This is generally the name attributed to the literary wave that occurred after the Cultural Revolution, when a new generation of writers wrote of their experiences under Mao, strongly influenced by what they (as intellectuals and urban youths) had lived through during the process of rural re-education and population redistribution (aka the 'Down to the countryside movement') leaving their city lives to go work in farms and labour camps in the countryside. They of course went against the pre-1978 traditions of favouring class consciousness issues instead of individual creativity, and that art should serve politics and specifically socialism, as had been prescribed by the 1942 Yan'an forum for writers and artists.
It is typically marked as having started with the 1978 story 'The Scar' by Lu Xinhua. The mood was one of anger, at the wasted youth and talent, persecution and suffering during the CR, and during this time of slight liberalisation under Deng Xiaoping they took the opportunity to harshly criticise the policies implemented by Mao (but still not directly attributing the blame on the CCP or Communist ideals themselves), or more typically by the 'Gang of Four'. A desire for reassessment of the past and of change to a new fresh start were also features of this movement, making a film such as King of the Children (based on a Scar literature story by Ah Cheng) potentially recognisable as a cinematic example of Scar literature.
Closely connected, but not always equivalent to, the movement which started in the mid-1980s known as Root-searching literature, which it gave way to, as well as subsiding into more introverted, humanistic and less specifically or directly critical literature.
References
http://www.mtholyoke.edu/~chen24r/classweb/wp/Postmao.html
http://contemporary_chinese_culture.academic.ru/479/Lu_Xinhua
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