Tien Chien

(full name T’ung T’ien-chien) Born 1917 in Anhwei Province. Chinese poet. One of the founders of Chinese epic and peasant poetry.

T’ien Chien joined the Chinese League of Left-wing Writers. His first poetry collections, Before the Dawn (1935) and Chinese Pastorales (1936), criticized the Kuomintang regime. The heroes of the lyric epic poem China: A Rural Story (1936) were the popular masses rising in struggle. T’ien Chien wrote his best works during the war against Japan (1937–45). He helped found the genres of chieh t’ou shih (poems for the street) and ch’uan tan shih (propaganda poems); examples were in the collections To Those Who Fight (1943), She Will Also Kill (1947), and Poems About the War Against Japan (1949).

T’ien Chien’s topical poetry written for the masses was influenced by Soviet literature, especially the works of V. V. Mayakovsky. Beginning in the mid-1960’s, T’ien Chien’s works were no longer published.