RED CHINA: Blighted Bloom

It is a dark night in Hopei province.

Armed with a pistol, a fervent young woman named Chin Lan Tse patrols the dikes that protect her village's cotton fields from the waters of the Grand Canal. But — hark! — what is that sinister shadow slinking away near by? As a dedicated Young Communist, Chin Lan Tse knows the answer: it is a skulking saboteur in the employ of the decadent Kuomintang clique. Chin Lan Tse pulls the trigger. "Bang!" and the bullet flies out. "Ah yah!" bellows the fascist running dog of capitalism as he vanishes in the night. Dauntless Chin Lan Tse pursues him, falls into a ditch. What bad luck! But, no, it is good luck. For it is at this very point that the treacherous saboteur has done his foul work: water is trickling through the dike. What to do? The hole is too large to be plugged by a finger, and, anyway, that technique has already been used by the capitalistic Dutch boy who saved the plutocratic fields of Holland from the sea. Chin Lan Tse is resourceful: she applies her maidenly breast to the breach and stoppers it. She almost freezes to death, but "her heart burns like fire," sustaining her until rescue comes.

Specks of Success. Such is the plot of Red Flower, one of the seven novelettes written by Liu Shao Tang, the "boy genius" of Red China, between his 13th and 1 6th years. More than 100,000 copies of his work were sold, and Liu modestly noted that "whatever little specks of success I may achieve — I who have always been reared and cultivated by the party —such specks of success are the result of the party's blood and heart." At 18, armed with a party recommendation, Liu left off writing about the heady world of production quotas, collective labor and agricultural cooperatives, entrained for Peking University to "study life more penetratingly, and undergo self-transformation." After one year Liu gave up the university to return to Hopei and "throw himself into the perpetual fires of struggling life."

But to party members in Hopei he was not the same old Liu. The Boy Genius became "disobedient, more conceited, even mercenary." Instead of seeking out stories of "socialist realism," he went about engaging "people in talk about which girl in which household had given birth to a bastard." He sneered that novelettes like his own Red Flower were "divorced from reality" and "stories told to console children." When Comrade Mao propounded his slogan of "Let all flowers bloom." Liu seized the opportunity to publish a new book, Grass at Hsiyuan, which, according to the shocked China Youth Daily, "turned Communists into monsters" and described many old party members as "war lords, vicious hoodlums, sex fiends, idiots, whores." Liu was sternly "advised" to behave himself, but he airily replied: "Please, I cannot bear so many well-intentioned warnings."