‘The Big Red Book of Modern Chinese Literature,’ Edited by Yunte Huang

In 1906, while studying medicine in Japan, a young Chinese man called Zhou Shuren was shown a slide depicting a scene from the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-5, which was partly fought on Chinese territory. It showed a crowd of Chinese watching while one of their compatriots was beheaded by the Japanese, accused of being a Russian spy. “They were all strong fellows but appeared completely apathetic,” Zhou recalled. “After this film I felt that medical science was not so important after all. The people of a weak and backward country, however strong and healthy they may be, can only serve to be made examples of, or to witness such futile spectacles. . . . The most important thing, therefore, was to change their spirit, and since at that time I felt that literature was the best means to this end, I determined to promote a literary movement.”

Soon after this Damascene moment — one of the most celebrated conversions in 20th-century Chinese culture — Zhou began his career as the self-appointed literary doctor of China’s spiritual ills. Across the next three decades, under the pen name Lu Xun, he became one of the founding figures of modern Chinese literature.

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Lu Xun’s publicly enunciated motives for becoming a writer have subsequently been seen as emblematic of modern Chinese literature’s obsession with politics. Like many critics before him, Yunte Huang, a professor of English at the University of California, Santa Barbara, also defines this literature as an overwhelmingly political phenomenon. It is, he explains in his introduction to this new collection of 20th-century writing from mainland China, a story that carries “the historical weight of a nation,” an expression of these writers’ crisis-ridden sense of China as a country “on the brink of ­annihilation.”

There is something to be said for this reading; indeed, it dominated academic study until the early 1990s. But the equation of modern Chinese literature with politics is also something of a ­straitjacket. Since at least the Cold War, the stain of ideology has adversely affected its perception in the West, where nonspecialist reviewers and readers have often characterized 20th-century Chinese writing as preoccupied with didactic political messages, to the exclusion of stylistic or psychological complexity. Like literature everywhere, however, that of modern China expresses a confounding mix of history, humanism and aesthetics; it has always done far more than reflect its political context. And although this worthwhile anthology asserts the primacy of the political story, it also allows alternative literary visions to glimmer through.

Drawing on the work of numerous translators, “The Big Red Book of Modern Chinese Literature” is divided into three parts, devoted to the Republican Era (1911-49), the Revolutionary Era (1949-76) and the Post-Mao Era (1976 to the present). The first section ­anthologizes, among others, the authors of the first half of the 20th century who form the “patriotic canon” of modern Chinese writers (Lu Xun, Mao Dun, Ba Jin). Associated with the New Culture Movement of the 1910s and 1920s (which, alongside other aims, sought to create a serious literature in vernacular Chinese that would forge a vigorous national consciousness), their writing denounced the poverty, injustice and political chaos that afflicted the country from the late 19th century onward. The anthology’s second section showcases a handful of “revolutionary” works, including a model opera, a peasant writer’s short story and Mao’s own unabashedly classical poetry. The third section can be read as a creative reaction against the strictures of the Mao era, and of the Cultural Revolution in particular. Here we encounter the return of ambiguity and nuance in the poetic language of Bei Dao; Mo Yan’s ­taboo-busting fiction, packed with sex and gore; and the linguistic playfulness of Ma Yuan and Che Qianzi.

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