Part one

Beauty is neither mysterious, nor profound. Those living within a socialist society encounter many beautiful things, images that activate our sense of beauty on a daily basis. Early in the morning, a group of smiling children in red scarves walk by, while energetic folks young and old alike perform morning exercises and shadowboxing. The aunties working at the nurseries beam as they welcome mothers and children. Workers and students holding the fourth volume of Selected Works of Mao Zedong are engrossed in their reading. The sight of any of these images creates a sense of beauty and sweet happiness in any ordinary working person. By standing in the shoes of the proletariat and laboring peoples, and then adding further typification, the scenes described above become the most beautiful picture.

But things were different in the old society. The laboring people of those times lived in darkness and pain. Their lives were full of hideous things. Every morning began with the sight of frozen bodies, the sound of people moaning for food, and scenes of thugs hustling and merchants collecting debts. In those times, the image of the rotten exploiting class oppressing, exploiting, and destroying the livelihood of the people was certainly ugly. In a society ruled by the three enemies,Footnote ² ugliness and gloom run rampant. The only image that is beautiful is that of those who push history forward, opposing the rule of the decadent classes; that of the revolutionary struggle in the lives of laboring people; that of the revolutionaries who fight tirelessly to overthrow the old world.

From our own lives, we gain a deep knowledge of beauty; that it is not simply imagined in our minds, but that it exists in real life. Beauty is certainly not fixed or eternal; rather, it changes with society … If we take a class perspective, looking at things in their essence, then in these times, what kind of person possesses a beautiful image and what kind of person possesses an ugly image? I think many people might answer this question by saying that the image of the laboring people is beautiful, and that the image of the exploiting classes is ugly. This is a broad distinction that can be drawn between beauty and ugliness, where the laboring people are the workers, peasants, and soldiers, and the revolutionary cadres and leaders who work for their benefit.

In matters of life and in matters of struggle, we live amongst ordinary yet mighty members of the masses. We come into contact with the sublime spiritual world of the laboring people, regularly sensing the depth of the beauty of their spiritual nature. In the midst of real struggle, we see the nobility and simplicity of the spiritual world of the laboring people; we see how wholeheartedly laborers throw themselves into collective labor; we see the workers and the poor peasants who are full of profound class feeling; and we see those who are awakened, fighting selflessly for the betterment of the nation, the people, and socialism. From their character, from their image—we sense in them all an inner beauty. And when we sense this sort of inner beauty, we discover those subtle, touching qualities that express the beauty of their spiritual world, qualities we might have otherwise overlooked because of their ordinary outward appearance. Thus, when we see a sailor with a ribbon in his hat, wearing the fresh blue and white stripes of the naval officer’s uniform; a soldier with a red star on his cap; a peasant harvesting crops from the field; or a hale worker in his workwear—these all cause us to feel something fresh and beautiful.

This sense of beauty is inspired by their forms. The form of these characters is both sincere and manifest in outward appearances, with form revealing content. Their form reveals their identity, such that their demeanor, actions, clothing, physique, and appearance all reflect their spiritual outlook as well as the characteristics of their lifestyles. They are both the creators and the protectors of social wealth, and they represent the new force within the revolution taking place within society. Their form expresses the characteristics of the beautiful things that are so prevalent in social life, and, in turn, this form allows us to appreciate its beauty. There are some serious cases in which a soldier dresses sloppily, with his hat askance. On those occasions, the exterior appearance is not beautiful because it makes us feel as though he has not fulfilled his duties as a revolutionary soldier. His careless appearance undermines his responsibility to enforce discipline …

The image of the exploiting classes is ugly. Those who suffered under the imperialist oppression of the old society can see the inherent ugliness of imperialism. The reason why different images of imperialists are ugly is clearly because they reveal their reactionary, backwards, degenerate, and rotten character—that foul “American lifestyle.” Each and every antic of the American imperialists during the Korean War is still fresh in our memories. In the people’s eyes, the image of the landlord is ugliest. On stage, the ugliness of the landlord and his henchmen becomes even uglier. [Actor] Chen Qiang brought the ugliness of [landlord] Huang Shiren to life with such clarity that he made some soldiers want to reach for their gun and shoot him dead.Footnote ³ This demonstrates how, after typification, beautiful things become prettier, and ugly things become uglier …

The bourgeois lifestyle has already become synonymous with ugliness. When we see a gangster or a grotesque bourgeois woman on the street, their expressions and attire create a comprehensive image. With just one look, they make us feel uncomfortable and unhappy, and we sense their ugliness. Because this image is permeated with the attributes of a decadent bourgeois lifestyle, it is diametrically opposed to the new socialist life. The vast majority of the people make an aesthetic assessment of capitalist-roaders and their actions as ugly … They bring us back into the dark ages in their attempt to deliver the beauty of socialist life into the hands of capitalist society … The things that those reactionary forces who prevent the progress of history find beautiful are, in fact, ugly, and that is because their concept of beauty elevates decay and declining power. Beauty being in the eye of the beholder is a phenomenon that certainly exists, but whether or not the lover of beauty is beautiful comes down to objective standards … Beauty does not simply disappear due to subjective matters like love or hate …

A myriad of different kinds of lifestyles exists within human society. In every class, people create concepts to distinguish beauty from ugliness, and these concepts are conceived out of their own lifestyles and aspirations. The life that everyone supposedly “understands” and loves is emphatically not a matter of abstract personal desire. Rather, it is a reflection of how people understand the lifestyle of certain classes. But what is a lifestyle? Lifestyle is a part of certain ownership structures and productive relations. Certain relationships of production constitute specific ways of living. Social existence determines social consciousness. The many different evaluations of beauty and ugliness are rooted in the aesthetic reflection of different productive relations. To the bourgeoisie, the most beautiful women are sexy, lewd, and voluptuous. Their preference for these qualities reflects how people are treated as products in capitalist relations. Feudalists see frail, slender, and pale women as most beautiful, which reflects how women are treated as appendages of men in everyday life under feudal relations. Thus we can say this: the concept of beauty has a clear class character, as do many beautiful things within social life …

The proletariat’s concept of beauty and of a beautiful life is a new life that is built upon socialist and communist productive relations … It profoundly reflects the objective laws of historical development, and its class nature and truth are one. This is why we assert that what the proletariat considers to be a beautiful life is what is truly beautiful, while what the bourgeoisie considers to be beautiful is ugly … But in a classed society, the beauty of the art of the laboring people is limited in its achievement and twisted in its expression. Only socialist art has broken through in its profound reflection of the beauty of the laboring people, and this is a great revolution.

As for the exploiting classes, we have never said something so strange as, “A good person has never existed.” Rather, the situation requires a specific analysis: “In the past, before they won state power and for some time afterwards, the slave-owning class, the feudal landlord class, and the bourgeoisie were all vigorous, revolutionary, and progressive; they were real tigers. But over time, because their opposites—the slave class, the peasant class, and the proletariat—gradually grew in strength and struggled against them ever more fiercely, these ruling classes changed step by step into the reverse, changed into reactionaries, changed into backward people, changed into paper tigers.”Footnote ⁴ This profound analysis reminds us of the necessity of having a concrete historical analysis of the exploiting class and the lifestyle that they pursue and glamorize. Does this equate to “replacing aesthetics with philosophy”? No, because what we are discussing here is the fundamental issue of aesthetics. Why is there such dissatisfaction over linking with reality, on the one hand, and disgust for the general principles of Marxist philosophy, on the other? Just look to recent history: when the bourgeois intellectuals of the May Fourth Movement [1919–1920s] attacked feudal morality in the name of freedom of marriage and love, and when they overthrew the Confucian school of thought in the name of the freedom of bourgeois democracy, did the people not find this image beautiful? Don’t works of literature contain characters who escape the confines of the feudal family? No matter how the old feudalists smear their actions, calling them ugly and claiming that “people’s hearts have changed,” it does not change the fact that these new actions gleam with beauty, and are adored by young people all over.

Yet they are not proletarian. Although their image—indeed, the very life that they understand and yearn for—can, at times, have beautiful aspects, it also has an ugly side that remains in fundamental conflict with the proletarian attempt to create a new life without exploitation. Later on, as the conflict between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat grew, the revolutionary forces led by the Communist Party grew stronger. Of these, there are some who refuse to change, and stick to bourgeois ways when they are confronted by the proletariat. Their image then becomes ugly. The masses should not simply withhold their praise. Instead, they should spurn it. When they arrived in the liberated areas, these people even tried to use individualism to oppose the party’s leadership; they tried to use the bourgeois concept of “personal freedom” to resist the discipline of the proletariat; and to use the bourgeois concept of “freedom of love” to oppose communist morality. People like this transformed into the antithesis of the good life in the liberated areas. For a work of literature to write in praise of such a character, that can only be a hideous thing. This phenomenon is not limited to a few isolated examples. These types of transformation occur within the ranks of the laboring people: in The Builders (Chuangye shi), during land reform, Guo Zhenshan fought against the landlords with bravery and resolution.Footnote ⁵ Is his image not beautiful? But once he begins to hinder the establishment of the new socialist life, he becomes spiritually vulgar and ugly in character. In the course of life’s development, the struggle between new and old is the essence of how beautiful lives and beautiful characters continuously adapt …

Socialism is beautiful, but if we are not resolute in our struggle against these old things, the ugly life that we have already banished may return. The failure to perceive that there are still ugly things in socialist society is dangerous. Some do not agree, and look for the logic of lines, like the symmetry of a house, the span of an airplane’s wings, or the streamlined shaped of a car. They think that beauty is a matter of geometry. But it must be said clearly: so far, what we have discussed concerns the essence of beauty. Truth, beauty, and goodness are fundamentally unified. New and beautiful things are also those that both reflect the truth of society’s development and are attuned to the moral standards of the revolutionary class.

Yet beauty is not only the image of that which is true and good; it also has its own expressive forms. Beautiful and ugly forms can affect the beauty of the overall image. In order to gain a comprehensive understanding of aesthetic standards, it is important to analyze not only the content of an image, but also its form. The forms of life have an independent quality, meaning that the formal standards for beauty in turn have an inheritable aspect. To ignore content over form leads to aestheticism, and ignoring form over content leads to oversimplification, and an inability to account for specific and complex aesthetic phenomena … But in the end, it is content that determines form, and what determines the beauty or ugliness of a thing is its essential raison d’être, and the lifestyle of a certain class. Whenever any class evaluates the beauty or ugliness of life, their first criterion is whether or not it fits within their lifestyle …

The bourgeois aesthetes of the past approached the study of aesthetic concerns without taking the reality of human society into consideration. They saw beauty as a matter of mechanics. Faced with the infinite splendor and beauty of social life, we fall into a quandary. Take architecture as an example: in times of darkness when reactionaries were in power, imperialists built factories on the blood and sweat of the laboring peoples. Those factories were then used to exploit the Chinese people. During those times, the factories did not belong to the people. No matter how exquisitely a building is constructed, the working people will only harbor hatred for it, and the factory cannot become an object of beauty. When factories are a tool at the hands of the bourgeoisie, who use them to oppress the working people, squeezing the life out of them, when workers live lives of darkness in those factories—how can they feel good about them?

But when the relations of production change and the factories belong to the people, the working people see it as a beautiful thing because it is connected with the construction of a new socialist life … As a worker put it, “Before Liberation, when I heard the noise of machinery I thought it was the roar of man-eating beasts. But after Liberation, it was music to my ears, and brought me a sense of happiness and beauty.” Why? Because … the content of life, the very relationship between humans and the material—it has transformed. In [Maxim] Gorky’s eyes, the skyscrapers of New York were a symbol of “the yellow devil’s city,” the ugliest of things. When millions of people live in extreme misery in horrific slums, those high-rise buildings can only weigh on the backs of laborers, providing a few wealthy people with a place to live shamelessly, and carry on exploiting those workers. This can only be an ugly, repugnant thing. In that era, the only way the image of those buildings could become beautiful is if the laborers had the strength to rise up and fight the oppressors living in them. This is not “the unity of the subjective and the objective”; this is an objective fact …

The executioner’s knife is ugly because its force is wielded by a power that slaughters the people, yet in the hands of the people, rifles and red-tasseled spears are beautiful things. The enemy’s airplanes are thieves, but the people’s own plane they affectionately call the “Silver Swallow.” Here, buildings and airplanes are all manifestations of the aesthetics of specific social lives. The question whether they possess beauty or ugliness is determined first with reference to the social life with which they are associated. They may also have additional independent formal factors influencing their beauty or ugliness, and they may reach differing degrees of perfection in their respective content and forms …

Part two

Before the existence of humanity, the natural world, perpetually in motion, already existed. Yet we cannot say that beauty existed then. This is because there was no subject with the ability to make aesthetic judgments, therefore the natural world as it objectively exists does not have the intrinsic characteristics of an object of aesthetic appreciation, and is indifferent to distinctions of beauty and ugliness, just as there was no distinction between good and evil then. Beauty and the ability of humans to appreciate it are a product of historical development. Beauty emerged alongside the social life of humanity, and the social praxis of humankind (productive struggle, class struggle) created the object of beauty as well as subjectivities that were capable of perceiving it. Through labor, the people transform the natural world into an object of beauty, allowing themselves to enjoy the beauty of nature. Therefore, even though the Sun and Moon are celestial bodies beyond Earth, the natural world as an object of beauty is a part of the social life of humanity. Landscape poetry and painting are also products of reflections on a certain social life in the minds of humankind.

If we proceed with an analysis of the facts, we discover the relationship between the beauty of the natural world and the social praxis of humankind: first, humankind’s ability to steer the natural world and utilize it is gradually deepening. At the same time, humanity’s relationship with the natural world is also constantly changing. The mountains, seas, and landscapes that we see today are no longer those of the primordial times. If people from our times could go back to primordial times, the living conditions and natural scenery would only cause them to feel fear and strangeness, and only rarely the sense of beauty. Through their own labor, the people have procured many materials for production and living in a developing understanding of the natural world’s attributes. Through their labor, they also transform the appearance of nature such that it benefits and does not harm the development of our lives, transfiguring it from an object of defense and terror into an object of beauty. As they transform and conquer nature, the working people perpetually transform the natural world into an object of beauty. Second, society and nature follow their own rules … The natural world, like society, is constantly in motion, and constantly changing. Like society, all different sorts of natural phenomena have processes of development and decline. There are new things and decaying things, things that grow and things that are destined to die …

Natural beauty is like all other forms of beauty: it contains the unity of content and form. As we study natural beauty, there are obviously some relatively independent factors contributing to formal beauty, but natural beauty is just like social beauty: we must begin by considering its social content. Because the natural world has multiple connections to society, its images have a dual nature. Many things can become beautiful under certain conditions, but under other conditions become ugly. This situation gives rise to the diversity and variation of natural beauty. Let us look at a few different aspects in some specific examples:

The green color of plant matter is a primary component of natural beauty. The green of fields, of mountain ranges, of the plains, of trees—it gives us a fresh and pleasant feeling. Throughout the natural world, green is the color of prosperity and development. What is the objective content that this feeling reflects? And how is this feeling of aesthetic appreciation produced? First and foremost, it is linked with the development of agricultural production. People know from their long-term engagement in agriculture that the greenery of plants is a reflection of agricultural abundance. It is an essential material condition for human survival, and it is bound up with prosperity and the attainment of a developed life. This feeling extends to the green of plants that are not grown by humans, and thus forms our aesthetic perception of the greenery of plant life. Green plants reflect vigorous growth, and represent the growth of life … This natural phenomenon allows people from all different classes to feel content related to their own lives. “Verdurization” is a method of “beautification.” Greening cities beautifies the lives of the working people, bringing fresh air, cool shade, and the vigorous posture of growing things …

But green is not always beautiful. Moldy green spots and ghosts that are “green-faced and jagged-toothed” are ugly … Naked branches and tree trunks in fall and winter are ugly. They express a life in decline and death. Humanity knows through practice that the withering and yellowing of leaves is a harbinger of the cold, and that the cold is detrimental to human life … Some say that natural beauty is the beauty of form, suggesting that dead leaves and branches are as beautiful as green plants. If that were true, why is it that we “green” cities and not “dry” them?

… Scenes of autumn’s growth are also beautiful: stems of rice heavy with seeds, bunches of bananas, pods bulging with beans, and lush bolls of cotton: the maturity of the cultivated plant is an expression of the full harvest of labor. If they do not grow healthily, ears of rice will be thin, bananas will be rotten, cotton bolls will be small and black, and beans will be withered with insect bites—an ugly image indeed …

The transformation of nature in the struggle for production fundamentally alters our perception of the beauty and ugliness of images. From understanding the laws of nature to the power to create a better life, humanity is in the midst of a struggle to conquer nature. Yet humans do not accomplish this with the body, but with their wisdom and labor, creating tools and machines to conquer nature …

Part three

There are two types of beauty in people: inner beauty and outer beauty. Namely, inner beauty is the beauty of the spiritual world, and outer beauty is the beauty of the human body. They are both expressed through form. For example, it’s commonly said that “the eyes are the windows to the soul,” and certainly the eyes are not only an expression of outer appearances, but can reveal the depths of one’s spiritual beauty. Being beautiful or ugly on the inside is like being beautiful or ugly on the outside—these can be aligned, or they can be in conflict. If we trace things back to their source, everything on the inside will, in the end, be expressed externally, forming a person’s external appearance. So to take stock of a person’s appearances on the basis of their looks is not just to look at their physiognomy, but to look holistically at the aesthetic significance of the innate character expressed in their social practice.

Humans are a composite of social relations. The spiritual appearance of the human reflects a person’s social relations, class position, and way of life. As far as the beauty or ugliness of one’s spiritual appearance is concerned, different classes of course have radically opposed standards of appraisal. To the landlord class, the slovenly spirit of the landlord who pores over voodoo accounting logs to calculate down to the last penny how much wealth he has squeezed from the land is exquisitely beautiful, yet to the peasants, this shows just how odious the nature of landlords truly is; the savagery of their countenance … When class positions differ, this difference could not be more clear in the appraisal of a person’s spiritual beauty …

To the proletarian artist, an indispensable factor in creating a work of art is the sensitive perception of the inner and outer aspects of the beauty of the laboring people. Those who believe that laboring people have “rough hands” and “dirty feet,” and are “not much to look at,” still wear white gloves in secret. They will never be able to produce a moving depiction of laborers. Capitalist artists have used all sorts of methods to beautify the idle lives of excess once led by rich ladies, dressing up their dark, pale spiritual worlds. They share the same stench, the same sentiments. Not only do proletarian artists understand the power and potential of the proletariat through reason; they also have a powerful perception of the beauty of the proletariat’s form and spirit, and they are driven by this feeling to create the image of the proletariat.

The beauty of the spiritual world and the altruism of ethics are one and the same. They are operative in the appraisal of beauty in the form of people. Artists, especially painters, are constantly using the method of taking the distinctive contours of one’s spiritual presentation to determine what the quintessential characteristics of a person’s appearance are. The painting Chairman Mao Travels the Country reveals the beauty of Chairman Mao’s spiritual world in a deep and moving manner, and the artwork chooses to show an outer appearance that takes its pointers from the Great Leader’s spiritual appearance.Footnote ⁶

But inner beauty is certainly not the same as a person’s outer appearance. The beauty of one’s outer appearance can be relatively independent of other factors. In the performing arts, the beauty of outer appearances cannot be overlooked. A good outer appearance can enhance the effectiveness with which the beauty of one’s internal world is expressed. Actors use their looks as a part of the conditions of their performance. It is wrong to believe that the proletariat does not understand the beauty of outer appearances, or to completely deny them. The beauty of outer appearances is composed of factors from social life, as well as elements that are naturally endowed. Yet these are certainly not unchangeable. In the presence of audiences, outstanding actors are constantly minimizing or completely obscuring the ugliness of their own appearances, such that the beautiful aspects can leave a deep impression in the audience’s hearts.

There are different class standards for the beauty of the human form. To workers, the human body is replete with a universal beauty. We should not take the sickly thin waist and small feet favored by the landlord class as truly beautiful. There are three basic conditions for the beauty of the outer appearance of human form: First, a healthy body. Healthy development of all body parts is the first condition for beauty, and a healthy human body possesses a powerful sort of beauty. Any state of disease is not beautiful. Humans are the product of their labor, and the healthy development of the body will always be closely linked with physical labor. A normal life, coupled with labor and exercise, produces a plump and sturdy body with a rosy complexion, such that all aspects of the limbs are well developed. This is a basic characteristic of outer beauty. In the old society, mental labor was opposed to physical labor, producing scholars with motionless limbs weak as chickens, as well as laborers whose bodies were deformed from excessive work. As for the exploiters and their ill-gotten wealth, their bodies betrayed the sickness and deformity produced by their extravagant desires and detachment from labor. Only in a socialist society can a person develop through the perfect combination of mental and physical labor.

The second condition is a body that is normal and fully developed. Humans possessing normal and evenly developed hands, feet, facial features, and bodies are beautiful. Deformation in any part of the body makes its overall image ugly, such as if one eye is especially large or one eye is especially small, or if a person only has one ear or three ears, or if their belly or neck is swollen. This gives us a sense of physical ugliness. These exceptional shapes hinder people from working and from living a normal life … It is quite common that some parts of a person’s body are beautiful, while some are not, but a body with normal, symmetrical, and appropriate development in all components is more beautiful …

Three, in terms of the course of a person’s life, images of youth are the most beautiful. Youth is like “the sun at eight or nine o’clock in the morning,” when a person has the most vigorous energy, when their musculature is strongest. It is a period of physical growth in which the body develops to its pinnacle. As we age, various organs in the body will gradually decline according to natural law. But this is just one part of the picture. Mental outlook is still the decisive factor in the overall appearance of a person. A person never ages in spirit, even after the passing of youth, and there will always be communist fighters full of vim and vigor. Even if the body ages, the overall image remains full of vibrancy and beauty. Their hair may be gray, but their ambitions remain the same, full of cheer and revolutionary optimism. When we encounter them, we can feel the beauty of their spiritual world from their outer appearance. But if one’s revolutionary will declines, individualism becomes a serious issue, sighing and frowning all day long. Even if their bodies are young with all parts normal, mentally they are dejected old codgers. The sight of them gives us an overall feeling of gloom and decrepitude. Humans are social and classed creatures, and wherever there are contradictions in outer and inner appearances of a person, it is spiritual beauty that plays the decisive role …

Part four

In terms of the specific analysis of beauty and ugliness, we can locate the essence of beauty in each aspect of life if we apply synthesis, and then identify the commonalities. What is beauty? What is ugliness? Beauty is the form of the newborn forces from within human society to resist and destroy the old things that impede the process of history; ugliness is the form of the destructive forces that oppress and ravage the new things that push history forward … This concept is a generalization of the most basic appearance of beauty and ugliness from within social life. If we put natural beauty aside, then according to this concept of beauty and ugliness, beauty in a socialist society is the form of all the people and things in life that demonstrates the flourishing and development of socialist life. It is those forms that the revolutionary laboring people take, by which they vanquish capitalism, feudalism, and other remnants of obsolete things, by which they triumph over natural disaster and create new socialist and communist life. Ugliness is the form of everything in our lives that expresses the people and things that are remnants of capitalism, feudalism, and other archaic lifestyles that are languishing; it is the form of the reactionary forces that impede and undermine the development of socialist life. This concept of beauty reflects the pacifist principles of society, and is consistent with the aesthetic tastes of the great progressive laboring peoples. And it is opposed to the aesthetic tastes of all of the rotten exploiting classes.

This concept of beauty clearly demonstrates that the beauty of life is the font of artistic beauty. It also clearly shows that only by creating art from the standpoint of the proletariat and laboring people can one truly reflect the beauty of life. This way of seeing beauty allows research into beauty both to follow objective rules, and to work as a powerful tool for breaking the rotten aesthetic viewpoints of the decaying classes …

In this way we can understand the beauty and ugliness of life, knitting aesthetics together with the most basic experiences of socialist arts and culture … We must strive to create images of the most advanced heroes amongst the working people, heroes who catalyze historical progress, so that we can both reflect and praise the beautiful and criticize the ugly in works of art and literature. Beauty can be created by criticizing things that are essentially ugly from a revolutionary point of view, and by fighting to eliminate ugly things. Works of art that depict ugliness in a naturalistic manner can only make the people feel their ugliness. Reflecting the beauty of socialist life requires us to stand in the proletariat’s shoes, and to vividly depict the creativity of the different types of labor in which the broad masses of working people engage. Moreover, we should express the high spirit they bring to labor, and how they thrive, without any limitation from technical issues …

The study of aesthetics can become a broad field with mass character, closely linked with the lives of the people, with communist education, and with the development of the arts. Like the poetry competitions that we have today, in the future the discussion of beauty and ugliness will become widespread, a commonplace affair. The task of aesthetics is not only to explain the phenomenon of beauty and ugliness, but to help people remake the world with a proletarian concept of beauty. The proletariat consciously changes the world according to the laws of social development, including the transformation of the people’s aesthetic views and way of living according to the laws of beauty and Marxist–Leninist aesthetics; the proletariat constantly sweeps things away and constantly creates new beauty within life. No matter how great the lengths required, the most beautiful communist society will surely arrive, and those living in this communist society will be the most beautiful flowers amongst beautiful flowers: the communist new person.

Commentary: toward a socialist vision of beauty

In the essay “On Beauty and Ugliness in Life,” the literary critic Yao Wenyuan takes up the task of articulating a positive vision of proletarian aesthetics. The essay was published in 1961, at a moment when the question of the aesthetic was particularly fraught in the People’s Republic of China. In the aftermath of the multiple failures of the Great Leap Forward, cadres in the cultural sphere seriously questioned the Maoist cultural project’s embrace of mass participation as a driving force of cultural production, asking why skilled artists working in traditional genres like ink painting had been sidelined in the production of culture of the PRC. In publishing “On Beauty and Ugliness in Life,” Yao waded into a wider debate on aesthetics and the direction of the PRC’s cultural development, offering a vision of the aesthetic that came to characterize much of the prominent art and culture produced in the PRC, especially during the Cultural Revolution.

According to Yao, the aesthetic is a framework for assessing the beauty or ugliness of an image, form, or vision that is explicitly situated within the social relations of a given society. If aesthetics are a property of social relations, then beauty and ugliness are a binary mapping onto the positive or negative vision of that society’s social relations. Beauty, therefore, does not and cannot exist in the abstract—not even natural beauty, which Yao contends did not exist prior to the emergence of the earliest human societies. Rejecting philosophical traditions from the sophists through to Immanuel Kant and David Hume, Yao dispenses with the idea that beauty is relative, subjective, or at all “in the eye of the beholder.” Instead, he grounds the aesthetic in an epistemology of reality that is objectively knowable through the senses, and proposes that beauty can accurately be assessed with reference to its ability to index social truth.

Although beauty, as an ideal, is not abstract, to Yao the appreciation of the aesthetic is fundamentally a question of form. Yao uses the term xingshi 形式 in multiple senses: as the shape or appearance taken by a person, a place, or a thing; as the embodiment of destructive or progressive and emancipatory social forces; as the underlying structure of an event, a lifestyle, or a knowledge; even as the medium or formal aesthetic choices made by an artist in a work of art. In turn, each of these presentations is permeated by the political, and indeed cannot stand apart from the political. This insight leads Yao, like many of his peers, to reject a concept of the aesthetic as a realm that stands apart from, or outside, society; it is a fundamental negation of the principle of art for art’s sake. The question of form is thus also a question of politics. Yao’s rendering of the sublime is not a question of that which is beyond comprehension, but rather a material and social phenomenon.Footnote ⁷ In that sense, Yao the aesthete is a strict formalist: to him, the work of the artist is to translate and distill the truth of life into a series of formal choices about appearance within a given medium: social truth distilled into a specific brush stroke in a painting, or a pose in a dance. Typification (dianxinghua 典型化) or identifying and highlighting the fundamental characteristics of the social types at hand, is the essential aesthetic trope of the proletarian artist, who applies it to reify the message carried by the work of art.

Today, Yao Wenyuan is remembered largely as one quarter of the Gang of Four, whose arrest and trial in the late 1970s and early 1980s signaled the end of the revolutionary period.Footnote ⁸ Scholarship on Yao understandably dwells on his involvement in the Cultural Revolution’s legacy of violent repression. Yao’s only biographer, for example, portrays him as the literary “cudgel 榜” of the more senior and powerful Gang members Zhang Chunqiao and Jiang Qing, under whose tutelage Yao’s career blossomed.Footnote ⁹ Yet grappling with the complex and lasting historical, cultural, and ideological legacies of the late socialist period also entails examining the key role Yao played in articulating the aesthetic vision of high socialist China, especially in his role as a member of the State Council’s Culture Group (国务院文化组), overseeing the development of the state’s most visible cultural projects (including national art exhibitions, major motion pictures, and international cultural exchanges, to mention a few.) The question here is not whether Yao can be rehabilitated. Rather, the point is to excavate Yao’s concept of the aesthetic within the context of its times, as well as its role in shaping the vision of socialist aesthetics that came to dominate the arts and culture of the Cultural Revolution.

Before Yao was known for being a member of the Gang of Four, he was an unknown young propagandist working in the Luwan District Party Committee Department in Shanghai. Born in 1931, Yao followed in the footsteps of his leftist literary critic father, Yao Pengzi, who had been jailed in 1934 by the Guomindang (Nationalist Party) for his radical activism. The younger Yao joined the Communist Party of China in 1948 at the age of seventeen, and published his first work of literary criticism the same year, on the Soviet writer Alexander Fadayev’s young-adult historical novel The Young Guard. The early 1950s campaign to criticize the writer Hu Feng, which came to be known as the Hu Feng clique counterrevolutionary incident (胡风反革命集团案), was a defining early moment in Yao’s career.Footnote ¹⁰ In 1954, Yao was just writing a manuscript titled On the Literary Thought of Hu Feng (论胡风文艺思想) when culture czar Zhou Yang published an essay which included the accusation that Hu Feng had misunderstood Marxist views of literature as “crude sociology” (庸俗社会学).Footnote ¹¹ According to biographer Ye Yonglie, Yao had actually known Hu since he was a teenager through his father, whose bookstore published Hu and several other authors connected to the League of Left-Wing Writers.Footnote ¹² Ye characterizes Yao as a Hu Feng fanboy who hoped to emulate the older writer by writing a book in praise of his role model, but he quickly repackaged his work into a series of trenchant attacks when the political winds shifted.Footnote ¹³ Although Yao’s original unpublished manuscript is not a matter of public record, his record of publication is: in the year 1955, Yao published exclusively criticism of Hu in a total of thirteen articles, or five more than he had published over the course of the previous seven years. He was twenty-three years old at the time.

Although many were ultimately involved in prosecuting and persecuting Hu, in terms of both literary criticism and legal proceedings, Yao’s writing substantiated Zhou’s prior accusation that Hu had seriously misunderstood the purpose of Marxist literature. The ensuing controversy ultimately changed the course of mainstream discourse on culture and condemned Hu and his purported “associates” to prison and hard labor over differences of opinion.Footnote ¹⁴ Yao’s first article criticizing Hu, “Distinguish Right from Wrong, Draw a Clear Line!” began to outline a view of proletarian aesthetics borne of class struggle,Footnote ¹⁵ or what Benjamin Kindler calls “partisan aesthetics.”Footnote ¹⁶ Where Hu saw literature as an autonomous field, Yao criticized him for attempting to fill in the gaps in Marxist thinking on culture with what he considered to be bourgeois intellectual traditions; for valuing minor characters 小人物, and for overlooking literature by and for the working class, among other concerns. Hu’s alleged embrace of subjectivity and philosophical idealism (唯心论) were of chief concern, as they both implied a worldview in which individual thought played a determining role in shaping the external world. Instead, according to Yao and Zhou Yang, art and culture should depict clear characters with clear positive archetypes (正面人物); meanwhile, Hu’s failure to recognize workers as a generative source of both art and theory betrayed the bourgeois sensibility lurking beneath his facade.Footnote ¹⁷ Yao would develop these ideas into a robust rejection of the notion that reality is at all subjective in the 1961 piece “On Beauty and Ugliness in Life,” where his concept of aesthetics flowed from this rationalist epistemological view of the real world.

In publishing “On Beauty and Ugliness in Life,” Yao emerged as a leading figure in the aesthetics debates of the 1950s and 1960s, a wide-ranging public conversation on aesthetics involving an estimated seventy different critics that cultural-studies scholar Laikwan Pang has characterized as “a rare philosophical debate with real vigor allowed during the Maoist period.”Footnote ¹⁸ The aesthetics debates were based in large part around criticism (and self-criticism) of the earlier aesthetic theory of Zhu Guangqian, the leading scholar on aesthetics since the Republican period and translator of Hegel’s Aesthetics.Footnote ¹⁹ Although Zhu wrote within broadly Marxist frameworks, his aesthetic views were deeply informed by his engagement with wider traditions of Western philosophy, especially that of Hegel and Benedetto Croce, even as he was later to repudiate parts of his views.Footnote ²⁰

In “On Beauty and Ugliness,” Yao forcefully rejects Zhu’s view of beauty as the unity of subjectivity and objectivity. Instead, he further articulates the Maoist cultural project’s dramatic rewriting of literature and art, removing aesthetics from a privileged space outside or independent of social relations, and fully resituating aesthetic considerations within them. Yao’s insistence that there is no personal truth and no circumvention of Marxist party orthodoxy was thus framed within the context of this discussion on aesthetics. If his ideas found resonance at the time of their publication, it was not because his thinking was an outlier, but rather because he clearly articulated trends that had already been developing in the revolutionary aesthetic traditions of twentieth-century China.

The cultural output of the early 1960s, when Yao’s essay was first published, was characterized by a reevaluation of form and genre prompted by the failures of Maoist cultural experiments in massification associated with the Great Leap Forward. High-level cultural cadres began to concede that new genres that had once held the promise of socialist cultural revitalization, such as folk-inspired woodcuts or artwork made by proletarian amateurs, had produced mixed results, failing to achieve high technical standards if they were made by the masses, or to connect with the masses if they were made by professionals.Footnote ²¹ Artists who practiced in genres that had been coded as the “traditional” foil to newborn socialist things rallied,Footnote ²² and party thinkers including Zhou Yang offered them theoretical accommodation, arguing that the skill and technical achievement of the professional artist represented an undeniable accumulation of artistic labor.Footnote ²³ When Yao singles out the artist Li Qi’s ink portrait of Mao Zedong at the Ming Tombs reservoir project for manifesting a unity of form and content matched by Mao’s inner and outer beauty, his comments reflect a renewed attempt to fill old bottles (figural ink painting, in this case) with new wine. His remarks also elevated the work to model status, and cemented the characteristics of the artistic genres that would become most distinctive to the aesthetic project of the high socialist period.

Many aspects of Yao’s essay are outdated or offensive, such as his belief in the necessity of extractive and prescriptive developmentalism, his self-assured stigmatization of disability and aging, and his sexualized aspersions of the bodies of women he labels bourgeois, to mention just a few. Yao’s belief in an epistemology of an objective reality that is sensorially knowable leads to the belief that morality is corporeal, rendering disability, gender, and sexuality sites of ideological scission. His aesthetic theory is imbued with a rigidity and dogmatism that are hallmarks of period thinking, and the fate of Hu Feng reminds us of the very real costs of an unabashedly partisan theory of aesthetics. Yet, as the film historian Ying Qian reminds us, dogmatism also needs to be contextualized as a historical occurrence indexing the depth of the challenges and crises of knowledge formation within the contentious and all-consuming revolutionary projects of the twentieth century.Footnote ²⁴ It is in that spirit that I offer this translation of Yao’s essay.