Wengongtuan and the Rural Literary Popularization Movement in Yan’an

Abstract

This paper takes the folk song collection movement in Yan’an as an example to examine the role of the wengongtuan (The League of Literary and Artistic Workers) in organizing the rural literary popularization movement in the 1940s. Dispatched by the Communist Party of China (CPC), wengongtuan members took on the task of mobilizing peasants into cultural production, and realized a self-reconstruction in the process of integrating themselves into the lives of revolutionary peasants. The idea of the wengongtuan derived from the CPC’s theory of the mass line—“from the masses and to the masses”—which laid the foundation of New Democratic culture in the 1940s.

Key words： literary popularization; new peasant poet/singers; intellectuals’ self-reconstruction; mass line