The Front Line: Remembering Our Land

From 1938 to 1944, as Japan invaded China and the country was torn apart, a large number of patriotic, progressive cultural figures, including Xia Yan, Guo Moruo, Tian Han, Ba Jin, Liu Yazi, Tao Xingzhi, Xu Beihong, Mao Dun, and Ouyang Yuqian, gathered in Guilin under the leadership and encouragement of the Communist Party of China. Together with the Guilin Eighth Route Army Office, represented by Li Kenong, they turned their pens into weapons and the stage into a battlefield amid the region's breathtaking scenery. Through a series of cultural movements in journalism, literature, theater, music, and fine arts, they promoted the national united front against Japanese aggression. Exile and renewal, hardship and responsibility, life and death, personal feelings and national sentiment were all transformed into a cultural Great Wall against foreign invasion, in a "cultural resistance war" fought without gunfire.