History of Chinese Literature/Chapter 27

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Chapter 27: Hong Kong, Macau, and Southeast Asian Sinophone Literature

1. Introduction: Literature at the Margins of the Chinese World

The literary traditions that have developed in Hong Kong, Macau, and the Chinese-speaking communities of Southeast Asia occupy a position within the broader history of Chinese literature that is at once marginal and central — marginal in the sense that these traditions have often been overlooked or undervalued by literary historians whose attention has been focused on the dominant metropolitan traditions of Beijing, Shanghai, and Taipei, and central in the sense that the questions these traditions raise — questions about the relationship between language and identity, about the meaning of "Chineseness" in a world of multiple cultures and multiple languages, about the possibilities and the limits of Chinese-language literary expression outside the borders of the Chinese nation-state — are questions that go to the very heart of what Chinese literature is and what it can become.

The literatures of Hong Kong, Macau, and Southeast Asia share certain fundamental conditions that distinguish them from the literatures of mainland China and Taiwan. They are literatures produced by communities that are, in various ways and to various degrees, culturally Chinese but politically and socially embedded in non-Chinese or partially non-Chinese environments — the British colonial and then post-handover environment of Hong Kong, the Portuguese colonial and then post-handover environment of Macau, and the diverse national environments of Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, Thailand, the Philippines, and other Southeast Asian countries where significant Chinese-speaking populations have maintained their cultural and linguistic identity for generations, sometimes for centuries. These literatures are shaped by the experience of colonialism, migration, diaspora, and cultural hybridity, and they reflect a consciousness of cultural identity that is more complex, more fluid, and more contested than the identities that are typically assumed by the literatures of the Chinese mainland or Taiwan.

The concept of "Sinophone literature" — a term that has gained wide currency in academic discourse since it was theorized and popularized by the Taiwanese-American literary scholar Shu-mei Shih (史書美) in the early 2000s — provides a useful, if contested, framework for understanding these literary traditions. Shih defines the Sinophone as "a network of places of cultural production outside China and on the margins of China and Chineseness" — a network that includes not only Hong Kong, Macau, and the Chinese communities of Southeast Asia, but also Taiwan, Tibet, Xinjiang, and the Chinese-speaking communities of the Americas, Europe, and Australasia. The concept of the Sinophone, as Shih theorizes it, is explicitly anti-hegemonic: it seeks to de-center the People's Republic of China as the default referent of Chinese culture and Chinese literature, and to foreground the diversity, the heterogeneity, and the particularity of Chinese-language cultural production in its many global locations. The Sinophone, in this view, is not a diaspora that looks back to a homeland; it is a set of local practices that are rooted in specific places and specific histories and that cannot be reduced to extensions of a metropolitan Chinese culture.

The Sinophone concept has been immensely productive in opening up new perspectives on literatures that were previously marginalized within the field of Chinese literary studies, but it has also been criticized — by scholars who object to the exclusion of mainland China from the Sinophone framework, by scholars who argue that the concept reifies "Chineseness" even as it claims to deconstruct it, and by writers and critics who resist being categorized under a label that they feel reduces the specificity of their cultural and literary traditions to a function of their linguistic medium. These debates, which continue to animate the field of Chinese literary studies, will not be resolved here; but they provide an important context for the discussion of the literatures of Hong Kong, Macau, and Southeast Asia that follows.

2. Hong Kong Literature: The Making of a Unique Literary Identity

Hong Kong's literary culture occupies a singular position within the Chinese literary world — shaped by the territory's history as a British colony (1841–1997), by its status as a major center of Chinese-language publishing, film, and popular culture, by its unique linguistic environment (in which Cantonese, English, and written standard Chinese coexist in complex and ever-shifting relationships), and by its experience of rapid modernization, urbanization, and economic development that transformed it from a small colonial outpost into one of the world's great metropolitan centers.

The origins of a distinctly Hong Kong literature can be traced to the 1930s and 1940s, when a number of prominent mainland Chinese writers — including Mao Dun, Xiao Hong (萧红, 1911–1942), Dai Wangshu (戴望舒, 1905–1950), and Xu Dishan (许地山, 1893–1941) — came to Hong Kong to escape the Japanese invasion and the political turmoil of the mainland. Their presence enriched the territory's literary culture, but they remained, for the most part, sojourners — mainland writers in exile rather than Hong Kong writers. It was not until the 1950s and 1960s, when the influx of refugees from the Chinese mainland following the Communist victory in 1949 created a large and culturally diverse Chinese-speaking population that had no prospect of returning to the mainland, that a distinctly Hong Kong literary consciousness began to emerge — a consciousness that was defined not by nostalgia for the mainland but by the experience of living in Hong Kong itself, with all its contradictions, its energies, and its peculiarities.

The development of this Hong Kong literary consciousness was closely connected to the growth of Hong Kong's distinctive popular culture — its Cantonese-language cinema, its popular music, its tabloid journalism, and its vibrant commercial publishing industry. Unlike the literary cultures of mainland China and Taiwan, which were dominated by the state-supported institutions of official literary life (writers' associations, literary magazines, publishing houses, and literary prizes controlled or influenced by the government), Hong Kong's literary culture was largely shaped by the marketplace — by the demands and the tastes of a reading public that was urban, commercial, pragmatic, and impatient with literary pretension. This commercial orientation gave Hong Kong literature a populist energy and a responsiveness to the rhythms of everyday urban life that distinguished it from the more self-consciously literary traditions of the mainland and Taiwan, but it also meant that serious literary writing — writing that aspired to artistic distinction rather than commercial success — often occupied a precarious and marginal position within the territory's cultural life.

The serialized newspaper fiction (报纸连载小说, baozhi lianzai xiaoshuo) that appeared in Hong Kong's numerous Chinese-language newspapers from the 1950s onward was a distinctive feature of the territory's literary culture. Writers such as Jin Yong (金庸, Louis Cha, 1924–2018), whose martial arts novels were serialized in the newspaper Ming Pao (which Jin Yong himself founded in 1959), and Ni Kuang (倪匡, 1935–2022), whose science fiction and adventure stories were serialized in various newspapers and magazines, created works that were read by millions of Chinese-language readers throughout the world and that exerted an incalculable influence on Chinese popular culture. Jin Yong's martial arts novels — including The Legend of the Condor Heroes (射雕英雄传, Shediao yingxiong zhuan), The Return of the Condor Heroes (神雕侠侣, Shendiao xialü), and The Deer and the Cauldron (鹿鼎记, Luding ji) — were not merely popular entertainment; they were works of considerable literary ambition and sophistication, drawing on the full resources of the Chinese literary tradition (classical poetry, historical narrative, philosophical discourse) to create fictional worlds of extraordinary richness and complexity. The ongoing debate about whether Jin Yong's novels should be classified as "serious literature" or "popular fiction" — a debate that has engaged some of the most prominent literary critics in the Chinese-speaking world — reflects the broader tensions between elite and popular literary culture that have characterized Hong Kong's literary landscape.

3. Liu Yichang and the Hong Kong Modernist Tradition

If Jin Yong represents the popular face of Hong Kong literature, Liu Yichang (刘以鬯, 1918–2018) represents its modernist conscience. Born in Shanghai and educated at Saint John's University, Liu Yichang came to Hong Kong in the early 1950s and over the next six decades produced a body of fiction that is widely regarded as the foundation of Hong Kong's modernist literary tradition.

Liu Yichang's most celebrated work is the novella Tête-bêche (对倒, Duidao, 1972), which interweaves the stories of two characters — an elderly man who lives in memories of pre-1949 Shanghai and a young woman who is absorbed in the commercial pleasures and the restless energies of contemporary Hong Kong — in a narrative structure that mirrors the tête-bêche arrangement of postage stamps (in which two stamps are printed in opposite orientations). The novella, which was serialized in a Hong Kong newspaper, was a technically innovative work that used montage, stream of consciousness, and typographic experimentation to capture the fragmented, kaleidoscopic quality of urban experience in Hong Kong. It was also a deeply meditative work — a reflection on memory, nostalgia, modernity, and the passage of time that resonated powerfully with the experience of a city that was perpetually reinventing itself, perpetually tearing down the old and building the new, perpetually erasing its own past.

Liu Yichang's influence on Hong Kong literature and culture extended far beyond the literary world. The filmmaker Wong Kar-wai (王家卫, born 1958) has acknowledged that his films Days of Being Wild (阿飞正传, 1990), In the Mood for Love (花样年华, 2000), and 2046 (2004) were deeply influenced by Liu Yichang's fiction — and in particular by the mood of nostalgic longing, the fragmented narrative structure, and the evocation of a vanishing Hong Kong that are characteristic of Liu Yichang's work. The connection between Liu Yichang's fiction and Wong Kar-wai's cinema is emblematic of the close and mutually enriching relationship between literature and film that has been a distinctive feature of Hong Kong's cultural life.

Liu Yichang's other works, including the novel The Drunkard (酒徒, Jiutu, 1963), which is often described as the first stream-of-consciousness novel in Chinese, were equally innovative. The Drunkard depicted the life of a frustrated literary writer in Hong Kong who is forced to produce commercial fiction to survive, drowning his artistic frustrations in alcohol. The novel was both a portrait of Hong Kong's literary marketplace and a meditation on the relationship between art and commerce — a theme that would recur throughout the history of Hong Kong literature. Liu Yichang's formal experimentation — his use of interior monologue, his disruption of linear chronology, his incorporation of advertising slogans, newspaper headlines, and other fragments of urban discourse into his narrative — anticipated many of the techniques that would later be associated with postmodern fiction, and his work established a precedent for formal innovation in Hong Kong literature that would be taken up by subsequent generations of writers.

4. Xi Xi, Dung Kai-cheung, and the Hong Kong Literary Avant-Garde

Xi Xi (西西, pen name of Zhang Yan, 张彦, 1937–2022) was one of the most original and most beloved writers in the history of Hong Kong literature. Born in Shanghai and raised in Hong Kong from the age of twelve, Xi Xi produced a body of work — fiction, poetry, essays, and experimental writing — that was characterized by a playful inventiveness, a profound compassion, and a distinctive vision of Hong Kong as a place worthy of serious literary attention.

Xi Xi's fiction is marked by a quality of wonder — a capacity to see the extraordinary in the ordinary, to find in the quotidian experiences of life in Hong Kong (shopping, eating, walking through the streets, watching construction cranes reshape the skyline) occasions for imaginative exploration and philosophical reflection. Her novel My City (我城, Wo cheng, 1979) — which depicted the life of a young man named Ah Guo (meaning "fruition" or "result") and his circle of friends and family in 1970s Hong Kong — was a landmark work in the development of Hong Kong literature, the first novel to treat the city not as a temporary way-station or a place of exile but as a home — a place with its own history, its own culture, its own identity, and its own claim on the affections and the imaginations of its inhabitants. My City was written in a style that was deliberately simple and direct — almost naïve — but that concealed considerable formal sophistication; Xi Xi drew on the techniques of comic books, children's literature, and visual art to create a narrative that was at once whimsical and deeply serious in its affirmation of Hong Kong as a place of belonging.

Xi Xi's later novels, including Marvels of a Floating City (浮城志异, Fucheng zhiyi, 1986) — which depicted Hong Kong as a city literally floating in the air, unmoored from any fixed ground — and Flying Carpet (飞毡, Fei zhan, 1996) — which traced the history of a Hong Kong neighborhood from the 1940s to the 1990s through the stories of its ordinary inhabitants — continued to explore the themes of urban life, memory, and identity that were central to her work. The metaphor of the floating city was particularly resonant in the context of Hong Kong's uncertain political future, as the territory approached the 1997 handover to China and confronted the question of what Hong Kong would become under Chinese sovereignty.

Dung Kai-cheung (董启章, born 1967) represents a younger generation of Hong Kong writers whose work has pushed the boundaries of Hong Kong literature in new directions. Dung's fiction is characterized by an ambitious intellectual scope, a fascination with the intersections of fiction and reality, and a sustained engagement with the history and the geography of Hong Kong that combines meticulous research with imaginative invention. His "Natural History Trilogy" — comprising Atlas: The Archaeology of an Imaginary City (地图集, Ditu ji, 1997), The Catalog (体育时期, 2005), and Histories of Time (时间繁史, 2007) — is a monumental work of postmodern fiction that reimagines the history and the geography of Hong Kong through a kaleidoscope of literary forms — maps, encyclopedic entries, fictional biographies, alternate histories, and philosophical meditations. Atlas, the first volume, was a collection of short fictions, each inspired by a map of Hong Kong, that blurred the boundaries between fact and fiction, between the city as it existed and the city as it might have been or might yet become.

Wong Bik-wan (黄碧云, born 1961) brought to Hong Kong literature a dark intensity and a psychological depth that were distinctively her own. Her fiction — which includes the story collections The Tenderness and Violence of Fire (烈女图, 1999) and the novel Bitter Taste (烈佬传, Lielao zhuan, 2012, winner of the Hong Kong Book Prize) — depicted the lives of Hong Kong's marginalized and dispossessed with an unflinching honesty and a prose style of fierce, concentrated beauty. Wong Bik-wan's work was shaped by her experience as a journalist and by her travels in conflict zones around the world, and her fiction often explored the connections between personal suffering and political violence, between the intimate experiences of individuals and the larger forces of history.

5. The 1997 Handover and Its Literary Reflections

The handover of Hong Kong from British to Chinese sovereignty on July 1, 1997 was the defining political event in the territory's modern history, and it generated a vast body of literary reflection — fiction, poetry, essays, and memoir — that grappled with the meaning of the event and its implications for Hong Kong's identity, culture, and way of life.

The anxieties surrounding the handover had been building since 1984, when the Sino-British Joint Declaration established the framework for the transfer of sovereignty, and they intensified throughout the 1990s as the date approached. For many Hong Kong writers, the handover raised fundamental questions about identity and belonging: Was Hong Kong Chinese? Was it British? Was it something else entirely — a unique hybrid culture that could not be reduced to either of its colonial or national components? And what would happen to Hong Kong's distinctive culture — its Cantonese language, its press freedom, its rule of law, its cosmopolitan outlook — under Chinese sovereignty?

The literary responses to the handover were extraordinarily diverse. Some writers approached the event with anxiety and foreboding — seeing in it the potential end of Hong Kong as they knew it. Leung Ping-kwan (梁秉钧, also known as Ye Si, 也斯, 1949–2013), one of Hong Kong's most distinguished poets and literary critics, addressed the handover in poems that were characteristically subtle and understated — using the imagery of food, clothing, architecture, and everyday life to explore the ways in which Hong Kong's culture was being transformed by the political changes that were overtaking it. Leung Ping-kwan's poetry — which drew on the traditions of both Chinese and Western poetry and which was deeply attuned to the textures and the rhythms of Hong Kong's urban life — represented a sustained effort to articulate a Hong Kong identity that was rooted in the specificities of the territory's culture rather than in the abstractions of national politics.

Other writers approached the handover as an occasion for a reassessment of Hong Kong's history and its place in the larger narrative of Chinese modernity. Chan Koon-chung (陈冠中, born 1952), a journalist and novelist who had been one of the founders of Hong Kong's influential City Magazine (号外, Haowai) in 1976, produced a body of work — including the politically provocative novel The Fat Years (盛世, Shengshi, 2009) — that explored the relationship between Hong Kong and the Chinese mainland with a critical intelligence and a dark humor that reflected the complexities and the contradictions of the post-handover era.

The years following the handover — and particularly the period after the 2003 mass protests against proposed national security legislation, the 2014 Umbrella Movement, and the 2019–2020 protests against the proposed extradition bill — saw an intensification of literary engagement with questions of Hong Kong identity, freedom, and resistance. A new generation of Hong Kong writers — writing in Chinese, in English, and in Cantonese — produced work that was shaped by the experience of political struggle and that reflected a deepening sense of Hong Kong's cultural distinctiveness and its distance from the political values and the cultural norms of the Chinese mainland. The imposition of the National Security Law in 2020 created new challenges and new constraints for Hong Kong's literary culture, and the full implications of these developments for the future of Hong Kong literature remain to be seen.

6. Macanese Chinese Writing

The literary culture of Macau — the small territory on the western side of the Pearl River Delta that was administered by Portugal from the mid-sixteenth century until its handover to China on December 20, 1999 — is far less well known than that of Hong Kong, but it possesses its own distinctive character and its own literary achievements.

Macau's literary culture has been shaped by the territory's unique history as the longest-lasting European colonial settlement in East Asia — a history that brought together Chinese, Portuguese, and other cultures in a small space and created a distinctive Macanese culture that was neither wholly Chinese nor wholly Portuguese but a unique blend of both. The Macanese community — the mixed-race descendants of Portuguese settlers and their Asian wives — developed their own creole language (Patuá or Macaense), their own cuisine, their own customs, and their own literary traditions, which include a small but significant body of work in both Portuguese and Patuá.

Chinese-language literature in Macau has a long history, dating back to the Ming dynasty, when Chinese scholars and officials stationed in the territory produced poetry and prose that reflected their encounters with the Portuguese and with the broader world of maritime Asia. In the modern period, Macau's Chinese-language literary culture has been characterized by a quiet, contemplative quality that reflects the territory's slower pace of life and its more intimate scale — a quality that contrasts with the relentless energy and the commercial dynamism of neighboring Hong Kong.

Among the most important Chinese-language writers associated with Macau are the poet Yao Feng (姚风, born 1958), who writes in both Chinese and Portuguese and whose bilingual poetic practice embodies the cultural hybridity of the Macanese experience, and the fiction writer Li Peng (李鹏, born 1964), whose stories depict the lives of ordinary people in Macau with a quiet realism that captures the texture of daily life in the territory. The literary critic and anthologist Zheng Weiping (郑炜平) has played an important role in documenting and promoting Macau's Chinese-language literary culture.

Macau's literary significance, however, extends beyond the work of individual writers. The territory's history as a meeting point of Chinese and European cultures — as the place where, for centuries, East and West encountered each other and exchanged ideas, goods, and cultural practices — gives Macau a symbolic importance in the history of Chinese literature that is disproportionate to the small size of its literary output. Macau is the place where the first Chinese-language printing press was established (by the Jesuits in the sixteenth century), where some of the earliest translations of Western literature into Chinese were produced, and where the cultural encounter between China and Europe first took on a sustained and institutional form. In this sense, Macau occupies a foundational position in the history of Chinese literary modernity — a position that has only recently begun to receive the scholarly attention it deserves.

7. Malaysian Chinese Literature: The Richest Sinophone Tradition in Southeast Asia

Of all the Chinese-language literary traditions that have developed outside the borders of the Chinese state, the Chinese-language literature of Malaysia (马华文学, Mahua wenxue) is arguably the richest, the most diverse, and the most critically acclaimed. The Chinese community in Malaysia — which constitutes approximately twenty-three percent of the country's population and which has maintained a comprehensive system of Chinese-language education, from primary schools to a university (the Southern University College in Johor Bahru) — has produced a literary tradition that is both deeply rooted in the Malaysian environment and deeply engaged with the broader traditions of Chinese-language literature.

The history of Chinese-language literature in Malaysia (and, before the separation of Singapore in 1965, in Malaya) can be traced back to the early twentieth century, when Chinese immigrants and their descendants began to produce literary works — poetry, fiction, essays, drama — in the various Chinese languages spoken in the region. The early Chinese-language literature of Malaya was strongly influenced by the May Fourth literary revolution on the mainland, and many of the writers of this period saw themselves as participants in the broader Chinese literary movement — writing in the vernacular Chinese that the May Fourth reformers had championed and addressing the social and political concerns (anti-imperialism, anti-feudalism, national awakening) that animated the mainland literary scene.

The question of whether Malayan (and later Malaysian) Chinese literature should be understood as a branch of Chinese literature or as a distinct literary tradition with its own identity and its own developmental logic has been one of the central and most contentious questions in the history of Mahua literary criticism. In the 1940s and 1950s, a series of debates — often referred to as the "uniqueness of Malayan Chinese literature" (马华文学独特性, Mahua wenxue dutexing) debates — addressed this question with a passion and an urgency that reflected the broader political debates about the identity of the Chinese community in the newly independent nations of Malaya and Singapore. Should Malayan Chinese writers look to China for their literary models and their cultural identity, or should they develop a literature that was rooted in the Malayan environment — a literature that depicted the tropical landscapes, the multiracial society, and the distinctive cultural experiences of the Chinese community in Southeast Asia?

The resolution of this debate — to the extent that it has been resolved — has been in favor of a Malaysian Chinese literature that is both Chinese and Malaysian: a literature that writes in Chinese but that takes as its primary subject the experience of being Chinese in Malaysia, with all the complexities, the contradictions, and the creative possibilities that this entails.

The most celebrated Malaysian Chinese writer on the international literary stage is Li Yongping (李永平, 1947–2017), a novelist who was born in Kuching, Sarawak (on the island of Borneo) and who spent most of his adult life in Taiwan. Li Yongping's fiction — particularly his novels Jiling Chronicles (吉陵春秋, Jiling chunqiu, 1986) and The Great River, End to End (大河尽头, Dahe jintou, 2008–2010) — drew on the landscapes, the cultures, and the mythologies of Borneo to create fictional worlds of extraordinary sensory richness and imaginative power. The Great River, End to End — a two-volume novel that depicted a journey up the Kapuas River in Borneo — was a work of visionary ambition that blended the conventions of the adventure novel, the Bildungsroman, and the mythological epic to create a narrative that explored the intersections of Chinese and indigenous cultures in the rainforests of Southeast Asia.

Zhang Guixing (张贵兴, born 1956), another Bornean Chinese writer who has lived in Taiwan since the 1980s, produced fiction that was set in the rainforests and the rubber plantations of Sarawak and that depicted the experiences of Chinese settlers in Borneo with a narrative intensity and a prose style of baroque richness. His novels Monkey Cup (猴杯, Houbei, 2000) and Wild Boar Crossing (野猪渡河, Yezhu duhe, 2018) — the latter of which dealt with the Japanese occupation of Borneo during World War II and its devastating impact on the Chinese community — were works of fierce beauty and moral seriousness that established Zhang Guixing as one of the most important Chinese-language novelists of his generation.

8. Ng Kim Chew and the Reinvention of Malaysian Chinese Fiction

Ng Kim Chew (黄锦树, born 1967) is perhaps the most intellectually provocative and the most formally innovative writer to have emerged from the Malaysian Chinese literary tradition. A native of Johor who has lived in Taiwan since 1988 and who teaches at National Chi Nan University, Ng Kim Chew is both a creative writer and a literary critic whose theoretical writings on Malaysian Chinese literature have been as influential as his fiction.

As a critic, Ng Kim Chew has argued that Malaysian Chinese literature has been constrained by a realist aesthetic and a nationalist ideology that have limited its formal possibilities and its imaginative range. In his critical works — including The Inscription of the Mahua: Literature, History, and Modernity (马华文学与中国性, Mahua wenxue yu Zhongguo xing, 1998) — Ng Kim Chew has challenged what he sees as the uncritical realism and the sentimental nationalism of the mainstream Mahua literary tradition, arguing instead for a literature that is formally experimental, intellectually rigorous, and unafraid to confront the contradictions and the ambiguities of the Chinese experience in Southeast Asia.

As a fiction writer, Ng Kim Chew has practiced what he preaches. His short stories — collected in volumes including Slow Boat to China (慢船去中国, Manchuan qu Zhongguo, 1997), From Island to Island (由岛至岛, 2001), and Rain and the Equatorial Forest (雨, Yü, 2016) — are characterized by a formal inventiveness, a thematic complexity, and a willingness to explore uncomfortable truths that set them apart from the mainstream of Malaysian Chinese fiction. His stories frequently return to the themes of Chinese identity in Southeast Asia, the violence of the colonial and postcolonial periods, the relationship between writing and memory, and the impossibility of recovering a lost homeland. The tropical rainforest — lush, threatening, and impenetrable — recurs in his fiction as a powerful symbol of the Southeast Asian environment that both nurtures and devours the Chinese communities that have settled within it.

Ng Kim Chew's work, along with that of Li Yongping and Zhang Guixing, has brought Malaysian Chinese literature to the attention of the broader Chinese-language literary world and has demonstrated that Sinophone literature produced at the periphery of the Chinese cultural sphere can be as formally innovative and as intellectually ambitious as anything produced at the center.

9. Sinophone Literature in Singapore

Singapore's Chinese-language literary tradition shares many features with that of Malaysia — unsurprisingly, given that the two territories were part of the same political entity until 1965 — but it has developed along a distinctive trajectory that reflects Singapore's unique political and linguistic circumstances. The government of Singapore, under the leadership of Lee Kuan Yew (李光耀, 1923–2015) and the People's Action Party, pursued a policy of bilingualism that promoted English as the language of government, commerce, and inter-ethnic communication while maintaining the "mother tongue" languages (Mandarin Chinese, Malay, and Tamil) as vehicles of cultural identity and ethnic community life. The promotion of Mandarin Chinese — through the "Speak Mandarin Campaign" (讲华语运动, Jiang Huayu yundong) launched in 1979 — came at the expense of the other Chinese languages (Hokkien, Teochew, Cantonese, Hakka) that had traditionally been spoken by the majority of Singapore's Chinese population, and it created a linguistic environment in which the relationship between Chinese-language literary expression and lived cultural experience was complex and sometimes fraught.

Singapore's Chinese-language literary tradition includes a number of significant writers, among them the poets Yao Zi (尧棐, born 1935) and Wang Runhua (王润华, born 1941), and the fiction writer Ying Peiann (英培安, 1947–2021), whose novel Playwright (戏子, Xizi, 2007) was a notable exploration of the tensions between artistic integrity and political conformity in the Singaporean context. The literary magazine Chao Foon (蕉风, Jiaofeng, "Banana Wind"), which was published in both Malaysia and Singapore from 1955 to 1999, played a central role in the development of Chinese-language literary culture in both countries, providing a platform for literary experimentation and critical debate.

The dominance of English in Singapore's public life has meant that Chinese-language literature in Singapore has increasingly occupied a marginal position — read by a shrinking audience and produced by a declining number of writers. At the same time, however, the rise of a Singaporean English-language literature that draws on Chinese cultural materials and that is shaped by the Chinese cultural sensibilities of its authors has created a new form of Sinophone literary expression — one in which the "Sinophone" quality of the writing is a matter of cultural orientation and aesthetic sensibility rather than of linguistic medium.

10. Chinese-Language Literature in Indonesia, Thailand, and the Philippines

The Chinese communities of Indonesia, Thailand, and the Philippines — which together number in the tens of millions — have produced literary traditions that are less well known and less well documented than those of Malaysia and Singapore but that are significant in their own right and that illuminate important aspects of the Chinese experience in Southeast Asia.

The Chinese community in Indonesia — the largest in Southeast Asia, numbering approximately ten million — has a literary history that is marked by the experience of anti-Chinese violence and discrimination. The anti-Chinese pogroms of 1965–1966, in which hundreds of thousands of ethnic Chinese were killed or persecuted, and the New Order government of Suharto (1966–1998), which banned Chinese-language education, publishing, and public expression, devastated the Chinese-language literary tradition in Indonesia and created a gap of more than three decades during which virtually no Chinese-language literature was produced in the country. The lifting of the ban on Chinese-language expression after the fall of Suharto in 1998 led to a modest revival of Chinese-language literary activity, but the Indonesian Chinese literary tradition has not recovered the vitality it possessed in the pre-1965 period.

The pre-1965 Indonesian Chinese literary tradition was, however, a rich and distinctive one. The Malay-Chinese literature (马来华人文学) of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries — which was written in Malay by Chinese authors and which addressed the experiences and the concerns of the Chinese community in the Dutch East Indies — was one of the earliest modern literary traditions in Southeast Asia and played an important role in the development of modern Malay and Indonesian literature. Writers such as Kwee Tek Hoay (郭德怀, 1886–1951) produced novels, plays, and essays in Malay that depicted the complex cultural negotiations of the Chinese community in colonial Indonesia and that explored the tensions between Chinese cultural identity and the emerging Indonesian national identity.

In Thailand, the Chinese community — which has been more fully assimilated into Thai society than the Chinese communities of Malaysia, Singapore, or Indonesia — has produced a small but significant body of Chinese-language literature. The assimilation of the Chinese community in Thailand, which was promoted by the Thai government through a combination of incentives and pressures (including restrictions on Chinese-language education and the encouragement of intermarriage between Chinese and Thai), has meant that Chinese-language literary expression has gradually given way to Thai-language expression, and the most significant literary works produced by Thai-Chinese writers are now written in Thai rather than in Chinese. The novelist Botan (โบตั๋น, pen name of Supa Sirisingh, born 1944), whose novel Letters from Thailand (จดหมายจากเมืองไทย, 1969) depicted the experience of a Chinese immigrant in Bangkok through a series of letters, produced one of the most widely read and most critically acclaimed literary portrayals of the Chinese experience in Southeast Asia — though it was written in Thai rather than in Chinese.

The Chinese literary tradition in the Philippines, centered on the Chinese community of Manila, has produced a body of work — primarily in Chinese but also in Hokkien and in Tagalog — that reflects the experience of a community that has maintained its cultural identity while also participating in the broader cultural life of the Philippines. Filipino-Chinese writers such as Ke Qingming (柯清明) and Shi Yilong (施颖洲, 1920–2002) produced fiction and poetry that explored the distinctive cultural position of the Chinese community in the Philippines, navigating between Chinese and Filipino identities in a society that has historically been ambivalent about its Chinese minority.

11. The Concept of "Sinophone" and Its Implications for Literary History

The emergence of the concept of "Sinophone literature" (华语语系文学, Huayu yuxi wenxue) as a critical category has had profound implications for the way in which the literatures discussed in this chapter — and, indeed, for the way in which the entire field of Chinese literary studies — are understood. As theorized by Shu-mei Shih and subsequently debated, refined, and contested by a wide range of scholars, the concept of the Sinophone challenges some of the most fundamental assumptions of Chinese literary history.

The first and most fundamental of these assumptions is the equation of Chinese literature with the literature of China — the assumption that Chinese literature is the literature produced within the borders of the Chinese nation-state (or states, if we include Taiwan) and that literature produced by Chinese-speaking communities outside those borders is, at best, a secondary or derivative phenomenon. The Sinophone concept challenges this assumption by insisting that Chinese-language literature produced in Hong Kong, Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, and elsewhere is not a derivative extension of a metropolitan Chinese tradition but a set of independent literary traditions that are shaped by their own local histories, their own cultural contexts, and their own aesthetic logics. From the Sinophone perspective, Malaysian Chinese literature is not a branch of Chinese literature; it is Malaysian Chinese literature — a tradition that happens to share a linguistic medium with the literature of China but that is no more reducible to Chinese literature than American literature is reducible to British literature.

The second assumption that the Sinophone concept challenges is the equation of Chinese culture with Han Chinese culture and of the Chinese language with Mandarin Chinese. The Sinophone framework, as Shih theorizes it, encompasses not only the Chinese-language literatures of the diaspora but also the non-Mandarin and non-Han literatures produced within the borders of the People's Republic of China — the literatures of Tibet, Xinjiang, Inner Mongolia, and other regions where Chinese-language literary production coexists with, and often conflicts with, the literary traditions of non-Han peoples. By including these internal peripheries within the Sinophone framework, Shih draws attention to the heterogeneity and the internal contradictions of what is often presented as a unified "Chinese" literary tradition.

The Sinophone concept has been criticized from several directions. Some scholars have argued that it draws too sharp a distinction between "China" and the "Sinophone," ignoring the fact that the cultural and literary connections between the Chinese mainland and the Chinese-speaking communities of the diaspora are deep, ongoing, and mutually constitutive. Others have argued that the concept is too focused on language as the defining criterion of literary community, ignoring the fact that many writers of Chinese descent — including some of the most prominent writers discussed in this and the following chapter — write in languages other than Chinese. Still others have questioned whether the Sinophone concept, despite its anti-hegemonic intentions, may inadvertently reproduce the very "China-centered" logic it seeks to challenge by defining the literatures it encompasses primarily in terms of their relationship (or non-relationship) to China.

These debates notwithstanding, the concept of the Sinophone has opened up new avenues of inquiry and new perspectives on the literatures discussed in this chapter. It has encouraged scholars to take seriously the literary traditions of Hong Kong, Macau, and Southeast Asia — traditions that were previously marginalized within the field of Chinese literary studies — and it has provided a framework for understanding these traditions in terms of their own cultural logics and their own historical trajectories, rather than as mere appendages to a metropolitan Chinese literary tradition.

12. Conclusion: Literature Between Chinese and Local Identities

The literatures of Hong Kong, Macau, and Southeast Asia, taken together, represent one of the most diverse and one of the most intellectually challenging domains within the broader field of Chinese-language literary studies. These are literatures that are produced at the intersections of multiple cultures, multiple languages, and multiple political systems, and they reflect a consciousness of cultural identity that is irreducible to any single national or ethnic category.

What unites these diverse literary traditions — beyond the shared medium of the Chinese language — is the experience of negotiating between Chinese and local identities, between the pull of a vast and ancient cultural tradition and the demands of the particular places and the particular communities in which the writers live and work. The Hong Kong writer who writes about the experience of the 1997 handover, the Malaysian Chinese novelist who sets his fiction in the rainforests of Borneo, the Singaporean poet who reflects on the relationship between Mandarin Chinese and the Chinese dialects of her childhood, the Indonesian Chinese writer who attempts to recover the memory of the 1965 pogroms — all of these writers are engaged in a common project: the project of articulating what it means to be Chinese in a world where "Chineseness" is not a given but a question, not a fixed identity but an ongoing negotiation.

This project — the project of Sinophone literature — is one that has only recently begun to receive the scholarly and the critical attention it deserves. As the field of Chinese literary studies continues to expand its horizons and to challenge its own assumptions, the literatures of Hong Kong, Macau, and Southeast Asia will increasingly be recognized not as minor appendages to a dominant metropolitan tradition but as vital, creative, and indispensable components of the larger story of Chinese literature in the world.

References

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History of Chinese Literature

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