Zhou Yang

Early Life and the Left-Wing Literary Movement

Zhou Yang was born on 7 November 1908 in Yiyang, Hunan. He joined the Chinese Communist Party in 1927 while studying at Daxia University in Shanghai. In the 1930s he threw himself into Shanghai's left-wing literary movement and became the de facto leader of the League of Left-Wing Writers, while translating works by Tolstoy and other Russian writers. In 1936 his promotion of the slogan "literature for national defense" brought him into a bitter dispute with Lu Xun and others — the "two slogans" controversy that would be held against him repeatedly for decades.

Yan'an and Literary Czar of the PRC

In 1937 Zhou went to Yan'an with his family and worked in cultural education and literary leadership in the border regions. After 1949 he served for many years as Deputy Head of the CCP Propaganda Department and Deputy Minister of Culture, regarded as the Party's top official for literature and the arts and often called its "literary czar" abroad. He directed a series of campaigns against writers: against Hu Feng in 1955, against Ding Ling in 1956–57, and the Anti-Rightist struggle in literary circles in 1957; in 1958 he co-edited the anthology Red Flag Ballads with Guo Moruo. When Mao twice criticized the literary establishment in 1963–64, the bodies Zhou oversaw bore the brunt.

The Cultural Revolution

In 1966 Zhou was publicly named in Red Flag magazine as the chief architect of the "black line" in literature and art during the seventeen years since 1949, becoming a national target of denunciation. In December that year Tianjin rebels seized him and brought him back to Beijing in detention, where he was paraded at struggle sessions across the city; from May 1967 he was held in Qincheng Prison until his release in 1975. By accounts of the time, he emerged badly traumatized, suffering memory loss, uncontrollable weeping and auditory hallucinations.

Rehabilitation, Apologies and Humanism

Rehabilitated after the Cultural Revolution, Zhou became Vice-President of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in 1977, was elected to the 11th Central Committee, and went on to chair the China Federation of Literary and Art Circles. In his later years he publicly apologized on several occasions to people he had attacked and harmed in earlier campaigns. Around 1980 he began advocating the humanist dimension of Marxism. On 7 March 1983, at the Central Party School's symposium marking the centenary of Marx's death, he read "An Exploration of Several Theoretical Questions of Marxism," which discussed "alienation" in socialist society; he promptly became a principal target of the Campaign against Spiritual Pollution and was compelled to make a public self-criticism in the form of a press interview.

Final Years

Zhou suffered a stroke in 1984; his condition deteriorated steadily and from 1985 he remained largely comatose. He died in Beijing on 31 July 1989, aged 80. His life traced a full circle — from organizer of literary purges, to their victim, to reflection and apology in old age — and he is regarded as one of the most representative figures in the history of the CCP's policy toward literature and the arts.