Chou Yang

Background

Chou was born into the family of a rich land¬lord in I-yang, just south of Tung-t’ing Lake in Hunan, but little is known about his childhood.

Education

His courtesy name is Chou Ch’i-ying, a name he used until the early thirties. After completing his secondary education in Hunan in 1926, he entered Ta-hsia (Great China) University in Shanghai where he studied English literature and became acquainted with Marxist ideology. He left the university in 1928 and went to Japan where he learned more about Marxism and Western literature. During these years he learned both English and Russian. In 1929 he was arrested for participating in leftist demonstrations and was subsequently released. He returned to China in 1930 and settled in Shanghai where he published literary criticism. He also translated Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina (from English) and some short works by Soviet writers, and wrote articles on new Russian literature. As early as the I930’s, he began to espouse theories which, with minor variations, later became the basis of Communist policy in literature and art. He believed that literature was primarily a political weapon and that a Writer should create only with this aim in view. Nevertheless, he also felt that art must have its own language, and should not be merely a repetition of political policy.

Chou expressed these theories in articles and debates on the popularization of literature and he figured prominently in the controversies over mass literature, which engrossed the literary world from 1930 to 1932. Along with Ch’ii Ch’iu-pai, he argued that the literary revolution following the May Fourth Movement had not been completed and that the pai hua (common speech) style of writing could be understood only by the middle classes. A further revolution was necessary to produce literature in forms accessible to the ordinary people. He advocated “national forms” which were actually short, simple stories and poems in popular, old literary styles, written in the colloquial language. Chou denied that this popularization would debase literature as some of his opponents claimed; rather it would educate the people and make them aware of class problems. This utilitarian concept of literature and art as a transmitter of educational propaganda was a recurring theme in all of Chou’s pronouncements. The mass language movement of 1934 implemented many of Ch’ii Ch’iu-pai’s and Chou’s ideas. Their views that writers should describe the life of workers and peasants, use “national forms,” and emphasize popular content over artistic criteria were later restated as orthodox doctrines by Mao Tse- tung in his Yenan Talks in 1942.

Career

Chou rose in the literary hierarchy not only because of his utilitarian literary views but also because of his maneuvers in the Party’s cultural organization. He apparently joined the Party in the early 1930’s. From 1931 to 1936 he was secretary-general of the League of Left-Wing Writers. The League was ostensibly under the direction of Lu Hsun, but the actual policy-makers were Party officials, principally, Ch’ii Ch’iu-pai. After Ch’ii left Shanghai of the winter of 1933-34 for Kiangsi, Chou became the real authority in the League. Because Lu Hsun and his followers sought to maintain an independent attitude not only toward literature but also toward the Party organization, they clashed with Chou and his associates, among them the playwright T’ien Han and the writer Hsia Yen. These two groups competed with each other in a fierce struggle for the leadership of left-wing intellectuals.

Their sharpest controversy occurred in 1936 over the slogan “Literature of National Defense.” After the formation of the united front against Japan, Chou disbanded the League and replaced it with another organization, the Association of Chinese Writers. Instead of confining its activities as the old organization had done to a small left-wing group within a limited geographical area, Chou sought to unite as many people as possible on a nation-wide scale. His association brandished the “classless” slogan, “literature for national defense,” which called for a realistic style of writing whose special theme would be national defense. Writers with different political views were encouraged to enroll, but once members of the association they were expected to conform to its requirements. Chou urged writers to engage in free debate and criticism but only as a means of resolving differences of belief and imposing the Party’s ideology. As early as the 1930’s, the techniques of the “rectification” campaigns of later years were beginning to evolve.

In 1937, when war broke out, Chou left Shanghai for Yenan where he quickly rose to prominent positions in the education and propaganda organizations. In addition to his political orthodoxy, the fact that he was one of the first intellectuals to arrive in Yenan aided his swift promotion. When the Shensi-Kansu-Ninghsia Border Region Government was established in 1937 he became head of the Education Department, retaining this post throughout the war years. In the spring of 1940 he was appointed vice-president of the Lu Hsun Art Academy and two years later he advanced to the presidency. Corfcurrently, he was dean of education at Yenan University and by 1944 he had replaced Wu Yii-chang as president of this school. These two institutions supposedly specialized in higher education in the arts, literature, and education, but were primarily training centers in Party ideology.

Chou’s ideas about education, as he expressed them in Yenan, were similar in spirit to his literary views. His anti-intellectual, anti-Western approach foreshadowed the tone of the Party’s educational policies in the 1950’s. Because to Chou education was inextricably linked to politics, he emphasized the need for mass indoctrination. He disapproved of any stress on technical and intellectual achievement because it diverted people from practical political demands. He declared that educational specialization was a result of Western middle-class influence. Instead he fostered “proletarian education,” which was largely the study of Marxist-Leninism and its practical application.

An important element in the Yenan educational system was the ideological remolding movement by which the Party sought to impose control through training and indoctrination. Chou played a leading role in this program, particularly in the campaign against the author Wang Shih- wei in the spring and summer of 1942. Wang Shih-wei, in an article entitled “The Wild Lily,” sharply criticized the Party’s policies in Yenan. He charged the Party with perpetuating the old class system except that at the top there were now Party bureaucrats. In Wang’s view, these bureaucrats were becoming as divorced from the needs of the masses as the old upper class had been. In another article, Wang also demanded that the intellectual and cultural realm be the preserve of the writers and the scholars, not of the Party. Wang became the negative example with which the Party propelled its first cheng-feng movement. Chou gave the final summation of this case in July 1942. Thereafter, he increasingly enunciated the Party’s case for political control of intellectuals. He repeatedly articulated the Party’s views that the majority of intellectuals were petty bourgeois and therefore required ideological remolding in order to make them more obedient to the Party’s will.

Politics

Because of political and personal differences with Chou, Lu Hsun and some of his disciples, among them Hu Feng and Feng Hsueh-feng, refused to join Chou’s association or to accept its aims. Fearing the dilution of the revo-lutionary spirit, they set up their own organization, the Chinese Literary Workers, made up of a small group of left-wing writers. It adapted a more revolutionary slogan, “people’s literature for the national revolutionary struggle.” Because of the refusal of Lu Hsun’s group to join the Association of Chinese Writers, Chou enticed one of Lu Hsun’s close colleagues, Hsu Mou-yung, to write a letter to Lu Hsun insinuating that his actions and those of his associates were against the Party. Lu Hsun responded by publishing Hsu’s letter and attaching an angry retort in which he defended his associates and accused Chou of labeling people traitors to enhance his own position. The disagreement between these two groups brought to light a fundamental question which was later to trouble the Party-the relation of art and politics. Lu Hsun’s group maintained that writers should keep their creative independence while supporting the political resistance against Japan; Chou and his circle insisted that in such a crucial period it was essential to have cultural as well as political unity. Already Chou appeared as the self-appointed champion of political control over literature and art.

In 1954, Chou was one of the leaders of the campaign against Western-educated Hu Shih and Yu P’ing-po and their interpretation of the 18th century novel, The Dream of the Red Chamber. Chou insisted that a popular literary work such as this should be reinterpreted as a description of the class struggle. Here again, he was concerned with Chinese tradition for political purposes. This campaign led to an attack at the end of 1954 on Feng Hsueh-feng, chief editor of one of the most important cultural journals, Wen-i pao (Literary gazette), ostensibly because he had defended the non-Communist analysis of The Dream of the Red Chamber. The attack was personally directed by Chou and seems to have been motivated as much by Chou’s past conflict with Feng and other disciples of Lu Hsun from the Shanghai days as by ideological differences. Moreover, as Lu Hsun’s closest associate, a Party member for 25 years, and a highly regarded Marxist literary theorist, Feng apparently did not submit readily to Chou’s direction. Consequently, this campaign gave Chou and his associates the opportunity to remove Feng and his assistant editor, Ch’en Ch’i-hsia, from Wen-i pao and replace them with Chou’s followers. Now, all the major literary journals were under Chou’s and the Party’s complete control. The attack on Yu P’ing-po and Feng Hsueh-feng soon led into a national campaign against literary critic Hu Feng. Although the campaign was based on political expediency, again it was probably motivated also by personal animosity. Most of Chou’s pronouncements in 1955 were devoted to assaults on heterodox thinking as exemplified by Hu.

Despite these suggestions of troubles to come, Chou’s political position in the mid-sixties seemed secure. He had served on the Third CPPCC Standing Committee from 1959 to 1964, and at the end of 1964 he was re-elected to this post for the Fourth CPPCC. He also served on the Presidium (steering committee) and the impor-tant Credentials Committee for the inaugural session of the Third NPC held from December 1964 to January 1965. And even in 1965, when the Party stressed the need for more works of art from amateur writers and artists (rather than the professional writers), Chou seemed to be capable of bending to this new directive. It was he, for example, who delivered a keynote address before the national conference of “Young Activists in Amateur Literary and Artistic Creations” in the closing days of 1965. But then in the spring of 1966 an unnamed deputy director of the Propaganda Department came under scathing attack for his alleged defense of a play by historian-playwright Wu Han. Within a few days it was revealed that this anonymous deputy director was Chou Yang, who, by the early summer of 1966, had become a major target of the “great proletarian cultural revolution,” an attack that coincided with the fall of Chou’s superior in the Propaganda Department, Director Lu Ting-i. The attack on Chou was apparently a reflection of Mao’s frustrations with the intellectuals, particularly the literary intellectuals. Chou was blamed for the fact that after almost 25 years of unceasing indoctrination and thought reform, intellectuals still resisted Mao’s direction.

Membership

Chou’s political posts were even more numerous. From 1949 to 1954 he was a member of the First National Committee of the CPPCC, and when the government was formed in the fall of 1949 he became a vice-minister of Culture and director of the Ministry’s Art Bureau (1949-1951). Moreover, from at least 1951 until he left the Ministry in 1954, he was also secretary of its CCP Committee. From 1949 to 1954 Chou served concurrently as a member of the central government’s Culture and Education Committee, and during these same years he was an Executive Board member of the Sino-Soviet Friendship Association. Still another post that he received in the fall of 1949 was membership on the China Peace Committee, then one of the most active of the “mass” organizations; he retained this position until the Committee was reorganized in mid-1958. Probably his most important post was as a deputy director of the Party’s Propaganda Department, which formulates the policies of the Ministry of Culture; Chou served in the Department from at least 1951 until 1966. He was also a Kwangtung deputy to the First, Second, and Third NPC’s, whose initial sessions opened in 1954, 1959, and 1964, respectively. At the Eighth Party Congress in September 1956, after delivering a speech on socialist literature and art, he was elected an alternate member of the Central Committee. In 1955 he was elected a member of the Academy of Sciences’ newly-established Philosophy and Social Sciences Department, and from 1956 to 1958 he was a member of the central government’s Scientific Planning Commission

Interests

• During the Yenan period, Chou edited several books, a compilation of essays by Marx, Lenin, Engels, and Stalin with a statement by Mao on literature, and an anthology of stories and reports from the liberated area. He also translated into Chinese The Aesthetic Relationship between Art and Reality by N. G. Chernyshevsky, a Rus¬sian populist writer of the 1860’s. He presented his theories most fully in The New Age of the Masses in which he elaborated on Mao’s literary doctrine. He particularly emphasized Mao’s tenet that a new literature be created in traditional folk styles. He also gave prominence to Mao’s dictum that intellectuals participate in the struggle of the masses. Here, he may have been influenced as much by his study of Chernyshevsky as by Mao. He urged writers to go to the villages, factories, and front lines in order to establish an organic relationship between their creative work and the practical world of the peasants and soldiers. The creativity and intelligence of the masses above other groups was an article of faith for Chou.