About People's Literature

People's Literature

People's Literature (Renmin Wenxue) is a monthly literary magazine published in Beijing, the oldest continuously published literary magazine in China and the first literary magazine of Communist China. Its first issue appeared in October 1949, the month the People's Republic of China was founded, and it has served ever since as the flagship journal of the Chinese literary establishment. The magazine is published by the People's Literature Publishing House and issued by the Chinese Writers Association, with its head office at 166 Chaonei Avenue in Beijing. Across more than seven decades it has defined what a new national literature should look like, published landmark works from Wang Meng's early fiction to the Scar Literature of the late 1970s, and in 2011 launched an English-language edition, Pathlight, to carry Chinese writing abroad.

Founding in October 1949

People's Literature was established in 1949 as part of the outset of what literary historians call the Seventeen-Year period, the seventeen years between the founding of the People's Republic and the Cultural Revolution. Its creation followed the First Congress of Literary and Art Workers, held from 2 to 19 July 1949, which brought together the cultural, artistic and political representatives who formed the All-China Federation of Literary and Art Circles. Under that federation stood the Association of Literary Workers, chaired by the novelist Mao Dun, and by the end of 1949 People's Literature had become the official organ of that body. The inaugural issue carried an inscription from Mao Zedong: "I hope that more good pieces of writing will be born of this." The calligraphy for the magazine's title was also done by Mao Zedong, giving the new journal an unmistakable mark of state endorsement from its very first appearance.

Mao Dun and the First Editorial Team

The magazine's first editor-in-chief was Mao Dun, one of the most significant figures in modern Chinese literature, author of the realist novel Midnight and a central figure in canonising the May Fourth literary tradition. His assistant editor was Ai Qing, one of China's most celebrated modern poets. Both men were prominent left-wing writers and party members, and their appointments signalled that People's Literature was intended to be both a literary and a political institution. In July 1949 Mao Dun set out the philosophy of writing for the new era in terms the magazine would promote: first, that workers, peasants and soldiers should be depicted as the main protagonists; and second, that workers, peasants and soldiers should be affirmed as the creators of the great era. Formed and funded by the newly emerging People's Republic, the magazine played a significant political and cultural role in the emerging communist state, modelling for readers and writers alike what "people's literature" should be.

Canon-Making in the Seventeen-Year Period

Scholars read People's Literature as an attempt to establish a new literary canon — one that drew on an amended legacy of the May Fourth movement and the experiments of the first half of the twentieth century, and taught its audience what the literature of the new China should be. Because the magazine was defining the rules for future creation, it provided models for readers to follow and develop, building on efforts by cultural leaders such as Zhou Yang and Mao Dun to re-canonise pre-1949 literature for the new order. The magazine's name itself belonged to the vocabulary of the new state, in which "the people" named everything from the Great Hall of the People to the People's Bank. Within that project, publication in People's Literature carried a weight no other Chinese literary journal could match: it was where the centre of the literary world announced itself, month after month, from Beijing.

Wang Meng and the Hundred Flowers Moment

One of the most famous episodes in the magazine's early history came in September 1956, when People's Literature published "The Newcomer in the Organisation Department" (also translated as "A Young Man from the Organization Department") by Wang Meng, then only 22 years old. The story criticised the distinction between an individual's ideals and the reality of the bureaucratic society around him, telling of an outsider unable to fit into a new environment. It appeared during the brief Hundred Flowers liberalisation, and when the political climate turned, Wang Meng was condemned and persecuted as a Rightist — a fate directly tied to the story the magazine had published. The episode illustrates both the magazine's centrality and its risks: to be published in People's Literature was to be heard everywhere in China, for better or worse. Remarkably, the story's author would return to the magazine nearly three decades later as its editor-in-chief.

Closure in the Cultural Revolution

The Seventeen-Year period ended with the Cultural Revolution. In 1965 Mao Dun, still editor-in-chief of the magazine, was stood down from his other position as Minister of Culture over ideological issues. In July 1966, along with almost all other literary magazines in the country, People's Literature ceased publication. The closure lasted a decade. For a journal so closely identified with the founding of the People's Republic, the silence of those years is a stark measure of how completely literary life was repressed: the flagship magazine of Chinese literature simply did not appear, and its early-1970s existence was one of absolute repression. Yet unlike many titles that vanished in the period, People's Literature retained its name, its institutional home and its claim to continuity — the basis on which it is described today as China's oldest continuously published literary magazine.

Revival in 1976 and Scar Literature

People's Literature resumed publication in 1976 — notably, early in the year, before Mao Zedong's death, the event usually taken to mark the Cultural Revolution's end. The two decades that followed were characterised by critical reflection and growing prosperity, and the magazine stood at the centre of both. As one of the leading literary magazines of the time, it published and popularised Scar Literature (also called Wound Literature), the movement that portrayed the suffering and despair inflicted by the Cultural Revolution and the Gang of Four. Its landmark texts included Liu Xinwu's "The Class Teacher," published in the magazine's eleventh issue of 1977, which took the lead in exposing the harm done to young people by cultural absolutism and obscurantism, and works such as "Wrongly Cut." Through such fiction the magazine helped a traumatised literary culture speak about what had happened to it.

The Wang Meng Editorship

In 1983 Wang Meng — the writer persecuted as a Rightist after his 1956 story in the magazine — became editor-in-chief of People's Literature, a return that remains one of the most resonant appointments in modern Chinese letters. In his inaugural remarks he stressed that he was only a writer and that the journal belonged to everyone who compiled it; he reformed its workings step by step, famously taking a year and a half before settling the choice of deputy editor. His boldest editorial decision came in 1985, when he published Liu Sola's avant-garde work "You Have No Choice," a trendy, non-mainstream piece whose appearance in the establishment's flagship startled the literary world. Wang Meng also used the magazine to excavate new talent, championing writers such as Mo Yan, A Cheng and Ma Yuan, who became influential figures in contemporary Chinese literature. In June 1986 he left the magazine on his transfer to become Minister of Culture, completing an arc from condemned young contributor to the country's senior cultural official via its editor's chair.

From State Funding to Financial Independence

For its first half-century People's Literature operated as a state-funded institution at the heart of the planned literary system. In the wake of China's financial liberalisation, that model changed: in 1999 the magazine shifted from a state-funded publication gradually toward a financially independent institution. The transition mirrored the wider transformation of Chinese publishing in the reform era, in which even the most official journals had to learn to operate in a market. Through the change, the magazine retained its institutional anchors — the People's Literature Publishing House as publisher and the Chinese Writers Association as issuing body — and its Beijing headquarters at 166 Chaonei Avenue. Later editorial leadership has included editor-in-chief Shi Zhanjun, named in listings of the magazine in the 2010s, while current listings give Pan Kaixiong as director and Guan Shiguang as editor-in-chief.

Pathlight and the Foreign-Language Editions

In November 2011 People's Literature began publishing an English-language version named Pathlight, extending the magazine's reach to readers of Chinese literature in translation around the world. The experiment in outward-facing publishing then widened: in 2015 the magazine launched French and Japanese editions, each published annually. The Japanese edition is named Tomoshibi. These foreign-language editions turned the flagship of domestic Chinese literature into a deliberate channel of cultural export, presenting contemporary Chinese writing — the same literary world the Chinese edition documents month by month — to audiences in English, French and Japanese.

Standing in Chinese Literature

People's Literature occupies a position no other Chinese magazine can claim. It is the first literary magazine created in Communist China, founded in the same month as the People's Republic itself, with a title in the hand of Mao Zedong and a first editor, Mao Dun, who stood at the centre of the project of defining a new national canon. It embodied the literary system of the Seventeen-Year period, fell silent with that system in 1966, returned in 1976 to publish the Scar Literature through which China reckoned with the Cultural Revolution, and under Wang Meng in the 1980s opened its pages to avant-garde experiment and a new generation of writers. Its shift to financial independence in 1999 and its multilingual expansion after 2011 show the same institution adapting to market and global eras. To follow People's Literature is, in large part, to follow the institutional history of literature in the People's Republic of China.