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Abstract
This article traces recent formulations and implementations of cultural policy in the People’s Republic of China, with emphasis on the regulation of literature. The analysis interrogates the quality criteria for creative production introduced in Xi Jinping’s 2014 speech at a forum for writers and artists, some of which are shown to be of pre-modernist European origin. It then looks at how these concepts are adopted by policy makers, cultural organizations, and the publishing trade, often in awkward juxtaposition with community-specific aesthetic values and markers of excellence.
Acknowledgments
I am grateful to James Luk and Jingyao Shan for their research assistance, and to Maria Repnikova for detailed comments on an earlier draft.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1 Bonnie S. McDougall, Mao Zedong’s “Talks at the Yan’an Conference on Literature and Art”: A Translation of the 1943 Text with Commentary (Ann Arbor: Center for Chinese Studies; University of Michigan, 1980), 61.
2 Rudolf G. Wagner, Inside a Service Trade: Studies in Contemporary Chinese Prose (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 1992).
3 Barbara Mittler, A Continuous Revolution: Making Sense of Cultural Revolution Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2012).
4 Howard Goldblatt, ed., Chinese Literature for the 1980s: The Fourth Congress of Writers and Artists (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1982), 13–14. Emphasis added.
5 Wang Wensheng, “Zhen shan mei – wenyi piping de biaozhun” (Truth, Goodness, and Beauty: The Standards of Literary Criticism), Wenyi yanjiu, no. 2 (1980): 30. Image reproduced by courtesy of the editors of Wenyi yanjiu.
6 For a description of this “socialist literary system” as it functioned in the 1980s, see Perry Link, The Uses of Literature: Life in the Socialist Chinese Literary System (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000). For a theoretical discussion of “fear” as an element of censorship, see Margaret E. Roberts, Censored: Distraction and Diversion Inside China’s Great Firewall (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2018), 44–55.
7 Richard Curt Kraus, The Party and the Arty in China: The New Politics of Culture (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2004), 37–72.
8 Shuyu Kong, Consuming Literature: Best Sellers and the Commercialization of Literary Production in Contemporary China (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005).
9 Geremie Barmé, In the Red: On Contemporary Chinese Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 179–200.
10 For a general overview of the development of Internet literature in China prior to the Xi Jinping era, see Michel Hockx, Internet Literature in China (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015).
11 Maria Repnikova, Media Politics in China: Improvising Power under Authoritarianism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 211.
12 Amy Hawkins and Jeffrey Wasserstrom, “Why ‘1984’ and ‘Animal Farm’ Aren’t Banned in China,” The Atlantic, https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/01/why-1984-and-animal-farm-arent-banned-china/580156/ (accessed January 14, 2019).
13 Xi Jinping did address the 2016 assembly as well, giving another lengthy speech in which he aimed to further solidify his moral-political framework for cultural production.
14 For this paper, I used the official publication of the full text of the speech that was posted on the Xinhua website on October 14, 2015. See http://www.xinhuanet.com/politics/2015-10/14/c_1116825558.htm. Quotes from this text are all in my translation, and will not be referenced separately. A report on the original meeting, held on October 15, 2014, can be found here: http://culture.people.com.cn/n/2014/1015/c22219-25842812.html. The report contains lengthy excerpts and paraphrases from the speech but not the full text. Please note that archival copies of all URLs cited in these notes are available through the Internet Archive Wayback Machine.
15 It is worth highlighting that Xi Jinping has a general tendency to recycle early reform-era slogans, such as “socialism with Chinese characteristics.”
16 The full list of names and titles mentioned by Xi Jinping, all in one long paragraph, is as follows: (Ancient Greece) Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes; (Russia) Pushkin, Gogol, Lermontov, Turgenev, Dostoyevsky, Nekrasov, Chernyshevsky, Tolstoy, Chekhov, Gorki, Sholokov, Tchaikovsky, Rimsky-Korsakov, Rachmaninov, Repin; (France) Rabelais, La Fontaine, Molière, Stendhal, Balzac, Hugo, Dumas Sr, Dumas Jr, Maupassant, Romain Rolland, Sartre, Camus, Millet, Manet, Degas, Cézanne, Monet, Rodin, Berlioz, Bizet, Debussy; (Britain) Chaucer, Milton, Byron, Shelley, Keats, Dickens, Hardy, Shaw, Turner; (Germany) Lessing, Goethe, Schiller, Heine, Bach, Beethoven, Schumann, Wagner, Brahms; (USA) Hawthorne, Longfellow, Beecher Stowe, Whitman, Mark Twain, Dreiser, Jack London, Hemingway; (India) the Rigveda, the Atharvaveda, the Samaveda, the Yajurveda, and Tagore; (China) Laozi, Confucius, Zhuangzi, Mencius, Qu Yuan, Wang Xizhi, Li Bai, Du Fu, Su Shi, Xin Qiji, Guan Hanqing, Cao Xueqin, Lu Xun, Guo Moruo, Mao Dun, Ba Jin, Lao She, Cao Yu, Nie Er, Xian Xinghai, Mei Lanfang, Qi Baishi, Xu Beihong, the Book of Odes, the Songs of the South, the rhapsodies (fu) of the Han dynasty, the verse (shi) of the Tang, the lyrics (ci) of the Song, the ballads (qu) of the Yuan, the novels of the Ming and Qing, the Kesar Epic, the Epic of Manas, the Epic of Jangar.
17 This term was famously used by Stalin to describe the work of writers and artists.
18 This is a quote from the seventeenth-century poet Li Yu (1610–1680).
19 Goldblatt, Chinese Literature for the 1980s, 11.
20 John Levi Martin, “The Birth of the True, The Good, and The Beautiful: Toward an Investigation of the Structures of Social Thought,” in Reconstructing Social Theory, History and Practice, ed. Harry F. Dahms and Eric R. Lybeck (Bingley: Emerald Group Publishing Limited, 2016), 43.
21 The term shehuizhuyi hexin jiazhiguan sometimes gets translated as “core socialist values” rather than “socialist core values.” However, as Xi Jinping himself explains in the speech, he considers “core values” to be one concept. He states that whereas people elsewhere might have other core values, he wants the Chinese people to have socialist core values. So it is not about a set of socialist values of which he only promotes the core, but it is about a core value system that he describes as socialist.
22 See “China’s Patriotic Hip-Hop Quickly Gains Steam as Rappers Repent Past Deviations,” Global Times, https://www.globaltimes.cn/content/1083843.shtml (accessed March 1, 2020).
23 For Qidian, see Shih-chen Chao, “The Re-Institutionalisation of Popular Fiction – the Internet and a New Model of Popular Fiction Prosumption in China,” Journal of the British Association for Chinese Studies 3 (2013): 1–38. For online romance fiction communities, see Jin Feng, Romancing the Internet: Producing and Consuming Chinese Web Romance (Leiden: Brill, 2013). For transgressive aspects and attempts at state control prior to the Xi Jinping era, see Hockx, Internet Literature in China, 110–20.
24 Katrien Jacobs, in her study of pornography in contemporary China, has noted how the authorities respond paradoxically to this type of cultural product “by denouncing pleasure industries while cultivating them as an area of capitalist expansion.” Katrien Jacobs, People’s Pornography: Sex and Surveillance on the Chinese Internet (Bristol: Intellect Books, 2011), 11.
25 See Serafina Aquilino, “Walking into the Literary Field? The Interaction between China’s Official and Online Literary Scene” (PhD dissertation, SOAS University of London, 2017).
26 Accessed March 28, 2019, https://culture.ifeng.com/c/7gH8lGLxv3g . Statistics in the following paragraphs are all found at this URL unless otherwise noted.
27 As I am writing this, in September 2021, the CCP Publicity Department and the National Radio and Television Administration (NRTA) just published a swath of new guidelines and rules to curb what are considered “immoral” trends in cultural programmes (wenyi jiemu) broadcast by (online) Chinese media. The NRTA announcement specifically calls for a ban on certain types of talent shows and reality TV programmes. There is also ongoing pressure on the media to promote conservative gender roles and combat the popularity of supposedly “effeminate” male characters. For the full text of the NRTA announcement, see http://www.nrta.gov.cn/art/2021/9/2/art_113_57756.html (accessed September 3, 2021).
28 Accessed February 7, 2020, http://www.chinawriter.com.cn/n1/2020/0120/c404027-31556582.html.
29 See “Guanyu yinfa ‘Guanyu tuidong wangluo wenxue jiankang fazhan de zhidao yijian’ de tongzhi” (Announcement about the Publication of “Guideline Opinions for the Healthy Development of Internet Literature”), http://www.gapp.gov.cn/news/1663/236795.shtml.
30 Ibid. The term “positive energy” was coined by the British popular psychologist Richard Wiseman and is used often by Xi Jinping and his speech writers to promote patriotic optimism.
31 Accessed February 7, 2020, http://www.chinawriter.com.cn/n1/2016/0719/c404023-28566837.html.
32 Ibid.
33 A similar initiative was described by the National Press and Publication Administration (NPPA), which is now a subsidiary of the CCP Publicity Department, on their website in August 2021. They announced a list of nine online novels with “realistic and historical topics” that they considered the best of 2020. See http://www.nppa.gov.cn/nppa/contents/279/98462.shtml, (accessed September 7, 2021).
34 See the first jury report on http://www.chinawriter.com.cn/n1/2018/0517/c403993-29997234.html (accessed September 7, 2021).
35 Accessed February 14, 2020, http://www.chinawriter.com.cn/ . It should be pointed out, however, that one day later, on February 15, the same web page featured a big headline citing Xi Jinping’s latest pronouncement on the virus crisis. The February 15 version of the page was captured that day by the Internet Archive Wayback Machine. See http://web.archive.org/web/20200215233226/http://www.chinawriter.com.cn/ . The February 14 front page has not been archived.
36 “Wangluo wenxue zhuanxiang zhengzhi xingdong quanguo zhankai” (Nationwide Operation for Targeted Correction of Online Literature Unfolds), http://www.xinhuanet.com/culture/2018-06/24/c_1123026769.htm (accessed August 29, 2018). I am grateful to Shuangshuang Cai for providing me with the link to this information.
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Michel Hockx
Michel Hockx is a professor of Chinese literature in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures and the Director of the Liu Institute for Asia and Asian Studies in the Keough School of Global Affairs at the University of Notre Dame. He has published widely, both in English and in Chinese, on topics related to modern Chinese literary culture, especially early modern Chinese magazine literature and print culture and contemporary Internet literature. His latest book, Internet Literature in China, was listed by Choice magazine as one of the “Top 25 Outstanding Academic Titles of 2015.” His ongoing research focuses on censorship and cultural policy in China from the early twentieth century to the present, as well as on the perception of Chinese censorship in Euro-American culture.