Abstract
By the mid-1920s, a new political reality had emerged in China with the Guomindang-Communist alliance more or less in place, an alliance that had been brokered by agents of Comintern (Communist International).1 It was an uneasy, difficult alliance from the get-go because the two parties in this “marriage of convenience” had very different political ideologies and national platforms. Guomindang (Nationalists, Kuomintang, KMT), founded in 1912, right after the 1911 republican revolution, was based on Dr. Sun Yat-sen’s San min zhuyi [Three People’s Principles], i.e., minzu [nationalism], min-zhu [democracy], and minshen [people’s livelihood]. The Chinese Communist Party (the CCP, founded by Chen Duxiu, Li Dazhao, and others in 1921), still in its formative stage, subscribed to the ideals, as stated in its founding manifesto, of a classless (actually, working-class dominated) society predicated on common ownership of economy and production, abolition of the existent oppressive government and institutions, and liberation from the hegemonic control of capitalistic foreign powers. These ideals, the Communists believed, could only be achieved through class struggle, i.e., mobilization of the proletariat and its close allies, peasants, soldiers, and so on.2 While the two parties shared some broad national platforms, i.e., to build a new, strong, and democratic China—whatever that meant—they parted company when it came to who would provide the leadership, who would be the core forces and allies, and what would be the best paths toward achieving those goals.
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Notes
The stated mission of the Communist International (Comintern) was to “mobilize the forces of all genuinely revolutionary parties of the world working class, and thereby facilitate and hasten the victory of communist revolution throughout the world.” See Duncan Hellas, The Comintern (Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books, 2008), 10. Its membership consisted of Communist party organizations from almost all European nations, the United States, China, and elsewhere. It was officially dissolved in 1943 as the nations represented by the various Communist parties were drawn deeper into the Second World War.
Tony Saich and Benjamin Yang, The Rise to Power of the Chinese Communist Party: Documents and Analysis (New York: M.E. Sharpe, 1996), 11–13.
See Jonathan D. Spence, The Search of Modern China, 2nd ed. (New York: Norton, 1990), 323–74, for more elaborate account of the Northern Expedition and the “fractured alliance” between Guomindang and the Communists.
Indeed, in its spectacular prime Shanghai had no rival in the Orient or in the world, for that matter, as the most “pleasure-mad, rapacious, corrupt, strife-ridden, licentious, squalid, and decadent.” See Stella Dong, Shanghai: The Rise and Fall of a Decadent City 1842–1949 (New York: Harper Perennial, 2001), 1.
See John K. Fairbank and Albert Feuerwerker, The Cambridge History of China, 1912–1949, Part 2 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 144–47.
Quoted in Hung-yok Ip, Intellectuals in Revolutionary China, 1921– 1949 (New York: Routledge 2005), 145.
Mark Selden, China in Revolution: The Yenan Way Revisited (Socialism and Social Movements) (New York: M.E. Sharpe, 1995), 170–71.
See Wang Jipeng and Xing Ruijuan, “Luelun yan’an shiqi de wenhua jiaoyu he wenyi gongzuo” [On Cultural Education and Art Work during the Yan’an Period], Chongqing keji xueyuan xuebao: shehui kexue ban [Journal of Chongqing University of Science and Technology: Social Sciences Edition) 12 (2008): 141–42, and Cao Dianzhen, “Yan’an shiqi de wenhua yu zhongguo xianjin wenhua de qianjin fangxiang” [Culture during the Yan’an Period and the Orientation of China’s Progressive Culture], Xinxiang xueyuan xuebao: shehui kexue ban [Journal of Xinxiang University: Social Sciences Edition] 22, no. 3 (June 2008): 19–21.
Edgar Snow, Red Star over China, First Revised and Enlarged Edition (Random House, 1938; New York: Grove Press, 1968), 119–25.
Steve Harrell, ed., Cultural Encounters on China’s Ethnic Frontiers (Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, 1996), 3–36.
This portion of discussion draws from Merle Goldman and Leo Ou-fan Lee, eds., An Intellectual History of Modern China (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 203–20.
See Rodney Koeneke, Empires of the Mind: I. A. Richards and Basic English in China, 1929–1979 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003).
Among Zhao Shuli’s best known stories are The Marriage of Young Blacky Fortunes of the Li Village, and Three-Mile Bay. Although Zhao was promoted as an exemplary peasant writer by the Communist Party since the 1940s, he was persecuted during the Cultural Revolution and died in 1970. In response to negative assessment of Zhao Shuli by C. T. Hsia, Liu Zaifu (1941-), an important contemporary literary critic and philosopher, defended Zhao as a talented writer coming from a rich rural, oral culture whose achievements do not pale when stacked next to those of much more urbane writers such as Zhang Ailing. See Liu Zaifu, “Eileen Chang’s Fiction and C. T. Hsia’s A History of Modern Chinese Fiction,” Shijie [Scope] 7 (2002): http://mclc.osu.edu/rc/pubs/liuzaifu.htm.
Translated by Gregory B. Lee and quoted from Joseph S. M. Lau and Howard Goldblatt, eds., The Columbia Anthology of Modern Chinese Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 510–11.
See Ba Jin, “My J’accuse Against This Moribund System,” in Modern Chinese Writers Self Portrayals, trans. by W. J. F. Jenner, ed. Helmut Martin (New York: M. E. Sharpe, 1992), 277–83, and Olga Lang, “Introduction” to Family by Ba Jin (Boston: Cheng & Tsui Company, 1972), vii-xxvi.
See Bernd Eberstein, A Selective Guide to Chinese Literature, 1900–1949 (Leiden, the Netherlands: Brill Academic Publishers, 1997), 60–63.
C. T. Hsia in his A History of Modern Chinese Fiction, 3rd ed. (Bloomington and Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press, 1999), for example, dismissed the later fiction of Ding Ling (Ting Ling) as part of the “proletarian literature in China” written to serve the agendas of the Communist Party (272). On Hsia’s scales of literary values, Ding Ling weighed much less than Zhang Ailing, whom he praised as the “most talented writer to appear in Shanghai” and possibly “the greatest Chinese writer since the May Fourth Movement” (322). See also Jiangshang Xingzi (Sachico Kawakami), “Xiangdai zhongguo de ‘xin funu’ huayu yu zuowei “moden nulang” daiyanren de Ding Ling” [The “New Woman” Discourse in Modern China and Ding Ling as the Spokesperson for the “Modern Woman”], Zhongguo xiandai wenxue yancjiu congkan [Modern Chinese Literature Research Series] 2 (2006): 68–88; and Xu Zhongjia, “Geming shiqi ziwo dingyi quan de sangshi yu nuxing zhuyi xiezuo de shibai: yi Ding Ling ji pian xiaoshuo wei zhongxin de fenxi” [The Loss of the Right for Self-Definition during the Revolutionary Period and the Failure of Feminist Writing: the Case of Ding Ling], Nanjingshida xuebao: shehui kexue ban [Journal of Nanjing Normal University: Social Sciences Edition] 1 (January 2008): 142–47.
See Wen-HsinYeh, The Alienated Academy: Culture and Politics in Republican China 1919–1937 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2000).
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© 2012 Shouhua Qi
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Qi, S. (2012). The Not-So-United Fronts (1928–1949). In: Western Literature in China and the Translation of a Nation. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137011947_3
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