The Rice-Sprout Song: la danza macabra dei contadini cinesi

The peasants’ life, traditionally a remote peripheral reality for the Chinese cultural élites, and the highly marginalized propaganda literature converge in the novel by Zhang Ailing, a bilingual Shanghainese woman writer who occupies a hyper-canonical place in the Sinophone literary world. The novel, written in English and self-translated into Chinese, was commissioned by the United States Intelligence Service in the 1950s as part of its cultural activities aimed to prevent the spread of communism in Asia, and provides a realistic portrait of the miserable daily life of peasants under the Land Reform implemented by the new-born People’s Republic of China. While making a harsh criticism of Chinese communism, the author, faithful to her poetics, subverts the conventions of propaganda literature in a tale that unites the oppressed and the oppressors in a common destiny of desolation. Ignored by the us public for its non-conformity with the tones and clichés of the Red Scare, and marginalized in the writer’s production because of its propaganda origins, the novel bears witness to Zhang Ailing’s resistance to the pressure of the ideological clash that marks the Cold War era and reveals her refusal to being assimilated into the ghettoizing role of native informant, assigned to the Chinese intellectuals who took refuge in the us following the Communist Party’s takeover of China.