Mass editing, mass writing: Experiments in collective literary production from Yan’an to the Great Leap forward

“Intellectual comrades”, wrote Kang Sheng in 1942 in the newspaper Liberation Daily, “must study together with worker-peasant cadres, and take them as their teachers; at the same time, they also assist these worker-peasant cadres in revising writings [xiugai wenzhang], they must be their hairdressers [lifayuan] in revising their texts”. These words, coming in the aftermath of Mao Zedong’s famous Yan’an Talks on Art and Literature, marked a series of experimental attempts in the Yan’an base area to re-think the most fundamental contents and practices of writing. The notions of “revision” and the intellectual as “hairdresser” as posed here marked an attempted displacement of the intellectual author as the solitary producer of culture and as the arbiter of creativity. In their place, not only would literate workers and peasants be called upon to devise their own works of fiction and journalism, but intellectuals came to function as editors of mass writing, forging, in these terms, a new, collective writerly practice resolutely opposed to the singular bourgeois concept of “author”. This writing practice appeared on the pages of Liberation Daily in the form of the juxtaposition of original draft submissions (yuangao) by worker-peasant cadres in conjunction with revised versions (xiugao) produced under the guidance of intellectuals. Readers would be invited to compare the organic writings of worker-peasant cadres with the suggested edits from intellectuals, and would encounter the revised text as a composite literary artefact to which no stable “author” could be assigned. This paper takes the practice of collective writing in this mode as the point of departure for examining how the Maoist cultural project sought to overcome the division of mental and manual labour through a consistent de-fetishization and de-mystification of categories of the author, creativity and ultimately the very autonomy of the literary itself. It does so by tracing the development of this practice from the Yan’an period onwards through to its varied points of emergence after 1949, not least during the Great Leap Forward, when this same form of juxtaposition became central to a resurgent project of mass culture. As a result, it emphasizes the radical, even avant-garde contents of Maoist culture, in which the “death of the author” was posed not simply as a theoretical trope but as a real process of social and cultural transformation.