We know from the speeches of the first meeting of literary celebrities in July 1949, that the new cultural leaders of China intended, from the very beginning, to carry out some kind of widespread literary popularization in the country. The meaning of popularization, not to speak of the means of achieving it was, however, by no means self-evident. Mao, in his speeches in Yenan in 1942, had spoken of two kinds of literature existing side by side: one adapted to the needs of the great majority of workers, peasants and soldiers, and another, more advanced kind, serving the cadres. In the communist areas, under wartime conditions, this might have been an adequate picture. The great majority of the recipients of the literary efforts in those areas were illiterate, and special forms of popular theatre had to be adopted to cater to their needs. Genres such as the novel, the short story etc., by their very nature belonged to the more advanced kind. From 1949 on, however, when the readership broadened to include the literate workers and the middle and upper classes of the cities, the diversity of levels and needs threatened to undermine the simplicity of the above criteria. Both the mass literature and the advanced literature developed during the Yenan period had a strong rural tinge that did not particularly appeal to urban residents. The fact that the Chinese Communist revolution since the thirties had been out of real contact with the city proletariat became a serious problem for literary creation in the fifties.