Liu Ya-tzu (May 1887-June 1958), the last outstanding poet of the traditional school. He also was known as a scholar and as the founder of the Xan-she (Southern Society).

Born in the Wuchiang district of Soochow, Liu Ya-tzu came from a land-holding literary family whose property provided means to educate several generations of its male members in the scholar-gentry tradition. His father, Liu Xien-tseng (1866-1912j, was a sheng-yuan, and his uncle was a scholar of mathematics and an expert calligrapher. Liu Ya-tzu began the study of the Confucian classics and T'ang poetry under his mother's guidance. By the age of 1 1 , he had begun to compose poetry and historical essays.

Having acquired a good classical education, Liu Ya-tzu distinguished himself by passing the sheng-yuan examination at the age of 15 (1902). Like many young men of his generation, he came under the influence of the reform movement led by K'ang Yu-wei and Liang Ch'ich'ao (qq.v.) and soon was swept into the revolutionary movement aimed at the overthrow of the Manchus and the establishment of a republican government in China. In 1902 Chang Ping-lin, Ts'ai Yuan-p'ei, Wu Chih-hui, and others organized the Chung-kuo chiao-yü hui [China education society] in Shanghai to promote modern education in China. The following year, the young Liu Ya-tzu joined this society and became a student at its new school, the Ai-kuo hsueh-she [patriotic institute], headed by Ts'ai Yuan-p'ei. In 1904—5 he was a student at the Tzu-chih hsueh-she [self-government academy] and an instructor at the Chienhsing kung-hsueh [constant action public school] .

In 1906 he joined the T'ung-meng-hui, founded by Sun Yat-sen, and became active in revolutionary work by writing patriotic essays and poems. Liu Ya-tzu's most important activity in this early period, however, was the founding of the Xan-she (Southern Society), originally an association of southern Yangtze men of letters in the Soochow-Shanghai-Hangchow area. With such writers as Liu Ya-tzu, Ch'en Ch'üping, and Kao Hsü as charter members, the group held its first meeting in Soochow on 13 Xovember 1909. The society became nationwide in scope and attracted many well-known writers; its membership grew from about 20 to more than 1,000. The Southern Society, the last important rallying point of traditional literature in the republican period, was also known as a group of politically conscious writers with radical and nationalistic sentiments. Its members were not formally committed to any political ideology, but the participation of such men as Huang Hsing, Sung Chiao-jen, and Ch'en Ch'i-mei (qq.v.) lent a revolutionary hue to the society during the period of the anti- Manchu revolt of 191 1 and the early years of the Chinese republic.

In 191 1-12 Liu Ya-tzu was active as a journalist in Shanghai, editing several newspapers which supported the revolutionary cause, including the T'ieh-pi pao, the T'ien-to pao, the Ming-sheng jih-pao, and the T'ai-p' ing-yang pao. He also seived briefly as secretary in the office of Sun Yat-sen in Nanking, but soon left this position to return to journalism in Shanghai, where he wrote articles attacking the peace negotiations between the revolutionaries and Yuan Shih-k'ai. After Yuan's accession to the presidency in February 1912, Liu Ya-tzu abandoned his political activities in disgust and returned to Wuchiang.

Liu devoted himself for several years to a literary career, writing poems and essays and editing the publications of the Southern Society. The group held semi-annual meetings, usually in Shanghai, and regularly published collections of literary works by its members. Between 1910 and 1923, 22 collections of poems and essays written by Southern Society members were published in 23 volumes, in addition to a volume of stories in 1917. During this period, Liu Ya-tzu also assembled a comprehensive collection of the literature of the Wuchiang district. Hundreds of rare books and manuscripts had to be copied by hand, and Liu himself copied some of these.

As head of the Southern Society during most of the 14 years of its existence, Liu Ya-tzu associated with writers and political figures throughout China. The end of the Southern Society came ostensibly as the result of a controversy over the relative merits of T'ang and Southern Sung poetry. One group, represented by Liu Ya-tzu, favored the traditions of T'ang poetry, and, among modern writers, preferred the works of the nineteenth-century poet and reformer Kung Tzu-chen (ECCP, I, 431-34). Another group, represented by Ch'en San-li and Cheng Hsiao-hsü (qq.v.) favored the "T'ung-Kuang" (T'ung-chih and Kuang-hsü, 1862-1908) style, w^hich traced its origins to the poetry of the Southern Sung period. The real reason for the controversy and subsequent end of the Southern Society, however, was Liu Ya-tzu's growing awareness of the inadequacy of the traditional Chinese literary language to express the ideas and aspirations of contemporary China. He was in full sympathy with the new movement, led by Ch'en Tu-hsiu and Hu Shih, which advocated the use of paihua [the modern vernacular] as a medium of literature. Liu himself changed to pai-hua in his prose writing, though he had to admit defeat in his attempts to write poetry in the vernacular. This change in Liu Ya-tzu's literary views finally led to his resignation from the Southern Society. In 1923 he organized the Hsin Xan-she (New Southern Society), a group which hoped to create a new literature for China by introducing significant currents of world thought to China and by reevaluating classical Chinese literature. The New S.outhern Society, however, had only limited success. Liu Ya-tzu was attracted to the new alignment of nationalist and revolutionary forces in south China. This was the period of the reorganization of the Kuomintang (1924) and the establishment of a new political regime in Canton. Liu, who had been promoting underground Kuomintang organizations in his native district, was made a member of the Kiangsu executive committee and head of the propaganda department. In 1926 he went to Canton to attend the Second National Congress of the Kuomintang; he was elected to the Central Supervisory Committee. However, he soon became disturbed by the attitude of Chiang Kai-shek, then military leader in Canton, toward the dispute between the party's left and right wings. A leftist member close to Liao Chung-k'ai, Liu Ya-tzu advocated the continuation of Sun Yat-sen's policies of admitting Communists to the Kuomintang as individuals and of alliance with the Soviet Union. Liu returned home from Canton, but he did not stay long; almost immediately he was forced to flee by Sun Ch"uan-fang, who was then in control of Kiangsu and east China. He remained for a few months in Shanghai, but was forced to escape to Japan in May 1927 at the time of the purge of Communist and leftwing Kuomintang elements by Chiang Kaishek. After almost a year of exile in Japan, Liu returned to Shanghai in April 1928. He refused to join the new National Government in Nanking, because he believed that its policies were at variance with those set forth by Sun Yat-sen in his final testament. Nevertheless, at the Fourth National Congress of the Kuomintang in 1931, he was reelected to the Central Supervisory Committee. In 1932 he was appointed head of the gazetteer office (T'ung-chih-kuan) of the Shanghai municipal government, and during the next few years he supervised the publication of several yearbooks and volumes of historical materials relating to Shanghai. »r- The outbreak of the Sino-Japanese war in mid- 1937 cut short these activities. For about three years Liu Ya-tzu Uved in Japaneseoccupied Shanghai, where he severed all political ties and led a secluded life, devoting himself to research on the members of the Ming imperial household who had resisted the Manchu conquerors in the second half of the seventeenth century. Liu Ya-tzu hurriedly left Shanghai in December 1940 because he was afraid he would be coerced into serving the puppet regime that had been established in Nanking in March 1940 under the leadership of Wang Ching-wei, the former Kuomintang leftist leader and sometime member of the Southern Society. Liu went to Hong Kong. At the time of the New Fourth Army Incident in January 1941, Liu sent a telegram to Chungking condemning the action as a serious threat to the wartime united front. He was expelled from the Kuomintang.

In December 1941, when the Japanese occupied Hong Kong, Liu Ya-tzu had to flee to the interior, abandoning his carefully collected library of materials on the southern Ming period. After traveling to a guerrilla base at Haifeng in southern Kwangtung, Liu Ya-tzu reached Kweilin in June 1942. For the next two years, he devoted himself almost entirely to literature and produced a large number of works. In 1944 he went to Chungking and returned to politics. He joined the China Democratic League in 1945; he also became a founding member of the San Min C^hu I Comrades Association and served as its chairman from 1946 to 1948. Liu Ya-tzu returned to Shanghai in late 1945. When postwar Kuomintang-Communist political tensions deteriorated into civil war, he found that because he was a member of the Democratic League he was not safe in Shanghai. He fled to Hong Kong in 1947 and joined a group of anti-Kuomintang dissidents. He participated in January 1948 in the organization of the Kuomintang Revolutionary Committee under the chairmanship of Li Chi-shen. In addition to Liu Ya-tzu, other prominent members of this group included Feng Yühsiang. Ho Hsiang-ning (the widow of Liao Chung-k'ai), and T'an P'ing-shan. In 1949 Liu moved to Peking, where he spent the remaining years of his life. After the Central People's Government was established, he served on its Government Council (1949-54). He also was a member of the standing committee of the National People's Congress (1954-58) and of the culture and education committee of the Government Administration Council. Because his health was poor, he avoided public functions and wrote very little, even cutting off family correspondence. He died of pneumonia in Peking in June 1958, at the age of 71. Liu Ya-tzu's principal contributions were in the realm of literature, especially poetry. He was one of the last outstanding poets of the traditional school and one of the most prolific writers of his age. He compiled only a few incidental volumes of his own writings, notably Ch'eng-fu chi [the raft], written in 1927-28, and Huai-chiu chi [remembrance of things past] of 1947. Most of his early poems and essays can be found in the twenty-odd collections of the Southern Society. A selection of his poetry, Liu Ya-tzu shih-tz'u hsuan, edited by his two daughters, Liu Wu-fei and Liu Wu-kou, was published in Peking in 1959. A devoted bibliophile and book collector, Liu Ya-tzu was also an indefatigable editor of his friends' literary remains, notably those of Su Man-shu (q.v.), whose collected works he published in 1928. Liu also enjoyed a poetical friendship with Mao Tse-tung, exchanging traditional verses with him on several occasions; and Liu may have had a hand in the composition of several of Mao's most famous poems, including "Snow — to the melody Ch' in-juan-ch' un," in which Mao by implication compares himself favorably with several major figures in Chinese history. Impractical in everyday affairs, Liu Ya-tzu was greatly dependent upon his wife, nee Cheng P'ei-i, whom he married in 1906. Throughout their long married life, she was his constant companion, accompanying him on his travels and sharing his misfortunes. A son, Liu W^u-chi (1907-), who was graduated from Tsinghua University, received a Ph.D. in English at Yale University in 1931 and later taught Chinese literature at Indiana University.