Zheng Zhenduo

Zheng Zhenduo a Chinese writer, literary scholar, editor and cultural official of the twentieth century (1898-1958) who helped to modernise Chinese literature and to preserve the nation's cultural heritage. A founding figure of the literary association named after his ideals of humane letters, he worked as poet, translator, bibliographer and museum administrator, and he devoted much of his life to the collecting and printing of rare books.

Early Life and Education

Zheng Zhenduo was born on 19 December 1898 in Wenzhou, Zhejiang province, though his ancestral home was in Changle, Fujian. He grew up in a family of modest means and received a classical education before moving to the modern schools that were springing up in the late Qing and early republican years. The intellectual ferment of the period, with the collapse of the old examination order and the flood of translated Western works, shaped his ambitions.

He studied at the Beijing Railway Management School from 1917, where he read widely in Russian and Western literature and began to write. He was active in the student movement of the time and joined the reformist literary circles of the capital. His early poems and critical essays showed the influence of the new vernacular writing advocated by Hu Shi and Chen Duxiu, and he became a passionate advocate of literature in the spoken language.

These formative years gave him the combination of classical erudition and modern literary enthusiasm that marked all his later work. He learned English and Russian and translated extensively, and he developed the habit of combining authorship with editing and scholarship that would characterise his career. He married Gao Junzhen in the early 1920s and the couple shared a deeply literary household.

Literary Associations and Editing

In 1921 Zheng Zhenduo was among the founders of the Literary Research Association, a group based in Beijing that championed a realistic, socially conscious art for the new nation. He served as an editor of its journal and helped to set its democratic and humanistic tone. Around this time he edited a celebrated monthly for young readers and contributed prose and poetry that made his name known to a broad public.

He worked as an editor for the Commercial Press in Shanghai and later taught at several universities, including Yenching and Tsinghua in Beijing and Jinan University in Shanghai. As a teacher and editor he did as much as any figure of his generation to establish modern Chinese literary criticism and bibliography as serious disciplines. He edited major collections of classical and modern writing and wrote influential surveys of Chinese literature and of the history of popular literature.

His poem collection of these years and his volume of translated Indian and Russian verse are still read. He was also a prolific writer of prose sketches, book reviews and essays on art and society. His broad curiosity, moving easily from Sanskrit drama to Chinese folk ballad, made him one of the most versatile men of letters of the republican period.

Book Collector and Cultural Administrator

After 1949 Zheng Zhenduo took up senior posts in the new cultural administration. He served as a leading official in the ministry of culture and later as vice director of the cultural section of the national academy, where he oversaw libraries, museums and archaeological work. He threw himself into the task of rescuing the scattered books and art objects of a country emerging from decades of war.

He was an insatiable collector of rare and ancient books, inscriptions and popular prints, and much of his private collection was eventually given to the state. He urged the preservation of local opera, folk tales and minority literatures, arguing that these neglected traditions were as precious as the classical canon. His campaigns helped to save numerous manuscripts and editions that would otherwise have been lost.

He was also active in international cultural exchange and represented China at conferences abroad, where his erudition won respect. His work in bibliographic scholarship, including editions and catalogues of rare texts, is a lasting contribution. The rescue of the great classical novel known as The Story of the Stone and the promotion of a reliable scholarly edition owed much to his advocacy.

Scholarship and Writing

Zheng Zhenduo's scholarship ranged over the whole field of Chinese literature. He wrote a history of Chinese vernacular literature that took seriously the storytelling, drama and ballads that earlier scholars had dismissed as vulgar, and his approach helped to broaden the modern study of the Chinese literary past. He edited anthologies of poetry, fiction and drama and produced detailed bibliographic studies of early printing and illustrated books.

He translated Tagore, Tolstoy and other foreign writers, and his versions of Indian poetry were widely read in the 1920s and 1930s. He collaborated on the compilation of large reference works and wrote repeatedly about the value of foreign literatures for the renewal of Chinese writing. His essays on art and archaeology applied the same careful eye to bronze, jade and painting that he brought to manuscripts.

He was deeply interested in the interaction of literature with religion, especially Buddhism, and in the popular literature produced at the great religious sites of western China. His studies of folk song and of the drama of the Yuan period remain important references. He combined the enthusiasm of the reformer with the patience of the textual scholar, and he insisted that scholarship should serve the culture as a whole.

Death, Legacy and Assessment

Zheng Zhenduo died on 17 October 1958 in a plane crash while flying to Afghanistan at the head of a cultural delegation. The loss was felt keenly in Chinese letters, for he was still in middle age and at the height of his energies. His death cut short a programme of collecting, editing and administration that had already reshaped the study of Chinese cultural history.

He is remembered as one of the small group of editors, teachers and scholars who carried the Chinese literary tradition through the upheavals of the early twentieth century and gave it modern institutional form. His insistence on the dignity of popular and vernacular literature anticipated the broader scholarly currents of the later century, and his tireless editing made countless texts available to readers.

His collected works and his studies on the history of literature, the theatre and illustrated books continue to be cited. Libraries and museums hold collections that bear the stamp of his ambitions, and the fields of bibliography and printing history in China owe a lasting debt to the standards he set. He stands as an example of the scholar who is also a public servant of culture.

See also

• New Culture Movement
• Vernacular Chinese literature
• The Story of the Stone
• Commercial Press