Who Is Liu Qing? Whose Liu Qing?

Liu Jiming · Written June 3, 2021; posted on Testimony of Time, October 3, 2026

1

Liu Qing has long been a writer I admire.[1] In the summer of 2016 I went to the outskirts of Xi’an to pay my respects at his grave, and visited the Liu Qing Memorial Hall, which had just been completed. Liu Qing holds a most important and special place in the history of contemporary Chinese literature. His novel The Builders has been hailed as the “magnificent epic” of the agricultural cooperative movement and as the highest achievement of the “literature of the Seventeen Years,” a classic of “socialist literature” and “people’s literature.” Of the “Three Reds and One Builders,” the “Three Reds” are Red Crag, Red Sun, and Keep the Red Flag Flying, and the “One Builders” is The Builders.[2] In actual critical esteem, though, The Builders stands far above the “Three Reds.” For a long time many scholars of contemporary literature, along with undergraduates and graduate students in university Chinese departments, have made Liu Qing and The Builders a favorite subject of research, and a “Builders fever” and a “Liu Qing fever” have run on unabated. In a mainstream academy that generally looks down on, or even rejects, the literature of the “first thirty years,” the honor Liu Qing enjoys is undoubtedly rare; set against the fate of Bright Sunny Skies, which also depicts the cooperative movement, and of its author, Hao Ran, who has been almost wholly repudiated, it is little short of a miracle. At the 2014 Forum on Literature and Art, in the long list of Chinese and foreign classic writers named by the country’s top leader, Liu Qing appeared prominently as the only writer of the “first thirty years,” which unquestionably added to his weight as a classic author.[3] And in recent years in particular, as Liu Qing has been widely held up as the model of “going deep into life and taking root among the people,” his influence has spread beyond the literary world, and he has shown signs of becoming a symbol, even an idol.

Yet the film Liu Qing, based on the life of this idol among writers, took a mere 170,000 yuan at the box office on its first day, and to this day has not passed one million. The American blockbuster F9, imported at about the same time, took 316 million yuan on its first day. Even Red Dust (Eileen Chang) and The Golden Era (Xiao Hong), likewise films based on the lives of writers, drew a large following in their day. This is truly a little baffling. One commentator could only sigh: “This is an embarrassment that leaves us nowhere to hide.”

As I see it, the film’s crushing defeat at the box office reveals, on the one hand, the awkward plight of “main melody” works in a cinema-chain market controlled by capital; on the other, it exposes a crack within Liu Qing as a cultural symbol. This “crack” exists not only in the film Liu Qing; it was “forged” jointly with the Biography of Liu Qing published a few years ago by Liu Qing’s daughter, Liu Kefeng.

2

Since I have not seen the film Liu Qing, I have no right to judge the film itself. Mr. Guo Songmin is a seasoned film critic, and I believe his assessment below is accurate and fair:[4]

The filmmakers’ understanding of the cooperative movement goes no further than the scar literature of the 1980s; on the contrary, to a great extent it repeats scar literature’s conclusions. The film’s treatment of the Great Leap Forward, for instance, is almost identical to Zhang Yimou’s To Live of 1994.

Liu Qing reads the cooperative movement in terms of a single motive, “living a good life.” This is a purely smallholder’s view, “thirty mu of land and an ox, a wife and kids and a warm kang,”[5] but the aims of the cooperative movement went far beyond that.

In essence, the cooperative movement was an attempt to build a new society, to end once and for all the history of man exploiting man and man oppressing man. Cooperation meant a new kind of human relationship. For the peasants, the cooperative and later the people’s commune were not only an economic community but a cultural and political one. For the first time, the peasants gained the protection of the collective; for the first time, they no longer merely accepted and adapted to their surroundings passively, but relied on their organized strength to build irrigation works on a large scale, to found schools, and even to start their own “commune and brigade enterprises”…

But none of this is shown in Liu Qing. Worse, after the first “honeymoon” of the cooperative movement, the director Tian Bo uses a highly symbolic sequence of shots to hint at his verdict on it: on a night of thunderstorm, a cart carrying grain sinks deep into the mud, and however the draft animals strain and the peasants push, it will not budge an inch.

Because the history of New China’s first thirty years, and the history of the cooperative movement above all, has so long been told in flat, formulaic terms, works like Liu Qing are especially needed. But Liu Qing has itself fallen into the rut of flatness and formula. That is a truly painful paradox.

— Guo Songmin, “The Film Liu Qing: How It Fell”

Liu Qing once said: “I am writing history. What I want to set down is how Chinese peasants felt about life at the very moment they entered socialism.” In the 1970s, in the last stage of his life, Liu Qing was still painstakingly revising the second part of The Builders from his sickbed. “It is no exaggeration to say that Liu Qing’s faith was firm; he never doubted the goal of Chinese peasants reaching socialism by the road of cooperation.” So for many students and readers of The Builders, the way the film Liu Qing portrays things is bound to be hard to accept. Yet this was no whim of the filmmakers, no fabrication out of thin air: they had ample “historical material” to rely on.

That “basis” was the Biography of Liu Qing written by his daughter, Liu Kefeng.

The Biography of Liu Qing came out in 2016 from People’s Literature Publishing House, known in literary circles as the “national press.” Out of my reverence for Liu Qing, I bought a copy on Dangdang the moment it appeared. When I had finished it, I was astonished to find that the Liu Qing presented in this book seemed so unfamiliar, so strange and so out of place beside the “people’s writer” long canonized in literary history, that he hardly seemed the same man; he looked, if anything, like an “opponent” of the Liu Qing we had been given.

I was seized by a tangle of doubt, disappointment, and bewilderment. But out of respect for Liu Kefeng as “Liu Qing’s daughter,” as if forcing myself to swallow a bitter fruit, I had no choice but to accept the fact that “this is the real Liu Qing.”

3

The Biography of Liu Qing records in detail Liu Qing’s winding path, from the son of a declining landlord family to a progressive youth, onto the road of revolution, and at last to the role of “revolutionary writer.” It reconstructs in full how, after the founding of New China, as the agricultural cooperative movement and socialist construction gathered force, Liu Qing resigned from the editorial board of the China Youth Daily, settled in the Shaanxi countryside, and finally wrote his enduring masterpiece, The Builders.[6] Liu Qing’s experience was like that of the other “Liberated Area writers” of roughly his generation, such as Ding Ling, Zhou Libo, Zhao Shuli, and Wei Wei.[7] All of them had been tempered by the War of Resistance against Japan and the War of Liberation; their literary careers were inseparable from their revolutionary work; and most of them produced their major works after Mao Zedong’s Talks at the Yan’an Forum on Literature and Art were published: Ding Ling’s The Sun Shines over the Sanggan River, Zhou Libo’s The Hurricane, Zhao Shuli’s Sanliwan Village, and so on. Liu Qing’s Sowing and Wall of Bronze were written in this period too.

The Biography of Liu Qing says: “When the Yan’an Forum on Literature and Art was held, my father was in northern Shaanxi, but he did not hear the talks, because in 1941 he had gone down to Mizhi County to organize village elections and take part, with the peasants, in the campaign for ‘reducing rents and securing tenancies.’ My father said: ‘Later I read the Talks, and I supported their basic spirit, because before that I had already made up my mind that if I was going to write, I must first go among the masses at the grassroots.’” (Biography of Liu Qing, p. 453.) In the early 1950s Ding Ling wrote a piece on how she came to write The Sun Shines over the Sanggan River, titled “Go among the Masses.” To go among the masses, to become one with the workers, peasants, and soldiers in life and in feeling: this was Mao Zedong’s call to revolutionary writers and artists. Liu Qing was plainly one of the writers who consciously put the “spirit of the Talks” into practice. In the early 1950s, when he volunteered to “settle down” in the countryside, it was also in order to “write a book,” a continuation of the spirit of the Talks: “The new age demands more of writers than any age before it: to reflect a social life richer than ever, conflicts in life growing ever sharper, and an objective situation changing fast. To be worthy of the demands, so hard to meet, that one’s own age makes of a writer is truly no easy matter. Once we think about it in this way, we can better understand the only way out that Chairman Mao pointed to: we must go among the masses for a long time, unconditionally and wholeheartedly, into the heat of struggle, into the one and only rich source of life. For a long time: not briefly, and not off and on. Unconditionally: without counting success or failure, and without shrinking from hardship or danger. Wholeheartedly: not half-believing and half-doubting, still less in two minds. This understanding is not a matter of quibbling over words.” (Biography of Liu Qing, p. 453.) These words show that Liu Qing’s practice of the spirit of the Talks was sincere, conscious, and wholeheartedly enthusiastic, without reservation of any kind, and without the slightest trace of reluctance or “compulsion.”

More important still, through The Builders Liu Qing conveyed to his readers his passionate enthusiasm for, and confidence in, socialism. At the “conclusion of Part One,” he copied out the major resolutions and directives of the Central Committee and Chairman Mao on agricultural cooperation and national industrialization, and commented: “To give a full account of the economic, political, and ideological effects of the unified purchase and marketing of grain on national industrialization and agricultural cooperation is the work of the historian.[8] The author of a story of life wishes only, before the first part of the story ends, to quote for the reader these brilliant judgments of the Central Committee’s October resolution of 1953. You must understand that many historical events are forced into being. For example: without the Five-Year Plan, there might not have been a strained grain market; if the grain merchants had not made trouble for us, unified purchase and marketing might not have been introduced in 1953; without unified purchase and marketing, mutual aid and cooperation might not have ended so suddenly their stage of rowing against the current and broken into a gallop. The footsteps of the giant of history are not disordered. There is no God! It is Comrade Dialectics who decides: let the old forces rage and run mad before they perish, so that they goad us, force us, to launch at once the struggle to destroy them, with no turning back!” (The Builders, p. 492, China Youth Publishing House, 1960.)

These comments of Liu Qing’s are in perfect harmony with the story and the characters of The Builders. They make you feel that he created The Builders not only with the pen in his hand, but with his whole body and soul. He was no onlooker or recorder of the age he lived through; he threw himself into it with full passion and utter selflessness. Not only did he take a direct part in solving the problems and difficulties that arose as Huangfu Village moved toward cooperation, so that the “bad elements” who opposed cooperation saw him as a thorn in their side, had him secretly “tailed,” and very nearly did away with him; after the first part of The Builders was published, he also donated all his royalties to the local village. In 1964 Liu Qing wrote to his editor: “One should live simply. Only the feelings nurtured by such a life are of a piece with the feelings of a writer’s creative labor and with the feelings the writer must awaken in his readers. A life of luxury is bound to ruin a writer, to destroy his feelings and moods, and turn him into a fellow whose words do not match his deeds…” (Biography of Liu Qing, p. 473.)

From this we can see that both as a writer and as a man, Liu Qing reached a rare height. Nor was he alone: after The Sun Shines over the Sanggan River won the Stalin Prize, Ding Ling likewise gave the whole of her prize money to children’s welfare work. Such conduct, “putting the public good before oneself,” was not merely a matter of individual moral character; it was the result of an age that exalted the spirit of collectivism and the communist ideal, which inspired it and brought it forth.

To put it another way: had Liu Qing not identified with and supported the age he lived in from the bottom of his heart, he could not have acted so nobly, nor could he have written a work like The Builders. That is to say, The Builders was not something the writer “created” in isolation; it was a fruit conceived by the writer and his age together. This is not to discount the writer’s own labor, but to show that between the writer, his work, and his age there is a hidden and profound “intertextual” relationship.

4

On the cover of the Biography of Liu Qing, beside the title, runs a line of text: “Conversations between Liu Qing and His Daughter.” This is no casual touch; it marks the importance of this material in the book as a whole. In fact, what really catches the eye in the Biography is not its account of Liu Qing’s life or of how The Builders was written and published, but the “Conversations between Liu Qing and His Daughter,” which take up less than a quarter of the book. It is precisely in this part that the author presents us with an image of Liu Qing that is unfamiliar and out of place, utterly different from, even the opposite of, the author of The Builders in literary history.

Liu Qing’s conversations with his daughter range over history, politics, literature, specific policies, and his judgments of the leaders of the communist movement; their content is very rich. In the section “Plans for the Unfinished Builders,” Liu Qing says: “The policy of ‘steady advance’ put forward by Deng Zihui was correct; it was put forward after learning the lessons of cooperativization in the Soviet Union.” Deng Zihui had been head of the Central Committee’s Rural Work Department, and “a woman with bound feet” was Mao Zedong’s criticism of Deng’s “Rightist,” conservative policy of “steady adjustment.”[9] Speaking of his plans for the fourth part, Liu Qing also says: “Its main content is a critique of how the cooperative movement took the wrong road. When I write Part Four I’ll have to see what the political climate is. If it’s still like it is now, I’ll say it more obliquely; if it’s more open than now, I’ll say it more plainly.” These words give something of an impression of “opportunism,” and they show that Liu Qing’s view of the cooperative movement had changed fundamentally since he wrote The Builders, and that he had come to have certain doubts about it. Later Liu Qing said bluntly: “China’s agricultural cooperativization turned out a pot of half-cooked rice.” In the section “Long Study and Reflection on Cooperativization,” Liu Qing states clearly once more: “The road of cooperativization did not achieve final success. ‘Leftist’ mistakes appeared at the very first stage of our work, and afterward, far from being corrected, they grew more and more serious. If the methods had been right, and there had been no such serious deviations, you can imagine that our country would not be in the state it is in now…” (Biography of Liu Qing, p. 495.)

This is no longer merely doubt and criticism of certain specific policies in the cooperative movement; it is a thoroughgoing repudiation.

In the section “On Socialist Democracy,” Liu Qing puts forward a number of “shocking” views: “If the divided state of the Spring and Autumn and Warring States periods had lasted another five hundred or a thousand years, China’s place in the world would be entirely different. It would be a developed region; long before Zheng He sailed to the Western Oceans, Chinese would already have been settling and multiplying on many islands and continents.”[10] He also says: “A social policy that encourages people to pursue new ideas, and a later social policy that always restricts people from pursuing new ideas, will produce two opposite historical outcomes, and not only in the realm of ideas. So, in the same historical period, even under the same social system, different rulers can make some ages the opposite of others… The nineteenth century in America was a century that relied mainly on national expansion and personal enrichment. In the nineteenth century, most of those who pursued free thought ran to France, which is why the classical masters of England and Russia made friends in France.” “In our time, a person sometimes comes to think himself tremendous, an absolute authority whom no one may doubt or contradict… Only democracy can end this. Under democracy, no naive person and no vicious person can do as he likes on the strength of his power…”

Were their source left out, many people would probably take these remarks of Liu Qing’s for the words of some liberal intellectual.

For anyone who knows The Builders well, such a “Liu Qing” is plainly hard to accept, emotionally and rationally alike. People may even ask: if Liu Qing really was as the “Conversations between Liu Qing and His Daughter” present him, doesn’t that amount to his repudiating The Builders? Or, can everything depicted in The Builders still be trusted?

Or, to put it another way: did Liu Qing repudiate The Builders, or did The Builders repudiate Liu Qing?

Liu Kefeng has expressed this “perplexity”: “What my father’s writings show today is so distorted and partial compared with the whole of his thought and his life; social and historical causes kept him from leaving complete works of art and a systematic statement of his ideas.” (Biography of Liu Qing, p. 476.) His so-called “complete thought” is concentrated in the “Conversations between Liu Qing and His Daughter.” Liu Kefeng had long been aggrieved that, because of The Builders, people regarded her father as “ultra-leftist.” So what she does in the Biography of Liu Qing is to separate Liu Qing from The Builders and restore a “real Liu Qing.” As his daughter, she can perhaps hardly be faulted for the effort. But its actual effect is this: through firsthand material from her own experience, she has indeed freed Liu Qing from the vast “shadow” of The Builders; yet at the same time she has deconstructed the intertextual relationship between Liu Qing and The Builders, overturned the image of Liu Qing fixed by literary history, and so overturned The Builders too, together with the age it portrays.

Liu Qing once said: “In writing The Builders, I was urging people to make a complete break with private ownership and private ways of thinking, and to build the great cause of socialism with communist ideas. That is how I wrote it, and that is what I should demand of myself!” “The Builders is also my own experience. I put into it part of what I had felt and part of what I had lived through. Shengbao’s character, and his attitude to the Party, to the things around him, and to people of every kind, contain a portrait of myself.”

But now, can we still believe that Liu Qing was telling the truth?

At the time of Liu Qing’s centenary, a certain “figure of the Right” wrote an article titled “Liu Qing at One Hundred: A Lifetime Afraid to Tell the Truth.” If that is really so, how can we believe that Liu Qing’s The Builders set down “true history”?

Liu Qing and The Builders are one indivisible whole, like conjoined twins: cut either one away on its own, and the other is doomed.

In other words, without The Builders there would be no Liu Qing. A “Liu Qing” severed from The Builders: is he still Liu Qing?

5

Let us return once more to the film Liu Qing.

Guo Songmin says that the film turns the writer Liu Qing into “China’s Tolstoy”: “On ‘Liu Qing’s’ desk there are always two photographs. One is a bust portrait of Tolstoy; the other shows ‘Liu Qing,’ on a visit to the Soviet Union with a delegation of Chinese writers, standing in silent tribute before Tolstoy’s grave. Close-ups of these two photographs recur again and again; whenever ‘Liu Qing’ meets with difficulty, he gazes at them for comfort and strength.”

As I see it, though, Liu Kefeng’s Biography of Liu Qing turns Liu Qing into another “Gu Zhun.”

Like Liu Qing, Gu Zhun followed the Communist Party without hesitation in the period of the democratic revolution, was baptized in the fire of revolutionary war, and became a senior Party cadre. Gu Zhun was the first theorist within the Party to oppose public ownership and the planned economy and to argue for a market economy in China, and for this he was labeled a “Rightist,” until he “died wronged.” In the New Era, Gu Zhun was rehabilitated; some of his ideas were rediscovered and provided an early theoretical reference point for the establishment of the socialist market economy in China. For this the liberals regard him as a forerunner, and he has won a great many devoted followers among intellectuals.[11]

Before the film Liu Qing was released, the well-known economist Zhang Weiying was invited to “lend his support.” Zhang has long been a champion of neoliberalism, and together with mainstream economists such as Li Yining and Wu Jinglian he is regarded as an heir to Gu Zhun’s thought.[12] Knowing this, it is not hard to understand why Guo Songmin says that the filmmakers’ “understanding of the cooperative movement goes no further than the scar literature of the 1980s; on the contrary, to a great extent it repeats scar literature’s conclusions. The film’s treatment of the Great Leap Forward, for instance, is almost identical to Zhang Yimou’s To Live of 1994.”

But the problem is not that the film “has itself fallen into the rut of flatness and formula” in portraying “agricultural cooperation”; it is that it uses the “second thirty years” to deny the legitimacy of the history of the “first thirty years.” For a long time, and even today, after the top leader has said that the two thirty-year periods must not “negate each other,” this view is still regarded as “politically correct,”[13] so much so that Liu Kefeng would go as far as separating Liu Qing from The Builders to cater to this “political correctness.” That is what ought to give us pause.

In this sense, what the film Liu Qing raises is not merely a theoretical proposition but a practical one; not only a literary question, still less only a question of how to judge Liu Qing and The Builders, but the great question of how to understand socialism and the “first thirty years,” and “how to build socialism.”

I once read an article on the WeChat account “Midnight Outcry” that said: “The narrative thrust of the film Liu Qing follows, in the end, the Biography of Liu Qing, and so it faces this embarrassment: standing on the threshold of 1978, it wants on the one hand to raise a monument and write a life for the leading figure of the literature of the Seventeen Years, and on the other to repudiate completely the people’s communes and the last ten years of the Mao era, so that in today’s arena of public opinion neither left nor right will buy it. For the right wants to repudiate wholesale not just the last ten years but the whole seventy; the left, while it has criticisms of the Seventeen Years, mostly inherits them critically, and it is they who are the faithful readers of the Liu Qing who wrote The Builders. Regrettably, the film’s fence-sitting way of telling its story dooms it to a split in its values and its class standpoint, so that among an audience already divided it can hardly find a single truly faithful viewer.”

It is indeed rather embarrassing.

And the embarrassment belongs not only to the makers of Liu Qing, nor even only to Ms. Liu Kefeng, the author of the Biography of Liu Qing, but to our age.

I seem to remember that it was Gramsci who said that whoever grasps history grasps the present, and whoever grasps the present grasps the future. It has often been said, too, that history is written by the victors.[14] But the Marxist view holds that from the standpoint of different classes, the understanding and judgment of things are bound to differ. Bourgeois theorists have never admitted this; they have always believed that they alone hold the right to interpret the world and the right to sit in judgment on history (including cultural leadership). So it was in the past, and so it remains. Perhaps this is the secret of what Marx called the everlasting “millennial kingdom of the bourgeoisie”…

In the summer of 2016, after paying my respects at Liu Qing’s grave, I climbed the hillside nearby and gazed down at the famous village at the foot of the hill, Huangfu Village, and all before me was vast and hazy. Liang Shengbao, Old Liang San, Guo Zhenshan, Gaixia, and the other characters of The Builders flashed one by one through my mind.[15] It was as if I had walked into Toad Flats of more than half a century ago, and dimly I saw a man who looked like a peasant, in a black padded jacket with a white towel tied round his head,[16] his hands clasped behind his back, walking slowly toward me along the village road…

“Who is this man?”