Chinese Literature

Although People’s Literature concerns itself chiefly with creative writing, in every issue it gives space to literary criticism. To help both writers and readers get to know the best in China’s classical literature, ‘the magazine makes a special study of works like Dream of the Red Chamber, Water Margin, Romance of the Three Kingdoms, Pilgrimage to the West, and The Lives of the Scholars.*

The magazine also plays an important role in introducing the progressive literature of other countries to Chinese readers. From the start it published representative selections from the revolutionary literature and theoretical articles from the Soviet Union, the People’s Democracies, and other countries.

Thus Chinese readers have been given the chance of reading contemporary poets and writers like Pablo Neruda, Nazim Hikmet, Louis Aragon, Jorge Amado, Albert Maltz, Sunao Tokunaga, Paul Eluard, Krishan Chandar, Zo Ki Chun, Orlin Orlinov, Zsigmond Moricz and Francis Charles Weiskopf, as well as the classics of world literature.

The Chinese people appreciate these works from foreign lands as much as they do their own. The writings of outstanding Soviet writers have been an important medium for Chinese writers and readers alike to come to understand the Soviet Union. They have learnt a great deal about the art of writing from Soviet literature.

The emergence of so many new writers is a happy augury for China’s literature. People’s Literature gives these new writers full rein, as the impressive list of new authors mentioned in this article shows. Although they are just beginning to write, they show great promise. To help them attain stature and maturity is one of the most important tasks of the magazine,

Throughout these five years, People’s Literature has improved in quality and grown in popularity. It now enjoys the largest circulation of any literary magazine in China. Its readers are not confined to a limited number of writers and intellectuals, but include large numbers of workers, peasants, soldiers, government workers and studenis all over the country.

The new and exciting life of China today makes new demands on this young literary magazine. It seeks to mirror more intensively and more extensively what is actually happening in the life of New China, to be more critical, more militant. It seeks in this period of transition to socialism to continue to inspire the people with enthusiasm for the construction of their country, that great task in which they are privileged to participate. It seeks through literary delineation of the new man and woman to raise the political consciousness of its readers, so that they will be able to work still better for the good of all.

“For excerpts from The Lives of the Scholars see Chinese Literature No. 4, 1954.

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