Midnight (Mao Dun novel)
자야 (소설)
A novel by Mao Dun, finished in 1932 and published in 1933 by Kaiming in Shanghai. Set in Shanghai in the summer of 1930, it follows the silk-mill owner Wu Sunfu, who dreams of building up national industry, as strikes, a credit squeeze and bond speculation deliver him into the hands of the financier Zhao Botao.
In depth
What is the story?
Old Mr Wu, a musty country landlord, flees the fighting at home and comes to Shanghai. No sooner has he entered the city of neon than he collapses and dies; critics say he simply "weathered away" on contact with Shanghai, and old China crumbles to dust in the first chapter. At the funeral on 18 May, industrialists, financiers, politicians and officers crowd the house of his son Wu Sunfu, and the mourners talk about factories and bonds.
Wu Sunfu owns the Yuhua silk mill and is daring and ambitious. With the shipowner Sun Jiren and the coal-mine owner Wang Hefu he sets up the Yizhong trust, a finance company meant to bypass the banks, and by early June it has bought up a string of small factories making light bulbs, thermos flasks, glass and rubber. He dreams of an industrial empire. His rival is the financier Zhao Botao, drawn by the novel as a broker for American capital.
The plot drives forward with Wu "caught between three lines of fire". The first is the strike at his mill. His lieutenant Tu Weiyue has the Communists among the women workers arrested and breaks the strike, and on this front alone Wu wins. The second is money: Zhao's credit blockade and the war's disruption of trade force the Yizhong factories out of his hands. The third is a duel on the bond market. Wu stakes everything he has left on a fall in prices and is crushed when his brother-in-law Du Zhuzhai goes over to Zhao. Disheartened, he orders the mill stopped.
Why is bond speculation at the heart of the plot?
Because of the Central Plains War of 1930, when Chiang Kai-shek's central army fought an anti-Chiang coalition including Feng Yuxiang and Yan Xishan. Nanjing printed bond after bond to pay for it, and the price moved with the fighting. Those who expected the central army to win bought; those who expected it to lose borrowed bonds and sold them. That is why the novel's mill owners and bankers hang on the news from the front. The book closes with the showdown in July, before the war's outcome in September.
Why is it so famous?
It was read as an answer to the question of whether China could take the capitalist road on its own. During the writing Mao Dun met the party leader Qu Qiubai, who urged him to bring out strongly that industrial capitalists could not beat comprador finance capital. Mao Dun himself described the novel in a 1939 lecture as a reply to the Trotskyists, and it was long read that way.
Recent research draws a different picture. What brings Wu down is less the world depression Mao Dun stressed than the Central Plains War and bond speculation, and the mill itself never changes hands. Nor is the strike-breaking simply a hymn to the workers: it also reads as a criticism of the Li Lisan line, which pushed reckless urban risings.
How do the judgements differ?
Chinese literary histories long ranked it as Mao Dun's masterpiece. The critic C. T. Hsia disagreed, placing it below his early Eclipse and Rainbow, though he had no doubt that Mao Dun was modern China's greatest Communist writer. Some dismiss the novel as a "sociological document"; others answer by examining the appeal and tragedy of Wu Sunfu himself.