Kuo Mo-jo

Background

Kuo Mo-jo was born on November 1892 in a small market town in southwest Szechwan not far from Chia-ting. Kuo was originally named Kuo K’ai-chen and he was the fifth child of a merchant-landlord family.

Education

As a youngster Kuo Mo-jo received training from a private tutor in the classics, and in 1906-1907 he studied at a higher-level primary school in Chia-ting. In the fall of 1907 he enrolled in a new middle school in Chia-ting, and in the next year he took up the study of English and Japanese.

The study of Japanese in that period was in proportion to the large number of Chinese who were then going to Japan for their higher education, and there was an added impetus in Kuo’s case because two elder brothers were then students in Japan.

Kuo Mo-jo earned something of a reputation as a play-boy during these school years, and it was also in this period that an illness left him with a bad back and seriously impaired hearing. In 1909 he was expelled for leading a strike to protest the inaction of school authorities in regard to a fight between the students and soldiers posted nearby. However, early in the next year he entered a preparatory institution under the Chengtu Higher School, but again he was more attracted to the good life than scholarly pursuits.

Like all his countrymen, Kuo Mo-jo was outraged by Japan’s Twenty-One Demands in early 1915, and in protest he left for home with other students in the spring. However, he returned to Japan a few days later, and in the summer he was admitted to the Sixth Higher School in Okayama where he was to study for three years. One of Kuo’s schoolmates was Ch’eng Fang-wu, another co-founder of the Creation Society, who became an important educational official in the Communist government after 1949.

During these years Kuo Mo-jo continued his study of English, and he also began to learn Latin and German. In 1916 he met Sato Tomiko, a nurse at St. Luke’s Hospital, an American mission institution in Tokyo. He persuaded her to come to Okayama to enroll in a women’s medical school, and for the next two decades they lived together as man and wife.

Apart from his medical studies, Kuo Mo-jo became keenly interested in a variety of other pursuits. These included the works of the Ming idealist Wang Yang-ming, the Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore, and several German writers. He began his extraordinarily prolific writing career in 1917 when he translated some of Tagore’s poetry, and in the next year he wrote his first story. It was also during this period that he changed his name to Mo-jo. In 1918 he graduated from the Okayama school. That fall he entered the Kyushu Imperial University medical school in Fukuoka; Kuo graduated in March 1923, but he never practiced medicine.

Career

In the fall of 1920, Kuo Mo-jo, Ch’cng Fang-wu, T’ien Han, and others, began to discuss the establishment of a literary periodical. In the following spring he returned to Shanghai where he took an informal position with the T’ai-tung Book Company.

Not long afterwards he edited a collection of his poetry entitled Nu-shen (The goddesses), this work, which quickly brought him real recognition. Kuo Mo-jo then decided to return to his medical studies in Japan, and because of this the publication which he and his colleagues had been planning, Ch’uang-tsao chi-k'an (Creation quarterly), was turned over to the editorship of Kuo's friend Yu Ta-fa. The journal first appeared in May 1922, with the announced intention of counterbalancing the influence of the Literary Research Society in which Cheng Chcn- to and Shen Yen-ping were major figures. This declaration laid the foundation for the antagonism between the Literary Research Society and Kuo’s Creation Society. Both organizations were among the most important of their kind in China during these years of intellectual ferment.

In November Kuo Mo-jo returned to Shanghai where he earned his living as a freelance writer and a part-time lecturer on literature at Ta-hsia University.

Immediately after the outbreak of war in July 1937, his name having been removed from the list of political enemies of the Nationalist government, he was free to pursue his work, and like most Chinese writers of that period, he took up his pen as an anti-Japanese polemicist.

Shanghai fell to the Japanese in November, Kuo Mo-jo went into hiding in the French Concession and a few days later sailed for Hong Kong. From there in January 1938 he went to Hankow, the temporary national capital and also the focal point of a wide variety of activities designed to mobilize the nation for the war against Japan.

In March Kuo Mo-jo joined with Shen Yen-ping and some 40 other literary figures in establishing the All-China Resistance Association of Art and Literary Workers, which published anti-Japanese periodicals and sent writers to the front lines to report on the war. At the same time, in response to an invitation from the Nationalists, he became chief of the Third (Propaganda) Section of the National Military Council’s Political Training Department. The department was headed by the important Nationalist general Ch’en Ch’eng, and Chou En-lai was one of Ch’en’s deputies. Shortly afterwards, Kuo Mo-jo was readmitted to the KMT.

Throughout the summer and fall of 1949 Kuo Mo-jo was busily engaged in the preparations which led to the establishment of the central government and many “mass” and professional organizations. In early June he was made a member of the Higher Education Committee, this was subordinate to the North China People’s Government, which served in effect as the substitute for a national government until one was inaugurated on October 1.

In mid-June, at a meeting presided over by Mao Tse-tung, Kuo Mo-jo was elected a vice-chairman of the CPPCC Preparatory Committee. But his most important role in mid-1949 was in connection with the Congress of Literary and Art Workers (July 2-19), which was attended by over 800 persons. The convocation of the congress had been proposed by Kuo Mo-jo in March, and he had served as chairman of the Preparatory Committee. He headed the congress presidium, and delivered the keynote address on the “struggle” to achieve a “new people’s litera- ture and art,” as well as a summation report on the last day of the congress. The delegates established the All-China Federation of Literary and Art Circles (ACFLAC) under Kuo’s chairmanship. He continues in this post, having been re-elected at congresses in September-October 1953 and July-August 1960. In the days immediately following the 1949 congress, six subordinate national associations were set up for writers, dramatists, cinema workers, musicians, artists, and dancers, as well as preparatory committees for drama reform and ballad singing and story telling. The most important of these, the All-China Association of Literary Workers, elected Shen Yen-ping as its chairman and Kuo as a member of the National Committee. Kuo was re-elected to this post at the congress in September-October 1953 when the name of the organization was changed to the Union of Chinese Writers (and when the National Committee was renamed the Executive Committee). In 1950 the ACFLAC set up still another subordinate body, the Chinese Folklore Research Society, and by about 1957 Kuo Mo-jo became its chairman.

On July 1, 1949 Kuo Mo-jo became chairman of the Preparatory Committee for the China New Historical Research Society. At still another conference in July 1949, which set up the Preparatory Committee for the Sino-Soviet Friendship Association, Kuo gave the keynote address and was elected to the Preparatory Committee. And six weeks later, in early September, he was elected chairman of the Preparatory Committee of the China Peace Committee.

In mid-August 1950, during the early weeks of the Korean War, Kuo Mo-jo was sent to Pyongyang as head of a delegation to participate in the celebrations marking the fifth anniversary of the "libera-tion" of Korea from the Japanese. At the end of October he left Peking as head of a 65-member delegation slated to attend the Second World Peace Congress in Sheffield. However, when the British banned the meeting, it was held in Warsaw in mid-November. By this juncture the Chinese had entered the Korean War, and thus at this and subsequent meetings of the World Peace Council (WPC), the theme of American "imperialism" was stressed by Chinese delegates. Kuo Mo-jo was elected a WPC vice-chairman at the Warsaw meeting. From there he led a portion of his group to Budapest for the 125th anniversary of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences; the delegation then spent a few days in Moscow before returning to China on December 21.

Kuo Mo-jo, by now over 60, continued his heavy pace of foreign travel in 1953. In May, June, and November, respectively, he led delegations to WPC meetings in Stockholm, Budapest, and Vienna. Early in the same year the Chinese formed a committee to draft a national constitution and another to arrange for elections; these were the first of several organizational steps which led to the convocation of the NPC. Kuo Mo-jo was a member of both committees, and in 1954 he was elected a deputy from his native Szechwan to the First NPC, which convened in September 1954 and reorganized the central government. He was elected a vice-chairman of the NPC Standing Committee. He also attended the Second and Third NPC’s as a Szechwan deputy, and on each occasion (April 1959 and January 1965) he was again named a Standing Committee vice-chairman. In December 1954 and April 1959, respectively, Kuo Mo-jo was re-elected a vice-chairman of the Second and Third National Committees of the CPPCC, but in January 1965, when the inaugural session of the Fourth National Committee ended, he was only elected a member of the CPPCC Standing Committee.

Politics

Kuo’s first serious commitment to political activism took place during the winter of 1910-1911 when, in an attempt to force the government to adopt a constitution, the students staged a strike. Kuo Mo-jo was expelled, and it was only through the intervention of an older brother that he was readmitted.

In June 1911 Kuo Mo-jo was present at the meeting which established the Railway Protection Club of Szechwan, an organization that played an important role in sparking the Revolution of 1911 which overthrew the Manchus. Kuo himself, however, apparently took no active part in the Revolution.

Connections

When Kuo Mo-jo was just 19, he was married by his family to an unattractive and uneducated woman, but he abandoned her within a week.

Friend:

Yu Ta-fa