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THE NEW WRITERS in OCCUPIED SHANGHAI, 1941-1945 by YI

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THE NEW WRITERS in OCCUPIED SHANGHAI, 1941-1945 by YI THE NEW WRITERS IN OCCUPIED SHANGHAI, 1941-1945 By YI-CHEN CHEN B.A., National Taiwan University, 1972 A THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTER OF ARTS in THE FACULTY OF GRADUATE STUDIES Department of Asian Studies We accept this thesis as conforming to the required standard THE UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA Spring 2000 © Yi-Chen Chen, 2000 In presenting this thesis in partial fulfilment of the requirements for an advanced degree at the University of British Columbia, I agree that the Library shall make it freely available for reference and study. I further agree that permission for extensive copying of this thesis for scholarly purposes may be granted by the head of my department or by his or her representatives. It is understood that copying or publication of this thesis for financial gain shall not be allowed without my written permission. Department The University of British Columbia Vancouver, Canada DE-6 (2/88) ABSTRACT This thesis is focused on the new writers who appeared in Shanghai during the Japanese Occupation between December 1941 and August 1945. The rise of these new writers to fame and their subsequent disappearance from the literary scene were consistent with the fall and liberation of Shanghai. In the meantime, their appearance and disappearance were parallel with the success and decline of magazines published in Shanghai during that period as well. Both the magazines and their editors played significant roles in promoting the new writers into the literary arena. The war disrupted the development of literature, their writing "nourishment" mostly depended on the literary resources which had been stored up in Shanghai since the late Qing. My discussion of these eight new writers, Zhang Ailing, Shi Jimei, Cheng Yuzhen, Tang Xuehua, Zheng Dingwen, Shen Ji, Guo Peng, and Shi Qi, progresses through an analysis of the elements of region, literature, and war. While most of the female writers' themes were focused on love, mundane love or God's love, the male writers were either more interested in setting their stories on Chinese native soil like Shen Ji, Guo Peng, and Shi Qi; or personal concerns and anxieties regarding the future such as Zheng Dingwen. Among her contemporaries, Zhang Ailing is the most successful and the most influential. These new writers did not go through the baptism of the May Fourth Movement, and had less of a moral burden than their predecessors did. Thus they had more freedom to develop their writings— although the freedom was confined due to a depressed political and social climate. TABLE OF CONTENTS Abstract Table of Contents INTRODUCTION Chapter One Magazines: The Cradle of New Writers Chapter Two Zhang Ailing and Her Female Contemporaries Chapter Three Zhang Ailing's Male Contemporaries CONCLUSION Glossary Bibliography Appendix 1 Introduction There are presently two published works which study Chinese writers and their writings during the Sino-Japanese war: Edward M. Gunn's Unwelcome Muse: Chinese Literature in Shanghai and Peking 1937-1945 and Poshek Fu's Passivity, Resistance, and Collaboration: Intellectual Choices in Occupied Shanghai, 1937-1945. Gunn's research covers the writers and their written works in both Shanghai and Peking and is concerned "primarily not with the sociology of literature or the moral dilemmas of intellectuals, but rather with a critical appreciation aimed at fitting the literature into the mainstream of modern Chinese literary history and criticism."1 Unlike Gunn, Fu's focus is on the intellectual life in wartime Shanghai. He not only tries "to relate the literary texts to their historical context," but also aims to redress the "historiographical imbalance by explicating the moral and political responses of writers to foreign occupation."2 Although they use different approaches, they both select established writers as their major research subjects. My study is focused on the new writers who appeared in Shanghai during the Occupation - December 1941 to August 1945.1 selected Shanghai because of its metropolitan makeup and its unique literary tradition with roots in the late Qing. In addition, the Occupation provides an interesting political backdrop for a literary study of Chinese writers, owing to Shanghai's occupation by Japanese forces and its 1 See the introduction of Gunn's Unwelcome Muse, New York: Columbia University Press, 1980, p. 1. 2 See the preface of ¥u's Passivity, Resistance, and Collaboration, California: Stanford University Press, 1993, p.xii. 2 instalment of Wang Jingwei's collaborationist regime. The new writers are selected because their rise to fame and subsequent disappearance from the literary scene were consistent with the fall and liberation of Shanghai. Their written works reveal a literary phenomenon that appeared in a specific city at a special time. It is hard to provide a definitive view of mainstream Chinese literature during the war. If by mainstream we mean the development of literature since the May Fourth movement, then the chain was clearly broken due to the war. These new writers, not yet in their 20's, were suddenly thrust into the literary arena in 1942. Isolated and cut off from the rest of China, they were incapable of playing functional roles in the continuity of modern Chinese literature. In 1918 when Lu Xun wrote "Diary of a madman" (Kuangren riji), which is considered to be the first modern work of Chinese fiction, none of these writers was born. In 1937 when the Sino-Japanese war broke out, most of them were still high school students. Zhang Ailing, the oldest and most talented of them, published her first two stories "The Cow" (Niu), and "Farewell to My Concubine" (Bawang bie ji) in her high school bulletin that same year. The New literature enjoyed the same level of influence and popularity as the Mandarin Duck and Butterfly school novels and Western literary works in translation in Shanghai from the 1920s to 1930s. Because of these unique circumstances, I prefer not to classify their literature alongside the mainstream of modern Chinese literary history and criticism as Gunn has done. On the other hand, under political oppression and a struggle for survival, while senior intellectuals and writers had to make their moral and political choices as Fu points out, these new writers were neither noticed by the Japanese nor had to struggle with moral 3 demands due to their youth. While their predecessors either portrayed themselves as yimin, anachronisms, or withdrew into seclusion and changed their writing style and subject, these new writers could develop their writings based on each of their talents and interests due to their "newness." Therefore, Fu's approach is not considered in my study. The primary purpose of my study is to scrutinize what are the literary and socio• political elements which influenced and formed these new writers' writing styles through an analysis of their works. The Sino-Japanese war broke out on July 7,1937 in Hebei province and spread to Shanghai by August. The big city fell after four months of fierce combat. The war ended in August of 1945. The eight years in between in Shanghai can be divided into two phases: a Gudao (Solitary island) period when all the parts of the city except the International Settlement and French Concession were taken by the Japanese, and a full occupation (Lunxian) period ushered in by the Japanese seizure of the International area in December of 1941. In the Gudao period, after the Japanese troops marched into the city, many writers departed for Hong Kong or the unoccupied hinterland. Those who chose to remain in Shanghai confronted the hazards of being harassed and assassinated by the Japanese. The Shanghai Municipal Police closed down eleven Chinese newspapers and periodicals while another thirty stopped publication due to the requests by the authorities of the foreign concessions to maintain their "neutral status." To distinguish them from those pro-Japanese and Japanese-sponsored newspapers and express "Chinese patriotical opinions," some intellectuals established the "foreign published mwspaper"(yangshang 4 bad)—a newspaper run by Chinese but employing American, British or other Europeans as the publishers—to acquire legal immunity from Japanese censorship.3 After the establishment of the Puppet regime, Wang Jingwei created his secret service, known as No. 76 for its street address on Jessfield Road in the International Settlement. The organization and the GMD secret service—Military Bureau of Statistics and Investigation, known as Juntong —considered each other as enemy No. 1. Incidents of assassination, kidnapping, and bombing took place almost every day. Foreign-published newspaper journalists and editors became the prime victims of such terrorism. From 1939 to 1941, twenty newspapermen were killed.4 Wang and the Japanese delivered a powerful message to the newspapers that supported resistance and warned the city's reading public on the hazards of political resistance.5 Ironically, at the same time, a mood of hedonism permeated the populace. Theatres, hotels, restaurants, night-clubs, opium dens, and gambling casinos mushroomed in the city due to high demand. It seemed that people searched for a way to relieve the frustrations and anxieties of everyday life through amusement. "Even college students, who prided themselves on being 'progressive' and wrote anti-Japanese tracts and articles during the day went dancing and gambling at night."6 Immediately after the outbreak of the Pacific war, on December 8,1941, Shanghai gave way to full Occupation. Japanese troops marched across Suzhou River into the International Settlement. The first thing they did was to close down all foreign and 3SeeFu,1993,p.31-3. 4SeeFu 1993, p.48-9. 5 See Wen-hsin Yeh edited Wartime Shanghai, London and New York: Routledge, 1998, p.7. 6SeeFu, 1993, p.48. 5 Chinese banks. Two days later, most banks were allowed to reopen with limitations on cash withdrawals for each account holder to 500 dollars each day.
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