The Chinese League of Left-wing Writers, Shanghai 1930-1936

Abstract

The League of Left-wing Writers was formed in March, 1930, when a group of about fifty Shanghai intellectuals agreed on the need for a unity of the left in the face of increasing Kuomintang repression at home and a worsening international situation caused by Japanese militarism and the Great Depression. The members of the League saw themselves as a kind of cultural guerrilla force, a counterpart to the Red Army under Mao Tse-tung. They used creative writing, literary criticism and polemic to show that art motivated by purely nationalist, liberal, humanist or elitist sentiments could not contribute to the liberation of the Chinese people; only a literature written for and eventually by - the labouring people themselves, a literature which was anti-imperialist, anti-feudal and anti-Kuomintang, could meet the needs of the Chinese masses in a revolutionary era. This thesis studies the social background out of which the League came into being, the immediate circumstances surrounding its formation, its response to the persecution and outright murder of its members in Kuomintang "encirclement and suppression" campaigns, its aims and achievements during the six years of its operation, and, finally, the great ideological debate 01 1936, in which Lu Hsun, shortly before his death, led a struggle against misinterpretations of the communist policy of a United Front against Japan.