Chinese Literature

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throughout the country. As mass dramatje activities grow in popularity, dramatic workers were faced with the urgent task of producing short plays, particularly upto-date plays which reflect and comment on the rapidly changing life of China today. The competition was to encourage playwrights, both established and amateur, to extend the repertoire rapidly in order to meet the popular demand.

Nine plays were awarded prizes, and it is no accident that all of them, despite differences in treatment, centre round the dynamic new life of present-day China with all its growing pains, its aspirations and achievements.

The first-prize winning play was The Woman Delegate by Sun Yu. Superficially it is the old story of conflict between husband, wife and mother-in-law, put the real conflict is between the old feudal ideas in the Chinese countryside and the new life of today. The woman deputy is Chang Kui-yung, who on the strength of her record is elected local

deputy, to the vast annoyance of her

husband and his mother, who still hold very strong ideas about ““voman’s place.” They do their utmost to impede her activities, but all in vain. Finally the husband swears he will turn her out of doors, but is flabbergasted when Chang Kui-yung gathers together her worldly goods, including the title-deed for the land she received in land reform, and prepares to take him at his word. It is only then that husband and mother-inlaw really wake up to the fact that the old days of women’s servitude are a thing of the past, and they all settle down, with Chang’s help, to building the new society in which they can all “live happily ever after.”

The play that won the second prize, Quality First, traces the growth of industry in New China through the story

of an old worker and his insistence that quality comes first in building a factory, not dogma and red tape. Although the story itself is very simple, it is racy and convincing, and does present in dramatic form some of the fundamental problems that crop up in the course of industrializing China and building socialism.

Another prize winner is The Meeting. Tts hero is a peasant leader in local government whose good intentions are spoilt because he is such a bumptious busy-body, “organizing” everything himself, knowing best about everything and taking nobody else into his confidence. When his half-baked plans to organize the peasants to meet a threatened drought come to grief it is high time for a showdown, which does everyone, including himself, a great deal of good. This play has been warmly received by literary and art circles, and not less by peasant audience, who knows such types from personal experience. The play is, in fact, a riotously funny dramatization of that process of criticism and_ self-criticism which smooths out all difficulties and makes the wheels go round in China today.

Other prize winning plays include Man Goes Forward, the theme of which is the two roads before the peasants: regression to capitalism or advance to socialism. A Race with Floods is a gripping drama showing how the people conquer the hazards of nature by team work and dogged fighting spirit. Between Husband and Wife trenchantly denounces the old idea that used to be prevalent among the working class that the husband is master and encourages women stay-at-homes to learn to read and take part in the life about them; while She Who Stood Up, an opera, depicts a peasant woman’s resolute struggle against the feudal marriage system.

Paper-cuts

Recently the Chinese Artists’ Union held a national exhibition of folk papercuts in the Palace Museum at Peking.

Paper-cuts are dearly loved by peasants

all over China. They are generally prepared for use as window or wall designs. At the Spring Festival and other celebrations they are used to decorate lintels,

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