7—
A New Political Culture
The Sino-Japanese War was a conflict of extreme violence and cruelty and a period of immense cultural change in China. The Japanese invasion caused massive destruction, snuffed out numerous lives, and brought intense suffering to the Chinese people. According to some estimates, civilian casualties stood at between eight and ten million, more than three million Chinese troops were killed or wounded, and there were incalculable property losses.[1] Such a scale of destruction was unprecedented in Chinese history. Among the many Japanese atrocities, the December 1937 "Rape of Nanjing" would be remembered as a particularly notorious example of human brutality.
In this tragic conflict, however, China, though badly battered, was unbowed. Despite renewed Japanese attacks in the later phase of the war, including the devastating "Three-all" ("Burn all, kill all, loot all") mopping-up campaign of 1941–1943 against the Communist-held border regions in the north and the destructive Ichigo offensive of 1944 against the Nationalists' defensive lines in the south, the nation as a whole never lost its will to resist. By the time the war ended in 1945, China had tied down 1.2 million of a total 2.3 million Japanese overseas armed forces, thus making a significant contribution to the Allied victory.[2]
Despite chaos and ruins, the war marked a turning point in modern Chinese cultural and political history. This book has proposed that we consider the Sino-Japanese War not simply as a military confrontation between China and Japan or a period of economic upheaval and governmental disarray, but as an event that marked the emergence of a new political culture. We have explored several major changes that occurred in the eight-year war period: the intellectuals' move to the
hinterland and their attempt to reach out to the people and galvanize public support for the war cause; the dissemination and politicization of a host of popular culture forms, especially spoken dramas, cartoons, and newspapers, from urban centers like Shanghai to the rural interior; and the Communists' skillful use of these forms in their crusade to foster socialism and create a new China. The war shifted the momentum of cultural development to the rural hinterland, a reorientation that added importance and legitimacy to the Communists' rural revolution. At the same time, the Nationalists' failure to capitalize on this momentous change, together with their militaristic rule and their failure to provide a remedy to the worsening economy, meant their downfall in the civil war.
Intellectuals and Participation
"War," as Clausewitz wrote, "is an act of force and there is no logical limit to the application of that force."[3] But ironically, war is not just about force and destruction; it is also about commitment, expectation, and reconstruction. The Sino-Japanese War caused loss, fear, and uncertainty among some Chinese intellectuals, but among others it raised hopes for a new social and political order, propelling them to action. The conflict created an unprecedented wave of patriotism in China and, in its early phase, allowed a colossal release of frustrated feelings. Many claimed that after decades of foreign exploitation and years of thwarted efforts in bringing about a stable political system, the moribund nation had a new lease on life.
For intellectuals like Zheng Zhenduo, a literary historian and bibliophile who stayed in Shanghai throughout the war years, war was purely an act of destruction—not only of people, but of culture and history as well. When Japanese troops attacked Shanghai in August 1937, over ten thousand volumes of Zheng's priceless collection housed in the Kaiming Bookstore, many of them original Yuan and Ming editions, were lost in a fire.[4] "Those masterworks, which took numerous writers and scholars infinite pains to produce, could not withstand a single fire lit by the barbaric invaders," Zheng lamented.[5] Nevertheless, Zheng, prompted by patriotism and his love of books, launched a personal crusade to save many rare works from possible annihilation.[6] Under extremely difficult conditions, he managed to search out valuable items in bookstores all over Shanghai and reprint many rare Chinese texts, among them a multivolume History of Chinese Prints (Zhongguo banhuashi tulu, 1940–1947). He also moved many precious volumes to safety in the hinterland. Appealing in
1940 to the Nationalist government in Chongqing to help him and his friends in Shanghai set up a committee to preserve historical and literary documents,[7] he implored: "Let's protect our culture from destruction and occupation."[8]
In contrast to Zheng, who viewed the Japanese invasion as a crime and a cultural disaster, the Communist writer Guo Moruo saw it as a conflict between civilization and barbarism and an opportune time for intellectuals to make a commitment. As he wrote in September 1937, it was a "war between reason and bestiality, a war between evolution and retrogression, and a war between civilization and barbarism."[9] China's raising of arms in self-defense was thus justified, if in fact war could be justified. To Guo, then, war was more than an armed conflict; it was a cultural confrontation between two markedly different sets of values: good and evil, reason and madness.[10] Guo and many others seemed to believe that war, brutal as it was, promised to unleash a powerful energy of rejuvenation.
War was a sweeping change carried out by violent means. It eroded antiquated and harmful norms and promised to bring forth a new society. Many intellectuals, no doubt thinking of the years of internal chaos and ineffectual Guomindang rule, believed that China had reached a dead end, had lost its ability to renew itself. The conviction that the sick nation could not be rejuvenated until it experienced a major trauma was widespread among resisters, left and right alike. The correspondent Fan Changjiang, who took an increasingly critical stand against the Nationalist government as the war progressed, expressed this sentiment well in 1938: "War is the biggest destructive force, but at the same time it is also the most constructive. Only in a war can we destroy age-old evils and spur the growth of new life."[11] And Bu Shaofu, a journalist sympathetic to the Nationalists, wrote: "The War of Resistance propels everything in China forward."[12] When full-scale war between China and Japan finally erupted in July 1937, therefore, Chinese intellectuals experienced great excitement and euphoria. Guo Moruo registered his exhilaration in a poem, "Ode to the War of Resistance," after the conflict broke out in Shanghai in August 1937:
When I heard the rumble of guns above Shanghai,
I felt nothing but happiness.
They are the auspicious cannons announcing the revival of our
people.
And our nation has determined to resist till the end.[13]
Guo was not alone in his excitement. "We welcome war," Zang Kejia echoed. "It announces that we [Chinese] finally stand up."[14] True, China had now entered a difficult period of fighting for its own survival. "But tragedy," the dramatist Xiong Foxi stated emphatically, "is good for rousing the spirit."[15] This mixed sentiment perhaps reflects the old saying, "Life thrives in adversity, but perishes in comfort and pleasure" (Sheng yu youhuan, si yu anle). Suffering would enable men and women to rise spiritually and to understand the need for sacrifice. "Only when one is willing to sacrifice oneself for the country can China survive forever," wrote historian Gu Jiegang.[16]
A shared feeling that a new era was dawning prevailed among intellectuals. The early resistance movement seemed to eliminate discord, break down barriers, and unite feuding factions. In the face of a fearsome enemy, for the first time in many years political parties, including the Nationalist government and the Communist Party, agreed to bury their ideological differences. The country brimmed with hope. China's victory in the war would not just signify the triumph of order over chaos; it would mean a long-divided country had again found its soul.[17]
But how was this unification to be realized? Guo Moruo believed that "the rumble of guns" had awakened intellectuals and "summoned them into the streets, to the front, to the countryside."[18] To dramatists and artists like Ouyang Yuqian and Ye Qianyu, the formation of drama traveling troupes and the Cartoon Propaganda Corps was more than just a new course for the resistance campaign: it was a call for intellectuals' commitment and action. Vividly reflecting this new trend were two popular wartime slogans: "Go to the street" (Dao jietou qu) and "Literature must go to the countryside! Literature must join the army!" (Wenzhang xiaxiang, wenzhang ruwu).
The term jietou (street) first gained currency in the mid-1930s with the publication of Liu Shi's Street Talks (Jietou jianghua) and Xu Maoyong's Street Essays (Jietou wentan).[19] Both authors were leftwing writers, and both intended, in Liu Shi's words, to "talk about common social knowledge with people on the street."[20] This objective echoed the earlier search by left-wing writers for a "people's language," an idea first proposed by Qu Qiubai, one-time Communist Party general secretary and a prominent figure in the League of Left-Wing Writers. Qu's vision of a language of the masses was aptly expressed in the title of his posthumously published book Collection of Street Essays (Jietou ji).[21]
But the word jietou has a distinct urban ring; indeed, in Qu
Qiubai's case it referred specifically to city-dwelling proletarians, not to rural peasants. That connotation underwent a transformation during the war, acquiring added significance, and in a non-Marxist sense. Instead of being a class-related concept, jietou now referred to a patriotic fulfilling of one's obligation. Most resisters, in other words, associated the term less with the left-wing cause than with nationalism.[22] Reality, it seemed to say, could not be reduced to abstraction, and China could be saved only when resisters took action to the populace—specifically, to the countryside. Thus the term acquired a more rustic flavor. The drama slogan "From Carlton [Theater] to the street" reflected this new rural vision, and street plays like Lay Down Your Whip were products of the shift.
This move from the city to the countryside and the importance of participation was reflected even more clearly in the slogan "Literature must go to the countryside! Literature must join the army!" First used by the All-China Resistance Association of Writers and Artists, this was a call for intellectuals to build a broad base of support among the rural masses for the resistance cause. Like the slogan "Go to the street," "Literature must go to the countryside" expressed criticism of academic pursuits. The precariousness of everyday existence in the crisis not only "forced [writers and artists] into a confrontation with the concrete,"[23] but, more important, it also compelled them to examine their role in relation to their country. Indulgence in lofty ideals now drew fire from practically every corner. Esoteric talk had suddenly become a luxury, and perhaps even a moral crime, for it conveyed an air of apathetic indifference. The mood of the time stressed sacrifice and action. Getting involved helped intellectuals abandon their doubt and disillusionment and reaffirmed their traditional role as cultural spokesmen. Cultural nationalism—pride in China's heritage—and hope for the country's rebirth certainly played a role here; but feelings of individual responsibility and belief in freedom from foreign oppression were equally compelling motivations.
Slogans such as "Literature must go to the countryside" and the related "Drama must go to the countryside" (xiju xiaxiang)[24] affirmed intellectuals' participatory role in the war, yet they also marked a shift in cultural orientation toward the rural interior for which the resisters were ill prepared. General Feng Yuxiang offered specific advice: "Take off your mandarin jacket and change your clothes [into something compatible with the people]."[25] Ye Qianyu's hero in his cartoon "Let's Change into New Uniform" (fig. 26) did exactly that, the determined look on the young man's face unmistakable. The picture implied a
radical reorientation of value and an endorsement of action. As a leader of the National Salvation Cartoon Propaganda Corps, Ye Qianyu himself was a living testament to this metamorphosis from scholar to soldier. If a middle-class Philistine like Mr. Wang could change into a patriotic foot soldier (fig. 19), should not intellectuals do the same?
Granted that much of what resistance intellectuals were now advocating seemed to echo the May Fourth ideal of "going to the people,"[26] the new campaign had several novel aspects. This time the goal was far more focused, the number of participants greater, the methods of delivery new, and the area of coverage vast. The May Fourth's slogan of "going to the people," after all, never ventured far beyond the academic wall. Ironically, it took a war to drive this noble message home and put it into practice.
But did the resisters manage to shed their elitism in reaching out to the masses? Despite its unprecedented scope, after all, the wartime popular culture campaign was still largely an intellectual drive to educate the peasants and mobilize them to fight for a collective goal. Most intellectuals, however, did recognize that the resistance could be effective only if a genuine dialogue was established between the participants and their audiences. The harsh reality of the war dictated that success required the active commitment and participation of the masses. Hence, the resisters kept their audience—the ways in which people thought and talked about politics—very much in mind. The urge of intellectuals to communicate, indeed interact, with the people was sincere and fully evident, and they displayed great sensitivity to the people's responses and needs. This development represents a significant change in both attitude and method from the earlier May Fourth era.
The Dissemination of Urban Popular Culture Forms
The slogan "Literature must go to the countryside," was more than just an affirmation of action on the part of intellectuals. It also directed attention to the vast interior, which rapidly became China's stronghold of defense against the invaders. The resisters realized that the success of the anti-Japanese campaign required more than merely the will to fight; it also required an efficient propaganda effort to inform and win over the masses.
The crisis caused by the Japanese invasion saw the emergence of a new political culture. The various urban culture forms that were called into play in the resistance effort were highly politicized and popu-
larized during the war, ultimately to be transformed into a key vehicle of persuasion targeting the general public. Together with rejuvenated rural genres such as drum singing and storytelling, these refashioned urban forms created a sociopolitical coherence by cultivating compelling images and invoking shared symbols, which in turn helped shape the way people saw, felt, and thought about the Sino-Japanese conflict. What gave this political culture its cohesion was nationalism. Street plays brought the idea of unity to the grass roots, and patriotic symbols drove home the message of resistance. Historical figures like Hua Mulan and Liang Hongyu made China's past come alive in a vivid and personal way, in the process concretizing the ideal of patriotism. Similarly, the use of beasts and snakes to demonize the Japanese troops worked effectively to provoke public fury.
Political language offers another fascinating arena in which to study wartime popular culture. Like symbols and images, inflamed rhetoric and slogans abounded during the war.[27] They were never couched in abstract terminology, nor were they complex in connotation. Instead they tended to be simple, emotionally charged, and laced with gritty imagery. They dominated wartime discourse, appearing in newspapers, magazines, leaflets, and daily conversation. Clearly, the resisters were keenly aware of the manipulative functions of language, including political oratory and rhetoric. Wartime political language was never a static product; it was a process in which Chinese resisters and their audiences were carrying on an intense conversation. Political pronouncements appealed to shared feelings.[28] Charged slogans such as "The country is supreme! The people are supreme!" (Guojia zhishang, minzu zhishang) produced a collective sense of excitement and created the emotional bonds that tied people together, thus serving the function of social and national integration in the Durkheimian fashion. Designed to be spoken aloud, these slogans emphasized oral transmission; this made their impact on the illiterate possible and effective, hence adding a new dimension to the close relationship between politics and language.
The destruction of war seemed to demand a stringently political approach to everything, including the production and appreciation of literature and art. The fact that literature and art were so systematically used for a single cause and aimed at the entire population was truly unprecedented in Chinese history. Politics came to dominate everyday existence. In these troubled times, resistance intellectuals believed, art and literature could not afford to be mere entertainment; they had to serve the war. As a result, not only did the distinction between politics
and art become blurred, but politics became the ultimate yardstick of literary and aesthetic value. This homogenization and overpoliticization of culture, however, had damaging effects: wartime literature and art often produced bland and banal products, devoid of imagination and artistry—as the critics' epithet kangzhan bagu (eight-legged essay of the War of Resistance) indicated.[29]
Under the banner of "propaganda first, art second,"[30] anything irrelevant to the war was condemned as unpatriotic and perhaps even disloyal. In December 1938, Liang Shiqiu (1903–1987), a critic and the editor of the literary supplement of the Guomindang-controlled Central Daily, stated that he welcomed articles related to the War of Resistance, "but," he added, "those which are unrelated will also be accepted if written with genuine lucidity and grace."[31] Liang's proposition drew immediate fire from practically every corner, especially from the left, whose representatives accused him of insensitivity and irresponsibility.[32] Granted that the attack on Liang was launched in the early phase of the war when emotions ran high, and was prompted by his perceived ties with the Nationalists, the denunciation nevertheless reflected an oftentimes stifling climate of absolute intolerance to things deemed unpatriotic or pessimistic. This rigidity and excessively politicized view produced many unfortunate casualties; Liang was only its first and perhaps best-known victim.
Such a narrow political view, though loud and insistent, was not without its detractors. The independent writer Shen Congwen, for example, argued that things not directly related to the war—such as scientific research—might benefit the nation in the long run and so were worth writing about.[33] The linguist and writer Wang Liaoyi (Wang Li, 1900–1986) was even more blunt in confessing an aversion to the overpoliticized atmosphere. He wrote, "To be frank, the reason that I wrote [these] miscellaneous essays was not for the benefit of the reader, but for myself…. The essays might appear uninspiring to others, but to me they are like a cool and refreshing drink."[34]
But was such "self-interest" really bad? As the patriotic idealism of the early phase of the war began to wane and a military stalemate set in, the need for easy avenues to forget the present troubles became apparent. Some literature and art began to resume its prewar flavor of escapism, and the public in the hinterland as well as in occupied Shanghai turned increasingly toward light comedy and other seemingly frivolous entertainments. When Qin Shouou's (1908-) Begonia (Qiu Haitang), a sentimental play about the unfortunate life of a Beijing opera performer, opened in Shanghai in late 1942, it was an immedi-
ate success, running for 135 days and breaking every existing record, including that of Sorrow for the Fall of the Ming.[35]
Notwithstanding that too much politics proved dull and suffocating, the dynamics and complexities of the war were intimately connected to the political world, especially its culture. As we have seen, the Sino-Japanese War was a time of extraordinary ferment in political culture, with spoken dramas, cartoons, and newspapers taking the lead in shaping public consciousness. The war also "publicized" artistic behavior. Drawing a cartoon or writing a play was no longer a solitary, private exercise; it had become a public act of enlightening the masses. In many ways, China's wartime political culture was a culture of popular media, for it attempted to institute new values by transforming an elitist and urban popular aesthetic into a rural one. As such, it marks an important shift in the collective consciousness of the time.
But what impact did the various politicized popular culture forms have in the interior provinces, especially in the Guomindang-held territories? True, we cannot know for sure. Yet contrary to Chen Yiyuan's argument that popular culture remained restricted to a few large cities during the war,[36] ample evidence suggests that newspapers and cartoons did penetrate to small cities and towns in the interior provinces, if not necessarily to the deep countryside—a pattern far different from their prewar concentration in a few coastal metropolises. Street plays in fact reached many rural corners and often met with considerable success, as in the case of Lay Down Your Whip, though again, such activity was confined largely to the early phase of the war. Some forms of communication, of course, spread more successfully than others; political cartoons, for example, which appeared in the print media, could reach far more people than performances of spoken drama or drum singing. Nevertheless, there is no question that popular culture as a whole was an effective mobilizing tool. Never before in Chinese history had young dramatists roamed the countryside in such numbers to spread the gospel of patriotism, nor had political publications so flooded the interior to encourage the people to stand up against aggression. Newspapers and spoken dramas would be like "cultural cars" (wenyi che), as one literary magazine hopefully described them in 1942, delivering much-needed messages to the people.[37]
Yet the popular culture drive in the Guomindang-held territories was never well coordinated. The government's directive was half-hearted and unclear, and its urban-elitist distrust of mass movements debilitated this cultural campaign. Further, the Nationalists' rule over
a wide and disparate area with deep regional differences and old factional rivalries undermined their ability to mount a consistent cultural propaganda effort. The same was not true of the Communists, who managed to conduct a well-organized, carefully orchestrated crusade in their border regions.
Village Culture
The success story of the Communist popular culture drive likewise owes much to the reorientation of Chinese culture toward the rural interior during the war. As the resistance momentum shifted rapidly to the countryside when the coastal cities fell into the hands of the Japanese early in the war, the dramatist Zhou Yan expressed a prevailing sentiment: "China is an agrarian country. To achieve nation-wide mobilization and to sustain protracted war, educating peasants is ten or one hundred times more important than educating other groups of people."[38] To repel the enemy, intellectuals and policy makers dreamed of a country unified as an organic whole in defending itself.
Wartime intellectuals used the term hinterland (houfang) rather loosely to refer to the expanse of China unoccupied by the Japanese: interior cities, towns, and rural areas. But the term was also used specifically to refer to the countryside (nongcun). In the course of eight years, the hinterland/village culture came to dominate the minds of Chinese intellectuals. The assumption here was that the countryside, not the cities, was the mainstay of national defense against the Japanese invasion; it stressed the resistance potential of the vast peasant masses; and it argued not only that peasants were numerically significant (at least four-fifths of a total population of 460 million in 1936) but also that their culture—folk songs, yangge, drum songs, storytelling—should be accorded proper respect, both because of its intrinsic artistic value and because of its potency as a propaganda tool. The arrival of twentieth-century urban culture forms in the countryside during the war forced a reassessment of these traditional cultural genres and their new patriotic meaning. This new awareness and the repeated emphasis on village China marked a critical shift in Chinese consciousness: the "ruralization" of Chinese culture had commenced. Literature and art rapidly lost their urban, highbrow orientation and increasingly acquired a rustic flavor.
The interest in rural life, of course, has a long tradition in China. For centuries, Daoist ideals of a tranquil, idyllic world have fascinated Chinese scholars and artists. In the early decades of the 1900s, Chinese folklorists also developed a strong romantic attachment to
rural culture forms such as folk songs and legends, prompting them to hurry to the villages to collect what they regarded as unduly ignored but now rapidly vanishing folk products.[39] A deeply rooted appreciation of nature in its most pristine aspects has likewise played a central role in the cultural and spiritual life of China. Many in the past idealized the countryside as a society bound by communal solidarity and harmonious relationship; it was a world in which honest peasants toiled on their land and children were raised with simple values and abundant love. In this primitive Daoist setting, conflicts were few and harmony reigned supreme.
This romantic image of an eternal China of hardworking peasants, sleepy villages, and slow-moving river boats was rapidly replaced in the late 1930s by a more realistic and painful understanding of the countryside. As writers and students rushed to the villages to spread patriotic news, for the first time they looked closely at the harsh rural reality: poverty, backwardness, ignorance, and a parochialism manifested most vividly in the peasants' deep-rooted suspicion of outsiders. Yet the young activists, despite the challenges, set to work educating the largely illiterate peasants about patriotism and pulling vastly disparate regions together, for there was little doubt about where the center of resistance activity should be—it was reflected succinctly in two popular slogans: "To the countryside" (Dao nongcun qu) and "To the hinterland" (Dao neidi qu).[ 40]
Literature and art about rural China gained instant popularity during the war. There was a craze for things rural. Of the three major themes in the fiction of the 1930s—the rural situation, intellectuals, and anti-Japanese patriotism—the rural situation topped the list as the most written about subject,[41] indicating a shift from the May Fourth emphasis on subjective sentiments to nationalist goals and from urban culture to life close to the soil. That shift in emphasis was universal. The powerful images of burned-down hamlets and armed peasants came to dominate wartime art (as in the cartoons of Zhao Wangyun and Lu Shaofei), and the disquieting pictures of a rural society undergoing rapid transformation formed the core of the works of Ai Wu (1904–1992), Ding Ling, Sha Ding (1904-), Wu Zuxiang (1908-), and others.[42] Fan Changjiang's call for more local newspapers and Ye Qianyu's suggestion that cartoons be moved from magazines to street walls reflected the shift as well. Similarly, the arrival of new urban forms such as cartoons and newspapers in the interior spurred a new awareness of the potential of the traditional rural genres for the future of China. In brief, the contents of this new political culture were
oriented dramatically to matter rural, not urban. Intellectuals' prewar preoccupation with cities now gave way to exploration of the unfamiliar rural hinterland.
It was not easy for the urban intelligentsia, at home in Shanghai cafés and movie theaters, to endure the discomforts of the long journey to the hinterland and then to acclimatize themselves to the utter strangeness of peasant life. Many were psychologically unprepared to depict their newfound rural brethren. Although Hong Shen and Ding Ling, for example, claimed a certain emotional affinity with the peasants, their descriptions of the countryside seldom demonstrated a highly observant eye, and they lacked compelling realism and freshness. Moreover, the fact that they were writing in haste because of their itinerant life frequently resulted in shoddy products. But what they lacked in artistic subtlety they more than made up for in an effusive display of nationalism. The pressing question for these writers was not whether their work was artistically superior, but whether it could function effectively as a political device to arouse the spirit of the peasants. The road now led to the countryside. "In the early days of the war," wrote drama critic Tian Qin in 1944, "many regarded staying long in the city to launch a drama campaign a most shameful act."[43]
In the past, the left-wing drama critic Ge Yihong (1913-) contended, Chinese drama was one-sided, focusing on coastal cities to the exclusion of the vast hinterland. The same was true of the more recent spoken dramas. The war changed all that. Said Ge, "The center for drama has now moved from the urban area to the countryside."[44] Hong Shen concurred: "If the main force of the resistance is to come from the vast hinterland, dramas must center on rural China."[45] Signs of change were visible as early as the mid-1930s, when the specter of open conflict with Japan loomed on the horizon. In the inaugural issue of Drama Times (Xiju shidai), published in Shanghai in May 1937, several prominent playwrights called on their students and friends to direct their energy and talent toward the important but ignored hinterland. Anticipating a bitter war, one member of the group made a passionate appeal: "Dramas that people urgently need now are not necessarily those staged in majestic theaters, but are those performed in the dilapidated playgrounds and in the gloomy trenches. My fellow nationalist dramatists, let's work toward these goals."[46] Fan Changjiang and Cheng Shewo pleaded in a similar vein as they independently called for the dispersal of the press from cities to the hinterland.
To be sure, the decentralization of culture from coastal cities to the
interior was propelled by the war. The process gained momentum when the Nationalist government moved its capital to Chongqing in late 1937 and as propaganda teams began to penetrate into rural areas. Ironically, what began as a military retreat yielded considerable cultural fruits. This dramatic cultural shift, one critic argued, corrected the past mistake of the "radiation" (fushere) effect, in which major cities served as centers to spread ideas to other parts of China.[47] Coastal cities now no longer monopolized resources and talents, and the countryside began to benefit from its newly arrived urban visitors with the development of art and literature and ultimately new ideas.
The arrival of urban intellectuals benefited the hinterland in more than one way. Regional newspapers, for one, began to thrive, and the dissemination of knowledge to different parts of China accelerated. Withdrawing its headquarters from Shanghai after the war broke out, the famous Life Bookstore (Shenghuo shudian) established nearly thirty branch outlets throughout the country. Kaiming Bookstore and Beixin Bookstore followed suit, broadening their distribution networks and increasing their publications even despite paper shortages and financial uncertainties.[48] In so doing, new thoughts spread to interior towns and small cities. "Owing to the development of the resistance war, the cultural center has now moved to regional towns," one observer declared.[49] It is, of course, problematic to argue that the popular culture campaign permanently altered the political consciousness of the rural masses; but for eight years it certainly fueled the flames of the national salvation movement in China. Similarly, granting that cultural activities remained largely concentrated in cities and towns in the hinterland and less in the countryside, and granting that the momentum was halted when most bookstores and newspapers returned to coastal cities after the war, the wartime impact of the popular culture movement should not be underestimated.
The shift of Chinese culture from urban to rural areas during the war benefited Mao Zedong's conception of a rural-based revolution, indirectly if not directly. If nothing else, the war suddenly made the countryside central to China's survival and to everyone's concern. By denouncing the Nationalists as the mouthpiece of capitalism and imperialism and proposing that the countryside provided a systematic antidote to China's myriad problems, Mao emerged as the true spokesman of rural China.
In his writings, Mao consistently portrayed his party as the incarnation of nationalism and the embodiment of China's hope, always with rural China as its foundation. He cultivated the image of himself not
only as a liberator from foreign oppression and the fetters of China's past, but also as a prophet of rural woes. Although resistance intellectuals might not share Mao's deeply ingrained anti-urban bias (he believed strongly that cities, especially former treaty ports, were corrupted by predatory foreign influence and decadent bourgeois values)[50] and his faith in the spontaneous revolutionary creativity of the peasants, many of them did agree that the future of China lay in the countryside and that the peasants were pivotal in the resistance effort. Chinese Communists equated the "border region culture" with the "village culture." Although economically backward, the base area was depicted as politically active and full of promise. It was from here that a new revolution would be unleashed, with peasants as its loyal troops, delivering China from past sorrows. While the Nationalists ruled over a divided territory, were plagued by internal bickering, and lacked a coordinated propaganda effort, Mao and his associates were able to launch a concerted and controlled cultural campaign to realize their plan.
In waging war against the Japanese from their barren and poverty-stricken bases, the Chinese Communists did not abandon their dream of building a new socialist China. To this end they introduced a new discourse based on demolishing capitalistic and feudalistic norms, on the one hand, and extolling Marxist-Leninist-Maoist ideals, on the other. The proliferation of socialist rhetoric in the base areas attested to such an ideological undertaking, which became more systematic with the launching of the Rectification Campaign in 1942.
New socialist rhetoric dominated the Communist border regions. Language in these areas was employed in two ways: as an anti-Japanese weapon and as a systematic propaganda tool to refashion social order. Chinese Communists were ingenious at inventing new words and giving old phrases fresh meaning. Like the French revolutionaries who coined the term ancien régime to dismiss an antiquated social and political order,[51] the Chinese Communists were determined to create a different world with a new rhetoric. The Communists' attack on "semifeudalism and semicolonialism"—Mao's famous characterization of China—is now familiar. Other terms were equally provocative, including "new society" (xin shehui) and "labor" (laodong). For Mao and his followers, China's "old society" (jiu shehui) stood for oppression and corruption. When the old one was completely discarded, a new society (xin shehui) would emerge, in which "those who had suffered hardships" (shoukuren) in the past would rise to the top, fully "in charge of their own fate" (dangjiaren). These were the
peasants who tilled the land and prided themselves on labor and production (shengchan). And most important of all, they supported the Eighth Route Army and the Chinese Communist Party.[52] The Yan'an language was dense with hagiographic references to Mao and his associates as the force behind this moral and political regeneration.[53]
Chinese Communist rhetoric bore witness to the unfolding socialist transformation in Yan'an and other border regions. It was a language that demanded a change in consciousness, because it spoke enthusiastically of class struggle and with an air of certainty about the future. The political sayings in the Communist border regions did not just mirror radical social changes taking place in those areas; they were the very force that would realize those changes. The repeated and emotional use of the term fanshen (freeing oneself, turning over) bore this out. Fanshen was capable of magical effects, symbolizing as it did the peasants' awakening from centuries of oppression, bursting their chains, crying for revenge, and rising up to take control of their own fate. Similarly, qunzhong (the masses), like fanshen, was lauded as the cornerstone of a new society. Qunzhong were not just ordinary country folks; they were politically active patriots, the driving force in bringing about a new order. By putting the common people on center stage, Chinese Communists glorified the power of the masses while belittling that of the elite. The "people" now replaced the "rich and powerful" in making history, and villages, not urban areas, were where the dramatic transformation would occur. According to the Communists, the future of China lay not in the coastal cities, but in the interior, in villages—most specifically, in the border regions. And they used newspapers, cartoons, woodcuts, and yangge to drive this message home.
The rise of the Communist movement during the war was a complicated phenomenon. The social and economic reforms in the Shaan-Gan-Ning Border Region and the Party's organizational strength certainly contributed to their ascent.[54] But the history of the Communists' rise during the war will be incomplete and even incomprehensible if we fail to consider the vibrant political culture that they created. The Communist revolution was to a certain extent an experiment in new socioeconomic programs and a party-imposed rectification reform. Perhaps more important, it was also a careful and systematic effort to use powerful visual imagery (joyful life under the Communist rule), symbols (labor heroes), and language (terms such as fanshen and qunzhong). The socialist revolution launched by Mao was a battle of words and images fought for hearts and minds. Cartoons, woodcuts,
yangge, and newspapers were its strongest weapons. The war was waged on the battleground as well as on the popular culture front. Of the two, the latter posed a bigger victory for the Chinese Communists. Mao's strategy of wrapping socialism in the banner of national salvation and in a multitude of popular culture forms was of vital importance in the rising influence of the Chinese Communist Party.
The War of Resistance witnessed the enormous potential of popular culture. It also created a new political culture that shifted China's attention to the countryside. This shift provided a historic opportunity for the Communists to make their cause visible and appealing.