AT THE BEGINNING OF THIS BOOK I cited statistics showing that prior to 2012 more Chinese people went online to enjoy literature than to do online shopping. Since that year, the growth in numbers of users of Internet literature applications has slowed down, prompting the following pessimistic comments from the China Internet Network Information Center, here quoted in the original English:
As a new form of literature, the online literature was popular in the earlier stage of its development due to its low threshold when a vast number of works were written and distributed on the Internet to a vast number of readers, which led to the rapid development of online literature. However, the online literature is now in a predicament. On one hand, the low threshold resulted in a large number of low-quality works; on the other hand, in order that the online literature could be updated and distributed rapidly, it was written in such a way that it was less like the works of literature; and to adapt to the taste of the readers, the online literature became stylized. The low quality, lack of innovation and stylizing are the problems existing in online literature and prevent the development of online literature.1
Hidden among the many pages of a largely statistical annual report on the development of the Internet in China, these lines bear the unmistakable traits of postsocialism. Here we have a bureaucratic entity expressing concern about the stylistic quality of a novel kind of literature. Even more saliently, this entity, undoubtedly linked in some way to the Communist Party, couches its worries about literary quality in a warning against writers’ adapting to the taste of their readers. Giving the people what they want, apparently, can only lead to low quality, making literature seem less like literature, and eventually causing the same people whose tastes are provided for to turn away and go in search of some other form of entertainment. (The subsection of the report dealing with online literature is part of a larger section on online entertainment, which also comments on online games and online videos.) The passage is a perfect example of how, in the wonderful world of Chinese postsocialism, a distinction can be forged between what the market seems to want and what “the masses” really want, and articulated through a concept of style more commonly encountered in the writings of literary critics.
The passage also shows to what extent in recent years the term “online literature” (wangluo wenxue) has become synonymous with online commercial fiction. To be fair to the report’s authors, this limiting definition was partially imposed on them by the nature of the statistics they are collecting. They look at the use of specific applications designed for specific purposes. Genre fiction sites such as Starting Point or Flying Gourd have special characteristics, especially the VIP subscription system, which make them clearly recognizable and distinguishable from, for instance, online shopping sites. Moreover, when commercial fiction sites set up their web domains, they register as providers of literature, whereas noncommercial literary communities typically do not have their own domains and are therefore not individually registered. It would frankly be undoable for anyone to gather complete statistics on all literature created on the Chinese Internet.
Others in China worry about the future of online writing as well. In her textbook history of Internet literature, referred to at length in chapter 1 of this book, Mei Hong paraphrases some pessimistic comments by experts, all of which are couched in terms of economic capital. The main problem they perceive is that only martial arts and fantasy fiction are selling well online, but that even the big sites continue to struggle to make decent profits.2 As we have seen, however, some of the longest lasting literary websites in China, such as the Black and Blue site and the two poetry forums discussed in chapter 4, do not pursue profit at all, nor do they receive stipends from the Writers Association, yet they continue to thrive. If one looks beyond the profit principle, the outlook for online literature might be less gloomy. I shall provide my own speculations about the future of Internet literature in China shortly, but first I want to look back at some of the main points put forward in the previous chapters and address some areas I did not cover.
It has been the first and foremost aim of this book to show that there has been and still is a wide variety of Internet literature in China. Conscious of the fact that no comprehensive introduction to the topic had appeared in English before, I have tried to provide as much as possible basic knowledge. What is Internet literature? What is a discussion forum? What are threads and posts? What are VIP chapters? No scholarly audience in China would have required this kind of explanation. Long before the commercial business model now most commonly associated with wangluo wenxue was created, Internet literature was already widely discussed in the Chinese media, and printed reproductions of online work were widely available in bookshops, where they were clearly identified as a separate category of literature. As described in chapter 2, the first nationwide debate about Internet literature was sparked around the year 2000. The same year also saw the publication of the first of many printed anthologies of born-digital literary work. By 2005, Chen Cun was editing a special section on Internet literature for the highly established print journal October. By 2010, the fact that the Lu Xun Literary Prize was not awarded to a web author required a public explanation by a spokesperson of the Writers Association.3
The descriptive overview of the first decade and a half of Chinese Internet literature provided in this book has been much less comprehensive than the overviews that have come out in China in recent years. There are some very important areas that I have not included in my study. One of these concerns the mentioned highly popular genres of martial arts and fantasy fiction, which could be fruitfully approached from a range of different perspectives, including their traditional roots in premodern literature and their convergence with film productions and video games.
Although I have frequently pointed at examples of overlap or interaction between the online and print-based literary worlds in China, the role played by online publication and online fandom in the blossoming print-based careers of highly successful authors such as Murong Xuecun and Anni Baobei has not been discussed. Not dissimilar to the case of Han Han, discussed in chapter 2, both Murong and Anni have capitalized on their popularity, rooted in large part in their early careers as Internet writers, to push the boundaries of the Chinese publishing system. Murong has done this by making outspoken public comments both on Weibo and in the Western media on issues of freedom of speech, while Anni has tried to launch and sustain an independent, glossy literary magazine, with the English title Open, which published two issues in 2011 before being discontinued, most likely for similar reasons that caused the closing down of Han Han’s Party.
I have not discussed online literature that aims to make straightforward political statements, such as for instance the poetry written by the sinophone Tibetan blogger Woeser (http://woeser.middle-way.net/). The problems of political expression in China are well-known and have been widely studied and are generally not unique to literature. When dealing with the political side of the postsocialist mix, my focus has been on issues that are more directly linked to literary production, such as the relationship between online writers and the Writers Association, the regulation of online publishing, and the moral and legal debates about the balance between artistic quality and obscenity. Nothing is more consistently censored in China than pornography, and few things are more typical of the postsocialist mind-set than the government’s insistence, for purely ideological reasons, that its citizens should be allowed access only to “healthy” culture. The government insists that its view not to make pornography available to anyone, not even adults, represents the consensus opinion of the Chinese people. Ironically, as standards applied to moral censorship increasingly veer toward banning only the most explicit forms of pornography, less-explicit types of erotic online culture become automatically available to all ages. This has many parents in China worried and, as we have seen, has also caused the online industry to start self-regulating, as in the case of Flying Gourd, which makes its iPhone app available through the Apple App Store, allowing for the setting of age limits. The same Flying Gourd novels that only adults can download from the App Store are available to readers of all ages on the Chinese Internet, excepting the most explicit passages.
The increasing popularity of mobile applications for the distribution of literature via the Internet, but circumventing the World Wide Web, represents a technological innovation that will make it even more difficult than before for the Chinese authorities to check the health of its nation’s culture. At the same time, as we have seen in chapter 3, these applications have also allowed groups such as Black and Blue to come up with creative innovations in literary form itself. The addition of little editorial footnotes to literary texts downloaded straight onto e-readers is a small, but fascinating, innovation, bringing to mind the age-old Chinese literati tradition of reading texts with commentaries. The creativity of Chinese Internet writers when it comes to doing new things while staying within the linear paradigm is one of the things that has impressed me most over the years. Partly responsible for this is the very large extent to which Internet literature in China has often been a social activity. This can be seen from early examples such as Lu Youqing’s “death diary,” when the dying author amid his suffering obtained some solace from his interactions with his online reading community. It is also apparent in the playful interactions between Chen Cun and his fellow “gardeners,” not to mention their enthusiastic incorporation of me, the researcher, into their collective writing environment. A special case is that of the online poetry forums discussed in chapter 4, where the plentiful social interaction surrounding the composition and discussion of poems recalls the tradition of “poetry parties” of premodern times and appears to go hand in hand with an online revival of classical-style poetry writing. As I have shown, all these linear writings can easily be seen to possess innovative qualities and to challenge the ways in which we normally read and research literature. This innovative potential of what one might call interactive linearity has been greatly underestimated in the critical debate about electronic literature, for which the pursuit of nonlinearity in writing has been axiomatic.
It is tempting to suggest that the relative lack of formally experimental electronic literature in the PRC has something to do with the postsocialist condition. After all, writers and translators with Taiwanese roots, such as Dajuin Yao and Shuen-shing Lee, have enthusiastically practiced this kind of writing, as shown in chapter 4, so its relative absence in China cannot be explained by pointing to unique qualities of the Chinese language or literary tradition. (Although, as I have shown, the English-language origins of computer programming do make it more difficult to achieve some of the desired effects when working in Chinese.) One possible explanation might lie in the overall regulation of the Chinese Internet, where setting up a personal web domain is not as easy as in other countries. The higher the barriers for establishing one’s own site are, the more Internet users will be likely to settle for using standard applications (personal blog, microblog, discussion forum) offered by commercial portals. And the more standard the applications used, the less likely it is that online writers will be able to experiment with the shape and design of their writings. Another likely reason for the lack of formal experimentation in poetry especially is conventional literary education in the PRC, which tends to de-emphasize modernist experimentation in favor of memorization and appreciation of classical work, promoting widely held conservative views about what is, or is not, poetry. As we have seen in chapter 2, even otherwise unconventional literary figures such as Han Han are prone to condescending views of, for instance, modern free verse, considering it simply “not poetry.” Whenever I presented the material in chapter 4 to PRC audiences, I was met by similar reactions: the crowd was entertained by the dancing letters on-screen, but inevitably someone at the end would stand up to proclaim that all of this really was “not poetry.” I do believe that this will change. The fact that creative individuals like Dajuin Yao are now working and teaching in the PRC, albeit in an art school rather than a literature department, seems to suggest that changes are under way. Although the glorious tradition of Tang poetry is part and parcel of the stories about Chinese culture that feature in “soft power” initiatives, I do not believe that the state has any intentions to prevent, or declare “unhealthy,” other forms of poetry as they develop (with the exception of sexually explicit poetry such as the work of Datui).
It would be nice if, by writing this book, I have made some contribution to the more frequent inclusion of online material into the teaching of modern Chinese literature. As I hope to have shown, the material I have looked at, and much more like it, lends itself to discussions about the aesthetic, commercial, and political aspects of current Chinese writing, preferably considered simultaneously rather than in isolation. I would also be greatly pleased if some of this material would find its way into electronic literature syllabuses, which tend to be dominated by conventional lists of clearly delineated works by prominently named authors, no matter how unconventional the works themselves might otherwise be. Finally, I hope to have done something to support the emerging popularity of world literature curricula. If the study of literature that travels the world does not include the study of literature on the World Wide Web, then surely there is something wrong. Plenty of barriers are in place to make it difficult for Chinese Internet literature to be put on the curricula of U.S. and U.K. universities. The texts are often ephemeral, you do not always know where they begin or end, what is part of them or not, and translating them can be difficult if they include nontextual elements. Yet perhaps the identification of such barriers can itself be the stuff of fruitful discussions with students about what literature is and what kind of conditions and support structures are needed for it to travel in the first place.
There is no denying the fact that Internet literature has made a contribution to the development of Chinese literature as a whole. New writers have emerged, new niches have become available, and existing restrictions have been overcome. The question is: will it last? Although I do not share the bureaucrats’ concern about Internet literature losing its quality and its mass appeal, I think the specific practices of online interaction that created much of the literature studied in this book are undoubtedly in decline. As literature sites start to act more and more as publishers, and publishers invest more and more in e-publications, more and more literary work is becoming available for direct download onto mobile devices, where it can be consumed in very much the same way that one traditionally consumes a book, that is, by sitting on a sofa, or on a train seat, and looking at text, even if the text is now on a screen rather than on a printed page. The habit of going online to join communities where texts are written, read, and discussed will not disappear but may well become an activity of a minority of enthusiasts for particular genres or subcultures. Experimental authors or groups will continue to use the Internet to find their own spaces, but they, too, might choose to provide less content publicly on the web, where they might feel constrained by the need to use conventional applications. The rise of the mobile application definitely offers new opportunities for creative individuals wanting to combine literary writing with software development. Even long-standing online writers with no particular interest in formal experimentation beyond the textual, such as the Black and Blue writers, can be seen to go in this direction, with their magazine now no longer available on the World Wide Web. In future, websites are likely to function more as places where one finds information about writers and their publications and links to where these can be downloaded rather than as the actual spaces where reading and discussion take place.
Perhaps the poets will stay active on public forums, spurred on in part by enjoyment of social interaction in the context of poetic life. The poets might continue to bring out low-cost publications, displaying a preference that dates back to the time of hand copying and sharing underground writings during the 1970s. For chroniclers like Chen Cun, the web continues to be a perfect environment as well, allowing him to share the textual and visual fragments of his life with his friends and colleagues and leaving a public record. Public figures like Han Han, too, will continue to find use for web-based applications, especially blogs, although his longing to escape the confines of the postsocialist publishing system has already pushed him toward using customized mobile applications as well.
Whether or not the postsocialist publishing system will last, disintegrate, adapt itself into disappearance, or simply be abolished is anybody’s guess. Many have been expecting to see, sooner rather than later, the end of the state-owned publishers’ monopoly on book numbers, assuming that it would be more profitable for the state to sell book numbers directly to private publishing companies. Similarly, the state may decide at some point that there is no more need to subsidize and support official literary organs such as the Writers Association. Already the distinction between the “official” (guanfang) and “nonofficial” (fei guanfang) literary communities is highly blurred as the two are melting together in the postsocialist mix. Many are also expecting age limits for pornography to be introduced soon, although as Western countries, notably the United Kingdom, are considering expanding their own censorship mechanisms for pornography, it will be interesting to see to what extent the Chinese censorship system will function as a positive, rather than a negative, example. The least likely to change is the principle of the “bottom line.” As long as the CCP continues to take its ideological function seriously, it will want to have the final say about what can or cannot appear in the public sphere, and there will always be the possibility of that one phone call coming from somewhere to pull the plug on a publishing project, without giving a reason. But most likely there will be so many technologies, spaces, and means of communication available to find different ways of continuing the same project that it will matter less and less.
Even if in a decade from now all the literary websites are deserted and the World Wide Web has become entirely obsolete, I believe that the material discussed in this book, ephemeral though it may be, deserves to be remembered and from time to time reconsidered. The questions it raises about how to read and analyze unstable, interactive literary texts, how new literary genres and literary fields come into being, how professional and amateur writing communities interact, and how governments regulate literary production are relevant to all countries and all eras. Whether or not writing a book about a form of literature that has moved beyond books was a good idea remains to be seen. If nothing else, I hope that I have contributed to the preservation and understanding of a tiny sample of a huge display of creativity.