One Village and One Novel

Abstract

Wenquantun is an ordinary village located in Zhuolu County of Hebei province, near the intersection of Hebei, Shanxi, and Inner Mongolia and less than 150 kilometers from Beijing. It is famous in Chinese history and literature due to Ding Ling’s 1948 novel The Sun Shines over the Sanggan River (Taiyang zhao zai sangganhe shang). This novel, which describes the first round of “land reform” in 1946 in Wenquantun (named as Wenshui Tun in the novel), won a second prize of the Stalin Literature Award in 1951. Ding Ling and the novel, which later became a “red classic,” have been subject to much debate in the history of the People’s Republic. Sixty-three years after the novel was published and during the same season in which Ding Ling and her land-reform team rode donkey carriages into Wenquantun village to begin land reform, authors of this chapter visited the village.

* Originally published in Zhongguo Jingji (Chinese economics) 10 (2009): 104–113.