Between the Fall of the Gang of Four and the Rise of Bestsellers

Abstract

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes 1. In 1978 less than one per cent of China's urban population possessed a television set; ten years later the figure stood at nearly forth per cent, according to Joshua Aleksandr Harman in ‘Relative Deprivation and Worker Unrest in Mainland China’ (<http://mcel.pacificu.edu/aspac/papers/scholars/harman/ Harman.htm>, accessed 15 Feb. 2007). 2. In 1932 a debate over the concept of ‘Third Kind of Writer’ raged between Lu Xun on the one hand and Du Heng and Dai Wangshu on the other, who maintained that there was a third position between a bourgeois writer and a writer committed to the Party line. For more on this controversy see Gregory Lee, Dai Wangshu: The Life and Poetry of a Chinese Modernist, chapter 2. 3. At the same time it should be recalled that, even within the Communist Party and its pre-Liberation cultural front, the League of Left-Wing Writers, there were divergent politico-literary lines. The prominent metropolitan writers, such as novelist Mao Dun, were attached to a more Soviet-style socialist realism, while the Party theorist Qu Qiubai, whose ideas presaged much of what was preached at Yan'an, was critical of the use of such bourgeois forms as the novel and, in the face of mass illiteracy, favoured a recuperation of popular lyric and visual forms so as to achieve a mass democratisation of literature and culture. As for Lu Xun himself, in the late 1920s and early 1930s he had abandoned his critical realist narratives, for which he is celebrated, for a more polemical revolutionary line which he promoted in numerous essays. Both Qu Qiubai (1899–1935) and Lu Xun (1881–1936) died before their ideas and reputations could be recuperated, normalised and exploited by Communist Party theorists. For more on Shanghai literary politics see Wang-chi Wong Wang-chi Wong . Politics and Literature in Shanghai: The Chinese League of Left-Wing Writers, 1930–36 . Manchester : Manchester UP , 1991 . [Google Scholar], Politics and Literature in Shanghai: The Chinese League of Left-Wing Writers, 1930–36. 4. First published as an article in Wenyibao, II (1982). 5. Mang Ke, Mang Ke shixuan [Selected poems of Mang Ke], Beijing: Zhongguo wenlian chunban gongsi, 1989. Printed and ‘published’ in February 1989 but, because of the events leading up to and following the debacle of Tiananmen and Mang Ke's history as an underground poet, this book was not distributed. When I visited Mang Ke in May 1990 in his flat in Beijing, I found him surrounded by cartons containing several hundred copies of his book that he had rescued just before they were pulped by the publisher. 6. For Bai Hua's own full account of the ‘Bitter Love’ controversy see his interview with Cheng Yingxiang in Dégel de l'intelligence en Chine 1978–1989. 7. Following Party intervention in local elections in November 1986, the dissident Fang Lizhi made controversial speeches that led to students’ demonstrations against the authorities. Hu Yaobang, the relatively liberal party chairman, was held responsible, officially criticised and forced to step down on 16 January 1987. The following week the Anti Bourgeois Liberalism campaign was re-launched. The untimely death in 1989 of Hu Yaobang and the mass mourning that followed was reminiscent of the massive mourning and demonstrations that followed the death of Premier Zhou Enlai, held in high esteem by liberal intellectuals, in 1976. The brutal suppression of the mourners, deemed counter-revolutionary by the authorities, was termed the Tiananmen Incident. Those involved were later ‘rehabilitated’, or found to be innocent and the ‘Incident’ itself labelled progressive. After the massacre at Tiananmen in 1989, the authorities declared the student occupation and demonstrations to be counter-revolutionary, and described the event once again as the ‘Tiananmen Incident’. The 1989 ‘incident’ and those who participated in the democracy movement have yet to be ‘rehabilitated’. 8. The participation in the global capitalist economy of former state-controlled socio-economies has not significantly democratised them, while democracy in those countries that ‘won’ the Cold War has suffered serious reversals.