Contemporary Chinese Fiction Research Articles

Contemporary Chinese Fiction and Its Relations with World Literature

Contemporary Chinese Fiction and Its Relations with World Literature

Історія майбутнього як футурологія в дискурсі сучасної китайської фантастики

Introduction. The article considers the historical, philosophical and ideological implications of the concept of the history of the future in the context of the development of modern Chinese fiction. The history of the future is interpreted as a conceptual tool for influencing culture and mass consciousness in the context of transformations of modern history and historiography. Fiction is seen as the development of social expectations in the field of mass culture and collective consciousness. The urgency of the article. The relevance of the article is due to the formation of the latest paradigm of historical narrative and discourse in modern information culture and their impact on the mass consciousness and correlation with ideology. The aim of the study. The aim of the article is to study the peculiarities of the interpretation of the functioning of the concept of the history of the future in modern historical narrative and discourse, as well as to clarify the intentionality of this process and its effects on mass consciousness and ideology. Methods used in the study: textual analysis of sources, historical and philosophical analysis, analytical and hermeneutical methods in combination with contemporary history of ideas and culturological approach. The results research is based on the following considerations. The concept of the history of the future in the context of the research topic is interpreted not only as a form of representation and translation of historical knowledge and ideas, but also as a marker of the meaning-generating potential of the philosopher of history within the picture of the human world and his life (lebenswelt). Chinese fantasy discourse is interpreted not only as a part of literature and culture, but also as a necessary structural element of ideological constructions and the basis for the formation of worldview knowledge in the modern media space. The ambivalent nature of the instrumental humanism of modern Chinese fiction and its affinity with the ideology of transhumanism are emphasized. Particular attention is paid to fantastic discourse as a space for formalizing negative social, environmental and security expectations. There is a well-founded connection between the peculiarities of modern Chinese fiction and the mythology of the collective ancestral consciousness, which is inherent in the Eastern tradition in general. The ethical and ontological ambivalence of the ideological approach to history as the history of the future is formalized. It also points to the paradoxical nature of futurological prognosis in the latest Chinese fiction discourse, associated with the critique of Western anthropocentrism, which may justify the superiority of the total approach to social reality and the devaluation of fundamental humanistic values. The originality and novelty of the study is based on the interpretation of the concept of future history as a marker of transformations of modern history, philosophy of history and historiography, as well as the impact of these transformations on mass consciousness and culture, social ideology. Conclusion. The effectiveness of the concept of the history of the future as a cognitive tool and at the same time a marker of ontologization of the narrative of literature and culture in general is determined by the methodological foundations of the latest theoretical historical research. Liu Qixing’s Futurological and Social Problems in Memory of the Earth’s Past (2006-2010) and Contemporary Chinese Fiction in general cultivate a kind of non-anthropocentric humanism that can be greatly simplified and reduced to a set of social imperatives and ideological clichйs. In our opinion, such a critique of anthropocentrism can reduce the problem of choosing the future to agnostic-fatalistic worldviews. In the social dimension, this could mean the inevitable crisis of the model of democracy in societies and socio-political formations of cosmic proportions and those that have gone beyond the planetary cradle.

Biotechnology and the Socioeconomic Forms in Chinese Science Fiction

Abstract Under the impact of technology globalization, cosmopolitan concerns about how futuristic technology transforms socioeconomic forms become important themes in contemporary Chinese science fiction narrative. After examining the role of clone and organ transplant technology in reshaping the bioeconomic mechanism in the fictional “J country” and the reproductive framework across the world in two example stories, namely, Wang Jinkang's “The Reincarnated Giant” and “The Last Love,” I argue that biotechnology in the Chinese science fiction reshapes the politics of life and power dynamics in the society and transforms the socioeconomic institutions from one based on shared understanding and values into an apparatus controlled by interest-oriented rationality and technology. Although these speculative discussions about the dystopia transformation of human society show the world consciousness of Chinese science fiction writers regarding their narrative space and theme, and moves Chinese science fiction from the category of regional literature to an integral part of world literature by offering critique on cosmopolitan concerns, their emphasis of global setting and characterization poses the threat of homogenizing national cultures.

Introduction

Introduction David Russell, Karin Westman, and Naomi Wood In this issue of The Lion and Unicorn, we spend time with literature set in China, India, alternative versions of the United States, Australia, and the Nordic countries of Scandinavia. Lisa Chu Shen's "Masculinities and the Construction of Boyhood in Contemporary Chinese Popular Fiction for Young Readers" examines the works of two popular male Chinese authors, Cao Wenxuan and Zhao Lihong, to illustrate the transforming treatment of male characters in Chinese children's literature. Influenced by both economic, political, and cultural changes over the past several decades, Chinese children's books (like children's literature everywhere) are grappling with gender portrayal (notably stereotyping). Prior to the arrival of Western influences, the Chinese concept of masculinity exalted the wen (that is, the mind and intellect) over the wu (physical strength and prowess). But this began to shift toward the Western model of the domineering, macho male, a culturally antithetical view. And then, with the rise of Maoism in the twentieth century, Chinese manhood underwent a "second emasculation," when the government advocated the underplaying of gender distinctions, the consequences of which were dubbed, interestingly, yinsheng yangchuai ("the rise of women and the decline of men"). As Chen notes, "In contemporary Chinese popular fiction for children, the figure of the boy is invested with competing adult desires and anxieties around the changing notions of masculinity." Focusing on the works of two of China's most celebrated children's authors, Chen illustrates the transforming treatment of male characters in Chinese children's literature. Specifically, the author argues that "examining how masculinity is constructed in contemporary Chinese fiction for young readers reveals the continuous struggle between tradition and modernity, a topic of paramount importance in studies of Chinese literature and culture." We might add that this struggle is not peculiar to China, and that societies around the world are grappling with this, genuinely transformative, social phenomenon. Of Chinese children's literature, Chen sees hope in that, [End Page v] "[e]ncouragingly, alongside hegemonic masculinity that is widely perceived to be the ideal path toward manhood, into which male children are expected to grow, there have emerged nuanced and layered depictions of boyhood." Sharon Murphy's essay "'I think I shall die soon, Boosy': Child Illness and Morality in The History of Little Henry and His Bearer" analyzes a widely disseminated story by Evangelical writer Mary Martha Sherwood, based on her experiences as an English officer's wife serving the East India Company in early nineteenth-century India. Sherwood lost two children to tropical illnesses while in India and adopted several orphaned children in addition to caring for her own. In Murphy's reading of Little Henry and His Bearer, she connects the staggering infant mortality rate among English children in India—more than twice the rate of children in England—with stated and unspoken conflicts about the role of the English in India. Murphy provides a detailed context for those conflicts to illustrate the deep contradictions in England's Christian missionary projects, which could not mitigate the great costs to mothers and children of the "British appetite for India." Sam Morris, in "'Anything be better than this': Utopian Impulses in The Hunger Games Series and Orleans," pairs the well-known dystopian trilogy by Suzanne Collins with an unsparing and timely dystopia by Sherri L. Smith, set in a future New Orleans that has been expelled from the Outer States of America because of an intransigent and deadly disease, Delta Fever. Morris examines these dystopias and how they speak to the adolescent chronotopes of possibility and hope through the lens of Ernst Bloch's Principle of Hope, which stresses the unfinished and unfinishable quality of all utopian aspiration as the "Not-Yet." In both works the adolescent protagonists push toward utopian ideals, despite failure and even retrenchment. It is the "Not-yet" of hope that propels each to move away from the concept of utopia as a place and toward a utopian frame of mind that can disrupt complacency and acquiescence. In "Forging Truth from Facts: Trauma, Historicity and Australian Children's Picture Books," Martin Kerby and Margaret Baguley remind us how children's books about traumatic...

Masculinities and the Construction of Boyhood in Contemporary Chinese Popular Fiction for Young Readers

Masculinities and the Construction of Boyhood in Contemporary Chinese Popular Fiction for Young Readers Lisa Chu Shen (bio) The marriage between masculinity studies and children's literature is a fairly recent phenomenon. Compared with the attention received by femininity and female bodies in children's fiction, masculinity as an object of inquiry arrives rather late on the scene, not least because it was only toward the end of the twentieth century that masculinity studies emerged as an academic discipline. The problem with the continued focus on women and girls in children's literature could "run the risk of further naturalizing masculinity" (Wannamaker 122). Since manhood is a continuation of, rather than a flight from, boyhood, examining how boyhood is represented and constructed offers us insight into the kinds of masculine identities being propagated in children's books and the extent to which such identities conform to normative standards. Academic studies of gender in Chinese fiction, both modern and contemporary, have been largely confined to the study of women (Chow; Liu; Sang; Zhu). As Evans and Strauss note: "narratives on masculinity . . . are notably absent, in part reflecting how gender in academic studies of China is still largely associated with the study of women" (825). This imbalance is being redressed by an emerging body of studies on masculinity in modern and contemporary China, especially in the recent decade (Hird; Louie; Song; Xiao; Yang; Zhong). Nevertheless, in the field of Chinese children's fiction, studies of gender have been largely confined to the representation of femininity, with narratives on masculinities being almost nonexistent. As this essay will show, however, examining how masculinity is constructed in contemporary Chinese fiction for young readers reveals the continuing struggle between tradition and modernity, a topic of paramount importance in studies of Chinese literature and culture. On the one hand, [End Page 221] contemporary Chinese conceptions of masculinity, hegemonic masculinity in particular, have been largely Westernized in the process of modernization and globalization. On the other hand, there are alternative models that hinge upon the prospect of modernity but which reflect the persistent influence of the Chinese tradition. The Chinese case illuminates the intersections between masculinity studies, children's literature and modernity studies, intersections that have not yet been explored, due largely to the marginalized positions, in Chinese studies, of both masculinity studies and children's literature. As such, the Chinese case brings light to the role of children's literature in global studies of masculinities in patriarchal societies caught between tradition and modernity where gender categories are being constantly shaped and defined in relation to the tensions inherent in this ever-evolving dyad. Masculinity Studies and Chinese Masculinities Masculinity studies has emerged as a serious academic discipline in the past decades, as gender scholars in sociology, literature, and culture alike are regarding masculinity as a subject worthy of scholarly investigation. As with femininity, masculinity is now being recognized as a constructed concept, rather than innate or inherent (Gilmore; Connell; Kimmel). Manhood, rather than static or timeless, is historical, constructed in relation to "a set of 'others'" (Kimmel 182). Although masculinity is not the exclusive domain of men or manhood (for discussions of female masculinity, refer to Halberstam), it is usually in the context of men's/manhood studies that masculinity is taken as a serious object of inquiry. Since children's literature serves to prepare children for their future roles as gendered adults, it is understandable that authors tend to project their ideas of manhood onto their construction of boyhood. According to sociologist R. W. Connell, hegemonic masculinity is "the configuration of gender practice which embodies the currently accepted answer to the problem of the legitimacy of patriarchy, which guarantees (or is taken to guarantee) the dominant position of men and the subordination of women" (Masculinities 77). Rolf Romøren and John Stephens point out, with reference to Connell, that hegemonic masculinity is taken to be "the version of masculinity which is considered normative within a particular society's expressions of masculinity" (233). They argue that currently, within media images of global popular culture, forms of masculinity grounded in "domination, physical assertiveness, and egocentric individualism" dominate (217). What needs to be made clear is that these forms...

Unlocking the future: characterizing ‘hope' in contemporary Chinese science fiction

ABSTRACT‘The future’ is the primary premise for the development of Chinese science fiction. This article will endeavour to examine how ‘hope’ is characterized from two different perspectives. First, are there any reiterations of the future more free or unique than that which already exists with high-tech life? Second, is there a more active approach to conceptualizing the individual’s relationship with the future? The Town Beneath the Tower by Liu Weijia will be this article’s entry point to examining depictions of the future in the genre of contemporary Chinese science fiction for the past twenty years. Using The Town Beneath the Tower’s portrayal of the future, this article will analyze contemporary Chinese science fiction’s imagined aspects of a barbarous world vehemently opposed to progress, low-tech society, and the relationship between the individual and the future. Based on this analysis, what are the advantages and disadvantages that stem from society’s search for hope and projections of its future in contemporary Chinese science fiction?

Rethinking the Orwellian Imaginary through Contemporary Chinese Fiction

Although George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four ([1949] 2003) and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World ([1932] 2006) have long offered contrasting paradigms in surveillance theory, little attention has been paid to how race and cultural difference operate in their respective regimes. This oversight is surprising given race’s centrality in surveillance theory and practice, and it is increasingly anachronistic in light of contemporary geopolitics and the rising power of non-Western states. By contrast, the best-selling and critically acclaimed novels The Fat Years (Koonchung 2013), The Three-Body Problem (Liu 20014), and Death of a Red Heroine (Xiaolong 2000) are all set in modern China and portray issues of surveillance technology, policy, implementation, and resistance previously associated with Western powers. Yet while these later novels’ Chinese settings offer radically different scenarios than our previous touchstones of surveillance imagery, their global popularity also demonstrates their vast resonance and accessibility. Indeed, in strong reaffirmation of Orwell’s and Huxley’s ongoing value—and the value of literature to surveillance theory more generally—these recent China-set novels collapse the Orwell and Huxley dichotomy to offer surprising glimpses into the more culturally diversified twenty-first century global surveillance society.

Finding theology in contemporary Chinese fiction

ABSTRACTLiterature can offer a space and hope for a possible creative theology, and this is true also of the contemporary literature of China. In 1923 Lu Xun expressed his hope that literature was capable of transforming the spirit of the Chinese people, Chinese fiction has drawn upon the ancient wisdom of China to explore possibilities after the Cultural Revolution in works that are sometimes banned in the Peoples Republic of China but increasingly have a world readership in English translations. They may be compared with some of the ideas of liberation theology in the western tradition.

The Emergence of a Writer, the Evolution of a Literary Scene: In Conversation with Wang Anyi

For more than three decades, Wang Anyi has been at the forefront of China’s literary scene. Her novels The Song of Everlasting Sorrow, Love in a Small Town, and Brocade Valley have been regarded as classics of contemporary Chinese fiction. Moving beyond her fiction, this literary conversation took place before a class of two hundred university students at the University of California, Santa Barbara on May 12, 2016. The discussion begins with Wang’s formative years and discusses her influences, her experiences during the Cultural Revolution period through the early Reform Era, and her views on the contemporary Chinese literary scene.

A CITY THAT NEVER EXISTED: XIAO BAI’S LITERARY REMAKING OF 1931 SHANGHAI

This article provides an account of the literary recreation of the semi-colonial Shanghai of 1931, carried out by the Chinese contemporary author Xiao Bai in his 2011 novel Zujie. It also includes the features and implications of such an operation. Critically praised as a turning point in contemporary Chinese fiction about old Shanghai, the novel appears to transcend genre categories, and was welcomed as a heterogeneous “third type” crossing the boundaries between genre fiction and pure literature. Inspired by historical facts and supported by painstaking archival research, Zujie originally incorporates a variety of literary models, narrative techniques, sources, genres, themes, and perspectives. The heterogeneity at play in the novel can be essentially scrutinised at three levels. Such levels are: the debate on the genre as it emerges from a number of paratextual sources; the treatment of historical factuality and its relationship with fictional creation; the use of polyphonic devices, with reference to the portrayal of hybrid characters, deliberately disorienting narrative techniques, and a re-elaboration of imported and domestic sources and literary models that plays havoc with the very notions of foreignness and identity. Xiao Bai’s original representation of 1930s Shanghai is analysed and commented upon with respect to such factors. Finally, the significance of this multi-layered literary operation and its implications for the reader are highlighted.

Novellas, Contemporary Chinese Literature, and My Writing

Fiction author Xu Zechen is also an editor of China's most prestigious literary magazine, People's Literature. In this tour-de-force essay, he points to the novella as the most popular genre of contemporary Chinese fiction, and reveals how and why China has taken this genre and made it its own, from its influential birth in the form of Lu Xun's novella Ah Q on through to its present popularity.

River Water

Chi Zijian explores the confluence of rivers and writing as they merge and comingle in the estuary of her work within the wider contexts of contemporary Chinese fiction. Rivers, like languages, flow across a wide range of geographies, but each is tied to specific local places. Follow Chi through this poetic journey at the intersection of water, language, and land.

Contemporary Chinese Fiction and World Literature

Fiction in the history of modern Chinese literature has been increasingly dominating literary production, ranking the top among all the genres. Contemporary Chinese fiction is thus a universally recognized major literary genre that has long been practiced in a glocalized Chinese context although it has been largely influenced by its Western counterpart. Thus it has been qualified enough to dialogue with both classical Chinese fiction as well as Western texts. In this introductory article eminent contemporary Chinese novelists are also discussed in a historical and critical way with regard to their relations with world literature.

The Qur’an and Identity in Contemporary Chinese Fiction

How is it possible to comprehend and assess the impact of the Qur’an on the literary expressions of the Hui Chinese Muslims, who have been integrated into Sinophone and China’s multicultural community since the third/ninth century, when the first ‘translations’ of the Qur’an in Chinese made by non-Muslims from Japanese and English appeared only in 1927 and 1931, and that by a Muslim from Arabic in 1932? This paper looks at the ways in which the Qur’an is imagined, then embodied, in literary texts authored by two prizewinning Chinese Muslim authors. Huo Da (b. 1945) alludes to the Qur’an in her novel The Muslim’s Funeral (1982), and transforms its teachings into ritual performances of alterity in her saga of a Muslim family at the turn of the twentieth century. Zhang Chengzhi (b. 1948) involves himself in reconstructing the history of the Jahriyya Ṣūfī sect in China between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries in his only historical novel, A History of the Soul (1991), and invents an identity for Chinese Muslims based on direct knowledge of the sacred text and tradition.

Political interrogation in contemporary Chinese fiction

Many factors have played a role in the process of contemporary Chinese fiction. Chinese fiction in the twenty-first century is featured by various thematic concerns of which the political concern stands out. Writers in the new century have diverged from the conventional way to sing along with and speak for the dominant ideology of the reform as many did during Deng Xiaoping’s reign. They have shifted their attention to the shaded side of contemporary China, writing about the disadvantaged/marginalized and reflecting on the social problems that accompany the existing social order. Their voice is harsh, interrogative, but heart-wrenching. This paper will cite the texts by Yan Lianke, Mo Yan and Liu Xinglong to examine how these writers interrogate the leading policies and write up the grassroots rebellion against the orthodox society.

The Boxers in Contemporary Chinese and German Fiction: Mo Yan and Gerhard Seyfried

Germany’s colonial adventures in China have emerged increasingly over the last decade from a century of silence and neglect by historians, and in the wake of this revival the literary potential of this epoch has once more been exploited. Gerhard Seyfried’s novel Gelber Wind oder Der Aufstand der Boxer (Yellow Wind or The Boxer Uprising, 2008) has 640 pages and is exhaustively researched.1 What is claimed on the dust-jacket, that Seyfried’s work is ‘the first great historical epic in German on the Boxer Uprising’, is simply false. In the years immediately following the defeat of the Boxers in the late autumn of 1900 there was a spate of German fiction on this theme, the most popular of which, Elisabeth vonHeyking’s Briefe, die ihn nicht erreichten (Letters That Did Not Reach Him) was reprinted no less than forty-six times after its publication in 1903.2 While Seyfried avoids all mention of these predecessors in his foreword and wholly omits them from the bibliography at the end of the book, I shall argue later that his novel may be read – in part – as imitating this earlier tradition. In 2001 the eminent Chinese novelist Mo Yan, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2012, had already produced a novel of almost equal length entitled Tanxiang xing (The Sandalwood Torture) which is set at the time of the bloody conflicts with Boxers in Shandong Province, focusing on the city of Gaomi.3 In the following I shall examine what guises well-documented events assume in two texts that enjoy all the privileges and freedoms of fiction and the advantages of historical distance, enquiring into the literary enactment of the alien Other. But first some brief preliminary considerations on the genre of historical novels are in order.

Contemporary Chinese Fiction by Su Tong and Yu Hua: Coming of Age in Troubled Times. By Hua Li. Leiden; Boston: Brill, 2011, ix, 227 pp. $123.00 (cloth).

Contemporary Chinese Fiction by Su Tong and Yu Hua: Coming of Age in Troubled Times. By Hua Li. Leiden; Boston: Brill, 2011, ix, 227 pp. $123.00 (cloth).

Ecological awareness in contemporary Chinese literature

If perceived from a thematic perspective, Contemporary Chinese fiction harbors a variety of political dimensions. To subvert the conventions of socialist realism, many works in the 1980s joined to affirm the Party’s reform policies, but writers today seem to be keen on the status quo resulting from the economic reform. The fiction of the new century has fully recovered from the sentimental retrospection and naive, simplistic socialist realism in the decades following the end of the Cultural Revolution. The main characteristic of Chinese fiction in the twenty-first century is its sheer diversity featured by various thematic concerns. Examples of novels can be identified that address issues of globalization, hi-tech, urbanization, marketing economy, internet and poverty and their impact upon the lowly common Chinese such as the disadvantaged rural farmers. This turn to reality gives rise to a burgeoning ecological awareness in Chinese literature. Writers in the new century have diverged from the conventional way to sing along with or speak for the dominant ideology of the economic reform as many did during Deng Xiaoping’s time. They have shifted their attention to the shaded side of contemporary China, writing about the marginalized and reflecting on the social issues that accompany the existing social order. Efforts have been made to explore specific national and regional identities, displaying a reengagement with a realist tradition. It is argued that more and more Chinese, having felt distressed by increasing evidence of environmental deterioration, are now becoming conscious of environmental issues and speaking out about their concerns. This paper then attempts to examine how contemporary Chinese writers contemplate the consequences of China’s explosive capitalist growth and environmental issues in order to fashion their greening dimensions.

Sandalwood Death

A novel five years in the making, Sandalwood Death is a tour de force historical novel set in the tumultuous heights of the Boxer Rebellion at the turn of the twentieth century. Via a set of interlocking narratives centered on the family of the imperial executioner Zhao Jia in Mo Yan's home county of Gao Mi (Shandong Province), Mo Yan chronicles the collision of different strains of Chinese culture and geopolitical pressures that eventually destroyed China's last dynasty. Sandalwood Death is peppered with important historical figures like Yuan Shikai, who nearly succeeded in restoring the dynastic system in China (as self-appointed emperor) in 1915, and the “six gentleman of the 100 days' reform,” who were condemned to death by the Empress Dowager. Even in the context of contemporary Chinese fiction's penchant for violence, Mo Yan's methodical dissection of China's body politic stands out for its lovingly detailed prose bristling with his characteristic blend of folk idioms and magical realism. The narrative culminates in a striking meditation on violence, power, pain, and the philosophical and spiritual dimensions of our bodies as both the site of subjectivity and social values. In Howard Goldblatt's expert hands, Sandalwood Death reveals itself to be a leading contender in Chinese and world literature and true descendent of Lu Xun's “Diary of a Madman.”

The Aesthetics of Linguistic Divergence: Defamiliarization in Contemporary Chinese Avant-Garde Fiction

ABSTRACT This article explores how Chinese avant-garde writers, Yu Hua in particular, use style as deviation as an effective postmodernist language medium to achieve a new defamiliarizing blasphemy against the established norm and to combat the accepted notion of secular reality by attempting to confine them to the sheer verbal surface of a text. The avant-garde pursuit of stylistic eccentricity, along with the transcendent nature of language, endows these writers with an amazing linguistic irony or capacity to both subvert the mainstream world and to estrange the familiar with creative deformation.