" writers finds its origins in the Cultural Revolution of 1966, and just as the May Fourth writers sought to reject "old" China in favor of new cultural realities, so did the contemporary movement seek to reject the May Fourth approach in order to create a new outlook out of the ashes of the old. Increasingly since the Cultural Revolution, contemporary Chinese Writers such as Yang Lian and Yu Jian have broken as well from the ideology of Mao, who sought to use creative writers to promote political and cultural ideology for his own restricted purposes.
With respect to the attitude of the contemporary writers toward the May Fourth group, Morin writes:
In the eyes of the truly post-Mao generation . . . the works of these older poets, whether native or cosmopolitan in their inspiration, all look terribly tradition. . . . For these young poets, the socialist reality has been "contaminated" by an excessive ideology, so much so that ideology has served to alienate the human being from his or her true self. Thus for [the contemporary, post-Mao writers], the function of poetry is first of all to recover the human self (Morin xxiii).
Interestingly, however, this was one of the major goals of the first May Fourth writers in the 1920s---to liberate the perception of human existence from the previous generation's traditional stranglehold and to replace it with a more realistic perception, grounded in the problems confronted by the individual and the society in general.
Comparing two of the writers selected here, one from each school, Mabel Lee, introducing a collection of Yang Lian's poems, writes:
The fact that Yang Lian, at the time of writing Child by the Sea, had read only a few of the Wild Grass poems [by Lu Xun] . . . reveals an inherent affinity with Lu Xun in both philosophical concerns and poe
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