Background
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of death and graphic violence.
Historical Context: The Second Sino-Japanese War and the Occupation of China
Red Sorghum is set during the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937-1945), a brutal conflict that became the Asian theater of World War II. According to historian Rana Mitter, China suffered over 14 million casualties during the eight-year war, a staggering human cost that reshaped its social and political landscape while also disrupting the country’s nascent modernization (Mitter, Rana. Forgotten Ally: China’s World War II, 1937-1945. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2013).
Mo Yan grounds the novel’s extreme violence in this historical reality. The narrative’s setting in rural Shandong province, an area subjected to a harsh Japanese occupation, provides the context for events like the brutal flaying of Arhat Liu and the Mid-Autumn Festival massacre. The Japanese Imperial Army’s “Three Alls Policy” (sankō sakusen, “kill all, burn all, loot all”) was a scorched-earth strategy implemented in North China to crush resistance (Fairbank, John King, Goldman, Merle. China: A New History. 2nd enlarged ed., Harvard University Press, 2006). This policy is reflected in the novel when Japanese forces torch the village and indiscriminately slaughter its inhabitants.
Within the novel, the chaos of the war allowed for the rise of local figures like Commander Yu Zhan’ao, a bandit who becomes a guerrilla leader. By fighting both the Japanese and rival Chinese forces, he embodies the complex and often brutal struggle for survival and power that defined the era, where the lines between hero, bandit, and warlord were frequently blurred. The war’s devastation transforms the landscape itself into a site of trauma, where “the river was filled with water as black as blood; the fields were covered with sorghum as red as blood” (81).
Literary Context: China’s Root-Seeking Literary Movement
Published in 1986, Red Sorghum is a key work of the “root-seeking” (xúngēn) literary movement that emerged in China during the 1980s. This movement was a direct reaction against the artistic and ideological constraints of the Mao era (1949-1976), particularly the Cultural Revolution, which saw the destruction of many cultural, historical, and religious sites across China. Root-seeking writers associated the Cultural Revolution with the loss of China’s pluralistic identity, which they could only reclaim by driving appreciation for local cultures, traditions, and histories. They accomplished this by exploring folk mythologies, regional cultures, and pre-communist history in order to engage in wider dialogue with other cultures around the globe (Hong, Zicheng. A History of Contemporary Chinese Literature. Translated by Michael M. Day, Brill, 2008). Han Shaogong, whose novella Pa Pa Pa (1985) explores primal myths and rural mysticism, is considered the key figure of the movement, thanks to his 1985 essay “The ‘Roots’ of Literature,” in which he outlined the aims of the literary movement. Other root-seeking writers include Ah Cheng, whose novellas like The Chess Master (1984) are often set in his province of Yunnan and prominently featured Daoist and Confucian motifs, and Wang Zengqi, whose works explore his childhood in Jiangsu province.
Mo Yan turns to his hometown to unearth a more visceral past. Red Sorghum exemplifies the root-seeking style through its nonlinear narrative, magical-realist elements, and an unapologetic focus on sexuality, bodily functions, and extreme violence. The novel’s characters, particularly the “most heroic and most bastardly” (4) figures of Commander Yu and Dai Fenglian (or “Grandma”), defy the moral and political archetypes of the Cultural Revolution. By celebrating their anarchic vitality and flawed humanity, Mo Yan rejects the sanitized narratives of the recent past and forges a raw, mythic, and often disturbing vision of Chinese national character rooted in the blood-soaked sorghum fields of his homeland.
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