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Two Steps Forward, One Step Back: Towards a `Free' Literature

This paper will discuss the state of literature in the period of 1979 to 1987. It proposes to examine the evolution of a new literary policy by the post-Mao Chinese leadership under Deng Xiaoping and to discuss the impact of this policy on creative writing. It will be shown that the new policy retains some elements of Mao's more repressive literary policy while rejecting others, and that as a result of disagreement over basic development strategies, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leadership has sometimes stressed the policy's continuity with Maoism and sometimes its discontinuity. It will also be argued that in spite of much uncertainty, this relatively liberal policy has already reaped its first fruit in an unprecedented upturn in both the quantity and quality of creative writing. Some of the more representative and innovative literary trends and individual literary works will be mentioned as an indication of the general level of achievement in this area.