4 chapter one
guages: Guo Moruo, Wen Yiduo, Xu Zhimo, Bing Xin, Li Jinfa, Bian
Zhilin, He Qifang, Feng Zhi, Dai Wangshu, Ai Qing, Zang Kejia,
Tian Jian, Zheng Min, Chen Jingrong and others. At the end of the
day the New Poetry’s practitioners were forced to engage with the cri-
sis in which their country found itself, meaning imperialist aggression,
crippling social problems, a world war and a civil war. Art for art’s
sake, or art that could be construed as arrogating the right to remain
aloof from its national and social environs, fought a losing battle. Ten-
dentious though the metaphors of aloofness and battle may be, it is
difficult to deny them access to this particular bit of literary history.
As Chinese leaders have done through the ages, Mao Zedong
thought highly of the political potential of literature. In his 1942
“Talks at the Yan’an Forum on Literature and Art” (ᓊᅝ᭛㡎ᑻ
䇜ӮϞⱘ䆆䆱), he laid down the law for writers in Communist-con-
trolled areas, subordinating their work to politics in so many words.^3
This meant a ban on many types of literature, including those of the
so-called Individualist (ϾҎЏН) and Humanist (Ҏ䘧ЏН) kinds. It
also led to the active commission of literary works designed to advance
the war effort against the Japanese and the Chinese Nationalists. In
the People’s Republic of China, established in 1949, these wartime
rules for literature and art remained in force for decades after the war
was over. Taiwan, now home to the Nationalist government of the
Republic of China, and Hong Kong, still a British colony at the time,
were worlds apart from the mainland, as is borne out by their subse-
quent literary histories.
In China, literature and art—production, publication, distribu-
tion, criticism, scholarship—came under near-complete control of the
Communist Party and were institutionalized as ideological tools in
state-sponsored bodies like the Chinese Writers’ Association (Ё
ᆊणӮ) on national and local levels. Successful and popular works in
all genres treated of politically correct subject matter in politically cor-
rect forms. Their aggressively prescriptive poetics was that of Socialist
Realism (力ӮЏН⦄ᅲЏН) and later the Combination of Revolu-
tionary Realism and Revolutionary Romanticism (䴽ੑ⦄ᅲЏН
䴽ੑ⌾⓿ЏНⱘ㒧ড়). For poetry this gave rise to a dominant trend
known as Political Lyricism (ᬓ⊏ᡦᚙ䆫). Control and activism ex-
tended to issues of style that reached down to the sentence level and
(^3) McDougall 1980, Denton 2003.