Independent writers

Although government censorship and crackdowns occurred from time to time on China’s literary scene during the Republican Era decades from the 1920s through the 1940s, on average these three decades burdened Chinese fiction writers with far fewer political and ideological controls than they faced from the authoritarian regimes on either side of the Taiwan Strait over the following three decades from the 1950s to the 1970s. To be sure, literary groups such as Shanghai’s Communist-dominated League of Left-wing Writers (1930–1936) tried to drill their members into adopting a “correct” ideological stance, but had no prospects of inducting independent-minded writers such as Xu Dishan (1893–1941), Shen Congwen (1902–1988), and Qian Zhongshu (1910–1998). Each of these independent writers was skeptical both of the authoritarian Kuomintang regime and the Nationalists’ risible New Life Movement, on the one hand – and of the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) Marxist-Leninist obsession with class struggle and marching in lock-step towards a “Socialist Heaven on Earth,” on the other. In their fiction, these three writers were as likely to direct satire at left-leaning Communists as at right-leaning Nationalists. ¹