A Collective Grief: Catharsis and Legitimation in Scar Literature

In April 1978, a group of students from 复旦大学 Fùdàn Dàxué, Fudan University, was preparing a literary wall newspaper. Among the texts to be displayed was a story written by one of their peers, a first-year student named 卢新华 Lú Xīnhuá. The story did not speak of production, class struggle, or revolutionary heroes. It spoke of a mother and a daughter. The story was titled《伤痕》Shānghén, The Scar (or The Wounded).

When it appeared on the wall, students began gathering around those pages, some visibly moved. The text circulated by hand throughout the university and eventually reached the editorial office of the Shanghai newspaper《文汇报》Wénhuìbào. On August 11, 1978, the newspaper published the story. The reaction was extraordinary: over the following months, 卢新华 Lú Xīnhuá received nearly three thousand letters from readers across the country—workers, peasants, students, and soldiers who recognized something of their own experience in the story of his characters.

The protagonist of The Scar is 王晓华 Wáng Xiǎohuá, a young woman who, during the Cultural Revolution, accepts as true the accusation that her mother is a traitor and decides to sever ties with her:

妈妈被打成了“叛徒”，我当时真像跌进了万丈深渊。我怎么也想不到，一向受我尊敬、爱戴的妈妈，竟会是一个“阶级敌人”！

Māmā bèi dǎchéng le “pàntú”, wǒ dāngshí zhēn xiàng diējìn le wànzhàng shēnyuān. Wǒ zěnme yě xiǎngbudào, yīxiàng shòu wǒ zūnjìng, àidài de māmā, jìng huì shì yī gè “jiējí dírén”!

My mother was branded a "traitor"; at that moment, I felt as if I were falling into a bottomless abyss. I could never have imagined that my mother, whom I had always respected and devotedly loved, would turn out to be a "class enemy"!

在当时那种狂热的气氛下，我也顾不得去仔细想一想这究竟是怎么回事，我只知道自己是共青团员，应当听党的话，站稳阶级立场。

Zài dāngshí nà zhǒng kuángrè de qìfēn xià, wǒ yě gùbude qù zǐxì xiǎng yī xiǎng zhè jiūjìng shì zěnme huí shì, wǒ zhǐ zhīdào zìjǐ shì gòngqīngtuányuán, yīngdāng tīng dǎng de huà, zhànwěn jiējí lìchǎng.

Under that atmosphere of fanaticism back then, I did not even stop to reflect carefully on what was actually happening; I only knew that I was a member of the Communist Youth League, that I had to obey the word of the Party and stand firm in my class stance.

我流着泪，咬着牙，写了和她断绝母女关系的声明。

Wǒ liúzhe lèi, yǎozhe yá, xiě le hé tā duànjué mǔ-nǚ guānxì de shēngmíng.

Weeping, and gritting my teeth, I wrote the formal declaration severing all mother-daughter ties with her.

After drafting the declaration, the young woman leaves for the countryside and spends nine years separated from her family. When the accusation is finally proven false and she returns to seek out her mother, she discovers that her mother has just died. For nine years, 王晓华 Wáng Xiǎohuá lived convinced that political loyalty required sacrificing the family bond. Now she discovers too late that what she had considered a moral duty was also the cause of her irreparable loss. The scar does not belong solely to the persecuted mother: it belongs to the relationship between the two, destroyed by a political logic that turned even the most intimate bonds into objects of ideological classification.

The publication of《伤痕》Shānghén, The Scar, gave a name to a literary phenomenon that already had antecedents, among them《班主任》Bānzhǔrèn, The Class Teacher, by 刘心武 Liú Xīnwǔ, published in 1977. But 卢新华 Lú Xīnhuá's story became its emblem because it succeeded in transforming an individual experience into a recognizable one for millions of readers. 伤痕文学 shānghén wénxué, Scar Literature, had found an image to name the wounds of an entire society.

 The Unnameable Wound

To understand the impact of The Scar, one must recall what kind of literature had predominated during the Cultural Revolution. Ever since the《在延安文艺座谈会上的讲话》Zài Yán'ān wényì zuòtán huì shàng de jiǎnghuà, "Talks at the Yan'an Forum on Literature and Art" by 毛泽东 Máo Zédōng, delivered in 1942, literature and art had been conceived fundamentally in terms of revolutionary politics. During the Cultural Revolution, this conception reached one of its most rigid forms.

The so-called 三突出 sān tūchū, three prominences, required emphasizing positive characters, then heroes among them, and finally the principal hero. The canon of model works thus privileged a seamless revolutionary subjectivity. The primary conflict had to be political and class-based; characters had to be judged according to their position within the revolutionary struggle.

This does not mean that suffering, feelings, or family relationships did not exist during the Cultural Revolution. It means something more precise: certain forms of suffering lacked aesthetic and political legitimacy to become the centerpiece of a public work.

The problem posed by The Scar consists precisely in placing a young woman mourning her mother where the revolutionary hero was supposed to be. The difference is immense. The suffering of 王晓华 Wáng Xiǎohuá produces no revolutionary enthusiasm. It does not lead to a victory. It does not culminate in an image of glorious sacrifice. The protagonist discovers that she has obeyed a political logic and that this obedience has cost her something she can no longer recover.

Hence, the story introduces a question that the official literature of the Cultural Revolution had tended to exclude: what happens when a political category comes into conflict with an elemental human bond? The answer given by The Scar is brutally simple: it can destroy it.

From Private Pain to Political Problem

The strength of Scar Literature lies in having converted that individual question into a collective experience.

After 1976, the new leadership needed to revise much of the legacy of the Cultural Revolution. The dispute was not merely literary. In 1977–1978, differing views clashed over how the past should be interpreted and, above all, how the validity of a policy should be determined.

On May 11, 1978, 光明日报 Guāngmíng Rìbào published《实践是检验真理的唯一标准》Shíjiàn shì jiǎnyàn zhēnlǐ de wéiyī biāozhǔn, "Practice Is the Sole Criterion for Testing Truth," a text by 胡福明 Hú Fúmíng subsequently revised by other contributors. The publication triggered the so-called 真理标准大讨论 Zhēnlǐ biāozhǔn dà tǎolùn, "Debate on the Criterion of Truth," one of the fundamental episodes in the struggle to redefine political legitimacy following the chairmanship of 毛泽东 Máo Zédōng.

The connection between this debate and Scar Literature should not be understood as a mechanical cause-and-effect relationship. They are distinct phenomena. Yet both participated in a shared transformation: the past began to be evaluated by its concrete consequences and not solely by the authority of those who had issued the policies. Literature rendered that evaluation visible in the form of human experience.

A theoretical article could state that a policy should be judged by its results. A story could show what that principle meant in the life of a young woman who arrives too late at her mother's deathbed. In that sense, The Scar can be read as a kind of narrative moral experiment: what happens when a society makes ideological obedience the supreme criterion and allows politics to dictate who deserves to be a father, mother, child, friend, or enemy?

The answer lies in the title. A policy can end. A campaign can end. Even an unjust verdict can be overturned. But a human relationship destroyed by that policy cannot necessarily be rebuilt.

Weeping and Its Limits

Scar Literature thus opened a new space for the expression of grief. However, it would be overly simplistic to describe this phenomenon as a sudden liberation of individual subjectivity: this new space had limits.

A significant portion of Scar Literature identified the origin of the disaster with the excesses of the Cultural Revolution and, particularly, with the 四人帮 Sìrénbāng, Gang of Four. That interpretation made it possible to condemn past suffering without necessarily questioning the legitimacy of the political system as a whole. Indeed, the production of these works received support and dissemination through official organs, and the movement contributed to legitimizing the new political era.

This explains a fundamental paradox: Scar Literature could simultaneously be a literature of denunciation and a literature of legitimation. It denounced the destruction of lives, families, and careers wrought during the Cultural Revolution. Yet that denunciation could be absorbed into the political narrative of the new period: acknowledging past wounds proved that the new leadership was willing to rectify past mistakes. Weeping, then, was not merely subversive; it was also politically usable.

This does not imply that writers or readers were mere instruments of a state strategy. The vast volume of letters received by 卢新华 Lú Xīnhuá demonstrates precisely the opposite: readers used literature to articulate experiences that had lacked an adequate public form for years.

The relationship between literature and power was therefore more ambiguous: the State opened certain expressive spaces because they served its own political transformation, but readers filled those spaces with memories, losses, and emotions that exceeded any official agenda.

A Society Learning to Weep

Perhaps that is why the most fitting image for understanding Scar Literature is not solely that of a denunciation, but that of a politically framed catharsis. During the Cultural Revolution, literature had privileged the revolutionary hero. After 1976, another character began to emerge: the victim, and along with it appeared another legitimate emotion: mourning.

The Scar is particularly significant because it does not portray its protagonist as a heroine who had discovered the truth from the outset. 王晓华 Wáng Xiǎohuá errs: she believes the accusations and breaks ties with her mother. Only after her mother's posthumous political rehabilitation does she understand. This structure is crucial because it shifts the tragedy from the simple persecution of the innocent toward a much deeper problem: the internalization of ideology by the victims themselves.

王晓华 Wáng Xiǎohuá is not merely a victim of those who persecuted her mother. She is also a victim of a morality that managed to convince her that abandoning her mother was the right thing to do. That is why the wound is twofold: just as the mother loses her daughter, the daughter loses her mother. And when she finally discovers that both were torn apart by an unjust accusation, no reparation remains possible.

That is perhaps the deepest meaning of Scar Literature: not merely to remember what happened, but to demonstrate that a society may take years to discover what kind of damage was inflicted by that which it had called "revolution" for so long.

In December 1978, the Third Plenary Session of the 11th Central Committee institutionalized the major political pivot that would lead to 改革开放 gǎigé kāifàng, Reform and Opening-up. Scar Literature was not the cause of that shift, but it formed part of the new intellectual atmosphere that allowed the Cultural Revolution to be viewed retrospectively as a destructive experience that had to be overcome.

Literature had accomplished something that political documents could not achieve with equal efficacy: it had placed a face, a family, and an irreparable loss where previously there had only been ideological categories. And perhaps that is why so many wept upon reading it. They were not weeping solely for 王晓华 Wáng Xiǎohuá. They were weeping because, for the very first time, they could publicly recognize their own scars. 

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Lu, X. (1979). The wounded. In G. Barmé & B. Lee (Trans.), The wounded: New stories of the Cultural Revolution (pp. 9–24). Joint Publishing.

Lu, W.-B. (2001). 公共痛苦中的历史信赖——论“伤痕文学”时期小说的历史叙事 [Historical trust in public pain: Historical narration in the period of “Scar Literature”]. 华东师范大学学报（哲学社会科学版）Huádōng Shīfàn Dàxué Xuébào (Zhéxué Shèhuì Kēxué Bǎn), 33(1), 13–19.

Yang, M., & Kuiken, D. (2016). “Scar”: A social metaphor for working through revolution trauma. Frontiers of Literary Studies in China, 10(2), 318–342.

This article was originally published in Spanish: Un dolor colectivo. Catarsis y legitimación en la literatura de cicatrices