About Harvest

Harvest

Harvest (Shouhuo, "Harvest") is a bimonthly literary magazine based in Shanghai, founded in July 1957 by the writers Ba Jin and Jin Yi. It is one of China's most prestigious venues for serious fiction — the writer Chen Cun called it a shorthand, or simplified version, of contemporary Chinese literature itself. Across a history broken twice by political upheaval, Harvest has been edited from Shanghai under the sign of "pure literature," has published work by Lu Xun and Lao She in its first issue and by Nobel laureates Mo Yan and Gao Xingjian in later decades, and has been home to nearly three quarters of the works of Yu Hua, including To Live. At its height it had more than 100,000 subscribers, and its official website is shouhuo-harvest.com.

Founding by Ba Jin and Jin Yi in 1957

Harvest was founded on 24 July 1957 as a bimonthly magazine, edited by Ba Jin and Jin Yi. Ba Jin, author of the Torrents Trilogy and one of the most respected Chinese writers of the twentieth century, brought to the venture the editorial experience of the literary journals he had helped found in the 1930s and 1940s; Harvest inherited the new-literature spirit that ran from the May Fourth Movement through those earlier ventures. The magazine was under the supervision of the China Writers Association, with its editorial office in Shanghai and printing and publishing handled in Beijing. From the beginning, its first-generation editors held high the banner of "pure literature," aiming to handle correctly the relationship between politics and literature, to encourage new writers without asking where they came from, and to publish works of genuine literary value.

The First Issue: Lu Xun and Lao She's Teahouse

The inaugural issue of July 1957 announced the magazine's ambitions through its contents. It published Lu Xun's article "The Historical Changes of Chinese Fiction" and Lao She's play Teahouse, alongside Ke Ling's The City That Never Sleeps. Teahouse, in which Lao She compresses half a century of Chinese history into the life of a Beijing teahouse, became one of the most performed and filmed plays in modern Chinese theatre, and its appearance in Harvest's first issue — together with a posthumous text by Lu Xun, the founding figure of modern Chinese literature — set the standard the magazine would be judged by. Both Teahouse and The City That Never Sleeps were later made into films, beginning a long association between Harvest's pages and the screen.

First Closure, 1960, and the Death of Jin Yi

The magazine's first life was short. Its co-editor Jin Yi died of illness in November 1959, and in May 1960, amid the economic difficulties of the Three-Year Great Famine, Harvest ceased publication after publishing three issues for that year. The first run had produced a total of 18 issues. The closure cut off a journal that, in under three years, had established itself as a national venue for serious literary work under two of the most experienced editors in the country. For Ba Jin, who had edited journals since the 1930s, the suspension of Harvest was one more turn in a career that repeatedly crossed the political weather of the People's Republic — but unlike many titles closed in those years, Harvest retained the name, the editor and the institutional support needed to return.

Resumption in 1964 and Second Closure in 1966

In 1964 Harvest was resumed, now supervised by the Shanghai Writers Association, still as a bimonthly magazine and still with Ba Jin as editor-in-chief. The revived magazine published a total of 14 issues in this second incarnation. Its return was brief: in May 1966, as the Cultural Revolution began, Harvest was forced to cease publication again. The decade that followed silenced literary publishing across China, and Ba Jin himself was persecuted during the Cultural Revolution. Harvest's double biography — founded in 1957, closed in 1960, revived in 1964, closed again in 1966 — makes it an unusually direct register of the fortunes of Chinese literary institutions in the Mao era: each turn in the magazine's publication history corresponds to a turn in national politics.

Return in 1979 and the Reform Era

Harvest resumed publication in January 1979, in the first season of China's reform and opening up, and this time it endured. The post-1979 magazine rebuilt its position on the principles associated with Ba Jin and Jin Yi: strict screening of manuscripts, very high standards, active discovery and cultivation of new writers, and the courage to publish controversial works. Commentators describe its editorial style as compatible and inclusive, inherited from the May Fourth new-literature spirit, and note that it was not bound by interests even under the influence of the market economy that followed. In the 1980s Harvest played a role in fuelling the domestic movement of ideological liberation and earned the reputation of being a "window of Chinese literature," publishing excellent works from the various schools of contemporary writing. Together with Contemporary, October (Shiyue) and Flower City, it was counted among the famous "big four" large literary magazines enjoying nationwide circulation, specialising in longer fiction.

The Avant-Garde and a Generation of Writers

Harvest's greatest influence came through the writers it discovered and sustained. In the 1980s it became a principal home of China's avant-garde or "pioneer" fiction, publishing the pioneering writers Ma Yuan, Yu Hua, Su Tong, Ge Fei, Sun Ganlu, Ye Zhaoyan and others, and providing the free literary platform on which that movement grew. Nearly three quarters of Yu Hua's works were published in Harvest, including his most famous books — Cries in the Drizzle, To Live and Xu Sanguan Selling Blood (Chronicle of a Blood Merchant). Yu Hua has recalled that whatever an author's fame, everyone received the same respect at Harvest, a tradition he traced to Ba Jin and Jin Yi's founding editorship. Mo Yan, who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2012, put his own standard plainly: not submitting a manuscript he was not satisfied with to Harvest was the greatest respect he could give the magazine. In the first decade of the twenty-first century alone, Harvest published 65 novels, continuing to excavate new themes while maintaining its literary standards.

From Page to Screen

Works first published in Harvest have repeatedly reached film and television audiences. The tradition began with the first issue itself: Lao She's Teahouse and Ke Ling's The City That Never Sleeps were both later made into movies. Su Tong's novella "Wives and Concubines," published in Harvest, became Zhang Yimou's film Raise the Red Lantern. Yu Hua's To Live, a Harvest novel, was filmed as To Live, and Mo Yan's "The Master Is Getting More and More Humorous" became the film Happy Times (2000). Nobel laureate Gao Xingjian also passed through Harvest's pages early: his novella "There Is a Pigeon Called Red Lips" was first published in the third issue of Harvest in 1981. Few literary magazines anywhere can point to so many adaptations drawn from their own tables of contents.

Ba Jin's Legacy and Li Xiaolin

Ba Jin remained the magazine's defining figure for nearly half a century. Although he modestly described himself as a figurehead editor, his editorial spirit — summed up in the phrase "being unlimited for further progress" — in practice cultivated and protected a batch of new writers, and his name guaranteed the magazine's standards. Ba Jin died in 2005. Starting from the first issue of 2006, the editor-in-chief of Harvest has been his daughter Li Xiaolin, formerly the magazine's deputy editor-in-chief. Her succession kept the editorship within the founding family while continuing the magazine's established practice: a Shanghai-based bimonthly, published under the Shanghai Writers Association tradition, selecting long and medium-length fiction by literary quality rather than by authorial fame or market fashion.

The Harvest Literature List and Young Writers

In its recent decades Harvest has extended its influence beyond its own pages. Its Harvest Literature List has become known as one of the most professional and authoritative literary rankings in China: the 2021 list, the sixth edition, was judged by 14 judges and selected five works each for its long-fiction and non-fiction lists and ten each for novella and short story, with Yu Hua's Wencheng topping the long-fiction list. The magazine has also institutionalised its support for new writing through its Young Writers' Novel Album, a special-issue programme that ran to ten issues between 2010 and 2023 and continued with a further young writers' album in 2024 — the contemporary form of the talent-spotting mission that produced the avant-garde generation of the 1980s. At its historical height the magazine commanded more than 100,000 subscribers, a figure that marks the scale a serious literary bimonthly could reach in China.

Standing and Publication Details

Harvest is a bimonthly literary magazine with its editorial office in Shanghai, publishing fiction, with a particular strength in full-length novels and longer forms, at shouhuo-harvest.com. Founded by Ba Jin and Jin Yi in July 1957, closed in 1960 after 18 issues, resumed in 1964 for 14 further issues, closed again in May 1966 and resumed in January 1979, it has since published continuously for more than four decades. Within contemporary Chinese literature its standing is singular: a magazine described as a simplified version of the literature itself, which witnessed every important moment of that literature's development, raised the artistic standards of the novel in the Seventeen-Year period, midwifed the avant-garde fiction of the 1980s, and accompanied the growth of the generation of writers — Mo Yan, Yu Hua, Su Tong and their peers — who brought Chinese fiction its widest international readership.