“Red Sun” is a red classic novel written by contemporary Chinese writer Wu Qiang. It describes the war of liberation. During the two famous battles of Laiwu and Menglianggang, the East China Field Army annihilated the 74th Division of the Kuomintang ace army. s story. The novel shows magnificent battle scenes and epic heroic deeds, and successfully creates a series of flesh-and-blood artistic images such as Army Commander Shen Zhenxin and Company Commander Shi Donggen.
Wu Qiang (1910-1990), formerly known as Wang Datong, was a native of Gaogou Town, Lianshui County, Jiangsu Province. When he was young, Wu Qiang often entertained himself with literature. When he was in Huai’an Middle School, he and his classmates pooled money to mail-order books such as “The True Story of Ah Q”, “Death”, “Before and After Anyway” from Shanghai, and also founded the mimeographed publication “The Wind”. Publish their own poems, essays, and commentary on current affairs.
In February 1933, Wu Qiang joined the League of Chinese Left-wing Writers and began his revolutionary literary career. In September 1935, he published his first short story “Telegraph Pole” in the “Taibai” magazine sponsored by Chen Wangdao, and in the same year, he won the “Da Evening News” essay award for his short story “Bitter Face”. After the outbreak of the Anti-Japanese War, Wu Qiang abandoned his pen and joined the army, and joined the New Fourth Army in Yunling Village, Jing County, southern Anhui. During the War of Liberation, Wu Qiang served as the minister of six verticals of the East China Field Army, and experienced famous battles such as Lianshui, Laiwu, and Meng Lianggu.
On the morning of the second day after the victory of the Battle of Meng Lianggu (May 17, 1947), Wu Qiang witnessed Zhang Lingfu’s dream “immediately” at the entrance of the village where the troops were heading. The “Pride of Heaven” and “General Changsheng” of Yimeng No. 1 Peak finally lay on a door panel and were carried down from the mountain by soldiers of the People’s Liberation Army. From then on, he had the idea to weave a series of stories from the Lianshui Battle to Zhang Lingfu’s death in Menglianggang and write a novel. However, the troops marched every day to fight. When he was not fighting, he had to do ideological work to boost morale. He was busier than when he was fighting, and he couldn’t calm down to think about it, and he had no time to think about writing. What’s more, from Lianshui to Meng Lianggu, several diaries he recorded, together with the “Soldier’s News” collected by the 74th Division, were lost during the march across the Xinghe River at night, which made him very annoyed. I didn’t think about tea and rice for a few days.
However, Wu Qiang always wanted to write something in his heart, and that very “string” story was always lingering in his mind. It seemed that some magic power was inspiring him, thinking about walking, thinking about sitting, and thinking about the characters and plots in the book even in his dreams, which made him fascinated, a little crazy, a little crazy.
He once wanted to write a story with a beginning and an end, completely in accordance with the artistic requirements of creating typical characters, from the sea of life, and not limited by historical facts. But when you think about it, it doesn’t feel right. Because the battles of Laiwu and Menglianggang themselves are classics of war, shaping characters through these historical facts can not only rely on them, but also achieve two effects at the same time. But he wrote the history of the war: he wrote the history of the war, but he did not seek the history. Chengzheng seemed to be the base of the work, and many of the contents should have happened on this base and the growth intention came. Based on this conception, the basic situation and process of previous campaigns must be well-founded. The details of the story can be designed and fabricated by yourself. So he still didn’t start writing, and Xie Shi put the idea on hold.
In July 1949, Wu Qiang, as the missionary minister of the 10th Corps of Ye Fei and Wei Guoqing of the East China Field Army, marched south to Fujian and stationed in Xiamen. He was standing on the rough seaside, his heart agitated again. Liu Sheng, Shi Donggen, Qin Shouyun…these characters haunt his mind, making him sleepless all night, sometimes late at night, suddenly remembering a vivid detail in his dream, he sat in his clothes, turned on the electric light, and wrote down the detail. He wrote until the rooster broke dawn; sometimes he covered his face and cried for the shocking scene, so that Ye Fei and Wei Guoqing mistakenly thought that he and his lover had a relationship crisis, and came to mediate and persuade him seriously, making him unable to laugh or cry.
In 1952, Wu Qiang transferred to the local area and served as the deputy director of the Art Department of the Culture Department of the East China Military Region Committee, the deputy director of the Literature and Art Department of the Propaganda Department of the East China Bureau of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China, and the Shanghai Literature and Art Work of the Communist Party of China. Secretary of the Committee, etc. In 1953, he joined the Chinese Writers Association and the Chinese Dramatists Association, and served as a member of the Party Group of the East China Federation of Literary and Art Circles, the Party Secretary and Vice Chairman of the Shanghai Branch of the Writers Association, and a director of the Chinese Writers Association.
Shortly after transferring to the local area, Wu Qiang completed the story outline and character list of “Red Sun” with more than 80,000 words. At this time, he basically knew what to do. In the spring of 1955, after a long period of artistic conception, Wu Qiang hid in Nanjing with the outline of the story of “Red Sun” and a large suitcase of materials, and began to construct this vast project. Although the brewing and thinking time is relatively long, there are so many ready-made literary and dramatic story frameworks as the basis for further artistic processing. It’s not that he did it lightly, but when he wrote such a battle story into a novel, he always felt that he was doing something risky.