Chinese Theory and Criticism
		3. Twentieth Century
	The twentieth century has been a time of unprecedented tumult in China, intellectually, politically, and socially. For a variety of reasons, literature and theories of literature in particular have at most times been close to the center of intellectual and political contention in modern China, the theories at once being shaped by their times as well as contributing substantially to various visions of what the new China was to become. It is often difficult, in fact, to tell where literary theory ends and social and political theorizing begins. Perhaps the most remarkable thing about the mainstream of literary criticism in China after the late 1910s is the extent to which it has consciously been engaged in an iconoclastic project designed to overturn what it perceives as the pernicious legacy of traditional literary practice and literary ideas. The set of these departures from past practice is conventionally named after a particularly influential student demonstration that took place on May 4, 1919. What has come to be called the May Fourth Movement (also known as the New Culture Movement) signifies all the reforms undertaken in China from as early as 1915 through the early 1920s and, by implication at least, the full range of reformist and revolutionary initiatives that have marked modern Chinese thought as a whole.  At least up until the mid-1980s there was a convenient narrative of the development of theories of literature in China after May Fourth that had wide currency in China. The story dates back to 1917, when Hu Shi's (1891-1962) first calls for a literature composed in the vernacular language were published in the Beijing magazine New Youth, edited by Chen Duxiu (1879-1942). From the official perspective, literary theory in this period was a tale of the development of a realism that has become ever more consonant with the scientific view of reality espoused by the Marxist perspective of the Community party. In this view, the various left-wing deviations, such as the anti-rightist movement of the late 1950s and the Cultural Revolution of the late 1960s, represent merely temporary interruptions in this account of continuous progress. It is clear that Party and governmental coercion contributed substantially to the widespread circulation of this view. It is, however, remarkable how even oppositional writers and literary intellectuals tended to produce a narrative that was very similar to the official version in those brief periods when it was possible to advance a critique of orthodox literary thought. The only real difference was that the dissenters tended to regard the Party and/or Marxist ideology as the primary impediments to the progress toward the realization of realism.  This version of the progression of literary thought obviously occludes many of its more interesting developments. But there was significant compliance by the main body of modern Chinese critics and authors, later enforced by the official organs of the Left after 1930 and, from 1949 until about 1985, by the government itself. This story does, therefore, tell us more about the general direction of modern Chinese literary theory than any other account could. But we cannot forget that this discourse was never as absolute as it depicted itself to be, and it is rather poor at accounting for both the specifics of the literature produced and the complexities of the theory itself. Thus, in the years after 1985, as the official discourse rapidly lost its ability to persuade, features of literary thought that had been so carefully excluded by the official story have begun to come to light. The fact remains, however, that probably the most notable thing about literary theory in modern China is the extent to which the official version of literary thought, or something very much like it, maintained its influence, not just in criticism, but as guide to the creation of literary work. Given the politically interested orthodoxy that resulted, modern Chinese literary theory has tended in the main to be uninspiring, eventually an impediment rather than an encouragement to literary innovation.  Many of the ideas about literature that May Fourth represented to itself as its own discoveries had in fact been prefigured in the last fifteen years of the Qing dynasty, a period that began after China's 1895 defeat at the hands of Japan. The stunning evidence of the smaller country's rapid modernization stimulated a new generation of Chinese intellectuals to look to Japan for ways to adapt to the pressures exerted by the imperialist West. This process of adaptation was understood as being emblematized more than anything else by a new willingness to appropriate Western ideas concerning social structure and culture. Among the more resonant ideas adapted at the time was the notion of literature (wenxue) as a general and autonomous field of inquiry extending over a number of written genres, replacing the focus on the rhetoric of specific genres that had characterized the study of writing in the post-Song dynasty period. Within this new and comprehensive field of literature two ideas surfaced in the late Qing that were to exert vast influence for the rest of the century: that literary forms evolved through time and that a new and effective vernacular literature would be required to bring a broader spectrum of people into a revitalized polity. The critic Liang Qichao (1837-1929) is most prominently associated with the latter, or popularization, trend.  In the final years of the empire, however, for all the pressure to create new popular forms, writers held to the cultural primacy of the traditional elite literary (or classical) language that for over two thousand years had been regarded as the sole vehicle for serious literary expression. If anything, the literary style was accorded an even higher value in these years, as scholars such as Liu Shipei (1884-1919) and Zhang Binglin (1868-1936) seized upon the old language as a "national essence" that would remain as that ultimate signifier of Chineseness when so much else was being remolded using explicitly Western models. There was thus a two-tiered model for literary creativity at the end of the Qing: a vernacular suitable for the novels and meant to bring the semieducated into political and cultural life, and a continuation of the old literary language for works written by and for the educated.  Since there was so much precedent for it, the call for adoption of the vernacular language per se did not create much of a stir when it was first published in New Youth in 1917. Hu Shi, Chen Duxiu, Liu Fu (1891-1934), Qian Xuantong (1887-1939), and the other advocates of language reform, however, insisted upon taking the further step of championing the vernacular as the universal Chinese written language. In other words, the proponents of reform held that the vernacular was no longer to be simply a tool for educating the masses; it was also to be the means of written communication for everyone, from the very learned to those with only a rudimentary education. By stressing the radicalism of their advocacy, those who proposed this idea at once drew attention to their project and established a position from which they felt they could open the floodgates for the wholesale emulation of a wide variety of Western literary ideas. Chen Duxiu in 1917 wrote: "I do not mind being an enemy of all old-fashioned scholars in the country and raising to great heights the banner of 'the Army of Literary Revolution' . . . Destroy aristocratic literature which is nothing but literary chiseling and flattery" ("On Literary Revolution," Sources of Chinese Tradition, ed. William Theodore DeBary, 2 vols., 1960, 2:162).  The other principal feature of modern criticism dating back to the late Qing that received renewed impetus after May Fourth was the setting of literary history on an evolutionary track. Reformers and revolutionaries alike based their thinking on the notion that all literary genres and ideas are part of a universal historical process. Evolutionary theory was probably the most influential of the ideologies imported into China after 1895 and would prove to be the most tenacious. Its initial appeal lay in its apparent guarantee that even backward China would eventually catch up with the modern West. The disadvantage of this theory as borrowed from such thinkers as Thomas Henry Huxley and Herbert Spencer, however, lay in the social Darwinian aspect of a code that also guaranteed that some social formations would fail to meet the test and were thus bound to expire. This brought with it the fear that the backwardness evident in Chinese society and culture foretold eventual doom for the Chinese nation as a whole. "Madman's Diary," a story written in the vernacular by Lu Xun (pen name of Zhou Shuren, 1881-1936) and published in 1918, represented the Darwinist thesis with great force. This and other of Lu Xun's stories from this early period thus became almost universally regarded as essential theoretical guides to the creation of literature in the years after 1920.  From the Chinese perspective, then, the anxiety at the heart of the evolutionary scheme was that China was behind the "world standard" so evidently set by the advanced Western powers. Some sort of extraordinary effort was thus required of all facets of Chinese culture and society to catch up to this standard. Evolutionary thought found its literary counterpart in the sequence of literary terms "classical-romantic-realism-naturalism," set out by Chen Duxiu as early as 1915, a scheme that dominated literary thought in the early May Fourth years. In this formula Chinese literature was seen as frozen somewhere between classicism and romanticism, and realism thus became the "logical" goal of the most influential segment of Chinese critical opinion from May Fourth even into the 1980s. In such a context, however, for all the attempts to equate it with simple representation of ordinary life, realism was also seen as just beyond reach. It also seemed to require a radical suspension of old rules if it was to be brought into being.  One of the principal needs of the iconoclast literary movement was to differentiate the legacy of the past from the needs of the present so as to create the perception of need for radical change. Such advocates of cultural reform as Fu Sinian (1896-1950) and Zhou Zuoren (1885-1967), Lu Xun's brother, in the period between 1918 and 1920 took a step beyond mere promotion of the vernacular by finding the problems they saw in all Chinese humanistic discourse to be more fundamental than any such surface phenomenon as linguistic expression. In articles such as "Humane Literature" and "Literature of the Common People" by Zhou and "Vernacular Literature and Psychological Reform" by Fu, Chinese culture was diagnosed as being marked by a fundamental lack of seriousness, with the result that writing and thinking had become frozen into unproductive stereotypes. The vision of an airtight past impinging upon any possibility of natural evolution created the intellectual need for a complete transformation of literary ideology.  Negating the past was the easy part of May Fourth literary theory: the various factions largely agreed on the nature of the problem. Far more difficult was the task of constructing a set of ideas that would meet the needs of the modern age. A number of groups sprang up advocating different notions of change. The Society for Literary Research was founded at the end of 1920 and included such eminent critics and writers as Guo Shaoyu (1893-1984), Shen Yanbing, better known as Mao Dun (1896-1981), Wang Tongzhao (1897-1957), Ye Shaojun (1894-1988), Zheng Zhenduo (1898-1958), and Zhou Zuoren. They set as their task the careful scrutiny of Western literary ideas. Since they took as part of their task the need to avoid the irrelevancy to actual life that they assumed to be the essence of traditional literature, the rhetoric of engagement they adopted had much in common with theories of realism and naturalism that they were translating from foreign languages. Thus, while none of their official manifestoes advocated realism or naturalism, their common advocacy of "literature for life," combined with the fact that many of the prominent members of the society advocated realism and/or naturalism, led to the easy assumption among the literate public that the society stood for realism.  Meanwhile, another group of young Chinese writers, this one based principally in Japan, established themselves as the Creation Society. Members of this association had come to the conclusion that the need for selfexpression was more important than any careful attempt to match literature to social needs. Founded in July 1921, the society included Cheng Fangwu (1897-1984), Guo Moruo (1892-1978), Tian Han (1898-1968), Yu Dafu (1896-1945), and Zhang Ziping (1893-?). A good deal of superficial sloganeering on the virtues of romantic self-expression masked the fact that the Creation Society shared many ideas with the Society for Literary Research. Principal among these common ideas was a disgust with the Neo-Confucian idea of wen yi zai dao, "literature as the vehicle of the way." Both groups took this phrase as the embodiment of the Confucian didacticism they saw as having been so damaging to literary expression of all sorts. Nonetheless, by 1923 a positive loathing had sprung up between the two groups, a foretaste of the personal antagonism that came to mark literary debate in modern China.  Aside from a few rather poorly reasoned attacks, traditional men of letters were never able to launch a concerted response to the May Fourth critique. For all the apparent unanimity with which these new, European ideas were used as clubs for beating traditional ideas about literature and practices of writing, there was one notable effort to resuscitate classicism. Ironically enough, this steadfast defense of the values of tradition was launched by a group of scholars most of whom had received their training in the United States, many from the neoclassicist Irving Babbitt at Harvard (see New Humanism). Founded by Hu Xiansu (1893-1968), Mei Guangdi (1890-1945), and Wu Mi (b. 1894) in 1922, Xueheng [Critical review] attacked what it saw as the fashion for disparaging literature written in the classical language. Its defense of classical values met with little response beyond overt hostility in the iconoclastic atmosphere of the 1920s, however, and the journal soon expired.  The Bolshevik revolution in Russia had from the beginning been attractive to Chinese intellectuals. As the 1920s drew on, this attraction became both stronger and more concrete, what with Soviet advisors in China assisting a reorganized Guomindang (Nationalist Party) as well as providing ideological backing for a newly founded Chinese Communist party. Many of the most prominent literary reformers, such as Chen Duxiu and Mao Dun, became involved in organizing the new party, and literary thinkers in general were increasingly intrigued by the vision of social meliorism that Marxism offered. Marxism came to play a large role in the transformation of Chinese politics in the years between 1925 and 1927, when the newly militant Guomindang set about its military campaign to unify China under its own rule. The Marxian view of history fitted neatly into the evolutionary pattern that already had such deep roots in modern Chinese thought and explained to many how the events then in progress were to unfold. The conversion of so many of the more prominent members of the Creation Society to Marxism in these years is but the most striking evidence of Marxism's broadening allure.  If anything, the violent expulsion of the Communists from their alliance with the Guomindang in 1927 increased the currency of Marxist ideas among Chinese writers and instantiated a general antipathy to the new ruling party among intellectuals. A new generation of young critics such as Qian Xingcun, also known as A Ying (1900-1977), led an assault on selected writers and ideas of the May Fourth period. Qian selected as his target Lu Xun, the brilliant writer whose stories were so influential. Qian's accusation that Lu Xun had been mired in anachronistic portraits of traditional ways clearly stung a writer who had been universally considered a pungently innovative voice only a few years before. That Lu Xun responded by immersing himself in a study of Marxism and Marxist literary theory was characteristic of the period.  Most of those involved in this squabbling among dissident writers were not happy that energy was being expended in this fashion. Neither were those responsible for cultural policy within the Communist party, and by the end of 1929 a number of the feuding voices agreed to work together. This led to the founding, in February 1930, of the League of Left-Wing Writers, a group that soon included such people as Ding Ling (1904-85), Feng Xuefeng (1903-76), Guo Moruo, Hu Feng (1902-85), Lu Xun, Mao Dun, Qian Xingcun, Qu Qiubai (1899-1935), Tian Han, Yu Dafu, and Zhou Yang (1908-89). As the two most prominent writers, Lu Xun and Mao Dun played leading roles as spokespersons for what the Party clearly regarded as an organization existing primarily to propagate its ideas about how literature should serve the purposes of the revolution. In the years that followed the founding of the league, Lu Xun and Qu Qiubai (a former Party leader) were to issue forth with numerous brilliantly written polemics in support of league policy. These polemics were devoted predominantly to promoting writing for a mass audience through more popular themes and writing styles and adhering to the Party's notion of "proletarian revolution." There were various attempts by independent critics in the years between 1927 and 1937 to establish theories of writing separate from Party policy. Whether these efforts called for a focus on aesthetics, continued attention to Western theory, or simply alternative voices, the league critics were generally able to portray all such initiatives as elitist attempts to recuperate the days when the educated communicated with one another in their own inaccessible literary language.  When another war with Japan ensued in 1937, then, the literary community was already habituated to calls to support efforts of political and social mobilization. Once again in alliance with the Guomindang, the Communist party now had a broader platform from which to propagate its ideas about literature. While the Guomindang proved unable to present a compelling message, the Communists effectively built upon their expanding territorial base and patriotic appeals to amplify certain ideas first broached by Qu Qiubai. One of the first calls Mao Zedong (1893-1976) made was for a reinvigoration of national forms at the expense of ideas about literary theories imported during the May Fourth period. In advocating this repudiation of May Fourth ideology, Mao was clearly following Qu's perception that May Fourth vernacular represented a "new classical language" because it had incorporated elements of Western syntax and a whole set of neologisms. Mao's invocation of this argument caused much consternation among veteran critics, including such leftist stalwarts as Mao Dun and Hu Feng, a follower of Lu Xun, by then deceased.  Mao Zedong's most decisive move into literary criticism came with his talks at the so-called Yan'an Conference on Literature and Art of May 1942. He sought on this occasion to give a definitive shape to literary activity in those regions controlled by the Communists. More than anything else, Mao broke down the notion of literary universals into class-specific attributes. All writing had to become conscious of the fact that it was aimed at a particular audience. In this way Mao reinstated the distinction between a literature for the intellectual elite and one for the ordinary people. And by stressing the fact of wartime exigency, he set forth the notion that mobilizing the masses had to take priority. He also established a distinction between the literature of critique, appropriate to zones controlled by the Guomindang, and a literature intent upon extolling the achievements of the workers, peasants, and soldiers and, by implication, the party that spoke in their name. It is perhaps needless to add that he sought to establish the latter in those areas of China under Communist control.  With the coming to power of the Communist party in 1949, the "Talks at the Yan'an Conference" became official policy, or more properly, the "Talks" became the official justification for complete Party dictation in literary matters. Anyone who tried to resist this dictation, as Hu Feng did in the early 1950s, was ruthlessly crushed through massive campaigns of denunciation that pointedly included the dissenting writer or critic's close associates. The 20 years after 1949 thus witnessed an ever-tightening grip of Maoist ideas in the literary arena. This mode of treating the literary world achieved an extreme in the Cultural Revolution, which reached a crescendo in 1966-69 that saw virtually all modern Chinese writers and their works banished as having been part of a nefarious campaign to restore the old order. The sole exception among veteran writers was Lu Xun, whose writings had been rendered politically correct by swaddling them in an expanse of Maoist exegesis.  With Mao's death in 1976, those who had been in charge of the radical policies of the Cultural Revolution were soon brought down. The campaign against the Maoist legacy that ensued enlisted literature most prominently in its ranks. Notions of critical realism that Maoist literary theory had for years tried to transmute into various formulas for representing the inevitability of progression into Marxism suddenly came back in full force. After reaching a peak in the early spring of 1979, the liberalization engendered by this critique was abruptly reined in by the Party. While the next decade was marked by alternating liberalizations and Party crackdowns on dissent, the overall trend was toward diminution of intellectual control. After 1985, in particular, literary criticism seems to have regained a life of its own, with a renewed appetite for trying out a variety of theories, some borrowed, such as modernism, and some domestic, such as the "seeking roots" movement of 1985.  The years before 1989 were replete with new ventures and experimentation in all sectors of literary life. Characteristically, Liu Zaifu (b. 1941), a high official in the literary wing of the Academy of Social Sciences, sought to revive the notion of authorial subjectivity that had been anathema to Party literary policy for over 40 years. While the Tiananmen incident on June 4, 1989, certainly brought on a wave of political repression, literary criticism seems to have been allowed to continue much in the same direction it had taken since 1985. The years since 1989 have seen a discourse on literature that has become more like that of the West, as the theories that have circulated in North America and Europe since the late 1960s are translated into Chinese and naturalized into domestic literary theory. Most recently, however, Chinese literary criticism has taken on a reflexive tone, once again taking up the question of its relationship with literary events outside China. The issue of how the particular literary theories and practices of China fit into the literary "universals" of the rest of the world, a matter so bedeviled by political overdetermination through the years since May Fourth, has once again come to the surface. Theodore Huters
	Notes and Bibliography
		Beijing daxue et al., eds., Wenxue yundong shiliao xuan [A selection of historical materials on the literary movement] (5 vols., 1979); John Berninghausen and Ted Huters, eds., Revolutionary Literature in China: An Anthology (1976); Howard Goldblatt, ed., Chinese Literature for the 1980s: The Fourth Congress of Writers and Artists (1982); Bonnie S. McDougall, Mao Zedong's "Talks at the Yan'an Conference on Literature and Art" (1980); Zhao Jiabi, ed., Zhongguo xin wenxue daxi [A comprehensive anthology of China's new literature], vols. 1-2, 10 (1936). Marston Anderson, The Limits of Realism: Chinese Fiction in the Revolutionary Period (1990); Chow Tse-tsung, The May Fourth Movement: Intellectual Revolution in Modern China (1960); Marián Gálik, The Genesis of Modern Chinese Literary Criticism (1980), Mao Tun [Mao Dun] and Modern Chinese Literary Criticism (1969), Milestones in Sino-Western Literary Confrontation (1898-1979) (1986); C. T. Hsia, A History of Modern Chinese Fiction (1961, 2d ed., 1971); Leo Ou-fan Lee, ed., Lu Xun and His Legacy (1985); Bonnie S. McDougall, The Introduction of Western Literary Theories into Modern China, 1919-1925 (1971); Paul Pickowicz, Marxist Literary Thought in China: The Influence of Ch'ü Ch'iu-bai [Qu Qiubai] (1981); David Pollard, A Chinese Look at Literature: The Literary Values of Chou Tso-jen [Zhou Zuoren] in Relation to the Tradition (1973); Jaroslav Prusek, The Lyrical and the Epic: Studies of Modern Chinese Literature (1980); Yi Chu Wang, Chinese Intellectuals and the West, 1872-1949 (1966).

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