Introduction to the Post-Mao Era
The decade-long Cultural Revolution ended with Mao Zedong’s death in 1976, but the damage done to Chinese literature by Maoism was hard to repair even as the country slowly returned to “normal.” Major writers like Ba Jin, Mao Dun, Ding Ling, Wang Meng, and Ai Qing, who had endured years of persecution, were rehabilitated and allowed to write and publish again, but memories of the Mao years were impossible to erase. Deng Xiaoping, who had prosecuted the Anti-Rightist Campaign against intellectuals in 1957, came back to power in 1978. A pragmatist, Deng pushed for economic reforms and introduced the plan of Four Modernizations (industrial, agricultural, military, and scientific modernizations). When activists called for political modernization (democracy), they were thrown in jail.
But, as Václav Havel once said, “Life, with its unfathomable diversity and unpredictability, would not be squeezed into the crude Marxist cage.” Literature, a great vehicle for channeling pent-up emotions, made a comeback in China as soon as the government loosened, however temporarily, its grip on cultural life. Leading the way was a short story titled “Scar” by Lu Xinhua, published in August 1978. An otherwise mediocre work, Lu’s story about how a family was ruined by the Cultural Revolution hit a nerve among readers and gave birth to “scar literature,” a label under which thousands of other works would be published in the next two years. It was in this period that a group of poets associated with the underground journal Today, founded by Bei Dao and others in 1978, burst onto the scene. They made a radical departure from the formulaic language of Mao’s era. The poetry of Bei Dao, Gu Cheng, Shu Ting, and Yang Lian was dense with symbolism, rebellious in emotions, and unconventional in technique. Due to its semantic opacity, a quality dreaded by a regime that favors literature with clear messages, the work of these poets was soon criticized by the literary establishment as being too menglong (“obscure” or “misty,” leading to the nickname “Misty Poets”). Similar critique was also leveled at fiction influenced by Western modernism or having themes that were once taboos: absurdism in Gao Xingjian, existentialism in Bei Dao, black humor in Liu Suola, eroticism in Mo Yan, bestiality in Can Xue, and bold celebration of love in Wang Anyi.
The emergence of these new writers coincided with a “culture fever” gripping China. Economic reforms were under way, and intellectuals felt a strong urge to break through ossified official ideology and seek new ways of thinking. The ten-year catastrophe of the Cultural Revolution caused many Chinese to question the viability of traditional Chinese culture, which seemed to have provided a fertile ground for totalitarianism. Hungry for new ideas, China imported many works of Western literature, philosophy, and social science, from Martin Heidegger and Max Weber to Leo Tolstoy, Samuel Beckett, Sigmund Freud, and Walter Benjamin. The younger generation, in particular, were inspired by Western liberalism and felt disgruntled over the political reality in China. Their discontent was exacerbated by the increasing divide between the rich and the poor, a sentiment best captured by Cui Jian’s pop song “Nothing to My Name” (1986).
The government, always weary of any sign of discontent, waged at least two campaigns—the Anti–Spiritual Pollution Campaign in 1983 and the Anti–Bourgeois Liberalization Campaign in 1987—in order to drive out “bad” influences and maintain the party’s ideological control over the country. In June 1989, when student protests led to a nationwide call for democracy and political reform, the government resorted to the most drastic measure—a violent crackdown by guns and tanks, killing thousands of students and citizens in Beijing.
The Tiananmen Square massacre dealt a blow to China. Many writers went into exile abroad, part of a post-Tiananmen exodus of intellectuals, scientists, and students who had lost hope for their country. Those who stayed had to cope with a regime needing to repair its image in the world while tightening censorship and surveillance over what people say and write. Activists were jailed, books by Gao Xingjian and others were banned, and officials advocating liberal policies were sidelined.
Despite the setback and repression, Chinese writers continued to write, as they had always done in the tumultuous twentieth century. A new generation of poets came of age, including Che Qianzi, Yu Jian, Xi Chuan, and Zhang Zao. These poets, after the spiritual baptism of June 4, wrote with more abandon and less fettered imaginations. Commercialization of publishing houses also led to a boom in Chinese fiction, which began to draw worldwide readership with new talents such as Ma Yuan, Yu Hua, Su Tong, and Chi Zijian. The winning of the Nobel Prize in Literature by Gao Xingjian in 2000 and then by Mo Yan in 2012 symbolically signaled the rise of Chinese literature in the world, just as the return of Hong Kong to Chinese rule in 1997 indicated the ascension of China as a new world power.
Yet when Premier Zhu Rongji was cornered by foreign journalists in 2000 for comments on Gao Xingjian, now a French citizen, winning the Nobel Prize, the premier diplomatically congratulated France and refused to acknowledge Gao as a Chinese writer. Fifteen years later, Gao’s books are still banned from bookstore shelves in mainland China. For official China to reject or repress the best of its national literature, that is a typical, ironic tale of modern China.