Zhou Enlai's Unpublished Speech of 1961

Two years later, on June 19, 1961, Zhou Enlai delivered talks concerning literature and the arts that, like his speech two years before, remained unpublished until after his death.^[14] Delivered against the background of widespread food shortages, his message was a renunciation of the hard-line cultural policies of the Great Leap Forward.^[15] It called for the regularization of artistic activity, the return of amateur artists to their regular jobs, the elimination of some newly founded art technical schools, and the democratization of art. He specifically urged intellectuals to speak their minds, claiming that the party had been advocating the liberation of thought for three years with little result. Additionally, he criticized people who restricted themselves to the framework of Mao's Yan'an Talks.

Yet Zhou also stressed the need to balance freedom with order. That freedom of speech had limits was suggested when Zhou defended the Anti-Rightist campaign except as it had applied to those who "only spoke one sentence in error." He further ordered leaders to remain responsible for preventing political errors but to interfere less in other realms. Tolerance for individual work styles was desirable, he suggested, pointing to the poetic production of Chen Yi in contrast to that of Mao Zedong: whereas Chen Yi wrote quickly and rather effortlessly, Mao pondered and reworked his compositions. Similarly, the particular requirements of each art form, be it literature, drama, music, art, dance, film, or photography, he said, must be taken into account in determining how it might best serve the people. Moreover, within each form, differences should be tolerated; an art that loses its own form will not survive. Zhou mentioned several examples of regional schools of opera or drama that should be encouraged, concluding that Beijing people should not regulate Shanghai opera. His praise for the Jiangsu guohua painters, who were cited for the abundance of their work, encouraged regional developments in guohua.^[16] In spite of his protestations that the particular tastes of party leaders should not determine policy, merely by mentioning the Jiangsu group he ensured its painters a privileged position throughout the next two decades. Even though Zhou's examples were often taken too literally by cautious bureaucrats, his 1961 discussion was a mandate to promote regional arts of all kinds.^[17]

Zhou argued not only for regional styles, but also for professional and local determination of standards for art. "If we government leaders happen to love drama, painting, antiques, and so forth, that does not give us the right to set standards."^[18] To underscore the absurdity of political leaders establishing national artistic norms, he pointed out that he and Chen Yun liked different kinds of opera: Zhou favored that of the north, while Chen enjoyed

that of Suzhou. In emphasizing opera, Zhou may have been targeting Jiang Qing, who held extremist views on the need to reform the genre. Indeed, it became clear within two years that the moderate cultural policy outlined in Zhou's talk was strongly opposed by Jiang Qing and her allies.^[19]

Zhou's remarks were part of a nationwide readjustment of policy at the conclusion of Mao's disastrous economic experiments. In 1961, the secretariat of the Politburo, led by Deng Xiaoping and Peng Zhen, drafted the Sixty Articles on Agriculture, a manual for commune management that institutionalized a retreat from Great Leap policies. The Propaganda Department similarly re-evaluated the cultural situation.^[20] The result of this analysis emerged in draft form in May. In December 1961, the Eight Articles on Literature and Art, a document advocating the same sort of liberalization articulated in Zhou Enlai's speech, were drafted. They were formally issued in April 1962.^[21]

The single most influential event in the cultural readjustment was a speech delivered by Chen Yi at the Canton Forum of Opera and Drama on March 3, 1962, in which he told the artists that thought reform would no longer be implemented through movements, nor would the party force them to read Mao's works. He further declared that because intellectuals had undergone thirteen years of reform, they should have their "capitalist class caps" removed. "Today, I am holding for you a 'cap-removing ceremony.'"^[22] This liberalization of thought and intellectual practice, which was made public in a People's Daily editorial by Zhou Yang on May 23, 1962,^[23] was an extremely powerful, if short-lived, influence on artistic circles.

The shifting policies between 1959 and 1965 made artistic activity both challenging and perilous, as we shall see. Following the failure of Mao's extremist economics, open opposition to his leadership erupted within the party. The power struggles taking place at the highest levels of government filtered down to artists in the form of ever more rapidly shifting, and sometimes contradictory, cultural policies. It appears that individual artists were rarely able to adapt to party policies in such an environment. Instead, those whose style and outlook were suited to a particular trend might emerge when that view of art was on the ascendant, only to be replaced by different artists when new requirements were made of art a few months later. Relatively traditional landscape painters, such as the Nanjing master Fu Baoshi, attained great fame in 1959 (fig. 71). Specialists in painting oil portraits of Mao Zedong, such as CAFA artists Jin Shangyi and Wu Biduan, were publicized in 1960 (fig. 68). The Xi'an guohua painter Shi Lu emerged as a landscapist in 1961 (figs. 100 and 103). Even the reclusive and apolitical Lin Fengmian was pulled into the spotlight in 1963; by 1965, however, socialist realism was once again dominant.