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).

Gu Cheng's 'Curriculum Vitae'

Gu Cheng is one of the most remarkable writers in China. He was part of the zhiqing, also referred to as the sent-down youth — young individuals who either voluntarily or under coercion left China's urban centers to live and work in rural areas (Sze). In "Curriculum Vitae," Gu Cheng opens by stating: "I'm a sorrowful child, never grown up. / From the grassy north shore, / I followed a bright white road / into a city full of gears, narrow alleys." From the outset, Gu Cheng attempts to convey his feelings toward the state of the nation from his childhood to the present moment. He is in a state of sorrow and anguish brought on by the Cultural Revolution. Having been among the youth displaced to rural regions, he describes how his initially positive outlook slowly became negative and hopeless. After receiving an education, Gu Cheng was sent to the countryside, where he ended up working in a pigsty (Lau and Goldblatt 590). The image of following a bright road into narrow alleys captures the bitterness of a re-education that offered not enlightenment but degradation.

Conclusion: Comparisons and Contrasts

Bei Dao, Gu Cheng, and Yu Hua are prominent and celebrated poets and short story writers in China. This paper analyzes three works — "Resume," "Curriculum Vitae," and "On the Road at Eighteen" — from the three poets respectively. A key theme that emerges across all three is the harsh and cruel reality of the Cultural Revolution and the coming-of-age of the youth who lived through it. At the time, Mao Zedong sought to reassert the Communist regime across the nation. What is distinctive, however, is the standpoint from which each writer approaches that shared reality. Yu Hua came from a poor background and related directly to the hardships faced by him and by youth of similar circumstances — an experience that drove his work. Gu Cheng was part of the sent-down youth who ended up living in China's rural regions during the Cultural Revolution (Sze). Bei Dao, by contrast, came from a privileged family and was educated at one of the country's top secondary schools, attended by the children of the ruling class. Nevertheless, after joining the Red Guard Movement, Bei Dao was repelled by its factionalism, its violence, and its exploitation from above. This drove him to abandon his allegiance and to begin writing in opposition to the Cultural Revolution. All three authors, through their works, outline the harsh realities faced during the Cultural Revolution and highlight the forces that drove people toward a desire for democracy.

A key difference across the three works lies in the experiential perspective of each protagonist. In "On the Road at Eighteen" and "Curriculum Vitae," the main characters convey the realities of life during the Cultural Revolution through difficult personal experiences they and other youth endured under the regime. In "Resume," by contrast, the protagonist has not yet personally suffered hardship in the same way; indeed, he was once part of the very movement that inflicted violence and oppression on others. He could therefore perceive the influences of the movement but did not experience its consequences firsthand (Dao 12). Moreover, the protagonists in "On the Road at Eighteen" and "Curriculum Vitae" recount their stories from the mountainside and the countryside — places to which people had been sent to live and work — whereas the protagonist of "Resume" was situated at the center of the regime, in a setting analogous to the nation's capital (Dao 13).

Despite these differences, a clear similarity runs across all three poems: the depiction of the harsh and cruel reality that people faced during the Cultural Revolution. In "On the Road at Eighteen," a lack of empathy is evident when the young man is beaten for attempting to stop the thieves, while the truck driver smiles and then steals his backpack. In "Curriculum Vitae," the author conveys his sorrow at leaving bright roads for narrow paths, capturing the diminishment of hope. In "Resume," the protagonist describes conditions so extreme that he renounces his allegiance entirely and starts afresh. A second shared element is the desire for change — a longing for hope and for something different from what prevails. All three protagonists express a yearning for a different life. Bei Dao, for instance, writes: "seeing the cold-faced goats / on the other side of the fence / I changed direction" (Dao 87). These poems give voice to the anger and anguish of a generation that had lost faith in the past and was reaching toward the future. They also share a common point of origin in an initial rise of socialist idealism that curdled into a desire for a regime free from oppression (Jing 85).

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