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The Battlefield of Cultural Production : Chinese Literary Mobilization During the War Years

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The Battlefield of Cultural Production : Chinese Literary Mobilization During the War Years Journal of Modern Literature in Chinese 現代中文文學學報 Volume 2 Issue 1 Vol. 2.1 二卷一期 (1998) Article 5 7-1-1998 The battlefield of cultural production : Chinese literary mobilization during the War Years Charles A. LAUGHLIN Yale University Follow this and additional works at: https://commons.ln.edu.hk/jmlc Recommended Citation Laughlin, C. A. (1998). The battlefield of cultural production: Chinese literary mobilization during the War Years. Journal of Modern Literature in Chinese, 2(1), 83-103. This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Centre for Humanities Research 人文學科研究中心 at Digital Commons @ Lingnan University. It has been accepted for inclusion in Journal of Modern Literature in Chinese 現代中文文學學報 by an authorized editor of Digital Commons @ Lingnan University. The Battlefield of Cultural Production: Chinese Literary Mobilization during the War Years Charles A. Laughlin The entrenchment of the publishing industry and the emergence of the wentan [literary arena] throughout the 1920s in China made it possible for many intellectuals to become literary professionals. Aspiring writers congregated in major publishing centers and now responded to a broadening market as well as the special conditions of the modern Chinese literary field. Since the days of the May Fourth movement (beginning in 1919), the association of new literature with progressive social forces in a period of constant strife and unending revolution made even the most worldly authors identify strongly with the peculiar ideals of the literary profession in modern China. At the same time, patterns of patronage, the stabilization of modern education, and moderate prosperity were creating a situation in which more could make a living writing. Thus writing was now more likely to be viewed as a career as well as a social mission. In fact, the development of the literary market for writers of “new literature” through the early 1920s exacerbated the tension between writing as an economic career and writing as a vehicle for social transformation. Those who continued to identify most strongly with the latter ideal soon became painfully aware that the language and literature emerging from the May Fourth movement was as distant from the broad masses of the public as had been the classical tradition the movement had overthrown. Moreover, it seemed that the growing literary market, through its close connections with new institutions of higher learning, the limited dissemination of print media, and the commercial interests of publishers, had the effect of further stratifying cultural discourse along class lines. Thus one of the overriding concerns of those who wanted to continue to promote literature’s potential for social transformation was to transcend the boundaries that excluded the majority of the public from Journal of Modern Literature in Chinese 2.1 (July 1998): 83-103 © 1998 by Lingnan College 84 Charles A. Laughlin intervening in the cultural realm, either as consumers or producers. On the other hand, modern Chinese history would not allow the literature industry to be shaped entirely by either the economics of the literary market or the autonomous laws of aesthetic development (if there be any). The pressure and distortions created by the labor movement and the rise of leftism, Japan’s menace throughout the 1930s, and the outbreak of war forced literary activity into unprecedented configurations. Both the methods and contents of literary production and writers' consciousness and identity changed; those processes led to a literary work style that would ultimately condition the literary institutions of the People's Republic of China.1 One cannot overemphasize the disruption to the publishing industry，to the creative process, to writers’ careers, and to the human geography of China brought about by the outbreak of war with Japan in the summer of 1937. The rapid collapse of Beijing, Shanghai, and Nanjing in the early months of the war virtually obliterated the social and economic landscape of the existing Chinese publishing industry and forced practically all writers to move into new situations. Writers had to make decisions that tested the balances between personal considerations, professional goals and political commitment in a much starker manner than had been the case in Shanghai: should one go to the countryside, to other industrialized cities, or to the communist base areas? Or should one stay in Japanese-occupied areas? The government and many commercial enterprises were forced into the industrial cities of the interior, the Communists were pushed by both Nationalists and the Japanese into defensible mountain fastnesses between provinces, and many were stuck in occupied areas and battle zones. Literary production from authors in each of these situations both contributed greatly to the process of fleshing out each region’s distinctive human geography, and reflected the emergence of new relations of artistic production in the context of war. 1 I do not mean to imply that the current of development I highlight in this paper is the only or even the “main” one in modern Chinese literature; I mean only that it was the practical basis for literary organization in the People’s Republic after the war. The Battlefield of Cultural Production 85 Cultural work groups, service corps, interview teams, battlefield news stations and literary and artistic campaigns replaced, to a large extent, private composition and contemplation, literary journals, the publishing market and writers' associations. These were the new social structures in which Chinese literary practice and performing arts were engaged during the war against Japan.2 The genre of reportage or journalistic literature reveals much about this displacement of the literary market by literary organizations as the controlling force in many writers1 creative lives. Reportage was one of the predominant forms of literary practice during the war years, and most literary campaigns and other group projects were oriented toward the production of reportage. Moreover, fictional writing within journals in the Rear and in Communist base areas was often based on experiences first recorded as reportage in writing campaigns.3 In an effort to understand the cultural and subjective implications of literary practice in socialist China, I examine here the evolution of collective literary practice from the early 1930s to the early 1940s as the basis for the relations of literary production in the People’s Republic. This examination of one set of solutions to intellectuals’ obsession with overcoming class boundaries, while showing some of the practical drawbacks to collective literary mobilization, also emphasizes the conditions that facilitated the emergence of a new, non-individual literary subject. Literary Mobilization in the 1930s The earliest model for literary mobilization in China was provided by the League of Left-Wing Writers in the early 1930s, leftist writers, artists, and critics adopted the methods of the international proletarian literary movement to try to bridge the gap between writers and industrial workers (Wong 1991; Ma and 2 Occupied Beijing and Shanghai were an exception, as cultural production continued to function more or less within the same systems and networks (Gunn 1980). 3 Qiyue [July] (edited by Hu Feng), for example, published works 七丘阿月東、胡 瓏風曹 of both fiction and reportage by writers like Qiu Dongping, Cao Bai, and 平 Ah Long. 86 Charles A. Laughlin Zhang 1980). Despite the idea prevalent among writers and critics of the time that artists cannot transcend their class background,4 the proletarian literary movement held out the promise to “bourgeois” artists that they might become one with the laboring masses at the vanguard of social progress. This was supposed to be accomplished through volunteer teaching, investigation of and reporting on factory life and conditions, and even the training and coordination of workers in cultural activities and projects: We call upon the entire membership of the “Left-Wing League” to go to the factories, the villages, the front lines, to the lower levels of society. There accumulate feelings that want to explode; there unfold inhuman, painful lives that crave revolution . How we take these emotions, these convergences of different lives and organize them into a progressive struggle for liberation is precisely the work of the worker-peasant-soldier proletarian literary movement, work that we should begin decisively. This is not any ordinary communications work, but rather a broad-based educational movement to organize the lives of workers, peasants and soldiers, to elevate their cultural level and political education. From the midst of intense class struggle, from militant strikes and smoldering village struggles through community night schools, factory newsletters, wall newspapers, through all kinds of agitational propaganda work, let us create our reportage! Only thus can our literature be liberated from the hands of the privileged few and truly become the property of the masses. Only thus can we make the literary movement develop closely together with revolutionary struggle, and only thus will the lives of our authors undergo a true transformation, and the content of our works will be filled with the proletarian consciousness of struggle.5 葉聖陶 4 This view is generally identified with Ye Shengtao and especially Mao Dun in the context of both his late 1920s debate with the Sun Society on revolutionary literature, and the later debate on 瞿秋白 mass literature (1933)
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