Mao Dun

Mao Dun (born Shen Dehong, 1896-1981) was a Chinese novelist, essayist, translator and literary critic, and one of the most important writers in the Chinese language of the twentieth century. He was involved with the Chinese Communist Party from its early years, and his name is tied both to the literary renewal of the 1920s and to the cultural life of the People's Republic, where he served as its first Minister of Culture. The pen name he chose, which means roughly "contradiction", reflected the ideological tensions of his age.

He was born in Tongxiang, in Zhejiang province, and lost his father at the age of ten. His mother took over his education, and at secondary school in Hangzhou he read the Chinese classics widely, a formation that shows in his prose. He went on to Beijing but left university for financial reasons. In Shanghai he joined the Commercial Press and, from 1920, edited the influential Fiction Monthly, where he introduced readers to Western writers such as Tolstoy, Chekhov and Zola and helped shape new ideas about literature.

His political commitment came early. He helped found the Communist Party in 1921, and after the break with the Kuomintang in 1927 he went into exile in Japan. His most productive years as a novelist ran from 1927 to 1933, a period that produced the Eclipse trilogy, the novel Rainbow and, above all, Midnight, a naturalistic portrait of capitalist Shanghai. His fiction pairs close attention to social detail with a sympathetic view of working-class life and of revolution.

After the founding of the People's Republic in 1949 he was Minister of Culture until 1965, and he was criticized during the Cultural Revolution before being rehabilitated. He is remembered in China, where the country's leading literary prize bears his name, and his work remains central to the history of Chinese realism.