Great Leap actually was, so abundant and mendacious were the reports of rich harvests and successful innovations. The famines were less severe in Beijing (where Hao Ran was living) and its environs, though even there hunger showed its effects.36 Such was the

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state’s control of news in those years that Hao Ran might not have heard of state granaries, which he had cited as a guarantee of supplies in case of emergency, being locked and defended against the peasants. What we do know from his memoirs, however, is that he became aware of the deceptions that were being concocted during the first year of the Great Leap to paint (or more precisely, photograph) an unrealistically rosy picture of increased grain production for readers at home and overseas. As the Great Leap Forward began, Hao Ran was stationed in Beijing, working for the Russian-language Friendship Journal (Ewen youhao bao), and was able to make only brief visits to rural areas close to the capital. In a visit to his friend Xiao Yongshun, the inspiration for the hero of the novel Bright Sunny Skies, he spoke of his wish to report on a success he had seen in the press, a grain crop so dense that children could stand on top of the plants. Xiao told him how the photograph had been faked (by placing the children on a bench strategically hidden among the plants) and warned him that “this year [1958] those above and those below are lying and boasting, it’s bound to end in disaster.”37 His friend’s admonition notwithstanding, Hao Ran wrote at least one work in praise of the innovations of the Great Leap, a love story set among the iron-smelters of his home province.38 But the movement goes largely unmentioned in his fiction from the early 1960s, such as the stories collected in the Cultural Revolution anthology Spring Songs, which gives the reader no inclination of hardship in the Hebei countryside. The stories present charming village characters for a new collective age, romances built around agricultural production, and tales of enterprise and initiative in a common cause. Hao Ran was not alone in this: other authors who survived the Anti-Rightist Campaign (such as Ma Feng and Li Zhun, whose works were considered above) remained silent about the famines, and their stories about the countryside provided similarly heartening images of a new society. A number of rationalizations can be suggested for their omission: That witnessing the treatment of the “rightists” had cowed them into silence; that they were reluctant to lose the rewards brought to them by state sponsorship of their writing; or that they realized the impossibility of publishing even the most delicate mention of hunger. But it is also possible that they allowed themselves to be persuaded that the big picture was rosier than the travails they observed in their forays into the countryside and that their responsibility was to encourage their audience with a vision of better times ahead. Hao Ran, as a child of desperate poverty who owed everything to the communist revolution, might have been more willing than most to project past these potholes, however substantial, on the golden road to the glorious future of communism. He might have chosen to echo the words of Mikhail Sholokhov, the

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greatest Soviet novelist of the countryside: “Each of us writes according to the dictates of his heart, but our hearts belong to the Party.”39 Following the truth as presented by the Communist Party would have been the safer option, though hardly a guarantee of security given the Party’s history of internecine bloodletting. As we leave The Golden Road, whatever approval we feel about the triumphs of Gao Daquan and his comrades must be clouded by hindsight and doubt. On which side, we may speculate, would Gao Daquan have been standing in 1960 if the villagers of Sweet Meadow were starving and their grain locked in a granary at Tianmen awaiting export? And how might he have reacted twenty years later as the cooperative organizations to which he had dedicated his life were disbanded by the Party he had served so loyally, and his enemies had been declared to have been right all along? By that time both Gao Daquan and Hao Ran’s greatest achievements, respectively agricultural collectivization and its chronicling, would have been abandoned as milestones on a golden road to nowhere.

Notes

Introduction: The Road and the Writer Epigraphs: The first epigraph is from Lu Xun, “Guxiang,” story dated January 1921, in Lu Xun, Nahan [Battlecry] (Beijing: Renmin wenxue chubanshe, 1973), 64-75, qt.p.75; the story was published in English as “My Old Home,” in Lu Xun, Selected Stories of Lu Hsün, trans. Yang Xianyi and Gladys Yang (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1956) 1:61-75, qt.p.75. “Guxiang” has its origins in a trip made by the author from Beijing to his native Shaoxing in 1919 to dispose of family property. The quoted lines are the last of the story. I have chosen to quote the Yangs’ version because it repeats the word “road” (lu) the full three times that it appears in the original. This is not the case in either of the more recent, and generally more precise, translations by William Lyell (as “Hometown”) or Julia Lovell (as “My Old Home”). See Lu Xun, Diary of a Madman and Other Stories, trans. by William A. Lyell (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1990); Lu Xun, The Real Story of Ah-Q and Other Tales of China: The Complete Fiction of Lu Xun, trans. by Julia Lovell (London: Penguin Classics, 2009). The second epigraph is from Hao Ran, Jinguang dadao [The golden road] (Beijing: Renmin wenxue chubanshe, 1972), 1:498. Only two volumes of the novel were published during the Cultural Revolution. The quoted passage, at the end of Chapter 46, is given unchanged on page 449 of the complete four-volume edition published in 1994, also in Beijing, by Jinghua chubanshe. The third epigraph is from Yu Hua, “Huanghun li de nanhai” [Boy in the twilight], story dated February 1995, in Yu Hua, Huanghun li de nanhai (Shanghai: Shanghai wenyi chubanshe, 2004), 125-35, qt.p.125; unpublished translation by Allan H. Barr, slightly revised. These are the first sentences in the story. 1 In the preface to Nahan, Lu Xun attributes the (slight) optimism of two other stories in the collection to the “commanders of those days” (na shi de zhujiang) on the revolutionary left and their disapproval of passivity. Lu Xun, Nahan, 6. 2 See, for example, Yu Hua’s 1986 story “On the Road at Eighteen,” in which a naive young man’s road trip degenerates into violent confusion. Yu Hua, “Shiba sui chumen yuanxing,” in Yu Hua, Shishi ru yan [World like mist (and other stories)] (Shanghai: Shanghai wenyi chubanshe, 2004), 2-11; Yu Hua, The Past and the Punishments, trans. Andrew F. Jones (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1996), 3-11. 3 See the studies by Li Yang, Fan Xing, and Krista van Fliet cited in the chapters that follow; and Peter Button, Configurations of the Real in Chinese Literary and Aesthetic Modernity (Leiden: Brill, 2009), 201-33, for a reading of Yang Mo’s novel The Song of Youth [Qingchun zhi ge]; also Joe C. Huang, Heroes and Villains in Communist China: The Contemporary Chinese Novel as a Reflection of Life (New York: Pica Press, 1973). 4 See the studies by D.W. Fokkema and Merle Goldman, and the translations edited by Hualing Nieh, cited in the notes to Chapter 3; see also Merle Goldman, China’s Intellec­

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tuals: Advise and Dissent (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981); Perry Link, The Uses of Literature: Life in the Socialist Chinese Literary System (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 13-55. 5 Marián Gálik, Milestones in Sino-Western Literary Confrontation (1898-1979) (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1986). 6 My interview with Zhang Yigong at his home in Zhengzhou in May 2002 fell on the day designated by the Henan Writers’ Association for discussion of the Talks on their sixtieth anniversary. Zhang was excused from attending the meeting to entertain his foreign guest. 7 George Steiner, “The Writer and Communism,” in George Steiner, Language and Silence: Essays 1958-66 (London: Faber, 1985), 387-95, qt. p.397. Steiner’s interest here is in comparing the literary output of communism with that of fascism. He suggests that the reason for the superior product of communism is that “fascism tyrannises through contempt of man; communism tyrannizes by exalting man above that sphere of private error, private ambition and private love we call freedom.” Ibid. 8 For an account of the disasters of the Great Leap, see Frank Dikötter, Mao’s Great Famine: The History of China’s Most Devastating Catastrophe 1958-1962 (New York: Walker, 2010). 9 The sufferings of the intellectual class in the Cultural Revolution are well documented. See, for example, Anne F. Thurston, Enemies of the People: The Ordeal of the Intellectuals in China’s Great Cultural Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988). 10 Old Liang’s Three Paintings, illustration from the 1959 edition of Sanliwan, reproduced in Zhao Shuli, Zhao Shuli quanji [Complete works of Zhao Shuli] (Beijing: Dazhong wenyi chubanshe, 2006), 4:303. 11 Zhao, Sanliwan, in Zhao, Zhao Shuli quanji, 4:164-361; Chao Shu-li [Zhao Shuli], Sanliwan Village, trans. Gladys Yang (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1964). Plans for the images are devised in Zhao Shuli quanji, 4:261-62, Sanliwan Village, 139-41, and the final versions are displayed in Zhao Shuli quanji, 4:301-8, Sanliwan Village, 194-96. The paragraph describing the third painting is translated by Joe C. Huang in his reading of Sanliwan, in Huang, Heroes and Villains, 240. 12 Images of Hu County paintings published as posters can be found online at Chineseposters. net, “Huxian Peasant Painters,” http://chineseposters.net/. Numerous albums of peasant paintings were mass-produced during the Cultural Revolution. These include Huxian nongmin hua [Peasant paintings of Hu County] (Shanghai: Renmin chubanshe, 1974); Huxian nongmin hua xuanji [Selected peasant paintings of Hu County] (Shanghai: Renmin meishu chubanshe, 1975). For a critical history of peasant painting at Hu County, see Ralph Croizier, “Hu Xian Peasant Painting: From Revolutionary Icon to Market Commodity,” in Art in Turmoil: The Chinese Cultural Revolution 1966-76, ed. Richard King (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2010), 136-63. 13 Mao Zedong, “Zai Yan’an wenyi zuotanhui shang de jianghua” [Talks at the Yan’an Forum on Literature and Art], in Mao Zedong, Mao Zedong xuanji [Selected works of Mao Zedong] (Beijing: Renmin chubanshe, 1967), 3:804-35, qt.p.818 (translation mine). For a full trans­ lation of this text, see Kirk A. Denton, ed., Modern Chinese Literary Thought: Writings on Literature 1893-1945 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), 458-84; the “six even mores” passage is on page 470. 14 The most notorious of Hao Ran’s Cultural Revolution works was his two-volume “sanwenstyle” novel Xisha ernü [Sons and daughters of the Xisha Islands] (Beijing: Renmin wenxue chubanshe, 1974), written at the direction of Jiang Qing following a visit by Hao Ran to the Xisha Islands (over which China is one of a number of countries claiming sovereignty), and well outside the author’s areas of experience and competence.

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Chapter 1: Ma Feng and Xi Rong, Heroes of Lüliang, and “Revolutionary Popular Literature” The first titles were Du Pengcheng, Baowei Yan’an (Protect Yan’an), Qu Bo, Linhai xueyuan (Tracks in the snowy forest), Li Xiaoming and Han Anqing, Pingyuan qiangsheng (Gunfire on the plains), Zhou Libo, Baofeng zhouyu (Hurricane), Ma Feng and Xi Rong, Lüliang yingxiong zhuan (Heroes of Lüliang), Kong Jue and Yuan Jing, Xin ernü yingxiong zhuan (New son and daughter heroes), Li Yingru, Yehuo chunfeng dou gucheng (Wildfires and spring winds: Struggle for the ancient capital), and Ding Ling, Taiyang zhao zai Sanggan he shang (The sun shines over the Sanggan River). All were published by Renmin wenxue chubanshe in 1997. For recent scholarship on the red classics, see Fan Xing, ed., Yongyuan de hongse jingdian – hongse jingdian chuangzuo yingxiang shi hua [The eternal red classics – on the history of the creation and influence of the red classics] (Wuhan: Hubei changjiang wenyi chubanshe, 2008); Li Yang, 50-70 niandai Zhongguo wenxue jingdian zai jiedu [Re-examination of Chinese literary classics from the ‘50s to the ‘70s] (Jinan: Shandong jiaoyu chubanshe, 2002). Heroes of Lüliang, Gunfire on the Plains, and Wildfires and Spring Winds: Struggle for the Ancient Capital were made into television series during the first decade of the twenty-first century. Many of these novels are discussed in Joe C. Huang’s early study Heroes and Villains in Communist China: The Contemporary Chinese Novel as a Reflection of Life (New York: Pica Press, 1973), a work that predates the “red classics” designation. Ma Feng and Xi Rong, Lüliang yingxiong zhuan (Beijing: Renmin wenxue chubanshe, 1997); quotations from the novel use this edition. The novel’s claim to being the first written by authors in the liberated areas appears in Ma Feng’s obituary, released after his death in January 2004. In a memoir written in 1980, Ma Feng claims that it was the only novel to be written in the Jin-Sui (Shanxi-Suiyuan) liberated area; he also notes that it was serialized in the Nationalist capital of Chongqing. In his memoir, Ma lists some early short stories written in Shanxi, including one by his Heroes of Lüliang co-author Xi Rong. Ma Feng, “Jin-Sui bianqu kang-Ri genjudi wenxue yundong gaikuang” [The general situation of the literary movement in the Jin-Sui (Shanxi-Suiyuan) border region during the war of resistance to Japan], in La littérature chinoise au temps de la guerre de résistance contre le Japon (de 1937 à 1945) (Paris: Éditions de la Fondation Singer-Polignac, n.d.), 91-100. Meng Yue, “Baimao nü yanbian de qishi – jianlun Yan’an wenyi de lishi duozhixing” [Rev­ elations on the evolution of The White-Haired Girl – and comments on the historical multiplicity of Yan’an culture], originally published 1993 in the journal Jintian [Today], reprinted in Wang Xiaoming, ed., Ershi shiji Zhongguo wenxue de shilun [Essays on the history of twentieth-century Chinese literature], rev. ed. (Shanghai: Dongfang chuban zhongxin, 2003), 2:185-203. The reference to Li Tuo’s article, first published in 1985, is on page 186. Author interview with Ma Feng and his wife, Duan Xingmian, May 2002; a transcript of the interview was reviewed by Duan Xingmian in 2004. Jaroslav Průšek, Die Literatur des Befreiten China und Ihre Volkstraditionen (Prague: Artia, 1955), 201. The book was published in German only; translations are mine. Here and elsewhere, I have changed Průšek’s romanization to pinyin. Ibid., 200. Průšek’s contention that the inclusion of the character liang in Lüliang links it further with Liangshan, the location of Shuihuzhuan, seems over-enthusiastic. Novels written elsewhere in China around the same time in styles developed from earlier Republican fiction include Lao She’s family drama of survival under Japanese occupation, Sishi tongtang (Four generations under one roof ), Qian Zhongshu’s Weicheng (Fortress

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besieged), in which a superfluous hero is holed up in the interior, and Lu Ling’s Ji’e de Guo Su’e (Hungry Guo Su’e), a tragedy of deprivation in the countryside. Zhou Yang was pilloried for this comment following his condemnation by Yao Wenyuan in 1967 and his fall from power. Anything that implied that the situation in Yan’an had been less than perfect was anathema to Cultural Revolution ideologues. I have been unable to locate the offending statement in Zhou Yang’s writing. He Qun, dir., with music by Zou Ye, Lüliang yingxiong zhuan (Beijing/Lüliang: Zhongyang dianshitai/Shanxi guangbo-dianshi zongtai, 2005). The most notorious case of suppression of dissent and persecution of the dissenter is that of Wang Shiwei. Documents concerning his case are collected in Dai Qing, “Wang Shiwei and ‘Wild Lilies’: Rectification and Purges in the Chinese Communist Party 1942-1944,” guest editors Timothy Cheek and David E. Apter, Chinese Studies in History 26, 2 (Winter 1992-93) and 3 (Spring 1993). David E. Apter, “Discourse as Power: Yan’an and the Chinese Revolution,” in New Per­ spectives on the Chinese Communist Revolution, ed. Tony Saich and Hans van de Ven (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1995), 193-224, qts., 199-201. For the Lu Xun Academy, see Zhong Jingzhi, Yan’an Luyi – wo dang chuangban de yisuo yishu xueyuan [The Lu Xun Academy of Yan’an – a school for the arts established by our Party] (Beijing: Wenwu chubanshe, 1981); David Holm, Art and Ideology in Revolutionary China (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991); and Chapter 2 below. For an English-language biography of Kang Sheng, see John Byron and Robert Pack, The Claws of the Dragon: Kang Sheng – the Evil Genius behind Mao – and His Legacy of Terror in People’s China (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1992). The section on Yan’an is on pages 135-90. Frederick C. Teiwes explains the loyalty of Mao’s followers throughout his leadership as reflecting a “combination of belief, fear, and moral authority.” Frederick C. Teiwes, “Mao and His Followers,” in A Critical Introduction to Mao, ed. Timothy Cheek (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 129-57, qt.pp.154-55. The quotation is from Robespierre’s 1794 speech “On the Moral and Political Principles of Domestic Policy,” Fordham University, Modern History Sourcebook, http://www.fordham. edu/. At the time of the speech, Robespierre was the leader of the Committee of Public Safety elected by the National Convention. Within months he was himself arrested and guillotined, a victim (unlike either Stalin or Mao) of the terror he had endorsed. For the terror of 1789, see Simon Sharma, Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution (New York: Knopf, 1989), 746-92; for the arrest and execution of Robespierre, see pages 836-46. See Kirk A. Denton, “Literature and Politics: Mao Zedong’s ‘Talks at the Yan’an Forum on Literature and Art,’” in The Columbia Companion to Modern East Asian Literature, ed. Joshua Mostow (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), 463-69; Bonnie S. McDougall, Mao Zedong’s “Talks at the Yan’an Conference on Literature and Art”: A Translation of the 1943 Text with Commentary (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Center for Chinese Studies, 1980); C.T. Hsia, A History of Modern Chinese Fiction (1961; rev. ed., New Haven: Yale University Press, 1971), 308-13; Průšek, Die Literatur, 29-40; D.W. Fokkema, Literary Doctrine in China and Soviet Influence, 1956-1960 (The Hague: Mouton, 1965), 3-11; Merle Goldman, Literary Dissent in Communist China (Cambridge, MA: 1967; repr., New York: Atheneum, 1971), 18-50; Gregor Benton, “The Yenan Literary Opposition,” New Left Review 92 (July-August 1975): 93-106. The earliest published text of Mao’s Talks, from 1943, is translated in McDougall. The translation of the 1953 text used in Chinese publications, which appears in Mao Zedong, Selected Works of Mao Tse-tung (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1967), 3:69-98, is reproduced in Kirk A. Denton, ed., Modern Chinese Literary Thought: Writings on Literature 1893-1945 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), 458-84.

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Notes to pages 20-23

22 For the May Fourth new culture movement, see Vera Schwarcz, The Chinese Enlighten­ ment: Intellectuals and the Legacy of the May Fourth Movement of 1919 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986). 23 Qu Qiubai, “The Question of Popular Literature and Art,” trans. Paul G. Pickowicz, in Revolutionary Literature in China: An Anthology, ed. John Berninghausen and T.D. Huters (White Plains, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1976), 47-51; for more on Qu Qiubai, see Paul G. Pickowicz, Marxist Literary Thought in China: The Influence of Ch’ü Ch’iu-pai (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981). 24 Qu, “The Question of Popular Literature and Art,” 49. 25 Ibid., 50. 26 “Hongjun di’sijun silingbu bugao” [Announcement from the Fourth Division of the Red Army], in Mao Zedong, Mo Takutô shû [Collected works of Mao Zedong, Chinese: Mao Zedong ji], ed. Takeuchi Minoru (Tokyo: Hokubôsha, 1971), 2:71-72. 27 For example, Qu’s associate Li Bozhao, who had studied and worked in the Soviet Union, was head of the Arts Department in the Ministry of Education at the Soviet from 1933, when she was still in her early twenties. 28 Ellen Judd, “Prelude to the ‘Yan’an Talks’: Problems in Transforming a Literary Intelligentsia,” Modern China 11, 3 (July 1985): 377-408. Some of the informants in Sun Shuyun’s retracing of the Long March describe the propaganda activities within the Red Army. See Sun Shuyun, The Long March: The True History of China’s Founding Myth (New York: Anchor Books, 2006). 29 Judd, “Prelude to the ‘Yan’an Talks,’” 386. 30 Denton, “Literature and Politics,” 464. 31 See Kyna Rubin, “Literary Problems during the War of Resistance Viewed from Yan’an: A Study of the Literature Page of Liberation Daily May 16, 1941 – August 31, 1942” (master’s diss., University of British Columbia, 1979). 32 Ai Qing, “Liaojie zuojia, zunzhong zuojia,” Jiefang ribao (Yan’an), 11 March 1942, reprinted in Zhongguo xiandai wenyi sixiang douzheng shi xuexi cankao ziliao [Materials for the study of struggles in literary thought in modern China] (N.p. [printer given as Sichuan Daxian yinshuachang], 1976), 2:493-96. 33 Wang Shiwei, “Zhengzhijia, yishujia” [Politicians and artists], Guyu 1, 4 (17 February 1942), reprinted in Zhongguo xiandai wenyi sixiang douzheng shi xuexi cankao ziliao, 2:467-71. 34 Ai, “Liaojie zuojia,” 495. McDougall comments that “the possibility that sincerity or earnestness may not be sufficient qualification for wielding a surgeon’s knife does not seem to occur to him.” McDougall, Mao Zedong’s “Talks,” 31. 35 See Raymond F. Wylie, “Mao Tse-tung, Chen Po-ta and the Sinification of Marxism,” China Quarterly 79 (July-September 1979): 447-80; Joshua Fogel, Ai Ssu-ch’i’s Contribution to the Development of Chinese Marxism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987). 36 Mao Zedong, “Shijian lun,” in Mao Zedong, Mao Zedong xuanji [Selected works of Mao Zedong] (Beijing: Renmin chubanshe, 1968), 1:259-73; “On Practice,” in Mao, Selected Works, 1:295-309. 37 Edgar Snow, Red Star over China (New York: Random House, 1938), 115. 38 Mao Zedong, “Xue,” poem dated 1936, annotated edition in Mao Zedong, Mao Zhuxi shi-ci jiangjie [Chairman Mao’s poetry with commentary] (Shenyang: Liaoning daxue zhongwenxi, 1973), 134-46. The quoted translation is from Mao Tse-tung, Poems (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1976), 23-24. I have converted the romanizaton of Chinese names to pinyin. 39 Hung-Yok Ip sees Mao’s relationship with the intellectuals as characterized by “anti-elitist elitism,” in that he believed that the intellectuals must transform themselves ideologically but must still be the ones to communicate with the masses (and thus remain elites). Mao recognized “his intellectual comrades’ desire for aesthetic enjoyment” while requiring them

Notes to pages 24-27 215

to popularize their writing styles. Hung-Yok Ip, “Mao, Mao Zedong Thought, and Com­ munist Intellectuals,” in A Critical Introduction to Mao, ed. Timothy Cheek (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 169-95, qt.p.185. 40 McDougall, Mao Zedong’s “Talks,” 13. 41 Mao, Mao Zedong xuanji, 3:812; Denton, Modern Chinese Literary Thought, 464. 42 Mao, Mao Zedong xuanji, 3:831. 43 Hsia, A History of Modern Chinese Fiction, 303. 44 See Kirk A. Denton, The Problematic of Self in Modern Chinese Literature: Hu Feng and Lu Ling (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998). 45 Ding Ling, “Shafei nüshi de riji,” Xiaoshuo yuebao (February 1928), reprinted in Ding Ling, Ding Ling duanpian xiaoshuo xuan [Selected short stories by Ding Ling] (Beijing: Renmin wenxue chubanshe, 1981), 1:43-82. Translations of Ding Ling’s fiction can be found in Ding Ling, I Myself Am a Woman: Selected Writings of Ding Ling, ed. Tani E. Barlow, with Gary J. Bjorge (Boston: Beacon Press, 1989). See also Jingyuan Zhang, “Feminism and Revolution: The Work and Life of Ding Ling,” in Mostow, The Columbia Companion to Modern East Asian Literature, 395-400; Yi-tsi Mei Feuerwerker, Ding Ling’s Fiction: Ideology and Narrative in Modern Chinese Literature (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982). 46 Xiao Jun, Bayue de xiangcun (Shanghai: n.p., 1935; repr., Shanghai: Zuojia chubanshe, 1948). The work was also translated by Evan King (translator unattributed) as Tien Chun, Village in August (Cleveland: Tower Books, 1943). See Rudolf G. Wagner, “Xiao Jun’s Novel Countryside in August and the Tradition of ‘Proletarian Realism,’” in La littérature chinoise, 57-66; Alexander Fadeyev, The Rout (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, n.d.); Lu Xun’s translation, as Huimie, in Lu Xun, Lu Xun quanji [Complete works of Lu Xun] (Beijing: Renmin wenxue chubanshe, 1973), 18:258-613. The novel is also known in China as The Nineteen (Shijiuge), after the title of its final chapter. 47 Ding Ling, Taiyang zhao zai Sanggan he shang (1948; repr., Beijing: Renmin wenxue chuban­she, 1955). The novel was one of the 1997 “Red Classics” series and appeared in English as Ding Ling, The Sun Shines over the Sanggan River, trans. Yang Xianyi and Gladys Yang (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1984). 48 Wuchanjieji xianshizhuyi and shehuizhuyi xianshizhuyi respectively. Mao, Mo Takutô shû, 8:136, and Mao, Mao Zedong xuanji, 3:824. 49 McDougall, Mao Zedong’s “Talks,” 16. 50 Zhou Yang, “Wenxue yu shenghuo mantan” [Talks on literature and life], Jiefang ribao (Yan’an), 17-19 July 1941, translated in Rubin, “Literary Problems,” 192-208. 51 David Holm, “The Literary Rectification in Yan’an,” in Essays in Modern Chinese Literature and Literary Criticism, ed. Wolfgang Kubin and Rudolf  Wagner (Bochum, West Germany: Brockmeyer, 1982), 272-308. For the debate on national forms, see David Holm, “National Form and the Popularization of Literature in Yenan,” in La littérature chinoise, 215-35; Edoarda Masi, “La discussion sur les ‘Formes Nationales’ dans l’art et la littérature, 19381942,” in La littérature chinoise, 205-13. 52 Průšek, Die Literatur, 359-73; David Holm, introduction to and translation of Ma Ke, “Fuqi shizi” [Man and wife learn to read], in Berninghausen and Huters, Revolutionary Literature in China, 71-78; Chang-tai Hung, Mao’s New World: Political Culture in the Early People’s Republic (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2011), 75-91. For a sense of the pre-reformed yangge, see the translations of plays collected by the American sociologist Sidney Gamble during the 1920s and ‘30s in Sidney D. Gamble, Chinese Village Plays from the Ting Hsien Region (Amsterdam: Philo Press, 1970). 53 Bishang Liangshan, in Zhongguo xiandai wenyi sixiang douzheng shi xuexi cankao ziliao, 2:499-570; Mao Zedong, “Kanle Bishang Liangshan yihou xie gei Yan’an Pingjutuan de xin” [Letter written to the Yan’an Pingju Company after watching Forced to Ascend Liangshan], in Zhongguo xiandai wenyi sixiang douzheng shi xuexi cankao ziliao, 498. This collection

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Notes to pages 27-30

was provided to students at Liaoning University in Shenyang in 1976-77. The story of Lin Chong’s forced flight is spread through Chapters 6 to 10 of Shuihuzhuan. 54 He Jingzhi and Ding Yi, Baimao nü (N.p.: Shandong xinhua shudian, 1948). This was the first of many versions of the opera. The story also gave rise to a film and a ballet that became one of the Cultural Revolution’s model theatrical works. See also Meng, “Baimao nü yanbian de qishi,” in Wang, Ershi shiji Zhongguo wenxue de shilun. 55 Jack Belden, China Shakes the World (New York: Monthly Review, 1970), 209-11. 56 Xu Xueqing, “The Mandarin Duck and Butterfly School,” in Literary Societies of Republican China, ed. Kirk A. Denton and Michel Hockx (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2008), 47-78. See also Fan Boqun and Kang Qingdong, eds., Tongsu wenxue shi jiang [Ten lectures on popular literature] (Beijing: Beijing daxue chubanshe, 2003). Lecture 2 in Fan and Kang’s book traces tongsu literature from Tang dynasty tales of the remarkable (chuanqi) to prompt-books (huaben) attributed to Song dynasty storytellers, Ming-Qing serialized fiction (zhanghui xiaoshuo), and the popular novels of the twentieth-century authors Zhang Henshui and Jin Yong. 57 Third behind Mao Zedong and Zhu De. Belden, China Shakes the World, 89-96. Belden was unimpressed with Zhao for precisely the qualities that he would have cultivated to live up to his “peasant writer” description, and was unmoved by his fiction. 58 Yi-tsi Mei Feuerwerker, Ideology, Power, Text: Self-Representation and the Peasant “Other” in Modern Chinese Literature (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 115. 59 Ibid. 60 See Chen Tushou, “1959 nian dongtian de Zhao Shuli” [Zhao Shuli in the winter of 1959], in Wang, Ershi shiji Zhongguo wenxue de shilun, 165-75. In the winter of 1959, Zhao Shuli addressed letters to the Communist Party leadership criticizing the Great Leap Forward, incurring the enmity of fellow authors and the Party leaders. For a brief summary of Zhao Shuli’s career, see Hong Zicheng, A History of Contemporary Chinese Literature, trans. Michael M. Day (Leiden: Brill, 2007), 108-15. 61 “Xiao Erhei jiehun,” in Zhao Shuli, Zhao Shuli xiaoshuo xuan [Selected fiction of Zhao Shuli] (Taiyuan: Shanxi renmin chubanshe, 1980), 1-16; “Li Youcai banhua,” in Zhao Shuli xiaoshuo xuan, 17-60; Zhao Shuli, Rhymes of Li Youcai and Other Stories, 2nd ed., trans. Sidney Shapiro (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1980). 62 Edward M. Gunn, Rewriting Chinese: Style and Innovation in Modern Chinese Prose (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991), 138. 63 Author interview with Ma Feng, May 2002. Where possible, biographical information provided by Ma Feng has been checked with other sources, including biographical dictionaries and information in Průšek, Die Literatur; Cyril Birch, “Chinese Communist Literature: The Persistence of Traditional Forms,” in Chinese Communist Literature, ed. Cyril Birch (New York: Praeger, 1963), 74-91; Ma Feng’s memoir “Jin-Sui bianqu,” in La littérature chinoise; and his official funeral notice. Aside from his co-authorship of Heroes of Lüliang, Ma Feng is best known for short stories written in the 1950s about village life in his native Shanxi. He also wrote filmscripts and hagiographic novels about the Can­ adian doctor Norman Bethune and the young communist martyr Liu Hulan. Selected stories are translated in Ma Feng, Vendetta (Beijing: Panda Books, 1989). For a Chinese anthology with many of the same selections, see Ma Feng, Wode di’yige shangji [My first superior] (Beijing: Renmin wenxue chubanshe, 1977). 64 Members of the Training Group were not formally enrolled as students at Luyi, and most had a lower level of education than the Luyi students. 65 Zhou Wen is a sufficiently significant figure for his work to have been in the library at Luyi and to warrant inclusion in modern biographical dictionaries of Chinese authors. At Yan’an, he had been active in the promotion of national forms, responsible for the establishment

Notes to pages 31-38 217

















of a Mass Reading Materials Society (Dazhong Duwushe). Holm, “National Form and the Popularization of Literature in Yenan,” in La littérature chinoise, 232. 66 Průšek, Die Literatur, 194. 67 For example, the novels Protect Yan’an (Baowei Yan’an) and Liu Zhidan (the title of the novel is the name of its military leader hero) lost favour following the falls of Peng Dehuai (who is lionized in the former) in 1959, and Liu Zhidan, with Gao Gang in the mid-1950s. Following the death of Lin Biao and the political campaign to denounce him, the history of the civil war was rewritten, though the fictions were in essay rather than novel form, to show him attempting to sabotage the revolutionary war. The history was to undergo further changes following the Cultural Revolution, with Peng Dehuai rehabilitated and Lin Biao being given some credit for his civil war generalship. 68 David Der-wei Wang, “Reinventing National History: Communist and Anti-Communist Fiction of the Mid-Twentieth Century,” in Chinese Literature in the Second Half of a Modern Century: A Critical Survey, ed. Pang-yuan Chi and David Der-wei Wang (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000), 39-64, qt.p.42. 69 As is the case with the battle scene in Chapters 35 and 36. 70 [Shi Nai’an and Luo Guanzhong], Shuihu quanzhuan [Complete Shuihu] (Shanghai: Shanghai renmin chubanshe, 1975), 1:36; Pearl Buck, trans., All Men Are Brothers (London: Methuen, 1933), 51. For alternative versions of this passage among the translations of Shuihuzhuan, see [Shi Nai’an and Luo Guanzhong], Outlaws of the Marsh, trans. Sidney Shapiro (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1988), 1:48; [Shi Nai’an and Luo Guanzhong], The Broken Seals: Part 1 of the Marshes of Mount Liang, trans. John Dent-Young and Alex Dent-Young (Hong Kong: Chinese University Press, 1994), 68. 71 Ma and Xi, Lüliang yingxiong zhuan, 89. 72 Ibid., 24. 73 Ibid., 23. 74 Although such evil characters reappear in later fiction, it is highly unlikely that they would be related to the hero. Like the decent landlord Sir Second, Lei’s father-in-law is an indication of the lesser constraints placed on writers away from the political centre during the civil war period. 75 Birch, “The Persistence of Traditional Forms,” in Birch, Chinese Communist Literature, 88-91, with a list of “matching phrases” from Heroes of Lüliang and Shuihuzhuan on page 89. Birch provides an abridged translation. See also Průšek, Die Literatur, 196-97. 76 Ma and Xi, Lüliang yingxiong zhuan, 41-44. 77 This chapter is translated in full, including the poetic passages omitted in most translated versions, in H.C. Chang, Chinese Literature: Popular Fiction and Drama (Edinburgh: Edin­burgh University Press, 1973), 158-77, with an introduction on pages 147-57. Sadly, it is the only chapter of the novel translated by Chang. 78 The gender implications of the process whereby in later versions Xi’er escapes without being raped, and thus becomes simply a female victim to be saved by the revolution, are considered by both Meng Yue and Krista van Fliet Hang. See Krista van Fliet Hang, “The Heart of the Party: Language, Gender, and Power in Tracks in the Snowy Forest,” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 21, 1 (Spring 2009): 72-101. 79 Zhao Shuli is often associated with Ma Feng and Xi Rong, since all were from Shanxi. Ma Feng reports that he did not meet Zhao until after the communist victory, when they attended the first Assembly of Artists and Writers (Wendaihui) in Beijing. The three authors were reunited in Taiyuan during the Cultural Revolution, when they were incarcerated for their supposed literary crimes and occupied adjoining cells. Zhao died in custody in 1970. 80 Ma and Xi, Lüliang yingxiong zhuan, Chapter 47, 214-19. 81 Ibid., 214.

218

Notes to pages 38-46



82 Ibid., 219. 83 Kong Jue and Yuan Jing, Xin ernü yingxiong zhuan (Shanghai: Haiyan shudian, 1950; repr., Beijing: Renmin wenxue chubanshe, 1997). For a translation, see Yuan Jing, Daughters and Sons, trans. Sidney Shapiro (1958; repr., Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1979). 84 A similar incident, the rape of a young Chinese woman by a Japanese soldier, is very differently told in Xiao Jun’s earlier Countryside in August. In that novel, the incident is seen through the mind of the rapist, whereas Iino is simply a monster in New Son and Daughter Heroes. 85 Robert E. Hegel, “Making the Past Serve the Present in Fiction and Drama: From the Yan’an Forum to the Cultural Revolution,” in Popular Chinese Literature and Performing Arts in the People’s Republic of China 1949-1979, ed. Bonnie S. McDougall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 197-223, esp. 210-14. Hegel notes two further stories in New Son and Daughter Heroes that are adapted from the classic novels, one each from Shuihuzhuan and Three Kingdoms. 86 Yuan, Daughters and Sons, 211. 87 Yang Heling, “Xin ernü yingxiong zhuan de chuangzuo jingguo: ji Yuan Jing tongzhi de tanhua” [The creative experience of writing New Son and Daughter Heroes: Notes on a conversation with Comrade Yuan Jing], in “Xin ernü yingxiong zhuan” pinglun ji [Collected critical essays on New Son and Daughter Heroes], ed. Shi Yun and Xin Yi (Shanghai: Haiyan shudian, 1950), 86-91, qt.p.90. 88 Guo Moruo, “Dule Xin ernü yingxiong zhuan,” in Shi and Xin, “Xin ernü yingxiong zhuan” pinglun ji, 1-2. 89 Van Fliet Hang, “The Heart of the Party,” 75. 90 Qu Bo, Linhai xueyuan (1957; repr., Beijing: Renmin wenxue chubanshe, 1977). For a translation, see Chu Po, Tracks in the Snowy Forest, trans. Sidney Shapiro (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1962). 91 As van Fliet Hang’s reading of the novel demonstrates, Qu Bo’s adoption of the tongsu conventions also allows him to introduce elements of the supernatural in his novel, something that the civil war Heroes novels did not attempt. 92 Hegel, “Making the Past Serve the Present,” in McDougall, Popular Chinese Literature, 214-20. 93 Zhiqu Weihushan 1970 nian yanchuben [Taking Tiger Mountain by strategy, 1970 performance edition] (Beijing: Renmin chubanshe, 1971); Taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1971). 94 See “Sparks amid the Reeds,” Chinese Literature (September 1964): 3-63; Shajiabang, in Geming yangbanxi juben huibian [Libretti of model theatrical works] (Beijing: Renmin wenxue chubanshe, 1974), 137-200. 95 Hao Ran, Yanyangtian (1964; repr., Beijing: Renmin wenxue chubanshe, 1974), 1:396-402. 96 The score was composed by Zou Ye, whose other credits include the 2006 film Yun-shui yao (The knot), a saga with even greater pretensions to epic. 97 Cyril Birch, “Fiction of the Yenan Period,” China Quarterly 4 (October-December 1960): 7. 98 Cyril Birch, “The Particle of Art,” in Birch, Chinese Communist Literature, 3-14, qt.p.9. Chapter 2: Zhou Libo, Hurricane, and the Creation of a Chinese Socialist Realism Acknowledgment: An earlier version of this chapter was presented at the Association for Asian Studies conference in March 2010. The comments of the panel discussant Philip Williams are gratefully acknowledged. 1 Zhou Libo, Baofeng zhouyu, first edition of part 1 (following partial serialization in the newspaper Dongbei ribao) (N.p.: Dongbei shudian, 1948), reprinted in Zhou Libo, Zhou Libo xuanji [Selected works of Zhou Libo] (Changsha: Hunan renmin chubanshe, 1984),

Notes to pages 46-47 219



2



3



4



5



6



7

2:1-245, with part 2 on pages 247-514 (quotations below are from this edition). For a translated version, see Zhou Libo, The Hurricane, trans. Xu Mengxiong, with the assistance of Gladys Yang and Betty Chandler (1955; repr., Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1981). Part 1 spans pages 1-216 of the 1981 English version. What is now the second half of the novel was written as a sequel in 1948, first published in May of the following year, and included thereafter as the second half of the novel. As David Der-wei Wang observes, the sequel essentially reprises the plot of the original, the same work-team leader returning to the same village to direct the peasants’ struggle against new (and less threatening) exploiters. David Der-wei Wang, “Reinventing National History: Communist and AntiCommunist Fiction of the Mid-Twentieth Century,” in Chinese Literature in the Second Half of a Modern Century: A Critical Survey, ed. Pang-yuan Chi and David Der-wei Wang (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000), 39-64. The second part of the novel will not be considered here. Other authors who incorporated their own civil war experiences in their red classic works included Ding Ling in Taiyang zhao zai Sanggan he shang, Qu Bo in Linhai xueyuan, Du Pengcheng in Baowei Yan’an, Liang Bin in Hongqi pu (Keep the red flag flying), and Luo Guangbin and Yang Yiyan in Hong yan. Zhou Libo, Shanxiang jubian (Part 1 1958, Part 2 1960), Zhou Libo xuanji, vol. 3. Zhou Libo, Great Changes in a Mountain Village, trans. Derek Bryan (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1961). See Joe C. Huang, Heroes and Villains in Communist China: The Contemporary Chinese Novel as a Reflection of Life (New York: Pica Press, 1973), 242-43. See also Xiaomei Chen, “Worker-Peasant-Soldier’s Literature,” in Words and Their Stories: Essays on the Language of the Chinese Revolution, ed. Wang Ban (Leiden: Brill, 2010), 65-83, esp. 70-71; Ban Wang, “Socialist Realism,” in Wang, Words and Their Stories, 101-18, esp. 114-17. A third novel followed Great Changes in a Mountain Village, set among coal-miners, but was much less popular. Zhou’s final novel Longhu dou (Titanic struggle), also set in the countryside, was taken from the author by Red Guards at the beginning of the Cultural Revolution and returned to his family only after his death. It has never been published. Ding Ling, Taiyang zhao zai Sanggan he shang (1948; repr., Beijing: Renmin wenxue chuban­she, 1955). For a translated version, see Ding Ling, The Sun Shines over the Sanggan River, trans. Yang Xianyi and Gladys Yang (1955; new ed., Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1984). Ding Ling’s novel was published slightly after Zhou Libo’s original Baofeng zhouyu and is a much longer, more complex, and equivocal work, continuing the concern of the celebrated veteran of May Fourth fiction with individual (particularly female) sensitivities in an age of revolutionary change. Both of the Chinese Stalin Prize winners are considered in Průšek’s early report of the literature of the liberated areas and in Joe C. Huang’s study of the novel in the pre–Cultural Revolution People’s Republic. See Jaroslav Průšek, Die Literatur des Befreiten China und Ihre Volkstraditionen (Prague: Artia, 1955), 240-52; Huang, Heroes and Villains, 183-211. Also awarded the Stalin Prize in the category for drama was He Jingzhi and Ding Yi’s liberated areas drama Baimao nü, which was to reappear in a number of versions, as opera, film, and ballet in subsequent years. Author interview with Zhou Xiaoyi, Zhou Libo’s son and a professor of English at Beijing University, May 2002. The process for the selection of Stalin Prize nominees was not made public. Professor Zhou believes that the nominations were made by Zhou Yang, who included Ding Ling’s first work since her clash with the Yan’an authorities to avoid the appearance of favouritism to his lifelong friend and fellow provincial Zhou Libo. Alla Latynina, “The Stalin Prizes as the Quintessence of Socialist Realism,” in In the Party Spirit: Socialist Realism and Literary Practice in the Soviet Union, East Germany and China, ed. Hilary Chung (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1996), 106-28, qt.p.108.

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Notes to pages 47-48

8 Translation of these novels into the languages of the Warsaw Pact was a component in the midcentury cultural exchanges detailed in Nicolai Volland, “Translating the Socialist State: Cultural Exchange, National Identity, and the Socialist World in the Early PRC,” Twentieth Century China 33, 2 (April 2008); 51-72, see page 69. 9 Zhou Yang, “Wenyi zhanxian shang de yige da bianlun,” Wenyibao (May 1958): 2-15, trans. as Zhou Yang, A Great Debate on the Literary Front (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1958). Zhou Yang writes of Ding Ling that “it was thanks to help given her by the Party that she wrote The Sun Shines over the Sanggan River.” Zhou, A Great Debate, 16. 10 Wang, “Reinventing National History,” in Chi and Wang, Chinese Literature, 62, citing a memoir by Zhou Yangzhi on the mistreatment of his grandfather in the Cultural Revolution. 11 Zhou Yang, “Shehuizhuyi xianshizhuyi – Zhongguo wenxue qianjin de daolu” [Socialist realism – the road ahead for Chinese literature], first published in the Soviet literary journal Znamia (Banner) in December 1952, Renmin ribao, 11 January 1953, reprinted in Zhou Yang, Zhou Yang wenji [Collected works of Zhou Yang] (Beijing: Renmin wenxue chubanshe, 1984), 2:182-91, qt.p.183; Mao Zedong, “Lun renmin minzhu zhuanzheng,” in Mao Zedong, Mao Zedong xuanji [Selected works of Mao Zedong] (Beijing: Renmin chubanshe, 1968), 4:1357-71, qt.p.1360; Mao Zedong, “On the People’s Democratic Dictatorship,” in Mao Zedong, Selected Works of Mao Tse-tung (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1967), 4:41124, qt.p.413. 12 Zhou, “Shehuizhuyi xianshizhuyi,” in Zhou, Zhou Yang wenji, 182. 13 Zhou Yang, “Zai Zhongguo di-yi jie dianying chuangzuo huiyi shang guanyu xuexi shehuizhuyi xianshizhuyi wenti de baogao” [Report to the first conference on film composition on the question of studying socialist realism], in Zhou, Zhou Yang wenji, 2:192-233, qt.p.193. 14 Sources for this brief introduction to socialist realism include Katerina Clark, The Soviet Novel: History as Ritual (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985); Katerina Clark, “Socialist Realism with Shores: The Conventions for the Positive Hero,” in Socialist Realism without Shores, ed. Thomas Lahusen and Evgeny Dobrenko (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997), 27-50; Evgeny Dobrenko, Political Economy of Socialist Realism, trans. Jesse M. Savage (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007); Hilary Chung, “Introduction,” in Chung, In the Party Spirit, x-xviii; Lorenz Bichler, “Coming to Terms with a Term: Notes on the History of the Use of Socialist Realism in China,” in Chung, In the Party Spirit, 30-43; Régine Robin, Socialist Realism: An Impossible Aesthetic, trans. Catherine Porter (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992); Abram Tertz, On Socialist Realism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982); Li Yang, Kangzheng suming zhi lu – “shehuizhuyi xianshizhuyi” (1942-1976) yanjiu [The path of resistance and fate: Research on “socialist realism” (1942-1976)] (Changchun: Shidai wenyi chubanshe, 1993); Zhang Dexiang, Xianshizhuyi dangdai liubian shi [The evolution of realism in the contemporary period] (Beijing: Shehui kexueyuan ziliao chubanshe, 1997). 15 Chung, “Introduction,” in Chung, In the Party Spirit, x. 16 Leonid Heller, “A World of Prettiness: Socialist Realism and Its Aesthetic Categories,” South Atlantic Quarterly 94, 3 (Summer 1995): 691. 17 A memorandum by Ivan Mikhailovich Gronsky included in Katerina Clark and Evgeny Dobrenko, with Andrei Artizov and Oleg Naumov, eds., Soviet Culture and Power: A History in Documents, 1917-1953 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), 163-65, recalls the two-word term being formulated in Stalin’s study during April or May of 1932. 18 Quoted in H.G. Scott, ed., Problems of Soviet Literature: Reports and Speeches at the First Soviet Writers’ Congress (London: Martin Lawrence, 1934), 22. 19 Zhou Yang’s 1933 essay “Guanyu shehuizhuyi de xianshizhuyi yu geming de langmanzhuyi” [On socialist realism and revolutionary romanticism], reprinted in Zhou, Zhou Yang wenji, 1:101-14, introduced the term to China.

Notes to pages 49-50 221















20 Many of the novels included in Katerina Clark’s “Official Short List of [Soviet] Model Novels as Inferred from Speeches to Writers’ Union Congresses” predate 1934, the earliest being Gorky’s Mother, written in American exile in 1906 and published a decade before the October Revolution. See Clark, The Soviet Novel, 261-63. 21 See Richard King, “Fantasies of Battle: Making the Militant Hero Prominent,” in Art in Turmoil: The Chinese Cultural Revolution, 1966-76, ed. Richard King (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2010), 203-15. 22 Yang Li and Hu Zhihui, A Biographical Dictionary of Chinese Writers (Beijing: New World Press, 1994), 387. 23 Sources for the literary biography of Zhou Libo include entries in various biographical dictionaries including ibid., in which Zhou is described on page 387 as having been “born into a farming family”; Lin Lan (the author’s widow), “Zhanshi yu zuojia” [Warrior and author], in Zhou, Zhou Libo xuanji, 2:562-86; additional information was supplied by the author’s son Zhou Xiaoyi in May 2002. 24 See Zhou Yang, “Shiwu nian lai de Sulian wenxue” [Soviet literature of the last fifteen years], in Zhou, Zhou Yang wenji, 1:74-100; and Zhou, “Guanyu shehuizhuyi de xianshizhuyi yu geming de langmanzhuyi,” in Zhou, Zhou Yang wenji, 1:101-14. The latter details discussions within the organizing committee for the Soviet Writers’ Federation. 25 Zhou Yang, “Guanyu guofang wenxue,” first published in the journal Wenxue jie [Literary world], 5 June 1936, Zhou, Zhou Yang wenji, 1:170-77; trans. Richard King as “On National Defence Literature,” in Modern Chinese Literary Thought: Writings on Literature 1893-1945, ed. Kirk A. Denton (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), 408-14. For more on Lu Xun’s feud with Zhou Yang, see David E. Pollard, The True Story of Lu Xun (Hong Kong: Chinese University Press, 2002), 187-96; and Merle Goldman, Literary Dissent in Com­ munist China (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967; repr. New York: Atheneum, 1971), 13-14. Lu Xun’s views on Zhou Yang can be found in Lu Xun, “Da Xu Mouyong guanyu kang-Ri tongyi zhanxian wenti” [Reply to Xu Mouyong on the question of a united front in the resistance to Japan], in Lu Xun, Lu Xun zawen xuan [Selected essays of Lu Xun] (Shanghai: Renmin chubanshe, 1973), 230-46. This Cultural Revolution edition of Lu Xun’s essays is annotated to ensure that Zhou Yang and his associates received the discredit they were then felt to deserve. It is here (page 238 and note 28 on page 245) that Lu Xun describes Zhou Yang (Zhou Qiying), Tian Han, Xia Yan, and Yang Hansheng as sitiao hanzi (four villains), a label that was to be restored to them in the Cultural Revolution. 26 Mikhail Sholokhov, Virgin Soil Upturned, trans. Robert Daglish (Moscow: Raguda, n.d.); Mikhail Sholokhov, Virgin Soil Upturned, trans. Stephen Garry (London: Putnam, 1935; repr., Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977). Here and elsewhere, I cite only translations of Soviet novels, as I do not read Russian. Zhou’s translation, Bei kaiken de chunüdi, was first published in 1937 by Shanghai shenghuo shudian, with the translator’s name given simply as Libo. It is included in Zhou, Zhou Libo xuanji, as volume 7, with a translator’s note to the 1954 reprinting and the translation of a Soviet article on Sholokhov. The 1937 edition notes that in revising his translation of the novel, Zhou Libo also checked it against the Japanese translation by Yoneyama Masahiro. 27 Author interview with Zhou Xiaoyi, May 2002. Zhou Libo’s prison experiences were the basis for short stories collected as Zhou Libo, Tiemen li (Within iron gates) and published in 1955. The stories are in Zhou, Zhou Libo xuanji, 1:1-43; see also “Tiemen li xu,” [Preface to Within Iron Gates], in Zhou, Zhou Libo xuanji, 6:528-29. 28 Zhou, Zhou Libo xuanji, 6:74-104. 29 Zhou Yang’s account of his early relationship with Zhou Libo, up to the latter’s arrival at Yan’an, can be found in the record of a conversation with Zhou Libo’s son, Zhou Jianming, and three others (Hu Guangfan, Shi Dahao, and Li Huasheng) in Zhou Yang, “Guanyu

222

Notes to pages 50-54

Zhou Libo tongzhi de yixie qingkuang” [A few matters concerning Comrade Zhou Libo], in Zhou Libo yanjiu ziliao [Research materials on Zhou Libo], ed. Li Huasheng and Hu Guangfan (Changsha: Hunan renmin chubanshe, 1983), 97-101. Zhou Yang gives reestablishing contact with the Communist Party as his reason for going to Tokyo, notes that he supported Zhou Libo financially in Shanghai, and unsurprisingly glosses over the spat with Lu Xun. 30 David Holm, Art and Ideology in Revolutionary China (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 45. 31 Zhou Libo already had a family in Hunan before his departure for Shanghai. Zhou Yangzhi, who contributed a memoir to Li Huasheng and Hu Guangfan’s book of research materials on the author, was a grandson from that family. 32 A photograph of “the Chinese Department at Luyi listening to Comrade Zhou Libo lecturing” can be found in Zhong Jingzhi, Yan’an Luyi – wo dang chuangban de yisuo wenyi xueyuan [The Lu Xun Academy of Yan’an: A school for the arts established by our Party] (N.p.: Wenwu chubanshe, 1981). For more on Zhou’s Luyi lectures and their reception by their audience, his humanistic approach, and in particular his lecture on Stendahl, I have referred to Ban Wang, “Socialist Humanism and Revolutionary Culture” (unpublished paper, 2010). 33 Guy de Maupassant, Boule de Suif et autres contes normands (Paris: Garnier Frères, 1971), 1-43; Guy de Maupassant, Boule de Suif and Other Stories, trans. H.N.P. Sloman (Har­ monds­worth: Penguin Books, 1947), 15-56. The reader of Chinese civil-war-era leftist literature might see some similarity between Boule de Suif and the young woman Zhenzhen in Ding Ling’s 1941 story “Wo zai Xiacun de shihou” (When I was in Xia Village) sent back behind Japanese lines by the Communist leadership to serve as a comfort woman and then despised as a fallen woman by her fellow villagers. Ding Ling, Ding Ling duanpian xiaoshuo xuan [Selected short stories by Ding Ling] (Beijing: Renmin wenxue chubanshe, 1981). 2:451-60; Ding Ling, I Myself Am a Woman: Selected Writings of Ding Ling, ed. Tani E. Barlow, with Gary J. Bjorge (Boston: Beacon Press, 1989), 298-315. 34 Quoted in Peter Cogman, “Boule de Suif,” The Literary Encyclopedia, http://www.litencyc. com. 35 Zhou Libo Luyi jianggao [Zhou Libo’s drafts for speeches at the Lu Xun Academy], ed. Lin Lan (Shanghai: Xinhua shudian, 1984), 160. I have made slight changes to Lin Lan’s punctuation in my translation. 36 Ibid., 160-61. 37 Holm, Art and Ideology, 104-6. 38 Zhou Libo, “Baofeng zhouyu shi zenyang xiede” [How Hurricane was written], in Zhou, Zhou Libo xuanji, 6:240-46. 39 Clark et al., eds., Soviet Culture and Power, xii. 40 Mao Zedong, “Hunan nongmin yundong kaocha baogao” (essay dated 1927), in Mao, Mao Zedong xuanji, 1:12-44, qt.p.13; translated as “Report on an Investigation of the Peasant Movement in Hunan,” in Mao, Selected Works, 1:23-59, qt.pp.23-24. The sentence in which the words baofeng zhouyu (hurricane) appear is printed as the epigraph to most Chinese editions of the novel (though not in the Zhou Libo wenji version) and in the Foreign Languages Press translation. 41 Mao, Mao Zedong xuanji, 1:21; Mao, Selected Works, 1:33. 42 Lu Xun, “Guxiang,” in Lu Xun, Nahan [Battlecry] (Beijing: Renmin wenxue chubanshe, 1973), 64-75; Ye Shengtao, “Duo shoule san-wu dou,” translated as “Three to Five Bushels More” in Harold R. Isaacs, ed., Straw Sandals (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1974), 337-47. 43 Zhao’s invention of the peasant subject was paralleled by his own invention as “peasant author.” See Yi-tsi Mei Feuerwerker, “Zhao Shuli: The ‘Making’ of a Model Peasant Writer,”

Notes to pages 54-61 223











Chap. 4 in Yi-tsi Mei Feuerwerker, Ideology, Power, Text: Self-Representation and the Peasant “Other” in Modern Chinese Literature (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 101-45. 44 Zhou, Baofeng zhuoyu, 87; Zhou, The Hurricane, 83, where the phrase is unequivocally translated as “a real peasant.” 45 Quoted in Robin, Socialist Realism, 59. 46 Ibid. 47 This section draws on the analysis of the opening section of the novel in James Keefer, “A Tale of Red Heroes: Myth in Chinese Socialist Realist Fiction” (master’s diss., University of Victoria, 1992). 48 Zhou, Zhou Libo xuanji, 2: 5 (translation mine); the passage appears in English on page 3 of the Foreign Languages Press version. The Foreign Languages Press translation was checked by Zhou Libo against his Chinese original (author interview with Zhou Xiaoyi, May 2002). The result is competent, though not meticulous, inevitably losing the Manchurian flavour of the language for which the author was praised. 49 It is only in later variations of Chinese socialist realism that the rising sun, especially when red, would come to represent not the bright future and the Communist Party that would bring it, but exclusively the leader of that Party. 50 See Li, Kangzheng suming zhi lu, 100. 51 Zhou, Zhou Libo xuanji, 2:6. 52 Ibid., 2:12; translation adapted from Zhou, The Hurricane, 11. 53 Author conversation with Professor Yang Kuisong of the History Department at East China Normal University, Vancouver, May 2010. Yang Kuisong was one of the historians visiting the area in 2000. He was told during his visit that the model for the peasant activist Zhao Yulin was less of a hero than his fictional reincarnation. 54 V.I. Lenin, “What Is to Be Done?” http://www.marxists.org/ (emphasis in original). 55 Zhou, Zhou Libo xuanji, 2:86; translation adapted from Zhou, The Hurricane, 81. 56 After 1949, memories of bitterness were contrasted with the situation in the People’s Republic in a form known as yikusitian “remembering (past) bitterness and thinking about (present) sweetness.” Yikusitian was a standard part of education as well as fiction. 57 Zhou, Zhou Libo xuanji, 2:181. 58 Qu Bo introduces his alter ego Shao Jianbo as “a brilliant, handsome young officer of twenty-two.” Qu Bo, Linhai xueyuan [Tracks in the snowy forest] (1957; repr., Beijing: Renmin wenxue chubanshe, 1977), 1; Chu Po [Qu Bo], Tracks in the Snowy Forest, trans. Sidney Shapiro (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1962), 1. Ostrovsky is similarly selfindulgent in his self-portrayal as Pavel Korchagin in How the Steel Was Tempered, a novel considered in Chapter 4. 59 Zhou, Zhou Libo xuanji, 2:7; Zhou, The Hurricane, 5. 60 The man’s name is given as Wen Fengshan in the version of “How I Wrote The Hurricane” that appears as a preface to the 1981 edition of the translation. The author writes, “I included him in the novel, hoping that the description of his heroic death as well as the class consciousness and grief it aroused among the peasants might serve to teach our younger generation and inspire them to follow the example set by our heroic revolutionary martyrs.” Zhou, The Hurricane, iii. In “Baofeng zhouyu shi zenyang xiede,” the Chinese version on which the 1981 translation is based, the name is not supplied. Note Yang Kuisong’s report on the historical model for Zhao Yulin. 61 Zhou, Zhou Libo xuanji, 2:32; translation adapted from Zhou, The Hurricane, 29. 62 Clark, “Socialist Realism with Shores,” in Lahusen and Dobrenko, Socialist Realism without Shores, 29. 63 Ibid., 30. 64 Zhou, Zhou Libo xuanji, 2:151; translation adapted from Zhou, The Hurricane, 137.

224











Notes to pages 61-71

65 Clark, The Soviet Novel, 258, 259. 66 Zhou, Zhou Libo xuanji, 2:238. 67 Ibid., 2:239-40; translation adapted from Zhou, The Hurricane, 211. 68 The incident occurs in Sholokhov, Virgin Soil Upturned, trans. Garry, 333-36. 69 Zhou, Shanxiang jubian. The novel occupies volume 3 of Zhou, Zhou Libo xuanji. 70 Xie Tieli, dir., Baofeng zhouyu (Beijing: Beijing Film Studio, 1961). 71 See Wang Yuhe, “Feng gao wu tantu, tansuo wu zhijing – zuoqujia Li Huanzhi” [High peaks with no path, exploration without limits – the composer Li Huanzhi], in Zhongguo jinxiandai yinyuejia zhuan [Biographies of modern Chinese musicians], ed. Xiang Yansheng (Shenyang: Chunfeng wenyi chubanshe, 1994), 3:164-77. I am grateful to Joys Cheung for bringing this publication to my attention. At Yan’an, Li was a student of the composer Xian Xinghai, with whom he studied choral music and conducting to complement previous studies in Chinese operatic forms and European and American popular song. 72 Jay Leyda, Dianying: An Account of Films and the Film Audience in China (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1972), 301. Leyda had written on Russian and Soviet film, and translated the work of the Soviet director Sergei Eisenstein. His enthusiasm for those works might have heightened his appreciation of Hurricane. 73 Ibid., 303. 74 T.A. Hsia, “Heroes and Hero-worship in Chinese Communist Fiction,” in Chinese Communist Literature, ed. Cyril Birch (New York: Praeger, 1963), 113-38, qt.p.116. The possibility that Zhou Libo’s fiction allows for an anti-communist reading prompts Hsia to praise Zhou on page 118 as a “conscious artist” who has “studied, with some imagination and imaginative sympathy, life in Chinese villages under communism.” 75 Huang Weilin, Zhongguo dangdai xiaoshuo jiaqun lun [On modern Chinese fiction writers’ groups] (Beijing: Zhongyang bianyi chubanshe, 2004), 59-98. The section on Du Pengcheng is on page 75; the novel referred to is Du’s Baowei Yan’an (1954; repr., Beijing: Renmin wenxue chubanshe, 1997). 76 This criticism recalls that of C.T. Hsia, quoted in the previous chapter, that the Yan’an Forum killed the potential for development of a Westernized literature. 77 Mo Yan, Sheng-si pilao (Taipei: Maitian, 2006); translated as Mo Yan, Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out, trans. Howard Goldblatt (New York: Arcade, 2008). 78 The final section, which functions as an epilogue, abandons the paired headings. 79 Mo, Life and Death, 23. 80 Ibid., 11. 81 Ibid., 47. Chapter 3: Li Zhun’s “A Brief Biography of Li Shuangshuang” 1 Estimates of deaths can be as high as 45 million. See Frank Dikötter, Mao’s Great Famine: The History of China’s Most Devastating Catastrophe 1958-1962 (New York: Walker, 2012). Jasper Becker, Hungry Ghosts: Mao’s Secret Famine (London: James Murray, 1996), 270, came up with a substantially lower figure of 30 million. Historical materials in Chinese can be found in Yu Xiguang, Dayuejin – kurizi [Great Leap – bitter days] (Hong Kong: Shidai chaoliu chubanshe, 2005). The later historiography surrounding the Leap is summarized in Susanne Weigelin-Schwiedrzik, “Re-Imagining the Chinese Peasant: The Historiography of the Great Leap Forward,” in Eating Bitterness: New Perspectives on China’s Great Leap Forward and Famine, ed. Kimberley Ens Manning and Felix Wemheuer (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2011), 28-50. For an understanding of current research on the Great Leap, I am grateful to the participants in the conference “New Perspectives on the Great Leap Forward,” which was organized by Susanne Weigelin-Schwiedrzik and Felix Wemheuer at the University of Vienna in November 2006, in particular Jeremy Brown, Gao Hua, Gao Wangling, Qiao Peihua, and Xin Yi. The Great Leap Forward in Henan, the home province

Notes to pages 72-73 225



2



3



4



5



6

of Li Zhun and Zhang Yigong (see Chapter 8), is the subject of Jean-Luc Domenach, The Origins of the Great Leap Forward: The Case of One Chinese Province, trans. A.M. Berrett (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1995). “Xianqi wenyi chuangzuo de gaochao, jianshe gongchanzhuyi de wenyi!” [Raise a high tide in artistic creation, build communist arts!], Wenyibao 19 (1958), quoted in Chen Shunxing, Shehuizhuyi xianshizhuyi lilun zai Zhongguo de jieshou yu zhuanhua [The adoption and adaptation of socialist realist theory in China] (Hefei: Anhui jiaoyu chubanshe, 2001), 323-24. Li Zhun, “Li Shuangshuang xiaozhuan,” version dated March 1959 in Li Zhun, Li Shuangshuang xiaozhuan (Beijing: Renmin wenxue chubanshe, 1977), 332-66. This is the version included in post-1976 collections of the author’s work. I do not know if it is identical to Li Zhun’s 1959 original. Another version, dated 7 February 1960, appeared as “Li Shuangshuang xiaozhuan” in Renmin wenxue 3 (March 1960): 11-27. It is translated as “A Brief Biography of Li Shuangshuang,” in Heroes of China’s Great Leap Forward, ed. Richard King (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2010), 15-61. For an abbreviated version, see Li Zhun, “The Story of Li Shuang-shuang,” trans. Tang Sheng, Chinese Literature (June 1960): 3-25; a pictorial version based on the 1960 version appeared as Li Zhun, “Li Shuangshuang xiaozhuan,” text by Bai Zi and illustrations by Hua Sanchuan, Lianhuan huabao 217 (6 June 1960): 4-8, and 218 (21 June 1960): 18-22, and a comic-book version following the plot of the film is Li Zhun, Li Shuangshuang xiaozhuan, text by Lu Zhongjian and illustrations by He Youzhi (1964; repr., Shanghai: Shanghai renmin chubanshe, 1977). The film version Li Shuangshuang, directed by Lu Ren and starring Zhang Ruifang in the title role, was produced by the Shanghai Film Studio in 1962. The filmscript, dated May 1961, can be found in Li Zhun, Li Zhun dianying juben xuan [Selected filmscripts by Li Zhun] (Beijing: Beijing chubanshe, 1978), 330-404. I had three interviews with Li Zhun, in 1993, 1996, and 1998. During the first of these, Li Zhun told me that Premier Zhou Enlai joked to Zhang Ruifang after a showing of the film that if Li Shuang­shuang could become premier, he would step down from the post to make way for her. Li Zhun suspected that Zhou admired Li Shuangshuang for standing up to an autocratic partner, something Zhou failed to do in his relationship with Mao. For a recent study of the story, the lianhuanhua (picture book), and the film, see Krista van Fliet, “People’s Literature and the Construction of New China” (PhD diss., University of Chicago, 2008). I have outlined the main themes of Great Leap rural poetry, and discussed Great Leap romanticism, in Richard King, “Romancing the Leap: Euphoria in the Moment before Disaster,” in Manning and Wemheuer, Eating Bitterness, 51-71. Translations of some Great Leap poems appear in that chapter, and others can be found in Richard King, guest ed., Renditions 68 (Autumn 2007), a special issue on the Great Leap Forward, where they are joined by a partial translation of the 1960 text of “Li Shuangshuang xiaozhuan,” trans­ lations of other fiction and poetry from and about the Great Leap, and a brief introduction. For more on the background to the Great Leap, see my introduction to King, Heroes of China’s Great Leap Forward, 1-11. See Richard King, “The Hundred Flowers,” in The Columbia Companion to Modern East Asian Literature, ed. Joshua Mostow (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), 476-80; D.W. Fokkema, Literary Doctrine in China and Soviet Influence, 1956-1960 (The Hague: Mouton, 1965), 147-91; Merle Goldman, Literary Dissent in Communist China (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967, repr. New York: Atheneum, 1971), 158-242. Stories of the Hundred Flowers are collected in Chongfang de xianhua [Fresh flowers bloom again] (Shanghai: Wenyi chubanshe, 1979); translations of the major writings of the period appear in Hualing Nieh, ed., Literature of the Hundred Flowers (New York: Columbia University Press, 1981). For the demands placed on the proletariat, see chapter 4.

226



Notes to pages 73-76

7 Trofim Denisovich Lysenko was the leading figure in Soviet agriculture under Stalin. Although Lysenko was expert at manufacturing a string of agricultural successes, and purging those who opposed him, his agricultural principles were largely fallacious. In the early 1960s, he was criticized by Soviet scientists including Andrei Sakharov for the damage he had caused by his pseudo-science and his attacks on scientists. For Lysenko’s influence in China, see Laurence Schneider, “Lysenkoism and the Suppression of Genetics in the PRC, 1949-56,” in China Learns from the Soviet Union, 1949 – Present, ed. Thomas Bernstein and Hua-yu Li (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2010), 327-58. In China, the most notoriously mendacious regional official was Henan’s newly appointed first party secretary Wu Zhipu, who claimed in the summer of 1958 that, due to the philosophical leap of his peasants, rice-paddies in Henan now yielded seventy times as much as they had in the past. Wu Zhipu, “Yuejin de zhexue yu zhexue de yuejin” [The philosophy of the Great Leap and a great leap in philosophy], Zhexue yanjiu 6 (1958): 15. For more on Wu Zhipu’s public pronouncements, and his meeting with Mao in March 1958, see Michael Schoenhals, Saltationist Socialism: Mao Zedong and the Great Leap Forward, 1958 (Stockholm: University of Stockholm, Department of Oriental Languages, 1987), 49-51. 8 Roderick MacFarquhar, The Origins of the Cultural Revolution II: The Great Leap Forward (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), 41; Wu Xiuming, Zhongguo dangdai wenxue shi xiezhen [A true account of the history of contemporary Chinese literature] (Hangzhou: Zhejiang daxue chubanshe, n.d.), 1:52-57. 9 Quoted in Wu, Zhongguo dangdai wenxue shi xiezhen, 1:53. Xiao San had been an advocate of national forms in poetry at Yan’an. See David Holm, “National Form and the Popularization of Literature in Yenan,” in La littérature chinoise au temps de la guerre de résistance contre le Japon (de 1937 à 1945) (Paris: Éditions de la Fondation Singer-Polignac, n.d.), 227-28. 10 Quoted in Wang Jialing and Jin Han, Zhongguo xian-dangdai wenxue [Modern and contemporary Chinese literature] (Hangzhou: Zhejiang daxue chubanshe, 2004), 394. Analysis of the poems can be found on pages 393-97. 11 See Ban Wang, “Revolutionary Realism and Revolutionary Romanticism: The Song of Youth,” in Mostow, Columbia Companion, 471-75. 12 Zhou Yang, “Xin minge kaituole shige de xin daolu” [New folk-songs have opened a new road for poetry], Hongqi 1 (May 1958): 35. 13 Ibid. 14 Makesi wenyi lilun jiben wenti [Basic questions in Marxist artistic theory] (Shenyang: Dongbei diqu ba yuan xiao [Eight universities in the northeast region], 1973), 231. 15 Large numbers of the new folk-songs can be found in national and regional journals from the late 1950s and early 1960s, but these are probably a small fraction of the total output. By the end of 1958, if Yao Wenyuan is to be believed, over 2 million had been created in Shanghai alone. The number is quoted in Lars Ragvald, Yao Wenyuan as a Literary Critic and Theorist: The Emergence of Chinese Zhdanovism (Stockholm: University of Stock­ holm, Department of Oriental Languages, 1978), 117 Some of the early Shanghai poems are collected in a 1958 volume edited by the Shanghai Municipal Propaganda Department; these are considered in Chapter 4. 16 Zhang Dexiang, Xianshizhuyi dangdai liubian shi [The evolution of realism in the contemporary period] (Beijing: Shehui kexue chubanshe, 1997), 83. 17 He Zhi [Qin Zhaoyang], “Xianshizhuyi – guangkuo de daolu” [The broad road of realism], Renmin wenxue 9 (September 1956): 1-13; King, “The Hundred Flowers,” in Mostow, Columbia Companion, 477. 18 Guo Moruo and Zhou Yang, eds., Hongqi geyao [Red flag ballads] (1959; repr., Beijing: Renmin wenxue chubanshe, 1979); references are to the 1979 edition. See also Chen, Shehuizhuyi xianshizhuyi lilun, 327.

Notes to pages 76-80 227











19 For a fuller typology of the rural poetry, by far the largest section of Red Flag ballads, see King, “Romancing the Leap,” in Manning and Wemheuer, Eating Bitterness. 20 “Xiang taiyang tiaozhan” [Challenge to the sun], in Guo and Zhou, Hongqi geyao, 129. The poem is said to be from Fujian. Translation by Gladys Yang and Yang Xianyi. 21 Maria Galikowski, Art and Politics in China 1849-1984 (Hong Kong: Chinese University Press, 1998), 91. 22 Yao Wenyuan’s personal targets for writing criticism are recounted in the next chapter. The demand for unprecedentedly rapid productivity was also felt by translators at the Foreign Languages Press in Beijing. The husband-and-wife partnership of Yang Xianyi and Gladys Yang astonishingly translated Lu Xun’s A Brief History of Chinese Fiction in a single month, with Yang Xianyi dictating a rough translation and Gladys Yang editing as she typed it out. As Yang Xianyi explained in a 1993 conversation, with no time to check references or ponder the many difficult passages in the book, he had simply “leaped over” them, accounting for the many omissions in the English translation. Lu Xun, Zhongguo xiaoshuo shi lue, in Lu Xun, Lu Xun quanji [Collected works of Lu Xun] (Beijing: Renmin wenxue chubanshe, 1973), 9:145-450; Lu Hsun, A Brief History of Chinese Fiction, trans. Yang Xianyi and Gladys Yang (1959; repr., Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1976). 23 Another short story on a Great Leap theme of love, heroism, female enterprise, and sacrifice among the iron-smelters is Hao Ran, “Zhaoxia hong si huo,” first published in the journal Wenyi hongqi (Red flag in the arts) in May 1959, and reprinted in Hao Ran, Xin chun qu [Songs of a new spring] (Beijing: Zhongguo qingnian chubanshe, 1960), 1-33. For a trans­ lation of this story, see Hao Ran, “Dawn Clouds Red as Flame,” trans. Haydn Shook, with Richard King, Renditions 68 (Autumn 2007): 17-49; for more on the story, see King, “Romancing the Leap,” in Manning and Wemheuer, Eating Bitterness. During my May 2002 interview with him, Ma Feng said that he had also written a story glorifying the smelting of iron, of which he later felt ashamed, and of which he had kept no copy. 24 Zhou Yang, “Wenyi zhanxian shang de yige da bianlun” [A great debate on the arts front], Wenyibao (May 1958): 2-15; trans. as Chou Yang, “A Great Debate on the Artistic Front,” Chinese Literature (March 1958): 124-25. The published text is a revised version of Zhou’s speech of 16 September 1957. Mao had alluded to the need for a “cultural army” in his introductory speech to the Yan’an Forum. Mao Zedong, Mao Zedong xuanji [Collected works of Mao Zedong] (Beijing: Renmin chubanshe, 1968), 3:804. Zhou Yang’s prosecution of the “rightists” was itself denounced by Yao Wenyuan as half-hearted, or “two-faced,” in Yao’s 1967 condemnation of Zhou Yang, whom Yao effectively replaced as the main authority on national cultural and propaganda matters in the Cultural Revolution. 25 Author interview with Li Zhun, May 1993. 26 For a discussion of the different forms of “popular” writing, see van Fliet, “People’s Literature.” 27 Author interview with Li Zhun, July 1998. 28 The story of a conservative father eventually won over to collectivist ways by his progressive son also takes up much of the action of Liu Qing’s novel Chuangye shi, where the older peasant is Old Liang the Third, and the younger is his adopted son Liang Shengbao. Liu Qing, Chuangye shi (Beijing: Zhongguo qingnian chubanshe, 1960); Liu Qing, The Builders, trans. Sidney Shapiro (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1964). For more on this novel, see Joe C. Huang, Heroes and Villains in Communist China: The Contemporary Chinese Novel as a Reflection of Life (New York: Pica Press, 1973), 244-53. 29 Li, Li Shuangshuang xiaozhuan, 15; Li Zhun, Not That Road and Other Stories (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1962), 23. 30 Author interview with Li Zhun, May 1993. This quotation from Mao cannot be corroborated. Given Mao’s later treatment of the peasantry, there is a certain irony in the pronouncement. 31 Li, Li Shuangshuang xiaozhuan, 364. A fuller summary of the 1959 version of the story appears in King, “Romancing the Leap,” in Manning and Wemheuer, Eating Bitterness.

228













Notes to pages 80-86

In preparing it, I referred to the 1977 reprint; I have not seen a 1959 printing and cannot be sure that no changes were made. The lack of an original 1959 text was the reason for the choice of the less romantic 1960 Renmin wenxue edition for translation in King, Heroes of China’s Great Leap Forward. This chapter expands on the introduction to the story in that book. 32 See Tina Mai Chen, “Female Icons, Feminist Iconography? Socialist Rhetoric and Women’s Agency in 1950s China,” Gender and History 15, 2 (August 2003): 268-95. Perhaps the most famous of these trailblazers was Liang Jun, China’s first female tractor-driver, whose image graced the one-yuan banknote for much of the Mao era. 33 For a summary of the Mu Guiying story, see Louise Edwards, Men and Women in Qing China: Gender in the Red Chamber Dream (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2001), 89. 34 Li, Li Shuangshuang xiaozhuan, 350. In the Renmin wenxue version, Lie Ning (Lenin) has become En Gesi (Engels); the peasant couple assume that Ma Kesi (Marx) and the others are Chinese, hence the reference to “that Ma guy” (neige xing Ma de) and my rendering of their names in romanization. This conversation is repeated almost verbatim in the film version. 35 Author interview with Li Zhun, July 1998. 36 After Li Zhun’s death, Dong Bing wrote a memoir of her life with him, though her memories of the time he was researching and creating Li Shuangshuang focus on the difficulty of raising five children in Beijing while he was away from home most of the time. She does not mention herself as a source for the character of Li Shuangshuang, but she was present during the interview in which it was revealed. Dong Bing, Laojia jiu shi: Li Zhun furen zishu [Things past in an old household: Li Zhun’s wife speaks for herself ] (Shanghai: Xuelin chubanshe, 2005). Unlike Dong Bing, who struggled to become literate, Hao Ran’s wife, Yang Puqiao, also from an arranged marriage, never learned to read or write. Hao Ran seemed to take a perverse pride in her lack of literacy. 37 Author interview with Li Zhun, July 1998. 38 See H.C. Chang, “The Shrew,” the first selection in his Chinese Literature: Popular Fiction and Drama (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1973), 23-31 (Introduction) and 32-55, qt.p.28. On page 31, Chang gives the text from which he translates as Tan Zhengbi, Qingping shantang huaben [Huaben (vernacular storyteller tales) from the Qingping Studio] (Beijing: Gudian wenxue chubanshe, 1957). 39 Wu Cheng’en, Xiyouji (Beijing: Renmin wenxue chubanshe, 1973), 1:149-52; Wu Cheng’en, The Journey to the West, trans. and annotated by Anthony C. Yu (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977), 1:254-59. 40 Pu Songling, “Yingning,” in Pu Songling, Liaozhai zhiyi (Shanghai: Guji chubanshe, 1978), 1:62-67; Pu Songling, Strange Tales from Make-Do Studio, trans. Denis C. Mair and Victor H. Mair (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1989), 73-89. 41 Pu, Strange Tales, 85. 42 Chang, Chinese Literature, 46 (emphasis in original). 43 “A Brief Biography of Li Shuangshuang,” in King, Heroes of China’s Great Leap Forward, 24-25. 44 Li, “Li Shuangshuang xiaozhuan,” Renmin wenxue, 26; “A Brief Biography of Li Shuang­ shuang,” in King, Heroes of China’s Great Leap Forward, 58. An illustration on the same page of Renmin wenxue shows Li Shuangshuang holding up a handful of long noodles. The same scene appears in image 77 of Hua Sanchuan’s illustration of the story in Lianhuan huabao 218 (June 21 1960): 21. 45 For the filmscript, see Li, Li Zhun dianying juben xuan. Li Zhun was a prolific author of filmscripts as well as of fiction. Jay Leyda notes that he “seems to be the only author in

Notes to pages 86-93 229















China who is continuously associated with filmmaking.” Jay Leyda, Dianying: An Account of Films and Film Audience in China (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1972), 310. 46 Li, Li Zhun dianying juben xuan, 403. 47 For the film comedies of the early 1960s, see van Fliet, “People’s Literature,” 200-52. For the Four Clean-ups, see Richard Baum and Frederick Teiwes, Ssu-ch’ing: The Socialist Education Movement of 1962-1966 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968). 48 The film was honoured with a number of national Hundred Flowers awards for 1962, including best actress and best supporting actor. For more on the performers, see Xiaoning Liu, “Zhang Ruifang: Modeling the Socialist ‘Red Star,’” and Krista van Fliet Hang, “Zhong Xinghuo: Communist Film Worker,” in Chinese Film Stars, ed. Mary Farquhar and Yingjin Zhang (London: Routledge, 2010), 97-107, and 108-18 respectively. 49 Leyda, Dianying, 310 (emphasis in original). 50 The documentary accompanying the 2005 re-release of the DVD of the film is appropriately titled Qiao zhe liang kouzi [Look at the two of them] (Beijing: Beijing dianshitai, 2005). The documentary contains information on the preparations for the film and interviews with Zhang Ruifang and Zhong Xinghuo. 51 Ibid. See Jiang Qing’s instructions on “proletarian crying” to the actress playing the character Chang Bao in the opera Taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy, as recounted by Roxanne Witke, Comrade Chiang Ch’ing (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1977), 423. 52 Matthew Johnson, “Beneath the Propaganda State: Early 1960s Grassroots Institutions and the Limits of Cultural ‘Reach’” (prepared for the workshop “Between Revolution and Reform: China at the Grassroots, 1960-1980,” Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, May 2010). 53 For more on He Youzhi’s Li Shuangshuang comic book, see van Fliet, “People’s Literature,” 98-99. 54 Chen Sihe, Zhongguo dangdai wenxue shi jiaocheng [A course in the history of modern Chinese literature] (Shanghai: Fudan daxue chubanshe, 1999), 51. 55 Ibid., 49-50. 56 According to Li Zhun, he made statements during the Hundred Flowers movement to the effect that the cultural bureaucracy was a wall between authors and their audience, and that he would like to hear the sound of that wall falling. As a result, he was required to write a number of self-examinations – none of which he kept – before being released. 57 Chen Tushou, “1959 nian dongtian de Zhao Shuli” [Zhao Shuli in the winter of 1959], in Ershi shiji Zhongguo wenxue de shilun [Essays on the history of twentieth-century Chinese literature], rev. ed., ed. Wang Xiaoming (Shanghai: Dongfang chuban zhongxin, 2003), 170. 58 Ibid., 174-75. 59 William Hinton, Shenfan (New York: Random House, 1983), 217. 60 “We believed,” Ma Feng’s wife, Duan Xingmian, told me in my May 2002 interview with her and her husband, “because we wanted to believe.” 61 According to Professor Gao Wangling of Renmin University in Beijing, the canteens were never officially ordered closed, though most were disbanded by the end of 1960. Gao Wangling, pers. comm., Vienna, November 2006. Chapter 4: Hu Wanchun’s “A Man of Outstanding Quality” 1 Lars Ragvald, “The Emergence of ‘Worker-Writers’ in Shanghai,” in Shanghai: Revolution and Development in an Asian Metropolis, ed. Christopher Howe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 301-25, qt.p.322. Hu Wanchun, “Teshu xingge de ren,” Renmin wenxue 12 (December 1959): 37-51. The story is dated 18 April 1959, and the Renmin wenxue version is said to be somewhat revised from the one that first appeared in the June

230

Notes to pages 94-96

1959 issue of Wenyi yuebao. Reprinted in Hu Wanchun, Xinsheng ji [Sounds from the heart] (Shanghai: Shanghai wenyi chubanshe, 1981), 148-77; translated, with some omissions, as the title story in Hu Wan-chun, Man of a Special Cut (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1963), 98-133. Ragvald translates the title as “A Man Made of Special Stuff.” 2 Nikolai Ostrovsky, How the Steel Was Tempered, trans. R. Prokofieva (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1959); also as Nikolai Ostrovsky, The Making of a Hero, trans. Alec Brown (New York: Dutton, 1937). The novel was first published in two instalments in 1932 and 1934. Katerina Clark describes it as “one of the all-time classics of Socialist Realism.” Katerina Clark, The Soviet Novel: History as Ritual (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 131. 3 Roderick MacFarquhar, The Origins of the Cultural Revolution II: The Great Leap Forward (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), 88-90. Steel output for 1957 was 5.35 million tons. Mao demanded 10.7 million for 1958 and persuaded himself that 30.0 million was possible for 1959 and 100.0 to 120.0 by 1962. 4 Welfare and attempts at population control during and after the Great Leap are considered in Nara Dillon, “The Urban Great Leap Forward: A Watershed in Urban Politics or Just Another Campaign?” (prepared for the workshop “Between Revolution and Reform: China at the Grassroots, 1960-1980,” Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, May 2010). 5 The figure is quoted in Ragvald, “The Emergence of ‘Worker-Writers,’” 318. 6 Shanghai minge xuan [Collection of Shanghai folk-songs] (Shanghai: Shanghai wenyi chubanshe, 1958). 7 “Qide Longwang huzi qiao” [The Dragon-king’s beard bristles with fury], “Da Yu zen neng he ni bi” [How can Yu the Great compare with you?], “Tiaodan bupa biandan wan” [Unafraid of the carrying-pole bending (under the weight of the load)], and “Mei ba hongqi dang jiazhuang” [Little sister (female voice in love-songs) offers a red flag as her trousseau], all in Shanghai minge xuan, 183, 14, 214, 218. The industrial poems in the Red Flag Ballads, which originate from a number of urban centres, demonstrate similar themes. These include triumph over nature, in which the God of Thunder is humbled by the greater power of the explosives used by the miner-poet, and superiority to heroes of legend. “Wo he Leigong bi gao-di” [I compare height with the God of Thunder], and “Liu-yi Lu Ban chu jintian” [600 million Lu Bans bring forth this day], both in Guo Moruo and Zhou Yang, eds., Hongqi geyao [Red flag ballads] (1959; repr., Beijing: Renmin wenxue chubanshe, 1979), 233, 231, references are to the 1979 edition. A single poem celebrates the achievements of female industrial labour, in this case the transport-workers of Tianjin cheerfully pushing barrowloads of coal through the night, “each drop of sweat turning into molten steel.” “Funü yunshudui” [The women’s transportation team], in Guo and Zhou, Hongqi geyao, 268-69; the line quoted is the last line of the poem. There are no love poems in the industrial section of the Red Flag Ballads, in contrast to the rural verses, but there is plenty of revolutionary romanticism: one verse links workers’ effort and zeal with painting and poetry, concluding, “Poetry and painting come from the factory floor, workers are the poets and painters.” “Gongren jiushi shi-hua jia” [Workers are the poets and painters], in Guo and Zhou, Hongqi geyao, 230. 8 “Gang hua kailai hong you hong” [Steel flowers bloom red], in Shanghai minge xuan, 140; “Gang jiao tikai Yingguo huo” [A steel foot kicks away British goods], in Guo and Zhou, Hongqi geyao, 141; “Sulian shushu zhen congming” [The Soviet uncles are really smart], in Guo and Zhou, Hongqi geyao, 272. 9 “Renjian xibao duo” [So much good news], in Guo and Zhou, Hongqi geyao, 303. 10 “Xinli kuaihuo xiebuwan” [The joy in our hearts never fully set down], in Guo and Zhou, Hongqi geyao, 305. 11 “Yancong,” in Shanghai minge xuan, 106, and Guo and Zhou, Hongqi geyao, 235; trans. in Lars Ragvald, Yao Wenyuan as a Literary Critic and Theorist: The Emergence of Chinese

Notes to pages 96-102 231











Zhdanovism (Stockholm: University of Stockholm, Department of Oriental Languages, 1978), 125. I have followed Ragvald’s translation, restoring the divisions of lines in the original, where Ragvald writes it out as prose. 12 Yao Wenyuan, Zai qianjin de daolu shang [On the road forward] (Beijing: Renmin wenxue chubanshe, 1965), 265; translated and quoted in Ragvald, Yao Wenyuan, 125. Ragvald’s discussion of the essay is on pages 122-25. 13 Yao’s 1954 article attacking Hu Feng was written with the assistance of his mentor and future Gang of Four colleague Zhang Chunqiao. A story making the rounds in Shanghai literary circles during the mid-1980s, following Yao’s trial and condemnation, held that he had been sympathetic to Hu Feng in the first draft of his article, but that, on hearing from Zhang Chunqiao that a mass campaign against Hu was about to be launched, he swiftly revised it to express his furious condemnation of Hu’s heterodox literary views. If true, the story demonstrates the flexibility of Yao’s principles, the speed of his reactions, and his capacity for instant moral outrage. 14 Ragvald, Yao Wenyuan, 115. 15 Ibid. 16 For Yao’s reading of Hu Wanchun’s stories, see Yao Wenyuan, “Teshu xingge de ren xuyan” [Preface to (the short-story collection) A Man of Outstanding Quality], in Yao, Zai qianjin de daolu shang, 324-39. 17 Ragvald, “The Emergence of ‘Worker-Writers,’” 307. 18 The Uptown Theatre (Ping’an daxiyuan), at the corner of Nanjing Road West (formerly Bubbling Well Road) and Shaanxi Road North, was renamed the Ping’an Cinema (Ping’an dianyingyuan) after 1949; in the 1990s it became the Arts Cinema (Yishu dianyingyuan). It is not one of the major cinemas appearing in the guidebooks for Republican Shanghai. For information on the cinema, and other Old Shanghai facts, I am indebted to Pan Ling and Michael Schoenhals. 19 Author conversation with Hu Wanchun, May 1990. I do not claim this as an interview; we talked as we walked around town in the company of mutual friends for an afternoon, beginning at the Ping’an and ending at Hu Wanchun’s bookstore, which specialized in translations of foreign works, from American popular fiction to Nobel Prize winners. 20 Hu Wanchun, “Gu rou,” story dated 5 September 1955, in Hu, Xinsheng ji, 1-13; trans. as “Flesh and Blood” in Hu, Man of a Special Cut, 134-49. 21 Quoted in Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London: Verso, 1989), 145. Stalin was to return to this form of words frequently thereafter; see Clark, The Soviet Novel, 119. 22 Hu, “Teshu xingge de ren,” 37-38 (translation mine, with reference to the Foreign Languages Press version). 23 Ibid., 46. Vincent van Gogh might have had a similar epiphany at Arles. 24 See Chapter 5 below. It is characteristic of Wang Gang’s solicitude and guile that he feeds and liquors his unwilling workers before taking the plunge and urging them to follow. The more austere Iron-man, Wang Jinxi, simply leaps in. 25 Clark, The Soviet Novel, 132-33 (emphasis in original). 26 For the reception of the novel in China, from first translation to the first decade of the reform era, see Donghui He, “Coming of Age in the Brave New World: The Changing Reception of How the Steel Was Tempered in the People’s Republic of China,” in China Learns from the Soviet Union, 1949 – Present, ed. Thomas Bernstein and Hua-yu Li (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2010), 393-420. 27 Miin-ling Yu, “A Soviet Hero, Pavel Korchagin, Comes to China,” Russian History 29, 2-4 (2002): 329-55. Additional information on the publication and dissemination of the novel and film in China was provided on the Modern Chinese Literature and Culture listserv in 2004 by a number of contributors including Michel Hockx, Wendy Larson, and Xinmin Liu.

232











Notes to pages 102-4

28 For an example in which a section of the novel is used to describe Ostrovsky’s participation in the railway-building incident, see the Soviet hagiography S. Tregub, The Heroic Life of Nikolai Ostrovsky (Moscow: Foreign Language Press, n.d.), 17. For information on the educational uses of Pavel in Ukraine, I am grateful to my University of Victoria colleague Serhy Yekelchyk, one of the late Soviet-era Ukrainian youngsters who made the pilgrimage to Boyarka Station outside Kiev. 29 Wu Yunduo, Ba yiqie xian gei dang (1953; repr., Beijing: Gongren chubanshe, 1964). Although Foreign Languages Press used a literal translation of the title for its Frenchlanguage version (Tout pour le parti), it was changed for the English version: Wu Yun-to, Son of the Working Class (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1956). 30 Wu, Son of the Working Class, 217-18. 31 Wu’s meeting with Mao Zedong, Zhou Enlai, and other leaders took place on the occasion of National Day, 1 October 1951. The report “Gangtie shi zenyang liancheng de – jieshao Zhongguo de Bao’er. Kechajin” (How the steel was tempered – introducing China’s Pavel Korchagin) appeared in Renmin ribao on 5 October. 32 Hu Wanchun, “Bu Gao shifu suo xiangdao de,” in Hu, Xinsheng ji, 98-109; translated as “What Instructor Pu Kao Thought,” in Hu, Man of a Special Cut, 83-97. 33 Rudolf G. Wagner, “Life as a Quote from a Foreign Book: Love, Pavel and Rita,” in Das Andere China: Festschrift für Wolfgang Bauer zum 65. Geburtstag, ed. Helwig SchmidtGlinzer (Wiesbaden: Harassowitz, 1995), 463-76, qt.p.474. I have changed Wagner’s “Pawel” to “Pavel” for consistency. As Wagner notes, the Soviet novel was itself a quotation from a foreign book, Ethel Voynich’s 1897 historical romance The Gadfly (Chinese title Niumang). That novel was published in 1897 and immediately translated into Russian, to be followed later by many of the languages of the Soviet Union. E.L. Voynich, The Gadfly, with an introduction by Harrison Salisbury (New York: Pyramid Books, 1961). The Chinese trans­ lation and a 1955 Soviet film adaptation made The Gadfly extremely popular with Chinese youth enchanted by its blend of revolution and romance. The novel and film are discussed, and short clips shown, in the film Morning Sun, directed by Carma Hinton, Geremie Barmé, and Richard Gordon (Brookline, MA: Long Bow Group, 2003). The Gadfly resurfaced briefly as a literary model for Chinese youth in Liu Xinwu’s pioneering post-Mao story “Banzhuren” (The homeroom teacher). Liu’s story is included in most anthologies of immediate post-Mao fiction, including Liu Xinwu et al., Shanghen [Wounds] (Hong Kong: Sanlian, 1978). It is translated as “Class Counsellor” in Lu Xinhua et al., The Wounded: New Stories of the Cultural Revolution, 77-78, trans. Geremie Barmé and Bennett Lee (Hong Kong: Joint Publishing, 1979), 147-78. 34 The 1956 film version continued to be shown into the Cultural Revolution, at least until the production of Chinese-made feature films began again in the early 1970s. 35 Yu, “A Soviet Hero.” 36 Ostrovsky, The Making of a Hero, 270. 37 Hu, “Teshu xingge de ren,” 49. 38 Clark, The Soviet Novel, 119. See also pages 120-21 for more on Stakhanov and the Stakhanovites. 39 Hu, “Teshu xingge de ren,” 51. Wu Yunduo likewise ends his book with a look ahead to the communist future. Wu, Son of the Working Class, 225. 40 Hu, “Teshu xingge de ren,” 51. This paragraph is omitted from the English translation. 41 Žižek, The Sublime Object, 145. 42 Liang Xiaosheng, Chongsu Bao’er. Kechajin [Refashioning Pavel Korchagin] (Beijing: Tongxin chubanshe, 2001). The series was financed from China and filmed in Ukraine with Ukrainian actors. In 2001, when Liang published Chongsu Bao’er. Kechajin, it had been seen only in China.

Notes to pages 104-11 233















43 Ibid., 323-24. 44 Preface to Hu, Man of a Special Cut, iv; Zhdanov quoted in Régine Robin, Socialist Realism: An Impossible Aesthetic, trans. Catherine Porter (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992), 215. 45 Quoted in Michael S. Duke, Blooming and Contending: Chinese Literature in the Post-Mao Era (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985), 32-33. 46 Ragvald, “The Emergence of ‘Worker-Writers,’” 325. 47 The story was Cui Hongrui’s “Yipian jie maodun de baogao” (A report exposing contradictions). See Richard King, “A Fiction Revealing Collusion: Allegory and Evasion in the Mid-1970s,” Modern Chinese Literature 10 (1997): 71-90. 48 The concept of “middle characters” (zhongjian renwu) was hotly debated in literary circles during the early 1960s. See Joe C. Huang, Heroes and Villains in Communist China (New York: Pica Press, 1973), 266-91. Middle characters were one of the “eight black theories” (heibalun) condemned during the mid-1960s by Jiang Qing in “Lin Biao tongzhi weituo Jiang Qing tongzhi zhaokai de budui wenyi gongzuo zuotanhui jiyao,” Jiefangjun wenyi 8-9 (September 1967): 3-9; translated as “Summary of the Forum on the Work in Literature and Art in the Armed Forces with which Comrade Lin Biao Entrusted Comrade Jiang Qing,” Peking Review 23 (2 June 1967): 10-16. 49 Hu Wanchun, “Zhandi chunqiu” [Annals of the battlefield], in Zhaoxia congkan (Shanghai: Renmin chubanshe, 1975), 1-98. 50 When the national and regional writers’ associations introduced a ranking system for writers after the Cultural Revolution, both Li Zhun and Hu Wanchun were placed in the top echelon. Both wrote long fiction after their rehabilitation; Hu Wanchun also wrote literary criticism, and Li Zhun filmscripts. Their first post-1976 novels were Li Zhun, Huanghe dong liu qu [The Yellow River flows east], 2 vols. (Beijing: Beijing chubanshe, 1979); and Hu Wanchun, Wanü [The girl diver] (Shanghai: Wenyi chubanshe, 1983). Chapter 5: Hao Ran on The Golden Road 1 This chapter draws on my article “Revision and Transformation in the Cultural Revolution Novel,” Modern Chinese Literature 7 (1993): 105-29. 2 Roderick MacFarquhar and Michael Schoenhals, Mao’s Last Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006). 3 Yan Jiaqi and Gao Gao, Turbulent Decade: A History of the Cultural Revolution, trans. and ed. D.W.Y. Kwok (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1996). 4 Case studies include the history of the Red Guard movement by Yin Hongbiao of Beijing University as his PhD dissertation. Yin Hongbiao, “‘Wenhua da geming’ qijian de qingnian sichao yu sixiang tansuo” [Youthful trends of thought and ideological searching in the “Cultural Revolution”] (PhD diss., Beijing University, 2005). 5 See, for example, Liu Xiaomeng, Zhongguo zhiqing shi – dachao 1966-1980 nian [The history of the Chinese urban youth – the high tide 1966-1980] (Beijing: Zhongguo shehui kexue chubanshe, 1998). Other studies are cited in Chapter 6, which focuses on a novel by one of the “urban youth” generation. 6 Paul Clark, The Chinese Cultural Revolution: A History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). For the visual arts, see Wang Mingxian and Yan Shanchen, Xin Zhongguo meishu tu shi [History of the fine arts in New China], English subtitle The Art History of the People’s Republic of China (Beijing: Zhongguo qingnian chubanshe, 2000). According to the authors, they were not permitted to use the words “Cultural Revolution” in the title, though that is what the book is about. 7 The visual and performing arts are also the focus of Richard King, ed., Art in Turmoil: The Chinese Cultural Revolution, 1966-76 (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2010).

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Notes to page 112

8 Hao Ran, “Guanyu Jinguang dadao de jiju hua” [A few words on The Golden Road], in Hao Ran, Nituchao xiezuo sanlun [Occasional writings from Muddy Nest] (Kaifeng: Henan renmin chubanshe, 1997), 260-63. Muddy Nest was the name of Hao Ran’s residence in Sanhe County east of Beijing. 9 Lan Yang, Chinese Fiction of the Cultural Revolution (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 1998). 10 This is the case in volume 9 of Zhang Jiong, Deng Shaoji, and Fan Jun, Zhonghua wenxue tongshi [Comprehensive history of Chinese literature], 10 vols. (Beijing: Huayi chubanshe, 2000). No works of Cultural Revolution literature are mentioned; by contrast, the collectivization novels and red classics Chuangye shi (History of setting up, translated as The Builders) by Liu Qing, and Shanxiang jubian (Great changes in a mountain village) by Zhou Libo, which cover much the same ground as The Golden Road, both feature in small sections on their authors. Hao Ran is mentioned as the author of Yanyangtian (Bright sunny skies) and as a writer of short stories. Zhang, Deng, and Fan, Zhonghua wenxue tongshi, 9:13, 9:5. 11 Zhang, Deng, and Fan, Zhonghua wenxue tongshi, 9:5. 12 See Yang Jian, Wenhua da geming zhong de dixia wenxue [Underground literature of the Cultural Revolution] (Jinan: Chaohua chubanshe, 1993); Shuyu Kong, “Between Under­ current and Mainstream: Social Production of Hand-Copied Literature during and after the Cultural Revolution” (prepared for the workshop “Between Revolution and Reform: China at the Grassroots, 1960-1980,” Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, May 2010). 13 Well-known post-Mao authors who published fiction before September 1976 include Shen (Chen) Rong, Gu Hua, and Jiang Zilong. Zhang Kangkang, much better known for her later work than for her first novel The Dividing Line (the subject of Chapter 6), professed to have forgotten the plot of that novel when we discussed it in 2002. 14 An ignominious example was a novel published a few months before the first volume of The Golden Road; this was Hongnan zuozhan shi [History of battles at Hongnan] (Shanghai: Shanghai renmin chubanshe, 1972). It was written in eighteen months by a “three-in-one” writing team (of writers drawn from the “masses,” political officials, and the literary critic Zhou Tian) in celebration of the history of land reform in Hongnan County near Shanghai. The project was ill-fated: there are inconsistencies between sections written by different members of the team, the plot is absurdly contrived, the narrator lectures constantly, and the hero has only to cite Mao to be assured of success. He proclaims, “Chairman Mao is truly brilliant! Chairman Mao is in Beijing, how is it that Chairman Mao knows everything that happens here, just as if he had seen it with his own eyes!” Hongnan zuozhan shi, 440. The novel was favourably reviewed in the press until 1975, when the local official on whom the hero was based was demoted for sexual misdemeanours, and the book sank into deserved oblivion. 15 These were Hao Ran, Xisha ernü [Sons and daughters of the Xisha Islands], 2 vols. (Beijing: Beijing renmin chubanshe, 1974), a prose-poetry-style tale of the defenders of disputed islands written after Hao Ran and the poet Zhang Yongmei were dispatched to the islands on Jiang Qing’s orders, and Hao Ran, Baihuachuan [Hundred Flower Valley] (Tianjin: Renmin chubanshe, 1976). Named after the valley in which it is set, Baihuachuan features a heroine who exposes rural “capitalist-roaders” in keeping with the futile campaign against Deng Xiaoping at the end of the Cultural Revolution. Hao Ran admitted to his reasons for writing these two novels in his 1977 self-examination, of which a text is reproduced in the 2008 edition of Hao Ran, Hao Ran koushu zizhuan [Hao Ran’s oral autobiography], transcribed by Zheng Shi (Tianjin: Tianjin renmin chubanshe, 2008), 245-58. His confession was successful in distancing himself somewhat from Jiang Qing and former minister of culture Yu Huiyong, and thus avoiding serious censure.

Notes to pages113-16 235















16 In my interviews with Li Zhun, he expressed contempt for Hao Ran’s work, which he felt to be poorly written and untrue to historical fact. Liu Heng, one of the younger generation of authors, privately bemoaned the older man’s influence in suppressing innovative writing. Author conversation with Liu Heng, June 1995. Liu Heng was to speak more kindly of Hao Ran when he attended his funeral. 17 By the end of the Cultural Revolution, there were many more model works than the eight that were introduced in 1967, and more writers than Hao Ran, but the cliché does draw attention to the limited fare available to audiences and readers for much of the period. 18 For post-Mao writing that presents an opposing view of land reform and collectivization, see Mo Yan’s novel Sheng-si pilao (Life and death are wearing me out), Yu Hua’s Huozhe (To live) and Xu Sanguan mai xue ji (Xu Sanguan sells his blood), translated as Chronicle of a Blood Merchant, and Liu Heng’s Fuxi Fuxi, translated as The Obsessed. Later examples of urban youth literature will be discussed in the next chapter. 19 Hao Ran was described as a peasant novelist in the title of an introduction to his works for Western readers. See Joe C. Huang, “Haoran the Peasant Novelist,” Modern China 2, 3 (July 1976): 369-96. 20 In addition to works cited elsewhere, I have drawn for this summary of Hao Ran’s life and writing on my interviews with the author between April 1981 and May 2002. By our final meeting in 2006, his mental decline was advanced, and I decided against questioning him on his work. I also referred to Chia Ching, “Introducing the Writer Hao Jan,” Chinese Literature (April 1974): 95-101; Jia Ling [Ye Jiaying], “Hao Ran fangwen ji” [An interview with Hao Ran], Dousou (March 1978): 28-40; “Hao Ran jianjie” [A brief introduction to Hao Ran], in Hao Ran zuopin yanjiu ziliao [Materials for the study of Hao Ran’s works] (Nanjing: Nanjing shifan xueyuan, 1974), 1-7. 21 Ye Shengtao, “Xin nongcun de xin mianmao – du Xique deng zhi [The new face of the new countryside: Reading The Magpie Climbs the Branch], Dushu 14 (1958), reprinted in Hao Ran yanjiu zhuanji [Collected reference materials on Hao Ran], ed. Sun Dayou and Liang Chunshui (Tianjin: Baihua wenyi chubanshe, 1999), 330-38. This collection of materials has considerable overlap with the 1974 collection cited above, but it omits some of the author’s Cultural Revolution essays and presentations, and continues the bibliography of his works for a further twenty years. 22 Yao Wenyuan, “Shengqi-bobo de nongcun tuhua – tan Hao Ran jinnian lai de duanpian xiaoshuo” [Lively pictures of the village: On recent short stories by Hao Ran], Renmin ribao, 28 October 1962, reprinted in Yao Wenyuan, Zai qianjin de daolu shang [On the road forward] (Beijing: Renmin wenxue chubanshe, 1965), 226-39, qt.p.236 (emphasis in original). 23 “Jinqian ren songbie zuojia Hao Ran” [Almost a thousand people bid farewell to the author Hao Ran], Jinghua shibao, 29 February 2008, A38. 24 W.H.F. Jenner, “Class Struggle in the Countryside: A Novelist’s View,” Modern Chinese Studies 1, 2 (1967): 191-206. 25 “Hao Ran tan wenyi chuangzuo” [Hao Ran talks about literary creation], pts. 1 and 2, Qishi niandai (August 1976): 68-72; (September 1976): 66-71. This is a transcription of the author’s Cultural Revolution version of events, transcribed from a lecture given to foreign students at Beijing University in 1975. 26 Author interview with Hao Ran, May 1981. An adulatory biography of Wang Guofu is “‘La geming che bu song tao, yizhi ladao gongchanzhuyi’ – ji wuchanjieji youxiu zhanshi Wang Guofu” [“Pull the cart of revolution without letting go of the traces, pull it all the way to communism” – a record of the outstanding proletarian warrior Wang Guofu], Renmin ribao, 20 January 1970, reprinted in Xiandai wenzhang xuandu [Selected modern essays] (Guiyang: Guizhou renmin chubanshe, 1976), 77-93.

236



Notes to pages 117-19

27 Zhang Dexiang, “‘Shenhua’ yu ‘shihua’ – wo kan Jinguang dadao” [“Myth” and “epic” – my reading of The Golden Road], first published in the journal Qingnian wenyijia [Young literati] 2 (1995): 10-15 and 61-64. A copy was provided for me by the author. 28 In Jinguang dadao, Hao Ran casts doubt on their value as manuals. In Chapter 22 of volume 2, “Xu Meng xia xiang” (Xu Meng goes down to the village), pages 220-39, the innocent and bookish cadre Xu Meng, following novelistic practice, tries to seek out the poorest villagers but mistakenly picks out the former landlord Crooked Mouth (Waizuizi). 29 Here I apply Northrop Frye’s definition of melodrama as “the triumph of moral virtue over villainy, and the consequent idealizing of the moral views assumed to be held by the audience.” Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971), 47. 30 The conflicting ideologies were customarily characterized as the Yan’an Way and the Soviet Model. See Mark Selden, The Yenan Way in Revolutionary China (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971); Bill Brugger, Contemporary China (London: Croom Helm, 1977). 31 Frederick C. Teiwes, “Mao and His Lieutenants,” Australian Journal of Chinese Studies 19-20 (January-July 1988): 23. 32 Liu Shaoqi’s name is not mentioned in The Golden Road. No such discretion constrained the authors of Hongnan zuozhan shi, who refer to him as “the great traitor Liu Shaoqi.” Hongnan zuozhan shi, 339. 33 I have described the three prominences elsewhere and demonstrated their application in a painting. See King, “Fantasies of Battle: Making the Militant Hero Prominent,” in King, Art in Turmoil, 203-15. 34 Chu Lan, “Suzao wuchanjieji yingxiong dianxing shi shehuizhuyi wenyi de genben renwu” [Portraying proletarian heroic types is the basic task of socialist arts], Renmin ribao, 15 June 1974. 35 The opera Zhiqu Weihushan (Taking Tiger Mountain by strategy) was subject to a decade of revision, which gave rise to the cliché describing the model works’ perfection: “ten years to hone one opera” (shinian mo yi xi). See Fang Yun, Geming yangbanxi xuexi zhaji [Notes on the study of the model theatrical works] (Shanghai: Renmin chubanshe, 1974), 21-26. For an example of a troupe account, see Shanghai jingjutuan Zhiqu Weihushan juzu, “Nuli suzao wuchanjieji yingxiong renwu de guangrong xingxiang – dui suzao Yang Zirong yingxiong xingxiang de yixie tihui,” Hongqi 11 (November 1969): 62-71; trans. as “Strive to Create the Brilliant Images of Proletarian Heroes – Impressions on the Creation of the Heroic Image of Yang Tzu-jung [Zirong],” Peking Review 51-52 (26 December 1969): 34-39. For Jiang Qing’s biography, see Roxanne Witke, Comrade Chiang Ch’ing (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1977), 410-25. Directives from Jiang Qing are collected in the Red Guard anthology Jiang Qing, Wuxian fengguang zai xianfeng – Jiang Qing tongzhi guanyu wenyi geming de jianghua [Limitless view on a perilous peak – speeches by Comrade Jiang Qing on revolution in the arts] (Tianjin: Nankai daxue weidong, 1968). 36 In art, as in food and fashion, Jiang Qing did not limit herself to the diet she prescribed for her subjects; among her favourites were the films of Greta Garbo. 37 Makesizhuyi wenyi lilun jiben wenti [Basic questions in Marxist artistic theory] (Shenyang: Dongbei diqu ba yuan xiao [Eight universities in the northeast region], 1973), 150. 38 Testimonies to the motivational efficacy of the model theatrical works are contained in Yizhi changdao gongchanzhuyi – gong-nong-bing puji geming yangbanxi diaocha baogao [Sing all the way to communism: Investigative reports on popularization of the model theatrical works by workers, peasants, and soldiers] (Shanghai: Renmin chubanshe, 1975), esp. the title article, pages 1-23. 39 As did the young worker-writer Duan Ruixia when writing the celebrated short story “Tebie guanzhong,” published in Zhaoxia [Dawn clouds] (Shanghai: Renmin chubanshe, 1973),

Notes to pages 120-25 237











1-17; translated as Tuan Jui-hsia [Duan Ruixia], “Not Just One of the Audience,” Chinese Literature 9 (September 1973): 51-64. See Duan Ruixia, “Zuo weida shidai douzheng shenghuo de jiluyuan” [Being the recorder of the life of struggle in a great age], in Duanpian xiaoshuo xuandu [Selected short stories] (Shenyang: Liaoning daxue zhongwenxi, n.d. [1976?]), 86-95, qt.p.92; the story is reprinted on pages 68-85. See also King, “Fantasies of Battle,” in King, Art in Turmoil. 40 The quan of Gao Daquan’s name means “spring (of water).” In his study of the novel, Wong Kam-ming points to the character’s association with water. See Wong Kam-ming, “A Study of Hao Ran’s Two Novels: Art and Politics in Bright Sunny Skies and The Road in Golden Light,” in Essays in Modern Chinese Literature and Literary Criticism, ed. Wolfgang Kubin and Rudolf Wagner (Bochum, West Germany: Brockmeyer, 1982), 117-49. For another Western reading of the novel, see Michael Egan, “A Notable Sermon: The Subtext of Hao Ran’s Fiction,” in Popular Chinese Literature and Performing Arts in the People’s Republic of China 1949-1979, ed. Bonnie S. McDougall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 224-43. 41 See Hao Ran, “Mantan suzao wuchanjieji yingxiong renwu de jige wenti” [Talks on some questions regarding the depiction of proletarian heroic characters], in Hao Ran zuopin yanjiu ziliao, 11-29. This essay may be one of the works for which the author expressed regret in his later self-examination. 42 Katerina Clark, The Soviet Novel: History as Ritual (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 9-10. 43 Hao Ran, “Xindaokou qiaoyu,” Chap. 46 in Hao Ran, Jinguang dadao [The golden road] (Beijing: Renmin wenxue chubanshe, 1972), 1:487-99. 44 Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, 2nd ed. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968); see esp. pages 16, 30, 245-46, and 318-33. 45 Herbert Read, Michael Fordham, and Gerhard Adler, eds., The Collected Works of C.G. Jung (New York: Pantheon Books 1957), 7:para. 300. 46 C.G. Jung, “The Concept of the Collective Unconscious,” in Read, Fordham, and Adler, The Collected Works of C.G. Jung, 9.1:42-53. 47 Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, 30. Although the gold standard of the hero’s journey is that of Odysseus/Ulysses, Campbell’s morphology of the hero cycle is drawn from a wide historical and geographical range. Obvious examples of heroes’ journeys that postdate Campbell’s study are those of Frodo Baggins (in J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings trilogy) and Luke Skywalker (in the first Star Wars trilogy of films), the latter unsurprisingly given its creator George Lucas’s familiarity with Campbell’s work. 48 Hao Ran, Jinguang dadao, 1:489. The entire runaway horse incident is missing from Carma Hinton and Chris Gilmartin’s translation, in which Tian Yu simply walks over and introduces himself at the tea-stall. Hao Ran, The Golden Road, trans. Carma Hinton and Chris Gilmartin (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1981), 314. 49 Hao Ran, “Bangwan,” in Hao Ran, Zhenzhu [Pearls] (Tianjin: Baihua chubanshe, 1962), 90-103; reprinted in Hao Ran, Huaduoji [Garland] (Chengdu: Sichuan renmin chubanshe, 1980), 17-30. 50 Hao Ran, “Bangwan,” in Huaduoji, 19. 51 Ibid., 23. 52 Ibid., 24 (ellipses in original). 53 Hao Ran, Jinguang dadao, 1:490-91. 54 Ibid., 1:492. 55 Ibid., 1:493. 56 Ibid., 1:35. When Gao Daquan and Tian Yu meet for the first time, in an incident set in 1942, they defuse another runaway horse incident, as gunfire alarms a horse that Gao is driving and Tian restrains it.

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57 58 59 60 61

Notes to pages 125-29

Ibid., 1:497. Ibid., 1:498. Liang Haishan’s first political lecture concluded the novel’s prologue. Ibid., 1:48-49. Ibid., 1:500. Mao Zedong, Mao Zedong xuanji [Selected works of Mao Zedong] (Beijing: Renmin chubanshe, 1968), 3:882-90; Mao Zedong, Selected Works of Mao Tse-tung (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1967), 3:153-61. 62 Hao Ran, Jinguang dadao, 1:508-9. 63 See the section “Geming yangbanxi jingyan zai xiaoshuo lingyu de chenggong yunyong” [The successful adoption of the experience of model theatrical works in the realm of fiction], in Jinguang dadao pingxi [Analysis of The Golden Road] (Shanghai: Renmin chubanshe, 1975), 83-92. The book was prepared at Fudan University’s Chinese Department by a “three-in-one” combination of Party leadership, four students, and Professor Wang Yongsheng. Author interview with Wang Yongsheng, June 1981. 64 As Carlo Ginzberg notes of Conan Doyle’s creations, “Incidentally the Holmes-Watson pair, the sharp-eyed detective and the obtuse doctor, represents the splitting of a single character, one of the youthful Conan Doyle’s professors [John Bell] famous for his diagnostic ability.” Carlo Ginzberg, “Clues: Morelli, Freud and Sherlock Holmes,” in The Sign of Three: Dupin, Holmes, Pierce, ed. Umberto Eco and Thomas A. Sebok (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1983), 81-118, qt.p.87. 65 A variant used by Zhao Shuli features a progressive daughter-in-law and a conservative mother-in-law, in “Chuanjiabao,” in Zhao Shuli, Zhao Shuli xiaoshuo xuan [Selected fiction of Zhao Shuli] (Taiyuan: Shanxi renmin chubanshe, 1980), 272-86; translated as “The Heirloom,” in Zhao Shuli, Rhymes of Li Youcai and Other Stories, 2nd ed., trans. Sidney Shapiro (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1980), 67-86. 66 For analysis of The Builders (Chuangye shi) and a discussion of Old Liang the Third as a middle character, see Joe C. Huang, Heroes and Villains in Communist China: The Contemporary Chinese Novel as a Reflection of Life (New York: Pica Press, 1973), 273-78. 67 The brothers are the middle-aged Qin Fu, who believes in family enrichment, and Qin Kai, who tentatively supports collectivization. Their differences are repeated in Qin Fu’s sons Wenjie, who follows his father, and Wenqing, who prefers Gao Daquan. See “Yihu zhongnong de liangdai dixiong” [Two generations of brothers in a middle-peasant family], in Jinguang dadao pingxi, 69-76. The section is the work of Wang Yongsheng alone; in 1981 he expressed interest in undertaking a longer study of the Qins but reported that he was prevented by an order forbidding any research into Cultural Revolution literature. Author interview with Wang Yongsheng, June 1981. Professor Wang died shortly afterward and did not add to his research on the novel. For developments in the third and fourth volumes, see the Epilogue. 68 Mao, Mao Zedong xuanji, 1:3-11; Mao, Selected Works, 1:13-21. The passage on zigengnong “owner-peasants,” which a footnote defines as zhongnong “middle peasants,” is on page 5 of the Chinese text and page 15 of the English. 69 Mao, Mao Zedong xuanji, 1:8; Mao, Selected Works, 1:18. 70 Hao Ran, Jinguang dadao, 1:156-58 (ellipses added). 71 The sleepless worker up to his waist in liquid plot element is drawn from the humanconcrete-mixer fable in the mythology of Daqing’s Iron-man Wang, the most celebrated of the pioneer oil-workers of the Great Leap era, backdated to the early 1950s. Both Chen and Wang are additionally injured at the time of their heroic acts. See “Zhongguo gongren jieji de xianfeng zhanshi – tieren Wang Jinxi” [Vanguard warrior of the Chinese industrial working class – Iron-man Wang Jinxi], Renmin ribao, 28 January 1972; repr. in Xiandai wenzhang xuandu, 1-29, esp. page 7.

Notes to pages 129-35 239



72 73 74 75 76

Hao Ran, Jinguang dadao, 1:574. Ibid., 1:213. Ibid., 1:345. Ibid., 1:506. Hao Ran, Yanyangtian [Bright sunny skies] (Beijing: Renmin wenxue chubanshe, vol. 1, 1964, vols. 2 and 3, 1966; repr. 1974). 77 Hao Ran, Jinguang dadao, 1:43. 78 Feng’s class designation at the time of land reform is middle-peasant, which places him within the limits of class acceptability. However, this status was conferred over the objections of Gao Daquan, who had wanted Feng placed in the “class enemy” category of rich peasant. 79 Ibid., 1:219. 80 Ibid., 1:327. 81 Ibid., 1:328-29. 82 A representative opera turnabout character is the young dock worker Han Xiaoqiang, who is persuaded of the nobility of his profession and alerted to the malevolence of the barely concealed class enemy by the heroine Fang Haizhen in the model theatrical work Haigang. See Geming yangbanxi juben huibian [Libretti of model theatrical works] (Beijing: Renmin wenxue chubanshe, 1974), 283-338; trans. as On the Docks (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1973). 83 Hao Ran, Jinguang dadao, 2:599. 84 Sun Yu, dir., Jinguang dadao: shang [The golden road] (Changchun: Changchun dianying zhipianchang, 1975). This is Part 1 of a projected 3. 85 The reading comes in Scene 6 of the opera. Geming yangbanxi juben huibian, 380; Song of the Dragon River (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1972), 26-27. Mao’s essay, one of the “three constantly read articles” (laosanpian) of the Cultural Revolution and already committed to memory by almost all who saw the opera and its film version in the 1960s and 1970s, was “Jinian Baiqiu’en.” See Mao, Mao Zedong xuanji, 2:620-22; Mao, Selected Works, 2:337-38. 86 Author interview with Hao Ran, May 1981. 87 Zhongguo dangdai wenxueshi chugao [Draft history of contemporary Chinese literature] (Beijing: Renmin wenxue chubanshe, 1980), 1:193. 88 Resolution on CPC History (1949-81) (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1981), 27-47. 89 As, for example, the allegorical history of the barbershop that begins Wang Meng’s story “Youyou cuncaoxin,” Shanghai wenxue 9 (September 1979): 4-16; trans. as Wang Meng, “The Barber’s Tale,” Chinese Literature 7 (July 1980): 22-40. Rudolf Wagner’s analysis of the story is in Rudolf G. Wagner, ed., Literatur und Politik in der Volksrepublik China (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1983), 249-54, and in Rudolf G. Wagner, Inside a Service Trade: Studies in Contemporary Chinese Prose (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1972), 481-531. 90 Ru Zhijuan, “Jianji cuole de gushi,” Renmin wenxue 2 (February 1979): 65-76; trans. Wang Mingjie as “A Badly Edited Story,” in Ru Zhijuan, Lilies and Other Stories (Beijing: Panda Books, 1985), 153-73, was among the first exposés of the Great Leap. Gao Xiaosheng’s “Li Shunda zao wu” is an ironic review of the Party’s relationship with a compliant peasantry. Gao Xiaosheng, “Li Shunda zao wu,” in Gao Xiaosheng, 79 nian xiaoshuoji [(Gao Xiao­ sheng’s 19) 79 short stories] (N.p.: Jiangsu renmin chubanshe, 1982), 12-26; trans. Madelyn Ross as “Li Shunda Builds a House,” in Gao Xiaosheng, The Broken Betrothal (Beijing: Panda Books, 1987), 25-57. Leo Lee compares Gao’s story with Wang Meng’s writing in “The Politics of Technique: Perspectives of Literary Dissidence in Contemporary Chinese Fiction,” in After Mao: Chinese Literature and Society 1978-81, ed. Jeffrey C. Kinkley

240

Notes to pages 136-37

(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985), 159-90. See also Wagner, Inside a Service Trade, 431-80.

Chapter 6: Zhang Kangkang at The Dividing Line 1 I have illustrated this tendency to militarize peacetime conflict in Richard King, “Fantasies of Battle: Making the Militant Hero Prominent,” in Art in Turmoil: The Chinese Cultural Revolution, 1966-76, ed. Richard King (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2010), 203-15. 2 See, for example, the section quoted by Judith Shapiro from a report of Cultural Revolution dam building in Yunnan: “Each of these great boulders is a heavy bomb launched at the traitor/secret agent/scab Liu Shaoqi’s foreign slave philosophy and reptilianism, it is a sword that cuts to the heart of American imperialism, Soviet revisionism, and the counterrevolutionary faction of each country.” Judith Shapiro, Mao’s War against Nature: Politics and the Environment in Revolutionary China (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 127. 3 Shapiro, Mao’s War against Nature, 9. Shapiro’s source for this quotation is a letter from a “Chinese scholar from Yunnan Province.” The lines are also quoted in Mao Zedong tongzhi de qing-shaonian shidai [The childhood and youth of Comrade Mao Zedong] (Beijing: Renmin chubanshe, 1951), 33, and were reprinted at the start of the Cultural Revolution, in Jiefangjunbao, 27 June 1966. 4 Shapiro, Mao’s War against Nature, 13. 5 An early study of the rustication movement is Thomas Bernstein, Up to the Mountains and Down to the Villages: The Transfer of Youth from Urban to Rural China (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977). Studies of the works of zhiqing authors include Zuoya Cao, Out of the Crucible: Literary Works about the Rusticated Youth (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2003); Richard King, “Models and Misfits: Rusticated Youth in Three Novels of the 1970s,” in New Perspectives on the Cultural Revolution, ed. William A. Joseph, Christene W. Wong, and David Zweig (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), 243-64 (which includes a brief analysis of The Dividing Line). Hong Zicheng, A History of Contemporary Chinese Literature, trans. Michael M. Day (Leiden: Brill, 2007), has a brief section titled “‘Educated Youth Fiction’ in the Reconsideration of History” on pages 309-14. Translations of a range of writings by and about the zhiqing are included in “There and Back Again: The Chinese Urban Youth Generation,” ed. Richard King, special issue, Ren­ ditions 50 (Autumn 1998). Laifong Leung, Morning Sun: Interviews with Chinese Writers of the Lost Generation (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1998), has interviews with most of the major zhiqing writers, including Zhang Kangkang, on pages 229-39. Chinese studies on the zhiqing include Liu Xiaomeng, Zhongguo zhiqing shi – dachao 1966-1980 nian [The history of the Chinese urban youth – the high tide 1966-1980] (Beijing: Zhongguo shehui kexue chubanshe, 1998); Deng Xian, Zhongguo zhiqing meng [The dream of the Chinese urban youth] (Beijing: Renmin wenxue chubanshe, 1993). 6 Renmin ribao, 22 December 1968; the full directive is quoted at the beginning of volume 1 of Guo Xianhong’s novel Zhengtu [The journey] (Shanghai: Shanghai Renmin chubanshe, 1973). Guo Xianhong was the pen-name for two older professional writers. For a summary of the novel, see King, “Models and Misfits,” in Joseph, Wong, and Zweig, New Perspectives, 245-48. The first two chapters of the novel, the reception of the directive and the pre-departure parade, are translated in King, “There and Back Again,” Renditions, 10-17. 7 The process was described to me during a visit to the Shanghai home of the author Wang Ruowang in April 1981 by his daughter, who had witnessed such persuasion. 8 For the socialization of the Red Guard generation, who, as members of the laosanjie, “three senior graduating classes” (of 1966, ‘67, and ‘68), formed the first wave of zhiqing, see Anita

Notes to pages 138-43 241











Chan, Children of Mao: Personality Development and Political Activism in the Red Guard Generation (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1985). 9 Like so many of the vaunted agricultural breakthroughs of the Maoist era, Dazhai turned out to be fraudulent, and emulation resulted in disaster. See Shapiro, Mao’s War against Nature, 95-114. 10 Zhang Kangkang, Fenjiexian [The dividing line] (Shanghai: Renmin chubanshe, 1975). 11 Subsequent works by the author are listed in the collection Zhang Kangkang, Dahuang binghe [Great wasteland, river of ice] (Changchun: Jilin renmin chubanshe, 1998), 27680; see also the entry by Sylvia Chan on Zhang Kangkang in Lily Xiao Hong Lee, ed., Biographical Dictionary of Chinese Women: The Twentieth Century 1912-2000 (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 2003), 682-85; and the introduction in Zhang Kangkang, Living with Their Past: Post-Urban Youth Fiction, ed. Richard King (Hong Kong: Renditions Paper­ backs, 2003), 7-13. 12 Her marriage and the birth of her child do not appear in any of the memoirs she has written of that time, though she does include a very similar story in her novel The Invisible Companion (Yinxing banlü). Information for this introduction to Zhang Kangkang derives in part from a number of my interviews and conversations with the author between 1987, at the University of Victoria, and 2006, in Beijing. The October 1987 and May 2002 interviews dealt with her fiction on the rustication experience. 13 Zhang Kangkang, “Fenjiexian,” in Zhang, Dahuang binghe, 255-75. The book is one in a series of memoirs by authors from the laosanjie cohort. 14 The secrecy of the undertaking is not mentioned in her memoir but was stressed in the October 1987 interview. 15 Zhang, “Fenjiexian,” in Zhang, Dahuang binghe, 255. 16 The first representatives of the publisher to visit her in Hangzhou are referred to in the memoir by surname only as Lao [Old] Xie and Xiao [Young] Lu. In the revision process, Xie was joined by the former rightist Chen Xiangming (to whom the author gives the honorary title “auntie,” ayi). 17 Lan Yang, Chinese Fiction of the Cultural Revolution (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 1998), 49-59. 18 Zhang, Fenjiexian, 17. 19 Ibid., 17-18. 20 Friedrich Engels, “Letter to Margaret Harkness” (dated “beginning of April 1888”), in Marxists on Literature: An Anthology, ed. David Craig (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975), 269-71. I have reviewed the development of the typical in Chinese literary debate in Richard King, “Typical People in Typical Circumstances,” in Words and Their Stories: Essays on the Language of the Chinese Revolution, ed. Ban Wang (Leiden: Brill, 2010), 185-204. The “basic task” injunction derives from an article by one of the radical writing groups of the mid-1970s: Chu Lan, “Suzao wuchanjieji yingxiong renwu shi shehuizhuyi wenyi de genben renwu” [Depiction of proletarian heroic types is the basic task of socialist literature], Renmin ribao, 15 June 1974. 21 For the Cultural Revolution reinterpretations, see Makesizhuyi wenyi lilun jiben wenti [Basic questions of Marxist artistic theory] (Shenyang: Dongbei diqu ba yuan xiao [Eight universities in the northeast region], 1973), 134-49. 22 Zhang, Fenjiexian, 143. 23 Ibid., 142. 24 Wang Guangmei’s offence, from the point of view of the Cultural Revolution cultural authorities, was not simply that she had led a work-team during the Four Clean-ups movement of the mid-1960s and created a model unit, but that an opera had been written to

242

Notes to pages 143-55

celebrate the event. Renewed condemnation of Wang Guangmei and the opera San shang Taofeng (Going up Peach Peak three times) was under way as Zhang Kangkang was writing and revising her novel. See Chu Lan, “Ping Jinju San shang Taofeng” [Critique of the Shanxi opera Going up Peach Peak Three Times], Renmin ribao, 28 February 1974; the article is reproduced as the first entry in a book entirely devoted to this subject: Pipan Jinju San shang Taofeng [Condemnation of the Shanxi opera Going up Peach Peak Three Times] (Beijing: Renmin wenxue chubanshe, 1974). In our May 2002 interview, Zhang Kangkang would not admit to a connection between Huo Li and Wang Guangmei. 25 The class of youths wanting to leave the farm are the “misfits” in King, “Models and Misfits,” in Joseph, Wong, and Zweig, New Perspectives. The model and misfit categories are taken up by Cao in Chapter 5 of Out of the Crucible, pages 109-26. To these two types she adds a third, the striver. 26 Zhang, Fenjiexian, 172. 27 Ibid., 61, 107. 28 Ibid., 404. 29 Ibid., 414. 30 Ibid., 420. 31 The quotation is from Mao’s 1955 poem “Youyong” (Swimming), in Mao Zedong, Mao Zhuxi shi-ci [Poems of Chairman Mao] (Beijing: Renmin wenxue chubanshe, 1974), 30-31, qt.p.30. Jerome Ch’en and Michael Bullock translate the two lines as follows: “Let the wind blow and the waves strike,/ This surpasses an aimless stroll in the court.” Jerome Ch’en, Mao and the Chinese Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967), 346. Although the Chinese original featured quotations from Mao in boldface type, they appear in italics here. 32 Zhang, Fenjiexian, 421-23. 33 Geming yangbanxi juben huibian [Libretti of revolutionary model theatrical works] (Beijing: Renmin wenxue chubanshe, 1974), 373-74; translation in Song of the Dragon River (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1972), 22. I have changed the spelling of the names to standard pinyin format. 34 Geming yangbanxi juben huibian, 371; Song of the Dragon River, 21. 35 Both versions of What Have We to Fear are reproduced in Wang Mingxian and Yan Shan­ chun, Xin Zhongguo meishu tu shi [History of the fine arts in New China], English subtitle The Art History of the People’s Republic of China (Beijing: Zhongguo qingnian chubanshe, 2000), 80. Differences in the compositions are described on page 81. 36 Hong, A History of Contemporary Chinese Literature, 240, where the title is translated as Boundary Line. 37 Author interview with Zhang Kangkang, Beijing, May 2002. 38 An exception among zhiqing authors in his celebration of the conquest of nature in the 1980s was Liang Xiaosheng. One of his best-known works of zhiqing fiction, the 1982 story “A Land of Wonder and Mystery,” is, like The Dividing Line, an account of the cultivation of a tract of wetland in the Great Northern Wilderness. In Liang’s story, the Spirit Swamp (Guizhao) is portrayed as malign and pestilential, and so transforming it into fields of grain is an unambiguously desirable undertaking, the deaths of three members of a detachment sent to explore the swamp is a heroic sacrifice, and those who remain are ennobled by their achievement. See Liang Xiaosheng, “Zhe shi yipian shenqi de tudi,” in Suiyue [Time], vol. 1 of Zhiqing wenxue jingdian congshu [Collected classics of urban youth literature], 5 vols. (Lanzhou: Dunhuang wenyi chubanshe, 1996), 160-91; translated as “A Land of Wonder and Mystery,” in Best Chinese Stories 1949-1989 (Beijing: Panda Books, 1989), 325-82. For Laifong Leung’s interview with Liang Xiaosheng, see Morning Sun, 112-20. 39 Lao Gui, Xuese huanghun (Beijing: Gongren chubanshe, 1989), 337; translated as Ma Bo, Blood-Red Sunset, trans. Howard Goldblatt (New York: Viking, 1995), 239.

Notes to pages 155-63 243







40 Ma, Blood-Red Sunset, 241. 41 Ibid., 245. 42 Wang Xiaoying, “Chang xiang yi,” in Qingjie [(Psychological) Complex], vol. 4 of Zhiqing wenxue jingdian, 204-7, qt.p.207; trans. Jennifer Eagleton as “Faces Remembered,” in King, “There and Back Again,” Renditions, 154-57, qt.p.157. 43 See, for example, Zhang Kangkang, Zhang Kangkang zhiqing zuopin xuan [Collected urban youth works by Zhang Kangkang] (Beijing: Xiyuan chubanshe, 2000). Three of these stories are translated in Zhang, Living with Their Past. 44 Zhang Kangkang, Yinxing banlü (Beijing: Zuojia chubanshe, 1986); translated as Zhang Kangkang, The Invisible Companion, trans. Daniel Bryant (Beijing: New World Press, 1996). 45 Zhang, The Invisible Companion, 325. 46 In [Zhong] Acheng’s short novel The King of Trees, one of his celebrated “Kings” trilogy, the destruction of the natural environment and of the lives of those who exist in it is symbolized by the destruction of the tree that, and the person who, may both claim to be the “king of trees.” Cutting down the tree serves little purpose for the zhiqing who decide to perform the task, except to eliminate the superstitious beliefs of the locals and to prove the truth of the slogan that people can triumph over heaven. See “Shu wang,” in Acheng [Zhong Acheng], Qi wang, Shu wang, Haizi wang [The king of chess, the king of trees, the king of children] (Taibei: Xintian chubanshe, 1986), 61-118; translated as “The King of Trees,” in Ah Cheng, Three Kings, trans. Bonnie S. McDougall (London: Collins Harvill, 1990), 95-153, esp. page 142. Other former zhiqing authors who have expressed concern for the damage they did to the ecosystems they were sent to conquer are Lao Gui (Ma Bo) in Xuese huanghun and more recently Zhang Kangkang’s husband, Lü Jiamin, writing as Jiang Rong, in Lang tuteng (Wuchang: Changjiang wenyi chubanshe, 2004); translated as Jiang Rong, Wolf Totem, trans. Howard Goldblatt (New York: Penguin, 2008). 47 In her discussion of the devastation of the ecosystems of Mongolia and the Great Northern Wilderness, Shapiro cites the case, similar to that of the eagles in “Sandstorm,” of the shooting of muskrats for their pelts. Shapiro, Mao’s War against Nature, 161-68. 48 See Zhang Kangkang, “Zixu” [Preface], in Zhang, Zhang Kangkang zhiqing zuopin xuan, 1-4. 49 Author interview with Zhang Kangkang, May 2002. 50 Zhang, “Fenjiexian,” in Zhang, Dahuang binghe, 255-75. Chapter 7: Chen Guokai’s The Price 1 Bai Hua and Peng Ning, Kulian, first published in the journal Shiyue (October 1979), reprinted in the Hong Kong magazine Zhengming [Contending], June 1981, 82-98; quotations are from this edition. This issue of Zhengming also includes a number of articles discussing the criticism of Bai Hua and his filmscript. A painting by Huang Yongyu of geese in flight is reproduced on page 29. For more on Huang Yongyu’s painting and a reproduction of another metaphorical bird image, the winking owl, see Ellen Johnston Laing, The Winking Owl: Art in the People’s Republic of China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988). See also Michael S. Duke, “Resurgent Humanism in Bai Hua’s Bitter Love,” in Michael S. Duke, Blooming and Contending: Chinese Literature in the Post-Mao Era (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985), 123-48. Kulian was never publicly shown in China, though a version was filmed and released in Taiwan. 2 Author interview with Zhang Kangkang, May 2002. 3 Lu Xinhua, “Shanghen,” first published Wenhuibao, 11 August 1978, and subsequently included in numerous anthologies. 4 For more on the literary history of this crucial period, see Richard King, “‘Wounds’ and ‘Exposure’: Chinese Literature after the Gang of Four,” Pacific Affairs 54, 1 (Spring 1981):

244











Notes to pages 163-67

82-99; Perry Link, “Afterword: Popular Fiction in China,” in Perry Link, Mandarin Ducks and Butterflies: Popular Fiction in Early Twentieth-Century Chinese Cities (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981), 236-90; Perry Link, The Uses of Literature: Life in the Socialist Chinese Literary System (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), esp. pages 15-21. Anthologies of wounds literature include Shengui de shiming [Sacred duty (and other stories)] (Shanghai: Shanghai wenyi chubanshe, 1979); and Liu Xinwu et al., Shanghen (Hong Kong: Sanlian, 1978). Two anthologies of translations are Lu Xinhua et al., The Wounded: New Stories of the Cultural Revolution, 77-78, trans. Bennett Lee and Geremie Barmé (Hong Kong: Joint Publishing, 1979); Lee Yee, ed., The New Realism: Writings from China after the Cultural Revolution (New York: Hippocrene Books, 1983). 5 Bai and Peng, “Kulian,” 96 (punctuation from the original). 6 The multiple meanings of ren – humanity, humanism, people, the individual – are implicit in the title of the novel by Dai Houying, Ren a, ren! [People!] (Hong Kong: Yuandong pinglun chubanshe, 1983), a stylistically innovative book in which the narrative switches from chapter to chapter between the characters, colleagues, and family members as they come to terms with their treatment of each other in the Cultural Revolution and try to cope with the aftermath. The impossibility of rendering the title is acknowledged by the translator Frances Wood’s choice of the English title: Stones of the Wall, by Dai Houying (London: Michael Joseph, 1985). For a reading of this novel, see Duke, Blooming and Contending, 149-81. 7 Chen Guokai, Daijia (Guangzhou: Huacheng chubanshe, 1990), 264; quotations from the text are from this edition. The novel was first published in 1980 by Renmin wenxue chubanshe. A recent reprint is in Chen Guokai, Chen Guokai xuanji [Selected works of Chen Guokai] (Beijing: Renmin wenxue chubanshe, 1998), 1:1-279. 8 Chen, Daijia, 264-65. An emotionally charged letter also fills in the mother’s tragic story in Lu Xinhua’s “Shanghen.” The device of having the central character write a long suicide note to the man in her life recounting her ill treatment at the hands of another man also appears in the 1979 novel Shenghuo de lu (The path of life) by the Shanghai author Zhu Lin, the first post-Mao novel set among the urban youth in the countryside. 9 Chen, Daijia, 266. 10 Ibid., 274. 11 See, for example, Cong Weixi’s wounds-era story “Daqiang xia de hong yulan” [The red magnolia under the wall], Shouhuo 2 (April 1979): 5-38; translated as Cong Weixi, “The Blood-Stained Magnolia,” Chinese Literature (April 1980): 3-56, in which a prison warden, now a prisoner himself, is killed while picking a white flower to be placed in Tian’anmen Square as a tribute to Zhou Enlai. Zhang Yang’s Di’er ci wo shou, one of the first novels to be published after the Cultural Revolution, having circulated for a few years in earlier drafts as “underground literature” (dixia wenxue), had a scientist as its dashing hero. Zhang Yang, Di’er ci wo shou [The second handclasp] (Beijing: Zhongguo qingnian chubanshe, 1979). The novel is considered by Perry Link as a revival of the traditions of earlier romantic fiction in Mandarin Ducks and Butterflies; it is analyzed, with reference to its creation and publishing history, in Shuyu Kong, “Between Undercurrent and Mainstream” (paper presented at the conference “China at the Grassroots,” Vancouver, May 2010). 12 For the treatment of the intellectuals in the Cultural Revolution, see Anne F. Thurston, Enemies of the People: The Ordeal of the Intellectuals in China’s Great Cultural Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988). 13 Liu Binyan, “Foreword,” in Perry Link, Evening Chats in Beijing: Probing China’s Predicament (New York: Norton, 1992), xi-xiv, qt.p.xi. 14 Chen, Daijia, 62-63. 15 Late Cultural Revolution short stories typically feature these young heroes, said to have “horns growing on their heads and thorns growing on their bodies” (toushang zhang jiao,

Notes to pages 167-72 245













shenshang zhang ci), in literary versions of the Communist Party’s internecine struggles. A noteworthy example from film is Chunmiao, the young barefoot doctor who battles a conservative medical establishment in the 1975 film that bears her name. 16 Biographical information for Chen Guokai is derived from standard mainland biographical sources and from his answers to my questions during a May 2002 interview at his home in Shenzhen. 17 The story, “The Minister Plays Chess” (Buzhang xia qi), was published in 1962. 18 Following a People’s Daily editorial of 1 June 1966, written by Chen Boda and titled “Hengsao yiqie niugui-sheshen” (Sweep aside all ox-demons and snake-spirits), the term “ox-demons and snake-spirits” (niugui-sheshen) was used to describe those condemned in the Cultural Revolution. The cells in which those so designated were confined were called niupeng (ox-sheds). 19 For a summary of this campaign, see Roderick MacFarquhar and Michael Schoenhals, Mao’s Last Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), 409-12. 20 Chen Guokai, “Wo yinggai zenme ban?” Zuopin 2 (February 1979): 37-50; translated as Chen Guokai, “What Should I Do?” in Stubborn Weeds: Popular and Controversial Chinese Literature after the Cultural Revolution, trans. Kenneth Jarrett, ed. Perry Link (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1983), 73-96. 21 Link, Stubborn Weeds, 73. 22 Chen recalls that 790,000 copies of the issue were printed; the initial print-run had been 200,000. Link reports that the story was second on the list of reader favourites for the year but was selected for the eighteenth prize by the editors of Renmin wenxue. Ibid. 23 Chen, “What Should I Do?” in Link, Stubborn Weeds, 95. 24 Link, Stubborn Weeds, 73. 25 For a summary of Qin Zhaoyang’s activities in the mid-1950s and his tribulations during the two subsequent decades, including transcription of part of an interview with him, see Richard King, “After the Hundred Flowers: A 1981 Interview with Qin Zhaoyang,” Renditions 65 (Spring 2006): 38-61. 26 In his afterword to The Price, Chen Guokai also acknowledges the mentorship of the senior literary official and intellectual Wei Junyi. Wei’s importance in nurturing a new generation of writers during the late 1970s was also acknowledged by the author Zhu Lin. 27 Chen, Daijia, 3. 28 Ibid., 167. The words are spoken for Xu by the narrator. 29 Rape of young female zhiqing by the officials in charge of them was common and was cited by many in the immediate post-Mao period as one of the evils of the rustication movement. A dramatic event of this kind comes in Chapter 6 of Zhu Lin’s novel 1988 Wuyan de Lancang Jiang (The sobbing Lancang [Mekong] River), translated in “There and Back Again: The Chinese Urban Youth Generation,” ed. Richard King, special issue, Renditions 50 (Autumn 1998): 47-52. 30 Stories abound of offences against the image of Mao leading to harsh punishment. During my May 1981 interview with the author Wang Ruowang, he offered two examples, of a movie projectionist who somehow showed the leader’s face upside down, and of a man who put a nail in his side of a partition wall, which punctured a picture of Mao on his neighbour’s side, both actions resulting in imprisonment. Wang was himself beaten by Red Guards sent to interrogate him when they found the shards of a Mao bust he had broken by accident and hidden in a drawer. 31 Chen, Daijia, 155. 32 Ibid., 155-56. 33 Ibid., 31. 34 Ibid., 59. 35 Ibid., 275. This is the final paragraph of the novel.

246







Notes to pages 173-76

36 Ibid., 230. 37 See Bai Di, “Feminism in the Revolutionary Model Ballets The White-Haired Girl and The Red Detachment of Women,” in Art in Turmoil: The Chinese Cultural Revolution, 1966-76, ed. Richard King (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2010), 188-202. 38 Elsewhere, I have argued the case for this allegorical meaning in connection with one story. See Richard King, “A Fiction Revealing Collusion: Allegory and Evasion in the Mid-1970s,” Modern Chinese Literature 10 (1997): 71-90. Other young heroines overthrowing male adherents of the capitalist road can be found in the 1975 barefoot doctor film Chunmiao and Hao Ran’s final Cultural Revolution novel Baihuachuan. 39 For example, in Gu Hua’s celebrated 1983 novel Furongzhen (translated as A Small Town Called Hibiscus), the beautiful, full-figured, naive, and passionate beancurd seller Hu Yuyin is victimized by the unattractive and politically radical schemer Li Guoxiang. The beautiful and passionate young woman as victim and trophy is a recurring figure in Gu Hua’s work from this period. Wang Meng’s 1979 story “Youyou cuncaoxin” portrays the wife of an official returning after political persecution who devotes herself to maximizing the profit to be made from his position. For analysis of this story (the title of which is translated as “The Loyal Heart”), see Rudolf G. Wagner, Inside a Service Trade: Studies in Contemporary Chinese Prose (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1972), 480-530. The most notorious schemer of her age was Wang Shouxin, the corrupt official who is the subject of Liu Binyan’s 1979 investigative report “Ren-yao zhi jian,” published in Renmin wenxue (September 1979): 83-102; translated by James V. Feinermann as the title piece in Liu Binyan, People or Monsters? and Other Stories and Reportage from China after Mao, ed. Perry Link (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1983), 11-68. 40 Leo Ou-fan Lee, The Romantic Generation of Modern Chinese Writers (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1973), 45. 41 Within the classical tradition, there is also a long history of male poets adopting a female voice (the abandoned wife, the aging courtesan) in poems of lament and self-pity. 42 For more on the Zhang Zhixin case, see the following from mainland newspapers: “Yao wei zhenli er douzheng – youxiu dangyuan Zhang Zhixin tong Lin Biao, Sirenbang jinxing shusi douzheng de shiji” [We must struggle for the truth – incidents in the struggle to the death the outstanding Party member Zhang Zhixin waged against Lin Biao and the Gang of Four], Renmin ribao, 25 May 1979, 1 and 4; “Ji dang de hao nüer Zhang Zhixin tongzhi de gaoshang pinzhi” [On the fine moral quality of the Party’s good daughter Comrade Zhang Zhixin], Renmin ribao, 18 July 1979, 3, cont. 25 July, 3, and 1 August, 3; Zhang Zhixin, “Yige gongchandangyuan de xuanyan” [A Communist Party member’s mani­festo], Guangming ribao, 12 June 1976; “Zhang Zhixin lieshi de yiyan” [The testament of the martyr Zhang Zhixin], Renmin ribao, 16 June 1979; “Ta shi mingfu-qishi de qiangzhe – Zhang Zhixin lieshi yuzhong douzheng jishi” [She truly deserves to be called strong-willed – a record of the prison struggles of the martyr Zhang Zhixin], Shaanxi ribao, 14 August 1979; “The Nation Contemplates: Why Was an Outstanding Woman Communist Killed?” Beijing Review 30 (27 July 1979): 19-21. The magazine Zhongguo qingnian dedicated the first twenty pages of its July 1979 issue to Zhang Zhixin, including, Lin Chun and Li Yinhe, “Jinian Zhang Zhixin” [In memory of Zhang Zhixin], 2 and 3, and Zhang Zhixin, “Zizhuan” [My autobiography] (dated 3 November 1952), 4-8. Articles in the Hong Kong press include Ouyang Mei, “Zhongguo dangdai de ‘shengnü zhende’” [A contemporary Chinese ‘woman saint’], Zhengming, October 1979, 26-28; Dong Liushui, “Zhang Zhixin, hongse gongzhu ji qita” [Zhang Zhixin, the red princesses, and other matters], Zhengming, November 1979, 56 and 57; Tao Baobu, “Zhang Zhixin chuanwen zhongzhong” [Various stories concerning Zhang Zhixin], Zhengming, November 1979, 32-33. The comic-book version of the story is Wu Wenhuan (text), Zhang Zhixin, illustrations by Han Min et al. (Shanghai: Shanghai meishu chubanshe, 1979).

Notes to pages 177-81 247











43 “Yao wei zhenli er douzheng,” 4. 44 Luo Guangbin and Yang Yiyan, Hong yan (Hong Kong: Sanlian, 1979), reprint of the 1961 Zhongguo qingnian chubanshe edition; translated as Luo Guangbin and Yang Yiyan, Red Crag (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1978). The quotation is from page 283 of Red Crag, translating from page 272 of the Chinese text. For more on the novel, see Joe C. Huang, Heroes and Villains in Communist China: The Contemporary Chinese Novel as a Reflection of Life (New York: Pica Press, 1973), 93-113. Huang also translates a passage describing Sister Jiang’s neatness and dignity, on pages 103-4. 45 Wu, Zhang Zhixin (comic book), complete caption to illustration 74. 46 See King, “‘Wounds’ and ‘Exposure,’” 92-93. Liu Binyan’s groundbreaking report “Ren-yao zhi jian” (People or Monsters?) ends with the warning, “People be on guard! It is still too early to be celebrating victories.” Liu, People or Monsters? 68. 47 Author interview with Chen Guokai, Shenzhen, May 2002. Chapter 8: Zhang Yigong’s The Story of the Criminal Li Tongzhong 1 Zhang Yigong, “Fanren Li Tongzhong de gushi,” Shouhuo 1 (January 1980): 93-115 and 193; quotations are from this edition. Reprinted as the title story in the collection Zhang Yigong, Fanren Li Tongzhong de gushi (Beijing: Shidai wenxue chubanshe, 2001), 1-49. The author’s manuscript is housed in the Museum of Modern Literature in Beijing. A partial translation of the novel, by Johanna Hood and Robert Mackie, appeared in Renditions 68 (Autumn 2007): 82-111; the full translation is in Richard King, ed., Heroes of China’s Great Leap Forward (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2010), 63-128. 2 Much of the information in this chapter on the writing of the story, and on the author’s biography, comes from my May 2002 interview with Zhang Yigong at his home in Zhengzhou. 3 Zhang, “Fanren Li Tongzhong de gushi,” 93. 4 Jeremy Brown, “Great Leap City: Surviving the Famine in Tianjin,” in Eating Bitterness: New Perspectives on China’s Great Leap Forward and Famine, ed. Kimberley Ens Manning and Felix Wemheuer (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2010), 226-50. 5 Jasper Becker, Hungry Ghosts: Mao’s Secret Famine (London: James Murray, 1996), 270. Becker’s critics argue that numbers of dead may have been inflated by including children who, because young women were malnourished, were never born, or more simply that the high figures, and the book as a whole, are anti-Mao propaganda. These arguments were found on the website of the Maoist International Movement, http://www.etext.org/; a much abbreviated version later appeared with the title “Author Jasper Becker is a Proven Liar,” on http://wengewang.org/. During an intervention at a December 2006 conference on the Great Leap Forward held in Vienna, Professor Gao Wangling of Renmin University suggested that 45 million was closer to the number of casualties. This figure is compatible with Frank Dikötter’s estimate in his Mao’s Great Famine: The History of China’s Most Devastating Catastrophe 1958-1962 (New York: Walker, 2010), 3, which draws on recently available archival material. 6 There are striking similarities between Mao’s attitude to, and treatment of, the peasantry during the late 1950s and that of Stalin a decade into his own revolution in the late 1920s. In his history of Stalin in power, Simon Sebag Montefiore writes the following on Stalin’s reaction to protests at grain requisitions: Stalin and his allies “hated the obstinate old world of the peasants: they had to be herded into collective farms, their grain forcibly collected and sold abroad to fund a manic gallop to create an instant industrial powerhouse that could produce tanks and planes.” Simon Sebag Montefiore, Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar (London: Phoenix, 2004), 37-38. 7 William A. Joseph, “A Tragedy of Good Intentions: Post-Mao Views of the Great Leap Forward,” Modern China 12, 4 (1986): 419-57. Joseph quotes the claim by Bo Yibo in his

248









Notes to pages 182-86

memoirs that the Chinese people excused the leadership (of which Bo was a member) “because our intentions were good.” Ibid., 425. 8 Liu Binyan, “Shidai de zhaohuan” [The call of the age], Wenyibao 11-12 (December 1979): 36-46. 9 Issues of the leadership-only bulletin Neibu cankao (Internal reference) reported extensive famine, beggars’ marches, and some cases of cannibalism. 10 Jean-Luc Domenach, The Origins of the Great Leap Forward: The Case of One Chinese Province, trans. A.M. Berrett (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1995), 137. This edition is a translation of Domenach’s 1982 original Aux origines du Grand Bond en avant. 11 A picture of Zhang Ruifang in the role of Li Shuangshuang appeared on the cover of Renmin dianying, February-March 1978 double issue, with further photographs from the production inside the magazine. 12 Frederick C. Teiwes with Warren Sun, China’s Road to Disaster: Mao, Central Politicians, and Provincial Leaders in the Unfolding of the Great Leap Forward 1955-1959 (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1999), 97-98. Unlike wounds literature set during the last months of the Cultural Revolution, where Zhou Enlai is portrayed as a beacon of hope, fiction about the Great Leap does not mention him by name. 13 Amartya Sen, Poverty and Famines: An Essay in Entitlement and Deprivation (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981). See especially Chapter 10, “Entitlement and Deprivation,” pages 154-66. 14 Domenach, The Origins of the Great Leap Forward, 63. 15 The policy of opposing rash advances is presented in the second half of The Golden Road as being part of the conservative line of Liu Shaoqi and his supporters, and is thus endorsed by the village head and rich peasants and opposed by Gao Daquan. 16 Teiwes and Sun, quoting Bo Yibo’s memoirs, report that Mao concluded from his meetings in Moscow that socialism (the “east wind”) was in the ascendant: “Chairman Mao felt we could explore an even higher rate of development [and] if the masses were mobilized ... production could experience a Great Leap Forward.” Teiwes and Sun continue, “So aroused, Mao called China from Moscow, criticising the 1956 fanmaojin as wrong, saying that [it] should not be proposed again, and that building socialism must be a bit rash.” Teiwes and Sun, China’s Road to Disaster, 71. The authors describe and evaluate Bo’s memoirs on pages 262-63. 17 A second silence occurred between the 1980 publication of Zhang Yigong’s work and the mainland release of [Wang] Zhiliang’s novel Ji’e de shancun (Hungry mountain village) in 1994. Wang’s book, possibly the first full-length novel about the famines, was initially serialized in a Malaysian newspaper in 1992-93. A translation of excerpts from the novel’s first and twelfth chapters by Andrew Endrey, with a brief summary, can be found in Renditions 68 (Autumn 2007): 112-42. For introducing me to this novel, and for providing me with his unpublished paper “Hunting Ghosts: The Literary Re-appearance of Traumatic Experiences in Twentieth Century China,” I am indebted to Irmy Schweiger. 18 Sigmund Freud, “Delusion and Dream,” in Sigmund Freud, Delusion and Dream and Other Essays (Boston: Beacon Press, 1956), 25-118. Jensen’s novella appears as an appendix in this edition, pages 145-235. 19 Ibid., 61. Other translations of this passage differ slightly; some render the last few words as “the work of spades.” 20 Nicola King, Memory, Narrative, Identity: Remembering the Self (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000), 14. The quotation in this case is from Freud’s “Constructions in Analysis.” 21 Liu Zhen, “Hei qi,” Shanghai wenxue 3 (March 1979): 4-28; trans. as Liu Zhen, “The Black Flag,” Chinese Literature 5 (May 1980): 53-72; Ru Zhijuan, “Jianji cuole de gushi,” Renmin wenxue 2 (February 1979): 65-76; trans. Wang Mingjie as “A Badly Edited Story,” in Ru

Notes to pages 186-95 249





Zhijuan, Lilies and Other Stories (Beijing: Panda Books, 1985), 143-73. Although “The Black Flag” was published after “A Badly Edited Story,” I will discuss it first, despite its later date of publication. Shanghai Literature reportedly delayed publication of Liu Zhen’s story so that Ru Zhijuan, editor-in-chief at that journal, could be the first to break new ground. Author interview with Shanghai journal editor, May 1981. 22 In neither story is the province named, following the convention that village stories were intended to be about all villages; however, both authors are from Henan, and both told me that their fiction reflects what they saw in their home province. 23 Li Zhisui, The Private Life of Chairman Mao: The Memoirs of Mao’s Personal Physician (New York: Random House, 1994), 268. Wu’s name is given as Wu Zhifu. 24 Ibid., 270. See also Michael Schoenhals, Saltationist Socialism: Mao Zedong and the Great Leap Forward, 1958 (Stockholm: University of Stockholm, Department of Oriental Languages, 1987), 51. 25 Teiwes and Sun, China’s Road to Disaster, 262, quoting the Party history journal Dang de wenxian 4 (1995): 36. For more on this journal, see Teiwes and Sun, China’s Road to Disaster, 260-61. 26 Domenach, The Origins of the Great Leap Forward, 129. 27 Zhang Yigong was born in 1935 in Kaifeng; his father was a professor of Chinese literature at Henan University, and his mother taught Chinese at Kaifeng Women’s College. The parents and their five children moved around Henan and neighbouring provinces as the university relocated during the war against Japan. Zhang’s father died in 1954, and his mother was condemned as a rightist in 1958 for her opposition to the backyard furnaces of the Great Leap. During the following year, Zhang was himself criticized for a story he had published in a local journal. The story, “Muqin” (Mother), was perceived as praising his “rightist” mother and suggesting that love could transcend class. He was able to continue work as a journalist until the beginning of the Cultural Revolution, when he was again criticized and placed in detention. He was not fully rehabilitated until 1978, when he resumed his fiction writing with The Story of the Criminal Li Tongzhong. 28 I have also cited this anecdote, recounted during my 2002 interview with Zhang Yigong, at greater length in the introduction to King, Heroes of China’s Great Leap Forward. 29 Zhang, “Fanren Li Tongzhong de gushi,” 92-93. 30 Ibid., 94. 31 Ibid. Mu Guiying is also implicitly cited in “A Brief Biography of Li Shuangshuang,” where Guiying is the name of one of the central character’s friends. 32 Zhang, “Fanren Li Tongzhong de gushi,” 95. 33 A Chinese text of “Here I Come,” with translation by Gladys Yang and Yang Xianyi, can be found in Renditions 68 (Autumn 2007): 14. 34 Ibid., 97. 35 Ibid., 114. 36 The incident takes place in the third volume of The Golden Road, which was not released when Zhang Yigong wrote his novel; however, the film had still been on general release in 1977. 37 Although Chen Guokai’s narrator regularly addresses the reader in expressions of outrage, he forbears to direct diatribes toward his characters, as Zhang Yigong does here and elsewhere. 38 As explained by Zhang Yigong, sweet white soil, found in that region, is fine in texture, pale coloured, and slightly sweet to the taste. In previous famines, people had tried to eat it with fatal results. Author telephone conversation with Zhang Yigong, March 2007. 39 Zhang, “Fanren Li Tongzhong de gushi,” 102-3. 40 Ibid., 96. 41 Gao Xiaosheng, “Li Shunda zao wu,” in Gao Xiaosheng, 79 nian xiaoshuoji [(Gao Xiaosheng’s 19) 79 short stories] (N.p.: Jiangsu renmin chubanshe, 1982), 12-26.

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Notes to pages 196-201

42 Lu Xinhua pasted up his short story “Shanghen” as a big-character poster at Fudan Uni­ versity before it was published in the Shanghai newspaper Wenhuibao. In the case of two first novels by young authors, Yu Luojin’s A [Chinese] Winter’s Tale (Yige dongtian de tonghua) and Zhu Lin’s The Path of Life (Shenghuo de lu), the novelists and their editor Meng Weizai cut contentious passages, which allowed the works to appear. Zhu Lin’s book also won the support of the respected former rightist editor and short-story writer Qin Zhaoyang. Author interviews with Zhu Lin, Meng Weizai, and Qin Zhaoyang, May 1981. 43 This was Zhu Lin’s explanation for her relative restraint in writing about the sufferings of young women rusticated to the villages in her 1979 novel The Path of Life (Shenghuo de lu). 44 Zhang, “Fanren Li Tongzhong de gushi,” 193. This is the novel’s final paragraph. Epilogue: A Golden Road to Nowhere 1 In my May 2002 interview with Zhang Kangkang, she suggested 1982 as the year that Chinese authors began to come to terms with the multiplicity of literary styles available to them in translated works and to incorporate them in their own writing. From that point, the orderly progression and moral certainty of official writing under Communist Party control in the four decades since the Yan’an Forum were no longer possible. 2 Yu Hua, Huozhe (1993; repr., Shanghai: Shanghai wenyi chubanshe, 2004); translated as Yu Hua, To Live, trans. Michael Berry (New York: Anchor Books, 2003). 3 Hao Ran, “Wode jiaoxun” [Lessons I have learned], in Hao Ran, Hao Ran koushu zizhuan [Hao Ran’s oral autobiography], transcribed by Zheng Shi (Tianjin: Tianjin renmin chubanshe, 2008), 245-58. An exact date is not given for the document. A footnote added to the 2008 edition, which is essentially the same as Hao Ran, Wode rensheng: Hao Ran koushu zizhuan [My life: Hao Ran’s oral autobiography] (Beijing: Huayi chubanshe, 2000), warns the reader that “this confession was written shortly after the fall of the ‘Gang of Four’ and still includes some inappropriate expressions from that time.” Hao, “Wode jiaoxun,” 245. 4 Hao Ran, Shanshui qing (Tianjin: Baihua chubanshe, 1980); Hao Ran, Cangsheng (Beijing: Shiyue chubanshe, 1988). In my June 1996 interview with him, Hao Ran declared himself dedicated to promoting “the literature of the common people” (cangsheng wenxue). 5 Seven short novels from the early 1980s are collected in Hao Ran, Jiabuchuqu de sha yatou [The unmarriageable dimwit girl] (Beijing: Renmin wenxue chubanshe, 1985); the first three volumes of his autobiography were Letu [Joyful earth], Huoquan [Living springs], and Yuanmeng [Dreams come true] (Beijing: Renmin wenxue chubanshe, 1989, 1993, 1998). 6 Shu Suiren, “Guanyu ‘mingzhu’ Jinguang dadao zaiban de duihua” [Dialogue on the republication of the ‘celebrated work’ The Golden Road], Wenxue ziyoutan 4 (Winter 1994): 94. 7 In this respect, Hao Ran was following the urging of Wang Yongsheng of Fudan University, principal author of Jinguang dadao pingxi (see Chapter 5), who had focused a chapter on the Qins in his Cultural Revolution–era analysis of the first two volumes of the novel and regarded them as the most interesting of its characters. It is impossible to know whether Hao Ran took Professor Wang’s suggestions to heart in writing Volume 3. 8 The similarity between Fan Keming’s name and the designation fangeming (counterrevolutionary) is no coincidence: during our August 1995 interview, Hao Ran, temporarily forgetting his villain’s name (the author was already complaining of failing memory at that stage, a condition he attributed to male menopause), referred to him simply as neige fangeming (that counter-revolutionary). 9 Beijing shi Zhong-A youhao renmin gongshe pin, xia-zhong nong pinglun zu [Poor and lower-middle peasant criticism group of the Sino-Albanian Friendship Commune in Beijing Municipality], “Jinguang dadao women zou, feng chui lang da bu hui tou” [We walk the Golden Road, not looking back if winds blow and waves batter us], Renmin dianying, April 1977, 20.

Notes to pages 202-7 251











10 In her analysis of Fyodor Gladkov’s 1925 novel Cement, in many ways the prototype for the novel under Stalin, Katerina Clark observes that the role of the hero is to mobilize worker enthusiasm for mass voluntary labour even as officious bureaucrats tell him that his goal is impossible and accuse him of naïveté and insubordination. Katerina Clark, The Soviet Novel: History as Ritual (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 69-77, esp. page 71. The fourth volume of The Golden Road follows this course. 11 Hao Ran, Jinguang dadao (Beijing: Jinghua chubanshe, 1994), 4:702. This is the novel’s penultimate sentence. 12 Gu Xinmin’s indulgence toward peasant consciousness, as opposed to Gao Daquan’s idealizations of the proletariat, seen in the early encounter at the Beijing railyards in Volume 1 of The Golden Road, is a mark of his conservative thinking: “Gu Xinmin felt that it was all very well for the state to have a plan, but asking that peasants adapt to the demands of a planned economy could only be regarded as a fantasy. Peasants are peasants ... and can’t be changed.” Ibid., 3:252. While Hao Ran was writing, criticism of contemporary capitalistroaders was increasing in the national media. 13 As outlined in Chu Lan, “Suzao wuchanjieji yingxiong dianxing shi shehuizhuyi wenyi de genben renwu” [Portraying proletarian heroic types is the basic task of the socialist arts], Renmin ribao, 15 June 1974. 14 Hao Ran, Jinguang dadao, 3:173; see also 3:178. 15 Ibid., 3:529. 16 Ibid., 3:545-46. 17 Ibid., 4:2. 18 Ibid., 4:272. 19 Ibid., 4:537. 20 In defining the characters who serve as foils for the heroes of Cultural Revolution fiction, Lan Yang applies the term “negative superiors” to figures such as Gu Xinmin. The term “capitalist-roader,” which he also uses, is an anachronism in the case of a novel set in the 1950s. See Lan Yang, Chinese Fiction of the Cultural Revolution (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 1998), 111. 21 Hao Ran, Jinguang dadao, 4:666. 22 Ibid., 3:245. 23 Ibid., 3:246. 24 Ibid., 3:219, 240. 25 Ibid., 4:403. 26 In his study of “hunger, cannibalism, and the politics of eating,” which begins with Lu Xun’s 1917 story “Diary of a Madman” (Kuangren riji) and includes late-twentieth-century fiction, Gang Yue refers to this endlessly deferred gratification as “asceto-Marxism.” Defining this as “the uncritical subordination of material needs to some ‘higher cause,’” he judges it to be “theoretically misconceived and historically disastrous.” Gang Yue, The Mouth That Begs: Hunger, Cannibalism, and the Politics of Eating in Modern China (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999), 14. 27 Hao Ran, Jinguang dadao, 3:558, 560. See Yue, The Mouth That Begs, 363-64, for his discussion of Amy Tan’s dramatization in The Joy Luck Club of cooking one’s own flesh to feed a starving parent. 28 Hao Ran, Jinguang dadao, 4:176. 29 Ibid., 4:55. 30 Ibid., 3:517. 31 Zhang Dexiang, “‘Shenhua’ yu ‘shishi’ – wo kan Jinguang dadao” [“Myth” and “epic” – my reading of The Golden Road], Qingnian wenyijia [Young literati] 2 (1995): 20. 32 Hao Ran, Jinguang dadao, 3:231.

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Notes to pages 207-9

33 Ibid., 3:656. See also 4:51: “Grain is the greatest of all treasures [bao zhong zhi bao], it is the raw material for industry.” 34 Ibid., 3:656. 35 The authors of a history of one Hebei village note that in the following year (1956), as the state insisted the collectives grow larger, those who failed to commit immediately risked being condemned as rightists and that peasants were forced to perform “harsh, semi-militarized labor,” sometimes far from home. Edward Friedman et al., Chinese Village, Socialist State (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991), 218. 36 In his study of the Great Leap and the subsequent famines, Jasper Becker writes, “Even in Beijing there was nothing to eat, while in the countryside just outside the capital peasants who had survived were too weak to plant the new crops or harvest them. In villages a few miles outside Beijing, most peasants were grotesquely swollen by oedema and were dying in sizeable numbers. Grain output plummeted. The reality must have been impossible for anyone to escape.” Jasper Becker, Hungry Ghosts: Mao’s Secret Famine (London: James Murray, 1996), 96. 37 Hao Ran, Wode rensheng, 263. I have translated the full passage in Richard King, “Ro­mancing the Leap: Euphoria in the Moment before Disaster,” in Eating Bitterness: New Perspectives on China’s Great Leap Forward and Famine, ed. Kimberley Ens Manning and Felix Wemheuer (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2010), 81-82. The notorious photograph, distributed by the New China News Agency in 1958, is reproduced on page 65 of Manning and Wemheuer, Eating Bitterness. 38 Hao Ran, “Zhaoxia hong si huo,” first published in the journal Wenyi hongqi [Red flag in the arts] in May 1959, and reprinted in Hao Ran, Xin chun qu [Songs of a new spring] (Beijing: Zhongguo qingnian chubanshe, 1960), 1-33; translated as Hao Ran, “Dawn Clouds Red as Flame,” trans. Haydn Shook with Richard King, Renditions 68 (Autumn 2007): 1749. I have discussed this story in “Romancing the Leap,” in Manning and Wemheuer, Eating Bitterness. Other stories in praise of the Leap, if written, appear not to have found their way into later anthologies. 39 Quoted in Vera Alexandrovna, A History of Soviet Literature 1917-1964 (New York: Doubleday, 1964), 270.

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Index

Note: “(f )” after a number indicates a figure agricultural collectivization. See collectivization Ai Qing: on role of artist, 22; self-image as intellectual, 77; “Understand Authors, Respect Authors,” 21-22; in Yan’an, 21, 77 Ai Siqi, 22 “Analysis of the Classes in Chinese Society” (Zhongguo shehui ge jieji de fenxi; Mao), 128 Anna Karenina (Tolstoy), 50 Anti-Rightist Campaign: and “army of proletarian individuals,” 93; and Ding Ling, 26, 47; focus in literature on, 182; and Great Leap, 73; Li Zhun and, 90; and Red Flag Ballads, 96; surviving authors and new society, 208; and ultra-leftism, 134; and writers, 8; and Xiao Jun, 26; and Zhang Kangkang, 140; and Zhao Shuli, 91 Apter, David, 18 archetypes, 120-22; heroic, 127; peasant, 129-30 Army Cultural Cadres’ Training Group (Budui wenyi ganbu xunlianban), 30 art(s): “budding,” 26; and Communist Party, 28; of Cultural Revolution, 113; for masses, 24-25; national forms in, 26-27; social classes and, 24; traditional forms, 27. See also ballet; literature; opera Assembly of Writers and Artists (Wendaihui), 182 authors. See writers Azalea Mountain (Dujuanshan; opera), 173 Ba Jin, 67, 182 “A Badly Edited Story” (Jianji cuole de gushi; Ru Zhijuan), 185-86 Bai Hua, Unrequited Love (Kulian), 161, 162, 163, 179

Baihuachuan (Hundred Flower Valley; Hao Ran), 234n15 ballet: The Red Detachment of Women (Hongse niangzi jun), 173; The WhiteHaired Girl (Baimao nü), 16, 27, 37, 62, 173; heroines, 173 Becker, Jasper, 181, 224n1, 252n36 Beijing: famines and, 94; famines in, 207; opera, 16, 27, 119, 147; Xidan Democracy Wall, 175 Belden, Jack, 27, 28 Belinsky, Vissarion, 50 Bergman, Ingrid, 97 Bethune, Norman, 134, 194, 216n63 Birch, Cyril, 36, 37, 39, 40, 44 “The Black Flag” (Hei qi; Liu Zhen), 185-86 Blood-Red Sunset (Xuese huanghun; Lao Gui), 155 Bo Yibo, 30, 248n16 Book of Songs, The, 75-76 “Boule de Suif ” (Maupassant), 51-52, 63 “Boy in the Twilight” (Huanghun li de nanhai; Yu Hua), 1, 2 “A Brief Biography of Li Shuangshuang” (Li Zhun), 79-90; about, 11, 71; characters, 81-85; comic-strip version, 88-89; and female emancipation/empowerment, 80-81; film adaptation, 85-88, 89-90, 91-92; folk-song themes in, 76; humour in, 81; in Renmin wenxue, 80, 86, 88, 91; The Story of the Criminal Li Tongzhong compared to, 12, 180, 186; and themes of Great Leap folk-songs, 76; versions of, 71; villages in, 72. See also Li Cuilian (fictional character); Yingning (fictional character); and entries beginning Li Shuangshuang Brief History of Chinese Fiction, A (Lu Xun), 227n22

Index 267

Bright Sunny Skies (Yanyangtian; Hao Ran): about, 113, 208; film version, 13233; land reform in, 116; Liu Heng on, 115; substitute bride story in, 42; Xiao Changchun compared to Gao Daquan, 121, 130 Buck, Pearl, 33 Builders, The (Chuangye shi; Liu Qing): collectivization in, 15, 118; The Golden Road compared to, 129; progressive son/ conservative father duality in, 127-28, 227n28; The Story of the Criminal Li Tongzhong compared to, 193 Campbell, Joseph, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, 121 “Can’t Take That Road” (Li Zhun), 78-79, 106 canteens, 79-80, 85, 86, 90, 91 capitalist-roaders, 138, 140, 142, 162 Chairman Mao’s Red Guard – Study from Comrade Jin Xunhua, Model for Revolutionary Youth (Yi Zhong), 150(f ) “Challenge to the Sun” (poem), 76 Chang, H.C., 83 Chen Boda, 22, 26-27, 91 Chen Guokai: about, 167-69; Cultural Revolution and, 167-68; post-Mao writing by, 9; The Price (Daijia), 12, 16366, 167, 168, 169-75, 178-79, 180, 194; Qin as mentor to, 169; “What Should I Do?” (Wo yinggai zenme ban), 168-69, 170 Chen Sihe, 89-90 Chen Tushou, 91 Chernyshevsky, Nikolay, 50 “The Chimney” (poem), 95-96 civil war: entertainments during, 16; fiction, 31-32; in Hurricane, 64, 67; literature of, 27; proletarians and, 93; and tongsu, 27; writers, 77 Clark, Katerina, 53, 60-61, 101-2, 120 collectivization: in The Builders, 15; dis­banding of, 209; early novels of, 118; end of, 207; enrichment of individuals vs., 118; in The Golden Road, 11, 116, 118, 125, 204, 206, 207; in Great Changes in a Mountain Village, 15; and land ownership, 114; in literature, 114, 120; mythology of, 117; and peasantry, 130,

131, 132, 187; social classes and, 116; traditionalism vs., 128-32; transformation and, 120, 135; Zhou Libo and, 46 Common People, The (Cangsheng; Hao Ran), 199 communism: about, 5-6; in China, 5-6; Great Leap and utopia of, 71; literary output of fascism compared to, 211n7; and road metaphor, 2; and socialist realism, 46; Soviet literature and, 46; in Soviet Union, 5; and writers/artists, 6, 39-40; and writing style, 39-40 Communist Party: arts and, 28; changing view of history, 106; and culture, 27; divisions within, 117, 162; falling-out between Chinese and Soviet, 49; and famines, 181; and goal of communism, 2; in The Golden Road, 205-6; Hao Ran and, 115, 209; in Heroes of Lüliang television series, 44; heroes/heroism and, 142-43; and Hu Wanchun, 106; and Hundred Flowers, 73; intellectuals and, 6, 77; and Li Zhun, 105-6; and literature, 12; Ma Feng and, 30; and Marriage Law, 37; and nation, 32; in The Price, 172; purging of dissenters, 73, 74; and red classics, 65-66; Red Guards and, 137; relationship between Soviet Union and Chinese, 73; rising sun and, 223n49; socialist realism and, 48; and terror/ virtue, 19; and worker-writers, 106; and writers, 8; in Yan’an, 18, 19; and Zhang Zhixin, 175, 178; and Zhao Shuli, 29-30; and Zhou Libo, 50, 52 Comprehensive History of Chinese Literature, 112 Countryside in August (Bayue de xiang­ cun; Xiao Jun), 25-26, 218n84 Countryside Romance (Shanshui qing; Hao Ran), 199 Cultural Revolution: Anti-Rightist Cam­ paign and, 134; arts of, 113; and assault on nature, 137; and Chen Guokai, 16768; and Ding Ling, 26, 47; and The Golden Road, 117; and Hao Ran, 113, 116; and heroes/heroism, 119, 126-27, 141-43, 204; historiographical revision of, 11-12; and Hu Wanchun, 106-7, 113; and leaping into dangerous waters, 14753; and Li Zhun, 72, 79, 106, 107; litera-

268

Index

ture of, 111-12, 113; Mao and, 111; museum, 182; novels of, 11; in post-Mao writing, 182; The Price and, 12, 164, 165, 171-72, 173; and revolutionary realism/ revolutionary romanticism, 74-75; revo­ lutionary romanticism and, 49; and rustication, 111; scholarship on literature of, 111-12; and set patterns/frames (kuangkuang) in literature, 126-27; struggle in fiction of, 136; visual/ performing arts of, 111; witch hunts of, 134-35; women in, 173-74; and workerwriters, 106; and wounds literature, 162, 182; and writers, 8, 112; and Xiao Jun, 26; and Yao Wenyuan, 96; and Zhang Kangkang, 140; and Zhang Zhixin, 17576, 178; and Zhou Libo, 47 Daglish, Robert, 50 La Dame aux Camélias, 174 “Delusion and Dream” (Freud), 184-85 Deng Xiaoping, 134, 142, 143, 174, 198 Denton, Kirk, 21, 25 Devils on the Doorstep (Guizi laile; Jiang Wen), 44 “Diary of a Madman” (Kuangren riji; Lu Xun), 251n26 Dikötter, Frank, Mao’s Great Famine, 181 Ding Ling: Anti-Rightist Campaign and, 26, 47; arrival in Yan’an, 21; Cultural Revolution and, 26, 47; ideological remoulding of, 26; as land-reform cadre, 26; “Miss Sophie’s Diary” (Shafei nüshi riji), 25; on role of artist, 22; self-image as intellectual, 77; The Sun Shines over the Sanggan River (Taiyang zhao zai Sanggan he shang), 26, 46-47, 55, 118, 219n2; “When I Was in Xia Village” (Wo zai Xiacun de shihou), 222n33; in Yan’an, 25-26, 77 Dividing Line, The (Fenjiexian; Zhang), 138-47; about, 11, 113, 114, 158; action, 140-44; characters, 140-44, 155; heroes/ heroism in, 141-43; struggle against nature in, 144-47, 155-56; transformation in, 114; zhiqing in, 138, 149, 151, 156 Dobrenko, Evgeny, 53 Domenach, Jean-Luc, 183, 184, 187 Dong Bing, 82 Du Pengcheng, Protect Yan’an (Baowei Yan’an), 66, 217n67, 219n2

Duan Ruixia, “Tebie guanzhong,” 237n39 “Early Evening” (Hao Ran), 122-23, 124-25 Early Spring in the Second Month (Zaochun eryue; Rou), 65 Emperor to Citizen, From (Wode qian­ bansheng; Pu Yi), 172 Engels, Friedrich, 142 environmentalism, 157-58 Eternal Survival in Fierce Fires (Leihuo zhong yongsheng; film), 176 Everything for the Party (Ba yiqie xian gei dang; Wu Yunduo), 102 Fadeyev, Alexander, 49, 51; The Rout, 25 famines: about, 181-83; and cities, 94; collective vs. individual memories of, 185; Communist Party and, 181; death rates, 94; in The Golden Road, 194; Great Leap and, 73, 90, 181, 207-8; in Henan, 186, 196; lack of record of, 18283, 208; and peasants, 91-92, 183-84, 187-88; in The Story of the Criminal Li Tongzhong, 12, 180, 188-89, 192, 193-95; wounds literature and, 183-84; Zhang Yigong and, 185 farms, state: in The Dividing Line, 9, 11; rustication of zhiqing to, 111, 137, 139, 171 Feng Jicai, 169 Feng Menglong, 27 Feuerwerker, Yi-tsi Mei, 28-29 fiction, authors of, compared with authors of socialist fiction, 10; civil war, 31-32; communist guerrilla “heroes” of war of resistance, 38; of Cultural Revolution, 11; of Great Leap, 10-11, 76; of land reform, 118. See also literature films: Bright Sunny Skies (Yanyangtian), 132-33; Chinese, 65; Eternal Survival in Fierce Fires (Leihuo zhong yongsheng), 176; The Golden Road (Jinguang dadao), 133-34, 194, 201; of Hao Ran novels, 132-34; Hurricane (Baofeng zhouyu), 64-65; Li Shuangshuang, 87-88, 91-92, 105, 183; Pavel Korchagin, 102; The Red Detachment of Women (Hongse niangzi jun), 65; Unrequited Love (Kulian), 161; The White-Haired Girl (Baimao nü), 16, 27, 37; of Xie Tieli, 64-65 Flaubert, Gustave, 51; Madame Bovary, 25

Index 269

“Flesh and Bone” (Gu rou; Hu Wanchun), 97-98 folk-songs: Great Leap and, 74, 76, 94-95; Mao and, 74; and Red Flag Ballads, 7576; revolutionary realism/revolutionary romanticism and, 75; in The Story of the Criminal Li Tongzhong, 191-92; Zhou Yang and, 74 Forced to Ascend Liangshan (Bishang Liangshan; opera), 27 Foreign Languages Press, 227n22 Four Clean-ups movement, 86 free-market economy, 2 Freud, Sigmund, “Delusion and Dream,” 184-85 Friendship Journal (Ewen youhao bao), 208 Friendship Magazine, 115 Frye, Northrop, 236n29 The Gadfly (Niumang; Voynich), 232n33 Gálik, Marián, Milestones in Sino-Western Literary Confrontation, 4 Galikowski, Maria, 76 Gang of Four: The Golden Road and, 134; and Mao succession battle, 142; postMao literature and, 182; in The Price, 171; purge of, 96, 107, 163; Zhang Zhixin and, 178 Gang Yue, 251n26 Gao Daquan (fictional character), 2, 12034, 139, 141, 166, 193-94, 204-6, 209 Gao Erlin (fictional character), 126, 129-32 Gao Gang, 39, 217n67 Gao Gao, 111 Gao Xiaosheng, “Li Shunda Builds a House” (Li Shunda zao wu), 195 Garry, Stephen, 50 “Get Organized” (Zuzhiqilai; Mao), 125, 126 Golden Road, The (Jinguang dadao; Hao Ran), 1, 3(f ), 8, 115; about, 116-17; archetypal peasants in, 129-32; availability of, 111-12; class struggle in, 128; collectivization in, 11, 114, 116, 118, 12526; Communist Party in, 205-6; Cultural Revolution and, 117; as epic and myth, 117; famine in, 194; film versions, 13334, 194, 201; four pairs of brothers in, 128-32; four-volume edition publication, 112, 116, 198; heroes/heroism in,

120-26; land ownership in, 113-14; mar­riage in, 130-31; operatic model, 119-20, 133; peasants in, 114, 116; revolutionary romanticism in, 207; road metaphor and, 2, 125; runaway horse episode, 122-24; struggle in, 117-18, 136; traditionalism vs. collectivism in, 128-32; and transformation, 11, 113-14, 118, 120, 125, 126; volume 2, 199, 201, 205; volume 3, 117, 199-201, 203, 207; volume 4, 117, 201-3; volumes 1-2, 116-17, 203; volumes 3-4, 3, 12, 198, 203-6; Wang Jinxi and, 100. See also Gao Daquan (fictional character); Gao Erlin (fictional character) Gorky, Maxim, 47, 48, 51, 52; The Lives of Remarkable People, 104 “Gradiva: A Pompeiian Fantasy” (Jensen), 184-85 Great Changes in a Mountain Village (Shanxiang jubian; Zhou Libo), 15, 46, 63, 118 Great Leap Forward: about, 71; aim of, 71; authors of, 71-72; in “A Badly Edited Story, 185-86; beginning of, 73; in “The Black Flag,” 185-86; catastrophic results of, 105, 207-8; and cities, 94; and famines, 73, 90, 181, 207-8; fiction, 76; and folksongs, 74, 76, 94-95; Hao and, 207-8; historiographical revision of, 11-12; and Hu Wanchun, 72, 106; ignorance regarding extent of, 207-8; image of, 183; and Li Zhun, 72, 105-6; literary record of, 183; literature of, 68, 71; and “A Man of Outstanding Quality,” 105; Mao and, 184, 186-87; mismanagement of, 105; museum, 182; noodles, 85, 190, 191; and peasants, 73, 91, 187; and poetry, 74; and Red Flag Ballads, 76; and revolutionary realism/revolutionary romanticism, 49; and revolutionary romanticism, 104-7, 183; short stories, 10-11; and socialist realism, 49; and steel, 94; in The Story of the Criminal Li Tongzhong, 12, 180, 186, 193-94; victims of, vs. victims of Cultural Revolution, 183-84; village fiction writers and, 93; women and, 79, 80-81; and writers, 8-9, 72, 77-78; Yao Wenyuan and, 96 Gu Hua, A Small Town Called Hibiscus (Furongzhen), 246n39 Gunn, Edward, 29

270

Index

Guo Moruo: “On Reading New Son and Daughter Heroes,” 40; Red Flag Ballads, 76, 94-96 Guo Xianhong, The Journey, 138, 143, 149, 154(f ), 155 Hao Ran: about, 114-16, 208-9; Baihua­ chuan (Hundred Flower Valley), 234n15; Bright Sunny Skies (Yanyangtian), 42, 113, 115, 116, 121, 130, 132-33, 208; The Common People (Cangsheng), 199; and communism, 208-9; and Communist Party, 115, 209; condemnations of preCultural Revolution writing, 113; Countryside Romance (Shanshui qing), 199; Cultural Revolution and, 113, 116; during Cultural Revolution, 113; and device of local villagers explaining events to narrator, 127; “Early Evening,” 122-23, 124-25; The Golden Road (see The Golden Road [Jinguang dadao; Hao Ran]); and Great Leap, 8, 77, 207-8; on heroes, 121; and iron smelting, 91, 208; Jiabuchuqu de sha yatou (The unmarriageable dimwit girl), 250n5; later writings, 199; Li Zhun on work of, 235n16; as peasant writer, 114-16; and revolutionary romanticism, 115, 127; and social classes, 115-16; as socialist realist, 127; Spring Songs (Chunge ji), 113, 208; as unapologetic for writings, 9; and village life, 115; writings of, 113; Xisha ernü (Sons and daughters of the Xisha Islands), 211n14, 234n15; “Zhaoxia hong si huo,” 227n23 Harkness, Margaret, 142 He Youzhi, Li Shuangshuang, 89 Hebei Daily, 115 Hegel, Robert E., 39, 40, 41 Heller, Leonid, 48 Henan: agricultural production in, 226n7; famine in, 181, 186, 196; Great Leap in, 183, 184, 186; Li Shuangshuang and, 87; Li Zhun and, 72, 82, 90, 105, 112-13; The Story of the Criminal Li Tongzhong and, 186-87, 188 Henan dazhongbao (Henan masses), 187 Henan ribao, 187, 188 Hero with a Thousand Faces, The (Campbell), 121

Heroes of Lüliang (Lüliang yingxiong zhuan; Ma Feng/Xi Rong), 9-10; about, 15-16; action, 32-33; chapters/chapter titles, 33; characters, 33-36, 43; ideological commitment in, 65; Japanese invasion in, 32-33, 38; and martial fiction tradition, 32; narrative cycles, 36; New Son and Daughter Heroes compared to, 38; progressive consciousness in, 32; purpose of, 68; and red classics, 15-16, 65; serialization in Jin-Sui dazhong­bao, 15, 43, 44; Shui­ huzhuan compared to, 16, 17, 31, 32, 36-38, 43, 44, 68; as socialist realism, 65; style of, 45; television adaptation, 17-18, 42-44; tongsu style, 16, 17, 31, 44; traditions represented in, 41; wedding in, 36-38, 39 Heroes and Villains in Communist China (Huang), 4 heroes/heroism: archetypal, 120-22, 127; class enemies of, 140; Communist Party and, 142-43; Cultural Revolution and, 119, 126-27, 140, 141-43, 204; in The Dividing Line, 141-43; in The Golden Road, 139; Mao and, 119; plunging into dangerous water, 147-53; in The Story of the Criminal Li Tongzhong, 193, 196; “three prominences” principle of, 139-40; Zhang Kangkang and, 139-40 heroines: in ballet, 173; in Cultural Revolution literature, 143, 163, 173-74; imprisonment, 175-79; in opera, 173; in Red Crag, 176-78; in The Song of Youth, 176. See also women Hinton, William, 91 History of Contemporary Chinese Literature, A (Hong Zicheng), 151 Holm, David, 27, 52 “Homeland” (Lu Xun), 53-54 “The Homeroom Teacher” (Banzhuren; Liu), 232n33 Hong Zicheng, A History of Contemporary Chinese Literature, 151 Hongnan zuozhan shi (History of battles at Hongnan), 234n14 How to Be a Good Communist (Liu Shaoqi), 192 How the Steel Was Tempered (Ostrovsky), 11, 94, 101-5

Index 271

Hsia, C.T., 25, 224n76 Hsia, T.A., 66 Hu Feng, 32, 50, 96, 231n13 Hu Wanchun: about, 97-98; Communist Party and, 106; on constraints placed on writing, 9; Cultural Revolution and, 106-7, 113; “Flesh and Bone” (Gu rou), 97-98; Great Leap and, 8-9, 72, 77, 106; How the Steel was Tempered and, 101, 102, 103; “A Man of Outstanding Quality,” 11, 93, 98-101, 103, 104, 105, 127, 173; on own writing, 107; and Shanghai industrial working class, 72; Wenhuibao, 97; Yao Wenyuan on second volume of short stories, 96 Hua Guofeng, 203 Hua Sanchuan, 88-89 Huang, Joe C., Heroes and Villains in Communist China, 4 Huang Weilin, 66-67 Huang Yongyu, 161 Huaxia wenzhai, 182 Hundred Flowers, 73, 74, 75, 77, 96, 182 Hung Chang-Tai, 27 Hungry Mountain Village (Ji’e de shancun; Wang Zhiliang), 248n16 Hurricane (Baofeng zhouyu; Zhou): about, 10; action of, 54-55; as film, 64-65; The Golden Road compared to, 116; ideological commitment in, 65; land reform in, 118; landlord in, 42, 57-59, 61-62, 116; mimetic/mythic narratives in, 55-57; as model for Chinese socialist fiction, 46; origin of title/theme, 53; peasants in, 52-53, 54, 55, 56, 58-61, 196-97; purpose of, 68; and red classics, 65; social classes in, 56-57; as socialist realism, 55, 63-64, 65, 67; suffering in, 58-59; T.A. Hsia on, 66; two voices in, 55; Virgin Soil Upturned compared to, 63-64; wins Stalin Prize, 46-47; workteams in, 59, 61, 62-63; Zhou Libo on, 52-53, 54-55 “In Memory of [Dr. Norman] Bethune” (Mao), 134 intellectuals, Communist Party and, 6, 77; Great Leap and, 77; Liu Binyan on, 166-67; Mao and, 214n39; peasants and, 1-2, 24; in The Price, 166-67; workers

vs., 24; in Yan’an, 18-19, 21, 23-24. See also zhiqing Internationale, The, 176 Invisible Companion, The (Yinxing banlü; Zhang Kangkang), 157, 241n12 Ip Hung-Yok, 214n39 iron smelting, 91, 93, 208 irony: in Blood-Red Sunset, 155; in “Li Shunda Builds a House,” 195; in postCultural Revolution literature, 5, 12; in The Price, 12; in The Story of the Criminal Li Tongzhong, 12, 191, 195; Zhang Kangkang and, 158 Japan: collaborators with, 44; invasion, 27, 32-33, 38; occupation, 15-16, 31; war of resistance against, 30, 38, 42, 43, 44 Jensen, Wilhelm, “Gradiva: A Pompeiian Fantasy,” 184-85 Jiabuchuqu de sha yatou (The unmarriage­ able dimwit girl; Hao Ran), 250n5 Jiang, Sister (Jiang jie; fictional character), 176-78 Jiang Qing: arrest of, 198-99; and Beijing opera, 119; The Dividing Line and, 143; and Li Shuangshuang, 87-88; overthrow of, 107; and revolutionary realism/ revolutionary romanticism, 75; and theatrical works/opera, 173; Zhang Zhixin and, 175 Jiang Wen, Devils on the Doorstep (Guizi laile), 44 Jiang Zhuyun, 176 Jiangxi Soviet, 20-21, 26 Jin-Sui dazhongbao, 43, 44 Jinguang dadao pingxi (Wang Yongsheng), 250n7 Journey, The (Guo Xianhong), 138, 143, 149, 154(f ), 155 Journey to the West (Xiyouji), 37, 39, 83 Judd, Ellen, 21 Jung, Carl Gustav, 121, 184 Kang Sheng, 19, 52 Ke Qingshi, 94 Keep the Red Flag Flying (Hongqi pu; Liang), 219n2 Khrushchev, Nikita: condemnation of Stalin, 49, 73; and Mao, 73, 184; and steel industry, 94

272

Index

King, Nicola, 185 King of Trees, The (Zhong Acheng), 243n46 Kong Jue: about, 38-39; New Son and Daughter Heroes (Xin ernü yingxiong zhuan), 17, 37, 38-39, 40, 52 Korchagin, Pavel (fictional character), 11, 101-3 lachrymosity: and La Dame aux Camélias, 174-75; of post-Cultural Revolution writing, 164; of post-Mao writing, 113; in The Price, 163, 165; in The Story of the Criminal Li Tongzhong, 188-89, 194 Lan Yang, 141, 251n20 “A Land of Mystery and Wonder” (Liang Xiaosheng), 242n38 land ownership: in The Golden Road, 11314; individual vs. collective, 113-14; in socialist realism, 10; transformations, 55, 58 land reform: in Bright Sunny Skies, 115, 116; in The Builders, 127; in “Can’t Take That Road,” 78; Ding Ling and, 26; early novels of, 118; in The Golden Road, 126, 129; Hao Ran and, 115; in Hurricane, 54, 59; later authors and, 114; in Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out, 67; novels of, 118; red canon authors and, 66; Virgin Soil Upturned and, 50, 118; in Yuanbao, 57; Zhang Yigong and, 187; Zhou Libo and, 46, 49, 52, 53, 55 landlords: in Bright Sunny Skies, 116; Chen Guokai as son of, 167; in Countryside Romance, 199; in The Golden Road, 116, 117, 118, 121; in Heroes of Lüliang, 3233, 35, 36, 38, 43; in Hurricane, 10, 42, 53, 54-61, 57-59, 61-62, 66, 67; in Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out, 42, 67; overthrow by peasants, 53-54; in The Price, 173; in The White-Haired Girl, 37; Zhou Yang as son of, 49 Lao Gui, Blood-Red Sunset (Xuese huang­hun), 155 Lao Liang de san fu hua (Old Liang’s three paintings), 7(f ) League of Left-wing Writers (Zuolian), 49-50 Lee, Leo Ou-fan, The Romantic Generation of Modern Chinese Writers, 174 Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich, 22, 58, 61, 81, 98

Leyda, Jay, 65, 87 Li Bozhao, 214n27 Li Cuilian (fictional character), 82-83, 84, 85, 87 Li Huanzhi, 64 Li Qingzhao, 175 Li Shizhen, 194 Li Shuangshuang (fictional character), 72-73, 79-86, 90, 98, 106, 183, 190, 191, 225n3 Li Shuangshuang (film), 87-88, 89-90, 9192, 105, 183, 225n3 Li Shuangshuang xiaozhuan (comic-strip), 88-89, 225n3 “Li Shunda Builds a House” (Li Shunda zao wu; Gao Xiaosheng), 195 Li Tongzhong (fictional character), 192-95 Li Tuo, 16 Li Yang, 55 Li Youcai, 29 Li Zhisui, 186 Li Zhun: about, 78-79, 90, 105-6; and AntiRightist Campaign, 208; banishment to Henan, 112-13; “A Brief Biography of Li Shuangshuang” (see “A Brief Biography of Li Shuangshuang” [Li]); “Can’t Take That Road,” 78-79, 106; and canteen movement, 91; and Communist Party, 105-6; on constraints placed on writing, 9; Cultural Revolution and, 72, 79, 106, 107; depicting Henan villages, 71-72; Dong Bing and, 82; and famines, 208; Great Leap and, 8, 72, 92, 105-6; on Hao Ran’s work, 235n16; later work, 45; and Li Cuilian, 82-83, 84, 85; on Li Shuang­ shuang, 81-82; Li Shuangshuang (film), 87-88, 89-90, 91-92, 105, 183, 225n3; Li Shuangshuang xiaozhuan (comic-strip), 88-89, 225n3; “Not That Road,” 117, 193; on own writing, 107; speech at Fourth World Conference on Women, 82; and tongsu fiction, 78; as village fiction writer, 8-9, 77-78, 93; on women, 82; and Yingning, 83-85 Liang Bin, Keep the Red Flag Flying (Hongqi pu), 219n2 Liang Xiaosheng, 104; “A Land of Mystery and Wonder,” 242n38 Lianhuan huabao (journal), 88 Liberation Daily, 21

Index 273

Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out (Sheng-si pilao; Mo Yan), 42, 67-68 Lin Biao: attempted coup by, 139, 163; and battle against nature metaphor, 136; Cultural Revolution and, 134; in The Dividing Line, 145; in post-Mao period, 182; in The Price, 171 Lin Lan, 51-52, 64 Lin Manshu, 66 Lin Shu, 174 Lin Zexu, 194 Link, Perry, 168 literature: “budding,” 26; centrality in humanity vs. state/Communist Party, 161; collectivization movement in, 114; in common language (putonghua), 20; Communist Party and, 12; of Cultural Revolution, 111-12, 113, 126-27; Great Leap and, 68, 71; Mao and, 22-23; for masses, 24-25; May Fourth movement and, 20, 22-23; medieval, 17; peasants in, 29, 53-54; post-Mao, 11-12, 135; Western, 25; written from standpoint of one side in conflict, 65-66; Yan’an Forum and medieval traditions, 17 Literature of Liberated China and Its Popular Traditions (Průšek), The, 16-17 Liu Bairong, What Have We to Fear with the Morning Sun in our Hearts, We Dare to Offer Our Youth for the People, 148-49, 152-53(f ), 155, 156 Liu Binyan, 166-67, 178, 182 Liu Heng, 115 Liu Hulan, 216n63 Liu Qing, The Builders (Chuangye shi), 15, 118, 127-28, 129, 193, 227n28 Liu Shaoqi: and battle against nature metaphor, 136; Cultural Revolution and, 117, 118-19; in The Golden Road, 201; How to Be a Good Communist, 192; wife of, 143 Liu Zhen, “The Black Flag” (Hei qi), 185-86 Liu Zhidan, 39, 217n67 Liu Zhidan (novel), 217n67 Lives of Remarkable People (Gorky), The, 104 Long March, 18, 19, 20, 21, 23, 26 Long Shihui, 169 Lu Ren, 87

Lu Xinhua, “Wounds” (Shanghen), 162, 195-96 Lu Xun: about, 2; A Brief History of Chinese Fiction, 227n22; conflict with Zhou Yang, 50; “Diary of a Madman” (Kuangren riji), 251n26; first collection of fiction, 2; “Homeland,” 53-54; “My Old Home” (Guxiang), 1-2; translation of Fadeyev, 25 Lu Xun Academy of Art and Literature (Luyi): about, 18-19; Kong Jue and, 38; Ma Feng and, 30; Mao as principal, 50; peasant authors and, 28; socialist realism and, 48; Zhou Libo’s lectures at, 51-52; Zhou Yang as principal, 50 Luo Guangbin: Red Crag (Hong yan), 15, 176-78, 219n2 Lysenko, Trofim, 73 Ma Feng: about, 30-31; and Anti-Rightist Campaign, 208; and Communist Party, 30; Cultural Revolution and, 112; as enthusiastic participant in communist revolution, 8; and famines, 208; Heroes of Lüliang (see Heroes of Lüliang [Lüliang yingxiong zhuan; Ma Feng/Xi Rong]); later work, 45; Mao and, 30; as newspaper reporter, 30-31; and propaganda, 30; and rural “potato school,” 77; short stories, 216n63; and village iron smelting, 91; on writing process, 16; Zhao Shuli and, 41, 217n79 MacFarquhar, Roderick, Mao’s Last Revolution, 111 Madame Bovary (Flaubert), 25 “A Man of Outstanding Quality” (Hu Wanchun), 98-101; about, 11, 93-94; exemplary hero/slower-witted narrator formula in, 127; Great Leap and, 105; How the Steel Was Tempered and, 103-4; and later reversal of ideas, 173; Stakhanovites and, 104; working classes in, 72. See also Wang Gang (fictional character) Mao Yuanxin, 175 Mao Zedong: “Analysis of the Classes in Chinese Society” (Zhongguo shehui ge jieji de fenxi), 128; on arts, 19-20, 22-27; on arts workers, 90; on “budding” literature and art, 26; and “Can’t Take

274

Index

That Road,” 106; and class struggle, 91, 115-16; on “cultural army,” 227n24; and Cultural Revolution, 111; and culture, 23; death of, 142; and famines, 181; and folk-songs, 74; and Forced to Ascend Liangshan (Bishang Liangshan), 27; “Get Organized” (Zuzhiqilai), 125, 126; and Great Leap, 183, 184, 186, 187; and heroes/heroism, 119; and Hu Feng, 96; “In Memory of [Dr. Norman] Bethune,” 134; and industrial proletariat, 128-29; and intellectuals, 214n39; Khrushchev and, 73; as leader of Communist Party, 22; and Li Zhun’s “Can’t Take That Road,” 79, 106; Lin’s attempted coup against, 139, 163; and Liu Shaoqi, 11819, 134; and Ma Feng, 30; and Marxism, 22; on masses, 24; and May Fourth literature, 22-23; on peasant revolution, 58; and peasantry, 181; “On the People’s Democratic Dictatorship,” 47; and poetry, 23; and “On Practice” (Shijian lun), 22; Red Guards, 137; on relationship of art to life, 24-25; “Report on an Investigation of the Peasant Move­ment in Hunan,” 53; road metaphor and, 2; and rustication movement, 137; on “six even mores,” 24-25, 72; “Snow” (Xue), 23; and steel industry, 94; and subjection of nature to human will, 136-37; and succession battle, 142; Thought, 22; on Westernized writing, 25; in Yan’an, 18, 22; Yan’an Talks, 5, 10, 19-20, 23-27, 52 Mao’s Great Famine (Dikötter), 181 Mao’s Last Revolution (MacFarquhar/ Schoenhals), 111 Mao’s War against Nature (Shapiro), 136-37, 240n2 marriage: arranged/forced vs. free, 3738, 43; in The Golden Road, 130-31; in Heroes of Lüliang, 37-39, 41-42, 43 “The Marriage of Young Blacky” (Xiao Erhei jeihun; Zhao), 29, 37 masses (dazhong): art for, 24-25; culture for, 27; Li Zhun and, 78; literature for, 24-25; Mao on, 24; national forms and, 26-27; and writers, 40 Maupassant, Guy de, “Boule de Suif,” 51-52, 63 May Fourth movement: characteristics of, 24; and Countryside in August, 26; Jiangxi

Soviet artists and, 21; Mao on literature of, 22-23; Mao’s Talks and, 25, 52; nineteenth-century classics and, 46; and peasants, 53-54; Qu Qiubai on, 20; red classics and, 66-67; subjective style of, 46 McDougall, Bonnie S., 24 Mei Yi, 102 Meng Yue, 16, 17, 44 Milestones in Sino-Western Literary Confrontation (Gálik), 4 “Miss Sophie’s Diary” (Shafei nüshi riji; Ding), 25 Mo Yan, Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out (Sheng-si pilao), 42, 67-68 modernity: in Hurricane, 55, 59; of May Fourth movement, 17; in Sanliwan, 7; tradition vs., 117, 130-32 “Muqin” (Mother; Zhang Yigong), 249n27 “My Old Home” (Guxiang/Lu Xun), 1-2 Nanfang ribao (newspaper), 168 National Defence Literature (Guofang Wenxue), 50, 51 national forms, 26-27 Nationalists, 20, 27, 32, 41, 52 nature, struggle against: in The Dividing Line, 144-47, 155-56; Mao and, 136-37; in “Sandstorm,” 157. See also water, leaping into dangerous New Son and Daughter Heroes (Xin ernü yingxiong zhuan; Kong/Yuan), 17, 37, 38-39, 40, 52 “Not That Road” (Li), 117, 193 novels. See fiction On the Docks (Haigang; opera), 173 “On the People’s Democratic Dictatorship” (Mao), 47 “On Practice” (Shijian lun; Mao), 22 “On Reading New Son and Daughter Heroes” (Guo Moruo), 40 “On the Road at Eighteen” (Yu Hua), 210n2 opera: Azalea Mountain (Dujuanshan), 173; Beijing, 27, 119; On the Docks (Haigang), 173; Forced to Ascend Liangshan (Bishang Liangshan), 27; and heroes/heroism, 119; heroines, 173; Sparks in the Reeds, 42-43; Tracks in the Snowy Forest (Linhai xueyuan), 41; yangge, 27

Index 275

Ostrovsky, Nikolai, 49; How the Steel Was Tempered, 94, 101-5 Ostrovsky, Raisa, 102 Pavel Korchagin (film), 102 peasant writers, 6; about, 28; Hao Ran as, 114-16; Zhao Shuli as, 6, 222n43 peasantry: archetypes, 129-30; in “Can’t Take That Road,” 78-79; collectivization and, 126, 130, 131, 132, 187; famines and, 91-92, 183-84, 187-88; Great Leap and, 73, 91, 187; in Hurricane, 52-53, 55, 56, 58-59, 59-61; intellectuals and, 1-2, 24; in literature, 29, 53-54; Mao and, 53, 58, 181; “mentality” of, 126, 130; over­throw of landlord class, 53, 54; re-education of urban youth from, 137; revolution, 55; in socialist realism, 10; Stalin and, 247n6; women, 82; writers among, 38; Zhao Shuli and, 54; Zhou Libo and, 52-53 Peng Dehuai, 181, 183, 187, 217n67 Peng Ning, Unrequited Love (Kulian), 161, 162, 163 “People Can Certainly Conquer Heaven,” 157 People’s Cinema (Renmin dianying), 201 People’s Communes, 72, 86, 91, 206, 207 People’s Daily, 38, 74, 176-77 People’s Republic, establishment of, 42; and literary intellectuals, 21; Soviet Union and, 2 Ping’an Cinema, 97 poetry: Great Leap and, 74; of Mao, 23; revolutionary idealism and, 74; street, 21 “Politicians and Artists” (Wang Shiwei), 24 post-Mao writing: and Cultural Revolution, 182; lachrymosity of, 113, 164; Li Tongzhong as model hero for, 193; literature of, 11-12, 135; loss of young lives in, 155; The Price and, 172-73; revolutionary realism/revolutionary romanticism compared to, 12; sentimentality of, 9, 163; wounds literature, 162; Zhang Zhixin and, 175 “potato school” (shanyaodanpai), 77 Poverty and Famines (Sen), 184 Price, The (Daijia; Chen Guokai): about, 12, 163; action, 169-71; Communist Party in, 172; Cultural Revolution and,

12, 164, 165, 171-72, 173; intellectuals in, 166-67; lachrymosity in, 163, 165; revolutionary romanticism and, 172; sentimentality in, 163, 174, 194; social classes in, 173; The Story of the Criminal Li Tongzhong compared to, 180, 194; suicide note in, 164-65, 166; television adaptation, 169, 179; women characters in, 174-75; and world turned upside down, 171-72; as wounds fiction, 168; Zhang Zhixin and, 175-79. See also Xu Kewen (fictional character); Yu Lina (fictional character) proletarian realism. See socialist realism proletarian writers. See worker-writers proletariat. See workers/working class propaganda: Chen Guokai and, 167, 168; famines and, 183; of Great Leap, 183, 190; Heroes of Lüliang as, 37; Hu Wanchun and, 90, 106, 107; in Jiangxi Soviet, 20-21; leaping into dangerous waters as, 147, 155; Li Shuangshuang story and film as, 89, 90; Li Zhun and, 90, 107; Ma and, 30; parodied by Zhang Yigong, 190, 191; peasant authors and, 28; The White-Haired Girl as, 27; worker-writers and, 106 Protect Yan’an (Baowei Yan’an; Du Pengcheng), 66, 217n67, 219n2 Průšek, Jaroslav, 27, 36, 39, 40, 44, 67, 68; The Literature of Liberated China and Its Popular Traditions, 16-17 Pu Songling, Strange Tales from Liaozhai (Liaozhai zhiyi), 83-85 Pu Yi, Aisin Gioro, From Emperor to Citizen (Wode qianbansheng), 172 Qian Zhongshu, 67 Qin Zhaoyang, 75, 169 Qingming festival, 180, 185 Qingping shantang huaben (Huaben [vernacular storyteller tales] from the Qingping studio), 83 Qu Bo, Tracks in the Snowy Forest (Linhai xueyuan), 41, 45, 59, 219n2 Qu Qiubai, 20-21, 22 Ragvald, Lars, 93, 106 realism: changes in definitions of, 75; revolutionary romanticism vs., 75; Yuan Jing and, 40. See also socialist realism

276

Index

Rectification Campaign: about, 19-20; Communist Party and, 18; and humanistic style of Zhou Libo’s lectures, 52; traditional forms of literature following, 27; and Zhao Shuli, 29 Red Army, 28, 93 red classics (hongse jingdian): about, 4, 10, 15, 65-68; availability of, 111; Communist Party and, 65-66; and concurrence of reader with author’s views, 65-66; criticisms of, 66; Heroes of Lüliang and, 65; Hurricane and, 65; lack of transcendance of, 68; later fiction vs., 67; May Fourth literature and, 66-67; quality of, 68; socialist realism and, 49; traditional narrative in, 41; writers of, 66-67; Zhou Libo in, 46 Red Crag (Hongyan; Luo/Yang), 15, 176-78, 219n2 Red Detachment of Women, The (Hongse niangzi jun): ballet, 173; film, 65 Red Flag (Hongqi), 91, 115 Red Flag Ballads (Zhou Yang/Guo Moruo), 75-76, 91, 94-96, 104, 179, 183, 191 Red Guards, 137, 138, 162 ren (humanity), 161, 163 Renmin wenxue (literary journal), 80, 86, 88, 91 “Report on an Investigation of the Peasant Movement in Hunan” (Mao Zedong), 53 revolution, periods of, 3-4 revolutionary popular literature (geming tongsu wenxue), 16, 17, 20-21, 40-42, 44-45, 46, 67 revolutionary realism/revolutionary romanticism: about, 74-75; and “A Man of Outstanding Quality,” 98; post-Mao writing compared to, 12; and Red Flag Ballads, 76; socialist realism and, 49; as successor to socialist realism, 5 revolutionary romanticism: about, 90-92; in The Golden Road, 207; Great Leap and, 183; and Great Leap writers, 104-7; Hao Ran and, 115, 127; predominance of, 75; and The Price, 172; realism vs., 75; in The Story of the Criminal Li Tongzhong, 191-92; Zhang Kangkang and, 157 “Rhymes of Li Youcai” (Li Youcai banhua; Zhao Shuli), 29 rising sun metaphor, 2, 56

road, as metaphor, 2-3, 5, 8, 208-9 Robespierre, Maximilien, 19 Robin, Régine, 55 Rolland, Romain, 96 Romantic Generation of Modern Chinese Writers, The (Lee), 174 Rou Shi, Early Spring in the Second Month (Zaochun eryue), 65 Rout, The (Fadeyev), 25 Ru Zhijuan, “A Badly Edited Story” (Jianji cuole de gushi), 185-86 rustication: about, 21; Cultural Revolution and, 111; as disillusionment/waste, 114; in The Dividing Line, 11, 138; Hua and, 203; transformation of, 114; of zhiqing, 137-38 Sakharov, Andrei, 226n7 “Sandstorm” (Zhang Kangkang), 157 Sanliwan (Zhao Shuli), 6-8 Schoenhals, Michael, Mao’s Last Revolution, 111 Sen, Amartya, Poverty and Famines, 184 sentimentality: in post-Mao literature, 12, 163; in The Price, 163, 174, 194; in The Story of the Criminal Li Tongzhong, 193, 194, 195. See also lachrymosity; wounds literature (shanghen wenxue) Shajiabang, 42 Shanghai: in The Dividing Line, 140, 143, 144; famines and, 94; folk-songs collected in, 94-95; Hu Wanchun and, 72, 97, 105, 107, 113; intelligentsia in Yan’an, 18; in “A Man of Outstanding Quality,” 11, 72, 77, 93-94, 98, 99-100, 105; Ping’an Cinema, 97; and socialist realism, 48; worker-writers in, 93, 106; Writers’ Union, 96; Zhaoxia series, 107; and Zhou Libo, 46, 49, 50; and Zhou Yang, 49-50 Shanxi Writers’ Association, 112 Shanxi-Suiyuan Masses (Jin-Sui dazhong­ bao), 30-31 Shao Quanlin, 91 Shapiro, Judith, Mao’s War against Nature, 136-37, 240n2 Sholokhov, Mikhail, 49, 64, 68, 208-9; Virgin Soil Upturned, 50, 63, 118 Shostakovich, Dmitri, 64 Shuihuzhuan: characters in, 33; Forced to Ascend Liangshan and, 27; Heroes of

Index 277

Lüliang compared to, 16, 17, 31, 32, 3638, 43, 44, 68; heroic tradition in, 60; Mao and, 23; New Son and Daughter Heroes and, 39, 40; recycling of stories from, 20; Tracks in the Snowy Forest compared to, 41 Sister Jiang, 176 Small Town Called Hibiscus, A (Furong­ zhen; Gu Hua), 246n39 Smedley, Agnes, 18, 50 Snow, Edgar, 18, 23 “Snow” (Xue) (Mao), 23 social classes: and arts, 24; and collectivization, 116; in The Dividing Line, 144; in The Golden Road, 128; Hao Ran and, 115-16; and hero, 140; in Hurricane, 5657; Mao on, 24, 91, 115-16; in “My Old Home,” 1-2; in The Price, 173 socialist realism: climax/finale of plot, 61; and Communist Party, 48; consciousness vs. spontaneity in, 58, 60-61, 125; defined, 47-48; Great Leap literature vs., 74; Hao Ran and, 127; Heroes of Lüliang and, 65; history in China, 48-49; Hurri­cane as, 46-47, 55, 63-64, 65, 67; land ownership in, 10; mimetic/mythic narratives in, 55; as myth making, 48, 57; nineteenth-century classics and, 46; peasants in, 10; proletarian realism and, 26; and realism of socialist age, 75; and revolutionary realism/revolutionary romanticism, 5, 49; as romanticism, 48; Sholokhov and, 50; Soviet, and Chinese socialist fiction, 46, 47; Soviet vs. Chinese, 10; in Soviet Union, 5, 47-49; Stalin Prize and, 47; tension between components of name, 48, 49; tongsu style vs., 41-42; Zhang Kangkang and, 157; Zhang Yigong and, 195-97; Zhou Yang on, 26, 47 Son and Daughter Heroes (Ernü yingziong zhuan), 38, 40, 42 Song of the Dragon River (Longjiang song; opera), 147-48, 151, 155, 173, 193-94; comic-book version of, 149(f ) Song of Youth, The (Qingchun zhi ge; Yang Mo), 15, 176 Soviet Union: “bolsheviks” in Yan’an, 19; canon, 5; communism in, 5; Hu Wanchun and literary models of, 98, 101-5; Mao on those returning from, 22; and

People’s Republic, 2; socialist realism in, 5, 47-49; steel industry, 94 Soviet Writers’ Congress, 48 Sparks in the Reeds (Lutang huozhong), 41-42 Spring Songs (Chunge ji; Hao), 113, 208 Stakhanov, Alexei, 104 Stalin, Joseph: Khrushchev’s criticisms of, 49, 73; and peasantry, 247n6; and socialist realism, 47; speech at Lenin’s funeral, 98 Stalin Prize, 46-47 Statute of the Union of Soviet Writers, definition of socialist realism, 48 steel industry: Great Leap and, 73, 94; in How the Steel Was Tempered, 100-4; Hu Wanchun and, 97; in “A Man of Out­standing Quality,” 93, 98-100; in Shanghai folk-songs, 95 Steiner, George, 5 Stendahl, 51, 96 The Story of the Criminal Li Tongzhong (Zhang Yigong): about, 12, 180; action, 188-92; animals in, 187; Communist Party secretary in, 206; famine in, 12, 180, 188-89, 192, 193-95; Great Leap in, 12, 179, 180, 185-86, 193-94; heroes/ heroism in, 193, 196; irony in, 195; lachrymosity in, 188-89; origins of story, 188; peasants in, 187-88; sentimentality in, 193, 195; and wounds literature, 180, 188 Strange Tales from Liaozhai (Liaozhai zhiyi; Pu Songling), 83-85 struggle: in Cultural Revolution fiction, 136; in The Dividing Line, 138, 144-47, 155-56; with elements, 136-37; in The Golden Road, 136; in The Journey, 138; against nature, 144-47, 155-56, 157; in “Sandstorm,” 157 The Sun Shines over the Sanggan River (Taiyang zhao zai Sanggan he shang; Ding Ling), 26, 46-47, 55, 118, 219n2 Sun Yu, 133, 248n16 Taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy (Zhiqu Weihushan; opera), 41, 119, 236n35 tears. See lachrymosity “Tebie guanzhong” (Duan Ruixia), 237n39 Teiwes, Frederick C., 118, 213n19, 248n16

278

Index

television: adaptation of Heroes of Lüliang, 17-18, 42-44; adaptation of The Price, 169, 179; red classics series, 15 Three Kingdoms (Sanguo), 17, 23, 41, 60 Times Gone By (Liushi de suiyue), 179 Titanic Struggle (Longhu dou; Zhou Libo), 219n3 To Live (Huozhe; Yu), 198 Tolstoy, Leo, 68; Anna Karenina, 50 tongsu literature/style: about, 27, 44-45; chapter titles formed by paired sentences, 33, 67; decline of, 42; of Heroes of Lüliang, 16, 17, 31, 44; Hsia on, 25; and Hurricane, 67; Li Zhun and, 78; and Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out, 42, 67; New Sons and Daughter Heroes and, 40; and revolutionary popular literature, 44-45; socialist realism vs., 41-42; in Tracks in the Snowy Forest, 41 Tracks in the Snowy Forest (Linhai xueyuan; Qu Bo), 41, 45, 59, 219n2 tradition: agricultural collectivization vs., 128-32; modernity vs., 117, 130-32; Yan’an Forum and, 17 transformation: about, 11; collectivization and, 120; The Dividing Line and, 11, 113, 114; The Golden Road and, 11, 113-14, 118, 120, 125, 126; of land ownership, 55; Mao on own, 23-24; of rustication movement, 114; and socialist novels, 120; of turnabouts, 132; of view of social movements, 114 “Understand Authors, Respect Authors” (Ai Qing), 21-22 Unrequited Love (Kulian; Bai Hua/Peng Ning), 161, 162, 163, 179 USSR. See Soviet Union village fiction writers (xiangtu zuojia): about, 8-9, 77-78; Li Zhun as, 93, 106; roles of, 93; worker-writers compared to, 105 Virgin Soil Upturned (Sholokhov), 50, 63, 118 Voynich, Ethel, The Gadfly (Niumang), 232n33 Wagner, Rudolf, 103 Wang, David Der-wei, 32 Wang Anyi, 169

Wang Gang (fictional character), 98-101 Wang Guangmei, 143 Wang Guofu, 116, 120-21, 166 Wang Jinxi, 100 Wang Meng, 135 Wang Ruowang, 245n30 Wang Shiwei: arrival in Yan’an, 21; “Polit­ icians and Artists,” 24; on popular forms, 27; on role of artist, 21; and separation of roles of politicians and artists, 22; and suppression of dissent, 213n15 Wang Xiaoying, 156 Wang Yongsheng, Jinguang dadao pingxi, 250n7 Wang Zhiliang, Hungry Mountain Village (Ji’e de shancun), 248n16 Warsaw Pact, 17 water, leaping into dangerous, 147-53 “We Must Struggle for the Truth” (Yao wei zhenli er douzheng), 176 Wenhuibao, 97 What Have We to Fear with the Morning Sun in our Hearts, We Dare to Offer Our Youth for the People (Liu Bairong), 148-49, 152-53(f ), 155, 156; – Study from the Eleven Urban Youths of the Huang­shan Tea Plantation Who Feared Neither Hardship nor Death, 148-49, 152-53(f ), 155 “What Instructor Bu Gao Thought” (Hu Wanchun), 102 “What Should I Do?” (Wo yinggai zenme ban; Chen Guokai), 168-69, 170 “When I Was in Xia Village” (Wo zai Xiacun de shihou; Ding Ling), 222n33 White House (Baigongguan), 176 The White-Haired Girl (Baimao nü), 16, 27, 37, 62, 173 Witke, Roxanne, 119 women: “first” (nüjie di’yi), 80; and gender roles in literature, 163; and Great Leap, 79; in Great Leap workforce, 80-81; heroines in opera, 173; Li Zhun on, 82; mistreatment of, 166; peasants, 82; in The Price, 174-75; as victims, 174-75. See also heroines work-teams: in Hurricane, 54, 56, 57-63, 64; Wang Guangmei and, 143; Zhou Libo and, 49, 53, 57. See also zhiqing worker-writers: about, 8-9; Communist Party and, 106; Cultural Revolution and,

Index 279

106; Hu Wanchun as, 93-94, 97-98, 105; village writers compared to, 105; Yao Wenyuan on, 96 workers/working class: and beauty, 96; intellectuals vs., 24; “A Man of Out­ standing Quality” and, 72, 98; as Stakhanovites, 104; writers from, 8-9, 77 World Conference on Women, Fourth, Beijing, 1995, 82 “Wounds” (Shanghen; Lu Xinhua), 162, 195-96 wounds literature (shanghen wenxue): about, 162; archaeology metaphor in, 185; Cultural Revolution in, 182; and famines, 183-84; as lachrymose, 163; The Price as, 168; “Shanghen” and, 195-96; The Story of the Criminal Li Tongzhong and, 180; themes of, 168; tragedies of Cultural Revolution and, 178; “What Should I Do?” and, 16869; Zhang Zhixin and, 175. See also lach­r ymosity; sentimentality writers: Anti-Rightist Campaign and, 8; of civil war, 77; communism and, 6, 39-40; Communist Party and role of, 8; concurrence of reader with views of, 65-66; criticism/persecution of, 8; Cultural Revolution and, 8, 112; Great Leap, 8-9, 71-72, 77-78; ill-treatment of, 112-13; interviewing, 9-10; of late 20th/ early 21st centuries, 67; masses and, 40; outside Yan’an, 29-30; peasant, 6; proletarian, 77-78; of red classics, 6667; of socialist fiction, 10; state and, 8-9; transformation from bourgeois to proletarian, 20; from villages, 8-9, 77-78; from working classes, 8-9, 77. See also peasant writers; village fiction writers; worker-writers Wu Ching-po, Lao Liang de sanfu hua (Old Liang’s three paintings), 7(f ) Wu Wenhuan, Zhang Zhixin, 177 Wu Yunduo: Everything for the Party (Ba yiqie xian gei dang), 102 Wu Zhipu, 94, 186-87, 189, 226n7 Xi Rong: about, 30-31; Cultural Revolution and, 112; Heroes of Lüliang (see Heroes of Lüliang [Lüliang yingxiong zhuan; Ma/Xi]); as newspaper reporter, 30-31; Zhao Shuli and, 217n79

Xiang Mei, 179 Xiang Yu, 87 Xiao Jun: about, 25-26; Anti-Rightist Campaign and, 26; arrival in Yan’an, 21; Countryside in August (Bayue de xiangcun), 25-26, 218n84; Cultural Revolution and, 26; ideological remoulding of, 26; in Yan’an, 25-26 Xiao San, 74 Xiao Yongshun, 208 Xie Jin, The Red Detachment of Women (Hongse niangzi jun): as ballet, 173; as film, 65 Xie Tieli: and Early Spring in the Second Month (Zaochun eryue), 65; and Hurricane, 64-65 Xisha ernü (Sons and daughters of the Xisha Islands; Hao Ran), 211n14, 234n15 Xu Kewen (fictional character), 164-65, 166, 167, 169-71, 172, 173, 174 Xu Xueqing, 27 Yan Jiaqi, 111 Yan’an, intellectuals in, 18-19, 21, 23-24; repression in, 19; as revolutionary base, 18. See also Lu Xun Academy of Art and Literature (Luyi) Yan’an Forum on Literature and Art: and Heroes of Lüliang, 15-16, 22, 23-27; Mao’s Talks, 5, 10, 19, 39-40; and medieval traditions, 17; and revolutionary popular literature, 16; Zhou Libo and, 52-53 Yang, Gladys, 227n22 Yang Heling, 40 Yang Kuisong, 223n53 Yang Mo, The Song of Youth (Qingchun zhi ge), 15, 176 Yang Xianyi, 227n22 Yang Yiyan: Red Crag (Hong yan), 15, 17678; Red Crag (Hongyan), 219n2 yangge, 27, 32, 45 Yao Wenyuan: about, 96; and “The Chimney,” 96; criticism of Hao Ran, 116; and Great Leap, 96; on Hao Ran’s stories, 115; and Hu Feng, 96, 231n13; and Hu Wanchun, 96, 107; on proletarian arts, 96 Ye Qun, 175 Ye Shengtao, 115; “Three to Five Bushels More,” 53-54

280

Index

Yi Zhong, Chairman Mao’s Red Guard – Study from Comrade Jin Xunhua, Model for Revolutionary Youth, 150(f ) Yingning (fictional character), 83-85, 87 Yu the Great, 120 Yu Hua: “Boy in the Twilight” (Huanghun li de nanhai), 1, 2; To Live (Huozhe), 198; “On the Road at Eighteen,” 210n2 Yu Huiyong, 198-99 Yu Lina (fictional character), 164-65, 166, 171, 173-75, 178-79 Yuan Jing: about, 38-39; New Son and Daughter Heroes (Xin ernü yingxiong zhuan), 17, 37, 38-39, 40, 52 Yuanbao: land-reform movement in, 52-53, 54, 57; Zhou Libo in, 52, 54 Yue Fei, 20 Zhang Chunqiao, 231n13 Zhang Dexiang, 75, 117, 206-7 Zhang Henshui, 78 Zhang Kangkang: about, 138-40; attitudes in writing of, 9; Cultural Revolution and, 140; The Dividing Line (see The Dividing Line [Fenjiexian; Zhang]); on early postCultural Revolution writing, 161; as environmentalist, 157-58; and hero, 13940; The Invisible Companion (Yinxing banlü), 157, 241n12; and literary styles, 250n1; memoir, 139, 157-58, 161; “Sand­storm,” 157; writings, 139-40, 156; as zhiqing, 139 Zhang Ruifang, 87, 225n3 Zhang Yigong: about, 187-88, 249n27; and collectivization, 187; and famines, 185, 196, 248n16; and folk-songs, 19192; and hero, 196; “Muqin” (Mother), 249n27; post-Mao writing of, 9; and socialist realism, 195-97; The Story of the Criminal Li Tongzhong (See The Story of the Criminal Li Tongzhong [Zhang]) Zhang Zhixin, 175-79 Zhang Zhixin (Wu), 177 Zhao Shuli: about, 6, 28-30; Communist Party and, 29-30; Cultural Revolution and, 112; later work, 45; and Ma Feng, 41, 217n79; “The Marriage of Young Blacky” (Xiao Erhei jeihun), 29, 37; as peasant author, 222n43; and peasant subject, 54; on peasant suffering during

Great Leap, 91; and People’s Communes, 91; “Rhymes of Li Youcai” (Li Youcai banhua), 29; Sanliwan, 6-8; Shao Quanlin’s criticism of, 91; and Xi Rong, 217n79; Zhou Yang on, 17 “Zhaoxia hong si huo” (Hao Ran), 227n23 Zhaoxia series, 107 Zhazidong Prison, 176 Zhdanov, Andrei, 47-48, 51, 52, 55, 105 zhiqing: about, 137-38; in The Dividing Line, 138, 143-44; and environment, 157-58; memoirs, 155; rape of female, 245n29; as victims, 162; at war with elements, 148, 155; Zhang Kangkang and, 139, 156 Zhong Acheng, The King of Trees, 243n46 Zhong Xinghuo, 87 Zhou Enlai: and Great Leap, 183; on Li Shuangshuang, 225n3; and Mao succession battle, 142; The Price and, 173; wounds literature and, 162 Zhou Libo: about, 46, 49, 50, 52-53; adoption of name Libo, 50; and Agnes Smedley, 50; anti-communist reading of fiction, 224n74; character of Xiao as, 59; and Communist Party, 50, 52; in communist revolution, 8; Cultural Revolution and, 47, 112; death of, 9; Great Changes in a Mountain Village (Shanxiang jubian), 15, 46, 63, 118; Hurricane (see Hurricane [Baofeng zhouyu; Zhou Libo]); in land-reform team, 52, 57; lectures at Lu Xun Academy, 30, 51-52, 54; on life-art relationship, 52; and Maupassant’s “Boule de Suif,” 51-52, 63; and peasants, 52-53; “Selections from Famous Works” (Mingzhu xuandu), 30, 51-52, 54; Titanic Struggle (Longhu dou), 219n3; translations, 50, 63; and Western enlightenment thinking, 50; and Western literature, 51; in Yan’an, 50; and Yan’an Forum, 52-53; in Yuanbao village, 52, 54, 57; Zhou Yang and, 49 Zhou Wen, 30-31, 44 Zhou Xiaoyi, 9 Zhou Yang: about, 49-50; and “army of proletarian individuals,” 77, 93; and Ding Ling, 47; fall of, 74, 107; and folk-songs, 74, 94-96; and Great Leap, 49; and Hu Feng, 50; and Hundred

Index 281

Flowers, 77; introduction of socialist realism, 48, 49; and Lu Xun, 50; Mao and, 22; and national forms, 26; as Party’s literary authority, 17; peasant metaphor, 45; as principal of Lu Xun Academy, 50; and Red Flag Ballads, 76, 94-96; and socialist realism, 26, 47, 50;

and Soviet literature, 47, 50; and Stalin Prize, 47; and Yan’an intellectual elite, 29; on Zhao Shuli, 17; and Zhou Libo, 49 Zhu De, 21, 142 Zhu Lin, 169 Žižek, Slavoj, 104 Zuopin (journal), 168

Contemporary Chinese Studies

Glen Peterson, The Power of Words: Literacy and Revolution in South China, 1949-95 Wing Chung Ng, The Chinese in Vancouver, 1945-80: The Pursuit of Identity and Power Yijiang Ding, Chinese Democracy after Tiananmen Diana Lary and Stephen MacKinnon, eds., Scars of War: The Impact of Warfare on Modern China Eliza W.Y. Lee, ed., Gender and Change in Hong Kong: Globalization, Postcolonialism, and Chinese Patriarchy Christopher A. Reed, Gutenberg in Shanghai: Chinese Print Capitalism, 1876-1937 James A. Flath, The Cult of Happiness: Nianhua, Art, and History in Rural North China Erika E.S. Evasdottir, Obedient Autonomy: Chinese Intellectuals and the Achievement of Orderly Life Hsiao-ting Lin, Tibet and Nationalist China’s Frontier: Intrigues and Ethnopolitics, 1928-49 Xiaoping Cong, Teachers’ Schools and the Making of the Modern Chinese Nation-State, 1897-1937 Diana Lary, ed., The Chinese State at the Borders Norman Smith, Resisting Manchukuo: Chinese Women Writers and the Japanese Occupation Hasan H. Karrar, The New Silk Road Diplomacy: China’s Central Asian Foreign Policy since the Cold War Richard King, ed., Art in Turmoil: The Chinese Cultural Revolution, 1966-76 Blaine R. Chiasson, Administering the Colonizer: Manchuria’s Russians under Chinese Rule, 1918-29 Emily M. Hill, Smokeless Sugar: The Death of a Provincial Bureaucrat and the Construction of China’s National Economy Kimberley Ens Manning and Felix Wemheuer, eds., Eating Bitterness: New Perspectives on China’s Great Leap Forward and Famine Helen M. Schneider, Keeping the Nation’s House: Domestic Management and the Making of Modern China James A. Flath and Norman Smith, eds., Beyond Suffering: Recounting War in Modern China

Elizabeth R. VanderVen, A School in Every Village: Educational Reform in a Northeast China County, 1904-31 Norman Smith, Intoxicating Manchuria: Alcohol, Opium, and Culture in China’s Northeast Juan Wang, Merry Laughter and Angry Curses: The Shanghai Tabloid Press, 1897-1911