A New Draft of the History of Contemporary Chinese Literature

Author: Dong Jian
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2005-08-01
Features: This book was funded by the Jiangsu Province "Fifteenth Five-Year Plan" Key Social Science Project. We divide contemporary literature over the past 50 years into five stages: 1949–1962 as the first stage; 1962–1971 as the second stage; 1971–1978 as the third stage; 1978–1989 as the fourth stage; and the 1990s onwards as the fifth stage. This differs from several conventional periodizations. The year 1962 marks the end of the first stage and the beginning of the second stage because the 10th Plenary Session of the Eighth Central Committee of the Communist Party of China in that year proposed the slogan "Never forget class struggle," emphasizing that class struggle should be "talked about every year, every month, and every day." This signified the end of the preceding "adjustment period," the rise of ultra-leftist trends in literature, and the gradual progression toward the "Cultural Revolution." The year 1971 marks the end of the second stage and the beginning of the third stage because the "Lin Biao Incident" effectively divided the "Cultural Revolution" into two halves. After the incident, many people began to awaken to varying degrees, and literature underwent certain changes. The year 1978 marks the end of the third stage and the beginning of the fourth stage because the Third Plenary Session of the Eleventh Central Committee of the Communist Party of China in that year held far greater significance for ideological liberation and the revival of literature than the collapse of the "Gang of Four" in 1976. The year 1989 marks the end of the fourth stage and the beginning of the fifth stage because after entering the 1990s, the landscape of literature indeed underwent noticeable changes.