Liu Jiming · Posted on Bohuozhe (The Fire-Bearers), October 11, 2026

All I know is that if even recording injustice must be done with fear and trembling, and can even be made a crime, then what may be left in the end is a society that is very clean, very quiet, and very empty of people. Such quiet is the silence of death, and a tolling bell. I cannot remain silent about this. For silence is complicity.

On September 14, 2026, a young man named Feng Rui was placed under criminal detention by the Yuexiu branch of the Guangzhou Public Security Bureau on a charge of “picking quarrels and provoking trouble,” and is being held in the Yuexiu District Detention Center. As of today, it has been almost a month.[1]

He is better known as “Xiaowu,” and he ran a WeChat public account called “Chiapas East Wind Television.”[2] What the account did was simple: it recorded the conditions of working people (unpaid wages, layoffs, workplace injuries, excessive overtime) and for several years running published an annual review of labor rights.

Feng Rui graduated from the Chinese department of Beijing Normal University in 2017. He did not take the “more respectable” road. According to Southern Window, he went to Picun and worked at the Workers’ Home.[3] “Of course his parents didn’t want him to. They hoped he would be like everyone else. But he felt his interests lay in subjects like workers and peasants.”

He compiled the labor-rights review for five years in a row. The 2025 edition ran to about a hundred thousand characters and cited 589 different sources, nearly 40 of them government websites and more than seventy official and state-owned media outlets.

In the preface to the review he wrote: “We hope that one day there will be less and less for us to review. That people will gather together only to dance, and not to record injustice.”

A recorder who hoped to put himself “out of work.” Because that would mean there was no more injustice to record.

In the face of this shocking affair, most mainstream media have chosen silence.

But as a writer, I cannot remain silent.

If we all choose silence, the next one to be stuffed into the sack labeled “picking quarrels and provoking trouble” could be anyone at all.

The charge of “picking quarrels and provoking trouble” has long been controversial for its vague boundaries. The four situations listed in Article 293 of the Criminal Law (wantonly assaulting others; chasing, intercepting, abusing, or intimidating others; forcibly taking or wilfully damaging property; and causing a disturbance in a public place) all concern direct harm to persons, to property, or to order in public places.

Whom did Feng Rui assault? Whom did he intimidate? Whose property did he seize?

Treating online posts as “picking quarrels and provoking trouble” rests on a provision of the 2013 judicial interpretation by the Supreme People’s Court and the Supreme People’s Procuratorate, which covers “fabricating false information,” or spreading information known to be fabricated, on the internet in order to stir up trouble.[4] But the precondition is “fabrication,” and “knowing it to be fabricated.” Feng Rui’s review cited nearly six hundred sources, a great many of them official channels. If this information is false, who did the faking: the National Bureau of Statistics, or CCTV?

The official exposition of the Supreme People’s Procuratorate states plainly that the core of the crime of picking quarrels and provoking trouble is that it “endangers the public’s stable expectations of social order,” and that what it protects is “the supra-individual legal interest of social order.” A labor-rights review published on a personal WeChat account: which public place did it bring to a standstill? Which public activity did it interrupt? Whom did it leave thinking they “might be beaten if they went out”?

A worker whose wages are owed does not get paid because no one talks about it. A worker maliciously laid off does not get his job back because no article records it. Injustice does not vanish through silence. It only becomes invisible.

Many working people have no voice. They have no reporters, no public accounts, no means of turning what has happened to them into an article that many people will see. A worker owed several months’ wages; a delivery rider running all day in the rain for a pittance per order; a young person suddenly told he has been laid off: when these things happen, they are real lives. But once they are past, they usually disappear very quickly.

Feng Rui was willing to keep them, so that others would at least know they had happened. That is the simplest meaning of recording labor rights. It does not “manufacture” conflict. Many conflicts existed long before they were recorded. The recorder simply carries them out of one person’s misfortune and into public view.

On this ground alone, he deserves to be called a brave man.

The last update to Feng Rui’s account stopped on February 15, 2026. It was a poem. It ends:

“Thinking of what prison we will be in the next time we meet, and that you still insist on wishing me well.”

The sorrow of these lines is that he had already foreseen his fate, yet still held on to a heartfelt wish.

Eight years ago, I wrote an essay, “A Remembrance That Must Not Be Forgotten,” for several young people who had been placed under criminal detention.[5] Today I must write these words for another young man who has met the same fate, and my heart cannot help aching.

I do not know what Feng Rui is thinking at this moment. All I know is that if even recording injustice must be done with fear and trembling, and can even be made a crime, then what may be left in the end is a society that is very clean, very quiet, and very empty of people.

Such quiet is the silence of death, and a tolling bell.

I cannot remain silent about this. For silence is complicity.

October 11, 2026

Notes

[1] “Picking quarrels and provoking trouble” (寻衅滋事) is the standard English rendering of the offense in Article 293 of China’s Criminal Law. Its vagueness has made it a catch-all charge against petitioners, activists, and online critics.

[2] The account’s name joins Chiapas, the Mexican state where the Zapatista uprising began in 1994, with the “East Wind” of Mao’s saying “the East Wind prevails over the West Wind.”

[3] Southern Window (南风窗) is a Guangzhou-based current-affairs magazine. Picun, a village on the outskirts of Beijing, is home to the Workers’ Home (工友之家), a well-known center for migrant workers’ culture and education.

[4] The interpretation of September 2013 on criminal cases of defamation and related offenses committed through information networks.

[5] The title echoes Lu Xun’s famous essay “Remembrance for the Sake of Forgetting” (为了忘却的记念, 1933), written for five young left-wing writers executed by the Nationalist government in 1931.

By Liu Jiming · August 1, 2026 · Source: Left Review (Zuo Ping) | WeChat Official Account

The rhetorical maneuvering that severs capital from capitalism is the quintessential discourse of all contemporary revisionists.

Across mainstream academia and public discourse, commentators frequently pontificate on what "capital" can or cannot do while deliberately evading its intrinsic connection to capitalism. They attempt to rupture these two historical categories—"capital" and "capitalism"—proclaiming that capital can function as an entirely neutral factor of production, existing independently of its specific social relations, thereby draping the capitalist system in a "depoliticized" and "dehistoricized" disguise. Much like equating state-owned enterprises with socialism, this discursive trap is by no means an innocent oversight; it is a calculated theoretical ambush driven by definite ideological motives.

The starting point of Marxist political economy lies in the historical-materialist transformation of the category of capital. Vulgar economics equates capital with material goods such as factory buildings, machinery, and raw materials, thereby naturalizing it as an indispensable technical input for any form of social production. Marx sharply observed: "Capital is not a thing, but a social relation between persons, mediated by things." Material objects are not inherently capital; they transform into capital only when embedded within a specific, historical social structure of power, functioning as instruments to exploit wage labor and extract surplus value. Therefore, the essence of capital does not reside in its material carrier, but in the class relations it embodies—namely, the bourgeoisie's domination and uncompensated appropriation of the proletariat.

The effort to sever capital from capitalism denies this fundamental determination. It seeks to abstract capital into "pure productive forces," as though collective human production inherently requires some form of "capital." This argument ignores the historical prerequisites of capital: it requires that labor power becomes a commodity and that the means of production are divorced from direct producers. Divorced from the capitalist system of wage labor, capital loses the very class foundation upon which its existence depends. Consequently, speaking of "non-capitalist capital" or "capital disembedded from capitalism" is logically indistinguishable from speaking of "slavery without masters" or "monarchy without a sovereign"—it strips away the core contradiction of the category, reducing it to an empty signifier.

Capital is not a static entity; it is a continuous process of self-expansion and valorization. In Capital, Marx comprehensively exposed the iron law governing the movement of capital: the relentless pursuit of surplus value, continuous expanded reproduction, the forced transformation of technology driven by competition and accumulation, and the subjugation of the entire process of social reproduction beneath its rule. This internal logic of capital constitutes the core mechanism of the capitalist mode of production. In other words, between the laws governing capital's movement and the capitalist system, there is no separation between "essence" and "appearance"—the former is the living, beating heart of the latter.

When certain theorists argue that one can "utilize capital without heading toward capitalism," they are harboring the fantasy that capital can arrest its inherent drive toward expansion, surrender its dominion over labor, and cease seeking profit maximization. Yet every single cell of capital is saturated with the impulse for self-valorization. The moment it ceases valorizing, capital ceases to be capital, degenerating into idle currency or abandoned machinery. To accept capital is to accept all of its internal laws—including polarization, economic crises, labor alienation, and the subordination of public authority to private wealth. The eclecticism of pretending to "reap only the benefits of capital while suffering none of its harms" is nothing more than wishful reformist delusion, theoretically rupturing the organic link between the essence of a phenomenon and its necessary manifestations.

The underlying motivation behind this discursive trap stems from a specific class standpoint. On the surface, it appears to acknowledge the central role of capital within modern economies, while simultaneously striving to paint capital in protective shades of "neutrality," "all-people," or the "state," thereby evading fundamental critique of capitalist relations of production. The ideological utility of this strategy is glaring: on the one hand, it dissolves the fundamental principled boundary separating socialism from capitalism, lending spurious theoretical legitimacy to "convergence theories" and "synthesis theories"; on the other hand, through technological determinism and historical nihilism, it conceals the bloody reality of primitive accumulation alongside the enduring exploitation, recurring crises, and structural inequality generated by capital across the modern world-system.

More dangerously still, this discourse frequently wraps itself in the legitimate rhetoric of "development," "efficiency," and "innovation," beautifying capital into a mere "growth engine" or "source of vitality" while remaining reticent regarding its systemic, structural destructiveness. It lulls people into believing that the sole issue lies in how capital is deployed, rather than in the structural hegemony of capital itself. This is precisely the fetishistic consciousness against which historical materialism vehemently fights—it re-deifies social relations created by human beings into natural forces that hold sway over humanity.

To pierce this discursive labyrinth, one must adhere to Marxist totality analysis. Capital has never been an isolated, atomized category; it is the linchpin of capitalist society. Together with wage labor, commodity exchange, private property, and state power, it constitutes an organic whole. Any attempt to isolate capital in the abstract leads inevitably to a misdiagnosis of the entire organism. Just as organs cannot retain their definition or function outside the living body, capital undergoes an absolute transformation in its economic character and political implications once extracted from capitalist relations of production.

The rhetorical maneuvering that severs capital from capitalism is the quintessential discourse of all contemporary revisionists. It dodges the fundamental question of relations of production, blurs the battle lines of class antagonism, and conceals its pseudo-socialist nature. Marxism teaches us that the truth of capital is never located in its physical manifestations, but in the historical movement through which it dominates labor and perpetually reproduces class rule. Acknowledging this reality is the baseline requirement for being an authentic Marxist.

On the path toward the liberation of the proletariat and all of humanity, what is needed is not a reformist grafting of capital onto the existing order—the so-called notion of "riding the capitalist horse along the socialist road"—but a radical, revolutionary critique of the very social system upon which it depends. Only then can we break free from the revisionist maze and advance toward genuine socialism.

July 31, 2026

Key Theoretical Context & Terminology (核心理论范畴与术语解析)

• Severing Capital from Capitalism (将资本与资本主义剥离): Refers to modern theoretical formulations in reform-era discourse that define "capital" as an ideologically neutral resource allocation tool or productive force, distinct from the political-economic regime of "capitalism."

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• "Capital is not a thing, but a social relation..." (资本不是一种物，而是一种以物为中介的人和人之间的社会关系): Direct quotation from Karl Marx's Capital, Volume I, Chapter 33, illustrating the core thesis of Marxist political economy against commodity fetishism.

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• Convergence Theory (趋同论 / 融合论): The sociological/economic thesis (associated with Jan Tinbergen, John Kenneth Galbraith, and others) suggesting that socialist and capitalist systems tend to converge over time due to industrialization, technical requirements, and managerial structures; heavily critiqued by orthodox Marxists as ideological capitulation.

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• Fetishistic Consciousness / Commodity Fetishism (拜物教意识 / 商品拜物教): The cognitive illusion under capitalism where subjective, historically contingent social relations between producers appear as objective, immutable properties of physical commodities and financial instruments.

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• "Riding the capitalist horse along the socialist road" (骑资本主义的马，走社会主义的路): A colloquial political slogan from China's market-reform era, used by reformers to justify utilizing market mechanisms, private enterprise, and capital operations to build the material foundation for socialism, which Marxist-Leninist critics view as class concession and revisionism.

By Liu Jiming · July 17, 2026 · Source: Midnight Cry (Ziye Nahan) WeChat Official Account

Punishing two specific individuals amounts to nothing more than localized "dredging" around an alienating machine. The Left’s real duty is to target the machine itself—to demand why creative labor has been alienated into an instrument for arbitrage; why the authority to evaluate literature and art remains monopolized within closed, insular circles; why the collusion between political power and capital can so easily dissolve the founding mission of "serving the people"; and why the "people," who ought to be the beneficiaries of cultural works, are invariably abstracted into "traffic metrics" under the logic of the market, while remaining cast aside as "outsiders" under the logic of power.

Renmin University of China has revoked Jiang Fangzhou's master's degree, and Northwest University has determined that Jia Qianqian committed plagiarism and subsequently terminated her employment contract. Public discourse erupted with cheers, celebrations, and applause, with even segments of the "Left" joining the chorus—as if the long-sought ideals of fairness and justice had truly arrived. But is the matter really so simple?

Jiang Fangzhou and Jia Qianqian have never been isolated cases of "academic missteps." Rather, they serve as textbook specimens projected onto the literary and artistic sphere by the capitalist logic of cultural production and the collusive structure of power and capital.

In Capital, Karl Marx laid bare this reality long ago: capitalism drags all that is sacred into the vortex of exchange value, dissolving "all that is holy and steadfast into thin air." When this profit-driven, self-enriching logic thoroughly permeates artistic creation, cultural production ceases to foster the "free and well-rounded development of individuals"; instead, it degenerates into a mere link along the chain of capital valorization.

Yet critiquing the logic of capital alone is insufficient. Within China's contemporary landscape, capital never operates in isolation. It is deeply intertwined with bureaucratic and symbolic power, producing an entrenched matrix of power-capital complicity that proves far more intricate than that of Western free markets.

Viewed through this lens, so-called "academic misconduct" is merely a surface symptom. At its core, it represents the inevitable product of alienated relations of production and entrenched rent-seeking within the arts.

Under capitalist conditions, labor is alienated into a commodity, separating workers from the fruits of their labor and their species-essence. Within the contemporary Chinese cultural and artistic landscape, however, this process of alienation has been further reinforced and distorted by bureaucratic monopolies on power.

Rising to early fame as a prodigy, Jiang Fangzhou’s status as a "literary wunderkind" was never simply priced organically by the market. Instead, it was engineered through the complicity of media capital and institutional cultural authority: she commanded both commercial traffic and systemic institutional legitimacy.

Jia Qianqian offers an even more quintessential example: relying on the symbolic capital and networks accumulated by the preceding generation within the cultural bureaucracy, her recognition as a "poet," professional promotions, and access to resources were inextricably tied to a closed, intergenerationally inherited system of cultural authority.

This holds true for Jiang Fangzhou and Jia Qianqian, just as it once did for Han Han in earlier years. These instances all reflect the tangible manifestations of monopolized authority within cultural production: hereditary privilege and capital's pursuit of profit feed into one another, jointly cultivating an insular microclimate defined by restrictive barriers to entry, closed-circuit patronage, and self-conferred legitimacy.

When literary and artistic works are produced and appraised not merely as commodities, but appropriated and flaunted as badges of status and power, the relationship between creators and audiences suffers a threefold obfuscation: obscured by relations between things, obscured by hierarchies of authority, and obscured by the unspoken rules of power-capital collusion. Works no longer carry out their social, communicative function of "serving the people"; instead, they become investment assets aimed at accumulating personal cultural capital and consolidating institutional standing. Whoever controls the right of evaluation, access, and resource allocation dictates a "winner-take-all" landscape across the cultural marketplace.

The fact that Jiang Fangzhou’s alleged plagiarism went unaddressed for years, and that Jia Qianqian was admitted to the Writers Association and granted a faculty appointment despite widespread public skepticism surrounding her poetry, demonstrates that the silence preceding public exposure is itself the direct byproduct of monopolized authority. Criticism directed at entrenched interests is neutralized internally, and the critical tools of scrutiny are institutionally silenced—until public outcry mounts to an undeniable pitch, prompting a symbolic ritual of purification executed solely through the punishment of select individuals.

Crucially, this alienation and monopoly are by no means exclusive to the arts; they represent the pervasive consequence of the deep structural entanglement between market forces and bureaucratic power across all sectors of society.

In the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, Marx pointed out that alienated labor causes man to lose his objective reality, alienating his vital activity from himself. When monopolized authority intervenes in this process, alienation spreads from the economic base into every pore of social relations: from "paper mills" and academic oligarchies within higher education, to hereditary privileges and resource enclosure across specific industries, to nepotism and reciprocal rent-seeking inside local bureaucratic networks. The underlying logic remains remarkably consistent: wherever the logic of capital and the logic of power infiltrate in tandem, self-enrichment becomes the tacit operating principle. Public value is cannibalized by private profit, social good is reduced to a footnote of economic gain, and the monopoly of power ensures that the beneficiaries of these rules cannot easily be shaken. This is not a collective slide into moral depravity; it is a systemic crisis of production relations and power structures unfolding amid the tide of marketization.

Authentic leftist critique, therefore, must never content itself with the fleeting gratification of exposing individual wrongdoing. Applauding the notion that "academic misconduct has finally been punished" merely mirrors a naive variant of bourgeois jurisprudence: it punishes the transgressor without ever questioning the legitimacy of the rules, let alone interrogating who established those rules or who monopolizes the authority to interpret them.

Marxism reminds us that the weapon of criticism cannot replace the criticism of weapons; for theory to be radical, it must grasp things at the root. What is that root? It is that when the market imperative of "putting profit above all" merges with the bureaucratic imperative of "closed-circuit insider privileges" to form society's unspoken operating code, the socialist vision of an art that "serves the people" is stripped of the very soil required for its survival.

As long as cultural production remains steered by market profit margins and the idiosyncratic preferences of bureaucratic circles rather than guided by the genuine needs of the people and socialist values; as long as the survival and advancement of cultural workers remain trapped within a closed loop of "traffic metrics, monetization, and insider validation" rather than oriented toward the broad working masses at the grassroots; and as long as evaluation, access, and distribution rights remain concentrated within a handful of monopolistic structures passed down across generations—Jiang Fangzhou and Jia Qianqian will never be the last casualties.

Punishing two specific individuals amounts to nothing more than localized "dredging" around an alienating machine. The Left’s real duty is to target the machine itself—to demand why creative labor has been alienated into an instrument for arbitrage; why the authority to evaluate literature and art remains monopolized within closed, insular circles; why the collusion between political power and capital can so easily dissolve the founding mission of "serving the people"; and why the "people," who ought to be the beneficiaries of cultural works, are invariably abstracted into "traffic metrics" under the logic of the market, while remaining cast aside as "outsiders" under the logic of power.

Without confronting these questions—without redirecting the critical edge from personal conduct toward the reproductive mechanisms of capitalist production relations and the self-reinforcing dynamics of monopolized authority—all public cheering serves merely to replace parts on the very machine of alienation, rather than dismantling it.

The Left has no reason to settle for celebrating the fall of Jiang Fangzhou and Jia Qianqian. They were organic products of that machinery—indeed, one could say they were the standard output inevitably generated once the machine reached a certain stage of operation. What ought to awaken the Left is the realization that this machine continues to roar, its chains of institutional monopoly continue to harden, and we must ask ourselves whether our critique retains the piercing sharpness with which Marx once dissected commodity fetishism, and whether we still possess the courage to direct that critical edge simultaneously against the twin, intertwined dimensions of capital and power.

That is the question the Left must truly confront.

Key Context & Terminology Notes (背景与核心概念解析)

• Jiang Fangzhou (蒋方舟): Widely publicized from childhood as a "literary prodigy" (tiāncái shàonǚ), who later became a prominent public intellectual and media figure, often cited in discussions surrounding media packaging and institutional credentialing.

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• Jia Qianqian (贾浅浅): Associate professor of literature and poet whose father is Jia Pingwa, one of China's most prominent establishment authors. Her proposed membership in the China Writers Association sparked nationwide internet controversy over poetic standards, hereditary cultural capital, and institutional gatekeeping.

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• "All that is holy and steadfast into thin air": Allusion to the famous passage in The Communist Manifesto ("All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned").

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• Serving the People (为人民服务): The core foundational ethos articulated by Mao Zedong in 1944, historically institutionalized as the paramount objective of socialist cultural, artistic, and administrative work in China.

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• The weapon of criticism cannot replace the criticism of weapons (批判的武器不能代替武器的批判): Famous dictum from Karl Marx's 1844 A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right, emphasizing that material force must be overthrown by material force, while theory becomes a material force once it grips the masses.

2026年7月17

By Liu Jiming · September 17, 2025 · Source: Human Realm Institute WeChat Official Account

The reason the mainstream elite persistently beautifies figures like Ning Xuexiang is that, in their eyes, the "old China" is no longer "old," nor is the "new China" truly "new"; the people's view of history has once again been replaced by an elitist historical perspective. This is precisely the underlying secret behind why the cultural fixation on the "Republic of China era" (as well as the craze for emperors, generals, and ministers) has never ceased in film and television circles.

I

The CCTV hit television drama The Flourishing Life, adapted from a novel by Shandong author Zhao Defa, has drawn severe criticism for beautifying wealthy landlords and vilifying impoverished peasants. Denounced as a "historical revisionist drama" serving the exploiting class, it encountered a sweeping public backlash and condemnation across the internet. The controversy grew to the point where Hu Xijin, former editor-in-chief of the Global Times, personally stepped into the fray. He accused critics of ideological hair-splitting and arbitrarily pinning political labels onto cultural works, while appealing to cultural propaganda regulators to "broadcast what ought to be broadcast" without letting extreme rhetoric dictate judgments and strangle creative freedom.

Such scenes have become quite familiar in public discourse in recent years. From White Deer Plain to Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out and Soft Burial, identical themes and motifs have repeatedly surfaced, crystallizing into the dominant mainstream narrative model in China ever since the intellectual turn of "farewell to revolution" in the 1980s. The Flourishing Life did not push the envelope any further; its original source novel simply lacked the sweeping influence of those earlier works.

II

Under circumstances where negating the first thirty years of the People’s Republic—and even the broader twentieth-century communist revolution—has long hardened into the mainstream narrative, grassroots criticism against works like The Flourishing Life is powerless to shake the cultural hegemony wielded by the elite; in fact, such dissent is more likely to face heightened suppression. For the left wing, this conflict is far less a dispute over artistic creation than an asymmetric, behind-the-lines guerrilla resistance against overwhelming odds. Although victory remains out of reach, it still serves to tear through the fabric of lies woven by the elite, preserving yet another testament written in blood for posterity.

III

Amid the overwhelming popular denunciation of The Flourishing Life, a high-profile symposium organized by authoritative state institutions proceeded as scheduled. Naturally, this touched off a fresh wave of public backlash. Many expressed bewilderment and indignation at how the symposium endorsed the drama under banners of abstract humanism and labels such as an "authentic period piece," unable to grasp why mainstream cultural arbiters would defy majority sentiment to glorify the "old China" and the very reactionary class once explicitly repudiated by the Communist Party along with the societal soil that nurtured it.

What they fail to recognize is that all history is contemporary history; what matters is not the history being recounted, but the era doing the recounting. The mainstream elite persistently beautifies figures like Ning Xuexiang precisely because, through their lens, the "old China" has ceased to be "old," the "new China" is no longer "new," and the people's view of history has once again reverted to an elitist perspective. This is the very reason why the "Republic of China craze" in film and television remains perpetually in vogue. As Mao Zedong once stated: classes struggle, some classes triumph, others are eliminated—such is the history of mankind since time immemorial.

Key Terminology & Context Notes (术语与背景解析)

• The Flourishing Life (《生万物》): A television drama set in rural Shandong spanning several decades of social transformations, centering on rural gentry, landownership, and political upheaval.

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• Ning Xuexiang (宁学祥): A prominent landlord figure portrayed in the drama/novel who forms the focal point of the ideological controversy over historical representation.

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• "Farewell to Revolution" (告别革命): A foundational 1990s intellectual thesis advanced by scholars like Li Zehou and Liu Zaifu, advocating reform and modernization over radical mass revolution; frequently cited by Chinese left-wing critics as the turning point of cultural depoliticization.

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• Soft Burial (《软埋》), White Deer Plain (《白鹿原》), Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out (《生死疲劳》): Major post-1980s literary works that depict agrarian reform, rural gentry, and modern Chinese political campaigns, frequently debated in Chinese intellectual circles concerning their framing of landlords versus revolutionary land reform.

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• "Republic of China Craze" (民国热): A recurring trend in modern Chinese popular culture, literature, and television that romantically depicts the republican era (1912–1949), often critiqued by the socialist left for whitewashing class inequality and feudal-capitalist exploitation.

By Liu Jiming · January 27, 2025 · Source: Human Realm Institute | WeChat Official Account

After more than 40 years of reform and opening up, various contradictions within Chinese society have accumulated to an extremely grave degree. The contradiction between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie may become even more intense and acute in the years ahead. The long-repressed proletariat and left-wing forces will move to the forefront of social movements through ideological and public discourse struggles.

Today is our first discussion session, which serves as a meet-and-greet! We will hold several similar discussions throughout this six-month semester.

Everyone spoke very well, whether approaching the topic from theoretical angles or drawing on personal experiences. As I noted during the opening ceremony, for a writer—or one aspiring to become a "red writer"—surmounting the hurdles of emotion, standpoint, and language is mandatory. Our workshop is fundamentally different from those run by Writers Associations or academic creative writing degree programs. We are not here to train writers in the mainstream sense. Today’s mainstream culture has effectively become synonymous with bourgeois culture; the literary and artistic world as a whole has degenerated into merely a link in the capitalist cultural industry chain. What writers and artists assimilate and disseminate alike is bourgeois ideology. This holds true across the board, whether inside or outside the official establishment, and across internet-based literature; even the title of "writer" has nearly morphed into a derogatory term. In the minds of many ordinary people, it has become a symbol of moral degeneration. Nowhere are scandals more rampant than in the literary and entertainment circles.

Over the past four decades, many good words—including "socialism" and "communism," which were intensely positive terms during the first thirty years of the People's Republic—have been tainted and degraded. That is why our workshop does not exist to produce such writers. Today, from the China Writers Association down to provincial branches, numerous workshops are held each year, some co-sponsored with universities. Their goal is simply to groom authors to publish works, win prizes, and achieve fame and status, which writer associations then leverage to report bureaucratic achievements and apply for state funding.

More than twenty years ago, I attended the first Advanced Seminar for Young and Middle-Aged Writers organized by the China Writers Association. That cohort brought together a group of writers who were then the most active in the literary scene; most of them later became presidents or vice-presidents of provincial or municipal Writers Associations. I have also lectured at workshops for young writers hosted by Writers Associations on multiple occasions. What filled those participants' minds was purely the pursuit of fame and personal prestige. They were a group of sophisticated egoists who had thoroughly absorbed the doctrine of "pure literature" popular over the past three to four decades. Under such an institutional system of literary production, one can easily imagine what kind of writers are produced.

The degeneration of literary and art circles, as well as the collective fall of writers and artists, is no different from the decay seen in other sectors; it is an inevitable consequence of the comprehensive capitalization of society. From this perspective, our workshop’s explicit banner of training proletarian red writers is, in a sense, openly defying the mainstream order of the world.

This is the first point I wanted to address.

The second point is that, viewed more broadly, after more than 40 years of reform and opening up, the various contradictions in Chinese society have reached an acute threshold. In the coming years, the conflict between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie may intensify significantly. The long-suppressed proletariat and left-wing forces will step into the vanguard of social movements through battles in public opinion and discourse. Before actual material struggles arrive, a fierce cultural clash is bound to take place. There is a book titled Prelude, which recounts the ideological battles preceding the outbreak of the Cultural Revolution—documenting how the critique of Hai Rui Dismissed from Office was essentially a cultural struggle. In the near future, driven by shifting social structures, the struggle between left and right, or between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, will be equally inevitable.

In this sense, our writing workshop is dedicated to nurturing and preparing personnel for this cultural struggle. Under the current landscape, the marginalized status of the left wing and socialist forces cannot readily be reversed. Only when structural shifts occur in society—when the grip of bureaucratic-crony capital begins to falter—can these forces once again become the subjective agents who shape history, and, through arduous struggle, usher in the great revival of socialism in the 21st century. Prior to that moment, there are virtually no shortcuts or openings. We cannot predict the exact arrival of this window of struggle like fortune-tellers; there is no way to calculate how far away it is. Some commentators in the public arena refer to this period as an "interim phase" or "garbage time." Exactly how long will this period last? No one knows. But does that mean the left wing should sit idle and do nothing? Certainly not. The left must accumulate strength and make rigorous intellectual and organizational preparations for the eventual struggles ahead. Therefore, red writers and those who aspire to join their ranks must begin from where they stand, start from the present moment, and take each initial step solidly. They must study diligently, master Marxist intellectual weapons alongside literary craft, and play their due part in cultural struggles endowed with the distinct characteristics of our new era.

The pedagogical approach of our workshop differs from the establishment's seminars and university creative writing courses. Our defining trait is grounding ourselves in reality and in the practice of struggle. This means learning itself is a form of struggle. It is not merely about listening to teachers lecture—listening to me or any other instructor—but rather learning through practice and learning from one another. Our class includes young comrades as well as middle-aged and senior comrades, spanning diverse walks of life: representatives of the working class, college students, peasants, and members of other social strata. This creates ideal conditions for mutual learning. I hope everyone will deeply cherish every lecture and discussion opportunity.

As our coursework progresses, writing assignments and targeted discussions will be assigned—none of which will be aimless. We will conduct focused evaluations and discussions based on participants' individual works, examining each piece or selecting representative texts. Only through this integration of writing practice and rigorous discussion can everyone find genuine inspiration and substantive improvement. Abstract theoretical discussions in university lecture halls or formulaic "how-to-write manuals" can never produce authentic writers, let alone proletarian red writers. Ultimately, success relies on practice: personal diligence, deep reflection on critical societal issues, and profound empathy and solidarity with the working people. Only in this way can one shoulder the heavy vanguard responsibility of carrying forward the red lineage and promoting revolutionary culture in the arena of struggle, acting as bold pathbreakers for the great revival of socialism in the 21st century.

With that, we conclude today's discussion session. I wish you all great success in writing powerful articles and works, living up to the glorious title of red writers!

Key Terminology & Cultural Context Notes (参考注释)

• Red Writer (红色写手): Refers to an ideological and committed writer dedicated to working-class politics and socialist ideals, positioned in direct contrast to commercialized or establishment authors.

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• Pure Literature (纯文学): In modern Chinese literary history, this refers to the post-Mao aesthetic movement that emphasized artistic autonomy, modernist techniques, and depoliticization over socialist realism and political advocacy.

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• Garbage Time (垃圾时间): A contemporary Chinese internet buzzword derived from sports, widely used in recent years as a socio-economic metaphor referring to an era of stagnation or impasse where major outcomes seem predetermined before structural change arrives.

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• Bureaucratic-crony capital / Oligarchic capital (权贵资本): Used in Chinese political discourse to describe capital intertwined with state authority and systemic privilege.

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• Hai Rui Dismissed from Office (《海瑞罢官》): A historical play by Wu Han whose 1965 critique by Yao Wenyuan served as the opening salvo of the Cultural Revolution, commonly cited as a premier example of ideological struggle manifesting through cultural and literary debate.

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?”

“He is Liu Qing!”

“Who is Liu Qing?”

“…”

“Whose Liu Qing?”

“…”

I could not answer.

Perhaps what I saw was not Liu Qing, but only a man who looked like him?

June 3, 2021

Notes

[1] Liu Qing (柳青, 1916–1978), pen name of Liu Yunhua, from Wubu in northern Shaanxi. The Builders (创业史, Part One 1960; the unfinished Part Two appeared posthumously) follows Liang Shengbao, a young peasant who leads his village into mutual aid and cooperation in the early 1950s.

[2] Red Crag (红岩), Red Sun (红日), and Keep the Red Flag Flying (红旗谱) are three celebrated revolutionary novels of the 1950s and early 1960s; together with The Builders they make up the canonical “Three Reds and One Builders” (三红一创).

[3] At the Forum on Literature and Art of October 2014, Xi Jinping held up Liu Qing as an example, recalling how he settled for fourteen years in Huangfu Village to write about the peasants.

[4] Guo Songmin, a retired army officer, is a well-known left-wing film and cultural critic.

[5] “Thirty mu of land and an ox, a wife and kids and a warm kang” (三十亩地一头牛，老婆孩子热炕头) is the proverbial smallholder’s dream; a kang is the heated brick bed of northern Chinese homes.

[6] In 1952 Liu Qing gave up his Beijing post and moved to Chang’an County outside Xi’an, settling from 1953 in Huangfu Village, where he lived for fourteen years.

[7] Ding Ling (1904–1986), Zhou Libo (1908–1979), Zhao Shuli (1906–1970), and Wei Wei (1920–2008) all came of age as writers in the Communist base areas.

[8] The state monopoly on the purchase and sale of grain (统购统销) was introduced in late 1953 under a Central Committee resolution of October that year.

[9] Deng Zihui (1896–1972) headed the Central Committee’s Rural Work Department from 1953 to 1962. In July 1955 Mao attacked those who slowed the pace of cooperativization as “tottering along like a woman with bound feet.”

[10] The Spring and Autumn and Warring States periods (770–221 BC) saw China divided among rival states until its unification by Qin. The admiral Zheng He led seven great fleets across the Indian Ocean between 1405 and 1433.

[11] Gu Zhun (1915–1974), economist and Party veteran, was branded a Rightist in 1958 and again in 1965 and died in disgrace; his notebooks, published in the 1990s, made him a hero to China’s liberal intellectuals.

[12] Zhang Weiying, Li Yining, and Wu Jinglian are among the best-known advocates of market reform in China.

[13] In January 2013 Xi Jinping declared that the periods before and after the reform and opening of 1978 “must not be used to negate each other.”

[14] The saying that history is written by the victors is of uncertain origin and has been attributed to many people.

[15] Liang Shengbao is the hero of The Builders; Old Liang San is his stepfather, a peasant clinging to the dream of private farming; Guo Zhenshan is the village Party member who turns to enriching himself; Xu Gaixia is the girl Shengbao loves. Toad Flats (蛤蟆滩) is the novel’s fictional village.

[16] The white towel tied round the head (羊肚白头巾) is the traditional headwear of the peasants of northern Shaanxi.

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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