31 Facts About Mao Dun

Shen Dehong, best known by the pen name of Mao Dun, was a Chinese novelist, essayist, journalist, playwright, literary and cultural critic.

Mao Dun was highly celebrated for his realist novels, including Midnight, which depicts life in cosmopolitan Shanghai.

Mao Dun was the editor-in-chief of Fiction Monthly and helped lead the League of Left-Wing Writers.

Mao Dun formed a strong friendship with fellow left-wing Chinese author Lu Xun.

From 1949 to 1965, Mao Dun served as the first Minister of Culture in the People's Republic of China.

Mao Dun was well known for translating Western literature, as he had gained academic knowledge of European literature from his studies at Peking University.

Mao Dun adopted the pen name "Mao Dun" to express the tension in the conflicting revolutionary ideology within China in the 1920s.

The name means "contradiction", as Mao means spears and Dun means shields.

Mao Dun had already started to develop his writing skills when he was still in primary school.

Mao Dun read the Wen Xuan, Shishuo Xinyu, and a large number of classical novels, which influenced his writing style.

Mao Dun entered the three-year foundation school offered by Peking University in 1913, in which he studied Chinese and Western literature.

The trainings in Chinese and English as well as knowledge of Chinese and Western literature provided by the fifteen years of education Mao Dun received had prepared him to show up in the limelight of the Chinese journalistic and literary arena.

Apart from editing, Mao Dun started to write about his social thoughts and criticisms.

At 24 years of age, Mao Dun was already renowned as a novelist by the community in general, and in 1920, he and a group of young writers took over the magazine Fiction Monthly, to publish literature by western authors, such as Tolstoy, Chekhov, Balzac, Flaubert, Zola, Byron, Keats, and Shaw, and make new theories of literature better known.

Mao Dun resigned from the Chief Editor of Fiction Monthly in 1923, but in 1927 he became the chief columnist of the Minguo yuebao.

Mao Dun wrote more than 30 editorials for this newspaper to criticize Chiang Kai-shek, and to support revolutions.

Mao Dun wrote for the party magazine The Communist Party.

Mao Dun participated in Chiang Kai-shek's Northern Expedition to reunite the country.

Mao Dun quit when Chiang's Kuomintang broke with the Communists in 1927.

Mao Dun supported movements such as "New Literature" and "New Thinking".

Mao Dun believed that Chinese literature should have a place in the world.

Mao Dun helped to found the League of Left-Wing Writers in 1930.

The harvest period of Mao Dun's writing is considered to have been from 1927 to 1937.

Mao Dun left a work unfinished, the trilogy Shuangye Hongsi Eryuehua.

Mao Dun edited the periodical Literary Front and the literary page of the newspaper Libao in Hong Kong and worked as a teacher.

Mao Dun started the monthly literary journal Chinese Literature, which became the most popular for western readers.

Mao Dun was dismissed from his position as minister in 1964 due to the ideological upheavals.

Besides his achievements, Mao Dun had great influence on Chinese literature.

Mao Dun's family got him engaged to the Kong family when he was five years old and he married the daughter of Kong family after he quit from university.

Mao Dun has over 100 publications throughout his life, which includes short stories, novels, theories etc.

Between the 1920s and the 1930s, which was the early period of Mao Dun's writing career, the female characters occurring in his works mostly were in identity of "New Woman", for instance, Mrs Gui and Qionghua in Wild Rose, Ms.