Industrial Workers in Chinese Communist Fiction

In the opinion of the Communists, the significance of the Literary Renaissance in modern China beginning with the May Fourth movement of 1919, lies not in that it introduced the colloquial language as the new medium for literature, but in that it ushered into China a new literature which replaced the “old-fashioned, out-of-date literature of the bourgeois class.” But the new literature which the Communists had hoped for did not fully develop until the political revolution led by the Communists succeeded, and a new régime was established in 1949. To implement the literary revolution and to introduce the people's new literature, the Communist régime called the first conference of the All-China Federation of Literary and Art Circles in July, 1949 at which the government spokesmen expounded the concepts and scope of this new literature and outlined a programme for “literary workers” to follow. Since these expositions were indeed the expressions of the policies of the new régime on literary reform and are therefore pertinent to the discussion in this paper, they must be cited here as a point of reference.