David Der-Wei WANG (Harvard University):

This lecture addresses three incidents in 1951 that cast a lasting impact on the cultural politics of the PRC. In May 1951, the movie The Biography of Wu Xun (1950) was singled out by Chairman Mao as a “poisonous weed” nurtured by feudalist ideology. In June, the novella Between Husband and Wife (1951) by Xiao Yemu came under nationwide attack for catering to the petite bourgeois taste and mitigating the consciousness of class struggle. In September, the novel Hinterland (1942) by Wang Lin became the first officially banned literary work in new China. All three works were first published/released to rave reviews as paragons of socialist arts. Their meteoric fall into disgrace, followed by a harrowing record of criticisms and purges inflicted on the authors and production teams, bespeaks not only the treacherous terms of literary and artistic engagements, but also the intricate technology of (self-)censorship in the People’s Republic.