Mao Tun Biography and List of Works

Chinese editor and author, communist ideologue, one of the greatest modern novelists in China. Mao Dun is best known as the naturalist author of ZIYE (1933, Midnight), a massive novel about life in Shanghai, and the rural trilogy entitled CHUNCAN (1932-33, Spring Silkworms).

  "None of the women and children were healthy looking. From the beginning of spring they had to cut down on their meagre food, and their garments were all old and worn. They looked little better than beggars. They were not, however, dispirited; they were sustained by their great endurance and their great hope. In their simple minds they felt sure that so long as nothing happened to their silkworms everything would come out all right. When they thought how in a month's time the glossy green leaves would turn into snow white cocoons and how the cocoons would turn into jingling silver dollars, their hearts were filled with laughter though their stomachs gurgled with hunger."
(from Spring Silkworms)

Mao Tun was born in Chekiang province. He studied at the University of Beijing (Peking), but did not graduate. His first writings were published in the student magazine Xuesheng Zazhi. By the age of twenty-four he was already a well-known author. In 1920 Mao Tun and several other young writers took over the 11-years-old magazine Xiaoshuo Yuebao (Fiction Monthly). They started to publish western literature (Tolstoy, Chekhov, Balzac, Flaubert, Zola, Byron, Keats, Shaw, etc.) and make new theories of literature better known. Although Mao Tun was a naturalistic novelist, he admired Leo Tolstoy, who in his stories entwined the fate of an individual character or families with historical upheavals.

  '"Hah. With the world all going to hell, people starving by the thousands - what does it matter if we do split up!" Ah To exploded. "In these times a man can die like a dog and no one will care. What's so terrible about splitting up!" He glared at his brother and sister-in-law as if he wanted to swallow down the irresolute pair in one gulp.'
(from 'Winter Ruin,' 1933)

SHI, Mao Dun's first work, consists of three slim volumes, HUANMIE (1927), DONGYAO (1928), and ZHUIQUI (1928). It portrays a generation of young intellectuals, who are caught up in the tidal wave of revolutionary fervour without a true understanding of the nature of social change. Mao Dun himself had participated in Chiang Kai-shek's Northern Expedition (1926-28) to unite the country, but he fled to Kuling when the Kuomingtang broke with the Chinese Communist Party. In 1930s he helped to found the League of Left-Wing Writers, which was dissolved after a quarrel in 1936. Among his masterpieces dealing with Kuomingtang period is the short story 'The Shop of the Lin Family.' In the story a shop in a small town is forced to shut down under semi-feudal economic pressures.

'Mrs. Zhu did not cry. Her sunken red-rimmed eyes glared, and she kept saying frantically:
"The poor have only one life, and the rich have only one life. If they don't give me back my money, I'll fight them to the death!"'
(from 'The Shop of the Lin Family')

Mao Dun's next major work, HONG (1929, Rainbow), is the story of a young woman who escapes from her bourgeois family to join the revolutionary May Thirtieth Movement in Shanghai. Ziye is Mao Dun's magnum opus, which contains some 70 characters and numerous plot twists and turns. The main theme in the novel is the struggle between national capitalist Wu Sunfu and his rival Zhao Botao. In 1933 the novel Midnight was published, and enjoyed immense popularity. It played a vital role in the development of revolutionary realism. It was published later in English and French. In FUSHI (1941) Mao Dun tells the story of a young woman who is a secret agent for the Nationalist Party, the Kuomingtang, during the War of Resistance against Japan (1937-45). His other war novels include DIYI JIEDUANDE GUSHI (1937), about the siege of Shanghai in 1937, and JIEHOU SHIYI (1942), which depicts the Fall of Hong Kong. The trilogy SHUANGYE HONGSI ERYUEHUA (1942) was left unfinished.

  "Viewing her own simple dress, Miss Hunag thought of the elaborate finery of the other girls in the office. She couldn't imagine how they managed, since the best paid of them only got sixty or seventy dollars a month, while some received no more than thirty odd. Even if she spent her entire pittance of a salary on clothing she couldn't keep up with them. Besides, she needed it all to help the family. Miss Huang felt like crying.
   I knew I wouldn't be very happy at this kind of a job but - but I never dreamed I'd be so miserable... Tears rose to Miss Huang's eyes."
(from 'First Morning at the Office,' 1935)

After the Sino-Japanese War broke out in 1937, Mao Tun travelled and started a literary magazine in Wuhan. He edited the periodical The Literary Front and wrote the novels Corrosion (1941) and Frosted leaves as Red as Flowers in Spring (1942), the play Before and After the Quinming Festival (1944), and various short stories, essays and articles. He edited the literary page of the newspaper Libao in Hong Kong and worked as a teacher. In 1946 he visited the Soviet Union. After 1943, Mao Dun did not produce any other major works of literature, but continued to write articles and essays.

When the communist government took over in 1949, he was active on several committees. Mao Dun worked as Mao Zedong's secretary and Culture Minister until 1964. He started the monthly Chinese Literature, which became the most popular literary journal for Western readers. In 1964 he was dismissed as Minister in connection with the ideological upheavals. However, Mao Tun survived the Cultural Revolution and he was later rehabilitated. His last significant novel depicts wartime terror in Chungking. In the 1970s he edited a magazine of children's literature and started to write his memoirs, which were serialized in the Party publication, the quarterly Xinwenxue Shiliao (Historical Materials on New Literature). The memoirs were not finished before his death on March 27, 1981.

For further reading: Mao Dun de wenxue daolu, ed. by Shao Bozhou et al. (1959); A History of Modern Chinese Fiction by C.T. Hsia (1961); Mao Tun and Modern Chinese Literary Criticism by Marian Galik (1969); The Genesis of Modern Chinese Literature Criticism by Marian Galik (1980); Realism and Allegory in the Early Fiction of Mao Dun by Yu-shih Chen (1986); Fictional Realism in the Twentieth-Century China by David Der-wei Wang (1992)

Novellas HUANMIE, DONGYAO, ZHAIQIU, (1927)
HONG, (1930)
SAN REN XING, (1931)
LU, (1932)
CHUNCAN, (1932)
TZU-YEH, (1933)
SHIH, (1933)
ZIYE, (1933)
ZHONGGUO DI YIR, (1936)
DUOJIAO QUANXI, (1937)
DIYI JIEDUANDE GUSHI, (1937)
FUSHI, (1942)
SHUANGYE HONGSI ERYUEHUA, (1942)
JIEHOU SHIYI, (1942)
QINGMING QIANHOU, (1945)
Spring Silkworms and Other Stories, (1956)