GUO MORUO

WadeGiles romanization Kuo Mo-jo, original name Kuo K'ai-chen born November 1892, Sha-wan, Lo-shan county, Szechwan Province, China died June 12, 1978, Peking Guo Moruo Chinese scholar, one of the leading writers of 20th-century China, and an important government official. The son of a wealthy merchant, Guo early manifested a stormy, unbridled temperament. After receiving a traditional education, in 1914 he abandoned his Chinese wife of an arranged marriage and went to Japan to study medicine. There he fell in love with a Japanese woman who became his common-law wife. He began to devote himself to the study of foreign languages and literature, reading Spinoza, Goethe, the Bengali poet Tagore, and Walt Whitman. His own early poetry was highly emotional free verse reminiscent of Whitman and Shelley. His translation of Goethe's Sorrows of Young Werther gained enormous popularity among Chinese youth soon after its appearance in 1922. Two years later, Guo's translation of Social Organization and Social Revolution, by the Japanese Marxist Kawakami Hajime, greatly influenced his own thought, and he became an adherent of Marxism. Although his writing, even his prose, was still marked by Romantic moods, he declared a rejection of individualistic literature, calling for a socialist literature that is sympathetic toward the proletariat. . . . In 1926 he acted as a political commissar in the Northern Expedition, in which Chiang Kai-shek attempted to crush the warlords and unify China. But when Chiang purged the Communists from his Kuomintang (Nationalist Party) in 1927, Guo participated in the Communist Nan-ch'ang uprising. After its failure he fled to Japan, where for 10 years he pursued scholarly research on Chinese antiquities. In 1937 he returned to China to take part in the resistance against Japan and was given important government posts. As a writer, Guo was enormously prolific in every genre. Besides his poetry and fiction, his works include plays, nine autobiographical volumes, and numerous translations of the works of Goethe, Schiller, Turgenev, Tolstoy, Upton Sinclair, and other Western authors. He also produced historical and philosophical treatises, including his monumental study of inscriptions on oracle bones and bronze vessels, Liang Chou chin wen tz'u ta hsi t'u lu k'ao shih (1935, new ed. 1957; Corpus of Inscriptions on Bronzes from the Two Chou Dynasties). In this work he attempts to demonstrate, according to Communist doctrine, the slave society nature of ancient China. After 1949 Guo held many important positions in the People's Republic of China, including the presidency of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. In 1966 he was one of the first to be attacked in the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. He confessed that he had failed to understand properly the thought of Mao Zedong and that all his work should be burned. Strangely, however, Guo was not, as were many of his colleagues, stripped of all official positions; by the early 1970s he again enjoyed a position of great power. Additional reading Y.C. Wang, Chinese Intellectuals and the West (1966); David Roy, Kuo Mo-jo: The Early Years (1970).