Mao Dun

Mao Dun was the pen name of Shen Dehong, also known as Shen Yanbing, a Chinese novelist, essayist, journalist, playwright and critic who lived from 1896 to 1981. He was celebrated for realist novels such as Midnight, which portrays life in cosmopolitan Shanghai. A founder of the Chinese Communist Party, he took part in left-wing cultural movements of the 1920s and 1930s, edited the magazine Fiction Monthly, helped lead the League of Left-Wing Writers and was a close friend of Lu Xun. From 1949 to 1965 he served as the first Minister of Culture of the People's Republic of China. He also wrote essays, scripts, short stories and novellas, translated Western literature, and did much to popularize Walter Scott in China through a critical biography. His pen name means contradiction, combining the characters for spear and shield, to express the tension in the revolutionary ideology of his day.