LEO LEE
43
in order to restore, through art, the dignity of the self. An old argu–
ment, and renewed, once more, in a novel setting!
I was already familiar with the "Yang" argument, for since
1978, two years after the death of Mao and the downfall of the Gang
of Four, a number ofliterary works had appeared revealing the dark
side of life in socialist China- bureaucratic corruption, "back–
doorism," special privileges, persecution of intellectuals, even crimes
of murder and rape. This type of social expose was in tune with
Deng Xiaoping's effort to discredit the Cultural Revolution . But I
was somewhat dubious about the feasibility of Mr. Yin's hopes. In a
society where politics takes abiding command, there seems to be no
prospect for literature to transcend it. Notions such as the sanctity of
art and the dignity of the human individual have been castigated
over the past thirty years as bourgeois and even counterrevolu–
tionary. Little did I expect that Mr. Yin's position would win a large
following among writers and readers and become a central motif in
creative writing today. Even more fascinating, the theme of aliena–
tion has emerged as the subject of a nationwide controversy, even
though the term itself is "mangled" in so many different ways; the ob–
vious point is that it is a legitimate way of remaining "Marxist,"
while levelling sharp criticism at dogma, at political practice, and
even at the Party itself.
Shortly after my conversation with the young writers, two
prominent Party intellectuals began to raise the issue of "socialist
alienation" in official newspapers and journals. Wang Ruoshui, a
deputy editor of the Party newspaper,
People's Daily,
and a daring
Marxist theoretician, published an article titled "On the Problem of
Alienation" (in the eighth issue of the journal
News Front
in 1980) in
which he charged that China was currently beset with three kinds of
alienation: in thought (the cult of personality); in politics (bureau–
cratism); and in economics (mismanagement and waste). This open–
ing volley created shock waves in intellectual circles both inside and
outside the Party.
The other leading writer on alienation was Zhou Yang, the
longtime Maoist commissar of literature, who had masterminded
the purges of scores of writers from the mid-1950s to the early 1960s,
until he himself was purged during the Cultural Revolution. After
his rehabilitation and return to office as chairman of the All-China
Federation of Writers and Artists, Zhou made public apologies to
the writers he had once purged and adopted a consistently liberal
policy toward matters of creative writing
against
rigid Party control.
