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Abstract
Mao Zedong’s 1942 “Talks at the Yan’an Forum on Literature and Art” were officially established as the foundation of national policy on culture after the founding of the People’s Republic, but from the very outset they had direct implications for writers and artists in the Communist base areas of the time. As a case study of the implementation of the spirit of Mao’s “Talks” prior to 1949, this paper will discuss how illiterate peasant soldier Chen Dengke (1919–98) was educated by Party cultural cadres in the North Jiangsu (Subei) Base Area, enabling him within the space of just four years to produce a novella and a novel. In order to critically examine the auto/biographical and “slice of life” writings on which this paper relies, brief discussion will be provided of temporal considerations and genre boundaries of this class of writing in the context of the ever-changing political orthodoxy with which writers were required to comply during the Maoist period. The creation of what has been called the Chen Dengke “phenomenon” is not only a fascinating story, but also illustrates the operation of Communist Party cultural policy during the Sino-Japanese and Civil Wars.
摘要
中华人民共和国成立后，毛泽东于1942年发表的《在延安文艺座谈会上的讲话》正式被确立为国家文化政策的基础，但自“讲话”发布起，其内容就对解放区的作家和艺术家产生了直接的影响。作为毛泽东“讲话”精神在1949年之前贯彻落实的研究实例，本文将阐述苏北根据地文化干部的教育如何使文盲农民战士陈登科（1919--1998年）能够在短短四年内写出中篇小说和长篇小说。本文本着批判的态度审查传记与自传及“生活片”。考虑到毛时期作家们需要遵守不断变化的正统政治的观念，我将简短地论述这一类写作的时间因素和体裁界限。所谓陈登科“现象”的形成不仅是一个引人入胜的话题，同时也说明了抗日战争及其后的国共内战期间，共产党文化政策在解放区贯彻实施的作用。
Notes
1. See Section 2 of the Conclusion to Mao’s “Talks” on “how to serve the people”, translated in McDougall (Citation1980, pp. 68–74).
2. Chen Sihe (1954–) is Professor of Modern Chinese Literature, Associate Dean of the Humanities School at Fudan University (Shanghai) and Vice President of the Modern Chinese Literature Association in China.
3. All translations in this paper are by the author.
4. Professor of English Literature and Fellow of New College, Oxford.
5. In the countryside, boys were often given female names because of the superstitious belief that Heaven was more likely to take the lives of male children.
6. A traditional list of more than 500 surnames arranged in the form of a poem to facilitate memorisation by school children.
7. On 1 November 1967, Chen was labelled a Guomindang spy by Jiang Qing. Following this, and associated with the campaign against Liu Shaoqi, a series of attacks against Chen’s 1964 novel Fenglei (Thunderstorm) appeared in the Renmin ribao in July 1968. Subsequently Chen was imprisoned for five years.
8. The Yanfu dazhong bao was a popular newspaper set up in the North Jiangsu Anti-Japanese Base Area following Mao’s “Talks”. It used vernacular language and was aimed at the masses as part of the Communist war propaganda campaign.
At that time the wall posters were written on cloth. When the troops moved at night Chen would roll up his wall posters and carry them in his backpack. Whenever there was a victory or good news, or when a soldier had performed a heroic deed, Chen would record this on a wall poster (Sun, Citation2000).
9. Landlord-led military forces seeking to return and restore their control over Communist areas during the 1946–49 Civil War.
10. Kuaibanr: rhythmic comic talk or monologue to the accompaniment of bamboo clappers.
11. The Huai-Hai Campaign (6 November 1948 to 10 January 1949) was the second of three decisive campaigns in the Civil War. “Huai-Hai” refers to the area north of the Huai River, centring on Xuzhou and extending as far east as the city of Lianyungang (formerly Haizhou) (Xin shidai—Han-Ying da cidian, s.v. “Huáihǎi zhànyì” 淮海战役).
12. In order to implement official Party policy of fostering writers of a worker-peasant-soldier background the Institute was set up under the auspices of the Chinese Writers’ Association at the suggestion of Zhou Enlai and others. Zhou Yang and others were involved in its concrete planning, and it was established with Ding Ling as director (Gu, Citation1991, p. 70).
13. Yang’ge: a rural folk dance popular in northern China. McDougall notes that He Jingzhi and Ding Yi’s opera White Haired Girl (Baimao nü) is based on yang’ge tunes while Zhao Shuli’s Rhymes of Li Youcai (Li Youcai banhua) incorporates traditional narrative techniques and ballads.
14. Erhu: a two-stringed bowed instrument with lower register than jinghu; jinghu: a two-stringed bowed instrument with a high register.
15. Mao wrote in Section 2 of the Conclusion to the “Talks”: “Our professional writers should give their attention to the masses’ wall newspapers and to the reportage literature in the army and the villages... All of these comrades should develop close relationships with comrades who are doing the work of reaching wider audiences [on the lowest level] among the masses” (McDougall, Citation1980, p. 73).
16. Huai opera (huai ju, originally called jianghuai xi) is one of the main forms of local opera in Jiangsu, and is popular in such places as Huaiyin and Yancheng.
17. Pingshu: storytelling (by a professional storyteller, often with props such as fans, handkerchiefs and wooden blocks struck by the storyteller to attract the audience’s attention); pinghua: professional storytelling in a local dialect; tanci: storytelling (in various southern dialects) to the accompaniment of stringed instruments.
18. Take the Chinese character pā 趴, meaning to lie on one’s stomach. Because Chen did not know how to write this character, he replaced it with the character mǎ 馬 (horse) but omitted the four dots representing legs. His rationale: if you cut off a horse’s four legs, would it not be lying on its stomach? But would this occur to another reader? In other cases, when he did not know a character he would write down a symbol and the reader would have to guess which character he meant (Chen, Citation1979b, p. 149).