Three works of Chinese Literature

Wang Meng's "A Young Man Arrives at the Organization Department," and Bei Dao's "An Artist's Life." Mao's speech is thoroughly anti-individualistic. Meng's story is far more individualistic, but its lightly satirical focus on an artist's troubles with the Chinese bureaucracy hardly produces a counter-revolutionary glorification of individualism. Dao's poem is the most purely individualistic and experimental of the three, and the most free of any concern with ideology, whether treated reverently (as with Mao) or satirically (as with Meng).

Individualism is a threat to Mao and the Marxist ideology. The community and its order and cohesion are the foremost concern of Mao. Yet he realizes that artists are by nature individuals, so he must offer some rationale to such artists in order to use their talents for the development of communism. He does not want to crush their creativity, but to knead it into bread for Marxist propaganda. As much as Mao might try to appear to be saying that he honors the individuality of artists, he clearly means to direct artists' activity away from individual concerns and toward the expression of Marxist ideology:

Comrades! I have invited you to this conference today for the purpose of exchanging

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man perhaps reveals to authorities that the poet is a present danger, and then A shrieking ambulance pulled up close/ Took me to the hospital/ And that's how I became a model patient/ . . . Finally I too became a doctor/ A big syringe with a thick needle in hand/ I paced the corridor/ To kill time all night long" (Dao 82). Bei Dao does not name Confucianism or Maoism or any other "ism" as the basic force trying to undermine his or her individuality and creativity. To this artist, the name or names of this force or forces does not matter. Nevertheless, named or unnamed, Mao, alive or dead, is the abiding anti-individual force at work in China and Chinese literature. Mao's constant refrain is that the role of the writer and artist is to create for the common good, the good of the proletariat, the good of the revolution, the good of communism. Of course, this means that individualism is the enemy. The artist or writer under Mao is not free to decide for himself or herself what to write, what to write about, what to think, how to influence others. Under Mao, all is subjected to he standard of whether it is helpful or harmful to the revolution. Writing is not a freely creative enterprise, to Mao, but instead is a matter of
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Approximate Word count = 2167
Approximate Pages = 9 (250 words per page)

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