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Residual Femininity: Women in Chinese Communist Fiction
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 17 February 2009
Extract
In Chinese Communist literature, men and women are primarily seen in their likeness as workers rather than in their sexual and emotional unlikeness as human beings. Women, as much as men, are praised for their socialist zeal and heroic capacity for work and condemned for being socialist sluggards indifferent to production. But despite its repudiation of “human interest” as a symptom of capitalist or revisionist decadence, even this supremely practical literature cannot begin to exist without some superficial attention to personal problems, and these problems, inevitably, attest to the persistence of biological instincts and immemorial habits of human civilisation. Until the techniques, Communist or otherwise, for dehumanisation are perfected, men and women will remain subject to irrational passions, and if circumstances permit, they will fall in love, get married, bring up children, and in other devious ways contrive for pleasure and happiness. In tracing the lot of Chinese women under Communism, I will therefore take for granted that the primary purpose of their earthly existence is to contribute to and assist in production and examine rather their residual personal problems in the context of the overriding importance of socialist construction. The results of niy investigation, if my women characters, drawn invariably from short stories, are at all typical, will show, not surprisingly, the pathetic adjustment of their feminine instincts and interests to the jealous demands of Party and state. The exceptions that I will take notice of—sympathetic victims and challengers of the impersonal Communist bureaucracy—are all heroines of revisionist fiction that has been subject to vehement attack by the press.
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- Special Survey of Chinese Communist Literature
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- Copyright © The China Quarterly 1963
References
1 Orthodox Communist critics in China have of course no quarrel with “human interest” in its broader neutral meaning; in that sense, whatever a character does or fails to do is of human interest. Their quarrel with the revisionist critics is over the more dramatic kind of “human interest”: the problem whether under strong emotion or other unusual circumstance a person habitually seen in his “class” character may reveal his essential “human” character. The test case is whether a Communist hero may turn coward when facing death. The revisionists think he may; the orthodox Communists maintain, on the other hand, that to impute cowardice to a Communist hero is to distort and malign his Communist character. In his long address to the Third Congress of the All-China Federation of Literary and Art Circles on July 24, 1960, Mao Tun cites the following situations of “human interest” for special condemnation: “That a hero facing death must show a weak longing for life, that there must be mental conflict or hesitation when a man has to sacrifice his family for a just cause, or that a man may set free an enemy for the sake of ‘humanity.’” Mao Tun continues: “The revisionists like this kind of ‘human interest,’ but we are against it. To us, this smacks of the bourgeoisie and petty-bourgeoisie, not the human interest of the proletariat. In particular, the signs of weakness in a hero going to his death are intolerable distortions of a hero's character and not a matter of human interest at all.” The quotations are taken from the English text of Mao Tun's address as given in Chinese Literature (12 1960), p. 34.Google Scholar The issue of “human interest” is inseparable from the persistent debate between orthodox and revisionist Communists on “human nature,” of which see infra, footnote 34.
2 Cyril Birch quotes this phrase in his valuable article “Fiction of the Yenan Period,” The China Quarterly, No. 4, 10–12 1960, p. 3.Google Scholar
3 Chao Shu-li Hsuan-chi (Peking: 1951), p. 59.Google Scholar
4 In its May 1950 issue, PL publishes two letters from readers attacking the story, one reprinted from the People's Daily (Jen-min lih-pao). Fang Chi's self-criticism is featured in the following issue.
5 PL (July–August 1961), p. 61.
6 These stories, of course, make no reference to the far grimmer reality. According to Hu, Chang-tu et al. , China: Its People, Its Society, Its Culture (New Haven: 1960), p. 176Google Scholar, following the promulgation of the Marriage Law, “a rising number of suicides and murders, mostly of women, reached such an extent that in September 1951 the Government Administration Council … issued a directive to all local authorities calling for a general investigation in their respective areas.” In February 1953 the National Committee for the Thorough Implementation of the Marriage Law disclosed that “between seventy and eighty thousand people were killed or committed suicide in a single year in China over marriage difficulties” (ibid. p. 177).
7 Birch, Cyril, op. cit., p. 5Google Scholar, quotes an early critical pronouncement by Chou Yang, “Love has retired to a position in life of no importance; the new works have themes a thousand times more important, more significant than love.” Chou Yang, of course, is merely echoing Mao Tse-tung's belittling view of love maintained in his Talks at the Yenan Literary Conference, 1942.Google Scholar
8 Feng, Ma et al. , Chieh-hun (Marriage) (Peking: 1953), p. 2.Google Scholar This slim anthology includes six stories on the marriage theme of the 1950–51 period.
9 Ibid. p. 7.
10 See Feng, Li, “To Start with ‘Marriage,’” PL (08 1956), pp. 111–112.Google Scholar
11 Quoted phrases taken from Ch'iu-yun, Huang, “On ‘love,’” PL (07 1956), p. 61.Google Scholar
12 Ibid. p. 60.
13 PL (August 1954), p. 40. A girl making shoes for her lover, however, is a quite common situation in marriage stories. In Wang An-yu, “Li Erh-sao Getting Remarried,” included in Ma Feng et al., Chieh-hun, the widow Li also makes shoes for her lover.
14 PL (August 1954), p. 41.
15 Ibid. p. 42.
16 In Ai Ming-chih's “The Wife,” a story subsequently discussed in this paper, for example, Yueh-chen, while in bed with him, “tightly embraced her own husband,” on receiving the news that he would soon become a Party member. See Tuan-p'ien Hsiao-shuo Hsuan, 1949–59 (selected Short Stories, 1949–59) (Shanghai: 1959), II, p. 466.Google Scholar This two-volume anthology is part of a uniform series entitled Shanghai Shih-nien Wen-hsueh Hsuan-chi (Selected Shanghai Literature of the Last Decade).
17 The most famous work depicting the co-operative movement under the guidance of progressive youth is perhaps Chao Shu-li's novel San-li Wan, discussed in my History of Modern Chinese Fiction, 1917–57, hereafter History (New Haven: Yale Un. Press, 1961), pp. 491–195.Google Scholar
18 For a critical study of his pre-1949 career, see the chapter on Shih T'o in History.
19 PL (March 1954), p. 51.
20 Ibid. p. 51.
21 Ibid. p. 40.
22 Ibid. p. 41.
23 Ibid. p. 43.
24 PL (October 1953), p. 6.
25 Tuan-p'ien Hsiao-shuo Hsuan, 1949–59, II, p. 462.Google Scholar
26 Mao Tun was the first critic to praise her highly, in his article “On the Latest Short Stories,” PL (June 1958). Wei Chin-chih parrots this praise in his Foreword to Tuan-p'ien Hsiao-shuo Hsuan, 1949–59, I.Google Scholar
27 CL (July 1961), p. 80.
28 See the woman leader Chang Yun's address to the Congress, included in Chung-kuo Fu-nü Ti-san-tz'u Ch'üan-kuo Tm-piao Ta-hui Chung-yao Wen-hsien (The Third Congress of All-China Women's Delegates: Important Documents) (Peking: 1958), pp. 12–46.Google Scholar
29 CL (December 1960), p. 54.
30 In addition, Li Chun has written two important stories on the new women: “Mother and Daughter” (PL, October 1959); “Sowing the Clouds” (PL, September 1960). The high value assigned to these stories by the Communist literary leadership can be gauged by the fact that English translations were made available to readers of Chinese Literature soon after their original publication: “Mother and Daughter” (12 1959)Google Scholar, “The Story of Li Shuang-shuang” (06 1960)Google Scholar, “Sowing the Clouds” (01 1961).Google Scholar These stories also immediately prompted highly favourable critiques: see, for example, Ch'ün, Wei, “In Praise of New China's Women—Three Stories by Comrade Li Chun” (PL, 06 1960)Google Scholar and Wen, Jen, “The Achievement of ‘Sowing the Clouds’” (PL, 11 1960).Google Scholar
31 In the commune stories, to be sure, many heroines are seen actively engaged in a professional capacity. But these hardly literate nurses, obstetricians and meteorologists, usually teenagers and invariably drawn from the ranks of the peasants, have merely undergone a crash training programme so that they are hardly professional in the accepted sense of the word. The young doctor in “New Life” is, of course, a professional.
32 PL (December 1960), p. 41.
33 PL (September 1956), p. 53.
34 For a detailed account of the Communist persecution of the Hu Feng group and the rightist and revisionist authors, see the chapter on “Conformity, Defiance, and Achievement” in History. In his Talks at the Yenan literary forum, Mao Tse-tung scoffs at the idea of an abstract and unchanging “human nature.” All the purged critics and theorists—principally Hu Feng, Feng Hsüeh-feng, Ch'in Chao-yang, Liu Shao-t'ang and Pa Jen—were accused of advocating the bourgeois or revisionist theory of human nature. In his address to the Third Congress of the All-China Federation of Literary and Art Circles on July 22, 1960, Chou Yang refers to the persistent attraction of this theory even after the great purge of 1957–58: “At present the revisionists are desperately advocating the bourgeois theory of human nature, the false humanism of the bourgeoisie, ‘the love of mankind,’ bourgeois pacifism and other fallacious notions of the sort, to reconcile class antagonisms, negate the class struggle and revolution, and spread illusions about imperialism, to attain their ulterior aim of preserving the old capitalist society and disrupting the new socialist society” (CL, October 1960, p. 47).
35 I have briefly treated Ting Ling's Yenan career in History, pp. 275–279.Google Scholar During 1957–58, the two Yenan stories were cited by the orthodox critics as evidence of Ting Ling's anti-party, rightist character. Their striking resemblance in mood and tone to the author's early bourgeois stories was also emphasised to show her unchanged commitment to individualist nihilism through the years.
36 PL (July 1957), p. 26.
37 Ibid. p. 35.
38 Ibid. p. 36. Li Wei-lun's “Love” also ends with a rhetorical question. Dr. Chou's parting words to Pi-chen are: “Good-bye, Pi-chen. I wish you the greatest of happiness. Who could believe that a girl like you can be unhappy?”—PL (09 1956), p. 53.Google Scholar
39 I reluctantly exclude this story as a subject for discussion from this paper because its heroine, a Korean girl in love with a Chinese volunteer, is not Chinese.
40 PL (June 1956), p. 125. The magazine's associate editor, Ch'in Chao-yang, was later persecuted not only for his own revisionist articles and stories but for his warm commendation of “Our Paper's Inside News” and his supposed collusion with its author.
41 Ibid. p. 7.
42 Ibid. p. 14.
43 Ibid. p. 21.