Revolutionary Literature under Mao

This article includes literature (principally fiction, but also poetry, spoken drama, opera, and popular performances), cultural policy and debate, and the history of the Communist Party’s relations with cultural intellectuals for the years 1942–1976. The starting point is Communist Party chairman Mao Zedong’s “Talks at the Yan’an Forum on Literature and Art,” delivered in May 1942, when China was politically divided and at war with Japan, and the period ends with Mao’s death in September 1976, an event closely followed by the arrest of his widow and her closest associates in a coup the following month. Mao’s “Talks” set the tone for the entire period, demanding the subordination of the arts to the Party’s mission as currently defined, and insisting that culture serve the Party’s constituency of “workers, peasants, and soldiers.” The “Talks,” variously interpreted, remained Party policy through the civil war period (1945–1949), and following the establishment of the People’s Republic in 1949. The new communist state established a Soviet Union–style cultural bureaucracy, and the most fortunate writers, performers, and artists were rewarded with official recognition and state sponsorship; also imported from the Soviet Union was the doctrine of socialist realism, with its requirement for loyalist and heroic works celebrating the nation’s prospective progress along the road to the glorious future of communism. Throughout the Mao era, the authorities sought to sponsor a new socialist Chinese culture, with varying degrees of tolerance for indigenous traditions and Western influence. The Communist Party and its leader believed in the power of the arts to support, and in the wrong hands to undermine, the cause of socialism; Mao intervened periodically in cultural matters, and many of the political campaigns that disrupted the period had cultural components. The effect of mercurial and often vindictive policy changes on writers and artists could be devastating: the Anti-Rightist campaign of the late 1950s and the Cultural Revolution of Mao’s last decade (1966–1976) saw the persecution of many of the nation’s leading cultural figures; virtually no writer or artist had an uninterrupted career. Chinese cultural histories customarily view the Yan’an and civil war period as distinct, and they divide the period from 1949 to 1976 into the seventeen years before 1966 and the Cultural Revolution decade that followed. Although this periodization overstates the discontinuity of cultural policy and artistic output, it will be observed for convenience here. A note on Romanization: English-language publications from China prior to 1979 use a modified, and inefficient, version of the now little-used Wade-Giles Romanization; after 1979, Chinese publishers converted to the now conventional pinyin Romanization. For Western scholarship or translations, the transition from Wade-Giles (in its more precise form) to pinyin took place at around the same time.