The Chinese Leftists in the 1920s were not necessarily all communists or Marxists like Mao Dun hoping to (1) move national politics into the arena of global economy, (2) connect social disparity to class struggle between the proletariat workers and the national bourgeoisie. These basic creeds of Marxism and Leninism became recurring themes in the realist novels by Mao Dun (1896-1981), such as Spring Silkworms (1932) and Midnight (1933), both later adapted into film. Co-founder of The League of Left-Wing Writers and a member of the Shanghai communist team, Mao Dun was also one of the engineers of the May Fourth movement to debunk traditional world-views in favor of Western social thought. In the Preface to his full-length novel titled Midnight, Mao Dun offers his insights into Chinese society ripe for communist revolution.
“I decided that my novel should deal with three aspects of this current situation: (1) how Chinese industrialists, groaning under foreign economic aggression, were hindered on the one hand by the feudal forces and threatened on the other by the control of the money-market by comprador-capitalists, and how they tried to save themselves by employing even more brutal methods and intensifying their exploitation of the working class; (2) how, as a result, the working class was obliged to put up a fierce resistance; and (3) how the national capitalists, at enmity alike with the Communist Party and the people as a whole, were finally reduced to the only alternative of capitulating to the compradors (the tools of the imperialists), or becoming compradors themselves. A novel of such content, of course, would offer scope for dealing with quite a number of problems, but I decided to restrict myself to a refutation of the Trotskyte fallacy. I would use my facts to prove that China, far from becoming a capitalist country, was being reduced to the status of a colony under the pressure of imperialism. Truly, there were a number of people among China’s bourgeoisie who had much in common with the old French bourgeoisie, nevertheless the China of 1930, unlike eighteenth-century France, was a semi-colony, which meant that the outlook for China’s bourgeoisie was particularly bleak–it was, in fact, utterly hopeless. Such were the circumstances which gave rise to the attitude of vacillation in the national bourgeoisie. I intended also to refute some of the fanciful theories advanced by bourgeois scholars in those days. Typical of these theories was the following: China’s bourgeoisie could save itself–by which they meant developing industry and setting up a bourgeois regime–by opposing the national, democratic revolutionary movement led by the communist Party and at the same time opposing feudalism and comprador capitalism. As it turned out, Chinese capitalists like Wu Sun-fu, who opposed both the working class and the national, democratic revolution led by the working-class party, were left with no alternative but to become compradors themselves”.[i]
Such social analysis of China in the context of geopolitics by Mao Dun as a novelist was quickly replicated into many literary and cinematic works about modern Chinese experience. In the preface to his novella Spring Silkworms by Mao Dun, the theory of Marxism was elaborated.
“To sum up, here is my thought process for creating Spring Silkworms: Firstly, I recognized the bankruptcy of Chinese agriculture due to the political chaos in the nation and the economic invasion by foreign imperialism. And among these circumstances contributing to the bankruptcy of filature industry in Zhejiang Province and the hardship of the silkworm farmers were these particulars—the Chinese factories went bankrupt and undersold by Japanese silk at Lyon (France) and New York (U.S.A.), (the sale of the Japanese silk was heavily subsidized by the Japanese government, whereas Chinese silk manufacturers not only received no government subsidy but also had to suffer setbacks when paying state taxes and a variety of bureaucratic fees. To compensate their setbacks and prolong their own economic existence, the Chinese filature factory owners and silk manufacturers in turn doubled their effort to exploit the silkworm farmers. In fact, by the time silkworms were making cocoons, the foreign cocoon trust and organizations had already decided on the price for cocoon production, which determined the business of the local silkworm growers to be already at a loss, not to mention the manipulation of market prices for silkworm leaves by feed-producers. This resulted in a situation where the more the silkworm farmers produced, the more they had to lose. I started with this recognition, which was the theme of the story, and moved on to characterization and plot.” [ii]
Undoubtedly, Mao Dun wanted to anchor his literary works in the discourse of Marxism. The political lexicon that he appropriated also informed the film aesthetics of many Left-wing directors. As was made evident, China in the new fiction (the novel and cinema) was the part of the international world and a link to the chain of capitalist markets worldwide. As literary or ideological concepts whose meaning and precise definition were often not readily available, such terms as “industrialists”, “national bourgeoisie”, “comprador capitalists”, “imperialists”, “working class”, “manufacturers” were soon to have a human face in cinematic works. Thanks to such political analyses as by Chen Duxiu and Mao Dun, China of the “republican era” became readily comprehensible, with social conflicts as its defining characteristics and revolution as its zeitgeist.
[i] Mao Dun, Preface to Midnight,
[ii] Mao Dun, Preface titled “How I wrote Spring Silkworms”, 1945