Chinese Fiction Prognosis

As spectacular levels of corruption in China have become commonplace news reading, new genres of fiction have emerged to keep apace with an ever more surprising Chinese reality. In an excellent article in the New York Times on Feb. 1, NPR Beijing correspondent Louisa Lim wrote about a popular genre of fiction in China called “bureaucracy lit,” also known as “officialdom lit.” According to Lim, this genre has, during the past fourteen years, turned the intrigues of the Chinese system into a list of bestsellers (some banned, others not) which has become popular, she writes, not just as a “peek behind the curtains, but also as a go-to guide for aspiring cadres.”

Lim quotes Liu Xia — wife of imprisoned nobel laureate, Liu Xiabo — as saying, “I think Kafka could not have written anything more absurd and unbelievable than this,” in reference to her prolonged house arrest. And while here Liu is addressing the Chinese government’s draconic oppression of her family, she also suggests a possible beneficiary of China’s ongoing corruption problems: Chinese writers of fiction, already adapting in innovative ways to the challenges posed by the strangeness of real life events.

In the article, Lim also quotes Chinese novelist Yu Hua as saying that “The problem I’m having now is that China’s reality is already hyperreal. Whatever weirdness you write in your stories won’t be as weird as the reality.”

Yu’s statement reveals a similar stance on Chinese fiction, and offers one possibility for why he temporarily departed from his earlier novels and short stories with his semi-autobiographical 2009 work, China in Ten Words, as if he’d suddenly unplugged himself from the matrix and entered the real world. Yu is the author of several popular stories, including Brothers, a highly debated novel that traces the lives of two brothers through the cultural revolution and into the reform.

In a 2011 Op-Ed in the Times, Yu ascribes a “May 35th,” style of writing to Brothers — May 35th is the date that Chinese bloggers use to refer to the Tiananmen incident of June 4th, 1989, in order to avoid automated censors online — that utilizes metaphor and figurative language to treat subjects that censors might target, while China in Ten Words is written in June 4th style, where sensitive subjects are addressed directly and explicitly. Both styles may address the same ideas, but only one style is publishable. Brothers has sold over 1 million copies in mainland China, while China in Ten Words has been limited to Hong Kong, Taiwan, and internationally.

As a newcomer to China, I had trouble accepting the reality of censorship, and stubbornly searched bookstores for a copy of China in Ten Words in simplified characters. What I found is that if a book is banned, such searches will turn up dry, and questions about the book are likely to go unanswered. A clerk at a bookstore in Hong Kong told me that her store only carried copies of the book in traditional characters, and that a copy in simplified characters would be nearly impossible to find. I therefore gave up hope and immediately purchased, read, and enjoyed the book in English. (It might be worth noting that the United States has it’s own fluctuating list of frequently challenged or banned books, however small this list is compared to China’s.)

The overarching project of China in Ten Words, as I read it, is to trace many of the vexations and peculiarities of present day China to Mao’s Cultural Revolution, from 1966 to 1976. Yu distills these themes into ten chapters that combine accounts of the author’s own experience — particularly growing up in the cultural revolution (Yu was born in Hangzhou, in 1960) — with anecdotal evidence of these themes accumulated from the media.

In a fascinating chapter headed under the word “Revolution,” for instance, Yu describes how the spirit of mass propaganda campaigns of the1950s and 1960s era stayed constant once Mao’s proletarian revolution became Deng’s economic revolution. In one example, Yu writes about an incident in his hometown during the Cultural Revolution, where warring factions of Red Guards fought over the local administrator’s seal — a stamp that effectively represented the political authority of the village. He connects his own memory of this comic struggle over  conflicts that occur in present day corporations and state owned enterprises, where shareholders, the board of directors and local officials will vie — often violently — for control of the seal, and thereby the power to make decisions on behalf of the company. While the economic revolution has produced amazing changes in Chinese society, questions about legal authority remain just as suspect, as demonstrated by the absurd conflicts that Yu notes.

In another example, Yu discusses the zealous movements for greater steel production during the 1990s, harkening back to the campaigns to produce steel during the Great Leap Forward. The mass economic campaigns of the post 1978 period have helped raise the standards of living for a large portion of Chinese, but Yu argues that they have been carried out with a similarly blind hastiness that has resulted in its own set of problems (such as inequality, environmental problems, and waste). “After participating in one mass movement during the Cultural Revolution, for example, we are now engaged in another: economic development,” Yu writes in the book.

Of his ten words, the one I found most surprising was “grassroots.” In China, grassroots has come to refer to “disadvantaged classes that operate at some remove from the mainstream and the orthodox” Yu writes. But where ‘Grassroots’ differed from the sense in which Americans might understand the term — unofficial yet organized and purposeful local efforts towards a particular goal — was a wily entrepreneurial spirit, and an implacable chaos that Yu connotes in his usage.

In his anecdotal account, Yu uses the term to denote anyone who exploits the vagaries of Chinese law and society for their own economic or political gain. Particularly noteworthy examples of “grassroots” behavior are a successful black market blood trader who purchases a 100 million yuan apartment in a brand new high rise, and a politician named Wang Howen, who rose through the cultural revolution to become Mao’s number 2 man (after Zhou Enlai) in 1973, only to be pilloried with the rest of his clique, the Gang of Four, after Mao’s death.

If the book implies a central argument, it might be that whatever psychological ailments beset China today find their origin in the cultural revolution. Is this true? Debatable. Is ten words enough to describe an entire country? Perhaps not, but one senses that Yu’s ten words provide the best possible encapsulation.

In his 2011 Op-Ed, Yu recounts an interview with a Taiwanese reporter, who asks him the question: If you had an 11th word to describe China, what would it be?” Yu’s answer was ‘freedom.’ But by freedom, Yu meant a subtle freedom — a May 35th, artistic type of freedom, where rhetorical innovation circumvents censorship and enlivens the Chinese language.

“Surely our language has never been as rich and vital as it has today. Sometimes I can’t help but wonder, if one day the June 4th kind of freedom we’re to arrive, would we still be so creative, so ingenious?” Yu asks.

Does optimism about the state of fiction in a country imply a certain type of cynicism? Perhaps, but perhaps this is a question for another post. At the moment all I can say is that if Yu’s non-fiction is so enrapturing, then the future of Chinese fiction ought to bode well.

A Quiet History, A Quiet History Museum

The age of human activity in area that comprises the three cities of Wuhan is as old as Chinese civilization itself. Wuhan is an industrial city, with strong iron and automobile sectors, but before it manufactured these, it manufactured bronze. When China unified, in 221 B.C., Wuhan had been growing for more than 1500 years. 

The city is ancient, and yet it’s nearly impossible to tell. Signs of the city’s history are infrequent, and have very little influence on how a visitor experiences the city. The past is hard to picture. Lacking an official history of Wuhan, or any sense of how past and present are linked here, I referred myself to the City Museum, a concrete fortress on the outskirts of Hankou, one of Wuhan’s three cities. 

The museum confirmed my sense that what was once here has been completely forgotten. Crucial periods of the city’s history are not mentioned, or brushed over. Swaths of history are absent. Part of this is due to the limited capacity of history museums, but part, I sensed, is due to selective amnesia. 

Thousands of years are compressed into three floors — two devoted to artifacts and one to the city’s modern history, dating to the mid-nineteenth century. There are two dominant historical features: it is foremost a trading city, and also a crucial political nexus. In times of peace, the city prospered, and in times of instability, the city was a theater of chaos. In the museum’s selective display of its own history, and the dispassionate, empirical way that it remembers itself, I found truth to an anecdote I’d heard, that “Wuhan’s special characteristic is that it has no special characteristic.” 

According to information given by the museum, Wuhan has been continuously occupied for the past 10,000 to 50,000 years. There is plenty of evidence that by the Neolithic age there was regular traffic in the area. But it was China’s unification under the Qin dynasty in 221 B.C., and a subsequent 400-year period of stability during the Han Dynasty, which solidified Wuhan as a permanent center of the handicraft trade. 

As Chinese history moved sluggishly forward, more and more crafts flowed ashore. Each successive dynasty left ornate trinkets behind: porcelain vases, enamel incense burners, bronze instruments, jade stamps, crystal snuff bottles, bamboo brush-holders and so on. 

Hundreds of years are portrayed as being relatively quiet. A placard in the museum describes Wuhan’s development during the rough equivalent of the dark ages of Europe: “In the period of the Sui, Tang, Song and Yuan Dynasty, Wuhan enjoyed a long peaceful developing opportunity, whereby Wuhan increase[d ]her political status and rapidly developed her economy and became, of course, the most important commercial metropolis and handicraft industry in Jing-Chu area.” 

Tang and Song Dynasty poets who visited the city remarked on the beauty of Wuhan’s houses, and the activity of the port, always immersed in trade. 

At the museum, crafts are organized by material used, not the time period of use. Porcelain from the Qing Dynasty accompanies porcelain from the Sui, more than a millennium before. As the centuries go by it seems that the craft remained relatively constant. New processes developed and new markets emerged, but the forms and uses stayed the same. 

The major fissure in the city’s predictable historical pattern occurred in 1861, when the British established a port at Hankou, a concession granted by the Qing dynasty after the Chinese defeat in the 2^nd Opium war (1856-1860). Until then, Wuhan had remained an “occlusive feudal city” that “began its evolution from a feudal town to a modern metropolis like a toddling child.” The city’s encounter with modernity changed its status from a successful port, complacent with the ruling order, to a place where a new China would form.   

After 1861, the city’s growth took off. It became a major iron producer as well as a hub for the country’s developing railroads. By the end of the Qing Dynasty, in 1912, Wuhan was a powerful industrial city, hailed as the “Chicago of China.” 

As the Qing Dynasty became incompatible with China’s modernization, Wuhan became a vital center of political activity. The uprising that brought down the Qing erupted in Wuhan in 1911 and spread to the rest of the country, leading to a 38 year period where Wuhan occupied a central location in a shifting battleground fought over by Republicans and Qing imperialists, warlords and idealists, Nationalists and Communists, Chinese heroes and Japanese “devils”, and again, by Nationalists and Communists. Wuhan became a crucial intersection of conflicting politics. It was an early center of Communist activity, and was, for a brief period in 1926, the nation’s capital under the Nationalist Government. 

By the time that Mao came to power in 1949, the city had been exhausted by years of political uncertainty and war, not to mention the occasional natural disaster. From the museum’s point of view, Mao’s rise ended the chaos. “Nonetheless, the perseverant Wuhan people pulled through all this hardship together with the city, and finally embraced the liberation of the city on May 16, 1949. Since then on, Wuhan has been ushered in a brand new era,” the museum placard read. 

It seems that the city, now beyond this tumultuous period, has resumed its ancient role as a robust but calm inland port city, complacent with the wax and wane of the ruling order. The so-called new era that defines Wuhan suggests, at least in the museum’s own view, that the politics stewing in Wuhan are for the moment not worth discussing.