RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-1982
https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/mk61z420p
117

Li Yunchang, "The Role of Chinese Lawyers," Beijing Review, 1980, 46 (Nov. 27) 24-25.

For a translation of the original Decision see Jerome Cohen, The Criminal Process in the People's Republic of China, 1949-63 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1968), pp. 249-50. For a translation of the 1979 resolution see "Supplementary Regulations of the State Council on Rehabilitation Through Labor," Foreign Broadcast Information Service, Daily Report: PRC, Nov. 30, 1979.

15 For a rather favorable report on one aspect of the programme, see Wei Min, “Reforming Criminals,” Beijing Review, 1981, No. 8 (Feb. 23), 22-29.

16 See Bryan Johnson, "China Dissidents Fall through Crack in New Legal Code," Christian Science Monitor, Jun. 18, 1979: 1, Jay Mathews, "Chinese revive labor camps for youthful dissidents," Washington Post, Jun. 1, 1980, Al and Fox Butterfield, "Hundreds of Thousands Toil in Chinese Labor Camps," New York Times, Jan. 3, 1981, 1,4.

17 According to a New China News Agency report at the time of the conviction of the dissident Wei Jingsheng in October 1979, one of the charges levelled against him is that he had violated these specific provisions of the Constitution. See US, China Review, 4.2 (Mar-Apr. 1980), 8.

18 The Chinese text of the new Constitution was published in the Renmin ribao, Dec. 5, 1982. For a translation see Beijing Review, 1982, 50 (Dec. 27), 10-29.

20 Peng Zhen, "Report on the Draft of the Revised Constitution of the People's Republic of China," Beijing Review, 1982, 50 (Dec. 13), 10-11.
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RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-1991
https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/k356gt84j
77

incoming events did take the role of initiating a new trend in China.

China's domestic policy reassessments were mainly motivated by political considerations and were generally centred on political and theoretical matters. Accordingly, art and literature were less affected than policies by these reassessments. Nonetheless, the bearing of these reassessments on art and literature were enormous.

In 1977-1978 there appeared a literary genre called “scar literature” (“wounded literature”), under which a number of stories, plays and poems were published or staged. Among these works were "Class Teacher" ("Ban zhuren”) and “Scar” (“Shanghen”), after which the genre was named. The themes of the works under this genre were almost exclusively focused on the wrongs done in the Cultural Revolution. The open, and sometimes forceful condemnations of past policies were pretty much the same as the practices in earlier campaigns to criticize Liu Shaoqi and Lin Biao, but the content showed that writers tried to analyse history from their own perspective. After the Third Plenum in December 1978, at which Deng Xiaoping called upon the intellectuals to “emancipate their minds” and to break into previously forbidden zones, more works under this genre were published.

The impact of political reassessment in the post-Mao era was strong though, the first reassessment affected the development of art and literature only marginally. With the pulling down of the Xidan "Democracy Wall" and the arrest of Wei Jingsheng, an activist in the demonstrations who advocated adoption of a Western system of democracy, there appeared a tendency to limit the scope of literary and artistic activities. In June 1979, an article "Praise and Shame" was published arguing that any writer who criticizes the dark side of socialism is shameful. This article ignited a nationwide criticism of “ultra-leftist tendencies in literary and artistic creation.” In the following few months, major newspapers and journals published articles to refute this stand, dubbing its supporters the "whatever" faction.

This development made high culture a victim of political campaigns.

16

Though "scar literature" was unaffected by the campaign started in the spring of 1979, it had become out-of-sale by the autumn of that year as the mood of the nation turned more to the present and the future rather than concentrating on the past. So this literary genre was replaced by a more controversial genre, "exposure literature", in which social
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