Mao Dun

Literary innovation in modern China has been closely linked with the awakening of the Chinese nation epitomized in the May 4th Movement of 1919, which put an end to the dominance of classical language and tradition and heralded the advent of modernism. Modern literature was thus the product of a growing ideological awareness of modern ideas about democracy, socialism and the role of literature itself. The corruption permeating society and the danger the nation faced, as well as the revolutionary fervor to which these gave rise and which had its own roots in the May 4th Movement too, occupied the attention of the majority of writers, who consciously or unconsciously joined the revolutionary struggle by taking up their pens to analyze social reality. It was against this socio-historical background that the revolution began to influence literature directly and profoundly and determine the direction in which it would develop, conferring on it a historical character foreign to its precursors. Mao Dun, a versatile talent, was active during this process.

Mao Dun, whose real name was Shen Yanbing, used this pen-name when he began writing in the late 1920s. He was well known both nationally and internationally as a writer, but was at the same time a social activist. One of the earliest members of the Chinese Communist Party, he began revolutionary work in the mid-1920s and continued to take an active part in social and political struggle throughout his life. But it was literature which he made his career, one in which he achieved splendid things. National liberation and social progress were the constant goal of his writing. In him were combined the social activist and the man of letters, the writer and the revolutionary. It is nonetheless in the establishment and development of modern Chinese literature that his contributions were greatest and where his far-reaching influence can be felt today even after his death. He was truly one of the great men of modern Chinese literature.

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When Mao Dun was born on July 4, 1896 in Tongxiang, Zhejiang, the last feudal dynasty, the Manchu Qing empire, was on the verge of collapse, and he people of China were seeking liberation and a way to change their society. His home was on the southeast coast close to Shanghai, in that economically and culturally developed area where advanced science and thought were first introduced from Japan and the West. His father was a doctor who sympathized with the doomed Reform Movement of 1898, and consequently Mao Dun grew up in a relatively free and progressive atmosphere, reading books that would never have found their way into the hands of a child in a feudal family, among them popular novels whose wealth of social content at once instilled in him a love of literature and a democratic consciousness. His political zeal was further fired by the Revolution of 1911, which finally toppled the ailing dynasty, and he began to busy himself with propaganda work; a protest against the autocratic nature of his middle school got him expelled.

In 1916, as the ideals of the May 4th Movement were crystallizing at last, Mao Dun graduated from the preparatory course at Beijing University, went to work for the Commercial Press and began to write. He formed eclectic intellectual habits at these two institutions, which despite being tightly controlled by conservative interests were respected as disseminators of advanced ideas in both science and politics.

His early writing was aimed predominantly at the young and preoccupied with the nature of ideological enlightenment, so that when Hu Shi, Chen Duxiu and Lu Xun began to promote the literary revolution through the columns of their magazine New Youth, they found in the young Mao Dun a ready response. In January, 1920, he began to experiment with literary innovation as editor of the "New Trends in Fiction" feature of the magazine Short Story Monthly, which by the end of the year he had taken over and transformed thoroughly. From this he went on to join with Zhou Zuoren, Ye Shengtao, Zheng Zhenduo and others in founding the Literary Research Society to put his ideas into practice by promoting realistic literature that mirrored life. He was not only the society's active organizer but also the elaborator of the theory it stood for. His management and advocacy gave Short Story Monthly and the Literary Research Society alike a modern flavour all their own which destined them to be enormously influential.

His articles from these years reveal a keen concern for the freedom of youth and the liberation of women. It was after the 1920s that he began to be drawn to Marxist theory and the ideals of the Russian Revolution, which were just then becoming known in China, and this led him to direct involvement with the Chinese communist movement. He was never exclusively concerned with literature. The outbreak of the First Revolutionary Civil War (1924-27) rapidly disillusioned him with the "enlightenment" of the early post-May-4th literature, and he began to call for "great changes". As one of the first writers to combine proletarian Marxism with literature, he helped to make the step from literary revolution to revolutionary literature. In 1930 he joined the China League of Left-wing Writers, which for a time he led in this spirit during what many historians have called the "red 30s". He added luster to that turbulent decade with a phenomenal output of original writing and criticism, working in close association with Lu Xun and Qu Qiubai. His novel Midnightwas universally regarded as a prime example of revolutionary literature and was enthusiastically received by writers themselves and the reading public, soon achieving international status with translations into English, Russian and German.

In 1937 the War of Resistance Against Japan broke out, which was destined to last for eight years and be followed by another three years of the War of Liberation, a turbulent period during which Mao Dun was constantly on the move from place to place in an attempt to evade the ravages of the invaders as well as the persecution of the Kuomintang government. He lived in Urumqi, Yan'an, Guangzhou, Hongkong, Wuhan, Changsha, Guilin and Chongqing, and as a council member of the All-China Federation of Writers and Artists for Resistance Against the Enemy he continued his work of writing, criticism and translation, besides editing literary journals -- Literary Front was one of the most important magazines of the war of resistance -- and the literary supplements of several newspapers.

With the death of Lu Xun in 1936, Mao Dun and Guo Moruo became the most prestigious and influential writers in China. Mao Dun devoted himself to the twin tasks of making literature contribute to national liberation and winning acceptability and popularity for it with the public at large, whilst at the same time exploring the theoretical and creative possibilities of a distinctively Chinese literature.

The Yan'an Forum on Literature and Art, held in 1942, encouraged much new writing in the liberated areas; full of admiration for the new literature, Mao Dun embodied its principles in his own work in the Kuomintang-controlled areas, extending his endeavours beyond the literary field into the forefront of the ideological struggle for national freedom and democracy against world fascism.

For a long period after the founding of the People's Republic of China in 1949, Mao Dun was a leading figure in government cultural institutions and in other literary and artistic bodies, interesting himself particularly in cultural exchanges with foreign countries and the defence of world peace. At the same time he kept up his theoretical work and literary criticism, writing voluminously on new writers. His contribution to the world-wide debate on socialist realism of the late 1950s was Notes of a Night Reader, a summary of world literature down to modern times upholding realistic writing and the socialist path.

During the "cultural revolution" Mao Dun, like any other honest writer, was persecuted into silence. He was over eighty by the time the storm passed, and began to concentrate on his memoirs, which when finished ran to tens of thousands of words, an invaluable document for the study of his life and work and the political, literary and social history of modern China, besides reviving the tradition of literary memoirs, which had been in abeyance for many years.

Mao Dun died in Beijing on March 27, 1981. On his deathbed he donated his royalties to establish an award for novels to encourage young writers.