Introduction

The awesome energy of eight hundred million people, when finally harnessed for a unified purpose, burst forth in many startling ways. Scattered creative forces, long handicapped by the stringencies of a protracted war and kept underground in most areas of China until 1949, burgeoned soon after the Liberation. Nationwide campaigns to increase production on the literary front and corresponding drives to improve literacy spurred the publication of thousands of volumes in all genres. Some of these works had ephemeral lives, some had stormy careers, and others traced a rather curious course of disappearance and reappearance.

What is in these thousands of volumes? The stories, plays, and verses of modern China portray a human drama of astonishing magnitude. Their settings range from the heart of Peking to the frontiers of Tibet and Sinkiang. Their action might center around victory over enemy secret agents or the participation of intellectuals in physical labor. But the numerous variations generally stem from five major historical themes:

1. The Communist revolution up to 1949. This category includes works about the early underground urban struggle (for example, Ou-yang Shan’s saga A Generation of Noble Souls), the guerrilla war against the Japanese and the Kuomintang in the 1930s (the Peking opera The Red Lantern) , and the war in the 1940s (Chiin Ch’ing’s “Dawn on the River”).

2. The land reform experience, shortly before and after 1949. This era, which was as violent as the first, is the focus of works such as Ting Ling’s Stalin Prize-winning novel, The Sun Shines over theSangkan River, and Liu Ch’ing’s The Builders.

3. The Chinese Communist participation in the Korean War—the early 1950s. Liu Pai-yü’s “On the Dusty Road” and Yang Shuo’s A Thousand Miles of Lovely Land are two of the works that depict the men and women involved in combat or in support of the war effort.

4. The socialist reconstruction of the country—an ongoing process since 1949. The feverish activities of building up a new socialist society on the agricultural and industrial fronts have inspired by far the largest group of works, including Sha Ting’s “Try and Catch Me” and Hsiao Chiin’s Coal Mines in May.

5. The continuing need for socialist education of the masses. “Be Alert Against Enemy Spies,” screams a ubiquitous poster in the People’s Republic of China. And numerous stories and plays, particularly those aimed at younger readers, also concentrate on the need to guard against imperialist (American) and counterrevolutionary (Kuomintang) spies, like the one in Malchinhu’s “On the Kolchin Grasslands.” The need to maintain the fight against the corrupting influences of urban life has been equally important, and multitudinous works have been written to exhort junior high school students to settle on the communes as peasants or to work in frontier areas. Ch’en Yiin’s The Young Generation is an example.

Despite Mao’s 1942 decree that all works must be written for the proletariat, not all the literature that followed was aimed at the amorphous masses of barely literate peasants, workers, and soldiers. Some works were clearly intended for the cadres and students—a more sophisticated segment formerly known as the “petty-bourgeois intellectuals.” In the post-1949 works, complications along the road to socialist success provided themes for the development of complex characters, both heroic and villainous, and enabled authors to demonstrate their awareness of what real life entailed, although their attempts at in-depth realism often brought them political misfortune. The waxing and waning of the writer’s political fortune follow a course that at times seems tortuous and bizarre; the history of literature in the People’s Republic of China has certainly been no less tumultuous than that of Communist politics, wherein one leadership has replaced another as rapidly as meetings could be held.

WAVES OF CONTROVERSY

Politico-literary arguments in Communist China have covered the entire range of socialist theories, reviving at different times all the pertinent issues ever raised by Engels, Trotsky, Stalin, and Mao Tse-tung. Once the old society began to crumble, literary and artistic energies heretofore spent on exposés, criticism, and satire were put to the service of the revolution and its guiding light, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). The creation of a proletarian literature became the subject of intense debates. What should be considered an acceptable degree of realism? How much emphasis should be placed on the positive side of life? To what extent should a work adhere to Engels’ interpretation of typicality? Clearly, political dicta had to be formulated to guide literary activities.

Every writer in China accepts the socialist goal as the ideal for a new Chinese society and agrees that his duty is to work toward that goal. But the authorities cannot always make specific assignments, and the writers themselves cannot always agree precisely what and how they should write in support of the revolution. Many writers see imperfections in reality; political authorities, on the other hand, insist on the need to be positive, to exhort readers to follow an infallible Party and its ideology. Hence the recurrent argument concerning the “depth of realism.” Many writers see human nature as complex—nonstereotyped, but with some fundamental traits that are universal; the Communist Party, however, insists on the social class theory as the only correct, true, and adequate explanation of human nature. Hence the quarrel about “middle characters” in literature—those who are neither heroes nor villains. While the writers see the reality of man in such a way as to preclude the existence of perfect heroes, proletarian or not, the Party insists on presenting models for the masses to emulate; the result is the quarrel over whether all heroes should be “red-faced”—suntanned, fearless, almost superhumanly powerful—as they are in every revolutionary opera. Many writers feel impelled to write about the unhappiness of their characters, which they see as the result of the uncertainties and contradictions that can exist in any society. Thus, even though their characters are supposed to be living in a new and more perfect society, the exposure of their unhappiness is not intended as a criticism against communism. But the Party insists on drawing a sharp line, saying that any innuendo, however subtle, that casts a shadow over the Party’s perfect wisdom immediately makes the writer an enemy of the people. The theory of two kinds of contradiction was first proposed by Mao Tse-tung, who made a distinction between a contradiction within the people (a difference of opinion to be peaceably resolved among comrades all devoted to communism) and a contradiction between the people and their enemy (an irreconcilable difference that must be struggled against without reserve). Since only the Party Central had the power to make such distinctions, many serious writers who had tried to decide the issue for themselves were charged with sedition, despite the fact that they had been veteran Party members and had even risked their lives time and again for the Party.

In short, these issues revolve around three basic questions—the same questions Mao Tse-tung dealt with in his talks at the Yenan Forum on Literature and Art back in 1942. Which comes first, political ideology or literary art? Besides the life of the proletariat, what else is permissible in literature? Can there be characters whose behavior and motivation are more complex than what is easily explained by the class theory? In 1942 Mao’s own answers to these questions were already quite explicit, but, typically, not without tactical flexibility. Since then, Party-appointed literary authorities have interpreted the Yenan Talks to suit changing political needs, implementing a now more, now less, rigid policy based on “revolutionary realism plus revolutionary romanticism.” The former allows realism only to the extent that it will aid the revolution; the latter encourages exaggeration of the hero-villain contrast only so long as it, too, serves the revolution.

The controversies during the past three decades have arisen like waves in a troubled sea, repetitive and persistent, with only brief lulls in between. The first campaign against dissident writers began almost immediately after the establishment of the People’s Republic, as one facet of the Party’s effort to eliminate all opposition and to consolidate power. It was an extension of the quarrels that the Yenan Talks had failed to settle once and for all. No new major literary work was involved; the fire was mainly concentrated on the influential critic and essayist Hu Feng and his advocacy of a broader realism. The campaign culminated in his arrest in 1955.

The second major campaign gathered momentum in 1957 in the wake of the short-lived thaw known as the Hundred Flowers movement. Many well-established writers who survived the Hu Feng case, such as Ting Ling, Ai Ch’ing, and Hsiao Chiin, came under attack for their earlier works, published mostly during their residence in Yenan, which had expressed dissatisfaction with the Party’s arbitrary literary policy and with the corruption of some elements within the Party. Two new novels drew considerable criticism. Hsiao Chün’s Coal Mines in May ran afoul of the authorities for its failure to uphold the Party’s infallible wisdom. Fang Chi’s The Visitor incurred the ire of the official critics for its emphasis on the seamy side of urban life and the implication that the main character’s failure was due more to the imperfection of the new society than to his own bourgeois class background.

Following the Eighth Plenum of the Central Committee, Eighth Party Congress (September 1959), which ordered a drive to take a Great Leap Forward and to eradicate rightist opportunism and revisionism, a third major campaign was launched against those writers championing broad humanism and objective truth. Chao Hsün’s Homecoming, a play describing the heartrending disappointment of a veteran Red soldier with what he finds when he returns to his native village, was condemned for its antiwar spirit, despite its hopeful ending. That the soldier did not behave like a red-faced hero on stage, but rather gave in at moments to despair, could not be tolerated by the Party-directed critics. Even “Gazing at the Starry Sky,” a rather innocuous poem by the veteran Communist poet Kuo Hsiao-ch’uan, who for years shared the political stewardship of the national Chinese Writers’ Association, did not escape blame for its expression of “pessimism stemming from a frustrated individualism.”

The fourth intensified campaign to correct capitalist revisionism in literature was a response to the Party’s call for socialist education of the people, which was enunciated at the Tenth Plenum of the Central Committee, Eighth Party Congress, in September 1962. This time the CCP was intent on refuting the more open literary policies laid down by Krushchev in the Twentieth Russian Party Congress and amplified during the Twenty-Second Russian Party Congress in 1961. The CCP was particularly critical of the Russian literary trend reflected in the writings of Nobel Prize winner Mikhail A. Sholokhov, whose And Quiet Flows the Don, Virgin Soil Upturned, Fate of a Man, and other works—all very influential among Chinese writers—present complex characters and issues not easily explained by the CCP’s simplistic dogma.

The most severe berating was directed at the topflight Communist critic and literary leader Shao Ch’üan-lin (secretary of the Party branch of the Chinese Writer’s Association and concurrently holding half a dozen other leading literary positions in the government), who dared to advocate the importance of “middle characters” that are neither red-faced heroes nor ashen-faced villains. The campaign spread from Shao down to the popular novelist Ou-yang Shan, who was severely attacked for his unfinished saga, A Generation of Noble Souls. His assailants claimed that in the 1920s Ou-yang Shan allowed his principal revolutionary characters to indulge in sentimental romances. Even worse, the female objects of the hero’s attention were all bourgeois young ladies from a rich family! These offenses, the critics charged, distorted the typicality of underground Communist revolutionary cadres.

THE CULTURAL REVOLUTION

Li Hui-niang, a dramatic piece first published in August 1961, brought trouble for its author, Meng Ch’ao. The work was based on a Ming dynasty legend about the ghost of an aggrieved young woman returning to seek revenge against her tormentor-murderer, a corrupt prime minister. Meng was charged with leading his readers and audience back to feudalistic superstition and viciously instigating the masses (or the unreformed reactionaries) to seek revenge against authority. The play was condemned as an anti-Party piece. Beginning in mid-1962, criticism of Li Hui-niang served as a prelude to the theater reform led by Chiang Ching, Mao Tse-tung’s wife. A series of historical plays all fell under the charge that the authors criticized the Communist government through the thin disguise of re-creating history. Wu Han’s Hai Jui’s Dismissal from Office, T’ien Han’s Kuan Han-ch’ing, and other works all joined the ranks of the disgraced. The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, officially launched in June 1964, was in fact well under way.

Ostensibly aimed at correcting all undesirable tendencies in the new society, the Cultural Revolution was primarily motivated by factional politics in Peking. In literature this fifth major campaign carried on the unfinished drive for socialist education of the masses, for which the theater appeared especially suited. Chiang Ching and her chief spokesman, Yao Wen-yüan, reviewed the theater programs popular at the time and proscribed all of them because, as Mao Tse-tung pointed out, the shows contained only Confucian scholars and delicate maidens, emperors and generals—all feudal dregs reflecting values of the worst bourgeoisie. As such, these traditional programs were “poisonous weeds” that had to be eradicated. The metaphor of poisonous weeds had been in circulation since the end of the Hundred Flowers movement; now it regained currency. Weeded out of the theater along with the old works were the plays of Hsia Yen, T’ian Han, and Yang Han-sheng. Hsia Yen’s The Lin Family Store was faulted for its lenient treatment of the store-owner and the warm feeling of the apprentice toward his master. Yang Han-sheng’s Northland and South of the River, though based on his own experience of learning from the peasants, was condemned for its emphasis on the negative side of the rural situation, and all his earlier popular plays were also condemned.

These three playwrights, along with Chou Yang, the Party’s literary czar since the late 1930s and the man who had himself been responsible for all past literary purges, were unceremoniously removed from the limelight and labeled as the Four Villains. Finally, only about a dozen revolutionary operas designed by Chiang Ching remained on stage; all the writers had been ordered to the countryside to learn from the peasants; the students were turned loose as Red Guards to assail Party Headquarters in Peking with wall posters written in large, bold characters; the press ground to a halt; the bookstores and libraries boarded up their doors. The Cultural Revolution swept over China like a hurricane. In the desolate aftermath, there was only a whisper here, a murmur there, of what could be considered the voice of an underground literature.

THE FALL OF THE GANG OF FOUR

There was never an official closure of any movement launched in the People’s Republic. By 1970 Mao Tse-tung had indicated his wish to curb the Cultural Revolution, but not to end it forever. In fact, in the fall of 1973 there was an effort to rekindle the Cultural Revolution with a campaign to attack, once again, Confucianism. Much printer’s ink was spilled over a reexamination of China’s Confucian tradition, but very little creative writing was involved. A handful of officially sanitized writers, such as the peasant-novelist Hao Jan, the worker-poet Li Hsiieh-ao, and the woman writer Yang Mo, began to write a little, but mostly they revised and republished their earlier works.

The deaths of Chou En-lai and Mao Tse-tung in 1976 threw the country into another spell of political upheaval. Now those who ten years ago acted as the literary executioners of the Four Villains have themselves become the antiParty Gang of Four, and some works and authors previously condemned are being brought back into circulation. At the Third Session of the Third Congress of the All-China Federation of Literary and Art Circles, held in Peking in May 1978, the roster of delegates made it clear that the silenced and exiled had all been resurrected—all except the tragically unfortunate, like Lao She, Chao Shu-li, and Shao Ch’uan-lin, who died either under the Red Guards’ brutal beatings or under suspicious circumstances in political prison. The scenario of a political thaw seems quite complete at the moment, including a change of literary guards, reversal of verdicts, and public rituals to vindicate Lao She and many less famous than he, restoring honor to their memories. Only one question remains—how long before the next upheaval?

THE NEW FOLK HERO: AN EASY PATH TO SUCCESS

In thirty years the significant changes in Chinese literature have been so extensive that most readers familiar with pre-1949 works can hardly bring themselves to countenance Hao Ian, or Feng Ching-yiian, or even Tsang K’ochia. The latest works present a different world, expressed in a virtually different language. We can best observe this new phenomenon through its new heroes, through their actions, and through their view of reality around them.

The principle of proletarian literature dictates that the new hero hail from the common folk—the peasants, workers, or soldiers, who, with the advances of socialist education and the leveling of the classes, should include the entire Chinese populace by now. The new hero differs from the traditional Chinese folk hero in some important ways.

There have been several types of folk hero in traditional Chinese literature, but the general reader could truly identify with none of them. Kuan YÜ (Kuan Yün-ch’ang), the sword-wielding general of the Three Kingdoms, must be ranked among the most popular. He had a humble family origin, with which the common folk could identify, but his unbelievable physical prowess could only be explained by a divine origin, to which the reader could not aspire. Sun Wu-k’ung, the monkey king in Journey to the West (or Monkey), is another folk-hero model. His defiant caprices, tempered by his blunt but commonsensical handling of human frailties, have won immortal admiration, but his magical power lies beyond any reader’s realistic identification. Judges and magistrates with the wisdom of Solomon and the deductive powers of Sherlock Holmes are also folk-hero models. Their clever judgment and shrewd perception may inspire much admiration, but few readers see themselves as being so wise.

Perhaps the folk-hero model with whom the Chinese reader can identify most closely is a combination of the Kuan Yii type, with his loyalty to a sworn brotherhood (Romance of the Three Kingdoms) , and the Robin Hood type, with his readiness to take the law into his own hands (Water Margin) . The heroes of the kung-fu stories satisfy this formula, which accounts for that genre’s great popularity in China until 1949, when these folk-hero qualities were translated into a new code of conduct.

Post-1949 Chinese writers have created a new folk-hero model in the Kao Ta-ch’üan of Broad Road in Golden Light, the Kuo Chien-kuang of Shachiapang (actually, I think his female counterpart, Ah-ch’ing Sao, is the real hero of that work), and the Yang Tzu-jung of Taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy. The hero hails from a proletarian background, as does the reader. The hero possesses no supernatural powers; thus his accomplishments are within the reader’s reach. The new heroism is achieved with only two qualities: an ability to follow the Party’s dictates, and an undying loyalty to the proletarian brotherhood, translated into the state and the Party. No reader in the People’s Republic today would find it hard to meet either requirement.

The new folk-hero model is a success; it has to succeed because it is realistically easy to emulate. All it takes is determined dedication to surpass the assignments, which usually require physical labor on the production front. The hero does not have to die a martyr, even though there are such models of supreme self-sacrifice—Lei Feng, Wang Chieh, and Chang Ssu-te—whose images are paraded in public in the repeated campaigns to inculcate dedication to the Party. The new successful hero does not die, however; he or she is supposed to succeed, emerging triumphant and unscathed from difficulties. Therein lies the attraction. The heroic quality of the new production-brigade captain in Wang Wen-shih’s story is solely his courage to face, with the Party’s official support, the entrenched reactionary forces in the village. The old peasant in Chao Shu-li’s story distinguishes himself only with his pair of toughened hands and his insatiable appetite for hard physical work. The Mongolian girl in Malchinhu’s story is attractive simply because she is alert enough to take notice of a suspicious character, a Kuomintang spy, and foolhardy enough to spur her horse across a blazing prairie. With the new literature the reader may miss a dimension of daydream and wish-fulfillment, but he gains an identity with the hero, which is a powerful incentive to readership.

THE NEW SUBJECT MATTER: ELEVATION OF THE ORDINARY

The traditional Chinese tales were tales of the wondrous. From T’ang and Sung dynasty tales to Strange Stories from a Chinese Studio, all the short fiction told of something extraordinary. Fairy-tale romance, supernatural intervention in the affairs of man, crimes of passion, historical wars, and unusual experiences and strange coincidences were fit materials for traditional Chinese fiction. Then an influx of various literary theories and new ideas into early twentieth-century China stimulated a tremendous diversity in Chinese writings that lasted until 1949. During this period themes ranged widely, from exposés of social evils (a theme that dominated), to in-depth psychological probing, to allegorical exploration of the meaning of life and the nature of reality. However, it was only after 1949 that writers affirmed the validity and upheld the supremacy of one type of subject matter—that of making an honest living or doing an honest job.

If we were to examine the pre- and post-1949 treatments of fighting a flood, a frequent theme in Chinese literature, we would find that Liu T’ieh-Yün’s Travels of Lao Ts’an (1907) makes use of this subject, but there is no description of how people actually fight the flood. Tien Han’s Flood (1936) and Ting Ling’s Water (1933) also use this theme, but these works are mainly concerned with the tragedy aggravated by government abuse and the evils of the rich, rather than with the drama of fighting the flood. The task of fighting a flash flood becomes a central scene only in such a story as “Carry On,” by a People’s Liberation Army soldier, Yang Hsing-wang.

The construction of a factory, the development of frontier lands, a survey for ore deposits, or just the daily routine of digging dirt and manufacturing wheelbarrows has never before constituted the main subject matter in any recognized work in Chinese literature, and yet today’s writers in the People’s Republic are using these subjects, almost to the exclusion of others. This is a new literary phenomenon created by the new generation of writers in China; it could have been created only by them.

THE NEW LANGUAGE: FROM INTELLECTUAL TO VISCERAL

How the new folk heroes express their responses to the world around them can best be seen in their use of imagery and other rhetorical devices. The traditional Chinese poet has excelled in using images from nature to elicit the reader’s emotive and aesthetic response. Take, for instance, two lines from Wang Wei’s “Clear Stream,” a poem with the kind of nature imagery that evokes a feeling of joy about life:

Writing over a thousand years ago, Wang Wei (701-761) evoked a beautiful world of nature in these two lines: the sound of a creek bubbling through strange-looking rocks; shades of green, all subdued and quiet, melting into the deep blue of a pine forest. We can enjoy the picture as it is even without turning to the next level of meaning suggested by sheng (sound) and se (color), the first words of the two lines. For sheng and se are the phenomenal world, which, to Wang Wei, has been subdued by what is noumenal in nature. The sheng is heard only among the inanimate, unchanging rocks; while the se surrenders to the pine trees by becoming hushed. There is joy in such a world—quiet joy, to be experienced through one’s intellect in calm contemplation, a joy never accompanied by physical exuberance.

The Chinese poets after 1949 turn to nature images in a fresh way. To them, aesthetic responses are directly connected to man’s most basic needs. The beauty of peach blossoms lies not in their ability to remind the viewer of the cheeks of his beloved lady but rather in the fact that they herald a bumper crop of peaches. We discover a new evocative power in the nature imagery of post-1949 mainland Chinese poetry like Yen Chen’s Songs South of the River:

Traditionally, the image of the spring tide has connoted irrevocable seasonal change and the passage of time, or, taken a step further, the ruthless dictates of history and the futility of man. The Mongol poet Sa-tu-la uses this image in a poem from Pai-hsiang tz’u-p’u:

Chang Jo-hsü of the Tang dynasty describes a beautiful, serene, moonlit scene on a riverbank where poets gather to enjoy the view:

But let us look at the way the same image is used in the poem “Every Calendar Page, A Victory Poster”:

In the eyes of this poet, a Shanghai factory worker, spring tides promise a rewarding planting season, or a good catch for the fishing fleet, or smooth sailing for the seamen laboring on a loading dock. No doubt he is doing carpentry at the moment, and he sees all these possibilities as the curling wood shavings repeat the exciting pattern of the whitecaps on surging water, a spring tide. Both the post-1949 poet and his reader share the kinds of experiences symbolized, in a concrete way, by the spring tide.

The new use of old images and themes creates a different kind of evocative power not only in poems and songs but also in some stories. Wang Chia-pin’s “The Whale Trough” presents something more than just a heroic proletarian conquest of the sea. When Szu-ma, the skipper, leaps on the back of a fish-filled net that twists and tosses in black, twenty-foot-high waves, there is as much drama as when Wu Sung grapples with the tiger in Water Margin or when the legendary battle takes place between the folk hero Chou Ch’u and the marine monster. There is also a touch of the allegorical significance of man’s struggle to overcome a superhuman force, just as we find in Moby Dick or in The Old Man and the Sea. But there is a difference. While Melville’s white whale and Hemingway’s blue marlin are not hunted for their meat, the young comrade in “The Whale Trough” is trying to haul in that net full of gleaming fat garfish because each fish is enough to make a hefty meal that will bring smiles to ten hunger-haunted Chinese faces. In Chinese aesthetics today the visceral has taken over from the intellectual; materialism is now king.

Several stylistic traits characterize post-1949 prose. The principal innovation is the liberal use of familiar elements from the fiction and drama of the Ming and Ch’ing dynasties, combined with a rich technical vocabulary from factory, farm, and military life. The adoption of traditional narrative techniques has been selective, to be sure; the dominant style tends more toward the hard-line clichés of Water Margin than toward the finesse of Dream of the Red Chamber. The characters are often formally presented, as in traditional theater: when important figures first appear, they are required to recount their family background, their present position, and, most likely, the problem at hand. To these traditional techniques has been added a vocabulary enriched by the experience of the proletariat. To a reader unfamiliar with such modes of life, the terms could amount to an inconvenience, but in most cases they are not so esoteric as to be a barrier. Liu Pin-yen’s “At the Bridge Site,” though generously endowed with technical material, remains more a story for the general reader than a technical report.

From the pai-hua (vernacular) literature of the May Fourth era (the 1920s and 1930s), the new writings, particularly when they involve political and social ideas, have inherited many syntactical features and terms with European origins. These terms have been translated either directly into Chinese, or indirectly, via the Japanese. When the foreign elements are mishandled, the writing has a droll ring, but in the adroit hand of such an author as Hao Jan, the imported syntactical features have acquired a Chinese polish. Chao Shu-li demonstrates how the effective use of colloquialism not only adds touches of authenticity to the setting and characterization but also enhances the flow of the language: his works are rich and vibrant, nearly always fast-paced, and frequently sprinkled with delightful humor. Folk metaphors and proverbs are also being used heavily—and to good advantage—by most authors. Particularly popular is the unique Chinese figure of speech called hsieh-hou-yü, a proverbial phrase with its last word omitted, for the reader to supply. In descriptive prose, phrases with reduplicative and onomatopoeic sounds are in vogue, a technique that stems from the tradition of oral narrative. Although this technique is a worthy one, it is sometimes used excessively, as in Yang Shuo’s A Thousand Miles of Lovely Land.

As the leaves began to fall in 1978, the history of literature in the People’s Republic of China seemed to have turned a new page. The resumption of most of the major literary journals led to a flood of reports on new signs of life on the literary scene. Veteran writers talked about their grand schemes for chefs d’oeuvre, most of them not yet started. Yao Hsüeh-yin has now resumed work on his multivolume historical novel Li Tzu-ch’eng, and Ts’ao Yü has just completed his five-act historical play, Wang Chao-chiin, which he started at the beginning of the Cultural Revolution. A group of new writers (Liu Hsin-wu, Tsung Fu-hsien, Lu Hsin-hua, and others), some very young, have provoked nationwide discussion with their bitter and tragic stories of life under the Gang of Four. They write with convincing realism, and their characters show a measure of complexity that would not have been tolerated during the Cultural Revolution. The late Premier Chou En-lai’s speech of June 19, 1961, which called for relaxation of control over writers, was released in its entirety with fanfare on February 4, 1979. A flood of responses followed, all clamoring for greater freedom in literature. New magazines, literary and general, are being published, including one that is the equivalent of Good Housekeeping. Writers are experimenting with new genres: the first science fiction to appear in the People’s Republic was published in the August 1978 issue of the prestigious People’s Literature.

Since millions have learned to read and write in the last thirty years, speculations on the phenomenon of unleashed creative energy in the People’s Republic of China are hard to resist. Meanwhile, the creative writing that has already accumulated in the thirty years since the revolution begs to be recognized. Let us experience it in all its variety—some of it robust and sanguine, some skeptical and critical, and some trying to convey the bitter and the sweet in due proportion—a reflection of life in the People’s Republic of China.