Yan'an Talks On Literature and Art - Legacy

Legacy

An immediate change in Chinese music that resulted from the Yan'an Talks was the growth in respectability of folk styles. Key quotations from "Yan'an Talks" form the basis of the section on "Culture and Art" in the Maoist text Quotations from Chairman Mao Zedong. The Gang of Four's dramatic interpretation of the Yan'an Talks during the Cultural Revolution led to a new Party-sanctioned form of political art, revolutionary opera. Conversely, certain forms of art, such as the works of Beethoven, Respighi, Dvorak, and Chopin, were condemned in Party papers as "bourgeois decadence". After the death of Mao and the rise of reformist leaders like Deng Xiaoping, who condemned the Cultural Revolution, the Yan'an talks were officially reevaluated. In 1982, the Party declared that Mao's doctrine that "literature and art are subordinate to politics" was an "incorrect formulation", but it reaffirmed his main points about art needing to reflect the reality of the workers and peasantry.