I STARTED PAYING ATTENTION to Internet literature in China around the turn of the millennium, having noticed during a trip to China that wangluo wenxue was being widely debated and that printed versions of works originally published online were starting to hit the shelves of bookshops in major cities. What interested me especially was that such born-digital works, even if they looked exactly the same as conventional prose or poetry, would still end up in a special section of the bookshops and be identified as “Internet literature.” The potential emergence of an entirely new genre, possibly even a new literary field, in China fascinated me, and, over the years that followed, I tried to stay informed about what was happening. Around the same time I also began to talk about Chinese Internet literature during classes and lectures. My first opportunity to give a class on the topic came in 2000 when my SOAS colleague Kevin Latham invited me to make a contribution to his Chinese Cinema and Media course. Around the same time, Jie Lu from the University of the Pacific invited me to contribute a piece on Internet literature to a special issue of the Journal of Contemporary China, which she was editing, and in this context she also invited me to visit her university and give a talk on the topic to her students. I am grateful to both Kevin and Jie for encouraging my early interest in this topic.While Internet literature was booming in China and its practices, sites, and terminologies rapidly became part of serious literary discourse, the phenomenon continued to be very marginal in the United Kingdom, where I have been living since 1996, and in other Western countries. For many years, the majority of presentations I gave on the topic were descriptive introductions, simply because without ample explanation, most of my audience would have no idea what I was talking about. Often my audiences were surprised to find that such wide-ranging literary creativity existed online in China. After all, the most pervasive image about the Internet in China present in Western people’s minds is that of the “Great Firewall.” Although I am strongly interested in literary censorship as a field of study and often intrigued by how difficult it is to study it objectively, I soon found myself compelled to resist the trend of talking about only what could not appear on the Internet in China, and instead I focused on what could. After all, there has never been a period in China’s long history that literature was not subjected to state censorship, yet we study and appreciate Chinese literature from ancient times to the present. The existence of censorship per se can never be a reason to dismiss any literature, nor can it ever be argued that only literary fields with weak or no censorship institutions are worth studying.
Over the years I came to realize that the book I wanted to write, this book, would first and foremost need to be a general overview, useful not only for specialists but also for general readers interested in present-day China and its culture. In addition to that general intention, however, two further aspects are explored here in more depth: the ways in which Internet literature brings about literary innovation and challenges existing paradigms of “electronic literature,” and the ways in which this literature specifically challenges the established publishing system of the People’s Republic of China, bringing about changes and adjustments in the regulation regime.
A small group of other scholars has shared my enthusiasm for Chinese Internet literature. I believe we all shared a keen sense of doing something new and exciting, and I greatly enjoyed our many discussions, often via e-mail, and the exchange of materials and manuscripts. I want to mention especially Jin Feng from Grinnell College and my former student Heather Inwood, now at the University of Manchester. I should also mention Mei Hong from Southwestern Jiaotong University in Chengdu, author of the first-ever Chinese textbook on Internet literature, who spent a year in London including six months at SOAS in 2011–2012. Finally, I want to mention Shao Yanjun from Peking University, a recent convert, initially quite critical of Internet literature but actively promoting its study in the past few years.
I have many reasons to thank many people for their contributions to this research. Three names stand out in my mind: Helen Hockx-Yu, whose expertise in web archiving developed over the same period that I was doing this research, has been a constant source of advice in all matters related to the study of the World Wide Web. Second, the author Chen Cun, whom some refer to as the father of Chinese Internet literature, patiently responded to many questions through e-mail and also generously granted me a very long interview in Shanghai in 2010. I am also grateful for his generous permission to reproduce online work by him that is no longer available on the live web. Third, I owe a similar debt of gratitude to Dajuin Yao, the earliest online literary experimenter in the Chinese language, for kindly allowing me to preserve his work from the 1990s, despite its having disappeared from the live web many years ago, and refer to it in presentations I have given over the years, and in this book.
What follows is a list of people who have enabled me to present or publish my work, engaged me in discussions, helped me find materials, taught me crucial new computer skills, advised and inspired me, or supported me with their friendship and collegiality. With apologies for any unintentional omissions, my sincere thanks go to the following: Cosima Bruno, John Cayley, Kang-i Sun Chang, Shih-chen (Sheila) Chao, Chen Pingyuan, Chen Taisheng, Eileen Chow, Maghiel van Crevel, Susan Daruvala, Kirk Denton, Jennifer Feeley, Bernhard Fuehrer, David Gauntlett, N. Katherine Hayles, Margaret Hillenbrand, Pamela Hunt, Ann Huss, Wilt and Eveline Idema, Sara Jones, Joan Judge, Nick Kaldis, Paize Keulemans, Uganda Sze Pui Kwan, Wendy Larson, Charles Laughlin, Li Chao, Li Nan, Andrea Lingenfelter, Liu Shuling, Chris Lupke, Ma Lan, Paul Manfredi, Bonnie McDougall, Liansu Meng, Barbara Mittler, Stephen Morgan, Meesha Nehru, George Paizis, Xenia Piëch, Carlos Rojas, Fiona Sampson, Lena Scheen, Dan Stillman, James St. André, Julia Strauss, Liying Sun, Xiaofei Tian, Jing Tsu, Wang Qiang, Gerda Wielander, Xia Xiaohong, Michelle Yeh, Yuan Jin, and, last but most definitely not least, the inventors of Zotero.
Special thanks go to David Der-wei Wang for encouraging me to publish with Columbia University Press, to Jennifer Crewe at Columbia for her great patience, and to Mike Ashby, Jonathan Fiedler, and Roy Thomas for their editorial work.
Research for this book was supported by a research grant from the Arts and Humanities Research Council in 2010–2011, and further enabled by periods of sabbatical leave granted by SOAS, University of London, in 2005–2006 and 2010–2011.
Portions of chapters 1 and 4 have drawn upon material from within Michel Hockx, “Virtual Chinese Literature: A Comparative Case Study of Online Poetry Communities,” China Quarterly 183 (2005): 670–691 © SOAS, University of London, published by Cambridge University Press, reproduced with permission. Other parts of chapter 1 first appeared in Michel Hockx, “Links with the Past: Mainland China’s Online Literacy Communities and Their Antecedents,” Journal of Contemporary China 13, no. 38 (2004): 105–127. (See the journal website at www.tandfonline.com.) Parts of chapter 2 previously appeared in Michel Hockx, “Master of the Web: Chen Cun and the Continuous Avant-Garde,” in Text, Performance, and Gender in Chinese Literature and Music: Essays in Honor of Wilt Idema, ed. Maghiel van Crevel, Tian Yuan Tan, and Michel Hockx, 413–29 (Leiden: Brill, 2009). I am grateful to all three publishers for granting permission to reuse the material.
My most heartfelt thanks go to Hong for her ever-present love and support and to our son, Dylan, for bringing so much joy to our lives, and for showing us how the next generation grows up with the Internet. But as I write these words, my thoughts go out first and foremost to my father, Jacques Hockx, who bought a computer to catalogue his books, a project he was unable to finish. This book is dedicated to his memory.