ABSTRACT
Thus spoke Mao Zedong at the Tenth Plenum of the Eighth Central Committee in September 1962,1 a conference which marked a decisive swing to the left in Chinese politics. Oddly enough, it seems thaI: for many years Mao's words were interpreted by foreign scholars as an attack on works such as Wu Han's The Dismissal of Hai Rui and Deng Tuo's Evening Chats at Yanshan. 2 The trouble is, neither of these two works is a novel, and Mao was attacking novels. It is only relatively recently that a better interpretation has been suggested, namely that Mao was referring to the novels Defending Yan'an (Baowei Yan'an) by Du Pengcheng and Liu Zhidan by Li Jiantong.3 The fonner work is now quite well known, at least among Chinese readers, the latter much less SO.4 In fact Liu Zhidan became a cause celebre, implicating eventually
3 Sylvia Chan, 'The Blooming of a "Hundred Flowers" and the Literature of the "Wounded Generation" " in Bill Brugger (ed.), China Since the 'Gang of Four' (Croom Helm, London, 1980), p.176.
