The Song of Youth

The Song of Youth is a semi-autobiographical novel by Yang Mo drawn from her own experiences. First published by China Youth Press in 1958, it is the first full-length novel in the history of contemporary Chinese literature to portray in positive terms the patriotic student movement led by the Communist Party of China and to create images of revolutionary intellectuals. The story spans the period from the September 18th Incident in 1931 to the December 9th Movement in 1935 and centers on the heroine Lin Daojing: born into a declining bureaucratic landlord family in Beiping, her birth mother the daughter of a tenant farmer and her father an educator; when her adoptive mother tries to force her to marry an official of the Kuomintang party headquarters, she flees alone, is rescued at Beidaihe by Yu Yongze, a student from Peking University, and the two soon fall in love and live together. Yet the petty, philistine domestic life leaves her depressed; in the apartment of her neighbor Bai Liping she meets Lu Jiachuan and a group of passionate young people and begins to read Marxist works on the social sciences. Her divergence from Yu Yongze over life's faith deepens day by day, and she finally breaks with him resolutely, throwing herself into the tide of resistance against Japan and national salvation; under the guidance of Communists such as Jiang Hua and Lin Hong she undergoes trials and step by step grows from a hesitant individualist into a conscious proletarian revolutionary fighter. The novel also creates various types of intellectual figures, including Lu Jiachuan, Jiang Hua, Yu Yongze, and Lin Hong; with its grand structure and intricate plot, it sold widely for a long time after publication, with cumulative printings of millions of copies, and was adapted into a film of the same name, released as a tribute for the tenth anniversary of the founding of New China.