avant-garde poetry from china 5indeed that of the individual word. The mark this left on the Chinese
language as it was spoken and written in the PRC over the next three
decades and beyond, especially but not exclusively in public discourse,
is known as the Mao Style or Maospeak (↯᭛ԧ), with a predilection
for political lingo, ideologically heavy abstractions and the grand ges-
ture. Censorship, including systematically stimulated self-censorship,
became the order of the day, and many writers abandoned their art for
safer occupations. Those who continued to write but failed to toe the
line risked punishment, ranging from harassment in their private and
professional lives to domestic exile, house arrest, incarceration and
mental and physical violence, especially during the Cultural Revolu-
tion (1966-1976). This led, for instance, to the alleged suicide of famed
fiction writer and dramatist Lao She—or effectively his murder by
Red Guards. They were youngsters who had been instructed by Mao
to “bomb the headquarters” and take the law into their own hands,
but soon became the pawns of infighting within the Party that led the
country to the brink of mass psychosis, economic collapse and civil
war.
In the 1950s and the early 1960s there had still been a regular
production of literary texts, albeit monotonous and predictable, with
much banner-waving, heroic battling of sinister landlords, glorious
steel production and so on. Also, while the People’s Republic was in-
comparably less cosmopolitan and outward-looking than the Republic
had been and went on to be in Taiwan, and the selection of works
for translation was increasingly determined by the political loyalties of
their authors and their countries of origin, foreign literature did con-
tinue to be published in 1950s and early 1960s China. But by the late
1960s, after the outbreak of the Cultural Revolution, literary activity
in China came to a virtual standstill.^4
- The Unofficial Poetry Scene and the Avant-Garde
Ideological repression was now at a fever pitch. In a Maoist anti-intel-
lectual outburst, schools and universities were closed, and urban high
school and university students designated as Intellectual Youths (ⶹ
(^4) Yang Lan has shown that the production of new fiction did not stop altogether,
but his research confirms the general picture of a literary wasteland (1998). Cf Hsu
1975.