Lu Ling's "The Battle" on the Low-lying Land, which was criticized in the early 1950s, is a
fiction that can withstand
all historical trials as to not only its thinking tendency, but its artistic value. As
we can see at present, its major subject matter of the War to Resist U. S. Aggression and Aid Korea and
its heroism and internationalism theme were still in line with the mainstream of the political culture of that
time. The author has profound art skills. and at the same time the fiction presents a quite good narrative
level and abounds in content of psychological realism. We could say that it accords with Mao Zedong's lit-
erature ideal very well. If the Chinese contemporary
literature for the workers,
peasants and soldiers had
had followed this direction, there should have been a different future. But finally, the fiction went
through all those criticisms, or in other words, it fell to'ruin. Looking into the articles that criticized Lu
Ling, we can see that they shockingly lapsed so much away from the criteria of literature criticism. What
is revealed is that in surveying the literature history of the 1950s, we definitely can' t ignore literature
criticism.