Our last podcast was on Mao’s Yan’An lectures. If you left that podcast wondering, “Fine, but what’s an example of what Mao considered REALLY bad art?”, then we have a treat for you: Gao Xingjian’s 1981 play “Bus Stop.” A peculiar existential piece very much indebted to Samuel Beckett, it hardly seems the sort of […]
At the 1942 Yan’An Forum on Literature in Art, held in the Shaanxi city of Yan’An, Mao Zedong delivered a series of lectures on the role played by the literary arts in shaping, and being shaped by, the “soldier, farmer, and worker.” While not literature per se, they still played a huge role in Party […]