1949

Xiao, Qian. Pei'er Jinte : yi bu qing suan ge ren zhu yi de shi ju [ID D26256].
Xiao schreibt : "Ibsen is no longer suitable for us, not only because he belonged to far away Northern Europe. Yet as a forerunner of our profession [writers], we cannot deny that he had observed the organization of society with critical eyes and pointed out its rotten parts. His weakness lay in the fact that he just attacked the corruptions of society but did not analyse the economic causes. Therefore he recongnized only the existence of the individual, but did not see that there were the masses. He advocated the improvement of the individual, but neber that of the environment. Ibsen was spiritually an anarchist.
Today China has stepped into socialism, in which everything is put under organization and becomes part of a larger syste, from the anarchism of thirty years ago, which produced a spirit of rebellion in favour of individualism.. We have inherited from Ibsen the poisonous idea of perfecting oneself without much care for the others. As for our self-reform, can Ibsen contribute something to compensate the losses he has caused us ? Yes, Ibsen can. He gives us Peer Gynt which has a grander atmosphere, profounder significance and higher artistic accomplishment than A doll's hous and An enemy of the people.

Tam Kwok-kan : Xiao believes that Ibsenism is no longer needed in China, not only because Ibsen was a writer of the last century, but also because he belongs to the faraway Northern Europe, where the society is essentially different from that in China. As a forerunner of literary realism, Ibsen, Xiao said, examined the organization of society with critical eyes and pointed out the roots of its evilness. Xiao believed that Ibsen's weakness lay in the fact that he attacked only the surface corruptions of society and did not analyze their economic causes. He therefore attacked Ibsen for his advocacy of individualism. He thought that Ibsen recognized only the importance of the individual and not of the masses, because Ibsen failed to relate the victimization of the individual to the injustice hidden in the social structure. Xiao claimed that Ibsen's play Peer Gynt should be read as a critique of individualism. According to Xiao Qian, the play is a caricature of selfishness as exemplified in the self-centered Peer Gynt. Xiao asserted that the object of attack throughout Peer Gynt was the idea of individualism.