History of Chinese Literature/Chapter 31

Previous◀ Chapter 30

History of Chinese Literature

NextChapter 32 ▶

Chapter 31: Literature, Politics, and Censorship — The Eternal Entanglement

1. Introduction: The Indivisible Bond

In few literary traditions has the relationship between literature and political power been as intimate, as consequential, and as enduring as in China. From the earliest recorded reflections on the nature and the purpose of literary composition to the digital censorship regimes of the twenty-first century, the Chinese literary tradition has been shaped — enriched, constrained, deformed, and galvanized — by the fact that literature and political authority have never been fully separable in Chinese civilization. This entanglement is not an accident of history or a mere consequence of authoritarian governance; it is rooted in the foundational assumptions of Chinese culture about the nature of language, the purpose of writing, and the moral responsibilities of the literate person.

The Western liberal tradition, which has tended to conceive of literature as a sphere of free individual expression distinct from and potentially opposed to political authority, offers an inadequate framework for understanding the Chinese situation. In China, the assumption that literature has a political dimension — that it can instruct, transform, corrupt, or subvert — has been shared by writers and rulers alike, by those who have sought to use literature as an instrument of governance and by those who have used it as a vehicle of protest. The result is a tradition in which the political and the literary are woven together so tightly that any attempt to separate them does violence to the historical record.

This chapter traces the history of the relationship between literature, politics, and censorship in China from the classical period to the present, examining the ways in which political power has shaped literary production, the ways in which writers have responded to political pressure, and the paradoxical creativity that has sometimes emerged from the constraints of censorship and self-censorship.

2. Confucius and the Political Foundations of Literary Culture

The entanglement of literature and politics in China can be traced to the very origins of the Chinese literary canon. According to tradition, Confucius (孔子, 551–479 BCE) himself edited the Shijing (诗经, Classic of Poetry), selecting 305 poems from an original corpus of three thousand. Whether or not this tradition is historically accurate, it encapsulates a truth that is fundamental to the Chinese literary tradition: the literary canon was, from the beginning, understood as a curated collection — a selection made according to moral and political criteria by an authority figure who was simultaneously a sage, a teacher, and a political thinker.

The Confucian understanding of poetry, as articulated in the "Great Preface" (大序, Daxu) to the Shijing, established principles that would govern the relationship between literature and politics for millennia. Poetry, according to this understanding, was not merely a form of personal expression but a barometer of social and political conditions — a medium through which the governed could communicate their feelings to their rulers and through which the moral health of a society could be assessed. The feng (风, "airs") of the states were understood as expressions of the people's sentiments under particular forms of governance: when government was benevolent, the airs were joyful; when government was corrupt, the airs were mournful. This principle — that poetry reflects political reality and can therefore serve as a tool of political diagnosis — made literature a matter of legitimate concern for political authority from the very outset of the Chinese literary tradition.

The doctrine of wenyi zaidao (文以载道, "literature conveys the Way") — though it was not formulated in precisely these terms until the Song dynasty, when the neo-Confucian philosopher Zhou Dunyi (周敦颐, 1017–1073) gave it its classic expression — had its roots in the earliest Confucian reflections on the purpose of writing. The character wen (文), which means simultaneously "pattern," "writing," "literature," and "civilization," already implied a connection between literary art and the moral order of the cosmos. For the Confucian tradition, writing was not a neutral technology but a sacred activity that participated in the patterning of the universe — and that therefore carried with it a moral responsibility that no writer could legitimately evade.

3. The First Emperor and the Burning of Books

The most dramatic early episode in the history of the relationship between literature and political power in China is the "burning of books and burying of scholars" (焚书坑儒, fenshu kengru) carried out by the First Emperor of Qin (秦始皇, r. 221–210 BCE) in 213–212 BCE. According to the Shiji (史记, Records of the Grand Historian) of Sima Qian, the chancellor Li Si (李斯, c. 280–208 BCE) persuaded the emperor that the possession of private copies of the classics and of the historical records of the feudal states was a source of political instability, because it allowed scholars to use the authority of the past to criticize the present. Li Si therefore recommended that all copies of the Shijing, the Shujing (书经, Classic of Documents), and the records of the feudal states held in private hands should be burned, and that only copies held by the imperial academicians and works of a practical nature — books on medicine, divination, agriculture, and forestry — should be preserved.

The burning of the books was not merely an act of political repression; it was also, in a paradoxical sense, an acknowledgment of the power of literature. The Qin government would not have gone to such extraordinary lengths to destroy literary and historical texts if it had not believed that these texts possessed a genuine capacity to shape political consciousness and to challenge political authority. The episode established a pattern that would recur throughout Chinese history: the more a government feared the power of the written word, the more stringently it sought to control it — and the more stringently it sought to control it, the more clearly it demonstrated the power that it feared.

The Qin dynasty's attempt to control literature through destruction was, by the standards of Chinese history, an anomaly — an extreme measure that was condemned by subsequent dynasties and that served as a cautionary example of tyrannical excess. The approach to literary control adopted by most subsequent Chinese governments was more subtle and more sophisticated: rather than destroying literature, they sought to co-opt it — to harness the prestige and the persuasive power of literary culture to the purposes of the state through a combination of patronage, institutional incentives, and selective censorship.

4. The Imperial Examination System and the State's Co-optation of Literary Culture

The imperial examination system (科举, keju), which was established in rudimentary form during the Sui dynasty (581–618) and which reached its mature form during the Tang and Song dynasties, was perhaps the most consequential institutional mechanism through which the Chinese state shaped literary culture. By making literary skill — specifically, the ability to compose essays and poetry in classical Chinese — the primary criterion for selection to the civil service, the examination system created an intimate and enduring connection between literary accomplishment and political power that had no parallel in any other civilization.

The examination system did not merely select officials on the basis of literary ability; it also determined the forms and the styles of literary composition that were valued and that were practiced by the educated elite. During the Tang dynasty, when the examinations placed a premium on the composition of regulated verse (律诗, lüshi), the regulated verse form became the dominant form of literary composition, and the ability to compose regulated verse became a mark of social and cultural distinction. During the Ming and Qing dynasties, when the examinations required the composition of the "eight-legged essay" (八股文, baguwen) — a highly formulaic prose form with strict requirements of structure, parallelism, and argumentation — the eight-legged essay became the form in which the intellectual energies of millions of aspiring scholars were invested.

The effects of the examination system on Chinese literary culture were both positive and negative. On the positive side, the system ensured that the political elite of China was, for more than a thousand years, a literary elite — a class of men who were trained in the reading and the composition of literary texts and who therefore understood and valued literary art. This had the effect of raising the general level of literary culture in Chinese civilization to a height that was unmatched in any other pre-modern society. On the negative side, the system tended to channel literary creativity into the forms that were rewarded by the examinations, at the expense of forms — such as fiction and drama — that were not. The dominance of the examination essay, particularly in the Ming and Qing periods, was criticized by many scholars as a stultifying influence on Chinese intellectual life — a system that rewarded conformity and formulaic virtuosity at the expense of originality and genuine thought.

5. Literary Inquisition: The Qing Dynasty's Terror of Words

The most systematic and the most terrorizing form of literary censorship in Chinese history was the "literary inquisition" (文字狱, wenziyu, literally "prison of words and writing") that was practiced by the Qing dynasty (1644–1912), particularly during the reigns of the Kangxi (r. 1661–1722), Yongzheng (r. 1723–1735), and Qianlong (r. 1735–1796) emperors. The literary inquisitions were campaigns of ideological surveillance in which writers, scholars, and even their relatives and associates could be punished — by imprisonment, exile, confiscation of property, or execution — for passages in their writings that were deemed to be disrespectful to the Manchu ruling house or subversive of the established political order.

The most infamous cases of the literary inquisition illustrate the arbitrary and the terrifying nature of this form of censorship. The case of Zhuang Tinglong (庄廷鑨, d. 1655) involved a privately compiled history that was alleged to contain passages disrespectful to the Manchu conquest; the resulting investigation led to the execution of more than seventy people, including the author's family members, the editors, the printers, the purchasers, and even the person who wrote the preface. The case of Dai Mingshi (戴名世, 1653–1713), a distinguished scholar and essayist who had used the reign titles of the Southern Ming dynasty in a historical work, resulted in Dai's execution and the imprisonment or exile of hundreds of his associates.

The Qianlong emperor's project to compile the Siku quanshu (四库全书, Complete Library of the Four Treasuries) — the largest compilation of texts in Chinese history, encompassing more than 36,000 volumes — was simultaneously an act of cultural patronage and an act of cultural control. While the compilation preserved and catalogued an enormous body of Chinese literary and scholarly work, it also provided the occasion for a systematic examination of the entire Chinese literary heritage for passages that might be deemed politically objectionable. Thousands of works were censored, altered, or destroyed in the process of compilation, and the project served as a pretext for the most extensive literary inquisition in Chinese history.

The effect of the literary inquisitions on Chinese literary culture was profound and lasting. Writers learned to avoid any topic or any turn of phrase that might be interpreted as politically subversive — a lesson that produced a pervasive culture of self-censorship that extended far beyond the specific targets of the inquisitions. Scholars turned away from politically sensitive fields such as contemporary history and political commentary and devoted their energies to philologically safe pursuits such as textual criticism, phonology, and the study of ancient bronze inscriptions — a development that contributed to the flowering of the "evidential research" (考据学, kaozhengxue) movement of the eighteenth century but that also narrowed the scope of Chinese intellectual life.

6. Literature as Resistance: From Qu Yuan to Lu Xun

If the history of Chinese literary censorship reveals the power of the state to constrain and to intimidate literary expression, it also reveals the resilience and the resourcefulness of Chinese writers in finding ways to express dissent, to preserve moral integrity, and to resist political oppression through literary means.

The archetype of the writer as political resister in the Chinese tradition is Qu Yuan (屈原, c. 340–278 BCE), the poet of the kingdom of Chu whose "Encountering Sorrow" (离骚, Lisao) is at once one of the greatest poems in the Chinese language and one of the most powerful expressions of political protest in world literature. Qu Yuan's poem — which describes the poet's anguished loyalty to a ruler who has rejected his counsel, his disgust at the corruption and the sycophancy that surround the throne, and his refusal to compromise his moral principles for the sake of political advancement — established a model of literary dissent that would be followed by generations of Chinese writers. The figure of the loyal but unappreciated minister, the upright man who suffers for his integrity, became one of the central figures of the Chinese literary imagination — a figure that could be invoked by any writer who wished to express political dissatisfaction without directly attacking the authorities.

The tradition of allegorical and indirect political expression — the use of historical allusion, natural imagery, and coded language to convey political messages that could not be stated openly — is one of the most distinctive features of Chinese literary culture and one of the most important creative responses to the constraints of censorship. The poetry of the Tang dynasty, for example, is replete with political allegory: the neglected concubine who waits in vain for the emperor's favor is a figure for the loyal minister who has been dismissed from office; the autumn leaves that fall from the trees are an image of political decline; the frontier soldier who longs for home is a vehicle for the expression of dissatisfaction with military adventurism. These allegorical conventions were so well established and so widely understood that they constituted a virtual language of political dissent — a language that allowed writers to communicate subversive meanings to knowledgeable readers while maintaining a surface innocence that could be defended against the censors.

Lu Xun (鲁迅, 1881–1936), the greatest writer of modern China, brought the tradition of literary resistance into the twentieth century with a ferocity and a directness that had few precedents in the Chinese literary tradition. His short stories — "A Madman's Diary" (狂人日记, Kuangren riji), "The True Story of Ah Q" (阿Q正传, A Q zhengzhuan), "Medicine" (药, Yao) — attacked the moral bankruptcy and the cultural pathology of Chinese society with a savage irony that made him the most feared and the most admired literary voice of his generation. Lu Xun's willingness to use literature as a weapon of social and political criticism — his refusal to accept the role of the compliant, apolitical literary artist — made him a model for subsequent generations of Chinese writers who believed that literature could and should serve the cause of social justice.

7. The Yan'an Forum and the Maoist Prescription for Literature

The most systematic and the most consequential attempt to define the relationship between literature and politics in modern Chinese history was Mao Zedong's "Talks at the Yan'an Forum on Literature and Art" (在延安文艺座谈会上的讲话, Zai Yan'an wenyi zuotanhui shang de jianghua), delivered in May 1942. In these talks, Mao articulated a theory of literature that was, in its essentials, an adaptation of the Confucian doctrine of wenyi zaidao to the requirements of revolutionary politics. Literature, Mao declared, must serve the people — specifically, the workers, the peasants, and the soldiers — and must be subordinated to the political needs of the revolution. There was no such thing as art for art's sake; all literature was political, whether its authors acknowledged this or not, and the only question was whose politics a given work of literature served — the politics of the people or the politics of the exploiting classes.

Mao's Yan'an Talks established the principles that would govern the relationship between literature and political authority in the People's Republic of China from 1949 onward. These principles — that literature must serve politics, that writers must integrate themselves with the masses, that literary criticism must judge works primarily by their political content rather than by their aesthetic quality — were enforced with varying degrees of severity over the following decades, and their enforcement produced some of the most dramatic and the most tragic episodes in the history of Chinese literature.

The Anti-Rightist Campaign (反右运动, Fanyou yundong) of 1957–1958, which was launched in response to the criticisms that writers and intellectuals had offered during the "Hundred Flowers" period of relative liberalization, resulted in the persecution of hundreds of thousands of intellectuals, including many of China's most talented writers. The poet Ai Qing (艾青, 1910–1996) was sent to a labor camp in Xinjiang; the playwright Wu Zuguang (吴祖光, 1917–2003) was exiled to the countryside; the essayist and humorist Deng Tuo (邓拓, 1912–1966) was driven to suicide during the Cultural Revolution that followed. The message was clear: literary expression that deviated from the political line prescribed by the Party would be punished with the utmost severity.

The Cultural Revolution (文化大革命, Wenhua da geming, 1966–1976) represented the most extreme manifestation of the subordination of literature to politics in Chinese history. During this decade, virtually all literary production was suppressed except for a handful of "model works" (样板戏, yangbanxi) — revolutionary operas and ballets that had been approved by Jiang Qing (江青, 1914–1991), Mao's wife and the cultural arbiter of the revolution. Writers, artists, and intellectuals were subjected to public humiliation, physical violence, imprisonment, and forced labor. Many of China's greatest writers — including the novelist Lao She (老舍, 1899–1966), who drowned himself in a Beijing lake after being beaten by Red Guards, and the translator and essayist Fu Lei (傅雷, 1908–1966), who hanged himself together with his wife — did not survive the decade.

8. Self-Censorship and Its Paradoxical Creativity

One of the most important and most paradoxical aspects of the relationship between literature and censorship in China is the way in which the constraints imposed by censorship have sometimes stimulated rather than suppressed literary creativity. The need to express forbidden ideas in disguised or indirect form has led Chinese writers to develop techniques of allusion, allegory, irony, and ambiguity that are among the most sophisticated in world literature.

The tradition of "using the past to satirize the present" (借古讽今, jie gu feng jin) — a tradition that extends from the poetry of the Six Dynasties through the historical fiction of the Ming and Qing periods to the allegorical writings of the twentieth century — is a direct response to the constraints of censorship. By setting their works in the past and by using historical events and historical figures as vehicles for contemporary commentary, Chinese writers were able to address politically sensitive topics while maintaining a degree of plausible deniability that might protect them from retribution. The great historical novel Romance of the Three Kingdoms (三国演义, Sanguo yanyi), for example, has been read by generations of Chinese readers not merely as a narrative of events in the third century CE but as a commentary on the nature of political power, the ethics of loyalty and betrayal, and the relationship between personal virtue and political success — themes that were as relevant to the Ming dynasty reader as they were to the Three Kingdoms scholar.

The allegorical tradition reached perhaps its most remarkable expression in the fiction of the late Qing dynasty, when writers such as Wu Jianren (吴趼人, 1866–1910) and Liu E (刘鹗, 1857–1909) used the conventions of the novel to offer devastating critiques of the corruption, the incompetence, and the moral bankruptcy of the Qing government. Wu Jianren's Strange Events Witnessed in the Past Twenty Years (二十年目睹之怪现状, Ershi nian mudu zhi guai xianzhuang) and Liu E's The Travels of Lao Can (老残游记, Laocan youji) are works of fiction that are simultaneously works of political journalism — texts that use the narrative freedom of the novel form to say things that could not be said in any other medium.

In the post-Mao era, the technique of writing between the lines — of embedding subversive meanings in ostensibly innocent narratives — has continued to be practiced by Chinese writers who work under the constraints of state censorship. The novelist Yan Lianke (阎连科, born 1958), whose works have been banned in China for their politically sensitive content, has developed a narrative method that he calls "mythorealism" (神实主义, shen shishi zhuyi) — a method that uses fantastic and surreal elements to illuminate realities that cannot be addressed directly. His novel Serve the People! (为人民服务, Wei renmin fuwu, 2005), which uses a sexual allegory to satirize the cult of Mao Zedong, was banned in China but became an international success — a pattern that has become increasingly common in the era of globalization, when Chinese writers who are silenced at home can find audiences and publishers abroad.

9. Banned Books as a Literary Tradition

China has one of the longest and most extensive histories of book banning in the world, and the category of the "banned book" (禁书, jinshu) has become, paradoxically, a kind of literary genre in its own right — a category that confers a special prestige and a special interest on the works that have been subjected to official prohibition. The list of works that have been banned at various points in Chinese history reads like a catalogue of the greatest masterpieces of Chinese literature: the Jin Ping Mei (金瓶梅, The Plum in the Golden Vase), which was banned for its sexual content; the Shuihu zhuan (水浒传, Water Margin), which was banned for its celebration of rebellion; the Hongloumeng (红楼梦, Dream of the Red Chamber), which was censored for its perceived political allegory; and countless other works that have been deemed dangerous to public morality or political stability.

The effect of banning on the circulation of literary works in China has been complex and often counterproductive. In many cases, the banning of a book has had the effect of increasing rather than decreasing its readership — a phenomenon that Chinese readers have long recognized and that has given rise to the saying "the more they ban it, the more people read it" (越禁越看). The banned book acquires an aura of transgression and of hidden truth that makes it more attractive to readers than it would be if it were freely available — a dynamic that has been exploited by some publishers and some writers who have deliberately courted controversy in order to increase the commercial and the cultural value of their works.

The tradition of banned books in China also illustrates the shifting and often arbitrary nature of literary censorship. Works that are banned in one period may be rehabilitated in another; works that are celebrated by one regime may be condemned by the next. The Shuihu zhuan, which was banned by the Qing dynasty for its depiction of rebellion against authority, was celebrated by the Communist Party in the 1950s as a work of revolutionary literature — and was then criticized again during the Anti-Lin Biao Anti-Confucius Campaign of 1973–1974, when it was reinterpreted as an allegory of capitulation to the enemy. These shifts illustrate the extent to which the meaning and the value of literary works in China have been determined not only by their inherent qualities but by the political contexts in which they have been read and interpreted.

10. The Great Firewall: Digital Censorship in the Twenty-First Century

The advent of the internet and of digital communication technologies has created new challenges and new possibilities for both literary censorship and literary resistance in China. The Chinese government's system of internet censorship — popularly known as the "Great Firewall" (防火长城, Fanghuǒ Chángchéng) — is the most extensive and the most technologically sophisticated system of online content control in the world, employing a combination of automated keyword filtering, manual review, IP blocking, and legal sanctions to restrict the circulation of politically sensitive content on the Chinese internet.

The Great Firewall has had a significant impact on the production and the circulation of literary works in China. Online literary platforms — such as Qidian (起点中文网), Jinjiang (晋江文学城), and others — are required to implement content review systems that filter out politically sensitive material, and individual authors whose works are deemed to violate content guidelines may have their works removed or their accounts suspended. The boundaries of permissible expression online are constantly shifting and are often ambiguous, creating a climate of uncertainty that encourages self-censorship — a climate in which writers learn to avoid certain topics, certain words, and certain forms of expression not because they have been explicitly forbidden but because they sense that they might attract unwanted attention.

Chinese internet users have responded to these constraints with remarkable ingenuity, developing a rich vocabulary of euphemisms, puns, homophones, and coded expressions that allow them to discuss forbidden topics while evading keyword filters. The word "river crab" (河蟹, hexie), for example, became a widely used euphemism for censorship because it is a homophone of "harmonious" (和谐, hexie) — a reference to the government's rhetoric of "building a harmonious society." The expression "grass-mud horse" (草泥马, cao ni ma) became an internet meme because of its phonetic resemblance to an obscene phrase — and because its use as a symbol of resistance to censorship was itself an example of the kind of linguistic creativity that censorship inspires.

The paradox of digital censorship in China is that the very technologies that enable censorship also enable resistance to censorship. The speed and the anonymity of digital communication, the ease with which texts can be copied and redistributed, and the global reach of the internet make it far more difficult for the Chinese state to control the circulation of literary and political texts than it was for the emperors of the Qing dynasty. At the same time, the surveillance capabilities of digital technology — the ability to track, to monitor, and to identify individual users — give the state powers of control that the Qing emperors could not have imagined. The result is a dynamic and constantly evolving contest between the forces of censorship and the forces of creative expression — a contest that is, in many respects, the latest chapter in a story that has been unfolding for more than two thousand years.

11. Conclusion: The Eternal Entanglement

The history of the relationship between literature, politics, and censorship in China reveals a pattern of extraordinary complexity and remarkable continuity. From Confucius's editing of the Shijing to the algorithms of the Great Firewall, the assumption that literature is a matter of political consequence — that it has the power to shape minds, to influence conduct, and to challenge authority — has been a constant of Chinese civilization. This assumption has been shared by rulers and by writers, by those who have sought to control literature and by those who have sought to use it as a vehicle of resistance, and it has given the Chinese literary tradition a political intensity and a political resonance that distinguish it from most other literary traditions in the world.

The eternal entanglement of literature and politics in China has produced both tragedy and triumph — tragedy in the form of the countless writers who have suffered persecution, imprisonment, exile, and death for the crime of writing; triumph in the form of the extraordinary literary works that have been produced in response to political constraint, works that have found ways to express the inexpressible, to say the unsayable, and to preserve the moral and the imaginative freedom of the human spirit in the face of the most determined attempts to suppress it. The Chinese literary tradition, with its long experience of the relationship between the pen and the sword, between the word and the law, between the writer and the state, offers lessons that are of value not only to students of Chinese literature but to anyone who is concerned with the relationship between literary art and political power in any society and in any age.

References

Previous◀ Chapter 30

History of Chinese Literature

NextChapter 32 ▶