Ba Jin: In historical narration

Author: Li Hui
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2006-10-01
Features: This book is one in the series "Li Hui's Biographical Works," introducing the life and achievements of the modern and contemporary literary giant Ba Jin to readers. The main content includes Ba Jin's journey from dreams to reality, his works, personal life, and later years. This book will present a three-dimensional perspective of him. Ba Jin, a modern and contemporary writer, is renowned for his unique style and prolific output, and was called by Lu Xun "a passionate and progressive writer, among the few outstanding writers of his time." This book introduces the life and achievements of this famous writer. I wrote this piece after only browsing the beginning of the manuscript, which broke my usual self-discipline, but as some words needed to be expressed urgently, I made an exception. Here, Li Hui, as a researcher on Ba Jin's life, thoughts, and works, finally writes about Ba Jin's relationship with anarchism not from the perspective of clearing his name, but simply and unreservedly. Ba Jin himself said he was the "child of the May Fourth Movement" and also the "child of the French Revolution." From his youth, he adhered to the tenets of "freedom, equality, and fraternity." At the age of his teens, when the May Fourth Movement was just beginning to surge, he, with his admirable intelligence, engaged with the diverse new. He came from a wealthy family but was deeply aware of its flaws. He believed that all families that embodied the order of patriarchal rituals were prisons of no freedom, equality, or love, and were also microcosms of society as a whole. Therefore, not for personal warmth or livelihood, but out of conscience, his sympathy for the powerless, the poor, the sick, and the oppressed, his indignation at the oppression of man by man, and his anger at all injustice, led him to seek ways to transform society. At this time, he encountered the passionate and selfless revolutionaries from the histories of Western Europe and Russia, as well as the ideas and theories of anarchism. In the 1920s and 1930s, he actively participated in anarchist propaganda and protest actions. For him, anarchism was stepping over the "threshold" to sacrifice for a society of freedom, equality, mutual help, and love—it was the morality and ideal of the weak, and Ba Jin consciously stood with the weak. If the October Revolution "with a gunshot" brought Marxism-Leninism to China, anarchism had arrived even earlier. From some late Qing-era revolutionaries who sought to overthrow the Qing dynasty, one could find the influence of anarchist character and behavior. During the May Fourth period, the spread of anarchism coincided with the spread of communism. Among the workers' movement martyrs killed by warlord governments in the early Republic of China, there were brave anarchist believers. Many early communists, especially the intellectuals among them, had been influenced by anarchist thought, and some could even be said to have moved from anarchism to revolution. This was not uncommon even among the new generation that joined the revolution led by the Communist Party of China before 1949. If one examines the self-descriptions in the archives of revolutionaries from the 1930s and 1940s (especially around the time of the start of the War of Resistance Against Japan), a significant number of young intellectuals would say they had been drawn to revolution by the influence of revolutionary literature, including Ba Jin's works, such as the well-known Family and other translations. These works exposed and criticized the social system and human conditions of the time, resonating with them, inspiring them, and motivating them to seek a path to revolutionize society. Later, however, they would adopt a critical stance, saying that writers like Ba Jin did not point them toward a clear revolutionary path toward the Communist Party (e.g., in Family, Juehui only left Sichuan, and in Cao Yu's Beijing People, Ruihen only took a train to a distant place). Instead, it was the outbreak of the War of Resistance Against Japan in real life, as well as the stark contrast between the Kuomintang and the Communist Party, that led them to recognize the Communist Party as the revolutionary and force, leaving them with no choice. However, it is a fact that even some young men and women who were merely trying to escape arranged marriages or fight for marital freedom were encouraged by Family to go to Yan'an and the liberation areas. Ba Jin's ambiguous pointers in his novels thus coincided with the tangible reality of life. I remember before the Cultural Revolution, when we discussed this phenomenon, we jokingly said that Ba Jin was recruiting soldiers for the Communist Party and should be given a major award! Li Hui rightly points out that the terms "revolution," "faith," and "cause" frequently appearing in Ba Jin's early works must be understood in the context of his thoughts at the time of writing. Without additional context, the lack of specificity is an obvious tacit understanding, but also a necessary compromise. In different contexts, the meanings become ambiguous, a result of historical changes, not intentional misdirection. It was precisely the victory of the October Revolution and the establishment of the Bolshevik Soviet state that made the plight of anarchist opponents of class rule even more difficult in countries like Russia; the halo of revolution in the 19th century turned into a crown of "counter-revolution" in the early 20th century. In Russia and the Soviet Union, anarchists either went into exile or were suppressed. In China, anarchism was not only seen by warlord and bureaucratic governments during the May Fourth period as a "red tide" indistinguishable from communism or "extremism," but it later fell into a predicament of being attacked from both the left and the right, somewhat like the Trotskyist faction led by Chen Duxiu, who could not be tolerated by the two opposing political forces of the Kuomintang and the Communist Party. As a political party, anarchism no longer existed. As a movement, anarchism occasionally appeared in publications before 1949 but completely disappeared after 1949. Young people could only glimpse the cartoonish image of "anarchists" in Soviet films like Lenin in 1918 or hear during the Cultural Revolution that actions that defied the "strategic deployment" of the "" were called "anarchist." Ba Jin's historical relationship with anarchism became the source of his suffering, especially in his later years. During the Cultural Revolution, he was branded as a "master of counter-revolution," and even after the Cultural Revolution, during the "campaign to eliminate spiritual pollution," some still clung to the issue, seemingly determined to see him destroyed. In reality, those who raged against him in the struggle did not know what anarchism was. For decades, various versions of history textbooks in mainland China had long omitted any mention of anarchism. Discussing Ba Jin without reference to anarchism always felt like there was a barrier. Without a basic understanding of the origins of anarchism, it is difficult to have an in-depth and objective understanding of Ba Jin as a person and his works. Incidentally, speaking of a tangential point, for anyone seriously interested in modern and contemporary Chinese history, knowledge of the global anarchist movement, its theories and practices from the 19th to the 20th centuries, its influence on social life in various countries, and its relationship with various revolutionary trends and movements is essential background. Li Hui's book attempts to guide us toward a "forbidden zone" of Ba Jin's spiritual world in this regard. Of course, this forbidden zone was not set by Ba Jin himself; on the contrary, over the decades, he frankly stated his beliefs and ideals in black and white, but his sincere confessions and the hearts he laid bare to readers were often obscured by the smog of history. Li Hui, with his unique prose style, does not deliberately make things seem profound, yet he brings us close to a nearly forgotten or even erased history. Only when history is cleared of dust and washed of paint does it reveal its true nature, becoming logical and believable. Such writing also makes one feel close to the subject. I am eager to read the rest of the manuscript.