Ye Shengtao
| Ye Shengtao | |||||||||
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| Traditional Chinese | 葉聖陶 | ||||||||
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| Simplified Chinese | 叶圣陶 | ||||||||
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| Transcriptions | |
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| Standard Mandarin | |
| Hanyu Pinyin | Yè Shèngtáo |
| Wade–Giles | Yeh Sheng-t'ao |
Ye Shengtao (28 October 1894 – 16 February 1988) was an influential Chinese author, educator and publisher. He was a founder of the Association for Literary Studies (文學研究會), the first literature association during the May Fourth Movement in China. He served as the Vice-Minister of Culture of the People's Republic of China.
Throughout his life, he was dedicated to publishing and language education. He subscribed to the philosophy that "Literature is for Life" (文學為人生).
Ye was born on 28 October 1894 in Wu County, Jiangsu province. His name at birth was Ye Shaojun (葉紹鈞), and his courtesy name was Bingchen (秉臣). His father worked as a bookkeeper for a landlord and they lived a very modest life. When he was six years old, he entered a mediocre school for primary study. He often followed his father to work. He travelled around the city and experienced the lives of the poor.
In 1907, Ye entered Caoqiao Secondary School (草橋中學). After his graduation, he worked as a primary school teacher, before being dismissed by the school in 1914. Finding himself unemployed, he devoted himself entirely to writing classical Chinese novels, which were published in “Libailiu Magazine” (《禮拜六》 “Saturday Magazine”), until he found work as the Chinese teacher of a school set up by the Shanghai Commercial Press (商務印書館上海印刷廠). At the same time, he became the editor of primary textbooks of the Shanghai Commercial Press in 1915.
Ye had been living in an era of instability, including the 1894 Sino-Japanese War, the Hundred Days' Reform, and later the Sphere of Influence (列強割據). His early life experiences affected his sense of nationalism and contributed to his later career as a journalist and an educator.
Throughout his life, Ye worked a lot for literary movement. Under the influences of the May Fourth Movement in 1919 commonly known as the New Culture Movement, Ye indulged himself in his literary career. He participated in a student organization called 'Xinchao She' (“New Tide Society” 新潮社 1919-1920) of Peking University, and started publishing fictions, poems, prose, literary criticism and scripts of drama etc. Ye was also an editor in PuShe (樸社, 1923). In 1921, Ye, Mao Dun and Zheng Zhenduo founded the earliest literary society of the New Literature Movement, the "Wenxue Yanjiu Hui", (文學研究會 "Association for Literary Studies"), advocating realism art but rejecting the principle “Art is for Art's Sake”. In 1936, Ye, Mao Dun and Hong Shen (洪深) established the "Chinese Literature and Art Society" (Zhongguo Wenyi jia Xiehui 中國文藝家協會). In 1941, he became an editorial committee of the "Teaching for Literature and History"” (Wenshi Jiaoxue 文史教學). Ye was one of the establishers of the "Literary Alliance for Anti-Japanese Imperialism" (文藝界反帝抗日大聯盟).
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