I

FROM SHEN YEN-PING
TO MAO TUN

LITERATURE—POLITICS—LITERATURE

Mao Tun (1896–1981) was one of the most versatile writers and novelists of twentieth-century China. His major novels include the trilogy Disillusionment, Vacillation, and Pursuit, which was serialized in 1927–28 and published as one novel in 1930 under the collective title Eclipse; Rainbow (1929); Midnight (1933); Putrefaction (1941); and Frosty Leaves as Red as February Flowers (1942). In all, Mao Tun published thirteen novels, more than a hundred short stories, a play, two studies of Chinese mythology, two studies of Western mythology, and many articles (more than three hundred) and books on Western literature, thought, and literary theories. He also compiled high-school textbooks of classical Chinese literature and was editor of a number of important literary journals: Short Story Monthly in the 1920s, Literature in the 1930s, Literary Front in the 1940s, People’s Literature and World Literature in the 1950s. In 1949, after the founding of the People’s Republic of China, official recognition was awarded to him for the roles he played, first as a pioneer in a new literature that was eminently “modern” and of its time, and later as an untiring literary worker and promoter of cultural exchanges among nations. He became Minister of Culture in 1949 and remained in that office until 1965. He was also Vice-Chairman of the All-China Federation of Writers and Artists, Chairman of the Chinese Writers Union (1949), a member of and later Vice-Chairman of the People’s Political Consultative Conference (a non-Party organization devoted to the task of forming a united front of all non-Communist people in China), a member of the Preparatory Committee and then the Executive Board of the Sino-Soviet Friendship Association (and a Vice-Chairman from 1956), and a member of the Board of Directors of the Chinese People’s Association for Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries (1954). In 1975 a group of distinguished French writers and scholars nominated Mao Tun for the Nobel Prize for literature.¹

Mao Tun died on March 27, 1981. In his obituary in the People’s Daily, the Chinese Communist Party’s national newspaper, he was referred to as a “modern Chinese literary giant in the tradition of Lu Hsün.” Two weeks later, on April 11, an official memorial meeting in Peking was attended by many living Party leaders such as Hua Kuo-feng, Teng Hsiao-p’ing, Li Hsien-nien, P’eng Chen, Teng Yin-ch’ao (widow of Chou En-lai), Hu Yao-pang, and Chao Tzu-yang and was chaired by Teng Hsiao-p’ing. There a great honor which he had coveted in the last years of his life was conferred on him. Hu Yao-pang, Secretary General of the Chinese Communist Party and the keynote speaker at the memorial meeting, officially restored Mao Tun’s party membership, recognizing it retroactively all the way back to 1921, when, as we now know, Mao Tun first joined the CCP.

For the fifty years and more since the publication of Eclipse made him a national figure overnight, Mao Tun had not been known as a member of the CCP. He was looked upon in China and abroad as a prominent leftist writer who sympathized with the Chinese Communist movement in China, and who had attained considerable political eminence after the CCP took power in 1949. Because of the very peculiar political situation in China and the even more peculiar Chinese Communist Party politics of the past half-century, nothing was ever openly said about Mao Tun’s joining the Party immediately after it was founded in July 1921. His fellow writers and critics, even those who were Party members and sympathizers, were uniformly reticent. Ch’ien Hsing-ts’un, his most perceptive and caustic critic, joined the Party in 1928; Ch’ü Ch’iu-po, a harsh but friendly devil’s advocate, was Secretary General of the Party in 1927-28 as well as its leading literary theorist. Nevertheless, their references to the relationships between Mao Tun’s literary and his “other” activities were so oblique that the public view of him as a literary man, profoundly sympathetic to the revolutionary cause but never an activist, remained undisturbed. Historians in Japan and Taiwan sometimes include his name on their lists of early Chinese Communist Party members, but his name appears only as a documentary item, unrelated to Party history.

Mao Tun’s biographers usually note his various “leftist” activities and record what he did in which year with great accuracy. Klein and Clark’s well-researched Biographic Dictionary of Chinese Communism (1971),² for example, records Mao Tun’s working relationship with Mao Tse-tung in Canton in 1925–26 in the Propaganda Department of the Nationalist Party (the Kuomintang or KMT), and notes that in 1957, when Mao Tse-tung was head of state, Mao Tun accompanied his chief to Moscow as an official member of the delegation attending the fortieth anniversary celebration of the Russian Revolution. It also records Mao Tun’s working relationship with the Red scholar Tung Pi-wu and Mao Tse-tung’s brother Mao Tse-min, when they were editing and managing the CCP-controlled Hankow Republic Daily in 1927, during the Wuhan period of CCP-KMT collaboration, and with Mao Tse-min in Sinkiang in 1939 for assignments that were extremely perilous but whose true nature is still a matter of speculation. His Party membership is not mentioned, however, nor is the question raised why the Chinese leadership sought out Mao Tun to work in the volatile area of Sino-Soviet relationships during the 1950s. The Dictionary assumes that he was one of the literary luminaries whose “allegiance” the authorities “were eager to gain.”

Thus for over half a century, information about Mao Tun’s covert activities as one of the first CCP members was suppressed. The excitement and struggle surrounding his early career as a young Communist, his status as a committed revolutionary writer from within the CCP, and the complex ways he used his life experiences in his work were obscured. Critics and biographers were interested in Mao Tun primarily as a novelist and essayist on modern Chinese literature, and after 1949, when his creative writing stopped, they ceased to pay him much attention. Students of Chinese politics, on the other hand, might well have been interested in why he was sought out by the new government for responsibility in two of its most difficult areas, literature and Sino-Soviet relations. And his timely replacement as Minister of Culture (by Lu Ting-yi) in January 1965, just before the Cultural Revolution flared up, was surely a further clue to his closeness to the Party leadership.

In November 1978, without forewarning, Mao Tun published the first installment of his “Memoirs” in the first issue of a new official journal, Source Materials on the History of the New Literature, and this timing looks very much as if the one was designed to introduce the other. The “Memoirs” do not begin with Mao Tun’s family background and ancestry, as is conventional in Chinese autobiographical writing, but with his first job, as a proofreader and translator in Shanghai; they then dive speedily into a revelation of Mao Tun’s youthful interest in Marxism and his joining the Communist Party.³

The first fifteen installments, published between November 1978 and May 1982, cover the years 1916 to 1930, a period when the nation, the society, and Mao Tun’s life were all in ferment. It was a document unique in post-1949 China: no one of Mao Tun’s stature had received permission to lay bare what had been kept under rigorous security for over half a century.

The true circumstances surrounding the publication of the “Memoirs” may someday be known, but for the purposes of this book, it is quite sufficient that we learn from the unchallenged authority of Mao Tun himself that he became a member of the Chinese Communist Party the year it was founded and that he worked with its leadership. More specifically, he worked as a high-level Party propagandist in Shanghai and then in Canton and Wuhan from 1923 to 1927, and at the same time was intensely involved with the labor and women’s movements and the training of cadres for the mass movements. In Canton in the early months of 1926 he was, with Mao Tse-tung, an eyewitness of Chiang Kai-shek’s famous March 20 coup, the Chungshan Gunboat Incident, in which Chiang for the first time asserted military leadership of all the revolutionary forces in China by instigating a Communist naval revolt that he quickly put down.

This and other information about Mao Tun’s life between 1921 and 1927, when he adopted this pen name for his first and most important novel, Eclipse, provides additional documentary support for the central thesis of this book, formed before the appearance of the “Memoirs,” on the primary basis of the novels themselves. The early fiction of Mao Tun consists of allegorical representations of the early Chinese Communist movement in China; it is not merely, as most critics East and West have thought, realistic fiction about young urban intellectuals and their romantic and political adventures.

The “Memoirs” provide an unprecedented amount of information on Mao Tun’s early life, his career as a young Communist, his CCP work, and the context of his writings. They also put beyond dispute Mao Tun’s political preeminence in Chinese Communist history. Nevertheless, the historical framework that encloses the autobiographical account has some rather serious omissions. The omnipresent role of the Moscow-based Communist International in the early years of the Chinese Communist movement, for example, is almost completely ignored, and we see very little of the personalities and activities of early CCP leaders. Li Li-san, Liu Shao-ch’i, Chang Kuo-t’ao, and Chou En-lai—to name only a few—were all in Shanghai, Canton, and Wuhan in the 1920s. As a high-level Party propaganda and mass movements man, Mao Tun inevitably had constant and close contact with them.

The “Memoirs” are also quite selective about Mao Tun’s studies in Western literatures and literary theories. He was careful to document his early interest in Marxism, and quite informative about his studies of Walter Scott and Alexander Dumas (indigenous and Western historical romances and plays are popular in China today and this literary genre seems to have the authorities’ approval and encouragement). But Mao Tun’s silence about his once fervent interest in Russian literature, especially in the theories of the Futurist school and the poetry of the great Russian Futurist Vladimir Mayakovsky, is noticeable. Similarly, there is little mention of the nineteenth-century German Symbolist playwright Gerhart Hauptmann, on whom Mao Tun wrote a biographical article.⁴

But the area that requires special caution is Mao Tun’s discussions of the origins of his own work. In any culture, even one without censorship, writers tend to oversimplify when they try to explain themselves. In his “Memoirs,” Mao Tun’s selective attention to his own works suggests something more than censorship. He seems to be trying in his later years to revise the essence of his own writing, making it conform to the aesthetics he developed later. His discussion of Eclipse, for instance, is so clouded by autobiographical data and superficial equation of Party figures and personal acquaintances with its characters that critics in the future will have a hard time fighting this irresistible autobiographical undertow. And the amount of critical adulation for Midnight quoted in “Memoirs XIII,” an installment published after his death, is totally uncharacteristic of Mao Tun. The only possible explanation is that the editorial committee for the “Memoirs” wanted badly to stamp Midnight as the greatest and most representative, as well as currently the most acclaimed, of his novels.

The venerable Mao Tun painted a partial self-portrait of a young revolutionary and writer in his “Memoirs.” The society recreated there is in upheaval, but the old man remembering it is now at peace. With his Party at last in power, he has even become a conformist. Still committed to the Party that he helped to found and that embodied what he held most sacred, he did not want at the end of his life to leave a legacy of dissension. Surely Mao Tun was a patriot of the highest order, persuaded at the age of eighty-two that the most patriotic thing he could do was continue his record of impeccable service by clearing his Party of all possible future charges that it had suppressed the truth about the life and achievements of one of its greatest writers and most devoted members. Nothing in the “Memoirs” was to blemish the Party’s image or unsettle the official version of its history.

In Mao Tun’s early creative years there had been three levels of censorship: self-censorship, that of the Party, and that of the government in power. Each required him to veil subject matter and content. At the end of his life, with Party and government combined, he still labored under much the same conditions. The “Memoirs” establishes once and for all Mao Tun’s importance in the history of Chinese Communism. Nevertheless, in interpreting his early fiction, we will be well advised to examine the new information even more carefully than his earlier autobiographical statements. The creative works themselves, with their imaginative and allegorical subtexts, show us their meaning more clearly than either Mao Tun or his critics can do.

Chinese and Western critics today consider Mao Tun a writer of the realist school and a master of psychological realism. But as he began to write his fiction Mao Tun also used allegory and symbolism to express themes and ideas that he could not express directly.

Allegory and symbolism have a long and honorable tradition in China, and Mao Tun knew the tradition well. He had an extensive background in classical Chinese and had edited, among other classical texts for high school students, the writings of the philosopher Chuang-tzu and the anthology of ancient poetry Ch’u-tz’u, two treasure houses of ancient myth, political allegories, and symbolism. He could write both classical free prose, which is simple and forceful, and parallel prose, which is highly formal and allusive. Hence the allegories and symbols that appear in Mao Tun’s fiction can claim their source in traditional Chinese literature, which was as strong an influence as his studies of nineteenth- and twentieth-century European literature or Greek and Nordic mythology.

Mao Tun was a prolific writer, subject to all these influences at one time or another. He also used so many pen names for so many purposes over so many decades—from his first article, “Students and Society,” written in classical Chinese and published in Student Magazine in December 1917, to his “Memoirs”—that the Japanese scholar Matsui Hiromitsu’s noble effort to catalogue his “creative works, critical essays, and prose” has not been completed after more than twenty years.⁵ At the beginning of Mao Tun’s career many of these pseudonyms were assumed for reasons of practical publishing, to vary the bylines in Commercial Press publications. Very soon they were also used to avoid or postpone government retaliation.

Mao Tun began his literary career when he arrived at the Commercial Press, the largest in Shanghai, in August 1916 to compile anthologies for students and general readers and to translate books and articles written in English, of which he had a working knowledge. His supervisor was an elderly scholar named Sun Yü-hsiu, who had a predilection for writing in the parallel-prose style. Mao Tun was about twenty then, already versed in traditional Chinese literature. When Sun asked him what books he had read in classical Chinese, he was able to answer boastfully,

Allowing for exaggeration, it still represents an impressive classical education, and his knowledge was immediately tapped for his first assignment, to select and edit a collection of Chinese fables and parables.

Mao Tun went on to compile more school and general books, writing introductions in parallel prose. At the same time he was translating such books for popular readership as Edward Carpenter’s Travels in Europe, which he hoped would relieve Chinese ignorance about how Westerners eat, dress, and live. The following year two things happened that were to exert a decisive influence. One was the transformation of the general intellectual Youth Magazine into the revolutionary New Youth under the editorship of Ch’en Tu-hsiu, who later became the founder and first Secretary General of the Chinese Communist Party. The other was the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia. New Youth, published in Peking, was faithfully read by Mao Tun and the rest of the young Shanghai intellectuals. When it published Hu Shih’s “Draft Proposal of Literary Reform” and Ch’en Tu-hsiu’s “Theory of Constructive Literary Revolution,” and later Li Ta-chao’s two articles on the Bolshevik Revolution and Marxism—“Victory of the People” and “My Understanding of Marxism”—Mao Tun began to develop an active interest in the creation of a new Chinese literature that would be written in the vernacular for the people (as against the earlier tradition of using classical Chinese and writing in conformity with Confucian politics and ethics for an elite class); and in Marxism as a school of thought from the West that advocated social and political changes via revolution. He began to pay special attention to Russian literature and wrote in classical Chinese his first critical essay, “Tolstoi and Russia Today,” for the Commercial Press’s Student Magazine of April 1919.

The May Fourth Movement of 1919, which began as a student demonstration in Peking to protest the government’s humiliating concession of Chinese territorial rights to foreign powers at the Paris Peace Conference, soon developed into a nation-wide patriotic “Save-the-Nation” movement. Confucianism was denounced for having been at the very root of all the ills that plagued China in a modern world, and the intellectuals’ quest for guidelines in Western literature and politics to cure China’s degradation became more urgent. As Mao Tun said,

In 1920 Mao Tun too was reaching out toward many schools of radical thought in the West. He studied Nietzsche and wrote “The Teachings of Nietzsche,” published in Student Magazine in January 1920, and he studied anarchism enough to publish “Bakunin and Anarchism” in another Commercial Press magazine that same month. He probed into the social and political institutions of the West and wrote both “The Family in the Future Society” and “The Russian People and Soviet Government” the same year.⁸ His interest in “modern,” or Westernized, social and political institutions that might be useful for China was soon to be transmuted and given fictional expression. When he was asked to take over the “reform” of the Commercial Press’s popular Short Story Monthly, which had been dominated by the so-called Mandarin Duck and Butterflies School of fiction (also known as the Saturday School, because Saturday magazine was famous for propagating sentimental popular fiction), Mao Tun found a new medium of self-expression.

From 1921, when the first “reformed” issue of Short Story Monthly appeared (which for the first time carried a cover illustration—a picture of a newborn baby in its crib), to the second half of 1925, when he “severed his professional tie with literature”⁹ to devote himself to the revolution, Mao Tun wrote almost uncountable articles on Western literature. He published essays on realism, naturalism, romanticism, neoromanticism, Symbolism, and Futurism. He read in English translation and introduced to his audience Russian writers (Dostoevsky, Tolstoi, Chekhov, Gorky, Mayakovsky, Kropotkin), French writers (Flaubert, Dumas, Maupassant), and Scandinavian writers. He published literature from Spain, England, America, and “oppressed countries” like Ireland and Poland, as well as Zionist works. To learn, to know, and to assimilate creatively and selectively were the purposes of this enormous literary undertaking, and a more parochial purpose had its place also. He was waging a three-front war with the Saturday School, which resented his attacks on and exposure of their “decadence” and “outdatedness”; with the Creation Society—led by Kuo Mo-jo, Ch’eng Fang-wu and Yü Ta-fu, who had studied in Japan and advocated art for art’s sake in creative writing—over questions of aesthetics; and with the Hsüeh-heng School in Nanking, which advocated a return to ancient classical literature.¹⁰ As Mao Tun described the excitement from the hindsight of more than sixty years:

When Mao Tun set out to realize this lofty ambition, he did indeed draw upon the “essences” of both Chinese and Western literature. And he used them to their fullest in his earlier novels and short stories. Critics in the West as well as in China have always considered Midnight to be (1933) Mao Tun’s most important novel. His reputation as a creative writer rests primarily on this, his only translated novel¹² and on several short stories of that period which have also been translated and which deal with the same theme: the imminent fall of the traditional Chinese social order.¹³

Less well-known but even more significant in political as well as literary terms is a group of significantly different novels and short stories written between 1927 and 1933. These works, on which the present study will focus, include his first and most controversial trilogy, Eclipse; five short stories collected in The Wild Roses (1929), which was politely ignored at the time and barely acknowledged in the “Memoirs”; a set of three historical tales (1930), “Lin Ch’ung the Leopard Head,” “Great Marsh District,” and “Stone Tablet”; and “Autumn in Kuling,” an enigmatic story published in 1933 but arguably written much earlier. When Eclipse appeared it received enormous attention, including extensive and prolonged attacks from critics on the radical left. The three novels were denounced as weak in plot and characterization, lacking authenticity in their depiction of the revolutionary spirit. The standard critical line of later years is that Midnight represents the peak of Mao Tun’s artistic achievement, whereas the earlier works are qualitatively inferior and artistically unsatisfactory. Such criticism obscures the true nature of these novels and stories and distorts the perspective from which Mao Tun meant them to be read. The themes and characters in these novels, in fact, recur often in Mao Tun’s later works, which indicates that they represent something profound and lasting in Mao Tun’s creative consciousness. The question, of course, can always be asked whether the more popular and better received works of a writer are necessarily intellectually and thematically the more important and interesting. In Mao Tun’s case, the answer is no.

One can readily discern two dominant themes in all his thirteen novels: socialist revolution in China and the economic disintegration of the old order. Of the two themes, the former is much closer to Mao Tun’s heart; it appears in Eclipse and the other earlier works. Later, he returned to the theme of revolution for better understanding and further clarification. In Rainbow (1929), Mao Tun looked further back into the past, into the experience of pre-May Fourth youth, in search of an answer to the question why and in what sense the May Fourth Movement and the Great Revolution of 1925–27 were necessary and inevitable. Thirteen years later, in Frosty Leaves as Red as February Flowers (1942), by portraying a stifling family life early in the century Mao Tun demonstrated why, long before the May Fourth Movement and the Great Revolution, young people had already found it impossible to continue living with the old system. In The Wild Roses, as well as two less successful short novels, The Road (1930) and In Company of Three (1931), Mao Tun’s own inability to accept the catastrophic failure of his party in the 1925-27 revolution was vividly expressed in the failure of his fictional characters to achieve full self-realization. Frosty Leaves, along with Putrefaction (1941), a novel about the insidiousness of the KMT secret police system, becomes part of another trio when we add Tempering (1948), Mao Tun’s last novel. Like Midnight, Tempering is set in Shanghai. The structural thinking that underlies these three novels parallels that of the trio published in the late 1920s and early 1930s, Eclipse, Rainbow, and Midnight. The 1940s trio represents Mao Tun’s last effort as a creative writer to try to understand, represent, and come to terms with the most momentous phenomenon in modern Chinese history: the tragic necessity of the Communist revolution. It was necessary because of the stagnant social condition within (Rainbow, Frosty Leaves) and capitalistic and imperialistic exploitation from without (Midnight, Tempering). It was tragic because of the human faith, love, and ideals woven into the revolutionary movement (Eclipse, The Wild Roses) that made it perennially vulnerable to intrigue, tyranny, and betrayal by comrades and enemies alike (the three historical tales, The Road, In Company of Three, Putrefaction).

Mao Tun made only one known attempt at large-scale representation of the post-1949 socialist reconstruction effort in literary form. It was a movie script about the national campaigns against corruption and bureaucracy, written in the 1950s in Shanghai, before the campaign to suppress intellectual freedom and criticism of government and Party leadership began in 1957. The script never saw publication nor was the movie produced; Mao Tun is said to have used the sheets of his manuscript as lining for his spittoon, till every bit of it was used up.¹⁴

To understand Mao Tun and to appreciate his contribution to modern Chinese literature, we need to reassess his most misunderstood works, the novels and short stories published between 1927 and 1930. It will also be useful to examine the historical framework in which they are set and rediscover some of the issues that provoked such stormy criticism in the late 1920s from Ch’ien Hsing-ts’un and Ch’ü ch’iu-po and from the less understanding but more vociferous Fu K’e-hsing.

The first area to explore is the life of the man himself, from the time he joined the Chinese Communist Party to the time he settled on the significant pen name Mao Tun—Contradiction—for his creative writings. His activities and experiences as a dedicated Communist worker in these early years are intimately related to his early fictional works, all of which deal with the Communist movement. Many of what his contemporary critics regarded as flaws in these novels are best regarded as something more than artistic failings. They are reflections of Mao Tun’s mixed feelings about the uncertain future of his Party and about the morality of certain revolutionary tactics (such as agitation, violence, and deception) adopted by its leaders. Almost alone among the Communist writers of the May Fourth era, Mao Tun tried to articulate his profound personal skepticism about his Party’s governance by international Communist authority and the correctness of its national leadership, which was torn by incessant infighting and fitful changes of line.

In his fiction of 1927–30, such flaws as “inconsistent” characters (Wang Shih-t’ao), undependable authorial variations in involvement with them—from passionate closeness to a cold “overdistancing” which is most noticeable in his characterization in Pursuit and Vacillation respectively—uneven emphasis on plot development (between the first half and the second half of Disillusionment for example), the problem of the Jamesian unreliable narrator in “Suicide,” the discrepancy in scale of representation and scale of value in Vacillation, and the allegorical meaning of his women characters, which could not but escape the attention of any reader who did not know of the historical facts involved, stem from a young writer’s struggle to shape his material to his creative will. Other flaws may be regarded in the 1980s as genuine artistic failures: the obscuring effect of his “profile” technique rather than full exploration in the characterization of Li K’e, Shih Chün, and Fang Lo-lan; the sudden and anachronistic shift from the real time of Chang Man-ch’ing and Wang Chung-chao in Pursuit to the remembered, psychological time of Wang Shih-t’ao and Chang Ch’iu-liu without adequate preparation, and the failure to give even a minimal representation of Lung Fei who has been instrumental in the death of Wang Shih-tao’s lover, Tung-fang Ming. In these works Mao Tun is grappling with the overwhelming task of trying to create a form, for his reader and probably for himself, that gives some order, purpose, and meaning to the anarchical bloodshed spreading around him. The resulting perception, especially in Eclipse, comes painfully close to Yeats’s terrible vision in his poem on the Irish Easter Rising, “The Second Coming”: “The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity.” Mao Tun’s fictional men and women, such committed revolutionaries as Tung-fang Ming, Shih Hsün, and Wang Shih-t’ao, die, commit suicide, or sell their bodies to survive, and miscreants like Hu Kuo-kuang (Vacillation) and Dean Thorn (The Road) often carry the day. Mao Tun’s comrades and comradely critics would have preferred it otherwise. They wanted unblemished, ever victorious protagonists who whatever the strictures of censorship could symbolize an unblemished revolution. Mao Tun’s own life, especially his years in the Party, tells us much about why the young writer could not oblige.

Mao Tun was born in Chekiang Province, Central China, in 1896. His name was Shen Te-hung and his courtesy name Yen-ping.¹⁵ His father died when he was ten, and in 1914, at the age of eighteen, he left his large gentry family in Wu Village, Tung County, to enroll in the first year of preparatory study at Peking University.¹⁶ After two years at the university, financial hardship at home forced him to leave. In 1916 he went to Shanghai, the cultural capital of China and its most westernized city, and through family connections got his first job with the huge Commercial Press. His career, like that of many men of letters at that time, began almost at once to be divided between literature and politics.¹⁷

Between 1918 and 1920, when Shen was writing for the Commercial Press’s trade periodicals—Student Magazine, The Ladies Journal, the Intellectual, Tung-fang tsa-chih (East Magazine), and “Lantern of Learning,” the literary supplement of the Shanghai newspaper Shih-shih hsin-pao, he developed a burning interest in socialist thought in general and Communist literature in particular. He joined a Marxist study group in 1920, when such groups were being formed in Shanghai as preliminaries to formal Communist Party organization.¹⁸ Such groups were of course illegal under the Peking government of Tuan Ch’i-jui, but the foreign concessions of Shanghai offered more political freedom.

Mao Tun’s household then consisted of his mother, his wife, K’ung Te-chih, and himself. In the spring of 1918, in compliance with his mother’s wishes, he had married a girl from Wu Village. She was illiterate at the time, recognizing only the character “K’ung,” her maiden name, and the numbers one to ten.¹⁹ After the marriage, Te-chih went to live with her mother-in-law in the village and began to learn to read and write classical Chinese under her tutelage. Mao Tun went back to Shanghai alone after the marriage; he had only a month’s paid leave and barely enough income to support himself. As he became increasingly busy with his new literary activities and political involvements, and still so short of money—or time—and even with his salary raises that he did not go home for New Year’s at the end of 1920, his mother began to worry about his life among the sophisticated women of Shanghai. She wrote him a stern letter telling him to find an apartment as soon as possible so that she and his wife could come and live with him in Shanghai. Mao Tun, who had just agreed to reorganize the Short Story Monthly for the Commercial Press, was busier than ever, but he could not argue with his mother. Wife and mother arrived in Shanghai later that winter and his mother immediately took charge of managing the household, leaving Te-chih time to continue her studies.²⁰

The arrival of his womenfolk apparently did not change the direction of Shen Te-hung’s Shanghai life. “Before I was twenty-five, I led a peaceful and stable life under the supervision of my mother. In the ten years since, my friends have exerted a great influence.”²¹ Shen Yen-ping was twenty-five in 1920. His friends then included many literary figures who were to become famous writers of the May Fourth generation. There was Chou Cho-ren, a polished essayist and a younger brother of Lu Hsün; Cheng Cheng-tuo, editor of Shih-shih hsin-pao’s literary supplement and later of Short Story Monthly, who was also a respected scholar and historian of Chinese vernacular literature; Hsü Ti-shan, a poet, philosopher, essayist, and short-story writer who showed a strong intellectual preference for Buddhist philosophy; and Yeh Sheng-t’ao, an editor, writer, and teacher of Chinese literature and creative writing. Yeh wrote one of the first novels of the May Fourth era, Ni Huan-chih, which Shen read and reviewed at length in his “On Reading Ni Huan-chih.” In 1921 these young litterateurs founded the Literary Association, which was based on their common belief that literature is part of life and for the people.

At the same time he became part of this circle, Shen also became close to such political activists in Shanghai as Ch’en Tu-hsiu, editor of New Youth and a founder of the Chinese Communist Party; Li Ta, editor of Communist Party Monthly (a short-lived journal of only five issues) and another founding member of the Party, as well as principal of the first Chinese Communist school, the Common People’s Girls School, when it was set up in Shanghai toward the end of 1921 as a training center for the women’s movement; Shih Ts’ung-tung, a Marxist theorist; and Yü Hsiu-sung, leader of the Communist Youth Corps.²²

Under pressure from the warlord government in Peking, many of the May Fourth leaders left the capital for Shanghai in 1920. Ch’en Tu-hsiu, one of the first to arrive, reopened his magazine New Youth there and openly promoted basic knowledge about Marxism and Soviet Russia.²³ In the succeeding months he talked with a number of young intellectuals, and in July he predicted to a friend that if the Shanghai Communist Party nucleus were formed immediately, Yü Hsiu-sung, Shen Yen-ping, and seven others would undoubtedly join. The Shanghai Communist Party nucleus was formed in August 1920 and Shen Yen-ping joined the following year, after the Party was formally organized at the First National Congress²⁴ in Shanghai in July 1921.

Shen’s younger brother, Shen Tse-min, who had been studying hydraulic engineering in Nanking, also arrived in Shanghai in May 1921. Much against the wishes of his mother and brother, Shen Tse-min had abandoned engineering for literature and politics. In July he went to Japan to study, and when he returned to Shanghai the following year, his brother sponsored him for membership in the CCP. From then on, the two brothers worked together in the revolutionary movement as well as in propagating modern Chinese literature. Shen Tse-min did many translations from Russian literature which were published in Short Story Monthly and Tung-fang tsa-chih. One of his most impressive articles was “Characteristics of the Russian Citizen as Seen from the Russian Literature,” which was published in Tung-fang tsa-chih in 1921. In 1926, Shen Tse-min went to Moscow to study at Sun Yat-sen University, which was then headed by Pavel Mif. Later he became an important Party propagandist during the Mif and Wang Ming era in the early 1930s.²⁵

Shen Yen-ping was a patriot who believed in saving the nation through political change. Marxism offered an intellectual solution and the success of the Bolshevik Revolution offered proof of the feasibility of Marxism for China. At first he tried to understand, through Russian and German literature, the distant causes and forces in history that generated revolution and war and, above all, the psychology and the philosophy that made World War I and the Bolshevik Revolution historical facts. Before he actually engaged in any concrete organization work, he had read Bakunin, Kropotkin, Nietzsche for intellectual ideas, and Hauptmann, Maeterlinck, and the nineteenth-century Russian masters for prerevolutionary psychology and conditions of life.

Still in intellectual ferment as a Party member Shen Yen-ping gave the impression of being a prudent man.²⁶ He began Party organizational and propaganda work in 1921 and became involved with the Shanghai labor movement in 1922. That same year,²⁷ he began teaching English at the newly founded Common People’s Girls School. His six women students included the beginning writers Ting Ling and Wang Chien-hung, as well as his own wife, Te-chih. In late 1922 Shanghai University was opened as a cadre training center under the politically safe presidency of Yü Yu-jen, a pro-left KMT member. The following year Shen began teaching Marxism and fiction there. Ch’ü Ch’iu-po, who had just returned from a journalistic assignment in the USSR, was also teaching at the university, and Shen Yen-ping met him for the first time.

In September 1922, a party underground weekly, Vanguard, was founded, with Ts’ai Ho-shen, an active CCP propagandist, as its editor. Demanding freedom of speech, assembly, press, and religion, Vanguard was the first CCP-sponsored publication that bluntly proposed revolution as the means to overthrow the Peking government. The Party had already moved well beyond study groups. Vanguard’s four slogans were unification of China, peace, freedom, and independence. From then on the CCP had two forums for its programs—New Youth for theoretical guidance and Vanguard to point the way to practical action.²⁸

Shen Yen-ping’s position in the CCP became increasingly important after the Party’s Third National Congress, in January 1923. That congress was the first to endorse—at the insistence of the Communist International and over vehement protest—a policy of collaboration with the KMT. Also at the insistence of the Comintern, it ordered all CCP members to join the KMT as individuals. After a special branch meeting in Shanghai on July 8, at which these policies were again heatedly discussed, Shen was elected a member of the Executive Committee for the Greater Shanghai Region. He was charged with the unsavory mission of persuading his fellow CCP members to join the KMT and also with overseeing the well-being and success of the collaboration, the “united front policy” through which KMT and CCP together were to carry out a revolution against the warlords and strive for national unity under one democratic government. The Executive Committee was reorganized in September and the National Movement (the United Front KMT-CCP) of which Shen was now Committee Chairman, expanded its activities to include organizing the workers, peasants, students, women, and even businessmen.²⁹

In early 1924, the Shanghai Executive Department of the reorganized and expanded KMT was formed, and Mao Tse-tung, another CCP founder, became secretary of its Organization Department. At about the same time, the Executive Committee for the Greater Shanghai Region underwent another reorganization: Shen Yen-ping and his brother were both on the five-member Committee, and Shen Yen-ping was accountant and secretary. In addition to his committee and united-front work, Shen Yen-ping in March of 1924 took on the editorship of a supplement in the KMT newspaper in Shanghai, the Republic Daily. He also wrote on the average one article a day for the supplement, under the heading “Candid Sketches of the Society.” Not surprisingly, his contributions to Short Story Monthly diminished.³⁰

Shen did not slacken his pace in his work for the labor movement, however. The Secretariat of the Chinese Labor Unions, established in 1921 with headquarters in Shanghai, was for many years one of the most active CCP organizations. Shen participated in the workers’ education program and helped organize strikes, which were often led by Liu Shao-ch’i, the famous organizer who was later to become head of state in the Communist government before he was toppled as a “capitalist roader” in the 1960s. Liu was also a faculty colleague of Shen’s at the Common People’s Girls School.

In 1925, violence in Shanghai provided the impetus for what became the national May Thirtieth Movement. This movement is always noted in Chinese Communist history as the beginning of the era of mass awakening and the end of Franco-American style bourgeois-democratic revolution. In mid-May a young Chinese worker named Ku Chen-kung was killed by Japanese guards and security people at a Japanese-owned cotton mill. Denial of demands for punishment of his killers and compensation for those killed and wounded in the subsequent protest caused a furor among students, workers, and merchants. On May 30, great crowds of students from Shanghai University and other schools, laborers, women workers, and ordinary citizens marched down Nanking Road, the center of the business section, and there were mass killings and arrests by soldiers and police. The people were furious and the call went out for “Three Strikes”: students to strike the schools, workers to strike the factories, and merchants to strike the city’s businesses.

Shen Yen-ping participated in the Nanking Road demonstration and the May Thirtieth Movement that grew out of it. His familiarity with workers’ lives and his firsthand knowledge of events associated with the movement are vividly expressed in the factory scenes in Midnight and in the last chapter of Rainbow. This familiarity also caused him in his article, “On Reading Ni Huan-chin,” to voice acute disappointment that the novel’s protagonist, Ni Huan-chih, failed to respond positively to the anti-imperialist tide of the May Thirtieth Movement. The disappointment, we now see, was deeper than that of a disinterested literary critic.³¹ The same article contains one of his angriest outbursts against the Creation Society, which asserted that literature, like a beautiful poisonous plant, is for beauty only and not for any utilitarian purpose. Shen remarked that its members, notably Ch’eng Fang-wu and Kuo Mo-jo, would be infinitely better off if they had stepped out of their “snail shells” into the streets with the May Thirtieth Movement.³² Again the intensity of feeling is stronger than a doctrinal feud with antagonists of the Literary Association would evoke.

Because of his labor organizing and other radical activities, Shen Yen-ping became an embarrassment to the Short Story Monthly and was removed from the masthead in 1923.³³ From 1923 to 1925, although he was still officially in charge of the magazine’s “Literary News from Overseas” section, his literary work was noticeably reduced. It ceased almost completely in the second half of 1925, and in December, when the Nationalist Party set up a Shanghai Municipal Headquarters, Shen Yen-ping became chief of its Propaganda Department. Toward the end of that month, five members of the headquarters staff were elected delegates to the KMT Second National Congress at Canton, the seat of Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist Government. Shen Yen-ping was one of the five. Thus it was late 1925 when he “severed” his tie with literature and devoted himself wholly to the revolution. One of the last pieces he finished before going to Canton was entitled “On Proletarian Literature.”³⁴

During the turbulent years 1926–27 Shen Yen-ping the revolutionary was transformed into Mao Tun the revolutionary novelist. The next time we meet him in a literary context is with the appearance of Disillusionment, which was serialized in the September and October 1927 issues of the Short Story Monthly. Under his striking new pen name the author of Disillusionment wrote with an immediacy and exaltation that took the literary world by storm. Vacillation (January–March 1928) and Pursuit (June–September 1928) followed. Feverish, despondent, and neurotic, the as yet unidentified author of these works did not recall the thoughtful, prudent Shen Yen-ping of earlier days. The world reflected in these three novels was immensely different from the world that had inspired the reasoned arguments of such essays as “Naturalism and Modern Chinese Fiction,” and “The Duties and Efforts of Students of the New Literature.” Only the most advanced and boldest of the younger Chinese writers had anything like his confessional intensity. Mao Tun’s life in the mid-1920s yields a better understanding of that transformation than any inferences from the literary theories he adhered to at one time or another. The process of transformation was recorded by Mao Tun himself in “Remarks on the Past,”³⁵ an autobiographical essay that is much more intimate than the later, official “Memoirs.”

This 2500-word article, published in 1933, reveals a dimension of Mao Tun’s life up to 1928 with all the emotional coloring that is now expunged from the “Memoirs.” It also offers clues to the complex style that he devised for his early fiction to elude the censors by developing a narrative flow that on the surface betrays nothing that might provoke censorship. This narrative style uses facts as well as metaphors and symbols, and it advances action simultaneously with political allegory. In “Remarks on the Past,” we see that the setting is also both factual and allegorical. Kiukiang, for example, is factual, and so is Kuling, but the “hospital” and the “Supervisory Department” are as allegorical as the guests who stay there:

“Remarks on the Past” is itself a mixture of fact, metaphor, and political allegory; it is not merely personal reminiscence or straightforward autobiographical account. Mao Tun had let his organizational tie with the CCP lapse in late 1927, but in “Remarks” he was still writing about the CCP and therefore had to use indirect methods of expression to protect himself and his friends. On the whole, he used the actual time and geographical location for the historical events presented: from January to April 1926 in Canton; April to December in Shanghai; January to July 1927 in Wuhan; end of July to mid-August in Kiukiang and Kuling. But what actually happened during this time and in these places is presented indirectly, not on a single level or in uniform terms. The cataclysmic events that swept both Canton and Wuhan are presented in strikingly similar metaphors as “a huge furnace” and “an enormous whirlpool, a colossal contradiction” that “exploded.” The policy-making that went on first in Shanghai and then in Wuhan and Kuling, from which such events evolved and on which subsequent actions revolved, is presented in a much more complex narrative structure. Within this narrative structure, there is a realistic “cover” of research in Chinese mythology and a retreat to Kuling. There is also an allegorical underpinning in the allusions to “meetings” and “women.”

To trace the extremely complex historical events that underlie this deliberately vague narrative is a first step in understanding the similar narrative method in the short story “Autumn in Kuling,” which will be analyzed in the next chapter as an illustration of the method of interpretation used throughout this book. “Remarks” develops around the voyage from Wuhan to Kuikiang that Mao Tun actually took. Such a conspicuous clue strongly suggests looking more deeply into his activities in Canton and into the historical events of 1926–27.

Mao Tun reached Canton in January 1926. From January to April he was Secretary in the Propaganda Department in the Central Executive Committee of the KMT, first under its nominal chairman Wang Ching-wei and then, after February 1926, under Mao Tse-tung, who succeeded Wang as Acting Chairman.³⁸

When Mao Tun arrived in Canton, the CCP had already gained a foothold in high-level KMT governmental organizations. The Propaganda Department in which he served was, predictably, under CCP control.

Under Mao Tse-tung, Mao Tun edited Political Weekly, a KMT newspaper founded in 1925. He wrote several articles for it on the theory of the sovereignty of the state, and he lectured on revolutionary literature in the political training class organized by the Central Propaganda Department. He followed the expansion of Party activities from cell work to training school programs.³⁹ Under the cover of his job as secretary, he conducted training and educational programs for Party cadres as well as “ground-level” organizing among the masses. Party work during these revolutionary years was frequently conducted within the schools, and schools provide the setting and protagonists for much of Mao Tun’s early fiction, in which meetings among students—both in Eclipse and elsewhere—parallel Party meetings where policies and objectives are discussed and actions planned.

This parallel between fact and fiction helps explain why meetings and personal relationships among students in Mao Tun’s novels and stories received so much attention from Communist critics such as Ch’ien Hsing-ts’un, Ch’ü Ch’iu-po, and Fu K’e-hsing. When Ch’ien, for instance, criticized Mao Tun for obscuring the “main subject” in chapter 5 of Disillusionment with his “method of indirect presentation”—meaning that he had presented only a partial view of characters and events—the reference is to exactly one such “meeting” in one such “school,” when in the disguise of student debate, important resolutions about the CCP-KMT collaboration and KMT membership for all CCP members were voted on.⁴⁰ And when Ch’ien attacks Mao Tun’s portrayals of the women characters in Pursuit, it is obvious that the criticism does not really relate to literary issues but to a historical frame of reference from which these characters derive their symbolic meaning as representative of Party policies and their political future.⁴¹

More than once in later years, Mao Tun himself mentioned that during these revolutionary times he had been in close contact with all levels of the Party.

The “leadership center” is the CCP Central Committee, and the “ground-level organizations” are local party cells. The perspective in Mao Tun’s early fiction is not one of a keen, disinterested observer, as previously assumed by his readers and most critics, but that of a committed Party member, who, having participated in Party policy-making, was in a privileged position to present to the world “an overall understanding” and a penetrating analysis of the revolutionary movement.

Hence the revolution that Mao Tun “observed and analyzed” in the three parts of Eclipse corresponds not so much with the overall National Revolution of 1926-28, led by the KMT in alliance with the CCP, as with the Chinese Communist movement in that early stage. Only in this light are we able to explain Mao Tun’s deep emotional involvement with the dilemmas and tragic fate of his fictional characters: in reality they are his comrades. And only this approach to the subject matter of his fiction also explains why such prominent CCP leaders and leftist critics as Ch’ü Ch’iu-po and Ch’ien Hsing-ts’un took so much interest in even the most minute details in his early novels and short stories.⁴³ Mao Tun’s contemporary defense ironically anticipates the critical uproar over Pursuit at a time when misfortune and defeat had overtaken many of his old friends:

The metaphors of the twice-exploded contradiction Mao Tun referred to in “Remarks on the Past” are obviously related to the developments in the Chinese Communist movement. Two dates stand out in relation to the “contradictions”: March 20, 1926, and July 1927. Are these chosen by chance? On March 20, 1926 and July 15, 1927, the KMT and the CCP confronted each other in two crucial tests of power. The first confrontation, Chiang Kai-shek’s Chungshan Gunboat Incident was a setback for the Chinese Communist expansion within the KMT; the July 15 “Wuhan debacle” marked the permanent split of the CCP from the KMT left, and it was followed by large-scale persecution and massacre of Communist members and followers. Mao Tun viewed these two defeats—the two explosions mentioned in “Remarks”—as inevitable consequences of the tension and conflict that arose out of the “colossal contradiction.” In their respective suggestions of burning violence and inexorable self-encircling action, they lead to an inevitable end.

In the series of negotiations that followed the Chungshan Gunboat Incident, Chiang Kai-shek demanded that important CCP members be removed from responsible KMT posts and stipulated rigid restrictions on CCP participation in the KMT government.⁴⁵ CCP control over the KMT Propaganda Department was dissolved in early April, and shortly afterward Mao Tun returned to Shanghai.

From mid-April to the end of 1926, Mao Tun continued his work in the CCP Propaganda Bureau in Shanghai. The “August meeting” in “Remarks” is both a profile of the Second Enlarged Plenum in Shanghai (July 1926) and a composite of the many meetings held earlier on the central controversy that preoccupied all ranking CCP members: the policy of collaboration between the KMT and the CCP. In Mao Tun’s foreshortened representation, the reasserted “contradiction”—the collaboration policy—stretched out painfully and inevitably toward a second “explosion,” which occurred in Wuhan on July 15, 1927, when the Nationalist Government at Wuhan officially announced its expulsion of the CCP.

It is obvious from the early history of the Chinese Communist movement that the Comintern had a direct hand in formulating and directing CCP policy toward the KMT and many other party matters, such as the organization of mass movements and the interpretation of revolutionary trends.⁴⁶ In retrospect, we can say with considerable certainty that the Comintern’s interpretation of the situation in China from 1922 to 1928, and its resulting strategy of collaboration with the KMT, led to the disasters that befell the CCP in March 1926 and July 1927. This factor was more important in the Party’s setback than Chiang Kai-shek’s personal ambitions or his turn from Soviet aid to a campaign for peace with the Japanese. Mao Tun was certainly aware of every Comintern intrusion into CCP policy decisions. It is inconceivable that he should write about these years without giving the Comintern a prominent role. The natural questions to ask, then, are: In what image is the Comintern role cast? And who are the most prominent figures in the climactic scenes in Shanghai “on the eve of revolution” and in Wuhan in July 1927? The answer is “the women.”

It was the modern, emancipated women of Shanghai, with their radical ideological outlook, who attracted Mao Tun’s attention. It is a woman who, walking home with Mao Tun after the meeting in August 1926, reveals to us through her flushed face and excited talk the important issues that must have been raised and discussed in the meeting. The modern women acquaintances Mao Tun knew from Shanghai and Wuhan days were on board ship when he retreated from Wuhan to Kiukiang. Two other women acquaintances were there when Mao Tun went to Kuling to recuperate—one in the hospital, the other a guest at a shadowy “Supervisory Department.” To deserve such intense concern, who are these women? They must represent something persistent and essential in Mao Tun’s revolutionary experience. “Remarks” tells us that these women have to do with the revolution of 1926-28, with ideology, and with types; they are composites of women Mao Tun knew during the years he served as party propagandist and organizer of mass movements.

The women in “Remarks” are symbolic participants in the actual revolutionary history of the 1920s. They represent images of the dominant CCP leadership groups, including the group following Comintern policy, committed to conflicting political positions. Some opposed, some compromised with, and some exploited the collaboration policy; some supported and some advised toning down the radical peasant movements in Hunan and Hupeh provinces in the first half of 1927.

The main women characters are much better realized in Mao Tun’s fiction than in such autobiographical essays as “Remarks.” But in his fiction he so often shifts from a close-up of the individual to the movement of a group, and on to an analytical survey of revolutionary history, that to follow his trail, these works must be read on many levels at once. The real women of “Remarks on the Past” correspond to the two women characters Old Ming encounters in “Autumn in Kuling.”⁴⁷ They serve as the bridge between Mao Tun’s two worlds, of reality and fiction. They are also an indispensable key to an enlightened reading of the themes and of the meaning of both the characters and the character relationships in them, and the next chapter is devoted to a study of that story.