Guo Moruo

Chinese scholar and novelist

• Born: November 16, 1892
• Birthplace: Shawan, Sichuan, China
• Died: June 12, 1978
• Place of death: Beijing, China

Historian and novelist, poet and propagandist, Guo was perhaps the most prolific Chinese intellectual of the twentieth century. After the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, he served in a variety of government posts, including that of president of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. He survived the purges of the Anti-Rightist Campaign (1957) and the Cultural Revolution era (1966-1976) and continued publishing through the 1970’s.

Early Life

Guo Moruo (gyoh moh-ryoh), like many of the leaders of revolutionary China, was born during the tumultuous last decade of the nineteenth century. Born Guo Kaizhen to a well-to-do merchant family in the interior province of Sichuan, he received the foundation of a classical education at a time of sweeping educational reform. The near collapse of the Qing Empire in the wake of the 1894-1895 war with Japan, the abortive One Hundred Days of Reform in the summer of 1898, and the Boxer Rebellion of 1900 spurred an unprecedented overhaul of the curriculum required for admission to the bureaucracy. Thus, Guo studied Chinese and Western subjects at a school in Jiading from 1906 to 1909.

During the revolution of October, 1911, Guo received his secondary education in the provincial capital of Chengdu. On completion of his studies there, he decided to pursue additional modern courses in Japan. He completed an accelerated preparatory course of study for Chinese students and in 1915 was enrolled in premedical studies at Okayama. For the next half-decade, he labored to finish his medical studies while increasingly devoting himself to literary interests. The tensions involved in resolving this dilemma of direction taxed his family life as well as his inner muse and would play a crucial role in his later work.

Guo had submitted to an arranged marriage in 1912 but remained estranged from his wife almost from the beginning. During his medical studies in Japan, he met Tomiko Satō, a Japanese Christian, and soon moved in with her. Their liaison would eventually produce five children, though Guo refused to marry her for fear of offending his parents.

Guo’s literary interests during this period, which coincided with the development of the new vernacular literature advocated by Chen Duxiu, Hu Shih, Li Dazhao, and the literary renaissance at the University of Beijing, already displayed a surprising eclecticism and showed evidence of an early search for cross-cultural synthesis. Sources as varied as the idealist philosopher Wang Yangming, the Western Romantics and the poetry of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Walt Whitman, and Rabindranath Tagore dominated his studies.

In the autumn of 1919, amid the furor of the May Fourth Movement, Guo’s poems were published for the first time in the Shishi xinbao (the China times), and he soon determined, over Tomiko’s desperate protests, to leave his medical studies and pursue writing as a career. With his colleagues Yu Dafu, Tian Han, and Zhang Ziping, he formed the Creation Society and in the early 1920’s founded the Chuangzao qikan (creation quarterly), as well as a weekly and a daily. Guo and his fellow creationists, for the most part, followed a Romantic aesthetic a belief in pantheism, the primacy of intuitive knowledge and emotion, the heroism of individual action, and the need for rebellion. With the breakup of the group in 1924, however, he increasingly turned his attention to the momentous political events that would initially unite China, then plunge the nation into civil war.

Life’s Work

Like many Chinese intellectuals during the May Fourth period, Guo had initially been receptive to a wide variety of novel Western ideas. As early as the publication in 1921 of his poetry collection Nushen (partial translation, Selected Poems from “The Goddesses,” 1958), he had announced his interest in communism. The Bolshevik experiment in Russia, Vladimir Ilich Lenin’s renunciation of czarist claims in China, and the Comintern-inspired United Front of Chinese Communists and Kuomintang (Nationalists) drew the admiration of many patriotic Chinese, and by 1924, Guo had written of his conversion to Marxism-Leninism, though he did not join the party until 1927. His influences during this period included the Japanese Marxist Hajime Kawakami, Friedrich Nietzsche, Goethe, and Ivan Turgenev, and he produced translations of works from all of these writers. True to the catholicity of his interests, he also managed to publish, during a time when he was increasingly dedicating himself to remaking the social order, a series of vernacular translations of classical poetry and a romantic novel.

The next three years, which encompassed Chiang Kai-shek’s Northern Expedition to unite China under the Nationalists and his bloody purge to eliminate the Communists in 1937, saw Guo involved in the reforming of the Creation Society, heading the literature department of Sun Yat-sen University in Guangzhou (Canton), and leading the propaganda section of the National Revolutionary Army’s political department. In a move that would earn for him the enmity of Chiang, however, Guo secretly informed the Communists of Nationalist plans and in March, 1927, wrote an attack on Chiang urging the party to execute him. Chiang’s “White Terror” against the Communists began less than two weeks later.

In the confused internecine conflict between Chiang’s right-wing Kuomintang forces and the left wing and their Communist allies, Guo participated in a number of unsuccessful insurgencies but eventually fled to the International Concession of Shanghai and finally to Japan. His stay in Japan would last ten years and would span the momentous period of struggle between the Nationalists and Mao Zedong’s Communist guerrillas, as well as the accelerating Japanese incursion into China. Guo, now in the frustrating position of living in an increasingly hostile country and trying to aid a revolution from which he was far removed, turned to writing a series of Marxist interpretations of ancient Chinese history. He also worked on translations of Karl Marx’s Zur Kritik der politischen Ökonomie (1859; A Contribution to a Critique of Political Economy, 1904) and Die deutsche Ideologie (1845-1846; The German Ideology, 1938). Continuing his lifelong interest in Russian literature, he also translated a section of Leo Tolstoy’s Voyna I mir (1865-1869; War and Peace, 1886).

Guo’s decade-long exile ended in the spring of 1937, when, in the wake of the Second United Front between the Communists and the Nationalists, he was invited to work for the new coalition. Received by Chiang Kai-shek in Nanjing, he refused an official position but agreed to propagandize for the war against Japan. During the epic Nationalist retreat up the Chang (Yangtze) River to the wartime capital of Chongqing, Guo served in a number of capacities and frequently assisted in relief work. Tomiko and Guo’s children had remained in Japan when war broke out, and during this period he formed a liaison with Yu Lichun, the younger sister of a Chinese acquaintance from Tokyo.

After 1940, when he was removed from a briefly held post in the Military Affairs Commission, he worked closely with Chongqing Communists and produced his most famous play, Qu yuan (1945; English translation, 1953). True to Guo’s role as a propagandist, the play is an allegorical attack on the Nationalists as well as the Japanese through the freely interpreted life of the poet and minister Qu Yuan (Ch’ü Yüan). He also continued his researches in ancient Chinese paleography.

With the end of the war, Guo participated unsuccessfully in the attempts at reconciliation between Communists and Nationalists, and, with the outbreak of civil war, he moved briefly to Hong Kong. In November, 1948, with Communist victory imminent, he came back to China. In 1949, he chaired the All-China Congress of Writers and Artists for the new regime and through the 1950’s served in such positions as chair of the Committee on Cultural and Educational Affairs, vice president of the World Peace Council, and president of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

Despite Guo’s status as China’s leading intellectual and his years of service to the party, he was not immune to the periodic upheavals of the Maoist interval. He adroitly weathered the Anti-Rightist purges of 1957, even traveling with Mao to the Soviet Union, and his Morui wenji (collected literary works), totaling seventeen volumes, was published from 1957 to 1963. Still, Mao’s calls for attacks on intellectuals during the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution in 1966 subjected Guo to ritual abuse, threats of violence, and forced recantation of his works and ideas.

By 1971 he was considered rehabilitated, and his publication of Li Bai yu Du Fu (1971) marked the first classical studies done since the onset of the Cultural Revolution. Despite the often violent disfavor in which ancient Chinese culture was held during Mao’s last years, Guo continued to publish studies of paleography and poetry. By 1975 his reemergence on the national stage was complete when he was made a member of the standing Committee of the National People’s Congress. In 1978, at the age of eighty-five, he died in Beijing.

Significance

Guo Moruo has been called “the most versatile Chinese intellectual of our day,” and it is within this extraordinary range of abilities and interest that his significance lies. Like a number of the May Fourth period intellectuals who had sampled widely, but not deeply, of Western thought, he was enamored of the possibility of finding in it complementary aspects of Chinese philosophy. Unlike many of them, however, he lived long enough to develop a sophisticated grasp of the strengths and limitations of these foreign sources.

Guo pursued simultaneous researches in both classical Chinese and Western literature, sometimes with startling synthetic results. The cosmology of the Daoist Zhuangzi (Chuang-tzu) and the idealist philosophy of Wang Yangming with their emphasis on the spiritual unity of humans and the universe had, he believed, achieved many of the same insights as had Buddhism, the Vedic literature of India, and, in the West, the philosopher Baruch Spinoza and the Romantics. The urge to synthesize, to unify, permeates his writing, and ultimately, Marxism comes to represent the means of achieving the material ends of this unity.

This breadth of interest as well as his longevity coupled with the constant intrigue of his life as a party functionary and propagandist, has led to criticism of Guo as an intellectual and political opportunist. Notwithstanding this controversy, he remains one of the most prolific writers of the twentieth century in any language. His studies of ancient Chinese scripts and attempts to translate them into vernacular represent important pioneering efforts. His poetry marked the beginning of the modern era of Chinese verse and is considered some of the best of the May Fourth period. Above all, he epitomizes the role of the intellectual as propagandist.

Bibliography

Chen, Xioming. From the May Fourth Movement to Communist Revolution: Guo Moruo and the Chinese Path of Communism. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007. Uses Guo’s life and work as a case study to understand China’s encounters with modernity, communism, and capitalism. Traces how Guo changed intellectually and personally during his lifetime.

Chesneaux, Jean, Françoise Le Barbier, and Marie-Claire Bergère. China from the 1911 Revolution to Liberation. Translated by Paul Auster and Lydia Davis. New York: Pantheon, 1977. In one of the most complete accounts of the tumultuous years of China’s fragmentation and reconstitution, Chesneaux traces the evolution of the literary movement within the broader context of the Nationalist/Communist struggle.

Goldman, Merle. Literary Dissent in Communist China. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1967. A somewhat dated but extremely useful work tracing the literary trends of Chinese Communism from the Yenan period of the 1940’s to their climax in the Hundred Flowers and Anti-Rightist campaigns of the late 1950’s. Guo’s activities during this era, and particularly his works of the late 1950’s, are well documented.

Hsu, Kai-yu, ed. Literature of the People’s Republic of China. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980. Perhaps the most complete volume of songs, poetry, and short prose works of the Communist era. Contains an excellent short summary of Guo’s career.

Roy, David Tod. Kuo Mo-jo: The Early Years. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1971. One of the few works available on Guo’s life in English. Carefully stressing the role of Chinese sources, Roy provides a nuanced account of the intellectual influences that shaped Guo’s career up to his 1924 conversion to Marxism.

Schwarcz, Vera. The Chinese Enlightenment: Intellectuals and the Legacy of the May Fourth Movement of 1919. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986. In a revisionist look at intellectual trends in twentieth century China, Schwarcz views the May Fourth Movement as the beginning of a decades-long Chinese enlightenment rather than an isolated nationalist incident. She provides a sophisticated contextual background of Guo’s times and the evolving concerns of China’s intelligentsia.

Shi, Shumei. The Lure of the Modern: Writing Modernism in Semicolonial China, 1917-1937. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001. Explores the intersection of modernism and Chinese literature in the first part of the twentieth century. Includes the chapter “Psychoanalysis and Cosmopolitanism: The Work of Guo Moruo.”