ABSTRACT
Rehabilitated in 1979, Wang Meng helped many young talents publish their first works. In 1986, he was appointed minister of culture, a bold move by the reformist faction in the government around Hu Yaobang. Wang Meng's creativity did not end when he took office. Like the writer-officials Malraux and Fuen tes, he kept on writing and experimenting, though his detractors would have preferred that he remain aloof from politics in principle. His novel Huodong bian renxing (Interchangeable-parts man, 1987) belongs to the new Chinese aesthetics of ugliness, being the fictional biography of a wavering and "superfluous" Westernized intellectual before the war, ending in his utterly desperate demise under the post-1949 Communist regime. It is based on autobiographical reminiscences and episodes from the life of Wang Meng's father. Wang Meng resigned as minister of culture in 1989, his honor intact; he had refused to criticize the students and workers who protested for democracy at Tiananmen, and so was forced out.
