ZHOU YANG

born Nov. 7, 1908, I-yang, Hunan province, China died July 31, 1989, Peking Wade-Giles romanization Chou Yang, pseudonym of Zhou Qiying Chinese literary critic and theorist who introduced Marxist theories of literature to China. Zhou joined the Chinese Communist Party soon after the failure of the revolution in 1927. A graduate of Ta-hsia University in Shanghai in 1928, he went to Japan for advanced study in 1929. Upon returning to China in 1931 he became one of the leaders of the League of Leftist Writers. In 1932 he edited the League's organ Wen-hseh yeh-pao (Literature Monthly) and took part in the polemics of the 1930s over issues of literature and the ways of bringing literature closer to the masses. He went to Yan'an in 1937 and served in several official posts; he was appointed successively administrator of education of the Shensi-Kansu-Ningsia Border Region, dean of the Lu Hsn Academy of Art and Literature, and president of Yan'an University. After 1949 he was vice-minister of culture, vice-director of the Department of Propaganda of the Central Committee of the Communist Party, and vice-chairman of the All-China Federation of Literary and Art Circles. During the Cultural Revolution (196676) he was branded by the Jiang Qing clique as the representative of the counterrevolutionary line of literature and was repudiated at mass meetings and ruthlessly persecuted. He was rehabilitated in 1978 and was appointed vice president of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences and chairman of the All-China Federation of Literary and Art Circles. Zhou Yang's lifelong interest was in literary theory and criticism. In the 1930s he introduced into China Marxist concepts and theories of literature, the aesthetic theory of the Russian revolutionary democrat N. G. Chernyshevsky, and the Socialist Realism then fashionable in the Soviet Union. While in Yan'an Zhou compiled Ma-k'o-ssu-chu-i y wen-i (1944; Marxism and Literature), a systematic presentation of what the outstanding Marxists had to say about literature, and he translated Leo Tolstoy's Anna Karenina. He later wrote a considerable number of essays and dissertations collected in many volumes.