Chinese Poetry and the Cultural Revolution: Bei Dao, Gu Cheng, Yu Hua

Introduction

During the Cultural Revolution, the Communist leader Mao Zedong proclaimed specific cultural requirements for both art and writing in China. This was a period filled with violence and harsh realities for people throughout society. Authors such as Bei Dao, Gu Cheng, and Yu Hua can be considered misty poets whose works endeavored to shift from a passive response to active cultural formation. These individuals are renowned writers and poets celebrated for their influential literary works and their impact during the Cultural Revolution in China. Through their short stories and poems, these authors strove to create a cultural force with the purpose of educating the public and offering them revolutionary principles and ideals. The art and literature they produced played a significant role in the sociopolitical realm and contributed to the demise of the Cultural Revolution (Barnstone 21). This paper compares and contrasts three poems by these remarkable poets in relation to the Cultural Revolution.

Bei Dao's 'Resume'

Bei Dao is a celebrated story writer whose work is shaped by mixed emotions of apprehensive expectation and subdued fury. He served as a Red Guard at the start of the Cultural Revolution but went on to become one of the driving forces of the Democracy Movement. "Resume," in the context of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, can be read as both the start of and a call for rebellion. The opening lines of the poem — "Once I goose-stepped across the square / my head shaved bare / the better to seek the sun / but in that season of madness / seeing the cold-faced goats / on the other side of the fence / I changed direction" — signal a change of heart and an appeal for revolt and upheaval (Dao 11).

This passage encapsulates Bei Dao's intricate response to the pressures of a brutalized, conformist, and corrupt society. Emanating from Beijing, the focal point of government and therefore of the nation's intellectual and cultural elite, Bei Dao was acquainted from childhood with its scheming system of rewards and punishments. Like many of his generation and social class, he seized the chance to join the Red Guard movement in pursuit of a new and more forceful elite (Barnstone 19). However, as the poem indicates, he changed direction — a reflection of his growing disillusionment with the factionalism and violence within the movement and its exploitation by higher authority. Bei Dao consequently abandoned direct political action and renounced his earlier commitment to the regime (Dao 12).

Later in the poem, Bei Dao states, "I bent my spine / believing I had found / the only way / to express the truth." This line signals a turn in his beliefs and philosophies. He made the decision to reject the ideologies of the Red Guard movement he had once espoused and instead found a way to expose the severity of the violence, force, and manipulation that characterized it (Dao 13). Furthermore, the poet asserts, "In a single night I gambled away my belt, / and returned naked again to the world." This can be associated with Bei Dao's stance on the Cultural Revolution and his path forward. Even as the worst violence of the Cultural Revolution subsided, its destruction of normal social life continued. Bei Dao became an outsider, rejecting prevailing forms of political and social authority and asserting his independence in a manner that was, ultimately, dissident and revolutionary (Dao 87).