ABSTRACT
The title of this chapter, “Fiction of New China,” sounds much more wide-ranging than what it actually covers. To address fictional works produced in a historical period of a few decades is an impossible task. Instead of a comprehensive survey, this chapter will focus on some representative works from the 1950s to the early 1960s, which sing praises of socialist transformation and proletarian heroes in accordance with the state guiding lines of socialist realism and revolutionary romanticism. Although the actual use of the term “socialist realism” was sporadic in Chinese literary criticism after it was officially endorsed in China in September 1953, 1 reflecting the complexity of the relationship between the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and its Soviet Russian counterpart, the stance of most Chinese writers and theoreticians towards socialist realism and masterpieces of Soviet socialist realism was on the whole affirmative. 2 The concept of Chinese socialist realism is entangled with the multiplicity of ideological, social and cultural forces and traditions. Underpinning the adoption of the socialist realist literary trend were practical and political agendas. On the eve of founding a “new China” with the communist victory in 1949, the chairman of the CCP, Mao Zedong declared: “To win the country-wide victory is only the first step of a long march of ten thousand li … . The Chinese revolution is great, but the road after the revolution will be longer, the work greater and more arduous.” 3 The newly established People’s Republic had a tremendous task to reconstruct a national economy that was shattered by both World War II and the subsequent civil war. The task was inextricably linked with the task of training a large number of new socialist constructors. In this new China, the interests of individuals were to succumb to the interests of the community as a whole. In this light, the rhetoric of socialist construction became one of the dominant traits of literature of this era, with the supremacy of communitarian over individual identities turned out to be its central concern. The principle to subordinate art to politics and artistic criteria to political criteria ensured the Communist Party’s command of the whole cultural field in the service of the revolution.
