Wen yi bao was first issued on 25 September 1949 (the week before the founding of the People's Republic of China.
Howard Goldblatt (1979) described the impact as follows: The history of Wenyi Bao, the most prestigious and influential magazine of its kind in Communist China, parallels the history of the People's Republic; founded in September 1949, Wenyi Bao has been at the heart of every literary movement since its inception, including the controversy surrounding its own editorial staff in the early 1950s.
It has kept the Chinese reading public abreast not only of current literary trends, policies and squabbles, but of selected aspects of world literature as well.
Virtually every truly important statement on literature sooner or later appeared in the pages of Wenyi Bao.
Thus the magazine’s forced cessation of publication in 1966 temporarily stilled one of the truly influential literary organs.