ABSTRACT
This study of Chinese children's literature has concentrated on new urban literature written in the vernacular. The dominant genre in this May Fourth literature was fiction. By the thirties, many Marxist theoreticians rejected May Fourth literature as exclusive. Left-wing literary debates shifted to popular forms in the colloquial language which would be accessible to China's rural and urban masses as well as to an educated urban elite. This was the forerunner of the popularization strategy that Mao, as national leader, would apply wholeheartedly to the nation's literature from 1949 to his death in 1976.
