Writing in China
HOPKDMS, MARK
Culture Watching WRITlNG IN CHINA BY MARK HOPKINS Beijing Shortly after he became China's new minister of culture, 54year-old Wang Meng proclaimed: "When a writer writes, whether a...
...An intellectual is accused of "Leftism" and sent to a "reeducation farm...
...The deputy editor of People's Literature chimed in with the official censure, condemning Ma's work as a "product of bourgeois liberalization and other unhealthy tendencies...
...To continue their efforts to enlarge the scope of literature and to explore social problems commonly experienced but uncommonly written about, they must have protectors in high places...
...He fell into oblivion for 20 years, but was rehabilitated under the postMao leadership...
...Culture Watching WRITlNG IN CHINA BY MARK HOPKINS Beijing Shortly after he became China's new minister of culture, 54year-old Wang Meng proclaimed: "When a writer writes, whether a Communist Party member or not, he has actually but one god, and that is the god of himself...
...It's just like the weather, " he said...
...This sort of verse could scarcely please an officialdom that wants China's writers harnessed tothegoalsof higher production and industrial progress, and that regards Marxism-Leninism as the only legitimate source of creative inspiration...
...It should perhaps be stressed, however, that China's literary clampdown is most profoundly concerned with respected and established authors, many of whom feel little sympathy themselves for the popular press...
...Cultural overseers here have traditionally preferred novels about lofty, spiritual unions of men and women inspired to serve the masses and the State...
...Hu Yaobang was regarded as one such protector...
...Even before the present cultural regression, there were strong voices warning China's writers against individual expression...
...One of his poems, published in an anthology that circulated privately in Beijing, goes: After an hour They are still in a daze...
...A statement in Guangming Daily, the leading national newspaper for intellectuals, is symptomatic: " We cannot but admit that in recent years, there has been an erroneous ideological trend in literature and arts that has been growing and spreading...
...The poet Zhao Yanxiang proved prescient in saying a year ago that conservatives would not like the "hundred flowers campaign, and when they gain power they will block the movement...
...A well-known, if not outstanding writer, he had been purged in 1957 for a short story that drew official wrath...
...One must thank them...
...Xie Yongwang, editor of the Chinese Writers' Association newspaper, even declared confidently, "Writers' individuality has been brought into full play...
...The writer's road has never been a smooth one in Communist China, where the Maoist view that literature exists to serve the State and the masses has long held sway...
...The novel drew harsh criticism for its descriptions of incest and rape in a Tibetan family...
...In this conservative society overlaid with Communist morals, the most mildly erotic passages have always been risky...
...Oneof these, the paper said, is the notion that they have "unlimited absolute freedom," and the option of "rejecting the Communist Party's leadership...
...Wang Meng's sentiments, aired in interviews and press statements, were echoed by the then ne w chief of the Party's propaganda department, Zhu Houze...
...Thank them once more...
...No wonder that the Deng Xiaoping leadership's revival of the "double hundred" policy in the spring of 1986 was greeted skeptically by some Chinese writers...
...Another is the belief that "literature is literature," that it can be divorced from political and social consequences...
...The same was true of the "literature of the wounded"—graphic accounts of persecutions during the 1966-76 Cultural Revolution—and of literary forays into the delicate subject of alienation...
...Since his departure, though, there has been no one to take up the cause of literary freedom in the teeth of the conservative reaction...
...The Communist Party newspaper People's Daily advanced the attack in a long commentary defining new limits on writers and detailing their "confused ideas...
...Your eyes will never again see the enemy...
...Sometimes it rains and sometimes the sun shines...
...How can they see the machine's excitation, one after another They themselves are not stirred...
...Said People's Daily: "This is senseless...
...Wang Meng came under a shadow...
...Still, the spate of reforms afoot and the apparent tolerance for free discussion generally engendered a wider sense that the days of deadening political strictures were fading...
...Then from the direction of death, there issues forth The howl, when they are lost in hostility, You will never hear again...
...That is the howl of absolute suffering...
...Each pair of open Eyes, unwilling to awaken Within the dim light of the factory floor, Glistens tenaciously Like stars...
...A new commission for press and publishing has been created at the ministerial level to serve as a watchdog over all kinds of publications...
...Zhu Houze was replaced...
...The story, drawn from the author's own experience, is set in the late 1950s...
...It was also seen as offensive to the Tibetan people, in violation of the principle that Chinese literature should serve to unify the dominant Han Chinese with the country's ethnic minorities...
...Now the pendulum is swinging back: Individuality is under fire as political conservatives, never comfortable with literature lacking clear ideological purpose, again take hold of the propaganda and press machinery...
...Conservatives moved against People's Literature editor Liu Xinwu, too...
...The first invocation of the slogan "Let one hundred flowers bloom, let one hundred schools of thought contend," in 1957, ended in tragedy for China's intellectuals when they dared to criticize theParty.Tensofthousands were vilified, and many were sent to labor camps...
...Eventually he is released and gets married, only to discover that he has been made impotent by his physical andmentalhardships...
...critics who liked the novel said he had brought China's sexual repression into the open...
...Mark Hopkins, a specialist in Soviet and Eastern European affairs...
...has spent the last two years in China...
...A number of minor literary journals have been closed...
...An unnamed writer was scored for a passage in his novel describing a "newly wed couple dancing in the nude...
...So the appearance last year of works like Halfa Man Is a Woman, whatever their literary merit, was taken as a measure of growing artistic freedom...
...An example of the latter is the young Shanghai poet Meng Lang's attempt to capture the stultifying rhythms of the Chinese worker's life...
...As the Minister of Culture he was encouraging diversity in literary themes and genres and inveighing against political retribution disguised as literary criticism...
...But after the watershed student demonstrations for democracy in December and the January ouster of Communist Party leader Hu Yaobang, the conservative faction got the upper hand in cultural matters...
...There is at the moment no end in sight to the stricter cultural policy...
...Notwithstanding, the country's writers continued their experiments with new forms and subjects...
...The small printing plants that emerged under the economic reforms are being shut down for illegal output, especially if they cater to tastes for sex and violence...
...He has been temporarily suspended and ordered to make a "self-examination...
...Liu's troubles began when his journal featured a short novel entitled Show Your Tongue Coating or Nothingness, by Ma Jian, a young writer who has since moved to Hong Kong...
...As for the future, Zhao is neither cheerful nor despairing...
...Depictions of sex were specifically reproached: Literature should "enrich and raise the people's spirit, not stimulate their sensory organs...
...The newspaper denounced writing that "negates the national cultural tradition, and even the Chinese race, holding that Chinese people are ugly and inferior...
...The conservative Communist Party journal Red Flag, for instance, insisted that the "essential political task for literature and art [is] to arouse the patriotic fervor of the people throughout the country and push them to work hard and to devote themselves to the Socialist modernization of the motherland...
...In another contribution to the same anthology, the young Beijing poet Duo Duo takes up the emotion of hatred: They throw a shovel of earth on your face...
...One result of the liberal ambiance they fostered was the publication of a controversial novel titled Half a Man Is a Woman, by the 49-year-old Zhang Xianliang...
...bourgeois liberalization is the core of that trend...
...The case of Wang Meng himself seemed to justify optimism...
...Asked during a meeting with foreigners what he would do if a writer failed to conform with Marxist tenets, Wang Meng responded easily: "I'd probably offer him a cup of coffee, give him some friendly advice, or let him go his way and I'd go mine...
...Zhang Xianliang offers explicit accounts of intimate relations...
...But that was last year, following the fourth National Congress of Writers in 1985 and the subsequent official revival of the "hundred flowers" spirit, when Chinese authors felt they were entering what Wang Meng called the "golden age" of Chinese literature...
...Today, finally, there is no sun...
...Deng has voiced opinions on both sides in the past, but those currently being recalled are to the effect that literature must serve the masses...
...All periodicals are having their state registrations re-examined...
...The popular Shanghai writer Wang Ruowang was expelled from the Party on personal orders of Deng, and has been fiercely attacked for allegedly opposing the Party and advocating "total Westernization" of China—two cardinal ideological sins...
Vol. 70 • May 1987 • No. 7
