Patricia LaurenceProfessor Writer Critic

Sept. 4-11, 2001, 31-37

Since literature and politics are intertwined in China, writing has been organized in ways unfamiliar in the West. The Department of Propaganda of the CCP Central Committee exercises control over the national writers’ union and local writers’ unions. The national Chinese Union of Writers has a branch in each province. Deng Youmei, an elected officer of the Beijing Writers’ Union, said in an interview with the author in March that the Chinese Union of Writers currently has about 5,000 members, including novelists, translators, playwrights, poets and critics, 80 percent of whom were admitted after the Cultural Revolution.