“Where ideology restricts, art frees …”: the opening section of T. A. Hsia's paper provides an eloquent statement of a fundamental distinction, a distinction which is at the centre of a dilemma. How is a group of men whose inclinations and commitments are to literature as art to approach a literature which is ideological in inspiration and intent? For this, we agreed, is a fair statement of the nature of Chinese Communist literature. It is more than a matter of guidance, or direction or control. It is not at all to be taken for granted that control is disastrous for literature. Great works of literature emerged in the past from under the control of despotic monarchs and authoritarian religions. Dante did not necessarily understand the authority of the Church to impose some kind of fetter on his work; it was a measure of restricted freedom that Chinese writers of the past knew and felt at home in. Great literature endures, as Mao Tun maintains, “not because literature is independent of politics but because it serves in a way much more profound than can be assessed at the moment.”

Poetry and politics are rare companions in the competitive world of practical affairs today. In Moscow, Nikita Khrushchev, with peasant shrewdness, is addicted to Russian proverbs to enliven his rhetoric; but there are few indications that he is sympathetic with the creative writer and none that he himself will rank with Pushkin in the annals of his nation's literature. In Washington, the appearance of Robert Frost at John F. Kennedy's inauguration in January 1961 was an event at once exceptional and gratifying to admirers of Frost's artistic integrity; the elderly poet's advice to the young president of the United States to stress the Irish and underplay the Harvard hi his background may yet have enduring significance. Only in Peking, however, do we find a world leader who combines distinctive political abilities and literary talents. Indeed the juxtaposition of strategic and artistic instincts hi Mao Tse-tung is so unusual in the post-Churchillian world that the case merits more than passing note.

Commenting on literature as a human record, Goethe once called it “The fragment of fragments: The smallest part of what has been done and spoken has been recorded; and the smallest part of what has been recorded has survived.” I find this observation a very sobering and instructive reminder for a discussion of Chinese poetry under Communist rule. Goethe was speaking of literature in general. And poetry, formally at least, being but one of its branches, is by deduction a fragment of “the fragment of fragments.” Over a decade many things have been accomplished under the régime. Many deeds have been done, immense work of material reconstruction has been completed, and more is in process, on the débris of destruction of comparable quantity; and unfathomable tribulations, pains and frustrations in soul and body are felt and muttered, as well as the hue and cry of zeal and enthusiasm exclaimed among massive crowds.

Early in 1957, an event perhaps unparalleled in the world of letters was reported from China. A new monthly magazine, Shih-k'an (Poetry), made its appearance in February of that year, its inaugural issue including a collection of eighteen poems by Mao Tse-tung. The appearance of Mao's poetry was not in itself an exceptional event. From ancient times down to recent decades, Chinese statesmen and military leaders have often displayed talent in the writing of poetry; and it appeared that Mao Tse-tung was carrying on the established tradition of a long line of strong rulers in China who desired to impress the world that they were not only victorious conquerors and vigorous administrators, but also accomplished artists.

What pessimistic observers have lamented as the collapse of Chinese civilisation is exactly the necessary undermining and erosion without which there could not have been a regeneration of an old civilisation.… The product of this rebirth looks suspiciously occidental. But scratch the surface and you will find that the stuff of which it is made is essentially the Chinese bedrock which much weathering and corrosion have only made stand out more clearly—the humanistic and rationalistic China resurrected by the touch of the scientific and democratic civilisation of the new world.

The purpose of this article is to show what Communist literary dictatorship has done to some of the writers, who, though not literary giants, had in the past shown some promise in the art of letters.

A reader in the United States of America or Great Britain may have great misgivings when he opens a book of fiction from Communist China. He is painfully aware of the conditions under which the book is written. He knows that thought control in Communist China means not only a set of taboos but also a strict order to write about certain subjects in a certain manner. With little effort he can guess the plot which rushes on to actual victory or victory imagined. And there is the other side to the “struggle,” which is always wrong and bad and doomed. He knows what characters he is going to encounter: the familiar ugly face of a landlord, the aspiring workers, peasants, and intellectuals who unite to follow the leadership of the Communist Party, and the waverers who somehow have to make a choice between the good and the evil—shadows of the types which, he remembers, dominated proletarian literature in the 1930s. Oversimplification is always an insult to intellect; and the insult becomes all the more unbearable if things are simplified not merely because of the writer's ignorance but, as the reader suspects, from an intention to deceive. Of course, the reader does not have to suffer all this if he can help it. But the book in his hand may be useful as source material for some kind of research, a social document or a storehouse of Communist jargon. So in the name of research, he doggedly reads on, with little expectation of pleasure or stimulus for thought. He is prepared to be insulted and to be bored to death.

Modern Chinese literature, which I date from the deliberate new beginnings made at the time of the May Fourth movement, is distinguished by its conscious effort at Europeanisation, which is in itself a catchall term embracing a whole assembly of themes and techniques, images and linguistic features taken and adopted from the vast literature beyond the seas and vaguely and often incorrectly designated as European. To be European was in fact simply to be non-traditional Chinese.

In Chinese Communist literature, men and women are primarily seen in their likeness as workers rather than in their sexual and emotional unlikeness as human beings. Women, as much as men, are praised for their socialist zeal and heroic capacity for work and condemned for being socialist sluggards indifferent to production. But despite its repudiation of “human interest” as a symptom of capitalist or revisionist decadence, even this supremely practical literature cannot begin to exist without some superficial attention to personal problems, and these problems, inevitably, attest to the persistence of biological instincts and immemorial habits of human civilisation. Until the techniques, Communist or otherwise, for dehumanisation are perfected, men and women will remain subject to irrational passions, and if circumstances permit, they will fall in love, get married, bring up children, and in other devious ways contrive for pleasure and happiness. In tracing the lot of Chinese women under Communism, I will therefore take for granted that the primary purpose of their earthly existence is to contribute to and assist in production and examine rather their residual personal problems in the context of the overriding importance of socialist construction. The results of niy investigation, if my women characters, drawn invariably from short stories, are at all typical, will show, not surprisingly, the pathetic adjustment of their feminine instincts and interests to the jealous demands of Party and state. The exceptions that I will take notice of—sympathetic victims and challengers of the impersonal Communist bureaucracy—are all heroines of revisionist fiction that has been subject to vehement attack by the press.

Speaking in a very general way, youth and age have been taken in traditional Chinese literature as two stages in a continuous development of which the first represents the preparation and the last the goal. Respective values attached to these stages were derived from this concept. In a civilisation where literature, even polite literature, was to a large extent an amateurish pursuit of the scholar-official, this evaluation does not come as a surprise, particularly since it will not be easy to find another civilisation which was as strongly ideology-motivated as was the Chinese. Established attitudes concerning youth and age were thus, in general, accepted and taken for granted also by the poet.

In less than a decade, collectivisation has come to more than five hundred million Chinese peasants and a large portion of the urban population; it has transformed the socio-economic structure of the nation, causing general repercussions around the world and unascertainable effects in the country. The development of this massive and significant collectivisation movement is reflected, in large measure, in Chinese Communist literature. This article first presents, following a general chronological order, fictional materials reflecting the co-operative and commune movements, and then discusses summarily the artistic and social values of this literature.

In the opinion of the Communists, the significance of the Literary Renaissance in modern China beginning with the May Fourth movement of 1919, lies not in that it introduced the colloquial language as the new medium for literature, but in that it ushered into China a new literature which replaced the “old-fashioned, out-of-date literature of the bourgeois class.” But the new literature which the Communists had hoped for did not fully develop until the political revolution led by the Communists succeeded, and a new régime was established in 1949. To implement the literary revolution and to introduce the people's new literature, the Communist régime called the first conference of the All-China Federation of Literary and Art Circles in July, 1949 at which the government spokesmen expounded the concepts and scope of this new literature and outlined a programme for “literary workers” to follow. Since these expositions were indeed the expressions of the policies of the new régime on literary reform and are therefore pertinent to the discussion in this paper, they must be cited here as a point of reference.

In 1962, commemorative activities were held in Communist China to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of the publication of Mao's Talks at the Yenan Forum on Literature and Art. In the same year, a group of scholars and writers working in America and Britain gathered near Oxford to ponder over Chinese Communist literature. Though the coincidence was not intentional, it did force on one's mind a disturbing sense of history. For no review of Chinese Communist literature, from our point of view or theirs, can escape the fact of control, and the control began with Mao's Talks. The success of the control, of course, is something to be celebrated in Communist China, but the defects in the Chinese Communist writing, noted at the conference in England, indicate the costs paid for that success. For these defects are made to order. It is beyond the power of any single writer in Communist China to correct them. He is bound to contribute to the collective errors if he wishes to avoid a political offence.

First hard estimates of China's food production for 1962, a crucial year indeed, indicate a grains yield increase of from 8 to 10 per cent, over 1961, giving a total of 180–185 million metric tons; a fair enough year, all things considered, but not one promising any real relief from grey austerity, or an early end to the heavy industry pause.