China Perspective Issues
Sebastian Veg
Eliminating Disharmony: Recent Examples of Censorship in Chinese Writing and Cinema
This article examines contradictory recent trends in the Chinese censorship system regarding literature and cinema. While measures targeting the publishers of "eight banned books" in January 2007 demonstrated a preoccupation with the representation of history, fiction writing with political implications (Yan Lianke, Tsering Woeser) also remains sensitive. Independent cinema has recently been attempting to enter the official circuit, prompting the Film Bureau to accept a form of dialogue and negotiation with film directors. Nonetheless, the Bureau's continued preoccupation with a non-conflictual representation of society betrays the government's persisting tendency to assess films in terms of their political effects.
From Documentary to Fiction and Back: Reality and Contingency in Wang Bing's and Jia Zhangke's films
The generation of "independent" Chinese directors has repeatedly crossed and displaced the borders between fiction and documentary film in their works. While originally linked to practical constraints, this trend has developed into a full-fledged aesthetic programme in the works of Wang Bing and Jia Zhangke. Both directors document the demise of the world of China's state-owned industries and its impact in terms of livelihoods and social ideals, highlighting the subjective dimension of its dystopic significance. Finally, this article argues that both directors seek to define an aesthetics of contingency, commensurate both with the historical processes they document, and the absurdity felt by individuals who have no control over them.
Tibet, Nationalism, and Modernity: Two Chinese Contributions
Building a Public Consciousness: A Conversation with Jia Zhangke
This text is transcribed from the recording of a panel discussion organised on 13 April 2009 by the Hong Kong International Film Festival and the French Centre for Research on Contemporary China, as part of the symposium “Between public and private : A space for independent Chinese cinema.” Jia Zhangke’s answers to two additional audience questions have been inserted into the discussion where they seemed most relevant.
Opening Public Spaces
Editorial
Zhu Wen, I Love Dollars and other Stories of China, trans. With a foreword by Julia Lovell, New York, Columbia University Press, 2007, 228 pp
Utopian Fiction and Critical Examination:The Cultural Revolution in Wang Xiaobo's "The Golden Age"
The first novella in Wang Xiaobo's Trilogy of the Ages has in recent years become a genuine cult-work, in particular among Chinese students. The popularity of a text that links the sending-down of "educated youths" to the country with a golden age of sexual liberation in nature can certainly be explained in part by its scandalous aspects. However, it also conceals a sharply ironic discourse directed against the agrarian utopia of Maoism, which is associated with a regression to animal existence. From this perspective, Wang Xiaobo appears as an advocate of critical reflection, encouraging intellectuals to renounce political utopias and engage with society. His often polemical tone, when he refuses to regard past suffering as sacred, has in this way opened a precious space for discussion of the Cultural Revolution, a space that has so far proved elusive outside the area of fiction.
Chinese Intellectuals and the Problem of Xinjiang
The Subversive “Pleasure of Thinking"
Wang Xiaobo. Wang in Love and Bondage. Translated and with an introduction by Hongling Zhang and Jason Sommer. Albany: SUNY Press, 2007, 155 pp.
Cultural heritage in Hong Hong, the rise of activism and the contradictions of identity
Hong Kong by night: Prostitution and cinema in herman Yau's Whispers and Moans
Propaganda and Pastiche:Visions of Mao in Founding of a Republic, Beginning of the Great Revival, and Let the Bullets Fly
ABSTRACT: The two Mao films of 2009 and 2011 set a new standard in the confluence of commercial and propaganda productions in terms of sheer scale. While they are not fundamentally new in repackaging propaganda as entertainment, or even in co-opting parodic elements within official discourse, this essay argues that, viewed against the background of recent policy speeches, they contribute to defining the new “mainstream socialist culture” set out as a cultural policy goal by Hu Jintao. By the same thrust, they redefine the figure of Mao and the role of the CCP in an attempt to stake out a popular consensus on the contemporary Chinese polity.
KEYWORDS: Mao Zedong, red culture, propaganda, “Mainstream socialist culture”, cultural policy, main melody (zhuxuanlü), Hu Jintao.
Editorial 2012/2
Yan Lianke, Le Rêve du Village des Ding
Lucien Bianco, Les Origines de la révolution chinoise 1915-1949
Editorial
On the Margins of Modernity: A Comparative Study of Gao Xingjian and Ōe Kenzaburō
Gao Xingjian and Ōe Kenzaburō share an interest in margins that was the basis for a conversation between them in 2006. A closer comparison of Gao Xingjian’s Soul Mountain( Lingshan, 1982-1989) and Ōe Kenzaburō’s The Silent Cry ( Man’en gannen no futtobōru, 1967) also reveals a shared distrust of modernity, and a more precise preference for the margins of local culture. This cultural critique of modernity can be documented in their essays. However, although their respective doubts about modernity and central culture translate into similar formulations of an individual ethics, Ōe does not share Gao’s vision of a detached writer of “cold literature,” but rather continues to explore the political implications of his ethical stance. It is argued that their respective definitions of literature can be viewed as explorations of an alternative form of modernity.
Surviving Civilization: Rereading the History of Taiwan and Modernity
The novel Yu sheng 餘生by Wu He 舞鶴(Dancing Crane, the pen-name used by Ch’en Kuo-ch’eng 陳國城), first published in 1999 in Taiwan, has become something of a literary myth in certain circles, the work of a writer showered with prizes in the 1990s after re-emerging from ten years of reclusion in Tamsui. Born in Chiayi in 1951, Wu He lost his mother at 18 and began studying engineering at Cheng Kung University before transferring to the Chinese department in 1973. He was revealed to the literary scene with the publication of his first novella “Peony Autumn” (Mudan qiu 牡丹秋, included in the collection Sadness/Beishang 悲傷). He then became strongly involved in the literary journals associated with the Taiwanese “modernist” movement, in particular the “Avant-garde” series (Qianwei congkan). After having belatedly served out his military duties in 1979-1981, he lived in reclusion during his “ten years in Tamsui,” during which he wrote several other novellas, including “The Two Deserters” (Taobing er ge 逃兵二哥; also included in Sadness ), which were only published after his “return to the world.” When he moved back to the south of Taiwan in 1991, he notes that he seriously considered a final retreat to a Buddhist monastery before deciding that he could not renounce literature.
David Pollard, The True Story of Lu Xun
Zhang Yinde, Le Monde romanesque chinois au XXe siècleModernités et identités
New Readings of Lu Xun: Critic of modernity and re-inventor of heterodoxy
Editorial
Creating a Literary Space to Debate the Mao Era: The fictionalisation of the Great Leap Forward in Yan Lianke’s Four Books
ABSTRACT: Since the scar literature of the early 1980s, fiction and fictionalised autobiography have played an important role in bringing to light the mass violence of the Cultural Revolution. However, these texts remained within a well-defined framework in which the political system itself was not questioned. Over the last decade, by contrast, the Chinese literary field has focused more specifically on the 1950s, with works such as Yang Xianhui’s Chronicles of Jiabiangou (Tianjin, 2002), and Yang Jisheng’s Tombstone (Hong Kong, 2008). This paper focuses on Yan Lianke’s Four Books (Hong Kong, 2010), a full-fledged fictionalisation in a fantastic mode of the famine of the Great Leap Forward in a village on the Yellow River. Considering literature in the context of theories of the public sphere, it suggests that Yan’s book aims to broaden decisively the discussion on certain previously out-of-bounds aspects of the Mao era, an aim only partially thwarted by its failure to be published within mainland China. Four Books, like Yang Jisheng and Yang Xianhui’s works, thus represents an attempt to call into question the original legitimacy of the PRC polity and to create debate within the Chinese-speaking public sphere on the foundations of the current regime. KEYWORDS: Yan Lianke, Great Leap Forward, famine, memory, history, public sphere, literary space, censorship, fiction.