Leo Ou·fan Lee
LETTER FROM BEIJING:
ALIENATION, HUMANISM, AND MODERNISM
IN POST·MAO CHINA
One evening in Beijing some time ago I talked to two
young Chinese writers whom I shall call "Yin" and "Yang." The topic
was
yihua ,
the Chinese translation of the Marxist concept of aliena–
tion . They said that the successive political campaigns of the past
thirty years, particularly in the decade
(1966-1976)
of the Cultural
Revolution, had resulted in "estranging" the Chinese people - par–
ticularly youth - from their "true humanity"; they had been urged to
emulate models of "exemplary ideological behavior" so compulsively
that they felt they had been turned into nonhuman models. Thus the
two writers wanted to tear off the ideological masks in creative
writing in order to rediscover their human essence .
This is, of course, a curious paraphrase of the theoretical state–
ment which Marx had first expounded about the alienating effect of
money in the
Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts
of 1844, a text that
is now receiving much attention in China. Yet in the concrete
Chinese context - specifically the case of a generation of youngsters
and former Red Guards who experienced the Cultural Revolution
from its initial euphoria to final disillusionment - this "applied" no–
tion of alienation has a particular human pathos .
(It
is striking that
the generation of young Polish Communists in
1956,
led by Leszek
Kolakowski, also used the theme of alieriation to turn their fire on
Stalinist orthodoxy, a theme which the orthodox theorists had
denied as possible in Communist society.)
Though the two writers I talked to shared the same interpreta–
tion of alienation, they disagreed about how to deal with it in litera–
ture . Mr. Yang argued that creative writing should remain a
political act exposing the hypocrisy of the official Maoist dogma and
the countless problems it had produced; only by a relentless confron–
tation with the socio-political reality could a writer possibly effect
some changes. Mr. Yin presented an artistic counterargument: the
Chinese had had a surfeit of politics, which had all but eclipsed liter–
ature ; creative writing, therefore, should have nothing to do with
politics; it should be concerned only with probing the human heart
