The earliest recorded Chinese literature that has survived consists of folk songs mixed with verses and rhymes. Two factors determined the general pattern of subsequent development in Chinese literature: the nature of the written Chinese language and the establishment of the Confucian school as the orthodoxy in literary criticism. By 1800 there were more books printed in Chinese than there were printed in all other languages combined. The main body of the massive collection of Chinese books included histories and commentaries on Confucian classics, but even manuals on herb medicine were written in the same stilted classical language, and were treated as proper literature. The ideological trend in Chinese literature from the 1920's on has been one that shifted from a literary revolution that stressed a drastic change in the linguistic style to a social and political revolution. The most noticeable difference between the concrete Chinese and the abstract Western literature reveals the Western mind's preoccupations with the search for what is; a relentless search in nature that spurred the development of psychology, as contrasted with the Chinese concentration on what works. (Author/AM)