Ye Shengtao (28 October 1894 – 16 February 1988) was a Chinese writer, journalist, educator, publisher and politician. He was a founder of the Association for Literary Studies (), the first literature association during the May Fourth Movement in China. He served as the Vice-Minister of Culture of the People's Republic of China. Throughout his life, he was dedicated to publishing and language education. He subscribed to the philosophy that "Literature is for Life" (). Biography Early life Ye was born on 28 October 1894 in Wu County, Jiangsu province. His name at birth was Ye Shaojun (), and his courtesy name was Bingchen (). His father worked as a bookkeeper for a landlord and they lived a very modest life. When he was six years old, he entered a mediocre school for primary study. He often followed his father to work. He travelled around the city and experienced the lives of the poor. In 1907, Ye entered Caoqiao Secondary School (). After his graduation, he worked as a primary school teacher, before being dismissed by the school in 1914. Finding himself unemployed, he devoted himself entirely to writing classical Chinese novels, which were published in "Libailiu Magazine" (《禮拜六》 "Saturday Magazine"), until he found work as the Chinese teacher of a school set up by the Shanghai Commercial Press (). At the same time, he became the editor of primary textbooks of the Shanghai Commercial Press in 1915. Ye had been living in an era of instability, including the 1894 Sino-Japanese War, the Hundred Days' Reform, and later the Sphere of Influence (). His early life experiences affected his sense of nationalism and contributed to his later career as a journalist and an educator. Career in literary movement Throughout his life, Ye worked a lot for literary movement. Under the influences of the May Fourth Movement in 1919 commonly known as the New Culture Movement, Ye indulged himself in his literary career. He participated in a student organization called 'Xinchao She' ("New Tide Society" 新潮社 1919-1920) of Peking University, and started publishing fictions, poems, prose, literary criticism and scripts of drama etc. Ye was also an editor in PuShe (樸社, 1923). In 1921, Ye, Mao Dun and Zheng Zhenduo founded the earliest literary society of the New Literature Movement, the "Wenxue Yanjiu Hui", (文學研究會 "Association for Literary Studies"), advocating realism art but rejecting the principle "Art is for Art's Sake".