Internet Literature in China

ON OCTOBER 24, 2010, I met up with Chen Cun in a bookshop in Shanghai. We talked about Chinese literature in general, about the Internet, and about his involvement in Banyan Tree and other literature portals. At some point during the conversation I asked him when he had published his first online work. His response came instantly: “I have never published any works [zuopin] online. What I do online is just random writing. My real literary work has all appeared in print.”

This chapter represents a deliberate attempt, foolhardy though it may seem, to challenge Chen’s opinion about his own work. I have enjoyed reading his online writing, and I feel it has significant literary value, even if it does not represent “work” in the conventional print-era sense of the word. Specifically, Chen’s online writing represents a type of literary innovation that makes productive use of the interactive nature of online forums. This is consistent with some of Chen’s poetical inclinations from his pre-Internet days, especially his frequently stated desire to undermine the power of the fiction (xiaoshuo) genre in favor of a kind of writing that better grasps the fragmentary nature of modern-day existence. In addition, Chen’s online writings help to make a theoretical point regarding the study of electronic literature. Whereas most scholars tend to view nonlinearity as a precondition for distinguishing electronic literature from conventional literature, Chen Cun’s experiments show us that online linear texts can be given interactive features that make them innovative and unconventional, creating textual worlds that cannot be reproduced in conventional print.

Chen Cun is the pen name of Yang Yihua, a member of the Hui (Muslim) minority, born in Shanghai in 1954.1 Like many of his generation he was sent to the countryside (in his case in Anhui) during the Cultural Revolution. He returned to Shanghai in 1975 for health reasons, suffering from a progressive rheumatic disease known as ankylosing spondylitis. The fact that he walks with crutches and is unable to stand upright is mentioned in virtually every article I have read about him. It also plays a role in his recent online work, as we shall see below. His first published work was the story “Liang dai ren” (Two Generations), which appeared in the magazine Shanghai wenxue in September 1979 and is mentioned favorably by W. J. F. Jenner in his detailed overview of officially published fiction of that year. It is worth mentioning in our current context that Jenner’s reason for being positively disposed toward the story is that it breaks with established narrative conventions.²

In 1983, Chen Cun started receiving regular writing stipends (chuangzuo fei) from the Shanghai Writers Association and quit his job as a teacher to live off his writing. Two years later, in 1985, he was employed by the association as a professional writer, a privileged status implying that he received a monthly salary in exchange for maintaining a regular publication record.3 His online writing does not count in this context and is not included in his annual report to the association, which explains his assertion that his online writings are not really “works.”⁴

Chen Cun thus became a member of the literary establishment at the height of its development toward “cliquishness.” Before long he started to be identified with the avant-garde style of fiction. Various short stories and especially the 1989 novella “Shaonan shaonü, yigong qige” (Boys and Girls, Seven in Total) have been singled out post facto as belonging to the 1980s avant-garde, partly because of the way in which they break with narrative conventions.⁵ In the 1990s, Chen Cun gradually turned away from writing fiction in the traditional sense and moved toward writing other types of prose. His only novel of the 1990s, published in 1997 and titled Xianhua he (Fresh Flowers And),⁶ is acclaimed for its experimental technique, consisting entirely of seemingly randomly recorded prose passages, jotted down in the first person singular by the main character, who is a middle-aged, famous author. At the same time, in the late 1990s, Chen Cun became increasingly well-known for his involvement with web literature. He was one of the first established print-culture authors to make the move to web-based writing, and he has since been one of its staunchest defenders. He became widely known for his involvement with the popular Shanghai website Under the Banyan Tree. More recently he has moved on to a smaller niche inside cyberspace, where he continues to produce experimental work, an example of which will be discussed in detail later in the chapter. First, however, let us have a closer look at the emergence of the contemporary Chinese avant-garde and at Chen Cun’s pre-Internet writings.

The avant-garde in contemporary Chinese fiction is often seen as a phenomenon that belongs exclusively to the late 1980s. Experimental fictional writings by Can Xue, Ma Yuan, Yu Hua, and others are considered to have thoroughly undermined the socialist realist literary paradigm by carrying out the “subversive act” of “the making of a subject without a core who narrates without a purpose,” as Jing Wang so eloquently put it.7 Although the context in which they worked, as pointed out before, was inherited from the socialist system of literary production, the themes they explored in their writings could not be more different from those explored by previous communities active within that system. Probably for that reason, their experiments are usually seen as having been shortlived. By the 1990s, the socialist publishing system was largely dismantled and most if not all avant-garde authors turned away from extreme experimentalism and instead started producing work that was more accessible and more marketable, or simply stopped writing.⁸

In theoretical terms, the development just sketched is somewhat contradictory. Most theories of the avant-garde postulate that its programs or techniques will be gradually assimilated by the establishment, after which they cease to be avant-garde. What was a shock to the system at some point becomes part of the system at a later point. In the case of this particular avant-garde, the opposite seems to have happened: the authors previously belonging to the avant-garde voluntarily adopted establishment techniques. They reduced the shock value of their writing (or stopped writing), thus normalizing their work rather than waiting for it to be normalized. This is exactly why understanding the context in which these authors worked is so important: in the late 1980s, what they wrote shocked the system in terms of its aesthetic beliefs and therefore was avant-garde. But it was part of the system in terms of how it was produced, disseminated, and canonized and therefore represented a cultural elite. This makes the Chinese avant-garde of the late 1980s substantially different from, for instance, the European avant-gardes of the period between the two world wars, because the proponents of those avant-gardes did not generally produce work for mainstream journals and publishers and did not have the kind of material and logistic support that the Chinese avant-gardists had. As a result, the European avant-gardists challenged the literary system from the outside and then gradually made their way in, and saw their methods co-opted and assimilated in the process. The Chinese avant-gardists, on the other hand, started out from privileged positions within the system and then had to adapt when the system changed and became more commercial in the 1990s. For this reason, as well as for nonliterary reasons, such as the ideological inclination of many critics to view the political events of 1989 as the end of an era of cultural liberalism, contemporary Chinese avant-garde fiction is frozen in time and rarely if ever discussed on the basis of texts selected from a later decade.9 In short: the term “avant-garde fiction” has become a period term, referring almost exclusively to writing of the period 1985–1989.¹⁰ What I hope to show in this chapter is that for at least one author counted among the avant-garde of the late 1980s, the change to the postsocialist publishing system actually represented an opportunity to explore avant-gardism in a more fundamental way, challenging widely held conceptions not only about what literature is but also about where and how it should be produced and disseminated.

In looking at some examples of Chen Cun’s work and literary activities, my aim is to show the various ways in which he has attempted to uphold the avant-garde spirit during and beyond its supposed heyday in the 1980s. I hope to convey a sense of the more fundamental (i.e., not merely textual) avant-garde potential of Internet literature as practiced by people like Chen Cun in China today and to demonstrate how this ties in with overall trends in postsocialist publishing.

All biographical sources about Chen Cun mention that the story “Two Generations”11 was his debut work, but it does not appear to have attracted scholarly interest in China itself. In English-language scholarship, the work was briefly discussed by W. J. F. Jenner. Jenner calls the story “an obliquely written tale—a refreshing change from the usual narrative conventions.”¹² It is indeed the case that the story does not employ the omniscient narrator familiar from socialist realist fiction and also from most of the so-called Scar Literature fiction of the preceding years. Instead, Chen Cun’s story is told from the perspective of the I-narrator, a teenager called Huanhuan, who describes episodes in his relationship with his father, a once famous author turned editor, throughout the Cultural Revolution and its immediate aftermath. The tone for the story is set on the opening page when Huanhuan describes how, when he was twelve years old, Red Guards raided the family home. Whereas Huanhuan tried to keep them from entering the house and to resist them physically, his father opened the door for them and did not fight back when he was beaten up. Throughout most of the story, the narrator Huanhuan employs a macho tone of voice, boasting about his physical strength, his fighting skills, and his courage and contrasting his character with the fearful attitude of his father. At the same time, his father’s connections constantly save him when he gets himself into trouble. At the end of the story, Huanhuan is filled with enthusiasm about the new, post–Cultural Revolution era, but his father continues to err on the side of caution: although his earlier literary writings are once again published, as an editor he continues to turn down submissions that are politically risqué. This leads to a final confrontation, after which Huanhuan decides, in the final line of the story, to leave home.

Throughout the story, references to the political context are minimal. A few words are enough to indicate to the informed reader in which year particular episodes take place. Chen Cun’s focus is entirely on the father-son relationship. Apart from the oblique narrative angle, the story is successful in its use of colloquial, down-to-earth language, both in the narrator’s voice and in dialogues. This is, however, interspersed with awkward references to Western names and culture of the kind that are typically found in Scar Literature and appear to be meant to symbolize the lifestyle and interests of intellectuals and their families. Thus, when Huanhuan hears the news of the fall of the Gang of Four, he writes,

In terms of content, perhaps the most disturbing aspect of the story is its suggestion that for intellectuals who knew how to “play the game,” such as the father character, the return to positions of power was not a question of a sudden rehabilitation in 1976 but rather took place gradually throughout the 1970s. What’s more, the ending of the story, when the father figure confirms that a story written by Huanhuan’s girlfriend is not publishable for political reasons, indicates that such intellectuals continued after 1976 to have the power to censor the upright voices of the young. In September 1979, so shortly after the closing down of the various Democracy Walls and related publications,¹⁴ this aspect of the story’s content must have struck a chord with readers concerned about the renewed controls on freedom of speech. Compared with other works of Scar Literature, which invariably portray intellectuals as victims, Chen Cun’s thematic angle is as refreshing as his narrative technique, at least in the context of the time.

Although Chen Cun is not the most famous of the authors whose experimental writing drew attention inside and outside China from 1985 onward, his name regularly appears in recent scholarship on the period, often with the label “avant-garde” (xianfeng) attached to it. In chapter 17 of Hong Zicheng’s A History of Contemporary Chinese Literature, Chen’s “Boys and Girls, Seven in Total” is mentioned as one of ten works that signaled a turning point for fiction in 1985. Hong states that innovative writing of those years was customarily divided into two categories, “root seeking” and “modernism” and ranks Chen Cun’s work among the latter. Hong writes,

Some of Chen Cun’s short stories of the 1980s display avant-garde characteristics familiar from works by Can Xue, Ma Yuan, and Yu Hua: dreamlike settings, seemingly absurd plots, strained human relations, and ample use of metafiction. A case in point is the story “Die” (Daddy), which is included in the 1992 collection Wuding shang de jiaobu (Footsteps on the Roof) but appears to have been written in the 1980s.¹⁹ The narrator of “Daddy” is a writer suffering from a cold and high fever. After complaining about his colds and blaming them on his deceased father, he goes on to announce his desire to write a love letter and then, for the rest of the story, narrates in a fragmentary and at times surrealistic manner his relationship with a girl who refers to him as “Daddy.” Apart from recurring references to illness and colds, the narration revolves almost constantly around animal imagery. In one part of the story the girl falls into the hold of a fishing boat, is observed by the narrator squirming among the fish and compared to a mermaid; in another part the narrator and the girl have a prolonged discussion about his attempt to write a literary story about an elephant and her attempt to write an academic essay about dogs. Despite their obvious intimacy, many of their conversations are by telephone, creating a sense of distance and alienation. Toward the end of the story the narration takes on metafictional characteristics as the narrator contemplates various ways of writing a story about the girl, causing him to comment cynically on how writers will use anything and anyone in their surroundings as “material” and repeating many times that what he really wants is to write a love letter, not a story. Intertextual references appear, including one to another avant-garde author in a passage where the girl announces her decision to move to Tibet. The narrator writes,

She wanted to go to Tibet and mobilized me to go with her. I told her that Tibet is a great place to die, that sky burial is the noblest and most scientific burial method. However, I did not want to live there. I had a friend called Ma Yuan who went to Tibet and contracted some strange illness, an itch moving outward from his heart, incurable. Ma Yuan made bogus claims about Lhasa being such a wonderful city. Lhasa was also called the City of Sunlight, and from the look of it he was irreversibly poisoned by sunlight. I hoped that she would not become Ma Yuan the Second.²⁰

Chen Cun is probably the most prominent Chinese author to have taken an active interest in Internet literature almost from its inception. Despite his claim that he never published any literary work online, the fact that his last major printed work (the novel Fresh Flowers And) came out more than a decade ago and that he writes online almost daily makes it clear where his current literary preoccupations lie. Not only has he published writings on the web with increasing frequency since the late 1990s but he has also been involved in managing successful literary websites, especially Under the Banyan Tree, as we have seen in the previous chapter. Moreover, as also alluded to in the previous chapter, he was almost single-handedly responsible for the eruption of a nationwide debate about web literature in 2001. The debate was sparked by a post that Chen Cun submitted on July 3 of that year to the forum that he moderated for the Banyan Tree site. The full text of this now famous post is translated below.

This statement is of a more fundamental avant-garde quality than any of the text-intrinsic gestures that we have seen so far. Chen accused web literature authors of selling out to the establishment and to the market rather than remaining faithful to what should be considered the autonomous principles of their practice: freedom, randomness, and nonutilitarianism. He feared that the niche created by web literature would be submerged into the larger literary field at the expense of some of its unique qualities.

This is an often-heard complaint among those who were active in Internet culture in the early stages of its development, and it is by no means exclusive to the Chinese situation, but in 2001 Chen was perhaps the first prominent online personality to voice it so explicitly. According to commentators at the time,²³ Chen’s post instantly provoked debate, including thousands of hits and responses on the forum itself, where the site’s CEO, William Zhu, came out in strong opposition to Chen’s statements. This eventually led to Banyan Tree’s deciding it no longer required Chen’s services as chief artistic officer.²⁴ In a piece by Chen titled “Zhuyuan Rongshu Xia” (Wishing Banyan Tree Well), published on the site on October 25, 2001, and still available in the Banyan Tree online archive, he appears to be saying good-bye to the site, under the guise of commemorating its fourth anniversary. The closing lines of the piece represent a somewhat veiled restatement of his basic argument against commercialization:

Four years down the line, Banyan Tree now has a different look than before. The pressures of commercialization and the realities of existence have brought about its first major changes and new opportunities. This is how trees are different from plants. Trees will survive any setbacks only if they have a tough, weather-beaten trunk.²⁵ Then they will show off their luscious vitality through layer upon layer of new green foliage.

I wish Banyan Tree many more years.

Chen signed the piece with his name, job title, and the full name of the website (Chen Cun, Art Director, Under the Banyan Tree, the global website for original Chinese-language works). I believe it is not too farfetched to presume that he did this in order to emphasize his belief that Banyan Tree should promote artistry and originality.²⁶ As mentioned in chapter 1, Chen Cun’s personal space on the site eventually disappeared in 2002. Throughout this period, Banyan Tree vastly increased its contracts with print publishers, and the site was eventually sold to the Bertelsmann conglomerate in 2003. Chen Cun himself started a new online literary venture in 2004 by establishing a separate and restricted space for himself and like-minded web authors: a forum named Xiaozhong Caiyuan (Minority Vegetable Garden).²⁷

Minority Vegetable Garden was an online discussion forum with Chen Cun as main moderator. The website hosting the forum until very recently was 99 Wangshang Shucheng (99 Online Book City, http://www.99read.com). This is an online bookshop as well as a print publisher and book distributor founded in March 2004 by a limited company supported by both state-owned cultural entities (People’s Literature Publishing House and Xinhua Bookstore) and private individuals, including the famous author and scholar Yu Qiuyu, who functions as honorary chairman of the company’s board of directors.²⁸ It is a typical example of the kind of partnerships between the state and private sector that constitute the “second channel” in Chinese publishing as described by Shuyu Kong (see chapter 1). Chen Cun was employed by the website as an art director and general manager overseeing all discussion forums on the site, including Minority Vegetable Garden, thus he was more than just a forum moderator, who, typically, is not paid. In August 2013, a forum for which he was responsible was closed down by the authorities after some posts offering to sell weapons had been detected. Chen subsequently offered his resignation, and most of the past content of Minority Vegetable Garden is, as a consequence, not available on the live web at this writing (March 2014), although Chen is trying to reestablish the site elsewhere. References to URLs in the discussion that follows are to archived snapshots of pages I saw when doing my research.²⁹

Although 99 Online Book City is a commercial site following the Bertelsmann model of linking online literary production to distribution and sales of printed works (i.e., the model Chen Cun was opposed to when he worked for Banyan Tree), it is evident that Chen learned from previous experience and made sure that the space he was in charge of presented itself as a noncommercial niche. In a manifesto-like opening statement, originally posted to the forum on September 15, 2004, Chen explained the name and the aims of the forum.30 The term xiaozhong, here somewhat inadequately translated as “minority,” was meant to be opposed to dazhong (“mass” or “masses”). Chen explained that he and his fellow “vegetable farmers” (cainong, the term used for the regular contributors to the forum) had no intention of selling anything on a mass scale and would be happy to do their own farming and produce some “organic food.” The forum would accept contributions only from invited contributors. Chen stated that initially there would be roughly one hundred of his “friends” involved. After that, he explained, others wanting to join the forum would be able to do so only if they were introduced by a registered “farmer” and had submitted writing samples to Chen Cun for consideration. Anyone would be free to enter the forum and read the contributions. As moderator, Chen Cun would have full editorial control over all contributions.

Chen’s opening statement showed his awareness of the fact that the closed nature of the forum went against some of the principles of web writing that he previously espoused, namely freedom and tolerance. He defended his new stance by claiming that setting up a few hurdles for potential contributors was meant merely to keep out those who were not serious or who roamed forums to stir up trouble. He also argued that there were plenty of other places for such people to go and that the principle of tolerance should allow for his little “patch” to exist. He ended the “manifesto” with an explicit reference to the principles of randomness and nonutilitarianism, using a familiar and heavily laden term: “Going online is just to do something interesting [tao ge you qu]. He-he, let’s sow some vegetables!”³¹

By using the term qu and by references in the text to writers such as the premodern poet Tao Yuanming (365–427), as well as by suggesting the notion of “cultivating one’s own garden,” Chen Cun’s manifesto connected with a long-standing tradition of nonutilitarian writing in Chinese literature, including modern examples such as the prose writing of Zhou Zuoren (1885–1967), whose “poetics of quwei” is discussed at length in research by Susan Daruvala.³²

Some of those same “friends” who were among the early contributors to Minority Vegetable Garden also had their works published in another space controlled by Chen Cun created around this time: the section called “Wangluo xianfeng” (The Web’s Avant-Garde) in the print journal Shiyue. If the founding of Minority Vegetable Garden indicated that Chen was willing to work with commercial publishers as long as he could have his own “niche,” the appearance of “The Web’s Avant-Garde” in a highly established literary journal indicated that by this time Chen was no longer opposed in principle to web-based work crossing over into print, as long as it was associated with serious literature and, more especially, with the literary avant-garde. “The Web’s Avant-Garde” continued to appear in the journal October throughout 2005 and then disappeared for no clear reason.³³

In Chen Cun’s case, the search for qu in literature, the occupation of niche spaces, and the promotion of the avant-garde spirit are all linked to what appears to be his increasingly fundamental resistance to fiction as the central genre of modern Chinese literature. As early as 1987, in his essay “Fei xiaoshuo lun” (Not on Fiction), Chen Cun wrote,

It is statements like these that tie together Chen Cun’s late 1970s critique of establishment writers, his 1980s concerns about form and about using animals as subjects, and his interest in web literature. What Chen Cun strives for is an unrestrained writing practice that is as much as possible devoid of formal (“unnatural”) restrictions imposed by establishment or market culture, or indeed by human culture in general, and that is, at the same time, in tune with the fast pace of modern life. This, I argue, is avant-garde in the wider, more fundamental sense, and for Chen Cun this has, by and large, been a consistent stance ever since he started writing. It is also a stance that is easiest to adopt in online writing, which is generally short, fast-paced, and, at least in theory, less prone to outside restrictions or at least more likely to provide spaces and niches for all kinds of unorthodox experiments that would not easily make it into the print-based system. All the observations play a role in my reading, in the following, of Chen Cun’s chronicle-style writings on the topic of sex.

In “Xing biji” (Random Notes on Sex), published on Minority Vegetable Garden, Chen Cun displays the full range of his cultural and stylistic concerns.³⁵ Before going into the content of these posts, I should say a few words about the format of the Minority Vegetable Garden forum and of this particular thread. I visited Minority Vegetable Garden most frequently in early 2006, but I returned from time to time until the site closed down in 2013. During that period, the format of the site underwent very few changes.

As usual, there were various ways of accessing the forum. When one went to the site, one would see a list of threads that were recently submitted or to which new content was recently added. Some important threads or public announcements were kept at the top of the list by default for a certain period, other threads would disappear off the front page unless new content was added to them, in which case they returned to the top. (In online forums in general, causing a thread to be kicked back upward is a phenomenon referred to as ti or dinghuilai. The mere submitting of these words as a comment on the thread will do the trick.) Some threads were designated as “best of” (jinghua), indicated by the image of a stamp of approval on the first post of the thread.36 Users of the site could choose different views, listing all recent “best of” threads, all “best of” threads started by a particular person, or all threads started by a particular person. Further options were available to registered members of the site, which I was not.

Chen Cun’s “Random Notes on Sex” was started with a post published on the forum on September 7, 2005. This was followed by frantic further posting by Chen himself as well as comments by other “farmers” spurring him on in this new project, so that within two days the thread consisted of more than one hundred posts. After one week and 251 posts, most of them by himself, Chen interrupted the series while he was away traveling to conferences and then continued through the period from November 2005 to January 2006. After that his writings became more sporadic, with a final posting on February 24, 2006. Still, the thread was subsequently being kept alive and kicked back to the top of the list by others, reaching a total of 531 posts on April 24, 2006, after which Chen Cun closed the thread and archived it on the site, where it could still be read, but content could no longer be added. Most contributions to the thread are in plain text (disregarding the authors’ avatars, various emoticons, and the like), but Chen and others also contributed images and sound files. In fact, Chen’s very first post ends with a sound file: the overture to Verdi’s La traviata, possibly an early indication that the female sex would be the main concern of his writing in this thread.

As with many works of Internet literature, especially those that continue for a long time, it is impossible to give an adequate synopsis of “Random Notes on Sex.” During the first days of posting Chen appears to have had a clear idea of how to structure his writings thematically and more or less stuck to it, but at the same time he was inevitably sidetracked by comments on his posts, leading to various other discussions. Moreover, Chen himself intersperses his more serious posts with seemingly unrelated comments. At various stages during the life of the thread Chen directly addresses his fellow “farmers,” asking them for comments and criticism, leading to a brief series of responses keeping the thread alive and encouraging Chen to continue. At one point the thread links to another thread on the site, a collection of ministories all on the same topic (“What the Wife Did after Her Husband Strayed”) started by one of the “farmers” and continued by Chen with regular new additions, interspersed with comments by readers, with plenty of sexual innuendo. Chen’s own contributions are labeled xiaoshuo (fiction) when they contain new versions of the story. His posts that do not have that label are comments on the thread. For a short time, this playful thread then becomes known as the supplement (fukan) to “Random Notes on Sex” and has likely been read in conjunction with it by some readers. Despite the serious nature of Chen’s topic, the tone of the posts is generally light and humorous, at times banal. The vast majority of contributors to the post appear to be male and at least two of them were abroad at the time: one in Japan and one (the scholar Yang Xiaobin, who submitted one post, no. 288) in the United States.

Although not acknowledged, I have no doubt that Chen’s decision to start a thread on sex under the title “Xing biji” was inspired by the popularity of various online sex diaries (xing riji), most famously those by Muzimei.37 In other words, Chen takes a theme that appeals to the web-browsing “masses” (female sexuality) and gives it a radically different shape, suitable to the taste of his “minority.” Already in his first post, Chen makes it clear that his ruminations on the topic of sex are also linked to his literary practice. He writes,

I have had the intention of writing something like this for many years, to prattle about what I have seen, heard, thought, and considered about sex. For a professional writer never to have touched upon the theme of sex is a lack and a disgrace, a kind of self-castration. …

Write it without method. Write it without belles lettres. Write it with different techniques. It is only an outline or a prompt, the final text will be determined later. …

It is only “reading matter” [duwu], not “fiction,” not a “treatise.” It is only “reading matter.” It has to do with lust [se]. It has to do with passion [qing]. It has nothing to do with pornography [seqing]. Whether or not these words ever appear on a printed page is not my concern.

In later posts, Chen returns a number of times to the style of his creation, using terms such as “writing at will” (suibian xie, post no. 114) and “random writing” (luanxie, no. 420) and reminding his readers that he is “not writing fiction” (no. 36). He also repeats several times his statement that the notes are merely a draft and that “the real thing” remains hidden in a drawer, partly because soon after starting the thread he was warned that he should tone down his more explicit references, since those under eighteen might be reading the forum.³⁸ Perhaps Chen’s warnings about the draft status of his text were genuine, but they also happen to be a fantastic metalevel device, radically calling the status of the text into question and confusing those trying to treat it as “literature.” This is reminiscent of the 1980s avant-garde experiments with metafiction and consistent with his statements about his online writing not representing literary work. Whether made instinctively or on purpose, these gestures serve to place his online writing outside established conventions.

Thematically, most of the “Random Notes on Sex” revolve around the opposition between nature (often referred to as “God”) and culture. Using frequent references to the animal world, Chen muses mostly on how mankind has tried to separate sex from its original reproductive function and created a “sex culture” that is part of a “culture of play” (youxi wenhua) and consists of all kinds of symbols and practices that have no real meaning in the natural order of things (or “God’s dictionary,” as he calls it). He writes about this initially in fairly abstract terms, complaining with barely concealed sarcasm about the evolutionary process that determined that human beings should walk upright (something that he himself is incapable of due to his medical condition), moving on to a lengthy series of posts on women’s breasts and their development from having a nurturing function to being a sex symbol. At some point he posts a list of books that influenced his ideas, including a number of popular science works about genes and evolution and works by famous feminist thinkers such as de Beauvoir and by Freud (post no. 146). Although he does employ various styles and techniques in his writing, on the whole his approach seems to be consciously to avoid scientific or academic discourse and to make a literary contribution instead, relying on sudden flashes of brilliance, unexpected turns of phrase, wordplay, funny or outrageous comments, and other things that come under the category of you qu. For example,

A more serious theme of his random notes is the relationship between sex and literature. He speaks harshly of the Chinese literary tradition when it comes to writing about sex in a “natural” way. A long debate between various participants in the thread deals with descriptions of sex in Cao Xueqin’s (1724?–1763?) Shitou ji (Story of the Stone) and whether or not its author linked virginity to virtue. Chen also discusses how, as part of the development of “civilization,” sex has gradually been displaced by “love,” which is another “cover-up,” in his view—love is what we came up with in order to get young people to postpone reproducing long enough to finish their education (no. 161). He argues that the two eternal themes of literature are not “love and death” but rather “sex and death.” In post number 230, he complains, in terms not dissimilar to those used in his 1980s story “Daddy,” that “culture” has made something very simple (the mating of men and women) into something much too complicated. In one of his later posts (no. 474) this line of thinking, in which the development of civilization is deplored, is summed up with striking humor in one famous line, the opening line of the San zi jing (Three Character Classic), which takes on an entirely new meaning in the context of Chen’s work: Ren zhi chu, xing ben shan, or “At the beginning of mankind, sex was good.”

In addition to his preference for niche activity and his clear thematic concern with deconstructing or escaping established systems, genres, and conventions and exposing them as culturally imposed and unnecessary restrictions, Chen also breaks new ground in terms of form, even in the context of the relatively newly established conventions of online writing. As we have seen in chapter 1, it is not unusual for online writers to produce long works in installments over time, but the normal way of doing this is by submitting each installment as the beginning of a separate thread, often numbered like separate chapters. This has the clear advantage of making sure that each installment starts with the author’s text and is followed by some comments, which can be easily removed at a later stage in preparation for permanent publication, whether online or in print. What Chen Cun did with “Random Notes on Sex,” however, was to continue to add all his own writings to the original thread, keeping it going for a very long time and creating an indeed quite random structure in which his own jottings are interspersed with commentary by others and cannot be neatly or easily separated out to form installments or chapters of a coherent work. “Random Notes on Sex” thus became an ongoing, multiauthored work that could be “completed” only by a more or less random decision by Chen Cun to move the thread to the archive, where no new contributions could be made. In the archive it remains as it was, including all posts by both Chen himself and his commentators, who are really coauthors in this case, as a single, very long work that, when printed out, makes up hundreds of pages. What this shows is that linear writing, often considered by scholars of electronic literature to represent the essence of traditional print literature, can be used in the service of formal innovation in an online context. The suggestion that linear, nonhypertext writings online “do not provide empowerment to readers” and “fail to use the full potential of the WWW”³⁹ is simply not true, especially in the era of Web 2.0, where interactivity and online collaboration can, as Chen Cun and his fellow “farmers” have shown, be used to create niche writing that does something genuinely new and is not easy to fit into any existing genre categories.

Around the same time that he was working on “Random Notes on Sex,” Chen Cun also tried to keep alive a second thread in which he recorded random ideas and observations in (free) verse. He referred to this poetic chronicle by the genre name xushishi (narrative poetry). Having started the thread in December 2005, he closed it in April 2006 with a short post stating he found it too difficult to continue writing in this style. Despite a few requests from readers asking him to continue, the thread was locked and archived.⁴⁰ Another chronicle in the form of a blog, maintained on the Tianya portal from February 2006 onward, also came to an end in April 2006, with Chen citing ill health for his inability to continue writing it.⁴¹ In the meantime, a thread featuring a personal photographic record of his life in Shanghai started in early 2005 and is still ongoing at this writing, having reached nearly four thousand posts, the vast majority of them by Chen himself, since this is the one thread where he allows little commentary from others.⁴² It seems that both the narrative poetry and the blog were initial attempts to start a written chronicle to accompany the photographic one. Finally, in August 2006 Chen found the most suitable format for just a chronicle, namely an ongoing thread under the title “Duankan, duanting, duanxiang” (Fragments Seen, Fragments Heard, Fragments Thought). Unlike the photographic thread, this thread of written fragments plus ample commentary by other members is archived at fairly regular intervals (at the moment once every half year), with the first post in each new thread listing the stable URLs of the preceding ones. When I last visited the thread in 2012, five threads had been archived, one for August 2006–July 2007, one for July 2007–December 2009, one for 2010, and two for 2011. The 2012 thread was ongoing.⁴³

The very first post of the “Fragments” thread addresses the by now familiar theme of breaking through established conventions of writing, as follows:

In view of my foregoing discussion, this post represents the end of an ongoing development toward unfettered, fragmentary writing, free of any restrictions imposed by genre, tradition, of mode of publishing. In comparison, “Random Notes on Sex” was a step in this direction in terms of its form, but it still conformed to convention in terms of thematic unity. Conversely, Chen’s narrative poem was thematically unrestrained but imposed a specific form. It is only with this new thread that Chen seems to have drawn the ultimate conclusion: that in order to write the way he wants to write, he should sacrifice “art” and beauty altogether. And yet, by comparing his fragmentary chronicle to physical excrements (the things one deposits in a chamber pot), he makes an unmistakable avant-garde gesture, reminiscent of the tradition established by Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain and many other gestures aimed at destroying “Art” in order to create something new. In my view, what makes Chen Chun’s chronicles different from the online diaries discussed in the previous chapter, as well as many other online diaries and blogs produced in China and elsewhere, is exactly his awareness of the fact that he is experimenting and trying to break new ground, trying to find modes of writing that are indigenous to the online medium, not borrowed or transplanted from print culture.

A typical and arguably paradigmatic example of this occurred in October 2010, when I was in Shanghai and met and interviewed Chen Cun. If more traditional interviews of writers by scholars might end with the scholar asking permission to take the author’s picture, my interview with Chen Cun ended with the two of us taking pictures of each other, almost simultaneously. Moreover, while Chen Cun gave me permission to cite what he said during the interview in my work, he clearly assumed that the relationship would be reciprocal and that he could quote me in his work as well. I naturally came to feature in his chronicles, which, after all, are meant to maintain a fairly close record of his day-to-day activities. The day after I met him, his photographic chronicle featured a picture of me taking a picture of him, a picture of the book I had given him as a present, and a link to a new thread where he had copied two Chinese-language interviews with me that had appeared online elsewhere.⁴⁶

The same day, his chronicle of written fragments also mentioned our meeting and my interest in “Random Notes on Sex,” adding a link to a related thread (“Ironic Random Notes on Sex,” by “habor”) from December 2006, which I had not been aware of earlier.47 A few days later I wrote him a follow-up e-mail asking him specifically about his definition of “web literature” and why he did not consider himself to have any “works” published online. He responded to me by e-mail on November 1, 2012, and then proceeded the next day to publish the full text of both e-mails in two posts of the “Fragments” thread.⁴⁸ This means that rather than citing “private correspondence” as my source for Chen’s statement given in the following, I can cite the actual publication of the correspondence as part of an ongoing online work that I want to research but that I am now also a small part of. In response to my question as to why he did not consider his online writing to be literary work, to which I had added a comment saying that I thought threads like “Random Notes on Sex” had clear literary characteristics and were very innovative, Chen wrote the following:

Twitter is officially blocked in mainland China. Some blocked sites are nevertheless hugely popular with users who know how to scale the Great Firewall. The video-sharing site YouTube, for instance, was ranked by http://chinarank.org .cn as the thirty-eighth most visited website in China in August 2011, despite being blocked. Twitter, on the other hand, has fared much less well in Chinese-language communities, because even those Chinese users who do have access to it generally prefer the Weibo interface. To underscore this point, it is worth mentioning that even in Taiwan and Hong Kong, where Twitter is freely accessible, users demonstrate a clear preference for Weibo, whereas they do not prefer China-made alternatives to YouTube.⁵⁰ A formal comparison between Twitter and Weibo is beyond my scope of inquiry, but it is probably safe to say that Weibo appeals because of its built-in additional features, such as allowing users to add pictures to their tweets easily and without sacrificing text content, and the very prominent functionalities allowing users to join all kinds of Weibo groups, clubs, and networks. Wikipedia describes Weibo as “a hybrid of Twitter and Facebook,”⁵¹ which I think is an accurate description and which will help explain some of the features of Wen Huajian’s novel.

Apart from the special features of Weibo vis-à-vis Twitter, there is an additional general point to bear in mind before embarking on a discussion of microblog fiction. Regardless of which interface one uses, the 140-character limit applied to individual microblog posts means something entirely different in the case of a character-based language like Chinese compared with an alphabetic language such as English. A detailed technical and linguistic analysis is well beyond my ability and remit, but if we assume that the average length of an English word is about six characters (five letters plus one space), and the average Chinese word length about two characters (no space required), then it is clear that a Chinese-language tweet can contain up to three times as much content as an English-language tweet. This makes it at least relatively easier to serialize a work of microblog fiction in Chinese and ensure that each episode has discrete content.⁵²

Wen Huajian’s Weibo shiqi de aiqing (Love in the Time of Microblog⁵³) began serialization on January 29, 2010, with a newly established ID (@ wbsqdaq) on the Sina Weibo site. It ended almost a year later, on January 3, 2011, after 405 installments, an average of just over one post per day. By the time it stopped appearing, the Weibo novel had attracted around a hundred thousand followers. The printed version of the novel, which consists of 492 numbered sections divided into seventeen chapters, including two final chapters not included in the online original, came out in March 2011 and gained some media coverage.⁵⁴

Although Wen Huajian started microblogging less than two months before he began serializing his novel, he was certainly no novice to literature, nor to online writing. His first printed novel, Cry If It Hurts, was published in Taiwan in 2006.55 He had been maintaining a personal blog on the Sina portal from 2005 onward, which he used among other things for publishing short poetic texts that he classified as “prose poetry” (sanwen shi), and he was active in various online communities devoted to prose poetry. Not long after he started microblogging, he began to organize some of his more literary-minded tweets into two genres, using two separate hash tags, which translate as “Uncle’s Meditations” (Dashu Mingxiang) and “Uncle’s Longings” (Dashu Nian). In the early weeks of January 2010, he posted a flurry of tweets tagged as “Uncle’s Longings,” which all seemed to be addressed to a single beloved, who otherwise remained anonymous, arousing the curiosity of those posting reactions to his tweets. Shortly afterward, he announced his plan to begin writing a love story in tweets, based on his experiences in the (micro)blogosphere. A number of his earlier “meditations” were copied into some of the opening installments of the novel, whereas his predilection for affectedly unconventional (jiaoqing) romantic expression was turned into a habit of the novel’s protagonist, leading to some of his “longings” being copied into the novel as well.⁵⁶

The protagonist of Love in the Time of Microblog is a thirty-five-year-old Beijing resident called Wen Dashu, his given name Dashu a homonym of his nickname “Uncle.” He runs his own business, but he has a college background in psychology, which he puts to good use in acting as a kind of “agony uncle” to a circle of friends he interacts with on Weibo, most of them younger than him and most of them female. In the opening scenes of the novel, we find Dashu in a restaurant with a young female friend whom he met on Weibo and who has flown to Beijing to have dinner with him. He assumes that dinner will be a prelude to sex, but after the dinner conversation falters and both instead start twittering on their mobile devices, his companion finally asks him to drive her to a night-club, where she has a date with another Weibo friend. Dashu is upset, drives off, and gets lost. He accesses Weibo again on his mobile, and one of his friends gives him directions. As he approaches home, he is cut off by a speeding police car crossing a double yellow line. He follows and overtakes the police car, blocks it, and confronts the policeman, accusing him of yanzhong she huang (“serious transgression of yellow,” a pun on “seriously pornographic”). In this and later episodes involving confrontations with the same policeman, Dashu poses as a concerned citizen while constantly employing puns and irony in his speech, helped greatly by the fact that the policeman happens to be called Zhu Dengyan (a homonym of “glaring pig”). The use of Beijing slang, satire, brazen disrespect for authority, and at times very funny puns and jokes is instantly reminiscent of earlier “hooligan fiction” (pizi wenxue) as epitomized by the work of Wang Shuo.

Weibo in all its aspects plays a key thematic role in the novel. The characters all know one another through Weibo, they use online slang, which the narrator often helpfully explains, and they function as a mutual support community, such as in an episode where they arrange an event to raise funds for victims of drought in Yunnan. (Again, an actual event like this was organized by the author and his real Weibo friends around the same time.) Eventually, the story comes to focus on the fate of Dashu after he has had a car accident and is left paralyzed in the hospital. Ironically, the only limb he is able to move is his right arm, allowing him to continue using Weibo on his mobile phone. All his Weibo friends, now including the policeman Zhu Dengyan, who has also become a Weibo user, and the female celebrity Dai Man, whom Dashu is in love with, all visit him regularly at the hospital. As it turns out, various unlikely things happening to Dashu while in the hospital, such as his being awarded a huge sum of money for being a “heroic citizen,” Dai Man’s returning his affections, and surgeons apparently accepting his instructions to carry out a spectacular operation to cure his paralysis are all part of a plot hatched by his Weibo friends to try to get him so agitated and excited that he will indeed be miraculously cured. In the end, he does receive the big shock that makes him sit up and restores the use of his limbs, namely when he is told that Dai Man has suddenly left the country and married a foreigner.

The original posts of the novel as they appeared on Weibo were all accompanied by images bearing some relevance to the contents of the tweets, some of them pictures possibly taken by the author himself, others copied from the Internet.57 Instant photo sharing has been a distinctive functionality of Weibo right from the start and is seen by many as one of its main advantages over Twitter, which has only had a (much more limited) photo-sharing functionality since June 2011.⁵⁸ Most important in the current context is the fact that Weibo users can add pictures without this resulting in a hyperlink to the picture being included in their tweet, taking up more than twenty characters, which could otherwise be devoted to writing. English-language Twitter novels therefore rarely include images.

It is clear that in his selection of images as well, Wen Huajian from time to time tried to be somewhat provocative in order to attract comments and new followers, selecting many images of intimate couples and of women in various poses, some of them erotic. As a result, some of his tweets (such as no. 52, discussing domestic abuse and masochism, accompanied by a picture of a mud-wrestling couple) are discussed more for their visual content than for their textual content. In comparison, the print version of his novel has less visual appeal, although it is nicely illustrated and has maintained the microblog layout in the form of numbered paragraphs. Clearly, reproducing the images that originally accompanied the text online would have been technically cumbersome and, more important, would have run into countless problems in trying to trace the copyright holders of those images.

As is the case with most online literature, readers’ comments (pinglun) are an integral part of works like Love in the Time of Microblog as they develop over time. In some cases the comments are just short statements of approval or disapproval, but others discuss some of the social issues raised in the story, or comment on the extent to which the author has modified actual tweets sent on his personal account in order to make them part of the narrative. Wen Huajian often responds to the comments and sometimes asks for advice on developments in the plotline. Early on in the development of the work, after post number 11, he sent an unnumbered tweet to the main page, asking how many people were actually reading him, to which he received well over a hundred responses. However, the average number of comments on most of his tweets seems to be around twenty. There are some exceptions, with some tweets getting four or five times as many comments, mainly because they are re-sent by other people to their own account pages. (Each reposting triggers an automatic “comment” on the original tweet.) Apart from those comments that the author worked into later parts of the novel, none of the comments appearing on the original site made it into the paper version of the novel. In fact, even when reading the novel online, the comments are hidden and one actually needs to click on a link to access them.

Although there is a clear discrepancy between the number of followers of the novel as it developed, which reached well over a hundred thousand, and the number of people actually interacting with the author, which numbered only a few dozen, there is still no doubt that Love in the Time of Microblog attracted a reasonable amount of attention and was generally acknowledged as the first experiment of its kind.59 Already in March 2010, when the novel had been ongoing on Weibo for two months and its author had reposted the first hundred or so installments to two well-known literary websites (Banyan Tree and Tianya⁶⁰), traditional news media started to pay attention to it. On March 17, 2010, the Xinhuanet website reproduced an article from West China Metropolitan Daily, interviewing Wen Huajian and discussing the novel’s experimental way of weaving real-life stories about ordinary netizens into the narration. The article also raised questions about the provocative treatment of romance in the novel and expressed doubts about its stylistic sophistication.⁶¹

Most media coverage as well as promotion material for the novel on Weibo and for the later print publication emphasize the fact that Wen’s work is the first ever Chinese microblog novel. This claim was contested by Willis Wee, writing on the Tech in Asia website in April 2011.⁶² Wee pointed to two other articles making similar claims. One was an item from the Fox News website that reprinted a Wall Street Journal article⁶³ heralding the “influential blogger” Lian Yue’s first episodes of a Twitter novel, which appeared on his Twitter account (@lianyue) in March 2010. Forty episodes of the novel, titled 2020 and using the hash tag #ly2020, still appear in Lian Yue’s time line, but the work appears not to have been completed. In any case, the first installments of Wen Huajian’s novel predate those of Lian’s by two months, so the answer to the question of who came first is clear-cut, all the more so since Lian’s novel was never finished.

More interesting is the second link provided by Wee, to an article describing what is called “The First Microblog Novel Contest in China,” which took place on the Sina Weibo website from October to November 2010 (i.e., still well after Wen Huajian started serializing his work).64 What this competition was about, however, was not microblog novels (weibo xiaoshuo) but “microfiction” (wei xiaoshuo), meaning ultrashort fictional texts of no more than 140 characters (i.e., one tweet). This type of fiction was also recently experimented with by well-known British writers at the invitation of the Guardian.⁶⁵ On Sina Weibo it has proved immensely popular. The format is very straightforward: the organizers announce a time during which anyone can post microfiction using a particular hash tag. The hash tag identifies the posts as entries into the competition. After the set period has passed, a jury goes through all the entries and awards prizes. Weibo has held the competition three times already, and on the dedicated sites for the 2010, 2011, and 2012 competitions, new posts continue to come in, even though they no longer compete for any prizes.⁶⁶ According to the article referred to by Wee, the first competition was couched in some controversy because of the large number of entries featuring gay fiction, presumably of the danmei variety, which is briefly discussed in chapter 4 and has been studied extensively by Jin Feng.⁶⁷ None of this poses any challenge to Wen Huajian’s status as China’s first microblog novelist. Wen himself has, in the meantime, become a great supporter of the microfiction genre. He served as a jury member on all three competitions, and he manages a fairly active Weibo community devoted to the genre. Wen also continues to combine his literary activities with his business activities, and on his personal Weibo site he now identifies himself not only as “the Wen Huajian who is known as Uncle” but also as the inventor of the concept of “microtrade” (weishang) and as “China’s first ever microtrade trainer” (Zhongguo shouxi weishang jiaolian).

Comparing Wen Huajian’s writings with Chen Cun’s work reveals some similar characteristics. Like Chen, Wen paradoxically uses an interactive platform meant to produce ephemeral, time-sensitive content in order to create something that lasts and extends over time. Both authors clearly enjoy the social element of online writing, taking full advantage of the opportunities for interacting with readers commenting on their posts. Wen’s writing, especially, has a strong community element and hinges both practically and thematically on the idea of Weibo as a medium that creates a new kind of tight-knit community that helps people cope and find support in uncertain times. Wen’s writing also contains various references to Weibo slang and Weibo celebrities that are difficult to follow for the uninitiated reader, although one should modify this by pointing out that it is highly unlikely that anyone among his readership, even that of his printed novel, would not be intimately familiar with Weibo as a social medium and the associated terminology.

Also like Chen, Wen is aware of the fact that he is doing something new, and he uses various techniques to blur the lines between author, narrator, and reader. He does this especially, it should be said, in the printed version of the novel, which goes on much longer after having reached a point in the narrative where the narrator is starting to write a novel with the same title as Wen’s work itself, leading to earlier comments from readers on Wen’s writing being incorporated into the novel as comments from fictional readers (but with the same IDs) on a fictional novel (but with the same title).

What makes Wen different from Chen is, first of all, his choice of genre, something of a mixture between romance novel and picaresque novel. Second, what makes Wen different is his relatively stronger need to engage in self-promotion. This can be seen from the way in which Wen copied parts of his ongoing novel to other literary websites in order to increase his readership, from the way in which he actively promoted the print publication of his novel on his various personal blogs and microblogs, and from the sheer fact that he wanted to be published in print in the first place. This clearly shows that Wen is a much less established author than Chen. It also shows that Wen realized early on that his microblog novel was something new and potentially interesting to a wider readership. Whether or not Wen will continue to come up with innovative ideas in his writing remains to be seen.

Han Han (b. 1982) is a literary celebrity whose medium of choice is the online blog.68 So famous are his online essays that he is almost automatically associated with Internet literature in China, and it would seem a book like this cannot possibly leave him unmentioned. Yet it is worth stating at the outset that, like Chen Cun, Han Han clearly separates his literary writing from his online writing. In fact, also like Chen Cun, he became famous well before he went online, by winning the “New Concept” literary prize competition in 1999, famously dropping out of school the same year, scandalously refusing an offer to attend literature classes at Fudan University, and publishing his first best seller (a cynical dissection of the Chinese education system, titled Triple Gate) in 2000, when he was still only eighteen years old.⁶⁹ Similar to Wen Huajian and many others, he did not start blogging until 2005, when the Sina blog site came online. By that time he was already famous throughout China for his printed novels, and he accumulated half a million followers for his blog in no time. From then on he has gained increasing acclaim (and attracted occasional censorship) for the satirical essays, commenting mainly on current affairs, that he publishes on his blog. His novels, however, continue to appear only in print, and as far as I know he has never published any creative writing on the Internet and has used his blog only for social and cultural critique.

Of course, Han Han’s online prose can be considered from a literary perspective, and he has certainly reinvigorated the zawen (critical essay) genre of Chinese literature, employing it in a manner not unlike that of the great Lu Xun (1881–1936), who is credited with inventing the genre. Yet compared with the other two writers discussed in this chapter, Han Han neither shows the kind of reflection on his literary choices and methods that we encountered with Chen Cun nor does he engage in any popular genre-based experimentation like Wen Huajian. What makes Han Han interesting in our current context, however, is the way in which he uses his blog writings, and his celebrity status, to reflect on the material and legal conditions of literary production and to create new, independent niches that explore the outer boundaries of what is possible in postsocialist publishing in China. In addition, Han Han’s recent move toward distributing publications directly to mobile devices showcases a brand-new publishing strategy that still makes use of the Internet but bypasses the World Wide Web.

By focusing on Han Han’s writings about and involvement in the literary and publishing world, I am intentionally not treating his current affairs essays for which he became increasingly well-known around the time of the Beijing Olympics. These essays have drawn much attention and are also available in uncensored English-language editions, both online70 and in print.⁷¹

Han Han’s blog has always been located on the Sina blog site, where he uses the ID “twocold,” presumably because his personal name, Han, literally means “cold,” so Han Han sounds like “cold cold,” even if the first Han (his family name) is written with a different character. In its current state, the first post on his blog is dated November 2006, and at least one recent commentator has taken this to be the starting point of Han Han’s blogging career.⁷² However, Han Han was blogging well before that date but has himself removed his earlier posts, for reasons I will speculate on in the following. His very first blog entry was in fact posted on October 28, 2005, and consisted of a single line of text, which read, “Hello everybody! This is Han Han. I will keep a record of my life here. I hope everything will become perfect!” The post was read just under three thousand times and received seventy comments. It was captured by the IAWM only a few days later, on November 2, 2005.⁷³

After a hesitant start during the first few days, when he mainly uploaded texts and pictures about his rally-driving activities, Han started to write longer posts, and by the beginning of December, his blog entries were read by tens of thousands of people. As discussed in detail in an article by Marco Fumian, by spring 2006 Han Han was embroiled in an extended war of words with the critic Bai Ye. Bai had written, on his own blog, that the new generation of writers born in the 1980s (known as baling hou, or “post-80”) had only entered “the market” (shichang) but not yet “the literary scene” (wentan). In a blog entry posted on March 3, 2006, under the title “The Literary Scene Is Crap and People Should Stop Acting Like Cunts,” Han Han lashed out at Bai Ye’s perceived elitism, stating that all literature is individual, that creativity knows no thresholds, and that everybody who publishes anything, even if it is on a blog, has automatically entered “the literary scene.” He scoffed at the notion of “pure literature” promoted by Bai Ye as nothing but a form of institutionalized mutual gratification. Or, in Han’s rather more direct words,

In Fumian’s thoughtful analysis, the debate between Han Han and Bai Ye illustrates two sides of the present-day Chinese literary field, neither of which is particularly autonomous. Just as Bai Ye’s claims to expertise in “pure literature” are tainted by his closeness to official organizations such as the Writers Association, Han Han’s claim that his writing is more “pure” because he has acquired a wide readership without any institutional support is questionable in view of his celebrity media status. Fumian demonstrates how, over time, the two positions can be seen to merge, with established writers providing patronage and support to youngsters of the 1980s generation, and some commercially successful younger writers (though not including Han Han) voluntarily applying for membership of the Writers Association, indicating a gradual mixing of social, political, and commercial interests, none of which are particularly conducive to disinterested literary creation. Meanwhile, writes Fumian, Han Han found intellectual (if not literary) autonomy by becoming a respected independent blogger and commentator on sociopolitical affairs.⁷⁵

Perhaps it was this newly found direction for his online activity, away from the literary scene and toward a more direct expression of social engagement, that prompted Han Han to remove his earliest blog posts from the official record. As a result, his side of the debate with Bai Ye no longer survives on his own site but only on other people’s sites and in the IAWM archive. Also deleted was a series of posts in which Han Han satirized current Chinese poetry and exchanged rhetorical blows with Shen Haobo, at the time the most prominent representative of the online poetry avant-garde community known as the Lower Body Poets.76 I will have more to say about avant-garde poetry on the Internet in chapter 4, but for now I want to dwell on how Han Han’s initial clash with Shen Haobo eventually led to the two of them striking up an unusual partnership, which has had important consequences for the state of literary publishing in postsocialist China.

On September 26, 2006, Han Han published a short piece on his blog titled “How Come Modern Poetry and Poets Still Exist?”⁷⁷ In it he stated his opinion, with characteristic sarcasm, that modern poetry is nothing more than prose broken into separate lines and that it is therefore a waste of paper. Poetry, he writes, has lost its raison d’être ever since it did away with traditional prosody. If it has any status left, it is as a minor subgenre of popular song lyrics. The only reason why people still want to call themselves poets is because the term has a certain aura that makes it easier for poets than for prose writers to “fool literary-minded young girls” (pian wenxue nü qingnian). He ends with a mock poem consisting of a few colloquial sentences broken into many short lines, with some of the enjambment resulting in funny readings.

Although in his post he feigned ignorance of recent events, Han Han was surely aware of the fact that his caricature modern poem capitalized on a major online spoofing campaign ridiculing the work of the female poet Zhao Lihua, which had been gathering momentum online for a few weeks already and which, after Han Han joined in and affected his hundreds of thousands of followers, soon spilled over into the offline media as well.⁷⁸

The spoofing of Zhao Lihua’s poetry started on September 11, 2006, with a post on the educational website Liangquanqimei (Best of Both Worlds, http://www.lqqm.com) by someone using the ID “redchuanbo.” Titled “The Most Embarrassing Poems in History,” the post started with an overview of Zhao Lihua’s impressive CV, which included contributions to several established poetry journals, membership of the poetry jury for the Lu Xun Literature Awards, and other laurels linked with the state-sponsored literary system. The poster then asked his readers to “take a deep breath” before copying some of her poems, such as the following:⁷⁹

Within a matter of days, popular online forums were awash with poems spoofing Zhao Lihua’s style, and within a week a web domain “zhaolihua. com” was created, devoted entirely to followers of what by then was called (with a pun on the poet’s name) the “pear blossom teachings” (lihua jiao) producing spoof poems in the “pear blossom style” (lihua ti). Apart from hypershort lines and nonsensical enjambments, this “style” was also characterized by the typical preference of Chinese netizens for all kinds of homophones, with the character for “poetry” (shi 诗) routinely replaced with the character for “wet” (shi 湿) and the character for “reciting” (yin 吟) replaced by that for “lewd” (yin 淫). One of the most famous spoof poems, also quoted by Han Han on his blog, was the following:80

As is clear from the post that started the whole affair, as well as from many later contributions, the main issue at stake was the perceived in-congruence between Zhao Lihua’s status as a high-ranking writer in the official system and the quality of her poetry. It soon became commonplace to refer to Zhao as a “national first-rank poet” (guojia yiji shiren), although in reality no such title exists in the official system. The implication was clear, though: here was someone profiting from state resources in order to produce bad writing. Undoubtedly this was why Han Han joined the debate and gave it full endorsement. To him, Zhao must have seemed just another representative of the official literary scene that he had criticized so strongly in his exchanges with Bai Ye.

Han Han would not have expected the strong, hostile reaction he received almost instantly from representatives of the unofficial literary scene, especially the leading avant-garde poets Yi Sha and Shen Haobo. I do not think Yi and Shen would have been particularly fond of Zhao Lihua’s writing, but as representatives of the “popular” (minjian) style of avant-garde poetry, which aimed at desecrating poetry and poeticizing plain, at times vulgar, vernacular language as an aesthetic statement, they were understandably annoyed by Han Han’s critique of modern poetry and free verse in general as simply useless.81 Shen Haobo, especially, did not mince his words in a series of writings on a new blog, hosted on the Sina portal, that he set up solely for the purpose of attacking Han Han.⁸² The gist of Shen’s criticism was that Han was an uneducated, uncultured nobody: a commercial product, not a person, and definitely not anyone who could be credited with any understanding of modern poetry.

While Han Han’s adoring fans proceeded to spam Shen Haobo’s new blog, Han himself chose to make fun of Shen and other critics for their inability to produce proper prose in their critical articles or to show some examples of good poetry. The poets, especially those outside the state-supported system, responded by organizing public poetry recitals and gatherings in Beijing, defending their art, while Shen Haobo copied some of his own poems onto his new blog challenging people to imitate or spoof him.

Han Han seemed gradually to develop some respect for Shen, or at least came to understand that he was no government stooge. He even audaciously copied onto his blog some of Shen’s more explicit poems, offering him the kind of mass audience that he would otherwise be unable to reach. Although Han was still dismissive of the work as poetry, calling it, not entirely unreasonably, a kind of “performance art,” he seemed surprised to find that there were so many different schools of poetry active in the nonofficial circuit. In the end, his most well-considered criticism was of the way in which the poets, despite being divided into so many schools and groups, had pulled together as a collective, finding solace in the idea that they understood the value of their work, even if the rest of the world did not. Han chastised the poets for blaming everybody but themselves for the lack of appreciation of their work. He teasingly called modern poetry a “cult” (xiejiao) and stated that, as far as he was concerned, serious literary creation could only ever be a private activity. Writers should stay away as far as possible from any kind of collective or any kind of “association” (xiehui).83 Although his use of the term xiejiao, a heavily laden term normally reserved for ideological criticism of religious groups such as Falun Gong, was borderline malicious, Han Han’s suggestion that poets like Shen Haobo and works such as “A Handful of Tit”⁸⁴ had only “cult status” was not too wide of the mark. Furthermore, his warning against joining any kind of xiehui was an obvious swipe at the official Writers Association.

Around this same time, in August 2006, a statement appeared on the front page of Han Han’s blog that, despite some small changes over time, has continued to be there until the present. The earliest version of it, first captured by the IAWM on August 5, 2006, reads as follows:

In one of the last posts from 2006 that he later removed from his blog, published on November 1, Han Han connects his independent stance directly with a rejection of the Writers Association. Riled, perhaps, by the news that his fellow celebrity and best-seller writer Guo Jingming was about to join the association, Han lashed out at all Chinese writers who rely on the state for a living rather than stand on their own two feet. Comparing Chinese writers and the Writers Association to kept mistresses who perform on demand, he stated that real writers should look after themselves and should prefer to go begging rather than try to gain official favor. He also chastised the association itself for failing to stand up for Chinese writers’ legal rights in disputes over piracy or royalties.86

Han Han’s now-deleted posts from 2006 do not represent Internet literature as such. They are not intended as creative writing, nor do they make any use of the interactive features of online communication. Han posts his texts, and readers comment on them in their thousands, but as far as I can see, he never responded to any of the comments. Nevertheless his early writings are directly relevant to the topic of this book. His critique of Chinese literary institutions and Chinese writers’ cliquish behavior aims at the remnants of socialist mentality that remain at the core of the postsocialist literary system. At the same time it is exactly because these remnants exist that Han Han can take his position in such a provocative manner. Despite his aloofness and lack of interaction with his readers, his strong individual stance has turned him into a kind of “cult hero.” Reading through the comments on his blog posts, one cannot help but be struck by the amount of readers that comment only in order to declare their love or adoration for Han Han and everything he does.

Less than three years later, on May 1, 2009, Han Han published a blog post that featured another intervention in postsocialist Chinese literary culture. He announced that he would publish a literary magazine, with himself as editor in chief. He stipulated in great detail the fees he would pay for contributions, pointing out that they ranged from ten times to forty times the going rate in the publishing industry. His stated rationale for doing so was simple: the cost of living had risen sharply in China over the past few years, putting much pressure on writers: “If a writer in such a high-pressure society has to worry even about his food and clothing, then in my opinion he is unlikely to preserve his independent personal or literary integrity [duli de renge he wenge].”⁸⁷ There was again a touch of heroism to Han’s announcement, as if he were single-handedly striving to salvage the integrity of China’s writers, but the initiative was nonetheless meaningful and consistent with his view that writers should be able to achieve financial independence.

In the months following the announcement of what initially was simply called the journal, expectations soared. Further announcements followed, and by early 2010 the journal was starting to take shape. It was to be given the name Duchangtuan, often translated as Chorus of Solos. The title echoed some of the issues raised during Han’s 2006 debate with the poets. At the time, as we have seen, Han had commented negatively on the poets’ organized response to his criticism, using the term zutuan (getting organized) in a condescending manner. Now he himself had brought together a tuan, but his point seemed to be that all the members of his collective were still acting as individuals, singing their own tune (duchang).

After the name of the journal was known, several promotional images (haibao) for the publication of the first issue were circulated online, which looked like cover designs. One of them was a now iconic image of a naked man wearing only black socks and holding a black gun, his private parts in the center of the image covered by a light-blue circle containing the characters duchangtuan. The point of the image was, as so often, a pun based on homophones: the words for “covering the center” (dang zhongyang) sound the same as the words for “Party Central Committee.”88 To some observers, these emerging images raised expectations of Han Han’s new magazine being politically provocative, perhaps as a kind of extension of his independent blogging. When the first issue eventually came out in the summer of 2010, not all these expectations were met,⁸⁹ but nevertheless over a hundred thousand copies were sold the first day and well over a million in total.

The cover of the first issue does not carry any of the images that were previously circulated. To me this seems to have been partly for practical reasons: Han Han had promised that all authors whose contributions were featured with their title on the front page would be paid double, and that at least half of all contributors would be given this privilege. So it is not surprising that the cover design was quite plain and contained mainly text. Yet there is a brilliantly subtle political message on the cover, which surely will not have escaped a readership attuned to puns and wordplay. Under the Chinese title appears the title of the magazine in English: Party. Han Han had not just founded a magazine, he had founded a party, something that is quite out of the question in the Chinese political system. Within a few months after publishing the first issue of Party, Han Han followed up with a new novel, with an equally subtly subversive title. The novel was titled 1988 and would surely have been banned if it had been called 1989 instead due to the blanket ban on any cultural expression hinting at the events of June 1989.

When I arrived in Shanghai in October 2010, copies of 1988 were piled up high in all the bookshops, while copies of Party had already become scarce but were still being ardently sought after by customers at magazine stalls. Han Han was everywhere that month, not only in the bookshops and in the media but also smiling at people on advertising billboard posters in subway stations.

The contents of the first issue of Party might not have pleased those looking for a political edge, but from a literary perspective it did stand out from mainstream literary magazines. First, in light of my earlier discussion, it is impossible not to notice the fact that there is no poetry in the journal, except for a four-line poem written by a small child: an unmistakable swipe at China’s poets. The rest of the content consists of short fiction of uneven quality, including a prepublication of the opening pages of 1988, and much visual art, including Ai Weiwei’s My Brain, a copy of his brain scan after he had been beaten by police. Personally I found some of the photography in the first issue most impressive, and it certainly added to creating the impression of a glossy culture journal. According to a discussion on the English-language website Paper Republic,90 the section of Party that Chinese readers liked most was “Everybody Asks Everybody,” in which questions from readers on all kinds of topics were answered by so-called experts, although at times with quite a bit of tongue-in-cheek. For instance, questions asked of the authorities and supposedly answered by government offices resulted in the names of those offices (such as “the Prison Police” and “the National Committee for Population and Birth Planning”) being featured on the front page of the journal as “contributors.”

A second issue of Party never appeared. In order to avoid speculation, Han Han described the process of the publishing of the journal in great detail on his blog in December 2010.⁹¹ It constitutes a model case study in postsocialist publishing, its opportunities and its limits. Work on the first issue of Party started in cooperation with an investment from a second-channel company that sensed a good market opportunity. While this company’s studio (gongzuoshi)⁹² was starting work on the concept of the journal, the company was bought by Shanda Literature, a culture economy giant that, among other things, now owns virtually all major literary websites in China (further discussion can be found in chapter 3). A Shanda subsidiary company was then appointed as the journal’s distributor. Everything was ready to go, all that was missing was an actual publisher that could make the publication legal by giving it a book number. Over the course of almost an entire year, ten different publishers went over the contents of the first issue, and eventually a publisher from Shanxi took the risk. As part of the deal, Party was published as a book, the first in a series (congshu), rather than as a magazine, since approval for new ISSN numbers is very hard to obtain in comparison with ISBN numbers for books.

After the first issue had appeared and sold extremely well, various media (including state-run media) had drawn attention to the fact that this was a magazine published as a book, and the decision was made to avoid trouble and submit an official application for publication as a journal. The original publisher was unable to help with this, so a new publisher had to be found. This turned out to be, in a truly ironic twist, Beijing Motie Books Ltd., China’s largest and most successful private publisher, which operates entirely legally outside the gray area of the second channel, and whose owner is the former avant-garde poet Shen Haobo.93 Burying old hatchets, Han Han and Shen worked hard to get all official approvals for publication of the second issue of Party. Finally, when the first print run had already been printed, approval was withdrawn. In his blog post telling the story, Han Han emphasizes that he is certain that neither the General Administration of Press and Publishing nor the Ministry of Propaganda (the two main censorship offices) were responsible for the ban. Whoever did make the phone call that pulled the plug on the project, he does not know, nor does he know what the reason was.

The partnership between Han Han and Shen Haobo was set to last, however, and together with other prominent publishers and bestseller authors they took on the widespread piracy of Chinese books on text-sharing sites, especially Baidu Library (Baidu Wenku). In an open letter to Baidu’s CEO Robin Li, Han Han starts out by painting a grim, almost poetic image of himself and Shen Haobo going together to a paper mill in order to pulp over a million copies of the second issue of Party. He details the financial challenges and risks of publishing in China and the meager profits made by writers in order to point out how big an impact Baidu’s piracy has on literary livelihoods. He then writes, with a reference to the 2006 debates discussed earlier,

We don’t ask that you close Baidu Library, we only hope that it could voluntarily respect and protect copyright. So when one day in the future today’s countless readers will have grown up, perhaps Baidu Library will have become a source of livelihood for Chinese authors, unlike today, where you have become the industry’s enemy and target of public criticism.

Because there are no permanent enemies, and no permanent benefits. In 2006 I had a public spat with Shen Haobo from Motie Books. We hurled insults at each other in open letters like there was no tomorrow, over the issue of modern poetry. Yet today we are friends and business partners. Baidu Library could very well become the basis for the wealth of Chinese authors, and not the grave in which they are buried.⁹⁴

After a successful legal challenge to Baidu, the Writers Legal Protection Union (Zuojia Weiquan Lianmeng), founded by Han, Shen, and others, went on to challenge more cases of piracy, including the sale of pirated material on the Apple App Store.95 Compared with five years earlier, when Han Han had lambasted the Chinese Writers Association for not protecting the interests of writers in disputes over piracy, this new writers union made it clear that Han was no longer forced, as he feared at the time, to face all challenges alone.

Han Han may have attacked the Apple App Store for selling pirated books, but he also sensed the opportunities of the app format for exploring yet another possible channel of literary production. In October 2012 he launched a brand new app called Yige in Chinese and ONE in English, with the promotional slogan “One Is All,” again expressing the idea of collective individuality also found in the Chinese title of Party. With the launch of this app, Han Han has established a truly new format, making use of the functionalities of Internet connectivity but entirely bypassing the browser-based media of the World Wide Web. Users who have downloaded the free app to their smartphones are provided with daily contents not dissimilar to what was provided in the pages of Party. Every day there is one image (artwork or photograph), one text (short story or short prose, no poetry), and one “Question and Answer.” Users continue to have access to contents from previous days starting from the day they first downloaded the app, they can store their favorites for quick access, and they are shown unobtrusive advertising that undoubtedly helps to keep the app free.

In a piece published on ONE (and copied onto his blog) on November 28, 2012, Han Han claims that the app format was not designed to circumvent censorship, stating that it would make no sense to invest so much money in a new project if there was substantial risk of being shut down.96 Yet in terms of employing new technology in order to circumvent existing controls on literary production, ONE undoubtedly represents a masterly move. The format falls entirely outside the scope of any rules for ISBN or ISSN numbers, and it does not involve any publishers in the traditional sense. Unlike most web-based literature, the texts distributed through the ONE platform do not provide interactive features such as user comments. This is consistent with what I noted earlier, namely that Han Han has never been very concerned about direct interaction with his readership.

So far, Han Han has not yet published any new fiction on the ONE platform. It is too soon to tell if the new format will have any impact on his literary writing or if he will continue to draw a clear boundary between his fiction (always published in print) and his prose (published mainly online). Like Chen Cun, Han Han can rightly claim never to have published literary works online. But the work he has done and continues to do for Chinese literary publishing, in terms of shaking up its established practices and exploring new, independent avenues, is innovative and valuable.