Chinese Literature

love for life and firm confidence in an ever brighter and better future. The film scenario Three Years by another woman writer, Ko Chin, describes how workers in a private enterprise in China today wage a determined struggle against the illegal practices which the capitalist owners engage in to the detriment of the people’s state. Ai Wu’s A NV ew Home* and Return at Night, two short stories written in this veteran writer’s distinctive style, are succinct glimpses of life through which the author succeeds in expressing his admiration for the ways of the younger generation. Li Jo-ping’s North Shensi Sketches** and At the foot of the Chilien Mountain retiect one important aspect of our national construction—the work of geological survey teams.

In his four-act play Test, the playwright Hsia Yen shows one aspect of the conflict of ideologies which inevitably occurs in the course of China’s industrial construction. The author takes as his hero the new type of industrial leader who is modest enough to learn trom others, who keeps in close touch with the workers under him and is always ready to back new, progressive ideas with all his authority. The “villain” of the piece is another administrator in the same enterprise whose arrogance, smugness and individualistic ways are completely out of place in the new China.

There have also been successful poems and songs on all these themes. People’s Literature has proudly carried many of them Which are rich in realistic detail and show a wide variety of form and style.

Our writers have indeed expressed their response to the world about them more readily in verse and song than in any other literary form. And the emotion they most frequently express is one shared by the whole people in our own time—love for their country.

Yuan Chang-ching’s Water tm the Chang River and Chang Chin-min’s General and His Steed, and other patriotic poems by contemporary poets like Ai Ching, Tien Chien, Li Chi and Yuan Shui-pai, have all received a Warm response from their readers.

Love for one’s country and readiness to defend it are inseparable from the defence of world peace. This fact is well understood by Chinese poets and many of their poems deal with the struggle for a peaceful world.

Among the poems and songs printed in People’s Literature in these five years are Ai Ching’s Jewelled Red Star and other poems which sing of the Soviet Union as the bulwark of world peace. There are poems by Tien Chien and Yen Chen about heroes fighting for peace on the Korean battlefield: There are poems about the new construction going on all over China, which make us feel the Chinese people’s ardent love for peace, their courage and confidence in the ultimate outcome of the struggle for peace. Our poets constantly sing the praises of peace and friendship,

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* See People’s China No. 2, 1954. ** See Chinese Literature No. 2, 1954.

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