Guo Moruo

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Guo Moruo (Chinese: 郭沫若; pinyin: Guō Mòruò; Wade-Giles: Kuo Mo-jo, courtesy name Dǐng Táng 鼎堂) (November 16, 1892 - June 12, 1978) was a Chinese author, poet, historian, archaeologist, and government official from Sichuan, China.

In 1914, after receiving Chinese traditional education, he left China, and his arranged bride, to study medicine at Kyushu Imperial University (九州帝国大学) in Japan. There he fell in love with a Japanese woman who became his common-law wife. His studies at this time focused on foreign language and literature, namely that of: Spinoza, Goethe, Walt Whitman, and the Bengali poet Tagore. Along with numerous translations, he published his first poem anthology, titled The Goddesses (女神) (1921). He was one of the co-founder of the Ch'uang-tsao she ("Creation Society") in Shanghai, which promoted modern and vernacular literature. He joined the Communist Party of China in 1927. He was involved in the communist Nanchang Uprising and fled to Japan after its failure. He stayed there for 10 years studying Chinese ancient history until he returned in 1937 to join the anti-Japanese resistance.

Along with holding important government offices in the People's Republic of China, he was a prolific writer, not just of poetry but also fiction, plays, autobiographies, translations, and historical and philosophical treatises. He was the first President of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences and remained so from its founding in 1949 until his death in 1978. He was also the first president of University of Science & Technology of China (USTC), a new type of university established by the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) after the founding of the New China[1] and aimed at fostering high-level personnel of science and technology absolutely necessary for the development of the national economy, national defense construction, and education in science and technology. He produced his study of inscriptions on oracle bones and bronze vessels, Liang Chou chin wen tz'u ta hsi t'u lu k'ao shih (1935 “Corpus of Inscriptions on Bronzes from the Two Chou Dynasties”). In this work, he attempted to demonstrate, according to Communist doctrine, the “slave society” nature of ancient China.

In 1966 he was one of the first to be attacked in the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. He confessed that he had not properly understood the thought of Mao Zedong, and agreed that his works should be burned. Unlike the others similarly attacked, Guo Moruo was not stripped of all his official positions and had regained much of his powers by the seventies.

Guo Moruo was awarded the Lenin Peace Prize (1951).