The First Half: Disillusionment in Shanghai

The novel begins in Chang Ching’s room off campus with a dialogue between the two former high-school classmates, Miss Hui and Miss Ching. Miss Hui has studied abroad; she is just back from two years in France, much disillusioned by her experience with men both at home and abroad. Chou Ting-hui has acquired a cynical attitude toward people and her environment. She does not like Shanghai: In addition to foreigners, most of the objects of her contempt are working and propertyless people. She has a philosophy about men:

Hui believes men have to be dealt with on their own terms and made use of for one’s own purposes.

Hui is in a sense a creature of circumstance. In the first chapter we not only hear her philosophy, we also learn that she is not really master of her own life. Ching knows from a letter Hui wrote her earlier, on May 21, that she is out of work and has been turned down by all prospective employers. Her older brother has no respect for her because she studied abroad but got no academic degree. Her mother wants her to come home and marry. Hui, however, wants to room with Ching while she continues to look for a job.

Miss Ching’s has been a different family environment; so far she has lived an unsullied life. She is the one who still indulges in “illusions,” although disillusionment with her year’s work in a provincial student movement is what impelled her come to Shanghai. She now has the illusion that studying will somehow provide a way, but she has no clear idea about the purpose of her study, whether it is for the advancement of scholarship or a means of making a living. It seems mostly to be an escape from her general disenchantment with “movements,” and from her former classmates, many of whom have abandoned their original goals in the student movement and are now beginning to make useful social contacts and have love affairs. Ching’s mother, unlike Hui’s, has never tried to arrange a compulsory marriage for her. For Ching, man-woman relationships “had always been hiding behind a silk screen of dignity, holiness, and gentleness. She had never lifted a corner of the screen to find out what it is. She neither desired nor dared to lift the screen.”³ But Hui forces her to take a look, and she is amazed to find that underneath “such a lovable face as Hui’s, there lurks such abhorrent ugliness.”

Chapter 2 introduces two male classmates of Ching, Pao-su and Li K’e. It begins with Ching noticing a faded red blouse on the porch and becoming curious about its owner, her landlady, who was married a year ago. Ching wonders about the married life of that young woman:

The thought reminds Ching of Hui and her former fondness for her. Ching knows now that she is the more fortunate of the two, having neither the pressure to earn a livelihood nor the nagging criticism of her family. She decides to take Hui in.

In the afternoon, Pao-su makes an unexpected visit. He brings Ching the news that the university is to devote all of the next week to publicity work for the Anniversary of the Abolition of the Unequal Treaties. He also informs her that there are rumors that she is in love and that he is her lover. Pao-su mildly deprecates the rumors, saying that he is not even part of her group. Ching reminds him that he has always been against “free love” (meaning courtship without parental authorization and supervision), for all that he admires Kropotkin. She does not declare herself on the subject, but we shall see that she is capable of “free” behavior and does not worry about her “reputation.” On his way home, Pao-su meets Li K’e, who notices that Pao-su has just come from Ching’s room and appears to be pleased with himself.

Chapter 3 is set a week or so later, on the first anniversary of the May Thirtieth Movement. Most of the students go to the memorial rally, but Pao-su, Ching, and Hui have gone to a movie theater where Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment is showing. Pao-su is wearing a Western suit and a flashy necktie. “He was fond of wearing red ties. It was said that there was a reason behind his fondness for red ties.”⁵ His dress and his student pallor impress Hui favorably, and they get on like old friends.

In the theater, Pao-su finds Ching less attractive than formerly. Next to Hui she appears plain, even haggard. During an intermission they discuss the nature of crime and the meaning of punishment. Hui says that people are forced into crime by their environment; there was nothing wrong with Raskolnikov’s killing the two women, since it was to relieve the pressure of poverty on himself and his mother and sister. What she cannot understand is why, having killed her, he did not take more of the money for his trouble. Pao-su agrees with Hui and expresses sympathy for criminals; they are pitiable, not detestable people. Ching is of a different opinion. She concedes that Raskolnikov’s act of murder was motivated and not a wanton act, that he had reasoned and found it justifiable to kill for the sake of saving more people. Her question is why he suffered pangs of conscience after the murder. These speculations are interrupted as the movie starts up again, and the author comments, “Movies are like human history. It too leaves you with only a very brief interval when you can discuss and deliberate, but before you reach any conclusions, the show goes on. Hence you never get a satisfactory answer.”⁶

In the next chapter Pao-su takes Hui to dinner in the French Park in Shanghai’s French Concession. Later, out in the park, Pao-su declares his love for Hui, and they kiss. For such students this is a daring love scene. It is late when Hui gets back to Ching’s room, but she cannot sleep, and memories of her past crowd her mind.⁷ Soon Hui sinks into a dream. She is in the French Park again, and Pao-su is lying with his head in her lap. Not far away, by a tree, is a boy of about three—their child. As she raises her hand to pat the boy’s head, a man suddenly appears behind the child, shouting at her, “I’ll kill you, you shameless creature. Did I ever mistreat you when you were away from your country? And you run away from me without my knowledge! Who is this bastard? Take this, and this!” He is hitting her with his walking stick. She feels as if her skull has broken under the blows. Furious, she picks up a huge rock at her feet. Then she wakes with a start.

Lying awake and thinking about her dream, Hui asks herself whether Pao-su is worth her giving herself completely to him. Her answer is no; he is just like the men she has met before. Ever since a man named Lü abandoned her—whether in France or earlier is not clear—she has been committed to the idea of retaliation. She will flirt with men, but there will be no love. About having been wronged she feels only anger at not taking enough revenge, never grief or remorse.

Having come to the conclusion that “there is nothing wrong with her past strategy,” Hui gets up the next morning and tells Ching about her dinner with Pao-su, omitting the intimate details. When Pao-su comes again, she treats him as though nothing had happened. Pao-su is bewildered; “he had planned his next step already.”

Several days pass. Then, in chapter 5, there are two episodes on the S University campus. Pao-su, still puzzled beyond endurance at Hui’s rejection, runs into Li K’e and suddenly remembers that Hui and Li come from the same town. He knows nothing about Hui except that she was a student in Paris for two years and is a former classmate of Ching. To find out more about her he asks Li K’e about his home town.

As Pao-su briefly ponders what Li K’e said and did not say, he hears the sound of bells summoning students to a special meeting.

The meeting is in classroom 3: “Everybody knows that whenever the bell rings and no class hour is scheduled, it means that everyone is supposed to come to this classroom.” The occasion for this special meeting is a discussion of Miss Wang Shih-t’ao’s triangular love affair. The chairman is asking for a vote on prohibiting Mr. Lung Fei from courting Miss Wang, who is in love with Mr. Tung-fang Ming. The students’ opinions are divided. The majority is for an order to desist. But Mr. Shih Chün, a big gun on campus, says that Miss Wang’s idea of finding another girl friend for Lung is no help, and he proposes that she be punished for getting into such a situation. Finally, the proposal to prohibit Lung’s courtship is unanimously passed with a show of hands, but the vote on Shih Chün’s motion is postponed.

Chapter 6 sees one resolution of the triangle between Pao-su, Ching, and Hui.

Hui suddenly leaves to go home. Ching thinks that Hui’s suddenly going home must have something to do with Pao-su, but there is no way for an outsider to know exactly what is involved. She is restless and irascible. Everything gets on her nerves. The landlady is scolding a child. A couple is quarreling. “A fly is dashing itself against the glass pane on the window on the west side of the room. Seeking the light, the fly keeps trying to force itself through the blocked exit, emitting a spasmodic frantic humming.”⁹ Ching feels weighed down by all the ugly things that have been happening around her. They “gathered themselves into a huge black column and whirled in front of her eyes. She would like the earth to be destroyed. She would like to commit suicide. She could not endure a minute longer this endless ugliness and darkness.” She covers her face with her hands, muttering the word “destruction” over and over. Tears drop from between her fingers.

Her thoughts turn to Hui. Probably Hui’s mother is finding her a fiancé again. Then she thinks of her own mother. Is any other mother as loving as hers? “It is motherly love that brings warmth and comfort to society and light to life.” Ching suddenly regrets her own aloofness toward the outside world and remembers a piece of presumably kind advice from Pao-su, that she is too much by herself.

Sunlight comes in through the western window. The fly has stopped buzzing. A light knock at the door, and there is Pao-su. “The first thing that struck Ching’s eyes was that bright-red tie. . . . Whether it was a reflection from the red tie or for other reasons, Ching all of a sudden flushed red.”¹⁰

They talk about Hui, and Pao-su tells Ching that he had a heart-to-heart talk with Hui that sent her home. He found out from a classmate, he says, that Hui has been married several times and had had many affairs. Her behavior in the French Park caused him a great deal of suffering later, when she told him she was only flirting and was not serious about him.

Ching, believing Pao-su, does not know what to think of Hui, whether to pity or condemn her. Knowing that Hui has been hurt once, Ching decides that Hui is now taking her revenge on all who came later. Ching pities Pao-su but feels that Hui is probably even more pitiable, being the victim of fate.¹¹ When Pao-su laments that he should not have hurt Hui so by getting angry with her, Ching suddenly warms toward him. She responds to his lovemaking at once, and Pao-su stays the night.

After Pao-su leaves the next morning, Ching begins to analyze what took place. She is sure that her part in it was not a passive one. Then she thinks about her home town and her mother. The fields, the rice-sprout songs, the water buffalo and their boy riders all come to her mind in their pastoral tranquillity. A dream scene unfolds. She is in her home town just as she was seven or eight years ago, reading a newly founded youth magazine.¹² Mother is coming out of the door, followed by Pao-su and a puppy. Mother has her usual kindly smile on her lips. In that illusory state, Ching finds herself also smiling sweetly. But “reality” pushes the silk curtain of “illusions” aside, and Ching walks over to her desk to write down her thoughts. As she rummages through the pile of notebooks and books on the desk she comes upon a small leather notebook she has never seen before. On the cover is a strip of paper with the following line from Kropotkin: “In any age, between the reformists and the revolutionaries there can always be found anarchists (Modern Science and Anarchism).”¹³

As she turns the pages in the notebook, a photograph of a woman falls out. Written across it are the words “To dear Pao-su, June 9, 1926, Chinling.” She also finds a love letter from the same woman, and she reads it. She remembers that June 9 was the day on which Pao-su demanded an answer from Hui. She begins to pity the girl in the picture and feel relieved for Hui. Then she comes across another letter folded into the notebook:

Ching feels utterly betrayed. Her lover of the night before is a spy for a warlord general. She has lost her virginity to a shameless impostor. She cannot stand it any more; she feels terrible physically and emotionally. She knows she must run away. As a modern educated woman, she will go to a hospital.

In the next chapter we find Ching in the hospital, ill with scarlet fever. She has been there ten days and has passed the critical stage. During her recuperation in the month following, Ching thinks a great deal about fate.¹⁵ Her self-confidence recovers somewhat as she listens every day to the news of the Northern Expedition’s movements which a doctor reads to her. Wu P’ei-fu, the warlord who controls Central China, is losing ground and the Nationalist Army has taken over Hankow. The doctor does not seem to understand the good news in the paper’s statement that the “people” helped in the victories of the Nationalist Army, especially “the people” in Hupeh and Hunan provinces of Central China.¹⁶ A letter from Ching’s mother dated September 10 brings different news. She is leaving Changsha, the capital of Hunan, to go to her sister’s home, and she advises Ching to stay in the hospital instead of coming home. A few days later, Ching learns that Li K’e and other classmates are all in the hospital: Chao Ch’ih-chu, the loud student Shih Chün’s girl friend is there; so is Wang Shih-t’ao, who had her troubles with the two suitors. They tell Ching that Shih Chün’s proposal to punish Wang at the classroom 3 meeting was defeated.

When the news comes that the Nationalist Army, still fighting its way north, has captured Kiukiang, near Nanch’ang, Li K’e and others think everybody should go to Wuhan, now the center of the Nationalist Government, to work in the mass movements there. This gives Ching a new problem to agonize over. Should she join the new revolutionary movement in Wuhan? Can she allow herself to hope again and perhaps be defeated again?

Ching decides to try for a new life in Wuhan. “Enthusiasm, light, and a dynamic new life were opening their arms to her, waiting. After her disappointment in love, she now turned her eyes to ‘social services,’ anticipating consolation” and “a degree of happiness in living.”¹⁷

What the Students Are Really Studying

These eight chapters have components that call for explanation in the light of Mao Tun’s own experience and also of the CCP’s development since its founding in 1921.¹⁸ For example, Mao Tun himself returned from Canton to Shanghai after March 20, 1926, and left for Wuhan around January 1, 1927. Hence the period covered in the eight chapters coincides roughly with his own stay in Shanghai before he went to work in the new government in Wuhan.

In “From Kuling to Tokyo,” Mao Tun clearly stated what the novel is not about. First, it is not about the “conflict between love and revolution.” Second, it is not about “the vacillation toward revolution of the petty bourgeois.” Mao Tun did not “wish to ridicule the petty bourgeoisie, nor to use Miss Ching as a representative of the petty bourgeoisie.” Several years later, in “Remarks on the Past” he added that the content of the first part of Disillusionment bore closely upon his personal experience with the Great Revolution in the year 1926. Since Mao Tun was then a CCP activist, the historical frame of reference for the first half of Disillusionment is the major policies that concerned the Party leadership in 1926.

The central issue for the early Chinese Communist movement was the collaboration between the CCP and the KMT. This collaboration did not originate with the CCP but was decided upon by the Comintern, and almost all ranking members of the CCP strongly objected to the policy throughout its course, from 1923 to 1927.¹⁹

A “democratic united front” was first proposed at the First Congress of the Toilers of the Far East, held in Moscow and Petrograd in January 1922, and was relayed to a plenum of the Shanghai branch of the CCP by Chang Kuo-t’ao upon his return from the congress. Many members strongly opposed the plan as unfeasible in practice and detrimental to the integrity of the Party. At the same session, the leadership, reacting to the uproar, demanded stronger Party discipline and ideological training to insure conformity to the Party line. Shen Yen-ping was among those who protested against such Party dogmatism.²⁰

At a special plenum of the CCP’s Central Committee at West Lake, Hangchow, in February 1922, the policy of CCP-KMT collaboration was again discussed. All five members of the Central Committee were present and spoke against it. Maring, the Comintern representative, overrode their objections by invoking international discipline, and the Central Committee acceded under pressure.

The Chinese Communist Party officially adopted the policy of entering the KMT at the Third Party Congress in the summer of 1923.²¹ Party members began to join the KMT on an individual basis without giving up their CCP membership. Their double status soon became a source of serious conflict.

After the Third Party Congress, the position of leading CCP members remained polarized on the issues of collaboration and Party discipline. One group still demanded immediate withdrawal from the KMT. The orthodox Party line as dictated by the Comintern, however, remained the same: to maintain organizational relationship with the KMT for the long term goal of the Chinese National Revolution. CCP members were told to gradually take control of the KMT governmental organs and military forces and to strengthen their influence among the masses. When Voitsinskii came to China in late 1923, to replace Maring as Comintern delegate, he brought a different emphasis to the collaboration policy, encouraging independent development of the CCP as well as development within the structure of the KMT.²²

As top-level leadership was shifting its strategy, tactics were also being formulated on the operational level to strengthen the Communists’ position in the KMT. These included alliance with the Left Wing of the KMT and organization of Communist Party factions in the KMT. Programs for further organization of mass movements among workers, peasants, and women were also developed.

The KMT, as could be expected, was increasingly alarmed by these tactics. From the time Sun Yat-sen first agreed, in 1923, to admit individual Communists into his party, the KMT had taken measures to guard itself against excessive Communist infiltration and expansion. In November and December of 1925, some months after Sun Yat-sen’s death, a group of Right Wing KMT leaders, known as the Western Hills Group, made a serious attempt to expel CCP members and reduce Soviet influence in the KMT; their effort was soon defeated by the Left Wing of the KMT. On March 20, 1926, however, the Left-Wing KMT military leader Chiang Kai-shek, who then had the full support of the Moscow government and its representative Borodin, carried out his March 20 coup d’état and succeeded in curbing the expansion of the CCP while establishing his own claim to leadership of the KMT forces.

CCP and Comintern reactions to the March 20 coup differed radically. Soviet Russia was conciliatory toward Chiang, who had not entirely disowned his own Soviet connections, whereas the CCP leaders took the setback hard. They began to view collaboration as not only contradictory but ominously “suicidal.”²³ Much of the CCP leadership was again clamoring for immediate withdrawal from the KMT, but they failed to prevail against the Comintern line. There were heated arguments and flushed, angry faces at the Second Enlarged Plenum in Shanghai in July 1926, the meeting that for Mao Tun was the genesis of Eclipse. But in spite of all, a resolution in favor of continued CCP-KMT collaboration was passed. Measures aimed at placating the KMT were also rammed through, including downplaying radical organization of peasants and workers and a specific prohibition against the peasant movement’s taking land by force.

Disillusionment depicts the process by which the Chinese Communists’ first illusions about the Nationalist Revolution were dispelled. In the world of the novel, CCP activities are given the fictional form of student activities at a university that is probably modeled on the CCP’s real Shanghai University. Two kinds of student activities stand out in the first part of the novel: the triangular love affair of Miss Ching, Miss Hui, and Pao-su (chs. 1-4 and 6-7); and the student meeting in which issues of general concern are discussed and voted upon (chs. 5 and 8). In Chinese society, then as now, it is hardly conceivable that students would make a public issue of their fellows’ love affairs, and the very implausibility of the scene invites an allegorical interpretation.²⁴ But the parallels with the reality of the political world, combined with the course of the central characters’ love affairs in the rest of the novel, show that this elaborately developed episode is intended to apply to rivalry on another level.

Ching in Disillusionment is a sort of mirror image of Hui. The two women followed the same course until their high-school days ended. Many of Ching’s activities in Disillusionment get their meaning from the constant contrast with Hui. Viewed apart from Hui, Ching fits C. T. Hsia’s description of her comfortably—she stands for

Taking Disillusionment as a novel about the experience of individuals in the revolution during 1925-27, Ching is everything that Hsia has said. But if Ching, as Mao Tun himself specified, is not merely an individual but a type, and if Disillusionment is not merely a novel based on the experience of individuals in the revolutionary movement but instead expresses a collective experience of the revolution as a whole, then we have to assess Ching’s role in relation to that of Hui as well as in relation to the roles of the other characters. We need also to take Mao Tun’s own experience into consideration and interpret the plot and characterization in Disillusionment on the two levels he intended: the realistic level of individual experience, which is what the novel is ostensibly about, and the allegorical level, dealing with the collective experience of the Chinese Communist movement, which is the deep subject.

The comments of Ch’ien Hsing-ts’un, himself an insider, offer some assistance:

Chapter 5, in which the student assembly discusses Miss Wang Shih-t’ao’s triangular love affair is an apparent digression from the main plot, but Ch’ien’s statement that Mao Tun had a “very special purpose” here suggests that there is a key to the puzzle. What is it there in chapter 5 that made Ch’ien so concerned that the reader not miss it? Again, chapter 7 brings the main story of the relationships of Pao-su and Ching and Hui to a plausible resolution, but Ch’ien Hsing-ts’un criticizes the event that provides the denouement.

If we follow Ch’ien’s lead, we notice interesting correspondences between the times and places suggested by chapters 5 and 7, and key events in the development of the policy of collaboration with the KMT from the May 30th anniversary in chapter 1 to just before the Nationalist Government moves from Canton to Wuhan in chapter 8.

The collaboration policy was first decided upon by the Third International and, after heated debate, was adopted officially by the CCP at the Third Party Congress in the summer of 1923. These three “three’s” lend significance to the otherwise pointless detail of classroom 3, the setting of the student assembly. The students’ public debate about how Wang Shih-t’ao is to treat her two suitors (whether she should accept the one as a suitor when she is already in love with the other) becomes integral to the novel when it is viewed as representation of the question raised at the Third Congress, whether a CCP member should at the same time take KMT membership. The two-suitor policy is voted down at the student assembly, and there is even a proposal to punish Miss Wang. The debate and the vote accurately represent the feeling of the majority of the CCP members at the Third Party Congress, and it can even be said that Mao Tun is not merely indulging in wishful thinking but carefully setting the historical record straight.²⁷

The role of Pao-su on the allegorical level is easy to recognize.²⁸ His red necktie and the photograph and letter he carries in his pocket notebook unmistakably identify him as a representative of the faction of the KMT Left that was under Chiang Kai-shek’s control in Canton. Chiang’s faction in 1927 not only commanded the military forces represented by the Whampoa Academy but had also moved to occupy Nanking by June 2, the date of the “Kuo-liang” letter.

In the first half of Disillusionment, Mao Tun is representing the opposition of the CCP leadership to the policy of collaboration with the KMT. The argument against collaboration, presented allegorically in the student debate, was that the CCP was already committed to the cause of socialist revolution in China (just as Wang Shih-t’ao had already fallen in love with Tung-fang Ming); expedience was no excuse for parleying with the KMT (Wang Shih-t’ao, in the opinion of the student majority, should not have flirted with Lung Fei simply because she was too weak-willed to resist the opportunity). History, of course, turned in quite a different direction. To see how Mao Tun represents this development, we must turn to the other triangular love relationship in the novel, the one involving Ching, Hui, and Pao-su on the surface level.

This relationship is the product of circumstances. Hui’s philosophy of love, like her approach to all human relations, is based on expediency. Her flirtation with Pao-su, which develops in a simulated foreign setting, the French Park, is colored by distrust and motivated by retaliation; it cannot and does not lead to fulfillment. Hui’s foreign connections are not adventitious. Combined with other details—her birthplace, her age, the color of her clothing (purple, which is an excessive red), and her philosophy of love—they make a significant allegorical pattern.

Hui, we remember, is a native of Huang-po. In the history of the Chinese Communist movement, Huang-po is a meaningful place name; it was where the CCP-organized peasant movement was strongest in 1926. The radical land reform carried out at Comintern instigation in Huang-po and Huang Kang in Hupeh Province in the spring and early summer of 1927 was the direct cause of the catastrophic rupture of the CCP-KMT alliance in July. Less publicized in later years than Changsha in Hunan Province (Ching’s birthplace, which is near Hsiang-t’an, Mao Tse-tung’s birthplace), where the peasant movement was led by indigenous CCP people and organized by Mao Tse-tung on his own initiative, Huang-po carries an unfortunate association with arbitrary orders from abroad. Thus her geographical origin also identifies Hui with a foreign source that dictates policy.²⁹

As to Hui’s age, she is twenty-four at the beginning of the novel, and the year 1924 saw some vital political developments in the early Chinese Communist movement. That was when the reorganized KMT officially accepted the CCP in the Nationalist Government at Canton and also when members of the CCP were officially ordered to join the KMT. The double-membership issue was not merely a matter of policy but of practical experience, and it underlies the Ching Hui Pao-su triangle.

The CCP leadership objected to the policy on grounds of principle as well as practicality, which made it all the more distasteful to the Party members charged with implementing it. This foreign imposition of an impossible, unethical political partnership is translated into Hui’s nightmare after her evening with Pao-su. Hui’s dream tells us that her disastrous love affair left her with a child of three–the years 1924–27—and there is also a threatening personage from her past who makes it impossible for her to have a genuine relationship with any other man.

To find symbolism in Hui’s age is not as far-fetched as it may appear. Not only is it a time-hallowed custom in Chinese literature to use numbers as symbols, but there is a corollary in Ching’s age, which is twentyone, the year the CCP was founded. Ching represents a different conception of the CCP in the political alliance with the KMT—she is not trying to exploit Pao-su but truly taking joint responsibility for what becomes an illusory love affair. Accordingly this affair follows a different course, and Ching suffers more severely through Pao-su than Hui has done. She loses not just one round in political parleying but almost her ideal in love.

There are no illusions about possible fulfillment in Hui’s philosophy of love. It is at best a pose for pleasure and self-gratification and at worst an expedient. Its goal is always the maximum gain for the self. Her flirtation with Pao-su is in essence no more and no less than a match between two masters schooled in the art of political expediency; neither side intends sharing or giving. In Pao-su’s account, the skirmish comes to a speedy end when Pao-su suspects that Hui has had numerous affairs with other men and confronts her with his suspicions. We have no way of knowing whether fear of discovery of his own secret by a woman he now sees as worldly-wise is in Pao-su’s mind when he, as he reports, confronts Hui with her undeclared past. Mao Tun never explores Pao-su’s inner feelings. What we do know is that Hui promptly leaves Shanghai after the confrontation, and Pao-su, feigning innocence, continues his quest with a new target: Ching.

It is a curious fact that in the 1928 polemics between Mao Tun and his critics on the extreme left (with Ch’ien Hsing-ts’un as the most vocal representative) neither side took the trouble to argue over the ideological correctness of Hui. Her political role in Disillusionment was seemingly agreed upon. Mao Tun made only one noteworthy statement about Hui and her type in the trilogy in his first defense of the trilogy, when he wrote that her type did not represent “superficial women.”³⁰

Both Ching and Hui represent the CCP. The CCP during the Great Revolution years was by no means an undivided whole. Inner-party politics and factional struggles were constant. In 1926, the critical issue was the CCP-KMT alliance, and there the Party had always been split. The group that Hui represents saw it simply as an inevitable evil that could be rationalized as Raskolnikov rationalized his killing of the two old women in Crime and Punishment: it was the act of a superman done with the amoral conviction that the merit of the goal takes precedence over all conventional considerations of right and wrong. Ching represents the position which could not bear to see the Party’s will subjected to force of circumstance: the CCP should not be a tool in a conspiracy of foreign design. How to present these conflicting views in fictional form was only part of Mao Tun’s problem, for the Party’s will to self-determination was not borne out by its actions. What was Mao Tun to do?

In 1922, when he was studying the plays of the Belgian playwright Maurice Maeterlinck, Mao Tun had been particularly intrigued by one of his plays, Mona vanna, which poses two questions: Can a woman remain spiritually chaste when her body is sullied? Should a woman sacrifice her body as bravely as she would her life, to save others and her country? Maeterlinck’s answers to both were in the affirmative. Soon in a transposed context of political reality, Mao Tun as a Party propagandist had to deal with analogous political problems: Could the spirit of the CCP remain pure if its principles were compromised? Should the CCP sacrifice purity to serve a larger goal?³¹ And these problems, encapsulating the revolutionary consciousness throughout the period 1925–27, were reviewed in the fictional context of Disillusionment on more than one level.

Mao Tun first presents these questions on a moral plane, when his characters offer their opinions about Raskolnikov’s moral responsibility (chapter 3). Pao-su’s argument shifts responsibility from Raskolnikov himself to the invincible power of external circumstances. Hui then raises the claim that a moral goal justifies immoral means. But Ching, by considering Raskolnikov’s guilt, brings moral responsibility back to the human self. Thus three answers are suggested to the question of how to reconcile the humanity of a goal with an inhumane action, but no definitive answer is given.

Then the questions are presented on the political plane, when the student assembly debate stands for a debate on Party principle (chapter 5). Here the contention centers on the question of the acceptability, in principle, of one person having two loyalties at the same time. The discussion and vote shows a majority rejection of the idea of two loyalties. Purity of principle is asserted for the individuals and, by analogy, for the Party.³² One can well imagine how such an idealistic defense of Party principle, regardless of later compromises, appealed to CCP members. Even Ch’ien Hsing-ts’un a few years later accorded that chapter his rare approval: “Its method of representation is vivid and fascinating.”

The third plane is the historical and realistic one: How were the questions resolved in action? Here we have to look at another set of triangular love in the novel. Ching and Hui, regardless of their different attitudes toward love, both have a relationship with Pao-su, just as the CCP, in spite of intra-Party policy disputes, made an alliance with the KMT. Whatever their reservations about such a policy, members of the CCP did join the KMT in 1924; and in spite of Chiang Kai-shek’s Canton coup in 1926 and his Shanghai Massacre in April 1927, they continued to serve in the Nationalist Government in Wuhan. But Chiang’s faction was dissociated with the continued collaboration. To justify the March 20 coup, Chiang claimed to have discovered a conspiracy by the CCP (as Pao-su claimed to have found out about Hui’s hidden past): limitations were imposed upon CCP activities within the KMT government, and the Soviet advisers were expelled from Canton (paralleling Hui’s departure from Shanghai). Then the Shanghai Massacre occurred. This convinced even the Soviet advisers and Comintern representatives that Chiang was not a dependable partner in the collaboration. Thus after his overnight affair with Ching Pao-su disappears from the scene, and the redness of his tie contaminates Ching and becomes the redness of her scarlet fever.

The affair with Pao-su takes a physical toll on Ching’s health. She is hospitalized and is weighed down by a crushing sense of fate. But she accepts her share of responsibility in the affair. It does not matter, after the fact, whether it was out of innocence or ignorance or illusion that Ching went to bed with Pao-su. The important thing is that she had not been passive. She was temporarily immobilized by her physical and mental weakness. But she quickly recommitted herself to the revolutionary life at the exhortation of her old company of classmates. Accepting her role in the social movements, she once again reached out for fulfillment of her original ideal.

The political parallel to Ching’s recommitment occurred soon after Chiang Kai-shek’s massacre in Shanghai. Calling Chiang a traitor and expelling him from the KMT, as was done on April 17 in a communiqué signed by both Wang Ching-wei, soon to be the leader of the Wuhan government, and Ch’en Tu-hsiu, secretary general of the CCP, did not solve the problem. The question remained whether continued collaboration with the KMT Left now in power in Wuhan was still feasible.

As far as is known, the CCP leadership was just as averse to an alliance with the new leader of the Left KMT as they had been to the alliance with Chiang.³³ The politicians and generals of the Wuhan regime seemed to them no more trustworthy than those of the right-wing KMT. At a Politburo meeting held in Hankow before the Fifth Party Congress of April 27, 1927, Ch’en Tu-hsiu announced that cooperation with the KMT was becoming more precarious every day. On the surface, conflict with the KMT seemed to be over such problems as the peasant and land distribution movement, but the true contest was for hegemony. To the CCP leadership, the choice was clear: the party must now either abandon the fight for hegemony or break with the KMT Left at Wuhan since the attempt to undermine the KMT from within had been disastrous. Unfortunately, the decision was not theirs to make.

The Fifth Party Congress convened in the wake of the April 12 massacre and Chiang’s subsequent large-scale purges in Shanghai, Canton, and Peking.³⁴ There were heated arguments between Borodin, the Soviet government’s adviser to the KMT, and Lois, now the Comintern representative to the CCP, about the direction the Chinese revolution should take and what was to be done about the peasant movement. Borodin still urged collaboration with the KMT and moderation in the mass movements, while Lois demanded increasingly radical, indeed violent, take-overs. The CCP casualties among both cadres and the rank and file had been staggering. Most of the members present at the Fifth Party Congress saw no way out for the CCP in either Borodin’s or Lois’s position.³⁵ As they were still vacillating between continued collaboration and a decisive break with the KMT, advance or retreat in the peasant movement, the warlord forces struck again.³⁶

On May 21, General Hsü K’e-hsiang, long incensed with the CCP peasant movement, carried out a military coup against the CCP and the Peasant Association in Changsha. Immediately the angry calls for withdrawal from the KMT were renewed. But on June 1 a letter from Stalin himself arrived in Hankow. There was to be no withdrawal. The CCP was instructed to step up its operations: the part of the peasant movement it controlled was to start confiscating land and its military cadres were to take control of the KMT armed forces.³⁷ The Stalin letter immediately became known to Wang Ching-wei, thanks to Lois, and his Wuhan government quickly decided on its course of action. The expulsion of the CCP from the Wuhan government was announced on July 15; purges and massacres followed.

In the brief month and a half before the expulsion, the predominant mood in both the CCP leadership and its local provincial offices was a mixture of confusion, vacillation, and disillusionment, a mood vividly portrayed in the second part of Disillusionment.

The Second Half: Students in the Field

In the second half of Disillusionment, Ching, in the company of Hui and many of her university classmates, becomes active in the revolutionary center at Wuhan. The year is 1927.

Critics have noted that the second part of the novel is not as well constructed as the first. It may be that Mao Tun decided it would be too tedious to fashion yet another love triangle so like the previous ones. In reality, little that happened at Wuhan in the spring and early summer of 1927 differed from what had already happened in Canton and Shanghai. The CCP-KMT alliance continued, with Wang Ching-wei as the partner instead of Chiang Kai-shek. The covert struggle between the KMT and the CCP for control of the military, the labor unions, and the peasant associations went on as before. The Comintern and the Kremlin still issued directives that were remote from Chinese reality and that pushed the CCP ever closer to the breaking point with the Wuhan government.

In the novel, the disastrous outcome had already been presented once, when the March 20 coup and the April 12 massacre (and possibly the July 15 debacle too) were telescoped in Ching’s allegorical scarlet fever after her lovemaking with Pao-su. (Hence Ch’ien Hsing-ts’un’s comment that Pao-su’s betrayal is found out too soon). The surface action, the endless bustle in Wuhan over mass movement activities depicted in chapters 9-11, was no longer the central drama of the Great Revolution. The real center in the spring and summer of 1927 had shifted to the countryside and the escalating peasant movement—the story that will be told separately in Vacillation. But in the second half of Disillusionment there is still one episode pertaining to the Wuhan period that Mao Tun could not leave unrepresented, and that was the Nanch’ang Uprising of August 1, 1927. The Nanch’ang Uprising and the Southern March, in which the remnants of the first Red Army escaped after the uprising was crushed, form the basis for three of the six chapters in the second half of Disillusionment, providing a climactic ending to the increasingly disoriented narrative in the last six chapters of the novel.

To all ranking members of the CCP, whatever their attitude toward the role of the Comintern, the Nanch’ang Uprising was a glorious historic event. “Autumn in Kuling” was a clear though somewhat elliptical and offstage fictional representation of the uprising. The representation in the last three chapters of Disillusionment is still allegorical, but closer to the passion and will that inspired the revolutionary action. These scenes, portrayed before the apocalyptic Canton Commune was known to Mao Tun, bubble with an energy that the short story lacks, an energy exuberantly concentrated in the name symbol of Ching’s work partner, the battalion leader Ch’iang Meng, whose style Wei-li means Power by Force Only.

The Wuhan phase of Disillusionment begins with a surprise reunion between Ching and Hui on April 20, 1927, the day the Wuhan government launches its Second Northern Expedition from the military academy in Nanhu, a section of Wuch’ang. It ends when Ch’iang Wei-li leaves Wuhan to join the Southern March to Swatow and Canton, and Ching, accompanied not by Hui but by her university classmate Wang Shih-t’ao, starts back to Shanghai. There is a strong contrast between chapters 9–11 and chapters 12–14, between ineffectual revolutionary activity (Hsia’s “caricature of purposeful action”) and the purposeful romantic episode that concludes the book.

Chapter 9 is devoted to the ceremonial launching of the Second Northern Expedition and to the appearance of Hui, which signifies the continuing hand of the Comintern and Borodin in CCP politics at Wuhan. In chapter 10, a large assemblage representing the whole political spectrum of CCP leadership is complete on the Wuhan stage. One by one Ching meets her former classmates: Tung-fang Ming and Lung Fei, still rivals for Wang Shih-t’ao’s attention, are now political workers; Wang Shih-t’ao is now a representative of the women’s movement; Li K’e, Shih Ch’ün, and Chao Ch’ih-chu are affiliated with the labor organizations; and Hui is a salon hostess among the foreigners in Wuhan. Contradictions mark everything people are doing in Wuhan; the pursuit of pleasure seems to be the common denominator in this wartime setting. Ching gets sick again in the ambience of self-indulgence among revolutionaries.

In the midst of such contradictions does the revolution really march on? Ching had her moments of doubt, but she still had her illusions also.³⁹

In chapter 11, Ching is confronted with a dilemma. Tired of life in Wuhan but dependent on the company of her two “sisters,” Hui and Wang Shih-t’ao, she does not feel like going home to Changsha, where, as her mother now writes to suggest, she could do the same type of work. She has become close to Wang Shih-t’ao, but Wang is soon to join her lover Tung-fang Ming in Kiukiang, near Nanch’ang. Ching cannot go to Kiukiang because Hui objects, but she has no intention of moving in with Hui and becoming her roommate again. After prolonged discussion, all three women agree that it would be best for Ching to become a nurse at the military hospital in Wuhan.

In the historical context, at the time Ching is ruminating over her sickness and doubts, her unwillingness to room with Hui and her inability to follow Wang to Kiukiang (a veritable state of vacillation), the Chinese Communist movement is suffering serious losses in Hupeh and Hunan provinces and the uneasy two-party collaboration in the Wuhan government is becoming increasingly precarious. Vacillation is the keynote on the scene. And the effects were most immediate and concrete in the area of military movements. A showdown in terms of brute force was imminent and the stage was set for Ching, in the fictional context, to unite herself with the allegorical “Power by Force Only.”

In history, military attacks by anti-Communist warlords increased in number and strength in the spring and summer of 1927. Hsia Tou-yen, a lower-ranking military commander, led an attack on May 17 on Wuhan which nearly unseated the Wuhan government. Hsü K’e-hsiang’s May 21 Mutiny at Changsha followed,⁴⁰ and his rebellion had broad repercussions among other generals who, like him, owned land in the countryside. The Wuhan government refused to take action against the Hsü mutiny because of its displeasure with the labor and peasant movements radicalized by CCP agitation (see Vacillation). Instead, it began suppression by disbanding the peasant associations in Huang-kang and Huang-p’o, the two largest in Hupeh province.

In the novel, the news that western Hupeh province is under siege (ch. 12) and the message from Changsha that CCP reinforcement is needed there (in the form of the letter from Ching’s mother) register only peripherally on Ching’s sensibility, which is weakened by illness. But these reports reflect the result of military action against the peasant movements in Hunan and Hupeh provinces and the confusion and ineffectualness of the CCP leadership in Wuhan. The break between the CCP and the KMT Left is in the offing. However, this will not occur before Ching and Ch’iang Wei-li become united in a genuine romance of spontaneous love and free will.

Ch’iang Wei-li, when he first appears on the scene in chapter 12, is a wounded soldier back from the North China front. From his account of the battle of Lin-ying in Honan Province, we learn that he has been with the Second Northern Expedition force fighting Chang Tso-ling in Honan at the same time Hsia Tou-yen was besieging Wuch’ang. Mao Tun has dexterously brought the two battlefronts of the CCP together in chapter 12; news of the losing battle from the reports Ching reads to Ch’iang Wei-li, and the victory that Ch’iang reports to Ching. The latter is used to convey the fact of the CCP’s active participation in the Second Northern Expedition, although the numerical strength of these forces did not make them important to the general public.⁴¹ However, historical record not-withstanding, Mao Tun was most conscientious to preserve in Ch’iang’s characterization the discrepancy between the physical condition of the CCP military and the poetry of its aspiration. Ch’iang Wei-li is not portrayed as physically robust and his devastated body testifies to the untold story behind his narrated victory.

Three armed forces came together in the Second Northern Expedition in 1927—Chiang’s force from Nanking; the Sixth Army of T’ang Sheng-chih and the Fourth Army of Chang Fa-k’uei from Wuhan; and Feng Yü-hsiang’s army from Shensi. There was a concentration of CCP cadres in Chang’s Fourth Army. The CCP contingent suffered heavy casualties in the battles against Chang Tso-ling in Honan during the second half of May, but victory brought the Party no material gain. So in Disillusionment, we see

Ch’ien Hsing-ts’un, a die-hard extreme leftist, applauded what had been done in this chapter; he only wished the author had done the same in the next, working more “military action into it.”⁴³ Ch’ien’s wish is understandable. The CCP forces that led the Nanch’ang Uprising two months later included those that had participated in the Second Northern Expedition. The suppression of the peasant movement in Hunan and Hupeh by the warlord generals and the lack of KMT acknowledgment of CCP participation in the Second Northern Expedition had convinced many of the ranking CCP members in summer 1927 that the only way that the CCP could ever come to its own was to have an army, a banner, and a slogan of its own. And time was running out. On May 29, a few days before the Second Northern Expedition scored a conclusive victory against the northern warlords, powerful elements in the combined armies openly turned against the CCP. First Tang Sheng-chih, commander of the Sixth Army and the most powerful of the “progressive” warlords, announced his anti-CCP stand. Shortly afterward, at the Cheng-chou Conference on June 10, 1927, his position was supported by another hitherto “progressive” warlord, Feng Yü-hsiang, and by the KMT representatives from Wuhan. The stage was set for a thorough purge of the CCP, the only question was when.

But Mao Tun refused to let these circumstances entirely explain the dynamics of CCP policies and actions. The founding of a Red Army came about as the crystallization of a whole complex of factors. Some were external—the new pressures from the KMT and the warlords—but there were also critical internal factors, and these inform the last part of Disillusionment.

The union of Ching and Ch’iang Wei-li in the last chapter is literally a union between a sick body and a sick political consciousness. But on a different level, it is also a tender romance consummated in a fulfilling love relationship. Ching is passionately in love with Ch’iang Wei-li, a fanatical Futurist as well as a warrior. Their union,

Ch’iang Wei-li and Ching spend a week in Kuling, a week of “total forgetfulness, devoted to a whole-hearted pursuit of carnal pleasure.”⁴⁵ This was precisely the time when the CCP forces were gathering in Kiuchiang and Nanch’ang to form the Red Army and initiate its first independent action, the Nanch’ang Uprising. No wonder Ch’ien Hsing-ts’un would have preferred another description of military action.

Mao Tun, however, did not adopt a realist’s approach and end Disillusionment with a climactic battlefield scene. Had he done that the result might not have been complimentary in realistic terms either, because the Nanch’ang Uprising was a military failure, and the subsequent Southern March was de facto a military retreat. At the time, the real significance of the Nanch’ang Uprising to the CCP had little to do with the surface military action, and everything to do with the fact that it was a spontaneous act of total free will of the Party, conceived without interference from the Comintern and carried out, Futurist style, voluntarily by such dedicated leaders as Li Li-san, Chou En-lai, Yeh T’ing, and Ho Lung. These men first organized the Front Committee for the uprising, then led the rank and file of the Fourth Army, and ultimately founded the Red Army. No matter how the military action itself turned out, the two important things were this will to freedom and the determination to use speed, brute force, and destruction as the means of action.

Mao Tun ingeniously found a means to represent these two facets of the Futuristic poetry of those days in the white-hot “voluntary and self conscious” love of Ching for Ch’iang Wei-li and in Wei-li’s craving for battlefield destruction and his ultimate march back to duty. Writing in August and September of 1927, back in Shanghai and disillusioned with the fiasco of his party’s coalition with the KMT but nonetheless yet unburdened with the agony and despair to come out of the gory Canton Commune, Mao Tun was still hopeful that his comrades’ Southern March would build a base for future action. Hence Ching’s romance with Ch’iang Wei-li has a level of light-heartedness that marks only the writings of Mao Tun of the pre-Canton Commune days.

Mao Tun’s interest in Futurism, like his many other interests in Western literature and literary theories, was more than a scholarly one. It was a part of his life-long struggle to bring about revolutionary change in China and his literary comrades’ apparent inability to assimilate either Soviet Futuristic literature or the Soviet model of proletarian literature for China’s use concerned him for many years.⁴⁶ In the early 1920s Futurism bespoke for Mao Tun the poetry and romance of the Bolshevik Revolution. He had great admiration for the power of Futurism, as represented especially by Mayakovsky, although he recognized that, as Wang Ch’iung-ch’üan, a friend and literary collaborator, wrote in Short Story Monthly,⁴⁷ “Futurist poetry gathers its material from the clamor of an industrial work site, the roar of racing cars; and all noise of hubbub and commotion. Its goal is to smash the stagnant, passive, and unhealthy spirit; in effect its only poetic reality is the Dionysian state of unbridled life force.”⁴⁸ And Mao Tun knew anything unbridled can promise perils as well.

There are a number of parallels between Ch’iang Wei-li’s characterization and his creator’s early study of Mayakovsky. For examples, Mao Tun believed Mayakovsky’s claim that he enlisted in the army during World War I and that he enlisted not for patriotic motives but to give full vent to his passion for bloody destruction. This of course could well have been part of a pose that Mayakovsky was fond of assuming in his pre-October-Revolution writings, but Ch’iang Wei-li claims the same when talking to Ching. His battlefield speech impresses us in almost the same manner as Mao Tun’s praise for Mayakovsky’s “150,000,000.” “This is a great and powerful poem,” he wrote in “The Current State of Futurist Literature” in 1922.

In destruction there is a possibility for rejuvenation. Bolshevism could be the “spiritual dynamics” which the Futurist poetry celebrates, a kind of dynamism that brings “a blood transfusion for those paralyzed by the old Russian nihilism.”⁵⁰ But when transplanted, what it can be for China, even as Futurist poetry, is by no means certain.

Futurism, when serving as a guiding principle for action, or, worse, for revolutionary action, is a frightening philosophy, with its blind hacking away at all obstructions lying in the way to the future. In 1925 in his article “On Proletarian Literature,” Mao Tun was already calling attention to the distinction between revolutionary literature, which aims to destroy, and true proletarian literature, which portrays the people’s quest for freedom. More specifically there, he warned against any “ism” in literature that turns away from present-day reality and entrusts its goal to an unknown future. This warning was repeated in another article in the same year, “The New Missions of Writers.” He warned writers not to abandon real life to describe the future ideal world.

In the characterization of Ch’iang Wei-li as an allegorical representation of the goals of the Nanch’ang Uprising, we see the tension between two unresolved forces: one striving for a better life in a better future, and the other pulling it blindly, almost against its will, into the abyss of destruction in the warring present. Ch’iang’s excited speech about the battlefield—a faithful reproduction of Russian Futurist poetry—does not portend well for his promised reunion with Ching.

And when asked what sends him to the battlefield, Ch’iang says:

The last scene in Disillusionment sees Ch’iang Wei-li marching off to southern China with his leader Tung-fang Ming to an uncertain future, while Ching and Wang Shih-t’ao return to Shanghai together to await reunion with their lovers. But these reunions never materialize; destruction strikes instead. A few months later, the opening scene of Pursuit, back in Shanghai, does feature a Miss Wang and a Miss Chang, but Tung-fang Ming and Ch’iang Wei-li are absent. The failed promise of reunion tells us that Ch’iang Wei-li will never come back. The perversion of means has finally affected the nature of its goals. Between Canton and Shanghai, Ch’iang Wei-li’s Futurism has changed as much as European Futurism changed on its way from Italy to Russia to China. Celebration of force for the purpose of creation of a new future has been perverted to blind destruction.

Disillusionment was completed just three months before the prophecy of blind destruction was fulfilled in the Canton Commune, a blind uprising of workers ordered by the Comintern to supply proof for its prediction of a “rising tide” of revolution in the new-China-to-be. The romance of Chang Ching, reviewed in the context of the Canton Commune, becomes the grotesque and gory revitalizing project of Chang Ch’iu-liu in Pursuit. And in Pursuit, Tung-fang Ming returns only in a nightmarish vision and only with a blood ring around his neck.