In 1982, on the eve of my work in Zhengding County, Hebei Province, some acquaintances came to see me off, including Wang Yuanjian, a writer and screenwriter from Bayi Factory. He said to me, "When you go to the countryside, you should go deep into the peasant masses and mingle with the peasant masses, as Liu Qing did." In order to go deep into the life of farmers, Liu Qing served as the deputy secretary of the county party committee of Chang'an County, Shaanxi Province in 1952, and later resigned from the post of deputy secretary of the county party committee, retained the position of standing committee, and settled there in Huangfu Village, where he stayed for 14 years and concentrated on creating "History of Entrepreneurship". Because he has an in-depth understanding of the life of peasants in Guanzhong, Shaanxi, the characters in his pen are so lifelike. Liu Qing was well acquainted with the joys, sorrows, and sorrows of the villagers, and when the central government issued a policy involving the rural peasants, he could immediately imagine in his mind whether the peasant masses were happy or unhappy.

——Speech at the Symposium on Literary and Artistic Work (October 15, 2014)

Further reading:

Liu Qing, formerly known as Liu Yunhua, is a famous contemporary Chinese writer. Born into a poor peasant family, he began to write in the thirties of the 20th century, and in 1947 he published his first novel, "The Story of Planting Grain". In 1960, Liu Qing combined his 14 years of personal experience in the countryside to complete the epic novel "The History of Entrepreneurship", which established his position in the history of Chinese literature.

If Liu Qing is still alive, he will be just 100 years old in 2016. Unlike others who are poor in the study, he took the initiative to take root in Huangfu Village, Chang'an County, Shaanxi Province for 14 years, and is familiar with various characters, customs and psychological structures in the countryside, which provides him with inexhaustible living resources for creating "History of Entrepreneurship". It is precisely because of this that Liu Qing will become a diligent practitioner of the spirit of the Yan'an Literary and Art Symposium, and a model of "going deep into life and taking root in the people" in the literary and artistic circles.

Liu Qing is familiar with the joys, sorrows, and sorrows of the villagers, so he has successfully created a number of very successful literary images such as Liang Shengbao, Liang Sanlaohan, Guo Shifu, Yao Shijie, Guo Zhenshan, etc., and from these flesh-and-blood individual lives, it shows the magnificent historical style in the process of China's agricultural socialist transformation. Liu Qing does not sketch the characters in a single line, but digs deep and chisels, depicting the rich and complex inner world of the characters. Some people say that without 14 years of experience in the countryside, it is impossible to write a down-to-earth work like "The History of Entrepreneurship".

It is precisely because it is rooted in the people that it has won the enduring vitality and influence of "History of Entrepreneurship". In the history of contemporary Chinese literature, there is a saying of "three reds and one creation", which refers to the recognized red classics of "Red Flag Spectrum", "Red Rock", "Red Sun", and "History of Entrepreneurship".

"The question of why people is a fundamental question, a question of principle." In 1942, Mao Zedong put forward the fundamental direction of literature and art serving the workers, peasants, soldiers, and the people. After more than 70 years of turbulence, "for the people" has become the value background of socialist literature and art. In October 2014, at the symposium on literary and artistic work, Xi Jinping told the story of Liu Qing and the masses mingling, precisely in order to reaffirm the most basic value concept of "literature and art for the people" and calibrate the course for the development of socialist literature and art in today's profound changes in ideology and multiculturalism. Xi Jinping proposed to "adhere to the people-centered creative orientation", in his view, the people are not abstract symbols, but a concrete person, with flesh and blood, emotions, love and hate, dreams, and inner conflicts and struggles. Therefore, if we are people-centered, we cannot stop at slogans, still less can we replace the people's feelings with our own personal feelings. Heaven is the heaven of the world, and the earth is the land of China, and only by penetrating the roots into the masses can literature and art gain the inexhaustible strength to grow upward.