November 2024

These graphics are based on research by Lydia Wong, Eric Yan-ho Lai, Charlotte Yeung, and Thomas Kellogg.

This year, I returned to a Beijing I hardly recognized. It was not the capital I first glimpsed as a child in the 1980s, when groups of men in thin jackets stood smoking in the cold, and tides of cyclists seemed ready to carry me away. Nor was it the city of the 1990s, when the muzak of Kenny G poured out of the loudspeakers of Tiananmen Square, or the Beijing of Hu Jintao, when frat boys drank themselves into oblivion under the green skies of Sanlitun, while in hotel ballrooms Western professors conducted seminars on the rule of law. The old poor of the city appear to have been swept out of the picture, and the blaring engines of aproned motor bikers are softened by the silence of Teslas and BYDs. When I approached the Great Hall of the People this time, a guard smiled in a way that faintly suggested: Why do you bother coming here anymore?

Hurtling down the Third Ring Road in her Chevrolet Cruze, the Beijing playwright Si’an Chen told me about the latest tolls on literary life in China. “Traditional publishing platforms have become ineffective and some in-depth media has been shut down,” she said. “There are not that many real readers left.” Earlier this year, a play of hers was not permitted to open. The theater speculated that it was related to the pandemic elements in the story. “It’s a game where they never explicitly tell you what is off-limits, but you figure out where the line is,” she said. “At first we did really well in the pandemic. Now the pandemic didn’t really happen.” We stopped to buy a bottle of douzhi, the fermented mung bean drink, and I asked her why she stayed in Beijing despite offers from abroad. “Writing in Chinese and living on this land, experiencing all the good and bad that happens, is what my art is about.”

There used to be a time when Chinese writers, if asked about foreign literature, would say a few nice words about William Faulkner.

When I met the writers Zhang Yueran and Shuang Xuetao for dinner in Beijing, tall mounds of Yunnanese delicacies between us, the sense of China’s connection with international literary currents was unmistakable. They spoke of Clarice Lispector, John Cheever, Sally Rooney, Ben Lerner, Javier Marías, and J.M. Coetzee with easy familiarity. Traces of Roberto Bolaño in Zhang’s story “Speedwell” show that Chinese fusion often bypasses the Anglosphere altogether. Much of the consumption of literature in contemporary China happens on the phone, where books are discussed on the platform Douban and serial novels are produced at a staggering rate. It’s a literary world that seems at once incredibly vast and incredibly small. Yueran contacted each Chinese writer I mentioned in seconds on WeChat while we spoke, and wrote down the contacts of the writers I still needed to read.

The most thrilling development in Chinese fiction has come out of Dongbei, in the northeast. The leading writer of the scene, Shuang, told me how his love of writing was born out of trying to capture the down-and-out characters spit out by his deindustrializing hometown, Shenyang. He’s particularly attracted to losers, who are, in some sense, the heart of modern Chinese literature, which is filled with failed exam-takers, unconvinced revolutionaries, disenchanted bureaucrats, disgraced husbands, bereft women, unlucky gangsters, wistful repairmen, and utterly routed ne’er-do-wells. From Lu Xun’s stubborn rogue Ah Q, who thrives off his own humiliations, to Qian Zhongshu’s fake-diploma-bearing Fang Hung-chien, to the wife-beating gambler-turned-mourning pauper Fugui in Yu Hua’s To Live, the 20th-century Chinese canon presents a sharp contrast to the plucky red-cheeked heroes of China’s blockbuster films and television serials. The figures of Chinese fiction not only brim with resentments, but they take their revenge out on the language itself, disfiguring it and remaking it with their corrosive dialogue. They mock themselves along with their enemies, in some kind of grim acknowledgment that mutual degradation is the way of the world.

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If ever a nation was forged by literary writers, it was the People’s Republic of China. In the years following 1911, a band of Chinese literati determined that the country required a complete overhaul of its culture. The Xinhai Revolution, they believed, had foundered because it put too much trust in an abstract constitution and arid declarations of rights. It did not reach deep enough into the lives of ordinary people. Centered around the magazine New Youth, a set of young critics made demands that seemed at first peripheral to the main action of the warlord era: the use of vernacular Chinese, rights for women, a critical examination of Confucianism, the banishment of superstition, and the consecration of science. In short stories, poetry, and novels, the writers described a future in which peasants could read and hierarchies were unwound. They imagined putting patriarchs and landlords against the wall. In a few years’ time, many of them would be.

Not even the Soviet Union, where Stalin burned nights editing poets, could boast of such a focus on literature. The founders of the Chinese Communist Party, many of them trained literary scholars, included Chen Duxiu, the editor of New Youth; Li Dazhao, a librarian; and Mao Dun, a novelist and chronicler of Shanghai society.

Mao Zedong, no mean poet himself, proclaimed that writers in the Communist country of the future should serve the people. “The thoughts and feelings of our writers and artists should be fused with those of the masses of workers, peasants, and soldiers,” he insisted in his famous speech at Yan’an in the middle of the Chinese Civil War. “To achieve this fusion, they should conscientiously learn the language of the masses.” But as a pared-down literary style was encouraged in the 1940s, political guidelines also tightened the scope of Chinese literature. Great writers such as Eileen Chang left the country. Qian Zhongshu—China’s Evelyn Waugh—was tasked with editing Mao’s collected works until he was dispatched to work as a janitor during the Cultural Revolution. As literacy skyrocketed, Western literature became hard to come by. There were only eight novels a year published between 1949 and 1966, and that figure fell lower in the decade 1966-1976. China became a people of the book, Mao’s little red one.

The calibrated opening of China’s markets in the 1970s under Deng Xiaoping was also an opening for foreign literature. One of the repeated scenes in Chinese novels and stories of the period is writers gloating over their fresh access to this bounty. Printers in China pumped out cheap versions of whatever they wished, and carpets of foreign literature lined streets in Beijing (Chinese editors like to tell the story of how the country’s joining of the Universal Copyright Convention in 1992 was precipitated by Gabriel García Márquez’s horror at finding how many pirated copies of One Hundred Years of Solitude were for sale). In The King of Trees (1985), Ah Cheng delivered a satire of the literary-discovery scene in which a sent-down intellectual lugs around a precious chest of books that turns out to contain the collected works of Mao that he’s held on to for sentimental reasons.

Having officially declared the Cultural Revolution a catastrophe, Deng at first did nothing to block the rise of the “Scar” literature that appeared in the late 1970s. The movement took its name from Lu Xinhua’s short story “The Scar” (1978), which was written in a single night and posted on a door at Fudan University. It told of a young woman who renounces her petit-bourgeois mother, leaves home for nine years during the Cultural Revolution, and returns only to find her mother is dead. For some Western critics, like Perry Link, Scar literature never ran hard enough against Maoist excess, with the lone exception of the Taiwanese writer Chen Ruoxi. But the next generation of Chinese writers were less keen to participate in try-outs to be the next Solzhenitsyn. Western liberal demands to be on the right side of history smacked too much of the old Maoist drives for purity. Scar literature, with its repetitive, flat-footed tales of tragedy and hardship, rarely rose to the level of literature. Yu Hua once said he first started writing fiction out of his loathing for it.

The “Roots-Seeking Literature” of the 1980s was something else entirely. It grew out of concerns expressed by Han Shaogong and Ah Cheng that a degree of nihilism had crept into Chinese culture. In its incessant drive to modernize along or against Western lines, they believed both the May 4th movement and the Cultural Revolution had lost sight of the riches of China’s regional cultures. Lu Xun once counseled Chinese writers to only read foreign books—and through the process of “hard translation” even to import foreign grammar—but now the time had come for the opposite: to self-isolate from Western literature. Writers like Mo Yan and Jia Pingwa scavenged older peasant traditions, local lore and knowledge, even old recipes, which had been run roughshod in China’s pulverizing race to industrialize. They took some pride in being difficult to translate into English. The Western canon could not be dismissed completely, but it could be manipulated. While working on a state farm without electricity on the Laotian border during the Cultural Revolution, Ah Cheng recited the story of Anna Karenina, refitting it with Chinese characters and customs for his listeners.

In 2014, Xi Jinping reprised Mao’s Yan’an Talks with a speech about the place of literature in Chinese society. “Our country’s writers and artists should become the prophets, pathfinders, and heralds of the mood of the age,” he declared, and “inspire the people of all ethnicities in the entire country to become full of vigor and vitality and march towards the future.” But the stakes were nowhere near as high as in 1942. Like elsewhere in the world, literature in China—once more central to its culture than anywhere else—has become a niche industry indistinguishable from others. This is not necessarily a bad thing. For decades, Western publishers have treated Chinese literature like a koi pond from which to pluck Chinese Havels and Kunderas. Yet when relieved of domestic pressure to speak for the people, and foreign pressure to be paragons of dissidence, Chinese fiction and poetry enters a much more fertile terrain. Despite increasing censorship under Xi, much of the literature of China still breathes easier today. More fully connected to the outside world on its own terms, it no longer seems as burdened to unfurl local color or stories whose shape we already know.

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At a time when China has become a unifying specter of menace for Western governments, it has become a virtual requirement for foreign policy experts in the American and British governments to publish tracts against China. With titles like The Long Game: China’s Grand Strategy to Displace American Order, the argument they lay out is simple: China wishes to rid the world of democracy and to impose an authoritarian form of governance. Yet the projection says more about the West, and America in particular, than it does about China. The blunt fact remains: Of all of the major powers in the world today, China was the first to withdraw its world-historical ambitions from the geopolitical scene. Already in the 1970s, Mao was determined to cool down Communist networks which sought to spread peasant revolution in his name to Africa and Asia and beyond. In 1971, Mao’s right-hand man, Zhou Enlai, went so far as to offer weapons to help put down a Maoist uprising in Sri Lanka. Later in the decade, the country was humiliated when it fought Vietnam in an attempt to back Pol Pot’s regime in Cambodia. China, in other words, was already done exporting utopia two decades before the Soviet Union disbanded. That leaves the U.S. today as the last great power whose leaders still think, though perhaps with less certainty than before, that their system is the one to which the rest of humanity should aspire.

In the 1990s, it was still possible to think that the elites of China, the U.S., Russia, and Europe were in the process of stabilizing the world order at the expense of their working-class populations. The so-called “war on terror” was the pinnacle of coordination in which each of these powers pursued punishing—and mutually endorsed—campaigns against Muslim populations in particular: the U.S. and Europe in the Middle East and Africa; Russia in Chechnya; China in Xinjiang. As the promise of globalization splintered national populations, and popular revolts developed against the cosmopolitan mutual enrichment program, new forces and old demons came to the fore. In Chongqing, a charismatic People’s Republic of China (PRC) bureaucrat, Bo Xilai, saw an opportunity to channel frustrations into a kind of neo-populist, retro-Maoist political theater that challenged the prevailing Western-oriented consensus in Beijing. Bo was brought down, but Xi appears to have learned something from this episode. In Xi’s time in power, the Party has been less willing to tolerate rampant inequality as the price of prosperity and more willing to exercise repression in the service of ideological values. With an eye to how the Soviet Union broke down, the Party has struck back against the business class; purged corrupt officials on an enormous scale; reined in control of the press; and shut down the English tutoring industry, itself an engine of inequality.

While Washington congratulated itself on the biggest climate investment in American history—$369 billion over a 10-year period—China, in 2022 alone, invested $546 billion. Its status as the leader of the “green transition” can no longer be questioned, though its record in extractive zones certainly can be. In foreign policy, meanwhile, Beijing strives to retain room to maneuver. It backs Russia just enough for it to make advances in Ukraine, while worrying that the U.S. and NATO are using the theater as a rehearsal for China’s own encirclement. About the massacre of Palestinians, Beijing has spoken of armed struggle as a “legitimate” response to the oppressor, while doing a brisk trade in spyware with Israel. In many ways, the lack of ideology in China’s relations abroad allows it to concentrate on ideology at home, where the ideals of socialism, though sometimes strayed from and often contradicted by policy, nevertheless remain real.

In Shanghai, some of the tensions of Xi’s China were on display. The city is recovering its status as an international mecca. Inhabitants include everyone from Dilma Rousseff to Nick Land to Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s son, Yermolai, who works for McKinsey. In a mansion in the French Concession, I visited one of China’s so-called “Red capitalists,” a media mogul with close connections to the government, who regularly defends the PRC in the Western press. Cultural Revolution slogans were scrawled on the outside wall, and peacocks roamed the garden. The Red tycoon greeted me with a merry sense of supremacy. “What will your American oligarchy do if the populists take the White House again?” he asked. “You know it’s bad for you when the Chinese students going to America become more pro-Chinese after their time there!” The quips kept coming. “At the age Barack Obama was writing The Audacity of Hope, Xi was writing a treatise on forest management! Who got the better deal?”

The next day, I visited the local Writers’ Association, housed in another mansion nearby. Down one hallway the staff of the youth literary magazine Mengya were busying themselves giddily with their new issue, while down another, reclined, chain-smoking, and admirably strung out, the editors of Harvest, China’s hallowed literary quarterly, gazed into the void. Later, I walked down the Bund with the Shanghai writer Yun Sheng. We visited a series of Shanghai bookshops. “This one is a temple to our version of Instagram,” she told me in a giant cavernous shop, where many of the books lined unreachable shelves. I entered a room full of red and white covers. “You’re in the Party literature section, and over there, that’s the Henry Kissinger section.” “If we dress up the Chinese issue of Granta as a Party pamphlet, what are the chances they stock it here?” I asked. “Don’t count on it,” she said.

Every morning, I crossed a stretch of railway tracks on the way to my school. The tracks lay less than a hundred meters from the school gate, and a train often appeared in the late afternoon just as we were discharged. Sometimes it was a freight train piled high with lumber or coal. It would be gliding along, clink clank, clink clank, at low speed because it was getting near its destination. Not far beyond the road bend was a timber mill and a coal plant, where logs and the coal would be unloaded for processing and distribution. There was also a brick factory near the river. Some of my classmates’ parents worked in those plants.