ABSTRACT
The traditional forms discussed in the previous chapter were mainstream well into the mid-twentieth century, and are still used today. Mao Zedong famously wrote in ci form, despite his revolutionary ideals. From the beginning of the twentieth century Chinese poetry underwent radical changes. From about the 1890s, China had begun to throw off the restraining conventions of the classical language and adopted and adapted western forms widely. Radical new genres and styles in language and culture were both tools and mirrors of the changes in ideology and political systems. The espousal of spoken forms in writing, championed mainly by Hu Shi (reformer of Chinese language and literature), together with borrowings and calques from foreign languages, particularly Japanese, resulted in new, freer, more explicit styles. The changed writing style was a vehicle for greater ideological changes. The somewhat delicate understatement favoured by classical poets, even when they had quite vehement thoughts to express, gave way to raw images and frank statements. New technology, such as the telephone and the motorcar, began to permeate the discourse of twentieth-century Chinese life. Things and people previously unknown in Chinese life began to contribute to metaphor. Candour replaced understatement and taboos were broken.
