UNIDAD RESPONSABLE: DIRECCIÓN DE SEGURIDAD PUBLICA PROGRAMA: DESARROLLO OPERATIVO

The Chinese Folk Revival happened during the period of the New Culture Movement. Scholars in Peking University and other institutions in Beijing started collecting folklores and surveying local festival and rituals from 1909 to 1935. They ran a journal named Lays (Geyao Zhoukan《歌谣》周刊) in this period and published folktales and field records, usually in translations from local dialects into vernacular Chinese writing. These folklore collectors experienced the First World War and the whole academic group later moved to Southwest China where the National Southwest Associated University (Xinan lianhe daxue西南联合大学，a united educational institute of the most important Chinese Universities during the war time) was during

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the Second World War. In the late stage of the Second Sino-Japanese War they were forced to move to Sun Yat-sen University in Guangzhou (Xu 2006; Hung 1993). There were two types of scholars who engaged themselves in the Folk Revival. One was well-educated in a traditional way and had deep thoughts on traditional Chinese literature. They gained the insights in explaining Chinese folklores from classical Chinese texts which could be dated back to 11th century B.C.; the other was educated in a half-traditional way in childhood and resumed education in new-fashioned schools in big cities and finally sought further education abroad. They were deeply influenced by the studies of folklore in UK and Germany, or the studies of traditional folk literature in Japan. They appreciated the ‘forms’ and ‘grace’ of Chinese folklore, and devoted their efforts into ethnographic studies of folklore following the methodologies they learned abroad (Ibid., 1993). Also there were some foreign scholars in China who were especially interested in Chinese folklore and studied them since the middle of 19th century. The most important one is the German Scholar Wolfram Eberhard (1909-1989). He did an anthropological survey of Chinese folklores in areas around Peking and wrote his important work about Chinese folktales which connected the study of Chinese folklore to the European scholarship in the 19th

One representative figure of this Folk Revival Movement is Zhou Zuoren (see 1.2), who was also an important figure in the New Culture Movement. Soon after his strong proposal advocating a new literary style in the New Cultural Movement, Zhou Zuoren departed from radical leftist literati for his own reconsideration of the value of classical Chinese literary tradition. Inspired by his studies in ancient Greek and Indian epics in years of further education in Japan, he adopted the idea of preserving the national tradition defined by traditional aesthetic category (Bakhtin 1981; Daruva 2011). Zhou Zuoren was one of the earliest advocates and organizers of research in modern Chinese folk literature. In 1906, he published an article The Myth of Three

Stars （San Chen Shenhua《三辰神话》) on folk literature; In 1904, he called for

research and collecting of folk ballads in the Journal of Shaoxing Education century (Eberhard 1999). These scholars had immense influences on the Chinese folklore collectors, who were all urban intellectual elites.

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Association (Shaoxing Jiaoyu Huikan《绍兴教育会刊》), and in his own initiative he gathered around 200 nursery rhymes and children songs. When Zhou Zuoren got a teaching position at Peking University in September, 1917, he immediately participated in the ballad collection initiated by Liu Bannong (刘半农, 1891-1934, poet, prose writer and linguistic) and others. Half a year later he founded with Liu Bannong and Qian Xuantong (钱玄同, 1887-1939) the Ballad Collection Office in Peking University; and in winter 1920, the Peking University Ballad Research Society was established, with Zhou Zuoren and Shen Jianshi (沈兼士, 1887-1947) as chairmen. Between 1922 and 1923, he published a series of articles about ballads, and stirred wide interest in folk ballads among the Peking intellectuals, which is witnessed by the class of Chinese Ballads lectured by Zhu Ziqing (朱自清, 1898-1948) in Tsinghua University.

In imperial China, people living in the countryside had the same chance of receiving traditional education and doing well in the Civil Service Examination as people living in the city, since the wealthy property owners and renowned houses who could afford to hire teachers mostly lived in rural areas. However, after the abolishment of imperial examinations (1905), new schools firstly appeared and ran better in cities. The cultural severance between countryside and city were strengthened. Scholars who were engaged in collecting Chinese folklore considered their works to be a task of searching for the remnants of traditional morality and the real, original elegance of Chinese literature (Xu 2006). These explorations had a great impact on Shen Congwen. Given that he learnt to write in Mandarin, it is natural that his vocabulary in this second language was not enough to support his literary creation. In other words, he needed to accumulate primary speech genres in Mandarin in order to form a secondary genre which is inseparable from the formation of his literary style (Bakhtin 1986, 61–62). From Zhou Zuoren’s translation of Japanese folk drama (kuangyan狂言) he found expressing discourses similar to Xiangxi folk dramas for which he held a life-long affection. The appreciation and imitation of Zhou Zuoren’s translated works led Shen Congwen to incorporate folk genres and his hometown’s local dialects in his writings. As a result, his first literary works, mostly short drama

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scripts, were imitations of these translated drama playbooks (Shen 1997[1934]). After his first success in publishing these scripts, he furthered in other literary genres which he studied hard in Peking and gradually shaped his literary style. Shen Congwen studied and worked extremely hard trying to absorb and integrate different literary styles which he appreciated. He proved to be very talented in writing, and reached his distinct personal style before long. However, what he firstly absorbed from the folk revival movement, especially the influence of Zhou Zuoren’s translation of Japanese folk drama, set a keynote of his creation and became his life-long belief of the meaning of literature. This explains why he took the risk to appraise Zhou Zuoren’s literary works and to claim it ‘forever healthy in spirit and appropriate to humanness’ (永远是健康而合乎人性的) at the time when Zhou Zuoren was accused to be traitor to China in 1940 (Shen 2002, vol. 10).

Closely related to the literary and social reforms reviewed above, the reform of language was also a very important aspect of Early Modern nationalist ideology.