Character Structure and Cultural Conflict in Four Poplars by Four Poplars

Four Young Trees focuses on a cultural conflict in the countryside under the dictatorship of the proletariat. This conflict is manifested mainly through characters and structure.

The two types of culture are:

1. dictatorial culture, or revolutionary culture

2. traditional culture, or the four old cultures

The forces that represent the dictatorial culture are divided into three categories:

1. those who are bent on the revolution, who carry out the extreme leftist policies without any compromise, and who don't take into account the feelings of the people, as represented by the characters of Wan Fengyang, Wei Guangzheng, and Secretary Liu, etc.

2. those who are bent on revolution, who implement the extreme leftist policies without any compromise, and who don't take into consideration the feelings of the people.

2. those who were bent on revolution but understood the feelings of the people and were alert to the extreme leftist policies and were able to cope with them, represented by Li Qinglong, Bai Yuntian, Zhang Xuemei, Wan Roller, etc.

3. those who were politically ambitious and used the revolution to achieve their own ends, represented by Sun Zhihui, Immediately Crazy, etc.

The forces that represented the traditional cultures were divided into three categories of people:

1. the Taoist cultures, which borrowed The representative figures are Old Smokey, Zhou Jincai, Zhang Tianqi, etc.

2. Confucianism, based on teaching and educating people in the village, publicizes the traditional culture and fills the village with righteousness, represented by Zhang Zong'an, Zhang Zongxian, etc.

3. Evangelicalism, which takes advantage of the duel between the forces of the dictatorship and the forces of the old and the new to infiltrate the village and make the village people develop alternative explanations of their lives.

Between these two forces, there is another force that is active and balances the balance, so that the village does not fall into a collapse in the duel between the above two forces, represented by the three madmen.