Xin shiji de taiyang: Ershi shiji Zhongguo shichao [The sun of a new era: Currents in twentieth-century Chinese poetry] (review)

Abstract

584 China Review International: Vol. 2, No. 2, Fall 1995 outright resistance. Without an institutional base independent of the state, such as the Catholic Church in Poland or Islam under the Shah of Iran, Weiler points out rightly how difficult it will be in China for internal resistance to organize itself on a large scale. In the end, Weiler links any possibility for political change in China to the very "overloaded" meanings ofpopular rituals and movements that "defuse attempts at official control." This hope sounds very similar to (and perhaps inspired by) a philosophical Daoist approach. This Daoism, ofcourse, does not amount to a deliberate anarchist movement against the state, but is more an unconscious or intuitive attitude akin to Lao Zi's water and stone metaphors. That is, like a still pool ofwater slowly absorbing and dissipating the shock ofa rock thrown into its midst, or like the patient, undeliberate motion ofa flowing stream wearing down the hardest rocks in its path, so, too, to use Weller's provocative metaphors, the "messy pile ofinconsistent meanings" contained in movements, ideas, and even words that exist in free spaces outside official control, may provide a "well ofcreativity" that, even short of developing into conscious resistance to authority, may be too soft and indeterminate for any supposed totalitarian regime to repress for long. John A. Rapp Beloit College Xie Mian. Xin shiji de taiyang: Ershi shiji Zhongguo shichao [The sun of a new era: Currents in twentieth-century Chinese poetry]. Changchun: Shidai Wenyi Chubanshe, 1993. 297 pp. 6.60 yuan. This is the first volume in a series ofworks on twentieth-century Chinese literature titled Ershi shiji Zhongguo wenxue congshu, edited by Xie Mian and Li Yang. According to the cover information, already ten titles by different authors have appeared in this series. As the title ofthe series makes clear, Xie Mian's work must be placed within the context of ongoing efforts by Chinese scholars to view twentieth-century Chinese literature as an organic whole, rather than to use the well-known triple ofHawai'iPressframework ofjindai (recent), xiandai (modern), and dangdai (contemporary) or xin shiqi (new period) literature. This view was first put forward in an epochmaking article by Huang Ziping, Chen Pingyuan, and Qian Liqun in 1985.' Its 1995 by University Reviews 585 underlying philosophy is Li Zehou's scheme ofthe development ofintellectual and ideological trends in twentieth-century China. While Li Zehou called for the revaluation ofthe May Fourth heritage of qimeng (enlightenment) as opposed to jiuwang ([national] salvation), Huang, Chen, and Qian proposed to pay more attention to the individualism and cosmopolitanism ofmodern Chinese writers rather than to their concerns for the "nation" and the "era." Since 1985, the notion of"twentieth-century literature" has gained considerable acclaim and, so it appears, has been officially sanctioned, since it has even been introduced into high school textbooks.2 Compared to the previously sanctioned methods of studying literature, this new approach has so far displayed two (interrelated) advantages. First, it has created the possibility for discussing many works, authors, and groups that were erstwhile considered to be politically or culturally marginal. Second, it has freed accounts ofthe development ofmodern Chinese literature ofa certain type ofpolitical value judgment. So far, the most obvious drawback of the approach has been that, while enriching and depoliticizing Chinese literary historiography, it has not questioned the orthodox evolutionary scheme ofliterary development. In this scheme, each author belongs to a "school" or "current," representing a phase in a larger process. The result is that authors are studied solely for their contributions to poetry made in that particular phase, while their later work is neglected.3 The present volume, discussing Chinese poetry from the late Qing dynasty to the early 1950s, demonstrates both the strong points and the weakness just pointed out. Beijing University professor Xie Mian, one of China's leading authorities on modern poetry, has succeeded in presenting an enriched version of the orthodox line ofdevelopment—"free verse, regulated verse, symbolism, modernism "—with a keen eye for some of the lesser known poets and without displaying any overt political messages, but also without rearranging or questioning the "chain of evolution." In the greater part ofthe...