Like their contemporaries all over Asia, Chinese artists
were strongly influenced by the revolutionary changes
that were taking place in the art world of the West in the
early twentieth century. In the decades following the
1911 revolution, Chinese creative artists began to experiment
with Western styles, although the more extreme
schools, such as Surrealism and Abstract painting, had
little impact.
The rise to power of the Communists in 1949 added a
new dimension to the debate over the future of culture in
China. Spurred by comments made by Mao Zedong at a
cultural forum in Yan’an in 1942, leaders rejected the
Western slogan of “Art for art’s sake” and, like their Soviet
counterparts, viewed culture as an important instrument
of indoctrination. The standard would no longer be
aesthetic quality or the personal preference of the artist
but “Art for life’s sake,” whereby culture would serve the
interests of socialism.
At first, the new emphasis on socialist realism did not
entirely extinguish the influence of traditional culture.
Mao and his colleagues saw the importance of traditional
values and culture in building a strong new China and
tolerated—and even encouraged—efforts by artists to
synthesize traditional ideas with socialist concepts and
Western techniques. During the Cultural Revolution,
however, all forms of traditional culture came to be
viewed as reactionary. Socialist realism became the only
standard of acceptability in literature, art, and music. All
forms of traditional expression were forbidden.
Characteristic of the changing cultural climate in
China was the experience of author Ding Ling. Born in
1904 and educated in a school for women set up by leftist
intellectuals during the hectic years after the May Fourth
Movement, she began writing in her early twenties. At
first, she was strongly influenced by prevailing Western
styles, but after her husband, a struggling young poet and
a member of the CCP, was executed by Chiang Kai-shek’s
government in 1931, she became active in party activities
and sublimated her talent to the revolutionary cause.
In the late 1930s, Ding Ling settled in Yan’an, where
she became a leader in the party’s women’s and literary associations.
She remained dedicated to revolution, but
years of service to the party had not stifled her individuality,
and in 1942, she wrote critically of the incompetence,
arrogance, and hypocrisy of many party officials, as
well as the treatment of women in areas under Communist
authority. Such conduct raised eyebrows, but she was
able to survive criticism and in 1948 wrote her most famous
novel, The Sun Shines over the Sangan River, which
described the CCP’s land reform program in favorable
terms. It was awarded the Stalin Prize three years later.
During the early 1950s, Ding Ling was one of the most
prominent literary lights of the new China, but in the
more ideological climate at the end of the decade, she was
attacked for her individualism and her previous criticism
of the party. Although temporarily rehabilitated, during
the Cultural Revolution she was sentenced to hard labor
on a commune in the far north and was only released in
the late 1970s after the death of Mao Zedong. Although
crippled and in poor health, she began writing a biography
of her mother that examined the role of women in
twentieth-century China. She died in 1981. Ding Ling’s
story mirrored the fate of thousands of progressive Chinese
intellectuals who, despite their efforts, were not able
to satisfy the constantly changing demands of a repressive
regime.
After Mao’s death, Chinese culture was once again released
from the shackles of socialist realism. In painting,
the new policies led to a revival of interest in both traditional
and Western forms. The revival of traditional art
was in part a matter of practicality as talented young Chinese
were trained to produce traditional paintings for export
to earn precious foreign currency for the state. But
the regime also showed a new tolerance for the imitation
of Western styles as a necessary by-product of development,
thus unleashing an impressive outpouring of artis-
tic creativity later dubbed the “Beijing Spring.” A new
generation of Chinese painters began to experiment with
a wide range of previously prohibited art styles, including
Cubism and Abstract Expressionism.
An excellent illustration of Chinese artists’ tireless
battle for creative freedom is the painting My Dream
(1988) by Xu Mangyao. On the canvas, an artist, having
freed his hands from manacles, seeks to escape from the
confinement of a red brick wall. The painting represents
the worldwide struggle by all the twentieth-century
artists silenced by totalitarian regimes in the Soviet
Union, Latin America, and Africa.
In music, too, the post-Mao era brought significant
changes. Music academies closed during the Cultural
Revolution for sowing the seeds of the bourgeois mentality
were reopened. Students were permitted to study both
Chinese and Western styles, but the vast majority selected
the latter. To provide examples, leading musicians
and composers, such as violinist Isaac Stern, were invited
to China to lecture and perform before eager Chinese
students.
The limits to freedom of expression were most apparent
in literature. During the early 1980s, party leaders
encouraged Chinese writers to express their views on
the mistakes of the past, and a new “literature of the
wounded” began to describe the brutal and arbitrary nature
of the Cultural Revolution. One of the most prominent
writers was Bai Hua, whose script for the film Bitter
Love described the life of a young Chinese painter who
joined the revolutionary movement during the 1940s but
was destroyed during the Cultural Revolution when his
work was condemned as counterrevolutionary. The film
depicted the condemnation through a view of a street in
Beijing “full of people waving the Quotations of Chairman
Mao, all those devout and artless faces fired by a feverish
fanaticism.” Driven from his home for posting a portrait
of a third-century b.c.e. defender of human freedom on a
Beijing wall, the artist flees the city. At the end of the
film, he dies in a snowy field, where his corpse and a semicircle
made by his footprints form a giant question mark.
In criticizing the excesses of the Cultural Revolution,
Bai Hua was only responding to Deng Xiaoping’s appeal
for intellectuals to speak out, but he was soon criticized
for failing to point out the essentially beneficial role of
the CCP in recent Chinese history, and his film was withdrawn
from circulation in 1981. Bai Hua was compelled
to recant his errors and to state that the great ideas of
Mao Zedong on art and literature were “still of universal
guiding significance today.” 7
As the attack on Bai Hua illustrates, many party leaders
remained suspicious of the impact that “decadent”
bourgeois culture could have on the socialist foundations
of Chinese society, and the official press periodically
warned that China should adopt only the “positive” aspects
of Western culture (notably, its technology and its
work ethic) and not the “negative” elements such as drug
use, pornography, and hedonism. One of the chief targets
in China’s recent “spiritual civilization” campaign is author
Wang Shuo (b. 1958), whose writings have been
banned for exhibiting a sense of “moral decay.” In his
novels Playing for Thrills (1989) and Please Don’t Call
Me Human (2000), Wang highlighted the seamier side
of contemporary urban society, peopled with hustlers,
ex-convicts, and other assorted hooligans. Spiritually
depleted, hedonistic, and amoral in their approach to
life, his characters represent the polar opposite of the socialist
ideal.
Conservatives were especially incensed by the tendency
of many writers to dwell on the shortcomings of
the socialist system and to come uncomfortably close to
direct criticism of the role of the CCP. The outstanding
works of author Mo Yan (b. 1956) are a case in point.
Viewed as China’s greatest writer, in his novels The Garlic
Ballads (1988) and The Republic of Wine (2000), Mo
exposes the rampant corruption of contemporary Chinese
society, the roots of which he attributes to one-party
rule (see the box on p. 230).
World History
