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...foremost novelist of Communist China is a Yangtze Valley scholar's son who calls himself Mao Tun. The name sounds exactly like the Chinese words for spear and shield-a combination which, according to a literary tradition 2,500 years old, signifies contradiction. Last week, as Red China's "creative workers" met in the shining new Great Hall of the People for Peking's Third National Congress of Writers and Artists, Mao Tun, 64, capped a long career as a man of contradiction...
...when he was already established as a novelist in the new vernacular style, Mao Tun was one of Chiang Kai-shek's most effective pamphleteers. But after a quarrel with Chiang, he veered left. The slashing novels he then wrote (Midnight, Before Dawn) against foreign imperialists and thieving landlords made him the most widely read young man of letters of the day; their sharp critical edge persuaded many young intellectuals that Communism might be China's best hope...
...Communists made Mao Tun, a nonCommunist, their Minister of Culture, and sent him shuttling around the world to peace and cultural congresses. At Peking's Second Congress of Writers and Artists in 1953, he prodded his fellow Red lettermen: "The heroes of our fiction are drab and colorless creatures of abstraction. Many of our artists still lack the courage to write about the contradictions in our social life. They turn our rich experience into one-sided affairs, molded to fit an arid formula...
Last week, when the writers gathered again, Mao Tun was preaching the unabashed arid formula: "Praise the general line, the people's communes and the tremendous forward leaps," he urged his colleagues. "Unmask U.S. imperialism, which is feigning peace while intensifying war preparations." Production has been good, he said-almost twice as many works had been published in China in the past four years as in the previous six, including such lyric flights...
There was one curious literary note that Mao Tun failed to mention. In 1958, the year of the great economic leap, the Writers and Artists Union announced plans for a literary leap as well. Mao Tun, like others, was assigned his quota: one long novel, two of medium length. As everybody in the audience knew, Mao Tun has produced no novel since. In fact, the pen of China's most important living novelist has been curiously still ever since Communism took over...