Marxist Literary Thought in China: The Influence of Ch'U Ch'Iu-Pai

by Paul G. Pickowicz

Marxist aesthetic thought has dominated Chinese literary life for half a century, but little is known about how this distinctive Western school of thought came to be accepted. Paul Pickowicz remedies the situation, tracing the evolution of Chinese Marxist literary thought by focusing on Ch'U Ch'Iu-Pai, China's most important Marxist literary intellectual of the twenties and thirties.

Genres: China

276 pages, Hardcover

First published September 1, 1981

Reviews

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

A thorough account of the life and Marxist literary theory put forward by Qu Qiubai from the early 1920s to his death, although skipping over his tenure as a chief official of the Communist Party during the leadership of Li Lisan. Although I think Pickowicz, similar to Meisner and other non-Marxist interpreters of Chinese Marxism, draws too strict a line between "determinism" and "voluntarism" in Marxism (when, of course, the entire point is a dialectical unity of the two), he offers a valuable discussion and dissection of Qu's theoretical contributions to the issues of the economic base and superstructure, the role of intellectuals in the bourgeois-democratic and proletarian revolutions, the possibility of proletarian culture (which mechanistic theorists like Trotsky denied), and the role of the masses in producing and consuming revolutionary culture.

Pickowicz also offers a thorough rebuttal in his concluding marks to the charges brought against Qu by Zhou Enlai and later the Red Guards during the Cultural Revolution, point out that the criticisms of his essay "Superfluous Words" were largely irrelevant and that his literary theory actually paved the way for Mao's views on literature and art as well as the progressive aspects of the Cultural Revolution.