Novel
Morning in Shanghai
上海的早晨
Zhou Erfu · 1958
Synopsis
Shanghai, in the early 1950s. Xu Yide, general manager of the Hujiang spinning mill, is one of those capitalists whom the new government intends to transform through peaceful buyout. Faced with the workers, he evades his responsibilities and, with the mill's director, Mei Zuoxian, is content with token arrangements over the quality of the cotton. Opposing them, the trade unionist Yu Jing and women workers such as Tang Aying or Mother Qin carry the grievances of the spinners, against the background of campaigns against fraud and corruption.
Context
The author drew his material from the campaigns of the three antis and the five antis carried out in Shanghai. The first volume appeared in 1958 in the journal Shouhuo, the second in 1961; the Cultural Revolution interrupted the last two, and the whole appeared only in 1979, twenty-seven years after the work began, according to China Digital Times. In 1969, an article in the People's Daily denounced it as a “great poisonous weed”. The book shows the policy of peaceful buyout of enterprises and makes its factory owner a type of the period. A. C. Barnes translated the first volume into English in 1962, under the title Morning in Shanghai.
Who it is for
A fresco in four volumes, of which the entry covers the first; it can be read in English in A. C. Barnes's version.
Prizes and reception
Target of the official press in 1969; the completed cycle runs to about one million seven hundred and fifty thousand characters.
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