Internet Literature in China

Michel Hockx

• Editorial: Columbia University Press
• Año: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780231538534
• Categoría: Literatura
• Categoría: Crítica literaria asiática

Since the 1990s, Chinese literary enthusiasts have explored new spaces for creative expression online, giving rise to a modern genre that has transformed Chinese culture and society. Ranging from the self-consciously avant-garde to the pornographic, web-based writing has introduced innovative forms, themes, and practices into Chinese literature and its aesthetic traditions.

Conducting the first comprehensive survey in English of this phenomenon, Michel Hockx describes in detail the types of Chinese literature taking shape right now online and their novel aesthetic, political, and ideological challenges. Offering a unique portal into postsocialist Chinese culture, he presents a complex portrait of internet culture and control in China that avoids one-dimensional representations of oppression. The Chinese government still strictly regulates the publishing world, yet it is growing increasingly tolerant of internet literature and its publishing practices while still drawing a clear yet ever-shifting ideological bottom line. Hockx interviews online authors, publishers, and censors, capturing the convergence of mass media, creativity, censorship, and free speech that is upending traditional hierarchies and conventions within China—and across Asia.

ONE

Internet Literature in China

HISTORY, TECHNOLOGY, AND CONVENTIONS

INTERNET LITERATURE, like any other literature, is shaped by general technological developments and by specific social conventions. In the early twentieth century in China, the spread of mechanized printing and the demise of the literati lifestyle conspired to produce a richly varied magazine literature. This literature catered to a wide variety of tastes and was written in an equally wide variety of linguistic and cultural registers, but the many magazines of the early Republican period also had some notable shared characteristics. Most of them reveled in the opportunities the new printing technologies offered for combining textual and visual contents. Photographs, illustrations, and advertisements all played a role in distinguishing different journal styles or genres from one another. The magazine format also helped to continue and strengthen the traditional preference for linking literary production to collective activity. Many journals were affiliated with literary societies or clubs and used their publications as newsletters to stay in regular contact with their members and supporters. Finally, most of them promoted the spread of personal information about authors, encouraging biographical interpretations of literary work, as well as ad hominem criticism. This continued the Chinese tradition of considering text and author as two sides of the same coin (wen ru qi ren) while at the same time laying the foundation for a modern literary celebrity culture.

Following the establishment of the socialist literary system after 1949, both the technology and the social organization of literary production came under state control. Of the hundreds of literary magazines that were in circulation throughout China in 1948 and 1949, not a single one survived the introduction of the new system.¹ Instead, the cultural bureaucracy of the socialist state founded a number of nationwide and regional literary journals run by editors appointed by the various branches of the All-China Federation of Literary and Artistic Circles (Zhongguo Quanguo Wenxue Yishu Jie Lianhehui, or Wenlian for short) and its subsidiary, the Chinese Writers Association (Zhongguo Zuojia Xiehui, or Zuoxie).² Literary magazines became part of a network that also included official literary prizes, financial and nonfinancial benefits and incentives for writers, stipends for editors to travel around the country, distribution via the network of New China bookshops, as well as, specifically in the case of magazines, via the network of post offices. The system whereby readers could subscribe to magazines at dedicated post office counters survived well into the 1980s. All this was part and parcel of the socialist literary system, as described in great detail in Perry Link’s book-length study The Uses of Literature.

During the Cultural Revolution, Wenlian and Zuoxie ceased to function, and literary magazines closed down. For a while, literary production was reduced to carefully selected book publications and the occasional appearance of literary texts in newspapers. The quantity of literary publications gradually increased during the last few years of the Cultural Revolution, in the early 1970s, and periodical publishing recommenced during that time, although the major literary journals of the pre-1966 period did not reestablish themselves until after 1976.³ By the 1980s, the institutions of the socialist literary system were all back in place and literary magazines once again flourished. The 1980s also witnessed the gradual bifurcation between “official” (guanfang) and “nonofficial” (fei guanfang or minjian) literary circuits. As Xudong Zhang has argued, however, the preference of the nonofficial circles for apolitical, modernist writing tied in well with the policy of the Deng Xiaoping regime to promote the autonomy of cultural work in exchange for its depoliticization and noninterference with the overarching course of economic reform.⁴ The result was that the 1980s avant-garde movement (xianfeng pai) in fiction, widely celebrated by critics for its radical opposition to the socialist realist paradigm, was in fact very much dependent on direct support from the institutions of the socialist system. Professor Shao Yanjun from Peking University has described this paradoxical situation, in which a literary elite used a nationwide support system, designed for distributing mass-produced propaganda literature, to promote instead a kind of literature that could be appreciated only by a tiny minority:

Writers were showing off to editors, editors were showing off to critics, critics were showing off at conferences, and behind it all was the magazine publication system supported by the Writers Association, and the university system. Inevitably, this developed toward cliquishness—and these cliques were not communities of individuals with similar tastes but interest communities of individuals sharing the same privileges. … From the postal system that allowed the free sending of manuscripts for submission, to the patronage of and generous instruction to writers by the editors of the big magazines; from the formal establishment of culture bureaus at prefecture level to the assistance with revising manuscripts, free travel and lodgings provided by the big magazines, the whole emergence and development of the avant-garde movement relied on the latent continuity of the traditional literary mechanism.⁵

In her influential 2003 monograph The Inclined Literary Field, Shao describes how, when literary magazines were weaned off state support from the late 1980s onward, the literary elite was ill equipped for assuming leading positions in the emerging literary marketplace because its previous cliquish behavior and its denigration of more mainstream and popular work had alienated it from the tastes of the wider reading public.⁶ Without state support, the 1980s avant-garde collapsed, and the kind of “economic world reversed” described by Pierre Bourdieu as typical of European literary communities never developed in China. Instead, the literary field tilted toward the side of economic capital, with the frantic production of best sellers (chàngxiaoshu) balanced out only by the steady popularity of traditional realist “long sellers” (chángxiaoshu).⁷ It was against this background of typical postsocialist uncertainty, with familiar institutions disappearing, market mechanisms kicking in, and traditional tastes lingering, that Internet literature began to emerge.

A New Literary Space

The noticeable commercialization of Chinese literature in the 1990s was the outcome of two simultaneously occurring processes. One was the withdrawal of state support for the literary system already just mentioned. The other was the relaxation of state control over publishing houses and the rise of what is generally referred to as the second channel (er qudao) of semiofficial, market-driven print production.⁸ The second channel, studied in detail by Shuyu Kong in her book Consuming Literature, is “a grey area of publishing that … includes both unofficial publishing and private book distribution” and that “represents the most commercialized and liberated area of book publishing and distribution.”⁹

The phenomenon of private distribution of books and journals emerged in the early 1980s and was initially associated with the sale of illegal printed material, including pornography. During the 1990s, partly as a result of repeated government campaigns and a nationwide reregistration of publishing houses, as well as decreasing state control over printing and distribution, a workable system was forged in which state-owned publishers collaborate with private entrepreneurs, with the former providing access to formal “book license numbers” (shuhao) and the latter doing most of the work in terms of production, marketing, and distribution.¹⁰ The outcome so far has been that the number of official publishing houses in China has remained stable at around five hundred, but the number of private companies involved in producing books and journals is many times larger. At times the distinction between the state-owned and the private elements is not obvious, especially as the official publishing houses themselves have begun to adopt corporate business models. Changes in this area continue to the present and are reflected, for instance, in Xin Guangwei’s authoritatively comprehensive overview of publishing in China, where he states, in one and the same section of his first chapter, that “all publishing houses in the Chinese mainland are state-owned,” only to correct himself a few pages later to say that, since Liaoning Publishing Group was listed in the stock market in 2007, “gone are the days when all publishing houses in China were state-owned.”¹¹

Especially relevant to the present discussion is Shuyu Kong’s analysis of the main differences in private-sector publishing between the 1980s and the 1990s. After pointing out that, in the 1990s, state sector and private sector became more integrated, she goes on to say that second-channel publishers of the 1990s were “better educated” and produced “better books.”¹² As we shall see in later chapters, the expectation that publishers and editors in the private sector, including those operating online, are professionally trained and have certain qualifications is part of the conditions under which private publishing ventures can obtain business licenses from government regulators. These policies undoubtedly raise the level of publications, but they are also meant to discourage the second channel from getting involved in projects that move beyond state-sanctioned boundaries of “healthy” content. Nevertheless, as Kong’s study convincingly demonstrates, the introduction and semilegalization of the second channel has created a vibrant publishing climate, and market incentives can at times encourage cultural entrepreneurs to push the limits, or be instrumental in shifting them.

In the conclusion of her study, Kong turns to the recent emergence of online literature and asks the question if the Internet is providing “a new literary space.” She gives an excellent summary of the development of the major literary website Rongshu Xia (Under the Banyan Tree, http://www.rongshuxia.com), which will feature in my discussion later in this chapter as well. She notes the site’s rapid development toward a commercial business model, which leads her to the following gloomy observation, worth quoting at length:

On the surface, the Internet promises a democratic zone where everyone has the right to freely produce and publish, ignoring literary conventions, political censorship, and not least the prolonged and cumbersome publishing process. However, most objective observers would conclude that up until now, cyberspace has remained a huge virgin territory untouched by deep passion, originality, and talent. Anyone who browses through the gigantic database of literary works stored on Banyan Tree’s site would agree with those critics who decry Internet literature as, at best, simply a form of “literary karaoke” for self-entertainment and, at worst, “literary detritus” freely and copiously discharged onto the screen. The subject and style of these works tends to be narrow, trite, and monotonous, full of conventional and clichéd expressions of predictable personal sentiments. Although traces of unique style and language can be found in certain individual works of Internet literature, in general one must search hard to find any literary innovation. Rarely are the new technological possibilities of the medium, such as the potential for interaction between visual images and words, and the ability to link back and forward between pages, fully explored.¹³

As I will argue in the next chapter, I do not believe that multimedia and hypertext are the only means of literary innovation on the Internet, and I am less pessimistic than Kong about PRC authors’ ability to create new literary conventions online. More important, however, it is worth noting a slight but significant contradiction in Kong’s argument. The well-known modernist aesthetic that she favors (depth, originality, talent) is intimately linked to the ideals and conventions of an established professional print culture community in which authors, editors, proofreaders, designers, illustrators, and publishers spend large amounts of time polishing and perfecting literary texts meant to be presented as works of art. It is not feasible to expect online literature to have developed such an “art world”¹⁴ within the space of just a few years, nor is the Internet the kind of environment where one would expect such an aesthetic to develop. In some ways, Chinese Internet literature is reminiscent of the often hastily produced work that featured in the countless literary supplements of newspapers during the Republican period, which one scholar has aptly described as “literature in its primary state” (yuanshengtai wenxue).¹⁵ In other ways, it is quite simply something new to which old value systems might not apply.

In short: it is worth pointing out that a new literary space does not necessarily need to be a new space for “high” literature in the traditional sense. As we shall see in chapter 3, the rise of online genre fiction is a tremendously important new development in PRC literature, even if it means flooding the Web with pulp. In my view, there can be no question that the Internet does provide a new literary space and that it has established and will continue to establish its own conventions and values, which are not identical with the conventions and values of print culture, even though all kinds of intriguing forms of overlap between print media and digital media are in existence. In the following, I provide an overview of the early history of Chinese-language Internet literature. Following that, I give a brief description of the way in which Internet literature forums operate and introduce some of their conventions and the related terminology. This is followed by a more detailed look at the Banyan Tree site, which stands out among PRC online literature portals of the early period. Finally, I give a brief case study featuring Lu Youqing’s work “Date with Death,” which propelled Banyan Tree and online writing to nationwide popularity in the year 2000.

Chinese Internet Lite...

Índice

• Cover 
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents 
• Acknowledgments
• Note on Online Sources
• Introduction
• 1. Internet Literature in China: History, Technology, and Conventions
• 2. Linear Innovations: Chen Cun and Other Chroniclers
• 3. The Bottom Line: Online Fiction and Postsocialist Publishing
• 4. Online Poetry in and out of China, in Chinese, or with Chinese
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index