The Reinvestigation of Chinese New Ballad Movement in 1958-From a Viewpoint of Popularization of Literature-

"New Ballad Movement in 1958", admired as "combination of revolutional realism and revolutional romanticism", was developed on the largest scale. It could be regarded as the destination from a viewpoint of 'popularization of literature' which had been investigated in leftist literary movement since 1930's. I have tried to examine each problem along the concrete progress of this movement, and to revalue it from the standpoint of literary popularization. -Several issues- 1) The new ballads were meant for not only a literary movement but a combination of political and economical movement. Accordingly they introduced productive techniques and played political bills and posters. Especially they were sometimes used for means to attack leftist elements, and wore dangerous factors. 2) As the new ballads adopted old poetry form, there were disputes brought forth relating to poetry forms between the both sides of the new ballad and new poetry form. These disputes trended towards the idea that the form of new ballad was superior and should have been a main current above all poetry. New poetry form, since "Wusi" (Five Four) 1920's, faced to negative criticism. 3) Existing poets who had adopted new form lost their confidence in the negative atomosphere, so that they could not have been kept trying to improve techniques. 4) Regarding that new ballad was a bud of communist literature; i) The contents have communist spirit. ii) Only new ballad is peoples' form. iii) It is the combination of manual labor and brain work. These are illogical, unhistorical and dangerous ideas. 5) Relative to "popularization and improvement"; while popularization was more contradictory in forcible originality, improvement was also neglected because - 1) Popularization should be emphasized. ii) The quality of new ballad is properly superior. -Valuation of this movement in view of literary popularization- There were some above mentioned faults exposed, although this movement brought forth many new patterns for promotion by actually living farmers life in agrarian districts and had got a big harvest of rise of cultural level including the national education of learning Chinese characters. Chinese history has been coming on with cultural double construction; urban and rural, or intellectual and peasant. In 1930's, in 1940's and in 1950's after the emancipation, literary politics always experienced big swings between them. This new ballad movement evolved exclusively in farm villages entirely referring to Mao Zedong's "Wenyi Jianghua" (which properly did not include urban or intel-lectual literature) under "war time Communist System". And as for the literary politics, it could be said that there was the biggest question lain where mutual balance was lost on each literary politics to peasants, to laborers or to intellectuals