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153 Party Conference Level Leads to Successful Implementation. a Comparable Study of the Nationalist Period Would Show That

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153 Party Conference Level Leads to Successful Implementation. a Comparable Study of the Nationalist Period Would Show That BOOK REVIEWS 153 party conference level leads to successful implementation. A comparable study of the Nationalist period would show that the Nationalists also had a penchant for elaborate planning, only to see the plans unfulfilled because of wrong application or lack of appropriate personnel. And while the author has successfully integrated the factor of personalities into her presentation (her appendix is especially useful), actual political dynamics in China generally involved a great deal more personal interactions than this book suggests. These are, however, minor criticisms. Given the fact that Southwest China has remained closed to outsiders even in this time of frequent visitors to China, this book is the most penetrating analysis of the subject we have. It is a definite con- tribution to our understanding of the political workings of China. Ohio State University SAMUELC. CHU Columbus, U.S.A. Merle Goldman (ed.), Modern Chinese Literature in the May Fourth Era. Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1977, viii, 464 pp., $ 15.00. This volume, a compilation of seventeen scholarly articles plus an introduction by the editor, Merle Goldman, is the much anticipated result of a conference held at Endicott House in Dedham, Massachusetts in August of 1974 and of a workshop which had preceded it at the Harvard East Asian Research Center. The distillations of painstakingly thorough research into this much talked about but little understood era in Chinese literary history, performed by "scholars of Chinese literature as well as historians and social scientists," included in this one book will scarcely disappoint anyone who has endured the wait. Hard though it might be to make generalizations about a book as diverse and intensely thorough as this, I would venture to say my overriding impression is one of a mellowing in Western attitudes toward the literature produced amid the turbulence and chaos which was China's urban areas over the period beginning with the May Fourth Incident in 1919 and lasting through roughly two decades until the Japanese in- vasion had dispersed most of the patriotic Chinese writers into the hinterland. No longer is this literature compared with contemporary works in Europe and America, only to be judged decisively immature in terms of its sentimentality or overtly shrill in speaking out of turn about any or all of China's political and cultural dilemmas. Rather, the sensitive and well-studied scholars whose works are included here have traced the influence and extent to which Western ideas and literature inspired the writings of China's May Fourth Era, while never forgetting for a moment the deep roots these writings and their creators had in their own culture. Though some divergent interpretations of key questions about authors as important as Lu Xun, Yu Dafu and Mao Dun occur, "what emerges from [these essays," as Goldman puts it, "is that May Fourth literature was a hybrid that fused native and foreign influences." It was affected by both cultures but was not merely derivative. Though many of these writers are characterized as belonging to a treaty-port elite which "in some ways had less contact with Chinese realities than the old literati," their dedication and determination to play a role in the crucial revitalization of the old socie- ty by expressing and trying (however futilly) to popularize new ideas, feelings and ethics in their works seems to be admired by each of the American, Czech and other scholars who contributed papers to this book. Some, such as Irene Eber, seem to feel a 154 kindred spirit with these internationalist intellectuals who were just as concerned about and willing to learn from the plights of small, weak and oppressed peoples as they were about looking into the experiences of the more prominent countries. Included are articles with such broad topics as: the origins of modern Chinese literature; the impact of Western and Japanese literary trends thereon; the social role of the May Fourth Writers; the "Mandarin Duck and Butterfly School" (yuan-yang hu- die pat) of pop fiction; and a concluding comparison-contrast of May Fourth era fiction with a late Qing piece and a new novel from Communist China by Hao Ran. More specific studies on certain aspects of given writers or their works number: four on Lu Xun; two on the Marxist literary critic, scholar of Russian literature, erstwhile Secretary General of the CCP and revolutionary martyr Qu Qiubai ; two on Mao Dun; and one each on Yu Dafu and Ding Ling. Regretfully, articles on Ba Jin and Bing Xin are not included and hardly a mention is made of Lao She. Within the works, several serious questions involving Lu Xun arise. One is about the effect of the Cultural Revolution on the works of Lu Xun, since Fokkema em- phatically decries "a ban on the 1957-1958 edition of Lu Xun's Quanji (complete works, edited by Zhou Yang and others) during the Cultural Revolution" (p. 101), whereas Vogel, speaking about Lu Xun (on p. 158) writes: ... in 1966, when even Guo Morvo denounced all his (own) previous works in order to stay in favor, Lu Xun remained a hero. He received more publicity during the Cultural Revolu- tion, when his quarrel with the party organization's cultural czar, Zhou Yang, was revived to justify Mao's opposition to the party organization. From 1966 until the early 1970s, when virtually no other May Fourth writer's works were available on the market, selected works of Lu Xun were published and sold. Fokkema's article carries the strong implication that the Cultural Revolution had an adverse effect on the accessability of Lu Xun's works to the general public, whereas Vogel thinks that the climate was even more favorable than before. I might venture to add that both these scholars should have been more specific in their references to recent events such as the "campaign in the Chinese press against 'the literature of the thirties'. " Read consecutively, Lee's and Mills' respective articles on Lu Xun's formative and mature years are quite informative, and Mills' opening description of the famed Lu Xun funeral procession flanked on both sides by nervous soldiers reads like the best of fiction. Mills' tight and systematic treatment of the latter part of Lu Xun's life merits wide reading, as this particular stage in his life has remained unclear in the perceptions of many. As for Lee's article, a good deal of it was previously brought out in Chinese in his article on Lu Xun's childhood which appeared in the December 1970 issue of Ming Bao. I am rather suspicious of the validity of the Ericksonian psychological mold in portraying Lu Xun as a victim of a traumatic ` `curse" (the death of his father). Even more questionable is Lee's translation of an untitled classical Chinese poem commonly referred to as "Zi Ti Xiao-xiang" or as Lee calls it "Zi zhao" (Self-portrait). Lee's translation of the opening line as "My heart has no tactic to dodge the magic arrow," and his assertion that: "The allusion to the magic arrow in Western and refers to Cupid's arrow-in this context probably Western science" (p. 173), is scarcely definitive. Much light is certainly shed on previously neglected aspects of Mao Dun's work by Yu-shih Chen who directly interprets them as allegories based entirely on the com- posite history of the Communist movement, rather than as mere tales of "pinko" petty-bourgeois intellectuals in the cities. Chen uses the trunkated short story "Guling .
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