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.

我只能把空白的报告交给我的朋友。 但是当然，我没有看到它们并不意味着它们不存在。 一个人只能看到有限的内容。 我希望对此事特别敏感的发言人可以公开指出，甚至提供八到十篇文章的示例，或者只举三到五篇文章作为此类工作的典范，以启发我们并提高我们的辨别能力，以了解哪些论文被称为“呸呸呸”，或者同时通过类推来清理相关问题，即理解哪种论文也构成“ 叭叭叭”。--Deng Jinxia (talk) 13:32, 16 December 2020 (UTC)

我只能把空白的报告交给我的朋友。 但是当然，我没看到它们不等于它们不存在。 一个人能看到内容有限。 我希望对此事特别敏感的发言人可以公开指出，甚至提供八到十篇文章的示例，或者只举三到五篇文章作为此类工作的典范，以启发我们并提高我们的辨别能力，以了解哪些论文被称为“呸呸呸”，或者同时通过类推来清理相关问题，即理解哪种论文也构成“ 叭叭叭”。--Yao Cheng (talk) 13:40, 16 December 2020 (UTC)

我只能向朋友交回一份空白报告。当然，我没有见过他们并不代表他们不存在。一个人所能看到的是有限的。我希望在这个问题上特别敏感的发言者能公开指出它们，甚至举出八篇、十篇的文章示例，或者只举出三五篇作为这类作品的范本，让我们提高我们的辨别能力，为我们区分哪些文章是那些所谓的 "呸呸呸"的文章是提供启发，或许同时也能通过类比澄清相关的问题，就是让人明白构成 "叭叭叭"的文章是什么样的。--Zheng Huajun (talk) 13:44, 16 December 2020 (UTC)

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.

当代中国的知识文化环境是复杂的，其主要冲突趋势有两种，一种是知识/文化的商业化，另一种是对该商业化的强烈抵制。在更抽象的概念层面的知识分子的辩论中，可以听见各种不同的新声音，许多中国作家也加入了这一环境中——有意或无意地——带着他们自己独特的文学声音。《抵抗妥协》系列实际上体现了这些作家反对商业主义和全球主义的努力，他们认为商业主义和全球主义侵蚀了他们的文化和社会。--Ji Tiantian (talk) 13:51, 16 December 2020 (UTC)

当代中国的知识文化环境是复杂的，主要的冲突趋势——一种是走向知识/文学商业化的趋势和另一种对知识/文学商业化的强烈抵制趋势。在更抽象的概念层面的知识分子辩论中，可以听到新的多元化的声音，许多中国作家也加入了这个舞台——有意或无意地——带着他们自己独特的文学声音。《抵抗妥协》系列丛书实际上体现了这些作家反对商业主义和全球主义的努力，他们认为商业主义和全球主义侵蚀了他们的文化和社会。--Li Luyi (talk) 14:24, 16 December 2020 (UTC)

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 technology.

张将通俗文学与电视文化这种低级的和未受过教育的品味联系在一起，并批评当前中国文学评论过度受到了外国文学术语的影响。他的领域概念甚至是一种道德标准。通过这种道德标准，他批判了现当代社会的各个方面——从金钱是万恶之源的商业化，到以跨国公司统治的和一些外国文学的不良影响为标志的全球化，以及以手机、汽车和高科技为代表的现代化。--Li Haiquan (talk) 12:41, 16 December 2020 (UTC)

张将通俗文学与低级、无文化品位的影视文化联系在一起，并批评当代中国文学批评过度受外国文学术语影响。他的领域概念甚至是一种道德标准，他运用这种道德标准批判了现当代社会的方方面面——从商金钱是万恶之源的商业化，到以跨国公司统治的和一些外国文学的不良影响为标志的全球化，以及以手机、汽车和科技为代表的现代化。--Ji Tiantian (talk) 14:56, 16 December 2020 (UTC)

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. 但最重要的是，张先生对于土地的概念象征着一种古老的城乡对立的观念。在文章的开头，他告诉我们。"[城市]是一片被肆意改造的野地，我终将离开它"（萧1995，19）。后来他声称，一个真正的艺术家应该是 "土地的崇拜者"（萧1995，60）。在张先生看来，"土地 "的精神应该是时代的精神（萧1995，241）。从他对现代化的批判来看，这种二元对立显然是基于对城市道德不信任而建立起来的--这种心理情结可以追溯到中国的农耕传统和毛泽东的革命传统。同时，它也透露出对现代社会以前农村生活的深刻怀念。--Li LIli (talk) 15:07, 16 December 2020 (UTC)Li Lili

但最重要的是，张先生的土地概念象征着一种基于古老的城乡对立的理想。在文章的开头，他告诉我们。"[城市]是一片被肆意改造的野地，我终将离它而去"（萧1995，19）。后来他声称，一个真正的艺术家应该是 "土地的崇拜者"（萧1995，60）。在张先生看来，"土地 "精神就是时代精神（萧1995，241）。从他对现代化的批判来看，这种二元对立显然是围绕着对城市的道德不信任建立起来的--这种心理情结可以追溯到中国的农耕传统和毛泽东的革命传统。同时，也透露出对先前农村生活的的深刻怀念。--ZHOUYUJUAN (talk) 00:57, 17 December 2020 (UTC)

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.

阅读此书时，我将重点关注后现代主义形式——虽然他一直予以批判并极力否认其影响——与前现代主义内容之间的辩证关系（主要从其所代表的原始农业生活与文章使用的叙事模式这两个方向进行阐述）。张炜运用魔幻现实主义和某些后现代主义的手法再现了所谓的现代以前的原始世界，这一点无可厚非。然而，作者一再否认后现代主义的积极影响，这是我觉得矛盾点所在。这一矛盾点，再加上他毫无保留地将《远河远山》隐喻为原始乌托邦这一行为，与其说暴露了他的文学虚伪性，不如说这暴露了他在理解现代性、后现代主义乃至历史本身的不足。--Li Liqin (talk) 14:41, 16 December 2020 (UTC)

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.

与说教、长篇大论、屈尊俯就、充满文学陈词滥调的散文不同，张炜的小说《九月寓言》是一篇引人入胜、富于想象力的作品。这是一篇典型的虚构历史类型的文学作品——不是对真实历史人物和事件的虚构叙述，而是以历史的模式写成的纯粹虚构的作品。运用这种方法的其他例子，如追溯一个人、一个家庭或一个村庄的虚构历史，包括苏童的“枫杨树村”系列和格非的虚构传记小说《边缘》。考虑到小说中支离破碎、不连贯的故事和复杂的叙事情节，给这部小说一个简洁、准确的描述是一个挑战。--Li Luyi (talk) 14:08, 16 December 2020 (UTC)

与他那些倾向于说教、长篇大论、屈尊俯就、陈词滥调的散文不同，《九月寓言》这部小说引人入胜。这是一篇典型的虚构历史文学作品——不对真实的历史人物和事件进行虚构叙述，而是一篇以历史的模式写成的虚构作品。这种手法同样运用于追溯某个人、某个家庭或某个村庄的虚构历史，包括苏童的“枫杨树”系列作品与格非的虚构传记小说《边缘》。由于这部小说故事叙述支离破碎、叙事情节复杂，因此简洁准确地描述它着实是一个挑战。--Li Liqin (talk) 14:58, 16 December 2020 (UTC)

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).

如“忆苦”，作为村落重要的集体活动，从“文革”时期的政治话语，转变为凝聚村落社群、口述历史、创造传说的叙事形式。从本质上说，历史被从村庄的背景中抹去了。

小说脱离历史背景也意味着形而上学地否定解释和意义的历史范式，其特征是诸如因果关系、进步和目的论等概念。这使得作者有更大的空间进行不同配置的交互。正如评论家陈思和指出的那样，张的村庄存在三种形式:现实中的，传说/神话中的，口头讲故事的(Xiao 1995,265)。--Ling Zijin (talk) 14:41, 16 December 2020 (UTC)

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).

这些神话和传说是作为村庄日常现实的一部分呈现的。因此，文本中不同的本体论层面—现实和神话/传说/口头故事/神奇事件—村庄存在于其中，合二为一。这是一个过去和现在都成为一体的世界。换句话说，过去就是现在，神话就是现实，反之亦然。永恒的地方就像一个没有时态的句子。而作者对一种完全赤裸裸的、超越现代历史和理性配置的根本性、原型性存在的深刻怀念感就在于此。

正如南帆所指出的，虽然小说的时间跨度不长，但其内容却是庞大的，充满了各种故事（萧1995，253）。--Liu Liu (talk) 13:37, 16 December 2020 (UTC)

这些神话和传说作为村庄日常现实的一部分呈现出来。因此，文本中不同的本体论层次——现实和神话/传说/口头讲故事/魔法事件——村落的存在瓦解为一个整体。这是一个过去和现在同时成为一切的世界。换句话说，过去就是现在，神话就是现实，反之亦然。永恒的地方就像一个没有时态的句子。在这里，作者对一种基本的、原型的、完全赤裸的、超越现代历史和理性结构的存在有着深刻的怀旧之情。 南帆指出，小说的时间跨度虽然不长，但内容却很宏大，充满了各种各样的故事(肖1995,253)。--Ling Zijin (talk) 14:43, 16 December 2020 (UTC)

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.

金祥的讲故事展现了口述的力量，他的表演具有超越理性控制的潜力。他讲故事时自然而然，感情充沛，每到一站，往往泪流满面，口水直流，大呼小叫。他的动态口述控制了整个会场的气氛，并将听众带入多个情感高潮。因此，在以哭和喊为标志的高度情绪化的讲和听的氛围中，讲者和听者完全相互认同。作为一个 "活生生的即时性 "的讲故事的人（Benjamin 1968, 83），金乡是前现代农村生活的一个组成部分，其基础是其紧密联系的社区、可分享的经验以及故事和传说的基金。--Liu Yi (talk) 14:37, 16 December 2020 (UTC) 金祥的故事讲述展现了口述的力量，他的表演具有超越理性控制的潜力。他很自然地讲述故事，感情充沛，一停下来，往往泪流满面，口水直流，大呼小叫。他那充满活力的口述控制了整个会场的气氛，并将听众带入多个情感高潮。因此，在以哭和喊为标志的高度情绪化的讲和听的氛围中，讲者和听者完全相互认同。作为一个 "活生生的即时性 "的讲故事的人（Benjamin 1968, 83），金乡是现代以前农村生活的一个组成部分，以前的农村整个乡村紧密联系、人们互相交流经历，还流传着大量的传说和故事。--Li LIli (talk) 15:24, 16 December 2020 (UTC)Li Lili

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?

Shi Haiyao 石海瑶

Zhang’s answer rebukes the latter. Long before the first public debate over such issues took place, his own self-authorization in writing History of the Soul brought the “impartial” search for historical truth under critical scrutiny. Positing his ethnic unconscious as the testing site, Zhang launched an assault on the falsely fixed standards in writing Hui histories whose authority had been complicitous with the chauvinistic State ideology. He berated the methodological status quo in Chinese Muslim scholars’ historiography for tailoring local and ethnic memories to cater to the legitimacy of its hegemonic control. In the same vein, he called into question the validity of collecting and editing historical documents according to empiricist standards, chastising its total submission to a positivist view of historical development in the name of scholarly objectivity.

Si Yu 司妤

He specifically targeted the renowned Hui historian Yang Huaizhong whose investigation of munafeles, Hui collaborators with Manchu and Han rulers, had, in Zhang’s view, internalized the reigning codes of power-knowledge alliance. Despite of his fine appraisal and extensive research, Zhang reproves Yang’s aloof stand:

On the one hand, you try to reflect critically yourself and your tradition, on the other, you want to bring to light the suppression and violation committed against the human soul. How can the kind of subject you’re studying still be the same historiography? If Yang had yet to shake off the false sense of ethnic anonymity, Zhang does not make it any easier for himself when faced with the historical injustice inflicted upon the Huis.

Song Jianru 宋建茹

At the Jinji Bao, a historical site of many quelled Hui uprisings in 19th century, he could hardly help chiding himself for not “avenging the historical wrongs” as a professional historian. He confesses in a 1996 essay entitled “Odes to Waves”:

It so happened that I have the fortune of being a full-fledged academic historian, yet I examined every single detail (of official records) critically but could not offer any rebuttal. It so happened that I was born of Hui parentage, yet I attempted to skirt around it but could not escape this historical site---the wintry mist shrouding Jinji Bao pounded me wave after wave, pressing me to make a pledge, to declare a nietie, to make good the pledge of being dedicated to the people I took rather casually years ago.

Yang Huizhong, also known as Yang Mohammed Usiar, is a well-known Hui historian who has done crucial research on 18th Century Jahriyya Muslim uprisings. Zhang’s critical comments appear in The Heroes’ Paths in Wilderness (Shanghai: Zhishi Publishing House, 1994) 125.（文献无需翻译）

Su Lin 苏琳

This is not an occasional outburst of emotions for the sake of letting off his own guilt. This is sincere self-reproach to prod himself into keeping his ethnic memory and affective empathy from being worn thin by his years of academic studies, field work and research. Unlike the New Scholars’ chase of “disinterest” and neutrality, Zhang opts valiantly for the direction of racial and social activism: to knock down posts erected by “objective” histories, penetrate the walls of political and religious phobias and uncover the buried truths of ethnic repression and violence. One might query Zhang’s view of historical scholarship as emotive and skewed, thus running the risk of demeaning historiography into personal misgivings.

Tan Xingyue 谭星越

But in the era of cultural pluralism and ethnic identities, it is precisely the affective and personal that keep our ethnic awareness alive and urge us not to take boundaries of power and knowledge for granted.

No doubt, Zhang enters the debate of “the ultimate concern” of the mid-1990s, but he does so on his terms. He puts forward an ethnographical approach consisted of a person’s affective propensities (qinggan), ethnic lineage (xuetong) and a “prefigured destiny” (qianding). These are interlocked and reciprocal in variety of ways to enmesh a person in a nexus of cultural dialogics. He then probes the illusion of professionalism in the form of an “originary question” (yuanchu zhiwen).

Tan Xinjie 谭鑫洁

He asks: “How do you account for your being in the face of your own soul when there is nothing scientific or ideological to fend you from this ultimate accountability?” To him what accounts for his ultimate humanist concern is his Hui ethnicity. Ethnicity, according to Michael Fischer, “ … is something dynamic, often unsuccessfully repressed or avoided. It can be potent even when not consciously taught; … something that institutionalized teaching easily makes chauvinistic, sterile, and superficial.” It is thus the “id-like” sentient and psychological that lay the ground for one’s ethnic/cultural conditioning and in turn bring it to bear upon one’s historical awareness.

A sinicized Islamic term for “taking a devotional vow.” It is also known as Juyi in Chinese. Zhang 1999a, 37. Zhang Chengzhi, The Heroes’ Paths in Wilderness (Shanghai: Zhishi Publishing House, 1994) 125. Michael Fischer, ‘Ethnicity and the post-modern arts of memory,” in James Clifford and George Marcus, eds., Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986) 195. （文献无需翻译）

Tan Yuanyuan 谭媛媛

Being ethnically predisposed as an “other” likewise makes Zhang acutely watchful of the State’s covert practice of ethnocentrism in the name of social progress and scientific rationality. Drawing on his renewed ethnic ethos, Zhang has no qualms in issuing a call to all historians: “… disinherit the whole positivist baggage of the conventional historiography, and seek out the complex intuitive faculty of your individual soul.”

What about his image of a lone moral crusader? A great deal of ruckus has been raised over Zhang’s arguably obsessive stress on the “purity” and “truthfulness” of the Jahriyya Muslims; he is disparaged by some critics as “the most self-pleased” man in China today,” due precisely to his tireless and unsuspecting adoration of the close-knit and reclusive Jahriyya community.

作为一个 "他者 "的民族倾向，同样也使张先生对国家以社会进步和科学理性的名义，隐蔽地实行民族中心主义的做法产生了敏锐的警惕。 借着重新焕发的民族气质，张先生毫无顾忌地向所有历史学家发出号召。"... 摒弃传统史学的全部实证主义包袱" "寻找你个人灵魂的复杂直觉能力" 。

他的一个孤独的道德十字军形象呢？ 张先生对贾里雅穆斯林的 "纯洁性 "和 "真实性 "可以说是执着地强调，引起了很大的骚动；他被一些评论家贬为当今中国 "最自得其乐 "的人，"这正是由于他孜孜不倦地、不怀好意地崇拜着封闭而隐居的贾里雅群体。--Tan Yuanyuan (talk) 13:38, 16 December 2020 (UTC)

Tang Bei 汤蓓

Does this not make him one of those solitary seekers of moral perfection in a morally promiscuous age? Zhang’s admonishing axioms seem to answer in a seamless fit to Wang Xiaoming’s definition of a self-oriented search for ethical righteousness. As an alternative to the intellectuals’ direct involvement in politics of the 1980s, Wang emphasized the personal quality of ultimate concern and argued: “(1) you can only search for the ultimate value from your personal experience; (2) what you find is your own interpretation of what the ultimate value is, not the ultimate value itself.” Zhang seems to share the solitary seekers’ new sense of priorities in favoring a self-motivated quest for absent moral virtues, albeit transcendental and visionary.

Tang Ming 唐铭

But one facet of his writings forcefully rejects that equation: he has all along kept up public-minded criticism of social ills and moral depravities as a free-lance social/cultural critic. What the seekers of personal integrity and sublimation failed to hang onto Zhang has carried on with infinitely sharper insight and fiercer zeal.

Zhang detects and detests the anxiety of these individuals to rise above the laity of social meanings and responsibilities as a way to avoid being an accomplice to ideological repression. And indeed his most scathing exposé has so far been reserved for the mainstream intellectuals rather than the money-grabbing New Riches or the consumerist mass.

Tang Yiran 汤伊然

When readers’ feedback to his History of the Soul heated up into a media squabble in 1994, Zhang burst onto the scene again with another of his tirades “Poets, why aren’t you indignant?” The essay is brimmed with scorn for the public for its total surrender to consumerism and their frantic drive for worldly pleasures; yet it is the intellectual mainstay who bear the brunt of his verbal onslaught. Zhang accused them of “selling out to monetary gains and worldly repute,” the news media of “swarming up like bees after the ‘big shots’ for petty favors and leftovers, and the cultural critics of “becoming painfully silent on any honest, principled, to-the-point criticism.”

Zhang 1994a, 125. Zhang Yuanshan, “Zhang Chengzhi---the Most Self-Pleased Writer” at Xin yu si dianzi wenku (www.xys.org), listed under Zhang Yuanshan. Zhang Rulun et al, “The Humanist Spirit: whether and How Is It Possible?---Reflections on the Humanist Spirit, I” in Dushu 3: 3-13. For a fine critique of this shift of intellectual paradigm, see also Xu Ben. Disenchanted Democracy: Chinese Cultural Criticism after 1989 (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1999) 49-56. （文献无需翻译）

Tao Ye 陶冶

For a time, Zhang’s readers felt jabbed by his barbed comments on the gaping “void” of spiritual faith and rampant cynicism, philistinism and moral incompetence among the intellectuals. They were also exacerbated by his unmatched tribute to the Jahriyya Muslims who remained unperturbed by the hustle and bustle of economic boom elsewhere in China. All this led the public to conclude that Zhang’s posturing was cashing in on the polarization of the Haves and the Have-nots of China’s new social strata, and that with his accolades for “the poor men’s religion” he intended to push for the image of a “Me-alone Spirituality.”

Wang Meiling 王美玲

This grave misperception turned out to be the main ground for his detractors like Wang Shuo to lodge a protest, accusing him of getting rich with loyalties for his publications in Japan and overseas while turning hypocritically around to lecture the intellectuals at home in their weakness for cynicism, corruption and bankruptcy.

Nothing could be further from the truth: although feeling at home with the rigid and barren habitat of the poverty-stricken Muslims, Zhang is not necessarily biased against material comforts or social development as some critics have labeled him to be.

这种严重的误解竟然成为王朔等人诋毁他而提出抗议的主要理由，指责他依靠日本和海外出版的刊物事业一心一意地发大财，却还虚伪地反过来教训国内知识分子玩世不恭、腐败潦倒。

这一切都离不开此等事实：即张先生虽然对贫困穆斯林僵化贫瘠的生活环境感到十分亲切，但他并不一定像某些批评家所标榜的那样，会对物质享受和社会发展持有偏见态度。--Wang Meiling (talk) 14:46, 16 December 2020 (UTC)

This grave misperception turned out to be the main ground for his detractors like Wang Shuo to lodge a protest, accusing him of getting rich with loyalties for his publications in Japan and overseas while turning hypocritically around to lecture the intellectuals at home in their weakness for cynicism, corruption and bankruptcy.

这种严重的错误认识，成了像王朔这样的诋毁者提出抗议的主要理由，他们指责他依靠在日本和海外的出版物一心只想着致富，同时又虚伪地反过来告诫国内知识分子，说他们玩世不恭、腐败潦倒。

Nothing could be further from the truth: although feeling at home with the rigid and barren habitat of the poverty-stricken Muslims, Zhang is not necessarily biased against material comforts or social development as some critics have labeled him to be.

事实并非如此：尽管张先生对贫困穆斯林的僵硬贫瘠的生活环境感到熟悉亲切，但他并不一定像一些批评家所说的那样，对物质享受或社会发展抱有偏见。--Xiao yining (talk) 16:09, 16 December 2020 (UTC)Xiao Yining

Wang Xuan 王轩

Rather, he is adamant with the intellectuals’ frailties in the face of social malfunction and injustice as a result of harried economic policies, and he is outspoken about what little critical awareness the educated class can foster against the blindly raging “market forces” and the new alliances of wealth and power. In 1999, Zhang wrote a sequel “Again to the Honorable Teacher” to his 1991 tribute to Lu Xun, in which he firmly declares that he will not back down from his previous judgment on Lu Xun’s misfortune---why Lu Xun chose not to leave us a legacy of great volumes of scholarly or professional worth.

Zhang Chengzhi and Zhang Wei initiated a heated round of bizhan (pen-combats) in the Literary Supplement of Wenhui Bao (Wenhui Daily, Shanghai) over the issue of mass consumption and culture with many writers who are more sympathetic with the marketized economy and consumerist culture. This essay by Zhang---“Poets, Why aren’t you indignant?” is featured as the leading editorial on August 7, 1994. Zhang Chengzhi, “Poets, Why aren’t you indignant?” in Wenhui Bao (Shanghai) (August 7, 1994). For further detail of this dispute, read Geremie Barmé, In the Red: On Contemporary Chinese Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999) 304-309. （文献无需翻译）

Wang Yu 王煜

In fact, Zhang now argues, in less sarcastic yet firmer terms, why Lu Xun’s solitary yet relentless social and cultural crusades are gaining rather losing currency in 1990s’ China. He writes:

The populace in this nation have little power or scarce hope. But they are quick to discover: when they suffer and despair under the heavy burden of tyrannical rule of the bureaucratic few, “the intellectual class” turn out to be, after politicians and money, another cruel oppressor. The broad masses want nothing more than being fed and clothed. But they need the intellectuals to keep up the basic and constant criticism of the social elite and the powerful. Otherwise, their plight would be unthinkable.

Wang Yuan 王源

We, as readers of Lu Xun’s zawen, are surely struck by the familiar wording, the similar tone, and the unyielding views that have implausibly found their way back into Zhang’s essays over half a century later. We are also surprised at how candid and unaffected he is when making such social commentary from a position comparable to the Great Lu Xun.

One is tempted to ask: is Zhang grandstanding? I think not. However, the causes for leaping to charges against his feisty offensive are worth looking into: they are, ironically, spawned off the same binary frame of mind that has been consistently used by the CCP ideologues to denounce the inroads made by “liberal bourgeois values;” yet such a frame of mind is also replicated by many of Zhang’s critics at home and overseas.

Wei Honglang 韦洪朗

Odd bedfellows resting on the same cultural logic, they argue that criticism of the intellectuals’ dislocation and impotence in current China is motivated by the either/or option. One is either directed by a regressive Party-led agenda to exert the authority of socialist ideological legacy while intimating their message amidst the consumerist ambience. Or he/she is motivated by a dissenting political force to jump-start a new round of political subversion while laying itself open to patronage of the West (mainly America)-centered global order. Zhang’s detractors from both these stances see eye-to-eye on his role in today’s cultural politics, following the either/or mode of straightjacket thinking.

Wei Yafei 魏亚菲

But I believe he is neither a firebrand of old egalitarian idealism nor an extremist with religious fundamentalist zeal. His self-styled apologist persona is neither a haughty custodian of monolithic values, nor a self-righteous model of narcissistic purity and perfection, nor a slick po-mo master showcasing newly imported goods. His is more of a lone outlaw in a “mobile warfare” in the Gramchian sense: preying on the unjust and corrupt elite, yet forever keeping the society at large at bay.

Take the case of Zhang’s attitude towards “the people.” Pervasive social and cultural changes triggered by State-endorsed market economy had been set in place in China by mid-1990s which had led to seismic dislocation and reordering across the entire social spectrum.

Wen Sixing 文偲荇

The result is that familiar notions such as “the people” had been stripped of their usual ideological moorings, whereas the newly emerged social grouping was yet to be reckoned with. While the recent cultural warfare has struck a bitter discord between the Liberals and the New Leftists over the definition of the masses (dazhong), Zhang has been relentlessly lucid and unambiguous who they are---those of the disadvantaged and the impoverished in China today. He is evidently critical of the Liberals who are eager for China to partake of a global economic order and evolve into a liberal society with a rising middle class as the nucleus of its civic values, but tend to lose sight of how this class of well-off Chinese (most notably the New Riches) can emerge without tipping economic and social imbalances towards those at the lower rungs of the social ladder.

其结果是，人们熟悉的概念，如“人民”，已被剥夺了他们通常的意识形态根基，而新出现的社会群体还有待考虑。虽然最近的文化战争在自由主义者和新左派对“大众”的定义上产生了激烈的分歧，但张却毫不含糊地明确了他们是谁——当今中国的弱势群体和贫困群体。他显然是重要的自由主义者,他们迫切希望中国参与全球经济秩序和发展成一个自由与崛起的中产阶级社会作为其公民价值观的核心,但往往忽视这类富裕的中国人(尤其是新兴富人群体)的出现，而不引爆经济和社会失衡以及影响刚刚起步的社会主义事业。--Wensixing (talk) 13:50, 16 December 2020 (UTC)

其结果是，"人民 "等熟悉的概念已被剥去了惯常的意识形态寄托，而新出现的社会群体却还没有被重视起来。 当最近的文化战在自由派和新左派之间就大众（大中）的定义发生激烈的争执时，张先生却毫不留情地明确了他们是谁--当今中国的弱势群体和贫困者。 他显然对自由派提出了批评，他们渴望中国参与全球经济秩序，并发展成为一个以中产阶级为公民价值核心的自由社会，但却往往忽视了这个富裕的中国阶层（最主要的是新富阶层）如何能够在不使经济和社会失衡向社会底层倾斜的情况下出现。--Liu Yi (talk) 14:39, 16 December 2020 (UTC)

Wen Xiaoyi 文晓艺

For that matter, he is also adamant with the Po-Mo culturalists whose extreme kowtowing to the market culture and its mass consumers is, by way of an odd twist, turned into propelling forces for the predominantly Han Chinese to regain a very ethnocentric mode of self-empowering in a renewed East-West confrontation.

Although Zhang’s view on “the people” is in close proximity to those of the New Leftists, he does not convey them as if they were their carbon copies. Instead he distills the critical efficacy of their combat with the deceptive “mass culture” and implants it in his border-violating strategy as a mobile yet vital critiquing position.

Wu Kai 吴恺

Contrary to what he sometimes claims---to jettison the culpable intellectuals in the name of “religious” purity, Zhang has always felt the urge to recharge the power of the intellectual self as expository but not dispossessing, diagnostic but not agnostic, and independent but not self-insulating. The key to his border-crossing self is a dialogic interplay among multiple viable postures of the self while never allowing the self to be tied to a single rigid form of it. It is by negotiating between these individual stances of conviction that Zhang aims to create a vigilant and constructive ambience to see to the redress of social injustice. While revisiting Lu Xun in “Again to the Honorable Teacher,” he avidly called on Chinese intellectuals to embark on a solitary but enduring quest for the interests of the people at the lower rungs of the society.

For further readings on this dispute, read Li Shitao, ed. Zhishi fengzi lichang: ziyou zhiyi zhizheng yu zhongguo xixiangjie de fenghua (The Position of Chinese Intellectuals: The divided intellectual circle over the issue of Liberalism) (Changchun: Shidai wenyi chubanshe, 2000).（文献无需翻译）

Wu Qi 吴琪

To engage in a dialogue with these masses, he observes, is for the intellectuals “to forever keep a watchful custody of such people against the socially established and the powerful.” And the masses will discover Zhang’s polemical writings, much as they did Lu Xun’s Zawen in 1930s, “there is always someone like Lu Xun who is cussing his heart, all alone in his crusade.”

Discussion of this chapter: The xiaopin wen between xianshi sanwen and zawen

King-Fai Tam

I would first of all like to commend the contributors of this chapter for their original, well researched and well articulated papers which represent a diversity of angles of approaching the study of essays, while sharing an interest in the polemical nature of the genre.

Zhang Chengzhi, “Zaizhi xiansheng” in Wuyuan de sixiang (Unassisted Thoughts) (Changsha: Hunan chubanshe, 1999) 100-105.（文献无需翻译）

Wu Qiong 吴琼

Together, they constitute an eye-opener for me, given my interest in xiaopin wen and other similar works with a lyrical bent that shy away from discursiveness and argumentation. If the xiaopin wen writers have anything to say about politics and society, it is often with a bemused tone; and the most that one can expect from them is a lamentation of some unjust social phenomenon, accompanied perhaps by an expression of outrage and an ineffectual cry for change. In that sense, xiaopin wen can be said to have rejected one the basic tenets of the essay as a process of experimentation, questioning, reflection, and, indeed, essaying. Too often, it gestures superficially to the analysis of an issue, only to come down heavily on an emotional response at the end.

鉴于我对 "小品 "文和其他类似的抒情作品的兴趣，这些作品加在一起，让我大开眼界。 如果说 "小品 "文对政治和社会有什么要说的话，那往往是带着一种无奈的语气；人们能从他们那里得到的最多的是对某种不公正的社会现象的哀叹，也许还伴随着一种愤怒的表达和对改变的无效的呼喊。 在这个意义上，xiaopinwen可以说拒绝了散文的一个基本原则，即把散文作为一个实验、质疑、反思的过程，事实上，也是散文的过程。 很多时候，它表面上摆出了分析问题的姿态，却在最后重重地落在了情感的回应上。--WuQiong (talk) 13:21, 16 December 2020 (UTC)

这些作品加在一起，让我大开眼界，让我对 "小品 "文和其他类似的抒情作品产生了兴趣，。 如果说 "小品 "文对政治和社会有什么要说的话，那往往是带着一种无奈的语气；人们能从他们那里得到的最多的是对某种不公正的社会现象的哀叹，也许还伴随着一种愤怒的表达和对改变的无效的呼喊。 在这个意义上，“小品”文可以说拒绝了散文的一个基本原则，即把散文作为一个实验、质疑、反思的过程，事实上，也是散文的过程。 很多时候，它表面上摆出了分析问题的姿态，却在最后重重地落在了情感的回应上。--Blank (talk) 13:47, 16 December 2020 (UTC)

鉴于我对 "小品 "文和其他类似的抒情作品的兴趣，这些作品加在一起，让我大开眼界。 如果说 "小品 "文对政治和社会有什么要说的，那往往是带着一种无奈的语气；人们能从他们那里得到的最多的是对某种不公正的社会现象的哀叹，也许还伴随着一种愤怒的表达和对改变的无效的呼喊。 在这个意义上，小品文可以说拒绝了散文的一个基本原则，即把散文作为一个实验、质疑、反思的过程，事实上，也是散文的过程。 很多时候，它表面上摆出了分析问题的姿态，却在最后重重地落在了情感的回应上。--Wensixing (talk) 13:53, 16 December 2020 (UTC)

鉴于我对 "小品 "文和其他类似的抒情作品的兴趣，这些作品加在一起，让我大开眼界。 如果说 "小品 "文对政治和社会有什么要说的话，那往往是带着一种无奈的语气；人们能从他们那里得到的最多的是对某种不公正的社会现象的哀叹，也许还伴随着一种愤怒的表达和对改变的无效的呼喊。 在这个意义上，小品文可以说拒绝了散文的一个基本原则，即把散文作为一个实验、质疑、反思的过程，事实上，也是散文的过程。 很多时候，它表面上摆出了分析问题的姿态，却在最后重重地落在了情感的回应上。--Wang Meiling (talk) 14:53, 16 December 2020 (UTC)

Wu Xiang 邬香

Yet, the four contributions to this chapter point out that there is a bigger world in the study of essays beyond xiaopin wen. The essay can, as Mary Scoggin argues, be cantankerous, recalling the image of a spear and a dagger, where one piece of zawen is more likely to elicit an equally cantankerous response than to put an issue to rest. With good reasons, we describe such exchanges as pizhan (battling with the pen). The essay is also a site where the essayist can consciously sculpt an image of himself, as Lu Jie and Liu Xinmin show in the cases of Zhang Wei and Zhang Chengzhi.

Wu Yilu 吴一露

Moreover, while one single piece of essay is indeed different from a treatise in that its brevity makes it ill-equipped to address an issue in great depth, essayists such as Zhang Wei and Zhang Chengzhi can resort to voluminous output, exhaustively exploring different shades of a question in one essay after another to build up a coherent position. Wang Ban furthermore approaches the essay as a sensibility, or a structuring device, with which a writer tells and retells a story, puts forward a proposition and modifies or denies it. As such, it replaces the novel as the form that best captures the consumerist ethos of urban China in the 1990s.

Wu Zijia 吴子佳

Yet, if a literary genre can take up so many shapes and forms, are we still justified to consider these shapes and forms as a uniform entity, to be analyzed and studies with the same methodology ? In my study of the essay, I have often been confronted with this question. In the New England Association of Asian Studies conference in October last year I raised a similar query in response to the presentations of Alexandra Wagner, Martin Woesler and Xinmin Liu: in what way can we consider works as diverse as those of Feng Zhi, Qu Qiubai, and a group of other writers that we discussed that day as essays? Now, in light of the four papers of this chapter, I would like to ask the same question again.

Xiao Shuangling 肖双玲

I will take the clue from Wang Ban when he considers the “polemic pole” for the essay, i.e., that which the essay stands against, and see whether we can understand what essay is but finding out what it is not. At different historical junctures and in different cultural contexts, the essay has served as the voice of the opposition and the marginal. Wang Ban has already alluded to Adorno’s “The Essay as Form” to underscore the institutional system of philosophy, the discourse of scientific positivism, and its attendant socio-cultural conditions of reification, to which the essay stands in opposition. Likewise, one can find a late twentieth-century parallel where the articulation of feminism and decolonization often takes the form of the essay.

Xiao Ting 肖婷

Yet, in the Chinese context, even if we narrow it down to the last two decades of the twentieth century, it is not entirely clear what the polemic pole of the essay is. Wang Ban believes that the polemical pole to contemporary Chinese essays to be identified as the Enlightenment and Marxist paradigm of teleological history and its literary counterpart: the novel of “revolutionary realism.” For the zawen she is examining, Mary Scoggin suggests that zawen spits in the face of a “discourse of beauty” that serves to mute criticism in the name of social and rhetorical graciousness, an attitude that essentially forbids zawen writers to say anything if they cannot think of something nice to say.

Xiao Xi 肖茜

Zhang Chengzhi, Xinmin’s subject, has made it abundantly clear that his essays are manifestations of a historical method that deconstructs Han chauvinism even as he has little by way of counter evidence to go by. Like Wang Ban, Lu Jie also pits the essay against the novel, but for a different reason, and with findings intriguingly different from that of Wang Ban. Wang Ban attributes the “metafictional” signs in Wang Anyi’s Shushu di gushi to the intrusion of the essayist sensibilities. In other words, it is her essayist touch that accounts for the tentativeness of her narrative. On the other hand, Lu Jie succeeds in showing that Zhang Wei the novelist is much more tentative and equivocal than Zhang Wei the essayist. 《新民》的主体，张承志已经非常清楚地表明，他的散文是解构大汉族主义的历史方法的表现，尽管他几乎没有任何相反的证据可供参考。和王班一样，卢杰也把这篇文章与《红楼梦》对立起来，但原因不同，他的发现与王班的截然不同。王班把王安忆《叔叔的故事》中的“元化”符号归结为散文家情感的侵入。换句话说，正是她的散文家风格造成了她的叙述的不确定性。另一方面，卢杰成功地展示了小说家张伟比散文家张伟更加犹豫不决和模棱两可。--XiaoXi (talk) 13:49, 16 December 2020 (UTC)Xiao Xi

Xiao Yining 肖伊宁

Even if one were to maintain that Jiuyue yuyan, like Shushu di gushi, is informed by the essayist sensibilities, one still has to consider why Zhang Wei’s essays are more categorical, and hence more simplistic and reductionist, in their assertion than the novel, whose meaning requires considerable teasing out. What is one to make of this discrepancy between Wang Anyi and Zhang Wei? What does it say about the two writers? And what do they have to say, if anything, about the essay and the novel?

即使有人坚持认为《九月寓言》和《叔叔的故事》一样，都是受散文家的情感影响的，但我们还是要思考为什么张炜的散文在论断上比小说更直截了当，也因此更为简单明了，而他的小说的意义却需要相当多的梳理推敲。怎么去理解王安忆和张炜之间的这种差异呢？对于这两位作家有什么看法呢？他们对这篇文章和小说有什么要说的吗？

In various ways, our contributors also look into the self-image the essayists construct for themselves as they participate in the cultural polemics at the end of the century.

在本世纪末的文化论战中，我们的撰稿人也从不同的角度审视了散文家为自己建构的自我形象。--Xiao yining (talk) 15:56, 16 December 2020 (UTC)Xiao Yining

Xie Fan 解帆

Gone, apparently, is the supercilious pose of the xianshi essayist who, to paraphrase Lu Xun’s famous translation of Kuriyagawa Hakuson, “sits in a rocking chair by the stove in winter or puts on a bathrobe in summer to drink tea and chat casually with one’s good friends about things that do not give one a headache.” Rather, as our contributors succeed in pointing out, headache is precisely what our essayists aim to provide. Even though they also affect varying degrees of reclusivity or compromise, they always come back later to the polemic fray with renewed vigor. I have in mind such instances as Zhang Wei’s repeated claim to find a monastery in the mountains where he will study all by himself for a year even as he goes around giving advice to his readers on how best to resist the corrupting influences of mass culture.

Xie Ziyi 谢子熠

Similarly, the zawen writer distance themselves from the overtly declamatory tone with the sole purpose of making their gripes more readily stomachable, and their voices more readily heard. Zhang Chengzhi’s temporary withdrawal into religious isolation is another example, for, after a brief period of reclusivity, he enters once again the public sphere with deeper conviction and a broader agenda. In light of Wang Ban’s discussion, Wang Anyi’s case is perhaps less clear-cut than the rest. To be sure, she seems to have adapted rather well to the new consumerist society that commodifies literature; yet, it is clear that there is a serious intent in her deployment of the essayist sensibilities.

Xu Jia 徐佳

In fact, to the extent that Shushu di gushi has challenged the master-narrative with which the life’s progress of a rehabilitated rightist is often told, I would argue that the essayist sensibilities, far from being irrelevant to history, can be put to historical use. The works of Zhang Wei, Zhang Chengzhi and Shao Yanxiang can perhaps supply us with a footnote to the historical relevance of the essay.

The 20th Century Chinese Essay - Characteristics, Actors, and Trends

Martin Woesler

Abstract

In the first part of my paper, which deals with the characteristics of the essay, I will start with a definition of the essay as a non-fictional subjective representation in a free form: “Essay”, in Chinese mostly sanwen 散文, is a genre term for shorter, self-contained nonfictional prose texts, in which the author tries to mediate individual experiences on an object or a question using a subjective I-perspective.

Xu Jing 许晶

I will introduce the hypothesis that the Chinese and the Western essays belong to the same international genre and try to prove it by showing cross-cultural similarities both in form and content. However, there are special local characteristics of the Chinese essay, which I will name.

In the second part, I try to narrate the beginnings of the rediscovery of the essay in the early 1980s. Not before 1995 did international scholarship start to use common philological methods to explore single essayists or the essays of groups and to write a history of the Chinese essay. Then I will show the topical development of political and apolitical essays.

In the third part, I will ask, who were the major players in the Chinese essayism of the 20th century?

Xu Jing 许静

I will introduce Lu Xun, with his sharp, polemic subgenre for daily-political use, the zawen. Analysis reveals that he still remains the most-read essayist, not because of his zawen, but because of his reminiscences and lyrical essays. Using the examples of the most often reprinted essays, “The Back View” (Zhu Ziqing 1928b), “The Moonlit Lotus Pond” (Zhu Ziqing 1927), “Splashing Oars and Lantern Light on the Qinhuai River” (Zhu Ziqing 1924), “Wild Vegetables of my Home Region” (Zhou Zuoren 1925), “Listening to the Cold Rain” (Yu Guangzhong 1974) and “In Memoriam of Xiao Shan” (Ba Jin 1979b), I will show that moving essays form the top tier of the genre. I will also try to stimulate further analytic works by giving hints for examples of promising intertextual and intersubjective comparison.

Xu Mengdie 徐梦蝶

In the fourth section, I will name contemporary trends in essay writing. After the Cultural

Revolution essays came from the perspective of an authentic eye. In the 1980s and especially in the 1990s, individualism demanded a critical reflection on the satisfaction of personal consumption needs and tried to give a personal orientation, as essayists pleaded for moral virtues. Other essays in the 1980s and 1990s were written with a kind of new subjectivism, targeted away from contemporary contradictions but appealing to the feelings of the audience by creating either a positive or a negative world.

The fast-paced nature of current Chinese society demands diverting and short texts. There is also increasing consciousness of individuality, for which the essay is the most direct form of subjective expression, even more direct than the poem which is mediated by its metrical and formal demands.

Xu Pengfei 许鹏飞

In China we see a renewed interest in discussing social-political issues through the medium of the essay, as was the case in the 1920s and 30s. We become conscious of the banality of daily life when it is being used as a literary topic, as in the essay, which most commonly treats the genre of everyday life. The de-ideologization of Chinese society led to a rediscovery of the apolitical essays, dating from the Republican era, especially from the years 1923 to 1928. In the 1990s, the essayistic culture of political criticism of the 1980s has vanished; the only political relic is patriotism, for example expressed in the monograph published in 1996, China can say no! – Possibilities for politics and emotions in the period after the cold war (see China can say no!).

Yang Chenting 杨晨婷

1. CHARACTERISTICS

1.1 Defining the essay as a non-fictional subjective representation in a free form

Similar to international literature, the basic subdivision of literature in China in general is one in three types: epic (with xiaoshuo (fiction), sanwen (here in the broader meaning non-fictional prose)), lyrics shige (lyrics) and xiqu (drama). Though there is no pure epic form, fiction and prose are often jointly addressed with the Chinese term “wu yunwen” which corresponds to the term “epic” in the West. The types may be distinguished roughly by their nature in the following way: In the epic, bygone events are retold, a broad, filled story dominates the foreground. In the lyrics, the reader is encouraged to feel the current sensations and often confessionlike feelings of the poet.

Yang Hairong 杨海容

The drama recalls a self-contained action directly in monologue or dialogue and in this way unburdens the re-creative imagination of the readers/spectators through it. The essay as a genre of the epic is a detached non-fictional subjective representation in a free form.

“Essay,” Chinese mostly sanwen 散文 , is a genre term for shorter, self-contained non-fictional prose texts, in which the author tries to mediate individual experiences on an object or a question out of subjective I-perspective. This it tries associatively and from different sides, not as a text for daily use, but with artistic or educationally demanding means of language, nevertheless in an accessible form. The resource is mastered by the essayist sovereignly and the topic is seen in a larger context and can even be presented humorously. Free-dom in form and content is essential for the essay.

Yang Hui 阳慧

Different perspectives range in the international genre of the essay: Genres are primarily divisions of literature through the scholarship of literature for specialized contemplation and in order to be able to compare similar texts more easily. On the other hand, subcategoring the essay in too many small entities, questions the sense of such subdivisioning in reference to hermeneutic findings. One must also stay aware of the changing nature of literature itself and the relativity of the scientific perspective, which is still a timely one, even if its accepted internationally.

Regional deviations seem less important for the essay than for established genres like short stories, novels etc., and far less important than for poems.

Yang Yi 杨逸

All these other genres are seen as international genres. My hypothesis, that the Chinese and the Western essay also belong to the same international genre maybe proved by the crosscultural mutualities both in form and content.

In the 21st century, the world is growing together and culture is mainly determined by the grade of modernization. The Chinese essay, as we find it in newspapers today, has taken on the form and content of the Western essay and is aimed at a target group comparable to that of the Western essay.

Yang Yue 杨悦

This is a second hint that the modern Chinese essay belongs to the international genre of the essay. Even though the translation of duanpian xiaoshuo with short stories is commonly accepted, both are less closely related than the Western essay and its Chinese counterpart. The definition, which I developed out of a sample of more than 5000 modern Chinese essays, fits also the special international understanding of the essay (following Bolz 13:269-272 on the development of the western essay; Butrym 1989 on the theory of the western essay).

The choice of the term “sanwen” instead of “suibi” (familiar essay) or “xiaopin wen” (short literary piece) is of course arbitrary, but it corresponds to the present usage. In about 200 essay collections and histories between 1949 and 1996 known to the author, sanwen turned out to be the common expression, xiaopin was used only in one out of 25 essay titles of the PR China, in one out of 14 Taiwanese, and one out of ten Hong Kong publications.（文献无需翻译）

Yang Ziling 杨子泠

Besides the trend towards a globalized society, first expressed in Zhou Zuoren's call to adopt the English essay style, there are special local characteristics of the Chinese essay. How is the Chinese essay to determine culturally, what makes it “Chinese”? In the occidental essay the form seems to be a more important criterion of differentiation than in its Chinese counterpart. In China even those texts are included, which have only a similar content, but cross the borders of the formal generical framework. This can be shown with Cheng Ming-Lee, who subcategorises the “unfinished diary” or the “unfinished letter”. Those texts belong - within the Western context - to texts of personal use and therefor to the non-fictional prose works. Only after they have been altered into essays (Cheng Ming-Lee: “essay in diary form” and “essay in letter form,” see Cheng Ming-Lee), they are accepted as essays.

周作人是第一个呼吁采用英语文风来体现全球化社会趋势的，除此之外，中文杂文还具有地方特色。 中文杂文如何在文化上定义，是什么让其更加“中国化”？ “形式”在西方杂文里，比在中文散文中，更为一个重要的区分标准。 在中国，甚至包括那些内容相似的文本，但都跨越了正式通用框架的边界。 程明利（Cheng Ming-Lee）将“未完成的日记”或“未完成的信件”分类，进而证明了这一点。这些文本在西方语境中属于个人使用的文本，因此属于非虚构的散文作品。 只有在将其改写之后，人们才称之为杂文。--Yang Ziling (talk) 01:44, 17 December 2020 (UTC)

Yao Cheng 姚诚

This tendencial broader understanding of the essay in China can be traced back directly to the connotation, that the term sanwen possesses in Chinese: wú yùnwén“non-rhythmic prose,” which originally meant all non-fictional prose. In this broader meaning, also texts for personal or everyday use are included. However I deal only with sanwen in the narrower meaning “short literary essay pieces”.

Further differences are that Chinese essays often have ideological contents and show stylistic characteristics like repetitions and the usage of sayings.

这种对中国论文的倾向性更广泛的理解可以直接追溯到“sanwen（散文）”一词的中文含义：“wúyùnwén（无韵文）”，“非韵律散文”，它最初是指所有非虚构的散文。 在这种更广泛的含义上，它还包括个人或日常使用的文本。 但是，我只用狭义的“散文”来处理“sanwen”。

进一步的区别是，中国散文往往具有思想内涵，并表现出重复性和俗语性等风格特征。--Yao Cheng (talk) 13:46, 16 December 2020 (UTC) 在中国，这种对散文更广泛理解的趋势，可以直接追溯到“散文”一词在中文里所具有的内涵:“无韵文”“非韵律散文”，最初指的是所有非虚构的散文。在这个更广泛的意义上，个人或日常使用的文本也包括在内。但我说的“散文”只是狭义的“短篇小片段”。进一步的区别是，中国散文往往具有思想内容，并表现出重复、用语等文体特征。--XiaoXi (talk) 13:53, 16 December 2020 (UTC)Xiao Xi

Yao Jia 姚佳

1.2 I will describe the beginnings of the discovery of the essay.

Despite the increase in essay writing from 1979 on, it took a decade for the first theoretical reflections on this phenomenon to appear. It took another decade before the international scholarship of Chinese Studies became aware of the phenomenon of the essay.

In the 1980s, Chinese scholarship made a first major approach to reflect on essay literature by writing essay histories and collecting papers, which concentrated first on the essayistic work of single authors like Lu Xun. Also two essay conferences in the 1990s showed no move towards international scholarship. Not before 1995 did international scholarship started to use common philological methods to explore single essayists (on Gaylord Leung [Liang Xihua] 梁錫華 Kubin 1995, on Wang Meng 王蒙 Woesler 1995, on Liu Zaifu 劉再復 Mansberg 1995 [unpublished]) or essays of groups (on 'Xīnyùe pài 新月派' Wagner 1996).

Yi Huan 易欢

Not before the second half of the 1990s, did a history of the Chinese essay using the means of Western philology appear (Woesler 1998). For the first time, the essay was included in Western anthologies of literature as a genre equal to fiction and poetry (The Columbia Anthology of Modern Chinese Literature 1995, see Lau/Goldblatt, Modern Chinese Literary Thought 1996, see Denton).

Regarding the valuing of essays in China, Taiwan and the West, there are regional differences: In the States, essays are often chosen according to Western taste and totally unknown authors are given as much space as established ones. In Taiwan, Lu Xun has been banned for a long time, but today, in my survey, which Chinese essayists are printed the most in the 1990s, he ranks 16th.

Yi Zichu 义子楚

If one only take modern authors into account, he even ranks 12th. Hong Kong literature on Yu Guangzhong has been censored by Huang Weiliang in favor for the first (see Lin Yaode, 50), and Wang Meng has been overestimated in the People’s Republic of China due to his political post.

Still it remains a desideratum to get the most important Chinese essays in Western translation. Currently at least three essay collections in English translation are in the reviewing process (Tam King-Fai [announced]) or already published (Pollard 1999, Woesler 2000). Pollard's selection is a highly subjective and eclective choice of essays, covering even the premodern essay. Most of the contributors to the collection in hand met in 2000 on a first international conference on the essay.

You Yuting 游雨婷

In the years to come, a new Bonn History of Chinese Literature will grant the essay its proper place with two to three volumes only dedicated to the biji, youji and other essays.

1.3 20th Century Development and Hindrances

The topical development of political essays sees a shift from the enlightenment-educational essay, which emerged in 1907, to the daily-political essays in the 1920-30s, further to anti-Japanese propaganda in the 1940s and ideological propaganda in the 1950s and 1960s. In the 1980/90s, the discussion of politics of daily interest form a smaller part than in the 1920/30s. In the 1980s all genres including poems and essays were used for the critic against the master narrative of Communism or the Maoist understanding of art as serving ideology.

Yu Ni 余妮

Whilst the 1980s saw a revival of political issues in terms of discussion on the best system of society, (also in literature in general and in film) to a mere unpolitical and again more philosophical-moral theme spectrum in the 1990s, where essayists define their role, first of all to counterpart the consume-orientation of the masses. (Yu Guangzhong's essay “The Wolves are Coming” shows that the ideological perspective did not only harm mainland essaywriting, see Yu Guangzhong 1977.) The essay seems to be the only genre in China which has kept its educatio-nal claim with the exception of essays which claim to be “art pourt l'art”.

I mentioned the lack of translations in Western languages. One of the reasons might be the impression of some scholars that many of the Chinese essays were just propaganda.

Yuan Shiqi 袁诗琦

This might be true for the 1940s and even the 1950s, but nowadays this has changed, as the overwhelming majority of publications prove. This demands a closer look: Since 1949, politically affirmative literature has been encouraged by the government, resulting in a statistical paradox: not the affirmative authors and their texts form the majority of the essayists read in the 1990s, but the critical essayists, whose texts oppose the order to serve politics through their apolitical, sometimes even defiant character. In the 1990s, the texts of 1920s/1930s Republican China are still as often reprinted as their contemporary counterparts. Obviously we can conclude that the politically affirmative essay of the 1950s only survived in special political essay collections and is no longer written by famous contemporary authors nor read by the Chinese audience in the beginning of the 21st century.

在20世纪40年代甚至50年代，这可能是真的，但如今，正如绝大多数出版物所证明的那样，情况已经改变了。这需要更仔细的观察:自1949年以来,在政治上积极的文学一直在政府的鼓励下,导致了统计上的悖论:在20世纪90年代的散文家中，大多数人不是持肯定态度的作者而是持批判态度的散文家，他们的文章是非政治的、有时甚至带有挑衅特征，以此来反对为政治服务的秩序。在20世纪90年代，中华人民共和国二三十年代的文本仍然和当代中国的文本一样被重印。显然，我们可以得出这样的结论:20世纪50年代的政治肯定随笔只存在于特殊的政治随笔集中，在21世纪初，当代著名作家的作品和中国读者的阅读都将不复存在。--Yuan SHiqi (talk) 01:22, 17 December 2020 (UTC)

Yuan Tianyi 袁天翼

In restrictive regimes, where freedom of speech is not guaranteed, people still have different political ideas. To speak out directly is unhealthy, so in these countries people use art to express their differences. The most direct way of expressing political ideas in art is literature. To trick the censors, one must find indirect ways of expression. In an exhibition of Tendency Quarterly, 16 banned Chinese magazines were displayed. Most of the magazines choose the poem as their favorite form to express political thoughts. After having been banned, some magazines went abroad and now are published in exile. The internet has added a number of underground magazines, which are available also inside mainland China. In the last years of the 20th century, one can find an increase of essays in these magazines. This might be a hint, that the authors dare to speak out more directly.

Yuan Yuchen 袁雨晨

The topical development of the unpolitical essay starts with the everyday-topics of Zhu Ziqing (“On Dreams,” see Zhu Ziqing 1928c) and Zhou Zuoren from 1917 (My Own Garden 1923, “The Fly” 1924, “Reading on the Toilet” 1936), with a caesura 1927, when the political essays became the main stream, until the late 1930s, when the unpolitical essay was eliminated totally by the anti-Japanese movement. It didn't recover until the 1970s, when life turned back to normality and normal things became topics of interest because of their long absence. Again in the 1990s, the unpolitical essay boomed also due to less interest in political issues and the need for a new orientation in the new found world of mass consumerism.

Zeng Fangyuan 曾芳缘

2. Actors: Lu Xun, Zhu Ziqing, Ba Jin, Wang Zengqi, Yu Guangzhong

Who were the major players in the Chinese essayism of the 20th century?

Here is not the place to recount the struggle, which many of the today well-known heroes of the May-Fourth Movement had to establish their literary values and narrative. Unlike today, at that time the authors were also editors and publishers of magazines and therefore had a strong position in the cultural field.

One thinks first of Lu Xun, who invented a sharp, polemic subgenre for daily-political use, the zawen. In his own, broad understanding of zawen, it could contain poems, short stories, drama etc. From a genial writer of short stories, he turned to zawen for the rest of his life, leaving behind a legacy of more than 700 essays.

Zeng Liang 曾良

During his lifetime, with his sharp attacks, he was the most known essayist. But these essays were of daily-political interest only and are seldom read today. Analysis reveals now that he stills stays the most often read essayist until the end of the 20th century. Not his zawen, but the following reminiscences and lyrical essays remain until the end of the century in the top-ten list of essays: “Autumn Night” (Lu Xun 1925b), a lyrical essay from Wild Grass, in “Mr. Fujino” (Lu Xun 1926c), Lu Xun remembers his Japanese teacher, in “The Kite” (Lu Xun 1925a) he remembers how he hurted his younger brother's feelings once, and “From Hundred Plant Garden to Three Flavour Study” (Lu Xun 1926b), which recounts his childhood experience also with classical literature.

Zeng Xinyuan 曾心媛

The other most often printed essays are from Republican or modern times: The first is “The Back View” (Zhu Ziqing 1928b). With his whole work, this author ranks shortly behind Lu Xun. From this and other essays one can derive the criteria for essay best sellers in the P.R. of China: In “The Back View,” filial piety is the driving factor, parallelistic and repetitive structures in the atmospherical nebulous “The Moonlit Lotus Pond” (Zhu Ziqing 1927), also written by Zhu Ziqing, whose style easily may seem mannerist to the Western reader. In “Splashing Oars and Lantern Light on the Qinhuai River” (Zhu Ziqing 1924) the author describes a beautiful landscape and makes ancient customs alive again. Nostalgic home feelings are the emotional identification element in “Wild Vegetables of My Home Region” (Zhou Zuoren 1925).

Zeng Yanhu 曾雁湖

Yu Guangzhong is represented in this list with the nostalgic “Listening to the Cold Rain” (Yu Guangzhong 1974). In Ba Jin's most often reprinted essay “In Memoriam of Xiao Shan” (Ba Jin 1979b) he remembers his wife.

Works of authors who decided to serve an ideology are far less often reprinted than the eight authors found to be leading: Mao Dun and Guo Moruo (rank 15) are mentioned in the average as seldom as Lu Xun in Taiwan and Yang Shuo (ranks 30) appears only half as often.

Therefore one can state, that unpolitical, moving essays form the top.

For a list of the 36 most often (re)printed essayists, and the top 59 essays please see the mentioned monograph (Woesler 1998b).

Zhang Hu 张虎

The huge number of essays and essayists offer many possibilities for intertextual and intersubjective comparison, out of which only some thoughts can be indicated here due to lack of space. They might stimulate further analytic works. Lu Xun, Zhou Zuoren and Zhu Ziqing wrote about the same occasion, the massacre on March 18, 1926 quite differently. Zhu Ziqing attacks the government directly and promises it a soon collapse (“Report of the Government’s Great Massacre,” Zhu Ziqing [1926]). Lu Xun described the massacre in an unctuous chant instead (“Jinian Liu Hezhen jun” Lu Xun 1926a), and Zhou Zuoren bitter-humorously in his essay “Different Ways to Die” (Zhou Zuoren 1926).

Different ways of coming into terms with the 'Cultural Revolution' we can see in the essays of Ba Jin, Bing Xin, and Wang Meng: Ba Jin enlucidated unsparingly to the extend of self-accusation (Ba Jin 1979a).

大量的散文和散文家为互文性和主体间性的比较提供了许多可能性，但由于篇幅有限，这里只能表达一些想法。它们可能激发进一步的分析工作。鲁迅、周作人、朱自清对同一事件——1926年3月18日的大屠杀——的描写则截然不同。朱自清直接攻击了政府，并断定它很快就会崩溃(朱自清《政府大屠杀报告》[1926])。鲁迅用虚情假意的歌谣(《纪年刘和真君》鲁迅1926a)描述了这次大屠杀，而周作人则在他的散文《不同的死法》(周作人1926)中诙谐而辛辣地描写了这次大屠杀。

从巴金、冰心、王孟等人的文章中，我们可以看到巴金对“文化大革命”的几种不同的看法:巴金的狂热达到了自我谴责的程度(巴金1979a)。--Blank (talk) 13:43, 16 December 2020 (UTC)

Zhang Hui 张慧

Wang Meng dealed with it humorously (Wang Meng 1980), Bing Xin tried to pretend continuity by naming her works after the 'Cultural Revolution' with the same titles as before: The successful collections Letter to the Children (Bing Xin 1931), and Letter to the Children, vol. 2 containing texts since 1958, were followed by Letter to the Children, vol. 3 with texts since 1978. In her “Autobiographical Notes” (Bing Xin 1982) she simply skips the 'Cultural Revolution'.

A trip in early August 1923 (Mei/Wu, 46) with Yu Pingbo to the Qinhuai river, which Zhu knew from an earlier visit (Chen Xiaoquan, 68), inspired both to write in the same year at the age of about 24 and 26 an essay with the title “Splashing Oars and Lantern Light on the Qinhuai River” (Zhu Ziqing dated 10/11, 1923, Yu Pingbo dated 8/22, 1923, jointly published in Eastern Miscellany), an English translation by Hu Shiguang can be found in Chinese Literature 1 (Spring 1988) Yu 162-172, and Zhu 173-182 resp. Zhu Ziqing and Yu Pingbo continue here a tradition of Chinese poets, writing poems on a common experienced journey to compete with each other. I found, that Zhu Ziqing's essays is more persuading.

Zhang Ling 张玲

Wang Meng, Jia Pingwa and others wrote essays entitled “Falling leaves” (Jia Pingwa 1981, Wang Meng 1989) on the transitoriness of life in the allegory of falling leafs. It is interesting and surprising to discover the similarity between a, the differences between the description and interpretation of the falling leaves and b, the differences between the different authors' self-understanding and philosophy. One may compare essays entitled “On dreams” with 58 years difference in their origin (Zhu Ziqing 1928c, Bing Xin 1986). Moreover it is interesting to compare conceptions of essayism as we can see in Lu Xun's theory of “emerging” and “blossoming” and Zhou Zuoren's theory of the synthesis of the gongan school and the English essay.

Zhang Peiwen 张佩闻

3.Trends

3.1 The essay as a snapshot of contemporary thoughts

What is the state of contemporary essay writing in China? Its position should be brought into its proper relationship to recent approaches, perspectives and terms of categorization, like post-modernist elements, post-colonial thinking, deconstructivism etc.

The increase of the essay production after the ‘Cultural Revolution’ might be explained with the ability of the essay, to express personal experiences much more authentically than other genres because of its immanent claim of historical truth. But the essay is not a guarantee for objective truth: In the same time it is subjective, the essayist mediates his image consciously. This restricts the reported truth to a subjective one and bears the risk of a wilfully “corrected” truth.

Zhang Qi 张琪

The individualism of the Republican era has been based on the common feeling to stand at a historical turning point and directed towards common targets like the creation of a New Literature and a new Chinese society. In the 1980s and especially in the 1990s, individualism asks for a critical reflection on the satisfaction of personal consumption needs and tries to give personal orientation, essayists plead for moral virtues (“Serene” Wang Meng 1992, “First make your own things in a good way” Wang Meng 1994). These essays, mainly published in newspapers and magazines, are widely read by people in the rapidly changing, anonymous, alienating and consume-oriented mass cultural society.

Zhang Weihong 张维虹

Other essays in the 1980s and 1990s are in a kind of new subjectivism targeted away from contemporary contradictions but apply to the feelings of the audience by creating an either positive (“Shanxi Opera,” Jia Pingwa 1984) or negative world (“The Nightmare,” Si Yu 1995).

3.2 The essay as the genre of the giddy-paced nature of society, individuality, socio-political discussions, de-ideologization, everyday's profaneity and banality

From the essay, we can see contemporary trends of literature, which are also reasons for the increase in volume of this genre in the 1990s:

-The giddy-paced nature of current Chinese society with its demands for diverting and short texts: “[...] we live in an age of exposition” (Hall, xiii);

Zhang Xueyi 张雪仪

-The increasing consciousness of individuality for which the essay is the most direct form of subjective expression, even more direct than the poem with its metrical and formal demands;

-A revival of interest in discussing social-political issues through the medium of the essay, as was the case in the 1920s/30s.

-The banality of everyday life becomes conscious through becoming a literary topic, most commonly in the genre of everyday life, the essay.

-The De-ideologization of Chinese society. Today not the governmentally demanded affirmative texts stand at the forefront, but unpolitical essays, mostly dating from the Republican era, especially from the years 1923 to 1928. This observation is supported by the results of the mentioned statistical analysis. The mostly read political essays after 1949 are critical essays. For example Ba Jin complains in “Remembering Xiao Shan” (Ba Jin 1979b) about the death of his wife in the 'Cultural Revolution'.

Zhang Yinliu 张银柳

-Regarding the compiling of essay collections: For the most often selected essays in the People’s Republic, Taiwan and Hong Kong, moral and aesthetic criteria seem to have underlain. This is a sign of the increasing independence of the editors of essay anthologies from governmental or ideological handicaps, and for the increasing commercialization of the publishing houses with an orientation toward customers (former: “readers”).

-In the latter half of the 1990s, the master narrator himself seems to be lost within the subjectivity of in-dividuals and everyday's profaneity and banality of a more and more formally organized but substantially empty citylife. Time loses worth, since more and more of the daily acctivities are filled with mechanical and autistic actions.

Zhang Yu 张瑜

In the 1990s, the essayistic culture of political criticism of the 1980s has vanished, the only political replique is the patriotism, for example expressed in the 1996 published monograph China can say no! – Possibilities for politics and emotions in the period after the cold war (see China can say no!).

The reason that we do not find post-modernist essays in the sense of post-modernist fiction lies in the directness of the essay: The essay as a genre is a chat between author and reader and not an object d'art which wants to give cause for different interpretations or which would depend on exceptional form or contents or even quotations of pre-modern characteristics in order to make it an distinguishable object d'art. Also trends like the use of ordinary language, which one finds in novels since 1993 (Feidu, Jia Pingwa 1993; Ying'er, Gu Cheng 1993) and New Borderlessness since 1995, cannot be proven in the essaywriting.

Zhang Yujie 张毓婕

-Also the fictional realism David Der-Wei Wang sees in Lao She, Mao Dun and Shen Congwen, proves helpful for the understanding of some essays, one being “The Small Dog Baodi” (Ba Jin 1981), in which the author turns into a narrator who recounts the memories of the 'Cultural Revolution' in allegoric instead of in descriptive truth as before (“In Memoriam of Xiao Shan II,” Ba Jin 1984b). Similar is the concept of imaginery nostalgia, as Wang calls the fictional truth in Shen Congwen's work (David Wang 1992), helpful for the reading of “Rain in Kunming” (Wang Zengqi [1984]) as well as for “Shanxi Opera” (Jia Pingwa 1984).

1 Xin zhuangtai xiaoshuo 新狀態小說 new borderless fiction, represented by Chen Dong 韓東, Lu Yang 魯羊, Zhu Wen 朱文, Lin Bai 林白, Chen Liang 陳梁, Zhang Mei 張梅.

2 Post-colonialist thinking (Williams et al. 1994), which is to be seen as part of the social-political discourse, appears in essays, especially in the less critical political, but patriotic essays of the 1990s. Kafkaism helps us understand the essay “The Nightmare” (Si Yu 1995), where the author appears as a deconstructionist, the I-narrator even is drawn near to suicide.

Zhang Yuxing 张宇星

-The Schwarcz' concept of personal grief expressed in a metaphorical discourse helps us to understand how Ba Jin was able to overcome the truth of being he was known for, only to reach a more convincing fictional truth through the metaphor of his dog Baodi (Schwarcz 1996).

20th Century Chinese Essay - A Survey of the Genre and New Insights Into the Essayists Ba Jin, Zhou Zuoren, Zhu Ziqing

Martin Woesler

The narrative established by literary histories and anthologies has drawn a distorted picture of 20th century Chinese literature: The genre of the essay was almost ignored. In my paper I will demonstrate, how the picture of three authors change, if we take into consideration also some of their esayistic work. Here I choose the example of the critical political essay. The essay tells us more about an author than fiction or poetry, because in this genre, we encounter the author himself without metrical restrictions.

Zhao Xi 赵茜

In 1927, when the writers were threatened by a massacre among leftists by the National People's Party in Shanghai, a whole generation of writers found a common base in communist ideology, formally expressed in 1930 in the foundation of the "League of Left-Wing Writers".

Many writers had to define and often redefine their position and self-understanding in reaction to the changing political climate, often burying their own ideals, in the larger perspective for the seeming "needs" of society, which also claimed the author to be one of its products. This struggle of finding a position in a politicized environment is best documented in the essay --- "a genre of self-reflection". Moreover, by its very nature, the essay overcomes boundaries of form and content. Therefore there are more essays than there is fiction free from political thoughts. Some essayists even went a step further, deconstructed the master narrative of leftist ideology, like the three writers I will talk about today.

Zhao Xiaoyan 赵晓燕

Zhou Zuoren

The master narrative of the offical literary history of the People's Republic on Zhou Zuoren is, that a sophisticated May Fourth genius "degenerated" and later became a national "traitor". Zhou's writings were officially considered bad literature, a total elimination of his texts was only prevented, because of the fame of his brother, who became a state author posthumously through the valuing of Mao Zedong. Actually the reception of his essays reaches a new climax now, in the essay collections of the 1990s, his essays rank 3rd, as I was able to proof with a survey of 5000 essays. That makes clear that his political engagement had no effect on the brilliance of his literary works.

Zheng Huajun 郑华君

The official assessment of the People's Republic is that Zhou's work experienced a caesura in 1938 due to his "degeneration" and opposition against the patriotic campaign. Zhou kept trying to aesthetizise the little things of the everyday out of the subjective experience of his private space his whole life, only seven months after the incident at Marco Polo bridge he showed that it was again possible to write about a candy seller for which he had been critizised as "paralyzing" . But there was indeed a caesura, namely the change in style and subject in his essays on literature, art etc. to zhengjing 正經­ (serious, intentional essays), and xiánshì 閑適 (essays for one’s own enjoyment). But this change is located not before his outlawing through Mao Zedong (1942), and his arrest by the Guomindang (1945). Therefore not the Japanese suppressors should be made responsible for the retreat of this great writer, but his Chinese compatriots.

3 C. T. Hsia. [Note: Some of the annotations are in German and are translated into English during the editiorial work for the forthcoming edition.]

4 ("Mai tang 卖糖" 1924).

5 (Lu Xun 1934, Zhu Zhaoluo 1943).

人民共和国官方的评价是，在1938年，由于他自身的 "堕落 "和反对爱国运动，周春芽的作品经历了一个尾声。周作人一生都在试图将日常的小事从私人空间的主观经验中审美出来，在马可波罗桥事件发生七个月后，他才表明，他又可以写一个卖糖的人了，他曾因此被批判为 "麻痹"。但是，他的文章确实有一个高潮，那就是他的文艺文章在风格和主题上发生了变化，变成了严肃的、有意的文章和自娱自乐的文章。但这一变化并非在他被毛泽东取缔（1942年）、被国民党逮捕（1945年）之前。因此，对于这位伟大作家的退隐，不应该由日本的镇压者负责，而应该由他的中国同胞负责。--Zheng Huajun (talk) 13:35, 16 December 2020 (UTC)

人民共和国官方的评价是，在1938年，由于他自身的 "堕落 "和反对爱国运动，周春芽的作品经历了一个尾声。周作人一生都在试图将日常的小事从私人空间的主观经验审美中剥离出来，在马可波罗桥事件发生七个月后，他才表明，他又可以写一个卖糖的人了，他曾因此被批判为 "麻痹"。但是，他的文章确实有一个高潮，那就是他的文艺文章在风格和主题上发生了变化，变成了严肃的、有意的文章和自娱自乐的文章。但这一变化并非在他被毛泽东接力（1942年）、被国民党逮捕（1945年）之前。因此，对于这位伟大作家的退隐，不应该由日本的镇压者负责，而应该由他的中国同胞负责。--Tan Yuanyuan (talk) 13:43, 16 December 2020 (UTC)

Zhou Luoping 周罗平

So the first correction of the narrative is, that his literature was not effected by socio-political circumstances in quality, but in contents. And there is a second master narrative on Zhou Zuoren, which says that he was an apolitical author. Actually, he wanted his abstinence of political statement to be understood as a political statement by itself. For him, literature was a mean not for revolution, but for resistance . In the modernizing society, he advocated the liberation of women and asked to "treat children as full subjects with their own external and internal lives" and to "make children the essence of children's literature" , literature should make the society more humane.

The second example, where a reading of some of his essays lets us rediscover the author is Ba Jin: He is known for his practical essays with anarchistic and communist background in the 1930s and 40s, for his opportunistic self-criticism, self-censorship and the accusation of a writers' collegue during the cultural revolution. After the 'Cultural Revolution' he seemed to emerge as a righteous character , when he claimed to have done all this under pressure. He then devoted his essays to the working up of the trauma of the 'Cultural Revolution', for example in the self-accusing essay series Random Thoughts.

Zhou Shiqing 周诗卿

Since they were seldom reprinted, two of Ba Jin’s critical essays "Independent Thoughts" and "Writers’ Courage and Sense of Duty", dating 1956 and 1962 were overlooked. With them, Ba Jin turns out to be a lifelong independant writer. The two essays were criticised. He had to deny their contents and later they were censored. Even nowadays, these texts are not easy to find in anthologies and dictionaries in the P.R.C. and Taiwan.

"Independant Thoughts" dated 1956, propagates the freedom of the individual and of thoughts. This essay was written in the '100-Flower-Movement', when criticism was induced officially. Ba Jin corresponded only to the 'mainstream', although his criticism was unusually sharp. Much more distinctly directed against the 'mainstream' was the second text, which I want to introduce shortly.

Zhou Shuyao 周书尧

"Writers’ Courage and Sense of Duty", a speech at the second Shanghai congress of writers and artists in early 1962, has later been censored at seven striking places. In it, Ba Jin judges very hard about himself and his collegues: At different campaigns against literary works they would have followed the political demands opportunistically and therefore were traitors. The second target of Ba Jin's criticism were the censors and critics, who would posess more power than the writers and that without legitimation. Ba Jin interpreted Mao's Yan'an speeches on art and literature in the way, that writers should themselves take over responsibility.

"The Small Dog Baodi" as a metaphorical discourse on Ba Jin's personal grief

Although Ba Jin is regarded together with Bing Xin as one of the representatives of Republican literature, the more important part of his essayistic work seems to lie after 1949 . Publishing from Hong Kong since 1979, he has spoken out loudly in opposition and in trying to help ease the trauma associated with the 'Cultural Revolution'.

Zhou Siqing 周思庆

One of this essays is the story-like "Small Dog Baodi". Written in 1980, the author remembers his dog, which he had received two decades ago from a Swedish person and which he loved after a while. When the 'Red Gards' raged, the dog was in danger. Ba Jin describes in detail the fate of the animal and his own resignation, when he learned that he could not protect the dog. In order to save him from a torturous death, he finally submitted the dog in 1966 for medical experiments. Revisiting his garden after the 'Cultural Revolution', he remembers painfully how his wife had played here with the dog. I would like to show six points of interpretation:

Zhou Yiwen 周艺文

1, The dog is a metaphor. In the beginning Ba Jin seems to report the fate of a dog with relevance only to his owner. But soon it becomes clear that Ba Jin actually mediates to the reader the cruelty of the 'Cultural Revolution'. The reader wonders, "if they did this with an innocent dog, what did they do with men, whom they considered guilty?" Ba Jin analogizes himself with the dog, when he sees himself liying on the dissection table. Even Baodi's death is useful, he serves science - could a man be more altruistic?

狗是一个隐喻。在故事的开头，巴金看似在说狗的命运只和主人有关。但很快我们就明白了，巴金实际上是在向读者传达“文化大革命”的残酷。读者想知道，“如果他们对一只“无辜”的狗都能这样做，那么他们对那些他们认为“有罪”的“人”又做会怎样做呢?”当巴金看到自己躺在解剖台上时，他把自己比作狗。就连鲍迪的死也是有用的，他是为科学服务的，一个人还能更无私吗?--Zhou Yiwen (talk) 13:53, 16 December 2020 (UTC)

狗是个比喻。 一开始，巴金似乎在说狗的命运只跟主人有关。但是很快我们就知道了，巴金实际上是在向读者介表述“文化大革命”的残酷。读者想知道，“如果他们对一只“无辜”的狗“都能如此”，对那些视为“有罪”的“人”又会怎样呢？” 当巴金看到自己躺在解剖台上时，他将自己比作狗。就连鲍迪都死得其所，服务了科学---一个人还能更无私吗？--Yang Ziling (talk) 01:52, 17 December 2020 (UTC)

Zhou Yuanqu 周园曲

6 (Zhou 1929:180-181).

7 (Zhou 1923).

8 (The Family in 1951)

9 (1982 Yi pian xuwen).

10 (Suixianglu) The essays of the 1980s are more autobiographical, and deal with literature and questions for society nowadays. Due to the very nature of the essay, we can look through his "Random Thoughts" into the soul of Ba Jin..

11 (Random Thoughts 1978-86, see Ba Jin 1988).

2, Ba Jin expresses the pain of the loss of his wife through the dog. Not before the very end of the essay, Ba Jin mentions his wife in painful remembrance, who became ill and died during those ten years. In the essay "In Memoriam Xiāo Shān", which appeared earlier in the collection, he had confessed severe feelings of guilt regarding her death, what haunted him into his dreams. He claimed, that they had withhold her medical treatment because of him.

Zhou Yujuan 周玉娟

3, The essay is an accusation of the 'Cultural Revolution'. The not-mentioning of the 'Cultural Revolution' as the reason for his wife's death makes the pain the more accusatory, especially in front of the comparable unimportant doglife. His terrifying awareness is the powerlessness - he was not able to protect his dog nor his wife. Ba Jin actually wants to illustrate the powerlessness of the individual in front of collective cruelty.

本文是对'文革'的控诉。 没有提到“文化大革命”是其妻子去世的原因，这就更让人痛心疾首，尤其是在相对不重要的狗命面前。他可怕的意识是那种无力感-他没有能力保护他的狗和他的妻子。巴金其实是想说明个人在集体的残酷面前的无能为力。--ZHOUYUJUAN (talk) 00:50, 17 December 2020 (UTC)

这篇文章是对“文化大革命”的控诉。没有提及“文化大革命”是他妻子死亡的原因，使这种疼痛更具控诉性，尤其是在相对无关紧要的狗的性命面前。他意识到无能为力是多么可怕——他既不能保护他的狗，也不能保护他的妻子。巴金其实是想展示在集体的残酷面前个体的无能为力。--Yuan SHiqi (talk) 01:29, 17 December 2020 (UTC)

Zhu Meimei 祝美梅

4, The significance of this way to deal with the 'Cultural Revolution'. If one compares the mentioned essay with others of the year 1979, it lied within the common trend of criticizing the 'Cultural Revolution'. But there were also authors like Bing Xin denied the 'Cultural Revolution' - soon after its end, she used similar titles for her books than before - in order to pretend continuity. Wang Meng worked up the 'Cultural Revolution' in a humoristic way - Ba Jin's essays stand out of these, because of their relentlessness and confessing character.

Zhu Suyao 朱素瑶

5, The use of rhetorical means. Ba Jin pretends to be a simple documentarist "I expect from literature [...] that it tells the truth.". In fact he is known for his direct and accusing truth, sometimes his literary style is critizised as too direct and too less artful (a reproach from Hong Kong students). In "The Small Dog Baodi" he is using literary means to create emotion in his readers. He uses composition and rhetoric means like animation. The dog Baodi allegorically shows the injustice and inhumanity of the 'Cultural Revolution'. Here, Ba Jin turns into a narrator who recounts the memories of the 'Cultural Revolution' in allegoric instead of in descriptive truth as before . He is longing for a fictional truth, instead of the truth of being in the sense of Thomas Aquinas. The fictional realism Wang Der-wei sees in Lao She, Mao Dun and Shen Congwen, proofs helpful for the understanding of this piece.

Zhu Xu 朱旭

6, Ba Jin's personal grief is much more persuading in the metaphor of the dog than in his direct accusing essays. As Vera Schwarcz (1996) points out

"To speak too much of grief is to blunt its edge. It might even make us deaf to the cry that sparked discourse about suffering in the first place. A cold, calculating intelligence cannot grasp the rough contours of grief. [...] To preserve the significance of personal suffering in public life we need a more indirect approach; one that accepts and, indeed, nourishes AMBIGUITY. This, in the words of Cynthia Ozick, is the discrete province of METAPHOR, "the reciprocal agent, the universalizing force that makes it possible to envision the stranger's heart." [...] She also mentions that "[...] absence of talk -- or, rather modest use of metaphorical discourse -- serve us better in the presence of massive grief."

Zou Xinyu 邹鑫雨

To sum up, Ba Jin turns out not to be the self-censorer, who tried to make his literature fit into the communist ideology. Instead he was a lifelong fighter for the freedom of speech and the independancy of literature from politics, who spoke out whenever he had the opportunity without endangering himself. He also no longer appears as the "uneducated" writer of simple truth, as he leads us to believe. Yet he has achieved a high rhethoric of fictional truth and is able to transmit his personal grief even more persuadingly in a metaphorical discourse throught the metaphor of the dog Baodi.