Scar literature
상흔문학
A literary current that emerged in China in the late 1970s after the Cultural Revolution, depicting the wounds it left on people. It takes its name from "The Scar", a story by the university freshman Lu Xinhua published in Wenhui Bao on 11 August 1978.
In depth
What is "The Scar"?
The female Red Guard Wang Xiaohua breaks with her mother when the mother is denounced as a "traitor" and leaves for the countryside. Returning home nine years later she finds her dead, with a scar on the forehead. As the first work to confront family tragedies of the Cultural Revolution, it caused a sensation. Its author, Lu Xinhua, was a first-year student at Fudan University, a former sent-down youth and soldier.
Did it start there?
The current began earlier. Chen Ruoxi published "Mayor Yin" in Hong Kong in 1974, on a surrendered Nationalist colonel made county head and persecuted to death; it is counted as a forerunner. Inside China Liu Xinwu's "The Class Teacher" of November 1977 was read as a cry to "save the children harmed by the Gang of Four". "The Scar" then gave the name, and works such as Gu Hua's Hibiscus Town followed.
Why did it soon become a problem?
Bai Hua's film script Unrequited Love of 1979 was the sticking point. In it a painter's daughter asks, "You love this country, but does this country love you?" The 1980 film was attacked politically and banned. The official line treated such writing as "bourgeois liberalisation", and Deng Xiaoping said that whimpering would get nowhere, naming Unrequited Love for criticism.
Why do judgements differ?
Some of the harshest verdicts came from those who had been hurt. The linguist Ji Xianlin wrote in the preface to his memoir of the "cowshed" that scar literature only grazed the skin, while the true scars lay buried in people's hearts. Lu Xinhua himself said it leaned too much on emotional release and was bound to be short-lived.
Scholars see it differently. Dai Jinhua calls it a successful ideological operation that rewrote and masked history as a tragedy of innocent victims and evil forces. Liu Fusheng finds in it the disillusion of the sent-down and Red Guard generation, yet notes that many works sought a return not to May Fourth but to the orthodox revolutionary tradition. It can be read both as literature that broke a taboo and as ideological work for a time of transition.