Heroes and Hero-Worship in Chinese Communist Fiction

A reader in the United States of America or Great Britain may have great misgivings when he opens a book of fiction from Communist China. He is painfully aware of the conditions under which the book is written. He knows that thought control in Communist China means not only a set of taboos but also a strict order to write about certain subjects in a certain manner. With little effort he can guess the plot which rushes on to actual victory or victory imagined. And there is the other side to the “struggle,” which is always wrong and bad and doomed. He knows what characters he is going to encounter: the familiar ugly face of a landlord, the aspiring workers, peasants, and intellectuals who unite to follow the leadership of the Communist Party, and the waverers who somehow have to make a choice between the good and the evil—shadows of the types which, he remembers, dominated proletarian literature in the 1930s. Oversimplification is always an insult to intellect; and the insult becomes all the more unbearable if things are simplified not merely because of the writer's ignorance but, as the reader suspects, from an intention to deceive. Of course, the reader does not have to suffer all this if he can help it. But the book in his hand may be useful as source material for some kind of research, a social document or a storehouse of Communist jargon. So in the name of research, he doggedly reads on, with little expectation of pleasure or stimulus for thought. He is prepared to be insulted and to be bored to death.