NOTES Forty Years of the Yenan Talks FORTY years ago, from May 2 to May 23, Mao Zedong spoke on Art and Literature at Yenan. The talks are one of the major documents of a socialist position on arts. The fact that they were delivered right at the time when Japanese guns were thundering all over China and the Chinese Communists were fighting both Japanese Imperial-ism and the Kuomintang betrayal makes them a remarkable document. It underlines that arts were very much a part of the battle that Mao and his colleagues were fighting and that theories of the arts are very much a part of a people's existence, their victories and defeats, their survival and their death. Art is not something precious recapitulated "in tranquility". China celebrated recently the fortieth anniversary of these talks. Major Chinese newspapers and journals carried articles on the famous Yenan talks. To begin with, the spate of articles demonstrated that Mao, the maker of the Chinese revolution, has not been and cannot be forgotten. The creative element in his thinking and the wide scope of his thought are just too phenomenal to be ignored by any detractor of Mao and the Chinese revolution. No doubt there is considerable controversy over the Maoist heritage, especially of the last decade of his life. Indeed, writing on the occasion of the fortieth anniversary, the People's Daily/m its commentary, stated that while it was true that his (Mao's) thoughts on Literature and Art as also his other theories had at times overstepped the limits of history, especially during the last decade, there were several valuable and correct formulations in them. The commentary published on May 23, 1982, chose three thoughts of Mao as of special significance. The one was a quote from his writing of 1957 on the correct handling of contradictions, namely, "letting a hundred flowers blossom and a hundred schools of thought contend is the policy for promoting the progress of the arts and the sciences and a flourishing socialist culture in our land". Let a hundred flowers blossom, let a hundred schools of thought contend, for short: a quote which had become almost a catch phrase in 1956-57 •in China. The second is his comment that "the past should be made to serve the present and the foreign to serve China" (L e.