In the surging tide of reform and opening up, China's literature has broken with gathering momentum the fetters of the "Cultural Revolution", when literature was taken for a mere political instrument, and made bold attempts. In the early phase of reform and opening up, a number of middle-aged writers, led by Wang Meng, were the first to put the mode of writing of Western modernist literature into the creation of realistic literature and achieved certain success. Then some young writers such as Liu Suola and Xu Xing attracted the attention of the literary circle with their newer forms of creation. From the late 1980s, after the post-new trend novels appeared, a wave of formalism began to try to overturn completely the traditional realistic mode of writing. The principles they formulated, such as "primitive state", "zero-emotion", "natural man", "instinctism", "unfamiliarizing" and "language cult", caused literature creation to go from one extreme to the other.