How Should We Understand Hao Ran?

Liu Jiming · Posted on Testimony of Time, September 28, 2026

Anyone who sets out to understand and study the course of literature over New China’s seventy years will sooner or later have to reckon with Hao Ran.[1] Across the whole arc of contemporary Chinese literary history, through the “literature of the Seventeen Years,” the “literature of the Cultural Revolution,” and the “literature of the New Era” alike, Hao Ran’s work has always held a position of real weight. His novels Bright Sunny Skies, written in the early 1960s, The Golden Road in the 1970s, and The Common People in the 1980s are all recognized as representative works of contemporary Chinese literature. But because of the deep fractures between these periods, and because Hao Ran was once bound up in a thousand ways with the political life of a particular era, judgments of the man and his work have been full of disagreement, misunderstanding, and controversy, and even of slander and attack with ulterior motives.

In the heyday of “scar literature” and “rewriting literary history,” Hao Ran himself and his Bright Sunny Skies and The Golden Road were always held up as objects of criticism and contempt. In the 1990s, with the publication of all four volumes of The Golden Road, a wave of reckoning with Hao Ran swept the literary world. Faced with Hao Ran’s declaration that he had “no regrets,” one critic denounced him as an ultra-leftist and a “remnant of the Cultural Revolution,” as if he would like nothing better than to “knock Hao Ran to the ground and plant a foot on him.” Such attacks can hardly have been new to Hao Ran. Just after the fall of the Gang of Four, too, a good many writers had denounced and condemned him in speech and in print. A saying was going around the literary world then: “During the Cultural Revolution, China had only one writer and eight model operas.” The “one writer” was Hao Ran.[2] This tied him firmly to the Gang of Four, and in effect passed a political death sentence on him.

The notion of “one writer and eight model operas” is, of course, untrue. Kong Qingdong once wrote a piece, “Literature and Art in the Cultural Revolution,” in which he put it very sharply:[3] “There is a fallacy about the literature of the Cultural Revolution, too: that during the Cultural Revolution you could only read one living writer, Hao Ran, plus one dead writer, Lu Xun. Hao Ran’s book was called The Golden Road, so they summed it up as ‘Lu Xun walking down the golden road.’ Like the ‘eight model operas,’ this is their summary of Cultural Revolution literature. … I won’t go into the works of the Cultural Revolution, since I have listed hundreds, even a thousand of them here. The works of the Cultural Revolution period would fill a house to the rafters. Even I, who love reading so much, never read most of them; I read only a part of them. And having read only a part of them, I became a person of some cultivation. What is a great pity is that when I got to university, I found that the literary histories taught there do not cover these works. The works that my friends and I loved, that the whole nation loved, are simply absent from the literary histories at university today! So many of my friends, so many ordinary people, read Steel in the Raging Fire, The Seething Mountains, The Sparkling Red Star; how is it that these authors never read them? You can say a book is bad; you can argue with evidence that it is bad in this way and that. But for something read by hundreds of millions of people to be simply missing from your book! That is not a professional attitude; that is not seeking truth from facts. …”

Kong Qingdong and I are of much the same age. I too read the works he lists when I was a boy, and I could list many more: Red All Over the Mountains, Island Militiawomen, The Broadsword, Fierce Battle on the Nameless River, The Journey, Iron Whirlwind, The Dividing Line, A Thousand Waves, Evergreen, Little Shizhu, the Newcomer, A Battle History of Hongnan, Swift Spring Tide, At the Foot of the Wuling Mountains, Poems of the Land, and more. There was no television then and no internet, yet people, the “workers, peasants, and soldiers” above all, had more chances to read. Yet whenever the elites look back on the “ten years of catastrophe,” they always lament that there was “nothing to read,” that they were stranded in a “cultural desert.” It was precisely this that made me realize that culture, and literature too, is not as “universal” as the elites proclaim. Otherwise, why would people of different social positions and different values judge the same era so very differently?

In the housecleaning after the fall of the Gang of Four, the Central Committee of the Communist Party did not “beat Hao Ran to death with a single blow.” It not only gave him the chance to write again, but made him vice-chair of the Beijing Federation of Literary and Art Circles and chair of the Beijing Writers Association. This plainly left those who were bent on knocking Hao Ran down deeply dissatisfied, and so in the 1990s they launched a “second reckoning” with him, pressing him to follow the example of that “titan of the literary world,” Mr. Ba Jin, and confess and “repent” his conduct during the Cultural Revolution.[4] Regrettably for them, Hao Ran never satisfied their demands, right up to his death.

I once came across an article on the Tianya forum signed “Ziqiao,” titled “Hao Ran’s ‘Non-Repentance’ and Certain People’s ‘Repentance.’”[5] The author writes:

The moment the Cultural Revolution ended, Hao Ran came under criticism; his works were branded “poisonous weeds,” and he himself admitted more than once that he had “taken a wrong turn.” But he never formally “repented” as his critics demanded. Naturally the critics were not satisfied, and they would not let go. At the end of the 1990s, Hao Ran declared publicly that he had “no regrets” and called himself a “miracle,” and a new round of criticism and reckoning followed at once, which has gone on to this day.

Hao Ran’s attitude came partly from personal attachment, and partly from “stubbornness,” a contrariness provoked by years of attack. I think we might show him a little more tolerance and understanding. Today, not only netizens’ posts but even the articles of some literary critics are shot through with judgments of Hao Ran’s personal character, even vicious personal attacks, a hundred thousand miles from genuine literary criticism.

Some of the people who jump up and down cursing Hao Ran were thugs and cheerleaders themselves during the Cultural Revolution, and what they wrote was probably more disgusting than anything Hao Ran wrote. Of course, they have all repented now. I remember a certain scholar, skilled at pinning political labels on people, once saying: “Although I too wrote such-and-such during the Cultural Revolution, I repented afterward” (that was the gist). The subtext was: now I am entitled to criticize you; whose fault is it that you didn’t repent first? You’ll just have to take it!

What I want to say is: your repentance isn’t worth a damn!

Now that the Cultural Revolution has been repudiated and Mao Zedong has been “taken down from the altar,” your repentance costs you nothing! Is that so rare? So glorious? You are simply “keeping up with the times” so you can go on earning your keep, and playing the thug again whenever it suits you.

How much nobler is this sort of “repentance” than Hao Ran’s “non-repentance”? Next to them, Hao Ran comes across as open and upright.

If I had to choose one of the two as a friend, I would rather choose the “unrepentant” kind, like Hao Ran!

This author’s words remind me of a document I came across online not long ago, a compiled “complete catalogue” of works published by contemporary writers during the ten years of the Cultural Revolution. Many of them were leading figures of the New Era literary scene and of “scar literature.” Besides Zhang Kangkang’s The Dividing Line and Chen Rong’s Evergreen, mentioned above, there were Wang Meng, Chen Zhongshi, Liu Xinwu, Jia Pingwa, Ye Xin, Liu Zaifu, and others. In subject and content their works were just like Hao Ran’s: they portrayed the struggle between the two lines of socialism and capitalism and “served the workers, peasants, and soldiers.” The difference was that they drew a line in good time between themselves and the “Cultural Revolution,” now wholly repudiated, and fell into step with the mainstream politics of the New Era, while Hao Ran never stepped out of his old “rhythm” and refused to “repent.” That was far too “out of touch with the times,” and the hostility of his colleagues who had kept up with the times was bound to follow.

Yet Hao Ran was not the only writer who rose to fame or found favor during the Cultural Revolution and never “repented” afterward. Take Wang Zengqi. During the Cultural Revolution he was a playwright at the Beijing Peking Opera Company. For his part in writing the model opera Shajiabang he won Jiang Qing’s “appreciation,” and he was later even investigated as a “remnant of the Gang of Four.”[6] But he went on, with a series of short stories such as “The Ordination” and “A Tale of Big Nur,” to become one of the most important writers of New Era literature, winning the highest honor and standing. People did dig up his history as a model-opera writer and his close dealings with Jiang Qing, the “standard-bearer of the Cultural Revolution.” By some accounts, Wang himself not only showed no wish to repent, but freely acknowledged that Jiang Qing had “recognized his talent and treated him well,” and even “objectively” affirmed her principle of drama-making, “ten years to grind one sword.” (Qi Dong, “Wang Zengqi and Jiang Qing.”) Had Hao Ran taken this attitude, it would surely have drawn a storm of denunciation. But when it came to “Old Master Wang,” mainstream opinion not only refrained from condemnation but showed a rare tolerance, and some even wrote essays praising how kind and broad-minded Wang Zengqi was as a man. The contrast with the “treatment” Hao Ran received could not be sharper. The reason has much to do with the fact that Wang Zengqi’s later writing matched, and even led, the values and aesthetic tastes of New Era literature, whereas Hao Ran, though he published a good deal of new work in the New Era too, was seen by the mainstream literary world as never having freed his thinking and his creative habits from the “Cultural Revolution.” It had little to do with whether he declared himself “repentant” or not.

Look a little deeper, and this unthinking “double standard” also has to do with the utterly different “class origins” of Wang Zengqi and Hao Ran.

Let us first look at their records.

Hao Ran, whose real name was Liang Jinguang, was born in March 1932 in Zhaogezhuang, in the Kailuan mining district of Hebei. He “grew up beside the manure yards of the mining district; step out the door and there was dried night soil spread out or piled in heaps, and the stench filled the air.” After his father died in 1942, Hao Ran and his mother went to take refuge with his uncle in Ji County, and there he and his sister passed a childhood of hardship.

Before the age of thirteen, Hao Ran had three years of primary school and half a year at an old-style private school. At fourteen he was already taking part in revolutionary activity as head of the Children’s Corps. He began revolutionary work in 1946 and joined the Communist Party of China in November 1948, when he was just sixteen. In 1949 he was transferred to the district Party committee to work in the Youth League, and began teaching himself, resolving to write; he practiced writing short plays, poems, and news reports, studying and writing hard while he worked. In 1953 he was transferred to the Party school of the Tongxian prefectural committee as an education officer, and later took part in carrying out the state purchase and marketing of grain and the movement for agricultural cooperation. Nearly eight years of grassroots cadre work gave him a rich store of experience for his later writing. Taking as his vow “to live among the villages all my life, write about peasants all my life, and be the peasants’ faithful spokesman all my life,” he spent fifty years of hard living and artistic labor in the villages of eastern Hebei and the Beijing outskirts, writing and publishing more than eighty books. His works were serialized on the radio and adapted into picture-story books. They record the historical face of the Chinese countryside and create a gallery of characters full of rural flavor, the marks of their time, and vivid individuality, and they moved and influenced a great many readers. Bright Sunny Skies and The Golden Road in particular became household names after publication. In 1973 Changchun Film Studio made Bright Sunny Skies into a film.

Wang Zengqi was born at dusk on March 5, 1920 (the fifteenth day of the first lunar month, the Lantern Festival), into an old-style landlord family in the town of Gaoyou, Jiangsu. His grandfather had been a bagong, a tribute student selected in the last imperial examinations of the Qing dynasty, and his father, Wang Jusheng (1897–1959), courtesy name Danru, was a man of many talents.

In the autumn of 1935, after finishing junior middle school, Wang Zengqi passed the entrance examination for Nanjing Senior Middle School in Jiangyin County. In the summer of 1939 he traveled from Shanghai by way of Hong Kong and Vietnam to Kunming, and was admitted to the Chinese literature department of Southwest Associated University, his first choice. In 1950 he became an editor of Beijing Literature and Art, published by the Beijing Federation of Literary and Art Circles. In the winter of 1961 he wrote “A Night at the Sheep Pen” with a writing brush. In January 1981 his story “Special Gifts” appeared in Yuhua. His representative works include “The Ordination,” the story collection Evening Flowers, and the essay collection Late Green: Talks on Literature.

Wang Zengqi achieved a great deal as a writer of short stories and studied drama and folk art in depth. He has been praised as “a lyrical humanist, China’s last pure man of letters, China’s last scholar-official,” and as a leading figure of the Beijing School. In December 1996, at the Fifth National Congress of the Chinese Writers Association, he was elected an adviser.

As these records show, Hao Ran came from the very bottom of Chinese society, from a poor peasant family. Such “origins” gave him a sense of identity with, and support for, the New Democratic Revolution and the socialist revolution and construction led by the Communist Party of China, a bond “thicker than water.” Hao Ran joined revolutionary work as a member of the Children’s Corps, and after he joined the Party, communism became his lifelong faith. When he took up his pen, first as an amateur and at last as a professional writer, these same “origins” gave his work an artistic orientation and a set of values entirely different from those of most writers.

In his memoirs Hao Ran later called his “success” a “miracle.” As I understand it, the word has two meanings: first, his own diligence and gifts; second, the way the socialist literary system after 1949 nurtured writers from among the workers, peasants, and soldiers.

In 1942, in his Talks at the Yan’an Forum on Literature and Art, Mao Zedong said:[7] “Our literature and art are, first, for the workers, the class that leads the revolution. Second, they are for the peasants, the broadest and most steadfast ally in the revolution. Third, they are for the armed workers and peasants, that is, the Eighth Route Army, the New Fourth Army, and the other people’s armed forces, who are the main force of the revolutionary war. Fourth, they are for the laboring masses of the urban petty bourgeoisie and for the petty-bourgeois intellectuals, who are also allies of the revolution and capable of long-term cooperation with us. These four kinds of people make up the greatest part of the Chinese nation, the broadest masses of the people.” (Selected Works of Mao Zedong, vol. 3, People’s Publishing House, 1968.) After the Talks were published, writers and artists in the Liberated Areas answered Mao’s call and went among the masses, and a large number of fine writers and works portraying the lives and struggles of workers, peasants, and soldiers appeared, such as Zhao Shuli’s Little Erhei’s Marriage, Yuan Jing and Kong Jue’s New Heroes and Heroines, Liu Qing’s Wall of Bronze, Ouyang Shan’s Gao Ganda, Li Ji’s Wang Gui and Li Xiangxiang, and He Jingzhi’s The White-Haired Girl. They opened a new stage of “people’s literature and art” in modern literary history. After the founding of New China, the Party adjusted its literary policy in step with the times, taking “literature and art in the service of socialism and of the people” as its guiding principle for the period of socialist revolution and construction.

“Intellectuals becoming workers and peasants, workers, peasants, and soldiers becoming intellectuals” was always an important part of Mao Zedong’s thinking on building a New Democratic and socialist culture. As early as the Yan’an period, he felt keenly how hard it was for writers and artists from petty-bourgeois intellectual backgrounds to change their stance completely: “Writers who cling to an individualist, petty-bourgeois standpoint cannot truly serve the revolutionary masses of workers, peasants, and soldiers. Their interest is mainly in the small number of petty-bourgeois intellectuals. And this is precisely the crux of why some of our comrades cannot correctly solve the problem of whom our literature and art are for.” (Talks at the Yan’an Forum on Literature and Art, Selected Works of Mao Zedong, vol. 3, People’s Publishing House, 1968.)

After the founding of New China, Mao hoped that the coming of large-scale economic construction would bring with it a period of large-scale cultural construction. At first he placed great hopes in the intellectuals. “Many musicians belong ideologically to the bourgeoisie. So did we, in the past. But we came over from that side; why can’t they? In fact many of them already have. Uniting with them is good for the revolutionary cause of the working class. We must unite with them, help them remold themselves, and bring them over.” (Mao Zedong, “Talk to Music Workers,” People’s Publishing House, 1979.) In 1957, receiving figures from the literary, artistic, and educational circles of Shanghai, he voiced the same hope again. (Qiu Shi, “A Follow-Up Investigation of a Recollection of the 1957 ‘Mao–Luo Dialogue,’” Party Documents, 2018, no. 5.)[8] Plainly, Mao was full of confidence that these petty-bourgeois intellectuals, tempered in blood and fire by the Yan’an Rectification, the War of Resistance against Japan, and the People’s War of Liberation, would, through sincere ideological remolding, come over completely to the standpoint of the masses and become the main force in building a socialist culture. But the conduct of the intellectuals in the first years after 1949 seems not to have lived up to his hopes and trust, and even to have disappointed him somewhat. From the making and great popularity of the film The Life of Wu Xun in the early years of the People’s Republic, Mao keenly perceived that “in the eyes of many writers, history develops not by replacing the old with the new, but by striving in every way to preserve the old and save it from dying; not by class struggle to overthrow the reactionary feudal rulers who ought to be overthrown, but, like Wu Xun, by denying the class struggle of the oppressed people and capitulating to the reactionary feudal rulers. Our writers do not study who the enemies were who oppressed the Chinese people in past history, or whether there is anything praiseworthy in those who capitulated to these enemies and served them. Nor do our writers study what new social and economic forms, what new class forces, new people, and new ideas have arisen in China in the more than one hundred years since the Opium War of 1840 to struggle against the old social and economic forms and their superstructure (politics, culture, and so on), in order to decide what deserves praise or celebration, what does not, and what ought to be opposed.” (“Pay Serious Attention to the Discussion of the Film The Life of Wu Xun,” Selected Works of Mao Zedong, vol. 5, p. 46.) From this he drew a conclusion: “The appearance of the film The Life of Wu Xun, and in particular the sheer quantity of praise lavished on Wu Xun and on the film, shows to what a degree ideological confusion has reached in our country’s cultural circles!”[9]

On December 12, 1963, in his comment on a report titled “Comrade Ke Qingshi Takes Charge of Folk Performing Arts,” Mao wrote:[10] “In every art form, drama, ballad singing, music, fine arts, dance, film, poetry, literature, and so on, there are many problems and many people involved; in many departments, socialist transformation has so far achieved very little. Many departments are still ruled by the dead. The achievements in film, new poetry, folk songs, fine arts, and fiction should not be underrated, but there are also not a few problems in them. As for drama and other departments, the problems are even greater. The social and economic base has changed, yet the arts, as part of the superstructure that serves this base, are still a serious problem. We must begin with investigation and study and take this matter firmly in hand.” “Isn’t it absurd that many Communists are enthusiastic about promoting feudal and capitalist art, but not socialist art?” These phenomena, along with “scholars and beauties, emperors, kings, generals, and ministers” still holding our stages, made Mao realize that the ideological remolding of intellectuals was not the work of a morning or an evening, but a long and arduous task. Large-scale socialist economic and cultural construction required a body of intellectuals standing wholeheartedly on the side of the proletariat and the masses. That is to say, besides relying on writers and artists of intellectual background, it was also necessary to train from among the workers, peasants, and soldiers a large body of “our own literary and art workers.”

To this end, the Party not only called on intellectuals and professional writers and artists to carry on the tradition of the Yan’an period and take the road of integration with the workers, peasants, and soldiers, but also worked hard to discover and train writers from among the workers, peasants, and the Liberation Army. It devised a whole system of methods for this: literary magazines and even newspaper supplements recruited “correspondents”; “amateur writers’ revision workshops” of every kind were held, bringing together workers, peasants, and soldiers with deep roots in life and some ability to write, coaching them and going over their manuscripts, and raising their education and their skill. This tradition lasted from the early 1950s to the end of the 1970s and became a phenomenon peculiar to the “people’s literature and art” of New China’s first thirty years. It discovered and nurtured many worker, peasant, and soldier writers and poets, such as the Shanghai worker-writer Hu Wanchun, the Hubei worker-poet Liu Buxiu, the peasant poet Wang Laojiu, the coal-mine poet Sun Youtian, and the soldier-writer Gao Yubao. Hao Ran was the finest of them.

The mainstream literary world of New China’s “first thirty years” was made up, roughly speaking, of two groups: the “Yan’an school,” represented by Ding Ling, Zhao Shuli, Ouyang Shan, and others, and the so-called “liberal school,” who came from Shanghai, Beiping, and the other areas once under Nationalist rule.

“Liberal school” is today’s term; back then they could only be called petty-bourgeois literati. Mao Zedong gave an incisive analysis of the petty bourgeoisie in “Analysis of the Classes in Chinese Society”:

Though the strata within the petty bourgeoisie all share the economic status of the petty bourgeoisie, they fall into three different sections. The first section consists of those who have some surplus money or grain, that is, those who, by their manual or mental labor, earn more each year than they need to support themselves. Such people are very eager to get rich and worship Marshal Zhao most devoutly;[11] though they have no illusions of amassing great fortunes, they invariably long to climb into the middle bourgeoisie. Their mouths water at the sight of the small men of property who are so respected. They are timid; they fear the government, and they are also a little afraid of the revolution. Because their economic status is quite close to that of the middle bourgeoisie, they are quite inclined to believe its propaganda and are suspicious of the revolution. This section is a minority within the petty bourgeoisie and forms its right wing. The second section consists of those who are, in the main, economically self-supporting. They differ greatly from the first section. They too want to get rich, but Marshal Zhao never lets them; and because in recent years they have suffered from the oppression and exploitation of the imperialists, the warlords, the feudal landlords, and the big comprador bourgeoisie, they feel that the world is no longer what it was. They feel that if they put in no more labor than before, they will not be able to make a living. They have to work longer hours, getting up early and finishing late, and pay double attention to their trade, merely to get by. They have become somewhat abusive, calling the foreigners “foreign devils,” the warlords “money-grabbing generals,” and the local tyrants and evil gentry “the heartless rich.” As for the movement against the imperialists and warlords, they merely doubt whether it can succeed (on the ground that the foreigners and the warlords are so powerful), are unwilling to join it rashly, and remain neutral, but they never oppose the revolution. This section is very large, making up about half of the petty bourgeoisie. The third section consists of those whose standard of living is falling. Many of them came originally from so-called well-to-do families, but have gradually found they can barely hold on, and then that their lives are getting worse. … Such people suffer great mental anguish, because there is a contrast between their past and their present. They are quite important in the revolutionary movement; they form a mass of no small size and are the left wing of the petty bourgeoisie. In normal times these three sections of the petty bourgeoisie differ in their attitude to the revolution. But in times of war, that is, when the revolutionary tide runs high and the dawn of victory is in sight, not only will the left wing of the petty bourgeoisie join the revolution, the middle section may join too, and even the right wing, swept forward by the great revolutionary tide of the proletariat and of the left wing of the petty bourgeoisie, will have to go along with the revolution. (Selected Works of Mao Zedong, vol. 1, People’s Publishing House, 1968.)

“Literati” and “intellectuals” are a special group within the “petty bourgeoisie.” Long under the influence of Anglo-American culture, they have a simple sympathy for working people and democratic ideas, yet their heads are full of a sense of superiority, and they hold individual freedom to be the supreme value. This contradictory dual character leads them, when the revolutionary tide arrives, to throw themselves into the revolution out of a certain romantic enthusiasm, or even for opportunistic ends, as “fellow travelers”; but once the revolution meets setbacks or defeat, they often waver or even turn traitor. After the defeat of the Great Revolution in the 1920s, many Communist leaders of “petty-bourgeois” origin went over to the enemy; and after the failure of the Cultural Revolution and the radical socialist movement in the 1970s, great numbers of petty-bourgeois literati “bade farewell to revolution” and plunged headlong into the camp of Western liberalism. Both bear this out, and both confirm once again Mao Zedong’s judgment that intellectuals are like hair that must grow on some hide: “either they attach themselves to the bourgeoisie or they attach themselves to the proletariat; it must be one or the other.”[12]

In New China’s “first thirty years,” as “worker-peasant-soldier writers” stepped onto the historical stage as a group, the Chinese literary world settled into a three-way balance between the “Yan’an school,” the “liberal school,” and the “workers, peasants, and soldiers.” During the Cultural Revolution, the “workers, peasants, and soldiers” played the leading roles while the other two groups played supporting parts or were even “pushed aside.” So when the Cultural Revolution ended and the “Yan’an school,” the “liberal school,” and the Rightist writers known as the “returned generation” came back to the literary world, many “worker-peasant-soldier writers” vanished like smoke under the new political blows. Only Hao Ran stood firm, like a lone surviving fossil, tenacious (or obstinate?). This was bound to displease the mainstream figures who had been “persecuted” for one reason or another in the Anti-Rightist Campaign and the Cultural Revolution and who had nightmares at the very mention of “model operas” and “workers, peasants, and soldiers”; they saw him as a thorn in the eye and a splinter in the flesh. By comparison, although Wang Zengqi too had a brief “rise to fame” during the Cultural Revolution, and the “stain” of Jiang Qing’s appreciation, he came from an old landlord family and was himself one of those petty intellectuals and literati whose worldview, in Mao’s words, needed remolding; in his way of life and in his aesthetic tastes alike, he was at odds with the “workers, peasants, and soldiers.” To the “liberal school,” he was, when all was said and done, “one of us.”

From the 1980s on, as the West wind of “farewell to revolution” blew hard, Chinese literature underwent a metamorphosis, from “the people’s literature” to “the literature of the human being,” and on to joining the track of “world literature.” Power over literary discourse passed from the joint rule of the “Yan’an school” and the “liberal school” to the sole dominion of the “liberal school.” Not only had the “workers, peasants, and soldiers” long since been driven from the literary world; even the once-mainstream “Yan’an school” was gradually pushed to the margins (see my essays “The ‘Left’ and ‘Right’ of Ding Ling” and “Yao Xueyin, Branded ‘Ultra-Left’”).[13] The whole literary context was transformed in a way one can only call subversive. Wang Zengqi’s writing too was made over, root and branch. He cast off entirely the revolutionary discourse of the model opera Shajiabang and returned to the folk and rural culture, and the scholar-official culture, in the manner of Shen Congwen, which he had admired and followed in his youth.[14] From the side of traditional culture, he answered the trend toward “pure literature” that arose in the 1980s, and became the much-sought-after, much-respected “Old Master Wang.”

In fact, judged simply by how he conducted himself, Hao Ran was recognized in literary circles as a “decent, kindly man.” According to those who knew him, even at the height of his fame during the Cultural Revolution he never took a high-profile part in denouncing others, and he once protected Lao She at a Red Guard struggle session.[15] As for Wang Zengqi, he was famous inside and outside literary circles as a “good man.” Clearly, then, the mainstream literary world’s “reckoning” with Hao Ran, and its pressure on him to “repent,” were not a matter of certain individuals “settling private scores.” They were the continuation, into the New Era, of the struggle in the first thirty years between two kinds of writers of different “origins” and two different views of literature and values; to borrow a Cultural Revolution phrase many will remember, it was an ideological struggle over questions of fundamental right and wrong. Let me add in passing: in the second thirty years, even as the “liberal school” declared that classes had disappeared, they themselves kept their eyes wide open and never for a moment stopped waging “class struggle” against those they regarded as “leftists” or “ultra-leftists.” Even Hao Ran, already a “dead tiger,” they would not let alone.[16] The “liberal” and “Rightist” literati, once relegated to the blacklist, had now come together to take center stage. This fall and rise, this plunge and recovery, reflect the violent transformation of political life in twentieth-century China. Both Hao Ran and his kind, the losers, and the “Rightist” literati, the winners, are nothing more than products of that transformation. Of course, from the latter half of the twentieth century to this day, history has been especially fond of the Rightists. You can see it in the look that has played across their faces for forty years: the look of men who hold history’s steering wheel firmly in their hands, sure that truth is theirs and full of complacent satisfaction. By contrast, Hao Ran, or the Hao Rans branded “ultra-leftists,” though they may still hold some symbolic titles and positions within the literary system, have been reduced utterly to outsiders. Even if they can go on writing, they cannot, or dare not, overstep the bounds of the new ideology. They are rather like the “landlords, rich peasants, counter-revolutionaries, bad elements, and Rightists” of the Cultural Revolution years, who were “allowed only to behave themselves, and not to speak or act out of turn.”[17] Even when Hao Ran murmured a few words about having “no regrets,” he was at once met with a harsh, stern dressing-down.

One can imagine the state of mind in which Hao Ran kept writing in such circumstances. From 1988 until his death in 2008, he lived in Sanhe, in Hebei, far from Beijing’s cultural center and the mainstream literary world, and there he founded the magazine Cangsheng Literature.[18] The dedication and earnestness with which he nurtured local amateur writers call to mind the mass literary system of New China’s “first thirty years” that trained worker, peasant, and soldier writers, and his own legendary journey from an amateur of peasant origins to a nationally famous writer. Or was it precisely in this way that he was reliving, or paying tribute to, that vigorous era full of idealism, and lodging a silent protest against those who pressed him to “repent”? I seem to see Hao Ran lift his face a little, set his stubborn lips, and murmur to himself: “I will never regret it!” That low murmur was less a defense of his dignity as a writer than a ringing oath that he would never betray the class of his “origins.”

On September 9, 1976, Mao Zedong passed away. When Hao Ran heard the terrible news, the first thought that flashed through his mind was: “The long road of revolution: how will eight hundred million people go on walking it?” He was chosen as a representative of literary and art circles to stand vigil by Chairman Mao’s bier, and his heart was full of grief, even of fear: “I am a most ordinary Communist. I began revolutionary activity in 1946, a full thirty years ago now. In those thirty years, from an ignorant village child, I came through the practice of life to believe in Marxism-Leninism and to revere Mao Zedong’s leadership, and step by step I have come to where I am today. Today I am more advanced than thirty years ago, yet there is still a long road ahead of me. How am I to go on walking it?”

For generation after generation, the peasants of our mountain village held to the rule of “living a quiet life, knowing one’s place, and being a proper farmer”; they scorned politics and feared it, and their law was “keep clear of officialdom.” I took such farmers as my model and resolved to grow up to be a proper farmer. Unhappily, my mother fell ill and died soon after my father. While she was alive, my shrewd mother had, behind the back of my father, who had taken up whoring and gambling, entrusted my uncle with the money from selling our ancestral land, so that he could buy a house and land in the mountain village to keep us alive. But my uncle secretly had all the deeds and contracts written in his own name, and as soon as my mother died he turned against us and hardened his heart to drive us two orphans out of the house. Since ancient times it has been said that “a thousand-year-old deed can still speak”: the deed bore my uncle’s name, so the land and property were his, and the accomplished fact was protected by rules held to be “the law of heaven and earth.” Not even a god come down to earth could have saved us! Just as my sister and I were about to become homeless waifs sleeping in the street, the democratic government of the Liberated Area, acting on a report from the villagers, at once sent people to investigate. They did not listen to the lies of the “deeds” but to the truth from the people, and they ruled at once according to the facts. I received the property that was rightfully mine, and I had what I needed to go on living. From then on I was grateful to Chairman Mao for his kindness; I drew close to the Communist Party, and then threw myself into the revolution, and fought single-mindedly for thirty years!

In those thirty years I always dreamed of seeing Chairman Mao. In 1956 I was transferred from the Hebei Daily to Beijing, and on National Day I marched in the great parade. As we passed Tiananmen, I saw Chairman Mao on the rostrum reviewing the parade. From afar I saw his face glowing with health as he waved kindly to the people, and tears I could not stop poured down my cheeks. From then on, I did everything I could to take part in the May Day and National Day parades, just to catch a glimpse of Chairman Mao. One look at Chairman Mao, and I had more confidence and strength to press on and climb higher on the road of literature. By the mid-1960s my first novel had been published and well received, and the older writer Wang Zengqi was to adapt it into a modern Peking opera. Once, at the invitation of the Peking Opera Company at Hufangqiao, I went to discuss the adaptation with Wang Zengqi. When we had finished, one of the leading comrades said to me: “Chairman Mao takes a keen interest in the reform of Peking opera. Once we’ve finished adapting your novel, we’ll invite Chairman Mao to see it. He’s sure to be pleased.” When I heard this, a wish rose in my heart, and I thought to myself: if Chairman Mao likes the Peking opera made from my novel, perhaps he will receive me, and I can tell him to his face how grateful I am…

— Hao Ran, “I Stood Vigil by Chairman Mao”

For Hao Ran’s feeling for Mao Zedong, like that for one of his own family, the Rightists are sure to strike up their old tune and mock and attack him as ignorant, a blind loyalist. Their values doom them never to understand the deep gratitude that the vast peasantry, oppressed and exploited for thousands of years at the very bottom of society by the feudal landlord class, felt toward the Communist Party and its leader, who led them to “stand up and become masters.” Nor, therefore, can they understand the real reason Hao Ran refused to “repent.” For this concerned not only his personal honor and faith, but the dignity of a whole class.

On the question of “repentance” and “non-repentance,” the young scholar Li Yunlei offered this analysis in “One Man’s Golden Road”:[19] “Whether to ‘repent’ or not is a personal matter, bound up with one’s own faith, ideas, and understanding, and others ought not to force it. Besides, as one study has pointed out, both Rousseau’s and Tolstoy’s Confessions use ‘repentance’ to confirm their own moral rightness and superiority; all repentance comes down in the end to ‘I was wrong, but I am a good man.’ This can be seen in the famous preface to Rousseau’s Confessions. And in its original Christian sense, too, ‘repentance’ is no more than a way of earning the soul’s salvation, a kind of exchange or tacit understanding between man and God. We might take Mr. Ba Jin by way of comparison. Many people rate Ba Jin’s Random Thoughts very highly, as a work that speaks for ‘the conscience of the century.’ But for Ba Jin, self-negation and reflection began in the 1930s, and from the 1940s to the 1970s he was ‘repenting’ constantly; Random Thoughts is merely the continuation and the high point of a series of ‘repentances.’ If the main current of the times were to change, whether he would ‘repent’ again is hard to say. Second, judging from the two essays about Hu Feng in Random Thoughts, the force and depth of his repentance were closely tied to changes in policy, and not as ‘independent’ as some claim. Third, it was precisely through ‘repentance’ that he won the high praise of the cultural world and established his place as a ‘cultural hero’ on the literary scene of the New Era. From ‘a man who made mistakes’ to a ‘cultural hero’ or ‘the conscience of the century’: this dramatic transformation was accomplished through ‘repentance,’ and it is full of paradox. Of course, we mean no disrespect to Mr. Ba Jin here; the point is that ‘repentance’ itself deserves some reflective scrutiny. Compared with Ba Jin’s ‘repentance,’ Hao Ran’s ‘non-repentance’ shows precisely his ‘faith’ and his inner steadfastness. Views of that ‘faith’ may differ, but in an age that calls itself ‘pluralistic,’ if even one such ‘heretic’ cannot be tolerated, it is hard to call it ‘pluralism.’”

Li Yunlei’s words strike at the soft underbelly of those who pressed Hao Ran to “repent,” and puncture the hypocrisy of the Rightists who have always styled themselves “liberals.” From the standpoint of the “second thirty years,” people may well criticize Hao Ran as behind the times, conservative, and so on. But you have no right to force a man to “repent,” still less to demand that he betray his own past.

People of different stances may of course understand loyalty and betrayal differently. But even if loyalty is no longer regarded as a virtue, betrayal should not be regarded as a merit worthy of praise.

What makes one sigh is this. The chief charge that the mountains of New Era scar literature laid against the “cultural despotism” of the first thirty years was the mainstream culture’s ruthless suppression of heresy. Yet the “old Right” and “new Right,” who never stop talking of democracy and freedom, pluralism and tolerance, no sooner took over the mainstream than they struck the pose of lords on high. Not only have they shown no mercy at all in suppressing and attacking the “leftists” or “ultra-leftists” who are now the heretics; even the very words “workers, peasants, and soldiers” have become a target of their disdain and sneers. They have shown the face of what Mr. Lu Xun called “the capitalists’ mangy running dogs.”[20]

In 1980, in the preface to the foreign-language edition of The Golden Road, Hao Ran wrote:

In 1951, just as land reform had been basically completed across the country, the Party Central Committee issued its first directive on mutual aid and cooperation in agriculture. It criticized mistaken tendencies and pointed out that the peasants who had stood up must be organized, actively and step by step, to take the road of common prosperity; only this was the road forward, the necessary road to happiness.

As a spring wind scatters the clouds that fill the sky, my eyes were opened. Together with the broad masses of awakened peasants, I threw myself with high spirits into the great struggle for the socialist transformation of agriculture.

The lessons of practice and the guidance of theory brought me gradually to understand that in an agricultural country like China, if a revolutionary party is content to stop at the victorious completion of land reform, and does not go on to lead the broad masses of the peasants onto the broad road of collectivization, then it is not truly Marxist, and it is not truly building socialism.

Land is precious and dear; without land, humanity lacks the basic conditions for survival. Yet however thorough the land revolution, it can give the peasants only a relatively temporary satisfaction and joy. If ownership of the land is not protected by the collective organization of labor, it will be gained only to be lost again, and the satisfaction and joy will vanish like bubbles. At the same time, to build a socialist country there must be a solid, developed socialist agriculture as its foundation; otherwise one is building castles in the air.

These repeated experiences and this winding path of understanding prepared me, nearly twenty years later, to write the novel The Golden Road. Besides the raw material of life, they gave me above all my ideological preparation. Only when a writer, out of true feeling and real experience, has come to support the movement for the socialist transformation of agriculture, to believe in the socialist road, and to love the people who take part in this cause, can he wield his pen with sincerity of thought and fullness of energy to celebrate and re-create the scenes of a great struggle.

Hao Ran’s words are a solemn defense, on behalf of himself and of the hundreds of millions of workers and peasants, of the socialist revolution and construction of the Republic’s “first thirty years,” into which they poured their whole hearts, their passion, and even their lives. They can also be read as a powerful rebuttal of those who pressed him to “repent.”

Having written this far, I am reminded of a small “bond of letters” between Hao Ran and me.

In the mid-1980s I was a young literary hopeful just beginning to learn to write; having published a few pieces, I had been transferred to work at the county cultural center. Every young writer still feeling his way longs for guidance from a famous name, and I was no exception. So when I learned that Hao Ran, whom I had looked up to since childhood, had become editor-in-chief of Beijing Literature, I had the idea of writing to him and sending him a manuscript. Two or three months went by after I posted the letter with no word at all, and just when I had given up hope, I unexpectedly received a reply from Hao Ran: “Comrade Jiming: I have received your letter. I have been in hospital with an illness, and your letter reached me very late. I have passed your manuscript on to my colleagues in the editorial department to read and deal with. Thank you for your trust. I don’t know whether this letter will reach you. Hao Ran, —— 1986.”

The reply was very short, but Hao Ran’s plain, warm friendliness has stayed with me to this day. On the envelope, the address, “Shishou County Cultural Center, Hubei Province,” had been written as “Shou County Cultural Center, Hubei Province,” one character short.[21] Perhaps he did not quite remember my address, which was why the letter said, “I don’t know whether this letter will reach you.” More than thirty years have passed, and I still remember his elegant, rounded handwriting; that kindly, friendly, warm tone has stayed deep in my memory ever since.

In 2002, when I was studying in the first advanced seminar for young and middle-aged writers at the Lu Xun Academy of Literature, I thought of going to visit Hao Ran.[22] But by then he had stepped down as chair of the Beijing Writers Association and had moved with his whole family to live in Sanhe, in Hebei. In 2008 Hao Ran died. When I heard the news, I was sad for days. Deep in my heart, Hao Ran was the literary idol of my boyhood, and I had always wanted to write something about him, not only because of Bright Sunny Skies and The Golden Road, two novels that had a profound influence on me, but also because of that great era, now vanished.

Notes

[1] Hao Ran (浩然, 1932–2008), pen name of Liang Jinguang. The “Seventeen Years” are 1949–1966, from the founding of the People’s Republic to the start of the Cultural Revolution; the “New Era” is the period of reform that began after 1976. “Scar literature” (伤痕文学) is the late-1970s fiction depicting the sufferings of the Cultural Revolution; “rewriting literary history” was a critical movement launched in 1988 to reassess the literary canon.

[2] The “eight model operas” (八个样板戏) were the revolutionary Peking operas and ballets promoted by Jiang Qing, which dominated the stage during the Cultural Revolution.

[3] Kong Qingdong (b. 1964), professor of Chinese literature at Peking University and a prominent left-wing public intellectual.

[4] Ba Jin (1904–2005), author of Family, was long president of the Chinese Writers Association. His five-volume Random Thoughts (随想录, 1978–1986) called for repentance over the Cultural Revolution, including his own conduct, and won him the title “conscience of the century.”

[5] Tianya (天涯社区) was for many years one of China’s largest and liveliest online forums.

[6] Wang Zengqi (汪曾祺, 1920–1997). Shajiabang (沙家浜) was one of the eight model operas. “The Ordination” (受戒, 1980) and “A Tale of Big Nur” (大淖记事, 1981) are his most celebrated stories.

[7] The Talks at the Yan’an Forum on Literature and Art (May 1942) laid down the Communist Party’s literary policy for decades: literature and art must serve the workers, peasants, and soldiers.

[8] Mao’s “Talk to Music Workers” dates from August 1956. In July 1957, meeting Shanghai cultural figures, Mao was asked by the translator Luo Jinan what Lu Xun would be doing if he were alive; the exchange became known as the “Mao–Luo dialogue.”

[9] The Life of Wu Xun (武训传, 1950) told of a Qing-dynasty beggar who saved to found free schools. Mao’s 1951 editorial in the People’s Daily turned its praise into the first major ideological campaign of the People’s Republic.

[10] Ke Qingshi (1902–1965) was Party secretary of Shanghai. Mao’s comment of December 12, 1963, the first of his “two directives” on literature and art, foreshadowed the Cultural Revolution.

[11] “Marshal Zhao” is Zhao Gongming, the popular god of wealth.

[12] Mao’s figure of speech, from 1957: the intellectuals are hair, which must grow on the “hide” of one class or another.

[13] Ding Ling (1904–1986) was the leading woman writer of Yan’an; Yao Xueyin (1910–1999) was the author of the epic historical novel Li Zicheng. Both essays are by Liu Jiming.

[14] Shen Congwen (1902–1988), Wang Zengqi’s teacher at Southwest Associated University, celebrated for his lyrical portraits of rural West Hunan.

[15] The novelist and playwright Lao She was beaten by Red Guards in August 1966 and drowned himself the next day. Accounts that Hao Ran tried to protect him at the struggle session have circulated widely.

[16] A “dead tiger” (死老虎): a fallen figure who can no longer fight back.

[17] The “landlords, rich peasants, counter-revolutionaries, bad elements, and Rightists” (地富反坏右) were the “five black categories” of the Mao era. The phrase “allowed only to behave themselves, and not to speak or act out of turn” comes from Mao’s “On the People’s Democratic Dictatorship” (1949).

[18] Sanhe, a county (now a city) in Hebei just east of Beijing.

[19] Li Yunlei (b. 1976), literary critic, a leading advocate of “literature of the bottom layer” (底层文学), which writes about workers, peasants, and migrants.

[20] Lu Xun’s phrase, from his 1930 polemic against the critic Liang Shiqiu.

[21] Shishou, a county (now a city) in Hubei, is Liu Jiming’s hometown.

[22] The Lu Xun Academy of Literature in Beijing is China’s national training institute for writers; its first advanced seminar, in 2002, brought together many of the leading writers of Liu Jiming’s generation.

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