MAO DUN

born 1896, Ch'ing-chen, Chekiang province, China died March 27, 1981, Peking Wade-Giles romanization Mao Tun, pseudonym of Shen Yen-ping, original name Shen Te-hung editor and author, generally considered republican China's greatest realist novelist. Forced to interrupt his schooling in 1916 because he ran out of money, Shen became a proofreader at the Commercial Press in Shanghai and was soon promoted to editor and translator. In 1920 he and several other young Chinese writers took over editorial control of the 11-year-old journal Hsiao-shuo yeh-pao (Short-Story Magazine). The group revamped the magazine, began to promote new literature, and elected Shen as editor, a post he occupied until 1923. In 1926 Shen joined the Northern Expedition as secretary to the propaganda department of the Kuomintang Central Executive Committee. When the Kuomintang broke with the Chinese Communist Party, Shen, pleading illness, fled the confusion to Kuling. In the next year he composed three novelettes, published as a trilogy under the title Shih (1930; Eclipse), using the pseudonym Mao Dun, the Chinese term for contradiction. The work, dealing with a youth's involvement in the Northern Expedition, was an instant success and is considered by many Western critics to be Mao Dun's masterpiece because of its brilliant psychological realism. In China, however, Shih was attacked by Marxist critics, who berated it as petty bourgeois. A later work, Tzu-yeh (1933; Midnight), was praised by Chinese Marxist critics for its social realism, while Western critics found it less vital than Shih. In 1930 Mao Dun helped found the League of Left-Wing writers. During the Sino-Japanese War (193745), he continued his leftist literary activities, founding and editing two patriotic literary journals. After the establishment of the Communist government in 1949, Mao Dun was active on several literary and cultural committees, but he stopped writing works of fiction. He became minister of culture in 1949 but was dismissed in 1964. In the 1970s he became vice president of the Chinese Writers Association and edited a magazine of children's literature. In 1978 he was again publicly active in the Chinese Communist Party.