20201221 trans

Cao Runxin 曹润鑫

The idea that tones discerned in verbal art will reflect the mood of the relationship between the people and the state makes frequent appearances through Chinese literary philosophy, and it frequently enters the world of modern politics, as work on the modern Chinese folklore movement will attest (Hung).

Another more recent sample is the expression “setting the tone” [定調子] describes the degree of condemnation in a Cultural Revolution era Big Character poster. This modern example displays a relatively cynical view of the function of tone; the power to set tone is in the hands of the accuser, but its strength reflects the crime of the victim.In the world of literature and arts policy, “New Tone” 新基調 became the standard Chinese socialist line against precisely such works as our “provincial leader” above castigated as “pei pei pei-ing”.

Chang Huiyue 常慧月

The term “tone” (particularly as diao) has acquired negative connotations over the past two of decades, at least in part because of its role in politicoliterary battles. Even editors sympathetic to “new tone” values distance themselves from the term (Yang, Zhu). In a parallel strategy, contemporary zawen are written in covert form, more like “East Station,” than like “Pei pei pei!”?, which so revealingly displays the mechanics of the declamatory modal trope. In contrast to the late 1980's, contemporary zawen have in recent years receded to hide in other types of writing. This strategy is a familiar one in the context of zawen history; the necessity to hide only increases the effect the “involuntarily” discordant tone, which is held to be, biting and kicking, reflecting the truth.

Chen Han 陈涵

When zawen were first fashioned as a modern genre, it was the involuntary expression of responsive emotions that were explicitly invoked as zawen's purpose. When Hu Shih published the first major newspaper column devoted to the serial publication of zawen in 1918, the “Record of Spontaneous Feeling,” the introductory essay was entitled “什麼話,” literally “What speech.” This title also provides a demonstration of a modal trope on the level of syntax. In this original title there was no punctuation, as “shenme” already indicates the question “what” in the standard form, before European punctuation was imported as a regular feature of written vernacular Chinese.

Chen Hui 陈惠

Beyond the interrogative function, however, “hua,” [“speech” or “talk”] has the declamatory effect of objectifying speech, and holding it up for dramatic examination. For an idiomatic English translation I would offer “What!?” including both exclamation and question mark. The contents of essay describe the purpose of zawen as a venue for explosive emotional responses, linked to the other, “regular” items printed in newspapers everyday. This ordinary newspaper fare “gives people goose flesh [disgusts them] makes them sigh, or elicits a cold smile or an outright laugh” (Hu Shih, Shen Bao 1918). Zawen were thus launched in the early modern Chinese newspaper as the nearly physical expression of these feelings or moods in the form of literary essays.

Chen Jiangning 陈江宁

Hu Shih's formulation emphasizes zawen's role as a response to “life itself.” Like most poetry, but unlike most fiction and drama, zawen is itself a first person voice, not a representation of voices. Yet unlike poetry, which may need to be at least imagined to be read out loud, repeated and savored for full effect, zawen's ideal is to appear for a fleeting moment on the back page of a newspaper, to be received with the accompaniment of an enigmatic laugh, sigh or snort from the reader, and then thrown away quickly, before anyone can “find their seat and sit in it,” or take offence.

Chen Jiaxin 陈佳欣

Generic categories are not the only aspect that zawen tend to mix; they characteristically contain sudden shifts in tone, style and voice, moving from a snippet of stray “overheard” conversation to an elegant, classical allusion. Echoing Hu Shih's 1918 idea of zawen as a “response” to the articles on other pages of the newspaper, the zawen, still characteristically the back page of most newspapers, nearly always contains a “foil” in the form of a direct quote from the author has read or heard. In addition to creating a microcosmic social dialogue, this split between two voices, the writer's and that of the “foil” also allows for dizzying clashes of style and voice that enclose unlikely combinations of syntax and grammar, as well as ideas, a single text.

Chen Jingjing 陈静静

Tone in an essay is an ironic figure of speech; how can you channel that which is carried in sound through the ink of print? In this paper I have tried to illustrate the trope of tone through the “sonorous” work, particularly that of ShaoYanxiang, an official poet who in retirement is better known for the essays in which he collapses poetry into polemic, his zawen. The distinct and beleaguered social and cultural space for zawen in contemporary China reveals the mechanics, ideology and significance of tone in Chinese writing. Even more than other literary genres, zawen depends upon something within the earthy noise of moody, mulish voices to carry its messages.

Chen Sha 陈莎

While readers love to hate their morally and politically provocative zawen-of-the-moment, writers string zawen across stretches of time and publishing organs to construct heavily intertextualized conversations. Eventually they even preserve zawen, long after the dizzying minutia of allusions, jokes and digs are forgotten, often compiling a career's worth of them into small print runs of volumes that they give away to friends and admirers as discursive portraits of themselves. Lu Xun's genre of the “dagger and spear” is thus not only a sly political weapon, but also a complex sculpture of the culturally shaped self, chiseled by the cantankerous tones of contentious social dialogue.

Chen Sunfu 谌孙福

Appendix: Translations of two primary texts: “'Pei Pei Pei!'? ” and “East Station”

“Pei Pei Pei! ”?

A friend from outside literary circles asked me to find him some “pei pei pei!” essays to read, and I had to stare at him blankly with nothing to say. He then explained that he had read in a newspaper that a certain provincial leader had announced at a banquet that there must not be “pei pei pei – ing” all over the place, and so clearly there must be pei pei pei-ing all over the place. Have I gotten so insensitive? Out of self-abrogation, and also out of curiosity, I rushed to seek it out.And so it was, what had been said was “there must not be pei pei pei -ing all over the place, it must not always be the language of mockery, sarcasm and scornful dismissal that is used to write about the party, the nation and the people, dispersing a gray mood that makes people pessimistic and disappointed.” It is like this all over the place, and not in just in one particular place, things are always this way, and not just at a certain time, you can see how widespread and serious the problem is.

Chen Yongxiang 陈永相

A long time ago in the liberated areas, it was advocated that the entire party should publish newspapers. After the establishment of the nation, when everything was “operated on a large scale with the entire people” I did not pay attention to whether or not it was advocated that all the people should publish the newspapers. But getting all people to read the newspapers is the goal of all those who follow the newspaper profession. In that way, newspapers are not merely published for leading institutions and leaders to read, but rather at the same time (actually this should be primary) for the masses to read. They are published for all the people -- among the people there are illiterates and partially literate, but through listening to the newspapers being read, the broadcasters and televisions have accepted the responsibility of getting the newspaper read, and this segment of the masses also figures as indirect readers of the newspapers.

Cheng Yusi 成于思

The readers have the greatest right of criticizing the newspapers, and I wonder how many readers have discovered this phenomenon of there being “pei pei pei -ing” all over the place.

I am one of these readers, subscribing on my own to several “large” newspapers (newspaper publications have not been classified as large or small, but I follow convention here) there are in addition a few newspapers that people send to me; as to “small” newspapers, I have not the leisure nor the money to buy the papers in the Beijing area, not to mention nearby Tianjin and Hebei. Even so, just taking the 10 to 20 different newspapers I often look over, including the cultural newspapers, I have not discovered these “always using the language of mockery, sarcasm and scornful dismissal to write about the party, the nation and the people” sorts of “pei pei pei” pieces.

Deng Jinxia 邓锦霞

I could only hand back to my friend a blank report. But naturally my not having seen them does not mean they do not exist. What one person can see is limited. I hope that the extra sensitive speaker on this matter can openly point them out, or even offer examples of eight or ten articles, or even hold up just three to five articles as models of this kind of work, so as to allow us to be enlightened and improve our discriminating ability in seeing which essays are those called “pei pei pei,” perhaps at the same time clearing up a related matter by analogy, that of understanding what kind of essays constitute “ba ba ba” as well.

Ding Daifeng 丁代凤

This suggestion is sincere, not just the usual politeness. In order for literary arts, newspaper publications and literary publications to develop better social effects and to help unite the ways of our times with the people's hearts, newspaper editors, newspaper readers, and those in charge of this occupation should all be able to directly express their own views, and upon making mistakes should help each correct and make up for them, nobody needs to be polite about this.

Fang Jieling 方洁玲

After reading this speaker's comments, there is another matter that mystifies me. According to what was said, “from the next (meaning this and next) two years of discipline and rectification, there will be more new challenges and problems, and literary publications should be of assistance in stabilizing the people's minds, increasing faith, and not demoralizing the people's will.” In reading all these newspapers, this is the first time I have seen this “stabilize the peoples mind” proposition. If there is a need to stabilize the people's hearts, it must proceed from the assumption that the peoples hearts are not stable. As for the reason why people's minds are not stable, it comes back to the “discipline and rectification and the new challenges and problems” of these two years.

Gan Fengyu 甘奉玉

I am confused again. These “challenges and problems” that so vex people, do they result from the “discipline and rectification” or is it because of these “challenges and problems” that the need arises to “discipline and rectify”? If the more you “discipline and rectify” the more you provoke “many new challenges and problems” in people's minds, then why do all this “discipline and rectifying”? Moreover, I do not understand what “discipline and rectification” refers to nor what the “new challenges and problems” are, and I cannot figure out what “stabilize people minds” means very precisely, nor can I see what concrete request is being made. This is my request for instruction.

Gao Mingzhu 高明珠

The Literature Journal column “Literature and the People's Lives” has been asking for a manuscript from me many times, but I have never been able to take up the assignment. As I write to this point, I suddenly thought that this piece should be called “Literature and the Peoples' Minds”? But that is a big topic, something that a thousand characters can not manage to capture. 1989.2.21. Shao Yanxiang 1993 in 自己的酒 [My Own Wine] pages 181-183, 群眾出版社

East Station

Thirty years ago in Beijing, if you mentioned “East Station,” everybody would know that referred to the Beijing East Station that lies to the outer east side Front City Gate. Today this unremarkable construction, built in a half-westernized architectural style and sandwiched between the tall buildings of this noisy and busy city, supports a little sign that reads “Railway Workers Club.” It is already an “ancient artifact,” long gone are the prosperous and glorious days of old.

Gong Yumian 龚钰冕

This train station was once a symbol of bustling urgency, day and night swallowing and spewing out the many different hues of travelers who come to and leave the old capitol. Outsiders that have been to Beijing may not have wandered on Fragrant Mountain or not even have visited the Imperial Museum, but none would not remember this railway station.

This train station, like any other place in Beijng, has experienced everything, cycles of prosperity and demise passing before its watch. It has greeted both the voluntary and the involuntary travelers to Beijing, and also the powerful it welcomed, as well as those it did not welcome. It sent off the happy people on their first [train] voyages, and also the broken hearted people who were departing; how many of them left this place never to come back?

Gu Dongfang 顾东方

When 20-year-old Shen Congwen arrived in Beijing after his roundabout journey from Phoenix in Hunan Province, he may have walked out of the station and stood for a while at the square in front of it. He would have seen, because in those years there was still a space in front, first the uniformly arranged buildings, and the colorfully carved gate of Zhengyang tower. His senses would have been struck with awe at the deep and solemn beauty. Did he think of the way Kang (youwei) and Liang (qiqiao) were in the depths of an inescapable trap when they embarked their train to flee, in the midst of their hurry without even the time to look back upon the winged palace roofs of their beloved capitol?

Guan Qinqing 管钦清

That year in July the canons sounded at Lugou Bridge. When the railroad was restored between Beiping and Tianjin, the first trainload was the “four thousand refugee reds fleeing to Tianjin,” that was how the Tianjin newspaper put it. When those travelers entered East Station, they took their first step on the road of flight; were there any among them that that could predict that long after their own “fortuitous rescue,” in 1958 there would be another group making their unseemly departure from the Beijing station, submitting their fates to the unpredictable road?

Gui Yizhi 桂一枝

Recently I looked through Liu Meng's “Reminiscences on a Rainy Day” in which he writes of the rainy day April of 1958, when [he along with] a group was sent to the great northern wilderness. The platform in the rainy day, the locomotive in the rainy day; he deliberately reminisced calmly, saying it was like this memory had also been washed clean by the rainy rain. At that time Liu Meng had been young, but traveling along with him were many people who had fallen into this hardship in their old age, certainly each of them had their own earlier “at that time.”

Head hanging, walking upon the rain-wet road; this is someone who has far to travel. Every window is weeping; this is someone reminiscing in the rain.

Guo Lu 郭露

And in March of 1949, when Guo Moruo and his democrats gathered together and arrived in Beijing, they were received with grand ceremonious welcome; the tears they wept were of joy. At the time he composed a poem “How much of the people's blood was spilled for this honor. Thinking of it, the tears fall, and happy laughter is unable to articulate in sound.” -- I don't know why, but this poem was not collected in any of his later collections.

The platform of Beijing East Station, from the end of the last century to the middle of this century, has been a stage of constantly revolving action, no matter whether the security forces patrolling the edges of the stage were armed police of the North Coast Warlords, or the Japanese Army Police, or the Nationalist soldiers, police, M.P.’s or special agents, or the “People's Traffic Police.”

Han Haiyang 韩海洋

But because nearly everybody “performed” there in one way or another, at least having passed across that stage, everything about it was forgotten. Literary works pass through it with a single stroke, only the ending of the novel “Golden Powder Dynasty” provided a scene for it. This leftover architectural structure does not even rate a “district preservation unit” marker. This is because there are too many ancient traces in Beijing, how could an object merely one hundred years of age be considered antique?

Today will also become history. And every inch of Beijing earth will provide proof of its history.

1989. 9. 13

Please don't cut or change this date. The new railway station began operation in 1959, and this fits in parallel with “more that thirty years ago” at the beginning of the essay.

Han Wanzhen 韩宛真

Nostalgia without Memory: Reading Zhang Wei’s Essays In the Context of Fable of September

Jie Lu

Abstract

In this paper I will discuss what can be called agrarian nostalgia in Zhang Wei's essays collected in his Anxious and Indignant Homeward Journey, published in 1995 as a part of Resisting Compromise Book Series. I will examine his nostalgia as a critical and moral stance in the literary context of his highly claimed novel The Fable of September. In the novel, history is mythologized, essentialized, and therefore erased to embody an agrarian being associated with land. If land in Zhang's novel represents an idealized existence, then in his essays, it becomes both a social and literary metaphor to symbolize moral purity and literary elitism. It is posed as a means to achieve individual, social and literary salvation, and an absolute standard to critique social reality and popular culture in the age of commercialization.

He Changqi 何长琦

Nostalgia as an indication of fundamental condition of human estrangement or alienation has been exacerbated by the speeds and scopes of modernization and globalization in contemporary China. This nostalgic sentiment is intensely experienced by intellectual elites who wish to maintain their traditional role as society's moral guardians or as society's conscience, and by literary writers who wish to sustain the distinction between pure and popular literature. It is exactly this moral absolutism and literary elitism that have been undermined by cultural and socioeconomic changes. What nostalgia in Zhang's writings reveals is not so much a resistance to modernization process as incapability of deep understanding the complexity of Chinese modernity.

Hu Baihui 胡百辉

At the turn of the twenty-first century in China, with modernization and globalization gaining full momentum, it is interesting to find many writers turning their gaze backward to the past rather than singing the praises of this new global age. Among writers such as Liang Xiaosheng, Zhang Chengzhi, and Zhang Wei, nostalgia has become their dominant literary mode, through which to both critique commercialism and globalism and express the authors’ moral and literary ideals. In this paper I wish to focus on the moral and literary implications of nostalgia in Zhang Wei’s essays, as collected in his Anxious and Indignant Homeward Journey (youfen de guitu), published in 1995 as a part of the Resisting Compromise Book Series (dikang touxiang shuxi). [* Jie Lu is an Assistant Professor of Chinese at the University of the Pacific. The author is grateful to Martin Woesler, the organizer of the conference on The Modern Chinese Literary Essays (August, 2000, Germany) where this paper was presented, and Michelle DiBello for her insightful comments and careful editing of the whole text. Resisting Compromise Book Series (Dikang touxiang shuxi) includes collections of essays by Zhang Chengzhi, Zhang Wei, Han Shaogong, Yu Qiuyu, Li Ri, and Shi Tiesheng respectively. ]

Hu Huifang 胡慧芳

Instead of putting Zhang’s writings in the larger context of contemporary intellectual debates over radicalism (radical intellectual/cultural discourse) and (new) conservatism (anti-radical),[ Regarding the major theoretical discourses in contemporary intellectual debates in China, see Xu Ben’s “Contesting Memory for Intellectual Self-Positing: The 1990s’ New Cultural Conservatism in China” in Modern Chinese Literature and Culture, Vol.11 (Spring, 1999) 157-193; Jianhua Chen’s “Local and Global in Narrative Contestation: Liberalism and the New Left in Late-1990s China” in Journal of Asian Pacific Communication, Vol. 9 113-129; Intellectuals’ Positions (Zhishi fenzi lichang) in three volumes, edited by Li Shitao, published by Shidai wenyi chubanshe, 2000. ] I will examine it in the literary context of his highly acclaimed novel Fable of September published in 1992. Fable of September represents history in a way that mythologizes, essentializes, and therefore erases it in the name of an idealized agrarian existence. Indeed, the idea of “the land” (tudi) is a transcending and all-encompassing concept in Zhang Wei writings, representing an idealized pure state uncontaminated by industrialization and modernization. In his essays, the land is transformed into a social and literary metaphor that symbolizes moral purity and literary elitism against what the author perceives as the contemporary backdrop of general moral decadence and literary chaos. This ideal is posed as a means to achieve nothing less than social, moral and literary salvation, raised as a kind of absolute standard to critique social reality and popular culture.

Hu Jin 胡瑾

My argument, however, is that Zhang’s reification of “land” as a transcendental metaphor in his essays only betrays the author’s lack of any profound historically informed understanding of the complexity of Chinese modernity. He simply refuses to accept social and cultural dilemmas and contradictions as permanent fixtures of the intellectual and cultural landscape. At the same time, Zhang’s outright criticism of consumerism and globalism suggests an underlying ambivalence about modernization. As China’s post-socialist social reality grows more complex and demanding, with more diversified and unstructured cultural formation, any clear-cut moral solution to social evils based on pre-modern social relationship and norms (positing the utopian vision of a transcendental realm) can no longer be effective. Nor is it sufficient to solve the sense of cultural crisis brought on by the progression of both modernization and globalization.

Ji Tiantian 纪甜甜

The contemporary Chinese intellectual and cultural scene is a complex one, with major conflicting trends – one toward the commercialization of knowledge/literature and another in strong resistance to the very same. A new diversity of voices can be heard in intellectual debates at the more abstract conceptual level, and a number of Chinese writers have also joined the scene – whether consciously or unconsciously -- with their own distinct literary voices. The Resisting Compromise Book Series in fact embodies these writers’ own effort of resistance to commercialism and globalism, which they perceive as corrosive forces in their culture and society.

Jiang Fengyi 蒋凤仪

As the series’ editor-in-chief states in the preface, the work is devoted to those contemporary “literary heroes” (Xiao 1995, II), that is, certain literary idealists such as Zhang Wei, Zhang Chenzhi, Han Shaogong, Yu Qiuyu, Shi Tiesheng, and Li Rui. These literary heroes are recognized for daring to stand up and raise the banner of “literature of resistance” (Xiao 1995, II), attacking the literary degeneration and moral decay of the times.

Jiang Hao 姜好

In publishing the Resisting Comprises series, its creators were responding to a growing domination of the literary arena by a so-called “Hooligan Movement.” According to the editor, literary hooliganism, as it were, is essentially a “language game” -- represented first and foremost by the irreverent writer Wang Shuo – with its various forms of “literary trash” including “literature of sexual promiscuity” (xingluan), “literature of leisure” (xianshi), “hack literature” (bangxian) and “sneezing literature” (penti) (Xiao 1995, II).

Jiang Qiwei 蒋淇玮

But there are several larger social and literary issues that this project essentially addresses, namely: the loss of literary/cultural/social dominance by the intellectual elite to mass/commercial culture; the commercialization of knowledge/literature; erosion of the “humanist spirit;” abandonment of ultimate human concerns; desertion of idealism, enlightenment and such modernist projects. In the face of such upheaval, the editor describes the contemporary cultural/literary scene in China as dark and degenerate. The age is “cursed,” “tragic,” an age of “betrayal” and “surrender” (Xiao 1995, IV). And the targets of the literary/moral resistance are postmodernism, commercialism, and mass culture.

Kang Haoyu 康浩宇

Zhang Wei is primarily known as a novelist. His major novels include Ancient Boat, Fable of September, My Countryside, Clan, and novelle include Meditation in Autumn, Anger in Autumn, and Vineyard. [ Ancient Boat (Guchuan), Fable of September (Jiuyu yuyan), My Countryside (Wode tianyuan), Clan (Jiazu), Meditation in Autumn (Qiutian de sisuo), Anger in Autumn (Qiutian de fennu), and Vineyard (Putaoyuan) are all included in Zhang Wei wenji (Collected Writings of Zhang Wei) (Shanghai: Shanghai wenyi chubanshe, 1997).] He has also published many collections of essays. His writings collected in Anxious and Indignant Homeward Journey include essays, talks, and interviews. These essays do not express this uncompromising stance in such a strong voice and straightforward manner. Instead, Zhang poses a literary persona of moral integrity as a kind of self-representation. He appears as an idealized individual, embodying in every way pure moral qualities of both a human being and artist/writer. This idealized individual is a fighter, fighting a lonely and heroic battle against fashionable trends and any and all forms of evil (Xiao 1995, 6).[ Anxious and Indignant Homeward Journey includes both Zhang Wei’s essays as well as critical articles by various critics. In this paper I will use Xiao Xialin, the editor of this collection as the reference to provide in-text citations to essays by both Zhang Wei and other critics. ]

Kang Lingfeng 康灵凤

As a generous humanitarian, he loves and helps all good people. As a socially committed artist, he takes upon himself a great responsibility to all humanity. And as a serious writer, he self-consciously pursues high literature. He is also represented as an honest laborer, making a living through hard labor and sweat. As part of this self-representation, Zhang criticizes those who succumbed to moral and artistic degradation, such as those writers who choose to “enter the commercial world” (xiahai), or cater to popular low-brow tastes by writing “trash literature.”

Kong Xianghui 孔祥慧

He points out in his essay “Anxious and Indignant Homeward Journey” several “lacks” in many contemporary writers. First, many of today’s writers lack “self-reflexivity” (which really refers more to moral “self-reflection” or “self-consciousness” rather than intellectual self-reflexivity). They lack “conservatism,” an ability to hold to a certain kind of spirit, in which he also sees as a lack of real avant-guard spirit. They lack “intolerance,” meaning they are overly tolerant of vices and decadent practices, and rarely engage in serious, genuine, and frank criticism and debate. Finally, they lack “stable emotions” -- the definition of which is rather ambiguous.

Kong Yanan 孔亚楠

Zhang’s self-representation, then, is also a form of self-legitimization. It endows him with legitimacy through a kind of literary aura and the staking out of high moral ground. From this privileged stance, he proceeds to interpret, represent, articulate, define and judge the essence, meaning and criteria of literature, society, and human life. Throughout his essays, including interviews, talks, and lectures, we find Zhang, like a self-styled guru, constantly giving advice to college students, young writers, and literature fans on what to read, how to write, and how to live. This advice is based exclusively on a clear distinction between high and popular literature, and on his unabashed criticism of mass culture (represented by television).

Lei Fangyuan 雷方圆

In a broader sense, we can see his self-representation as an essential reaffirmation of the traditional role that Chinese intellectuals played in society. The claim to an authoritative voice is fundamental to maintaining the privileged position of the intellectual elite within a structure of knowledge and power. Zhang’s self-representation, then, is nothing less than an attempt to reestablish the intellectual elite’s role in literature and society based on a clear distinction between high and popular literature. This power struggle for cultural dominance and hegemony in the ongoing reformation of intellectual/cultural discourse largely defines China’s socio-cultural condition in the wake of socialism.

Lei Kuangxi 雷旷溪

Perhaps the most important part of Zhang’s essays is his use and development of the concept of “land” (tudi), which strongly conveys his self-representation as a simple yet serious “rural intellectual” (xiangcun zhishi fenzi). In his well-known essay “Immersion in the Wild Field” (rongru yiedi), the land in fact functions as a transcending metaphor. As a signifier of nature – wild fields, mountains, bushes, green crops, the ocean -- the land symbolizes all that is morally good in social and cultural realms as well as in individual’s life. The land represents a mother figure, where one can always find comfort, wisdom and inspiration. As an eternal backdrop, the land embodies eternity itself. It serves as an aesthetic standard through which the author defines the social and aesthetic functions of “pure literature,” and criticizes various aspects of cultural reality.

Li Haiquan 李海泉

Zhang associates popular literature and TV culture with low class and uneducated tastes, and criticizes current literary Chinese criticism for being overly influenced by foreign literary jargons. His concept of the land is even a moral criterion through which he criticizes many aspects of contemporary modern society -- from commercialization in which money is the source of all evils, to globalization marked by domination of transnational corporations and bad influence of some foreign literature, as well as modernization represented by cellular phones, cars, and high tech.

Li Lili 李丽丽

But most of all, Zhang’s concept of land symbolizes an ideal based on ages old dichotomy between city and countryside. At the beginning of the essay, he tells us: “[The] city is a willfully and recklessly modified wild field, and I will eventually leave it” (Xiao 1995, 19). Later he claims that a real artist should be “a worshiper of land” (Xiao 1995, 60). To Zhang, the spirit of “land” should be the spirit of the age (Xiao 1995, 241). Seen in the context of his criticism of modernization, it is evident that this dichotomy is built around the moral distrust of the city – a psychological complex that traces back to Chinese agrarian tradition and Mao’s revolutionary heritage. At the same time, it reveals a profound nostalgia for a pre-modern rural existence.

Li Lingyue 李凌月

The Land, then, points to an ideal transcendent realm, closed to contamination by the modern world. But represented only in highly literary, allusive, emotive language and nature images and analogies, the idea of the Land only comes across as very abstract and unreal. The author himself asks: “What exactly is the wild field? Where does it exist? Does it really contain my innocent world I imagine?” (Xiao 1995, 30). Indeed, as an all-encompassing and pervasive metaphor, The Land is never once in his essays clearly and objectively defined. Whether expressed as a personification of the mother figure, an embodiment of eternal being, or as a constellation of various ideal qualities and values, Zhang’s “land” lacks the substantial tour-de-force as a moral and social metaphor. But if we are to discover an ontological anchoring for this concept, it can only be found, I would argue, in his well-known novel Fable of September.

Li Liqin 李丽琴

In reading this novel, I will focus on the dialectic between its strikingly postmodernist form -- which he criticizes and whose influences he constantly denies --and its pre-modern content (in terms of the primitive agrarian existence represented and the mode of storytelling used). I find nothing to criticize in Zhang’s use of magic realism and certain postmodernist techniques to recapture the so-called original world of pre-modern existence. I do find a glaring contradiction, however, in the author’s repeated denial of any positive influence of postmodernism. This, together with his unqualified valorization of “The Land” as a metonymy of a primitive utopia, only betray not so much his literary hypocrisy as his limited ability to understand modernity, postmodernism and even history itself.

Li Luyi 李璐伊

In contrast to his essays, which tend to be didactic, long-winded, condescending, and full of literary clichés, Zhang’s novel Fable of September is a fascinating and imaginative piece of writing. It is best situated in the genre of fictional history -- not a fictionalized account of real historical figures and events, but a pure fiction, written in a historical mode. Other examples of this way of, say, tracing the fictional history of a person, a family, or a village, include Su Tong’s Maple Tree Village series, or Ge Fei’s fictional biography, Marginality. Given its fragmented, incoherent story and sophisticated narrative plot, it is a challenge to give the novel a concise, accurate description.

Li Meng 李梦

In general, the novel depicts a “historical” picture in which a small pre-modern, self-contained village is obliterated by industrialization. But what the novel really focuses on, instead of village’s fall itself, are certain memorable events and people that are part of the last 30-40 years of its existence (though the exact length of time remains questionable and unclear). The novel is divided into seven parts, each focusing on stories of a single character or family. These stories are mutually connected, and at the same time intermingled with myths, legends, anecdotes and magical or strange occurrences, which in turn map out a sort of “history” of the village.

Li Yongshan 李泳珊

Ironically, however, history is not quite the right term here to describe the village’s temporal contour, for what stand out as the central features in the life of the village are “land”/food (more specifically sweet potatoes), the tradition of staying with the village, and a certain mode of storytelling used in the village to recall past suffering. As quintessential indexes in the village’s existence, these features mark not a temporal movement but an eternal being. Centered on these three essentials, life in the village is hard, simple, unchanging, and close to the archetypal. The only way for the young to use up their abundant and restless energy is to run and play in the wild fields at night, and the married to beat their wives and do “cupping” (ba huoguan).

Li Yu 李玉

Thus what Zhang Wei aims to represent in this novel is a pure, simple, close-to-primitive life, uncontaminated by modern civilization. But he is also representing a sense of eternal being, long lost as it may be in our modern age. The novel is undoubtedly imaginative and fascinating. My sense of fascination as a reader, however, is derived largely from its mode of literary representation than from what is actually depicted in Zhang’s fictional world. Part reality, part myth, part legend, the story is at once mythical and real. It is a synthesis of straightforwardness and artifice, primitivism and mannerism, thematic simplicity and formal sophistication. In other words, in order to represent a pre-modern agrarian existence – Zhang’s utopian vision of pure being – he relies on quite sophisticated modernist/postmodernist literary devices.

Lin Min 林敏

Perhaps the most striking feature of the novel, as many critics have noted, is its formal manipulation of temporality, or to be more specific, the narrative negation of temporality. It is almost impossible for the reader to discern the actual timeline of the village’s history. Even the time span running from the 1930s to 1970s and temporal progression within the narrated world (which can only be pieced together after repeated readings), are unreliable, full of unexplainable loopholes. [ For the full discussion on the novel’s temporal scheme, see Chen Sihe’s “Huanyuan minjian: tan Zhang Wei Jiuyue Yuyan”(Returning to the people: on Zhang Wei’s Fable of September) collected in Youfen de guitu (Indignant Homeward Journey) 260-267.]

This unusual narrative stance achieves a number of thematic effects. First, it cuts the village off from the larger movement of history. The novel mentions no political movements, significant historical events, or chronology of dates other than “September.”

Lin Xin 林鑫

The only other temporal indicators are rainy seasons, or periods of winter when the snow is as sharp as strong acid, or autumn when the field is abundant with sweet potatoes and beans. These seasonal markers indicate changes more in nature than in the human world where chronological dates mark time. These markers of nature serve to draw the story further away from a real historical framework and closer to the pre-modern agrarian mode of existence, as if human life was “timed” by nature itself. Furthermore, this kind of temporal negation also foregrounds eternity in the land itself. Wherever any historical hint or political implication may crop up in the story, it is immediately dissolved into one of many village legends.

Ling Zijin 凌子瑾

For instance, “recalling past suffering” (yiku), an important collective activity of the village, is transformed from a political discourse used during the Cultural Revolution into a form of storytelling for binding the village community together, and for producing oral history and creating legends. In essence, history is erased from the village’s background all together. The novel’s detachment from historical background also means a metaphysical negation of historical paradigm of interpretation and signification, characterized by such notions as causality, progress and teleology. This allows the author to have a larger space for interaction of diverse configurations. As critic Chen Sihe points out, Zhang’s village exists in three forms: in reality, in legend/myth, and in oral storytelling (Xiao 1995, 265).

Liu Bo 刘博

However, the absence of a clear-cut time framework only blurs and transgresses the ontological boundaries among reality, myths, legends, the magic and storytelling. The novel abounds with magical, mythical, and supernatural figures and events: Niugan’s body was air-dried for a period of time before his actual death. A man named Jinyou can squeeze milk from his breasts. Another man’s eyeball jumps out and changes into a frog, disappearing into grass. The mother of Longran does not die after drinking pesticide; instead, her hairs have become darker, and skin softer. Very much like in Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, these magical events are presented in a realistic mode on the same ontological level as other “real” events.

Liu Jinxingqi 刘金惺琦

In other words, the magic is approached through the everyday. And the transgression of ontological levels of representation thus further negates historical temporality.

The absence of historical time in the novel also negates historical interpretation. Instead, myths and legends assume the function of historical explanation. The origin of the small village is explained in a myth about a group of vagrants who, exhausted after a long journey, stopped, and settled on a piece of land that could provide them with food. The story of the monkey spirit with the ability to carry things becomes a mythic explanation of social stratification and exploitation, a further departure from historical and positive discourses.

Liu Liu 刘柳

These myths and legends are presented as part of the village’s everyday reality. Thus different ontological levels within the text – reality and myth/legend/oral storytelling/magical events -- in which the village exists collapse into one. It is a world in which past and present become all-at-once. In other words, the past is the present, the myth is reality, and vice versa. The timeless place is like a sentence without tense. And herein lies the author’s profound sense of nostalgia for a fundamental, archetypal existence in its complete nakedness, beyond modern historical and rational configurations.

As Nan Fan points out, though the temporal span of the novel is not long, its content is massive, filled as it is with various stories (Xiao 1995, 253).

Liu Ou 刘欧

If the macro-structure of the novel is characterized by narrative strategies of postmodernist fragmentation and transgression, then at the micro-structure of individual stories the pre-modern form of Benjaminian storytelling becomes the dominant mode of narrative. “Recalling past suffering” is in fact in the typical mode of storytelling. The narrative tells us that in those long and cold winter nights when rain turned into snow, when there were nothing else to do for the rural folks, all villagers of the Small Village would gather together to listen to Jinxiang, one of the principal storytellers in the village, to recall past suffering. Here Jinxiang functions in the role that Water Benjamin describes: the giver of stories, of counsel, the link to a mythic but necessary past.

Liu Yangnuo 刘洋诺

Through storytelling, the storyteller’s personal experiences mixed with the mythic and magic become the collective experiences of the village, binding the village together, and providing it not only with a sense of community but also a sense of identity. Interestingly, the villagers prefer only the storytellers in their own village to tell of past. Thus, in relating his own experience and that reported by others, the storyteller in turns makes it the experience of those who are listening to his tale (Benjamin 1968, 87). In a way, Jinxiang perfectly embodies Benjaminian storyteller as the one who, in his storytelling, also gives counsels to the listeners -- the young in this context -- to value the happiness of the present and therefore stay with the tradition.

Liu Yi 刘艺

Jinxiang’s story telling demonstrates the power of the oral, in that his performance has potential for moving beyond rational control. He tells stories spontaneously and with great emotion, often with tears and slobbers and shouts at each stop. His dynamic orality controls the whole atmosphere of the meeting and carries the listeners to multiple emotional climaxes. Thus in the highly emotionally charged atmosphere of telling and listening marked by crying and shouting, the teller and listeners identify completely with one another. As a storyteller “in his living immediacy” (Benjamin 1968, 83), Jinxiang is thus an integrate part of the pre-modern rural existence based on its closely-knit community, the shareable experiences, and a fund of stories and lore.

Liu Yiyu 刘怡瑜

And this pre-modern rural existence can only be narrated and made sense of through the mode of storytelling, for the specific sense of historicity and experience of reality as mixed with myth, legend, the magical transgress normal parameters of our modern and rational paradigm of representation.

Thus the synthesis of the pre-modern, marked by both its existence and the mode of storytelling, and postmodernist mannerism with its sophisticated narrative strategies also points to an irony, in that this natural, pre-modern world can only be re-presented in very stylized devices. Here Zhang Wei encounters a similar paradox as the famous Taoist icon, Zhuang Zi. In spite of his distrust of language, Zhuang Zi could only envision the ineffable Way through language.

Liu Zhiwei 刘智伟

In other words, it was through language, given humanity’s permanent separation and alienation from nature, that Zhuang Zi could imagine the existence of something beyond. Zhang Wei’s pre-modern being is by no means ineffable. Yet, its “otherness” and its alterity vis a vis the modern world can only be perceived in our modern world, and represented through sophisticated devices of modernism/postmodernism. The absolute irony that the primitive or the pre-modern cannot be envisioned and represented except in our modern cultural condition in fact exists in the very center of this utopian text, though unrealized by the author himself as he repeatedly criticizes postmodernism and denies its inevitable influence.

Lou Cancan 娄灿灿

So the natural or the pre-modern state of being as eulogized by the author is no longer the first order of naturalness, but the second order, for it is only through an elaborate narrative architecture that such primitivism and naturalness can be re-enacted. To put it in another way, in resurrecting the primitive in our postmodernist age, the author in fact brings out, though unconsciously, a fundamental truth about primitivism. The natural, organic and a-temporal world of agrarian existence represented by the Small Village is not, in fact, a utopia from which we have fallen. Rather, it derives its meaning only through its opposition to a temporal world of modern civilization. Only in contrast to this temporal world can the primordial, the timeless take on meaning as negation of historical time.

Luo Weijia 罗维嘉

Thus the ideal of a timeless, primordial rural past beyond modern civilization is only an ideal created in our modern times.

In my discussion of modernist/postmodernist literary devices, I do not mean to label and categorize Zhang’s text as a modernist/postmodernist. Nevertheless, as seen in the above analysis, his formal strategies do share some strong features of postmodernism, or to be specific, magical realism. These features include boundary transgression, fusion and coexistence of different ontological worlds, and atemporal narrative structure. There is no doubt that Zhang Wei has succeeded in creating a world, a state of being beyond the reach of modern civilization. But his “world,” in the final analysis, can only be represented through modernist/postmodernist techniques.

Luo Yuqing 罗雨晴

It is evident that the creation of this archetypal village embodies the author’s profound nostalgia for the pre-modern past and his utopian search for an ideal state of being. And this timeless place represents the author’s attempt to re-orient geographical and cultural nostalgia in China’s contemporary times from commercially stimulated nostalgia to the rural past as the fundamental Chinese root. Yet the lack of direct temporal and spatial references in the presentation of the Small Village makes his nostalgia closer to imagination, or to what David Wang called, imaginary nostalgia (1993, 107). In other words, his nostalgic representation of the Small Village is devoid of actual memory. This is particularly demonstrated in his deliberately designed a-temporal narrative structure, his foregounding of myth, legends and those magical events.

Ma Juan 马娟

Moreover, as the title indicates, the whole novel is intended by the author as a fable, rather than a history, even though it is written in a historical mode. The village’s mythic origin, its lack of sense of time, and its sudden and catastrophic ending all point to the negation of historical progression. The elaborate narrative structure betrays the imaginative and fantastic construction of this mythic past. Thus Zhang Wei’s Small Village is less a historical object of nostalgia than a topographical/textual locus where imagination and utopian discourse intermingle. In other words, as a literary construction, this phantom village comes less from the actual yearning for what has been lost than from the desire for what has never been there (Wang 1993, 130).

Ma Shuya 马淑雅

The striking incongruity indicates the nature of nostalgia as both a textural stance as well as a structure of feeling.

Nevertheless, the incongruity between formal sophistication and primitive existence is a very hallmark of literary and cultural production in our postmodernist China. In discussing the Fifth Generation Films, Rey Chow points out that primitivism is often associated with modernism/postmodernism. The “primitive passion,” according to Chow’s definition, emerges at “a moment of cultural crisis.” It is an invented fact, fabrication of a sense of the primordial, rural rootedness that occurs in the post-construction (1995, 22-23). Chow’s theory of primitive passion is based on her study of new Chinese cinema.

Ma Zhixing 马智星

However it does shed light on our discussion of Zhang’s profound nostalgia for the rural past at the age of globalization, and on the ironic rupture between postmodernist sophistication and the pre-modern/primordial world presented in his novel. Read in intertextual relation with his essays, it is more than clear that Zhang’s re-imagining of the primordial Chinese rural past is meant to correct what he perceives as the diseased modernity and to rejuvenate Chinese culture. As a response to the cultural crisis in our globalized age, Zhang Wei has chosen the past to measure the present.

The nostalgic return in Zhang Wei’s writings is in fact a kind of self-exile. Zhang Wei actually spent five years in a rustic country house (soon to be torn down) near his hometown to write this novel.

Meng Ying 孟莹

There he was literally cut off from the outside world, expecting that this exile away from modern cities would get him spiritually closer to the land and nature so as to feel anew the vitality of the Chinese people, and rediscover the historical/rural root of Chinese culture. As agreed by all critics, this novel’s representation of the primordial past succeeds in bringing out a native naiveté and simplicity, a sense of gushing life force and animal virility -- the ideal form of being. However, in de-historicizing the past in order to re-imagine the golden age of the rural innocence and plenitude of meaning, the author had no alternatives but to simply let narrative play out its historical inevitability.

Mo Ling 莫玲

The pre-modern agrarian existence embodied by the Small Village is ultimately destroyed by modern industrialization. History then, though negated and erased by the narrative form of the novel, reasserts itself at the end. This leaves us not with a story about the slow decline of this pre-modern agrarian existence, but of its catastrophic fall. The structure of the village’s existence was in no way able to change and transform itself. This is demonstrated by the villagers’ strong resistance to outside influences represented by coal mining industry. As a result, rather than gradual transformation, the village is suddenly destroyed by industrial machine power.

Mo Nan 莫南

The moral dilemma Zhang faces in re-enacting of the Chinese rural past is similar to those encountered by root-seeking writers: the quest for the essence of “Chineseness” also leads to the discovery of unpleasant aspects in its society and cultural tradition. This moral dilemma is also reflected in the novel’s narrative form. While magical events serve to deconstruct the realist paradigm of historical representation, they at the same time also create a picture of rural life as something exotic. As David Wang points out, the object of nostalgia is also easily associated with the exotic (1993, 109).

So if we have found some substance in Zhang’s novel to support his transcendent, yet empty metaphor of “land,” this “substance” remains less than compelling and appealing.

Nie Xiaolou 聂晓楼

A primitivistic village life can be little more than that: it is basic and instinctual, centering on food and sex. The meaning of land is closely related to food; indeed the reason the villagers stick to this land is because it can produce rich food enough to preserve their community. The carnivalesque scenes describing the village young romping in the wild fields at night, while highly acclaimed by many Chinese critics, do not, to my mind, represent an infinite solitude or a simple form of joy as much as the poverty of these lives in an extremely closed and impoverished world. This strikes an even more pathetic chord when knowing that this form of exercise will soon be transformed into wife beating and cupping when these young people grow into adulthood.

Ou Rong 欧蓉

The extremely stable pattern of the village’s social customs, mindset, and traditions is incapable of absorbing new things, or initiating any transformation. So the static and cyclical form of existence is simply erased by the outside forces of industrialization. In a broader sense, the history of the Small Village, or rather, its fate can be seen as an allegory for Chinese traditional society which was also forced into fundamental change from the outside. Thus the Small Village reflects the broader historical impotence and lack of cultural flexibility in traditional rural China. Many critics, including the author himself, argue that the idea of Land is meant to represent a certain spirit. Nevertheless, unless located somewhere, this spirit can only remain an empty structure.

Ouyang Jinglan 欧阳静兰

Nevertheless, it is precisely this structural emptiness that enables Zhang Wei to fill in many meanings throughout his essays.

Fable of September, as well as Zhang’s essays, embody his search for truth and a moral ground based not on the rationally constructed modern world of scientific knowledge and market economy represented by urban centers, but on the simplicity of rural life. This search is rooted in the author’s disenchantment with certain aspects of modern civilization. To Zhang Wei, “Modern industrial civilization represents a form of beauty; yet this form is prone to hurt another more fundamental, more eternal beauty. Idealists all hope that these two forms of beauty can exist in harmony, without much conflict.

Ouyang Ling 欧阳玲

But of course, this hope is only a dream” (Xiao 1995, 193). This distrust of modern civilization also reflects in him what Raymond Williams called “rural-intellectual radicalism” (1973, 36). Indeed, as a rural intellectual (as many critics have labeled him), Zhang demonstrates many aspects of rural-intellectual mentality: hostile to modern capitalism, opposed to commercialism, and attached to country ways and feelings (Williams 1973, 36). Without doubt, Fable of September is a fascinating novel and has uttered our deepest longings and profoundest nostalgia for a pre-modern simplicity of existence free of modern-day ills like alienation and corruption.

Peng Dan 彭丹

Nevertheless, Zhang’s use of the central concept of “land” (referring to an idealized being) as the basis for his critique of modern civilization – decrying moral decay, consumerism, dominance of popular literature and commercialization of knowledge – and his rural intellectual mentality this concept reveals betray the author’s simple-minded, essentialist, and absolutist approach to the complexity of an ever changing social and cultural reality. The reification of land in his essays lacks a broad and deep historical perspective on Chinese modernity. Commercialism and its culture have by all means contributed to the general moral decay and erosion of basic humanistic values in society, and global cultural effects lead to profounder cultural crisis.

Peng Juan 彭娟

However, the absolute rejection of consumerism, globalism, and postmodernism fails to recognize their power and inevitability in restructuring contemporary Chinese society. The problems created by these developments have already moved the issue of solution beyond a discourse on morality. China’s ever more complex and changing social and cultural reality requires a more sophisticated and mature understanding. And finally, I would suggest that in today’s post-Cold War age in which socialism-capitalism antithesis has lost its relevance and meaning, the intellectual paradigm of confrontation must be replaced by one of negotiation. Nostalgia may always be pulling at us, and we may always be willing to indulge in a trip to the imagined past with stories like Fable of September. But as a critical stance, it does not equip us to effectively address the complex process of cultural reformation happening in contemporary Chinese and the world.

Peng Ruihong 彭锐宏

Deciphering the Populist Gadfly: Cultural Polemic around Zhang Chengzhi's "Religious Sublime"

Xinmin Liu

Abstract

Since mid-1990s the Chinese Sanwen has witnessed an upsurge by way of frantic polemics over social and cultural issues in journals, newspaper fueillton, book series and forums. In this "war of words," no writer has been as prolific, as provocative and as problematic as Zhang Chengzhi.

Zhang's essays feature a scathing critique of Chinese intellectuals' lack of spiritual faith, their surrender to global consumerism and the postmodern. Driven by a populist zeal, Zhang extols Chinese muslims' devotion to their religious faith, defiance of material affluence and bond to their harsh yet unsullied habitat. His populist approach to religious transcendence in opposition to what he perceives as today's intellectual disenchantment is ambiguous and ambivalent.

Peng Xiaoling 彭小玲

It wavers between subaltern politics and religious fundamentalism. It falls short of the prospect of constructing a ethnic pluralism that protects cultural differences without yielding to cultural positions that claim unique access to truth.

In a polyglot age in which all has to be contested and negotiated anew, boundary- violating is the rule rather than the exception. Before the last millennium closed out, the Chinese essay thrived in an upsurge of cultural polemics, but in terms of aesthetic and ontological norms, the essayists could ill afford to stay within secure and clear-cut boundaries for long, because they often found themselves bombarded and displaced by a plethora of slippery issues, wacky themes and “roguish dilettantes.”

Peng Yongliang 彭永亮

With battle lines frequently redrawn and growing ever so fuzzy, this round of cultural polemics took on the characteristics of a wild slugfest, no-holds-barred wrestling and elusive shadow boxing. But true to its essaying (or, alternatively, assaying) role, the essay form rose to the challenge with the right mix of mercurial, discordant and yet self-assured mettle. Thus, it proved most capable of lending expression to chaos, fracture and trivia of the postmodern world. One need not search far to bring this point home: the essay has lately swamped the public media with its newfangled offshoots: in addition to the common literary and political essays appeared the licai (personal financing) essay, the xiuxian (leisure/recreation) essay, the photo essay, the cyber essay and so forth. But it is with the cultural polemics of the 1990s that the readers witnessed the essay form in most amazing novelty, deftness and verve.

Peng Yuzhi 彭育志

One way to make sense of what essay form enabled the writers to achieve amid the “wars of words” (pizhan) is to take it to task by way of its intrinsic bond with cultural dialogics, i.e. to see how approaches of writing essays lead to the laying of grounds for a dialogic relationship that intersects even the most incendiary issues and dissimilar views of this discursive maze. To that end, we will focus on Zhang Chengzhi’s essays published after mid-1990s to see why a radical intellectual figure like Zhang, considered an intractable loose cannon by most, often contests and mediates, by virtue of his border-violating politics, what the cultural mainstream considers to be polemical and divisive. At once belletristic and carnivalesque, Zhang Chengzhi’s essays stood out with striking clarity and urgency, if also with unnerving uproar.

Qi Kai 漆凯

Extolled by some as the author whose one book single-handedly redeemed Chinese writing of the entire twentieth century, Zhang was riding high on the tailwind of his enormously popular Xinling shi (History of the Soul, 1992) and seemed to have returned to the public forum with his discursive buoyancy revived and his sense of the “sacred” mission renewed. At first glance, this does not seem the same Zhang Chengzhi who was overwhelmed by the spiritual loftiness he had ascended to upon completing Xinling shi and pleaded to his readers in all earnest, “there will no longer be this “me” from now on. Please banish me from your memory. … I have even taken myself by surprise that with this book I could bring myself to such a screeching halt.”[ Zhang Chengzhi, History of the Soul (Guangzhou: Huacheng chubanshe, 1991) 311.] But did Zhang ever quit the public forum and banish his voice from the on-going dialogue with his readers afterwards?

Qu Miao 瞿淼

And did he accidentally join the ranks of those escapist intellectuals who self-righteously beat a retreat in the face of social repression and identity dislocation of the early 1990s?

Indeed, at the height of his unexpected fame in 1992,[ Zhang Chengzhi made repeated statements in his essays written around this time that he had voluntarily terminated his career as a professional writer out of his desire to be embraced by the Muslim community and out of his disgust for what writers and intellectuals in general had failed to do in the face of rampant consumerist values.] Zhang did not hesitate to declare that his career as a professional writer had come to an end, and that he would retreat to the Muslim communities in the barren loess in Northwest China to begin his new life. While it is true that he verbally renounced his faith in and severed his tie with the mainstream intelligentsia, reality has proved otherwise: he could neither disinherit the dialogic potential of his earlier essays the same way as he allegedly cast off his Han Chinese upbringing, nor disown the intellectual milieu of his growth as though it were those business cards he symbolically tore up in disgust.[ This symbolic act is given an elaborate defense in one of his “position-statement” essays, “My Method of Tearing up those Business Cards,” published in Wuyuan de sixiang (Unassisted Thoughts) (Human wenyi chubanshe, 1999).]

Quan Meixin 全美欣

Zhang cannot give up the act of writing through which he once defied the false sanctity of official histories and celebrated the purity and incorruptibility of the Jahriyya Muslims,[ A sect Chinese Muslims who are often considered the inheritor of mystical Sufis of the religion of Islam.] and to which he owed the stage for exhibiting his extraordinary discursive power as well as his reinvented ethnic identity. While still pursuing his spiritual pilgrimage as a lone warrior, he could hardly remain an intellectual recluse in an imagined sanctuary. Although his views often turned hard-edged due to his combative and self-aggrandizing tone, we need not necessarily be put off by his ill-advised posturing, which is far more rhetorical than substantive. Rather we are urged to see beyond his argumentative mode and detect that ineluctable draw of cultural dialogics that lured him to charge right back to the frontline of the discursive war zones.

Zhang’s essays published since mid-1990s prove most intriguing and forceful when they give vent to his critical views that deliberately blur the boundary between personal commitment with public conscience.

Sagara Seydou

Seldom a believer of easy cultural synthesis, Zhang thrives in getting caught in the crossfire of public debates and wreaking havoc for the intellectual mainstream whose social legitimacy has fed off a complicitous liaison with the official and the ideological center. In a sense, what constituted the identity of his previous self, i.e., the “I” who nimbly narrated a hidden history of a suppressed people in History of the Soul, was a persona already poised on the borders between public outcry and personal misgiving, between official histories and popular memoirs, between discourses of cultural criticism and identity politics. Akin to the self/other-conscious tone of Martin Buber’s I and Thou, Zhang’s resort to “You” side by side with “I” as his discursive partner not only denotes the presence of a dialogic partner cued up by intersubjectivity, but interjects a critical awareness to set off the “unanimous intellectual escapism.”[ Here I am quoting the phrase from Dai Jinhua’s journal article “Hidden Narratives: The Politics of Mass Culture in the 1990s.” Her view is critically assessed by Chen Jianhua in his “Local and Global in Narrative Contestation: Liberalism and the New Left in Late-1990s China” carried in Journal of Asian Pacific Communication, vol. 9, Nos. 1 & 2, 113-29. ]

Shi Diwen 石迪文

Initially a survival tactic to avert political repression in post-1989 China, this latter movement gained popular currency in the early 1990s as some intellectuals and professionals who used to pursue political activism now withdrew into enclosed fields of specialist researches where they could claim professional excellence as their new moral high grounds and practice professional elitism as a testimony to their personal spiritual faith. These so-called “New Scholars” valorized scholarly research as “not just a matter of knowledge or profession, but more fundamentally, a form of life choice and value inquiry.”[ Chen Pingyuan, “Thoughts on Research of Scholarship History,” Xueren I, 2-6. ] Alongside this process of self-authorization, they also sported a sweeping disdain toward mass culture or other nonprofessional cultures. Was this a covert strategy of resisting moral degeneration, or a “club-spirit” rally of collective escapism in the guise of professional disinterest?