Chapter Four: Poets, Tradition, and Particularity
I have argued that Chinese intellectuals construct the peasant identity, through a discourse of "peasant consciousness" and "feudalism," to serve as a negative reference for the definition of their own identity as intellectuals. Furthermore, their identification with cosmopolitan and universal values reflects the deep ambivalence of modern intellectuals toward "Chineseness," an ambivalence that impels them to either reject traditional culture-- and its contemporary guise of totalitarian socialism-- or cleanse it of its "earthy" (tu) peasant character. This alienation from a peasant ‘other’, and the resulting construction of a conceptual world radically and consciously divorced from that of the countryside, is itself a response to self-alienation, disillusionment, and the "crisis of belief." Intellectuals searched for values to fill the ideological vacuum of post-Cultural Revolution China by exploring their souls, their "subjectivity," and rejecting the pathological cultural personality dwelling within, which they explained to themselves as an abstracted "peasant consciousness."
While this explanation became a widely held article of faith among Chinese intellectuals, and the core of their identification with universal and cosmopolitan values, it was only one possibility for understanding the newly liberated intellectual self-identity. The process of self-discovery and self-definition in the "thought tide" (sichao) of the 1980s was not limited to theorists and academics, nor was it always iconoclastic and "anti-peasant." This chapter will highlight the complexity surrounding the question of how "intellectuals" define themselves through their relation to traditional culture and "peasants," by expanding the category of intellectual to include artists, and by looking at alternative ways some Chinese thinkers limn the boundaries between their world of values and the world of the Chinese peasant.
It is important to consider artists-- especially writers, and within that group, poets-- not only as a qualification of the tidy portrayal of intellectuals I have thus far presented, but also because Chinese writers played a major role in instigating the tide of "reflection" (fansi) that swept intellectual circles in the post-Mao era. It should not be surprising that the "discovery of humanity" and the "exploration of the self" were expressed in literature even before these themes dominated the fields of history, philosophy, political theory, and the burgeoning discipline of "culturology" (wenhuaxue). Chinese poets of this era, in particular, consider themselves avant-garde, and often stay a progressive step ahead of more "traditional intellectuals" by striking an anti-establishment stance.
This avant-garde identity was certainly true of the group of poets I came to know in Chengdu, who wore their outsider status with pride, and for whom art was not simply produced, but lived. They, too, defined their identity in reference to traditional Chinese culture and life in the countryside, but they tended to identify with tradition rather than against it. Paradoxically, at the same time that they upheld tradition, they saw themselves as iconoclasts: rebels against the state, disdainful critics of intellectualized theories, living examples of free spirit-- but above all, poets. Being a poet meant cultivating an aura of progressiveness, yet carrying on both an ancient tradition and a more modern literary movement that preceded them, a movement of which they were acutely conscious, and one that entangled their own identity with that of Chinese peasants.
Contemporary Chinese literature and peasant "roots"
As Helen Siu (1990:12) points out, Chinese writers since the May Fourth movement frequently have chosen to engage the countryside as a literary theme. Peasants figure prominently in stories written by May Fourth iconoclasts, who were at once ignorant of village life yet filled with outrage by the suffering of the common people. This pattern of patronizing advocacy persisted even as it took on different forms, from the critical realism of the 1920s to the Leftist writers for whom peasants served as revolutionary fodder for their dogmatic tracts. Each of these groups of literary intellectuals used the peasantry as a tool for their broader work of reconstructing Chinese culture in their own image, but, in Siu’s words, "in treating the unawakened population as objects of social engineering and themselves as the providers of that engineering, the intellectuals failed to bridge the distance between themselves and the peasants. (1990:23)." According to Siu, after Liberation, when writers were silenced by the very socialist cause they had championed, they came to identify their own suffering more closely with the
suffering of the peasants, sometimes daring to expose the oppression of the rural populace at the hands of the state. Intellectuals drew even closer to the peasants as both groups were increasingly victimized under Maoist rule, culminating in the Cultural Revolution. The result of this identification-through-victimization, Siu argues, is that
The literary works of the 1980's display a quiet empathy with the peasants. Together with the Yellow River, the peasantry has always symbolized the life force of Chinese culture and society, with which the literate elites have historically claimed affiliation. Today there is an added dimension of compassion, perhaps because the years of exile in the countryside have given writers a more realistic understanding of the peasants. Also, both have been subjected to the abusive power of a state determined to transform them. Out of these experiences arose a bridge between the social and cultural distance separating writer and peasant...(1990:19).
Given Heshang’s attack on the Yellow River as symbolizing all that is wrong with Chinese culture and society, and the discourse of intellectuals castigating the peasant character rather than extolling its "life force," it seems from Siu’s description of Chinese writers’ "quiet empathy" that they must have a very different perspective than either their forbears or their more prosaic and iconoclastic intellectual brethren. Curiously though, the evidence Siu cites for this literary viewpoint so empathetic with the peasants does not quite live up to its billing. In the postscript to his novel The Yellow River Rushes On (Huang he dongliu qu) entitled "What Did I Want to Tell My Readers?," the writer Li Zhun explains that,
In this book I have not written about extended families with four or five generations "under one roof." Instead I have described seven ordinary peasant households... Even as I described their outstanding moral character, I described the burden they inherited from the past-- their backward and ignorant feudal consciousness. It is a spiritual straightjacket, a mesh of heavy ropes that surrounds their bodies. No doubt it is an important reason why our nation has been backwards for so long. (Quoted in Siu, 1990:306).
Later in the same essay, Li affectionately recalls his peasant friends and some of the "characters" he encountered and wrote about:
I like these stories; they all have a bit of the North China "drawl" to them. People call peasants from Henan "drawlers," and what does that signify? I understand it to mean simple, honest, and kindhearted, yet on the other hand quick-witted and cunning-- apparently clumsy on the outside, but having wisdom and a sense of humor inside-- stingy about little things but bold and generous when the real need comes. This must be the personality the Yellow River has given them. (Quoted in Siu, 1990:309).
Li’s empathy with the peasants he came to know was no doubt genuine, and his intent was clearly to write on their behalf. This attitude certainly contrasts with the iconoclasm of May Fourth era writers who "distanced" themselves from peasants, and marks a "bridge" of sorts between the worlds of intellectual and villager, but how far has Li really moved away from the abstraction of peasant consciousness? He reiterates, almost like a mantra, the conventional intellectual viewpoint that the peasants’ "ignorant feudal consciousness" is to blame for China’s national backwardness, and his portrayal of an essentialized peasant personality, while kindly, is a pedestrian expression of the peasant’s "dual nature," just as the concept is constructed in Chinese Marxist theory. Even his assertion that this ‘peasant contrariness’ is "the personality the Yellow River has given them" conjures up the same reifying logic used by Su Xiaokang and Jin Guantao in Heshang to damn the peasants "yellow river mindset" and metaphorically link the uncontrolable fury of the river with the turbulent-- and destructive-- actions of peasants in Chinese history. Li Zhun’s empathy with the peasants seems not to have escaped the conceptual framework that constructs the peasant as the ‘other’ against which new cultural aspirations are defined.
The point is not that Chinese writers, like other intellectuals, "don’t understand" the reality of peasant life, but that they understand what they choose to; in their narratives of peasants, these writers are "seeking roots" (xun gen) of their own identity, abstracting universal values-- whether a vital "life force" or the ubiquitous "simple and honest" lifestyle-- from their construction of the peasant identity as a "source of self." This point does not minimize the real distinction between the empathetic attitude toward peasants held by xun gen writers and the iconoclastic stance toward peasants of many "cultural theorists," but while the answers each group gives to the question of "What are the peasants?" are different, the question they pose--"Who am I?"-- is the same, as is the essentializing way they pose it.
Aesthetics and Poetry
Perhaps the reason some writers in the post-Mao era have constructed peasants more positively than other intellectuals lies less in their experience of being sent-down to the countryside (as Siu suggests), than in their desire to capture a "vital essence," a romantic creativity that set them apart from the (cold) rationality of the modern Chinese intellectual identity. Even as their search for self-discovery and self-expression put them in the mainstream of the 1980s "thought tide," these artists wanted to establish an aesthetic that marked their difference. If one source of difference was to be found in the countryside, another was provided by new Western ideas, for artists could snatch up the Romantic tradition’s critique of rationality just as other intellectuals had appropriated the Enlightenment’s championing of it. The most articulate spokesman for this new Western-inspired aesthetic of "non-rationalism" (fei lixingzhuyi) was the critic Liu Xiaobo. Drawing on Schopenauer, Nietzche, Bergson, Freud and Sartre in his theory of non-rationalism, Liu emphasizes "the evil of the subconscious," (qianyishi de xie’e) and sees the "sexual instinct" and "desire to possess" as the "true power of human nature" that gave rise to civilization itself. (Zhao Jianzhong, 1992:447). Since these instincts cannot be given free run in society, Liu reasons, they must be expressed in art and, especially, in literature:
My views on literature cannot be spoken of in terms of any rationality; the intervention of any rational factors, of necessity, can only to a certain degree damage the aesthetic purity of literature. Thus in China we cannot talk about any formulations that unite feelings and rationality. In the dialogue with traditional culture, then, we must strongly emphasize these kinds of things: "perceptual knowledge (ganxing), non-rationality, instinct, the flesh." (Quoted in Zhao Jianzhong, 1992:447).
Liu Xiaobo’s literary aesthetic is iconoclastic both to traditional culture, and to mainstream intellectuals’ rational sensibilites. To the artists for whom Liu spoke, "perceptual knowledge" or ganxing was in fact "non-rationality," a rejection of the essence (xing) of universal principle (li) in favor of the essence of particular "sense and feeling" (gan). Here the language Liu Xiaobo uses to privilege aesthetic creativity over rational understanding inverts, perhaps unintentionally, the discourse of peasant consciousness, wherein peasants are considered "backward" because they are only endowed with lowly ganxing (perceptual consciousness) and cannot see the world clearly from the "high ground of reason (lixing)," the way enlightened intellectuals can. The inversion is one of valuation; artists did not reject abstraction, but gave it a romantic meaning-- they embraced the very irrational, instinctive, earthy peasant sensuality that was anathema to other intellectuals bent on constructing a rationality-based cultural identity.
In the sweeping critical re-assessment of thought following the protest movement of 1989, many found non-rationalism’s appeal to the ‘dark gods’ of sensuality over the sweet light of reason to be threatening, and politically damaging enough to prompt one critic’s observation that "non-rationalism is both unsuited to Chinese national conditions (guoqing) and harmful to the development of art itself; only the scientific worldview of Marxism can save China." (Quoted in Zhao Jianzhong, 1992: 448). As the vanguard of individual expression, artists and writers in China are no strangers to persecution by the state. But while being an artist was clearly an iconoclastic calling, and artists needed to define their sense of "difference," it is sometimes less clear just which "tradition" they intended to attack, and what they wanted to be different from. As a critic, Liu Xiaobo was constructing a theoretical framework for what some artists were already expressing in their work: freedom of self-expression that took precedence over, indeed rejected outright, the Chinese intellectual tradition of social conscience, of "taking all under heaven as one’s own responsibility" (tianxia wei jiren). The pioneers of this shift from ethics to aesthetics, the vanguard of the cultural vanguard, were the group of poets who wrote what came to be known as "Obscure Poetry" (menglong shi).
The menglong poets included some of the best-known names on the Chinese literary scene in the post-Mao era, including Bei Dao, Gu Cheng, Jiang He, Yang Lian, and Meng Ke. This group not only initiated the "cult of poetry" (Yeh, 1996) in contemporary China, but exerted a considerable influence on the discourse of subjectivity and self-discovery in other intellectual circles, as well. Their cry of "World, I - Do - Not - Believe!" spoke the bitterness and disillusionment of a generation’s suffering and loss of faith during the Cultural Revolution. In the group’s manifesto, published in 1978 in their journal, Today (Jin Tian), the menglong poets inaugurated a creed that spoke to their times:
Today, as the people once again raise their eyes, we can no longer just let a kind of vertical sight come to rest on thousands of years of cultural heritage, but must begin to use a kind of horizontal sight to look around at the horizon. Only in this way can we make ourselves truly understand the value of ourselves, and from this avoid the laughable sense of self-importance or the tragedy of giving ourselves up for lost... The past is past, the future even more distant; for our generation today, there is only today! (Quoted in Li Dong, 1992:418).
Menglong poetry became all the rage in the early 1980s, inspiring young imitators on college campuses and setting off debates in poetry conferences throughout China. (Li Dong, 1992:418-19). The group’s stand drew strong condemnation from some intellectuals who saw "indulgence in individualism" as a "moral betrayal" of the intellectual identity of social conscience (Siu, 1990:2). Despite the controversy, menglong individualism set the cultural pace of the 1980s, and even began to gain a degree of critical acceptance. As early as 1981, the influential aesthetic theorist Sun Zhaoshen wrote that the menglong poets’ "sudden rise" ( a term used to belittle the movement) in fact marked the "sudden rise" of a new principle of aesthetics opposed to "traditional aesthetics" in that the poets "disdain to serve as a vessel for the spirit of the times," and in fact refused to serve society at all. Sun saw the poets’ introspection as a natural and welcome change from the "glorious" and "martial" poetry of the 1950s and 1960s, and he approved of their approach that "does not directly praise life, but rather searches for the mystery of life dissolved in the soul." (Quoted in Li Dong, 1992:422).
For his efforts to defend the creative spirit of the menglong movement, Sun Zhaoshen was himself criticized as a "subjective idealist." This charge, which had real bite in 1981, lost its teeth by the end of the decade, when "subjectivity" became a mainstream intellectual concern, and menglong poetry itself was no longer shocking, but instead was widely admired. The "thought tide" of the 1980s rushed forward with such speed that the once-daring and controversial individualism of the menglong poets was accepted enthusiastically, as in this eulogy by the critic Li Dong:
The menglong poetry group never had an independent, complete self-declaration, no systematic basic theory or methodology. Yet with a bold spirit of openness... they gave their readers enlightenment and identity: poetry is spiritual production, an intense expression of the life force, a natural component of existence; it is a certain moment of shock to the soul, of rising from the limits of experience to the unlimited level of spirit; it is strange and familiar, nagging and pure, comfort for a self-inflicted wound... In short menglong poetry... recovered the characteristic expression of art, emphasizing the hero’s outspoken self-image. (1992:421).
In speaking to the Chinese "soul" and elevating the Chinese "spirit," menglong poetry was a main current in the intellectual discourse of the post-Mao era, but its success and acceptance eroded its avant-garde status. A younger generation of poets, most born after 1960, arose to carry the movement of self-expression to new heights. These twenty-something poets had no real memory of suffering during the Cultural Revolution, although they bore its bitter fruit of disillusionment most heavily, and their individualism was not "comfort for a self-inflicted wound" so much as a howl of nihilistic protest. Proclaiming themselves the "third generation" and their movement "the third poetry wave" (di san shichao), these young poets perhaps came closest to realizing Liu Xiaobo’s non-rationalism and his aesthetic ideal drawing on the "evil of the subconscious." The third generation’s work and, even more importantly, their behavior rekindled the "individualism versus sense of mission (shiming gan)" debate, and their movement became a lightning-rod for intellectuals’ outrage. Li Dong, the same critic who so effusively praised the menglong poets, gives a much harsher assessment of the third generation:
They grew up during the last throes of political strife: sensitive, cunning, naive, cocksure, wanting to never again be deceived by politics, hung up on deep thought, buried in their selfish affairs, dissolute and Bohemian. They forgot the excellent psychology and social consciousness of their ancestors, and developed a movement of alienation with no goal but rebellion, no guiding principle but refusal, no future ideal but to reject present reality. (1992:423)
To Li and other Chinese scholars, the third generation was an affront to the intellectual identity, their individualism was the epitome of "freedom without responsibility" expressing a nihilism that moved poetry from the sober menglong creed of "I Do Not Believe" to a wild-eyed cry of "I Negate Everything."
As the name they chose for themselves suggests, and the reaction they received from their elders confirms, there was an element of generational conflict in the new poetry movement. These different generational experiences can be seen as breaking on the historical watershed of the Cultural Revolution, but the generational analysis can obscure the degree to which the menglong and third generation poets shared common ground. Both groups were fundamentally committed only to individual self-expression; both rejected "social engagement," yet both groups ironically found that their aesthetic stance inescapably drew them into political protest. Poetry and protest have been closely intertwined in contemporary China, from the Democracy Wall movement of 1978 to the protests of 1989. This common ground between the two generations of poets is intentional, since the third generation saw themselves as challenging their predecessors by inheriting and carrying forward a tradition of iconoclastic individualism.
All of the elements of the contemporary literary tradition introduced above influenced the poets of Chengdu that I came to know during my stay there. They were identified as ‘third generation’ poets, but preferred to call themselves "Post- Menglong" poets. They riled at being called "dissidents" and instead wanted to be known as poets whose activism was a natural outgrowth of their "lived aesthetic." They valued individual expression, had long hair and beatnik beards, lived a Bohemian life, and sometimes found their muse in the ‘dark gods’ of drink. Above all, they sought inspiration in traditional culture, in the vitality of the countryside, in the "earthy," the local and the particular. For these poets, Chengdu was not a "provincial anywhere," but an integral part of who they were and how they expressed themselves.
The poetry scene of Chengdu
Chengdu was a hotbed of the poetry movement in the 1980s. One of the most celebrated groups of third generation poets was the "Not-Not" (feifei) movement established in Chengdu in 1986. The group’s manifesto exhibits the third generation’s characteristic valuation of "non-rational" vitality, and their nihilistic mode of self-expression:
Not-Not: a blanket term covering the object, form, contents, methodology, process, way and result of the principles of Pre-cultural Thought. It is also the description of the primordial mien of the universe. Not-Not is not "no."
After deconstructing the relationship between man and objects to their pre-cultural state, there is nothing in this universe that is not Not-Not. Not-Not is not the negation of anything. It is only an expression of itself. Not-Not is aware that liberation exists in the infinite. (Quoted in Spence, 1990:719).
In Chengdu, the Not-Not group were known less for their tortured Da-Daist logic than for their rebellious lifestyle. In the view of one of my poet friends, they were nihlists who "affected" a hedonism that he found distasteful, degenerate, and lacking any moral values:
I think they are affected...They pretend to be free but they are really just selfish...I remember one time a group of them went to the girl’s dormitory at Chuanda and pounded on all the doors yelling ‘Who’s going to sleep with me tonight?" I think it’s terrible ...
There were many poets active in pre-1989 Chengdu, and there was both rivalry and collaboration between different poetry factions and between different generations of poets. In addition to the third generation Not-Not and post-Menglong groups, the best known figures were the "Seven Gentlemen" (qige junzi)-- including Bai Hua and Sun Wenbo of the Menglong movement-- and the "first generation" poet Sun Jingxuan.
Sun is something of an ‘eminence grise’ of the Chengdu poetry scene. He is about 60 years old, a small, crotchety curmudgeon. He lives in a fairly spacious and comfortable apartment, given him in his capacities as an "establishment poet," a high-ranking member of the writer’s association, and the head of an official scheme to bring together poets, artists and entrepreneurs for "artistic development of the socialist market economy." Sun enjoys a certain amount of popularity among some of the other poets in Chengdu, but others do not hold a high opinion of him because he "lacked the courage" to speak out during 1989. In 1958 Sun was branded a Rightist and sent to the countryside, and in 1981, as punishment for writing the poem A Spectre Prowls Our Land, he was forced to publish a self-criticism-- experiences that explain some of his bitterness toward life today, and his venomous criticisms of the Party.
Sun Jingxuan is a vehement critic of traditional culture, and of the Communist Party. The poem A Spectre Prowls Our Land explores the eternal return of feudalism, the "spectre" or malevolent soul of Chinese culture, and its reappearance in the guise of Maoism:
Brothers! Have you seen
The spectre prowling our land?
You may not recognize him,
though he stands before your eyes,
For like a conjurer,
master of never-ending transformation,
One moment in dragon-robe of gold brocade
He clasps the dragon-headed sceptre,
The next in courtier’s gown
he swaggers through the palace halls;
And now-- behold-- a fresh veneer!
The latest fashion! And yet
No mask, no costume, no disguise
Can hide the coiled dragon
branded on his naked rump.
The poem continues in an epic account of his experiences in the countryside, first as a child (his "infant head stuffed with graven images") in his "bleak and dreary village," and then returning as a sent-down intellectual:
What could I say to these country folk
who had nursed us?
I felt such shame, for the promises
of thirty years past.
Had we overthrown the Three Great Mountains
only to build a new Temple?
China! Ancient, mysterious China!
Home of gods,
cradle of myths, hotbed of tyranny;
In your innumerable temples and palaces
In your countless emperors’ tombs,
The spectres come, the spectres go,
inhabit this man’s corpse, that man’s soul.
Your vast domain breeds feudalism...
Ah China! My beloved China!
You need fresh blood, air,
Wind, rain, sun;
You need to change your putrid soil!
Written in the immediate aftermath of the Cultural Revolution, Spectre’s open and sweeping indictment of the failed socialist revolution pushed past the limits of acceptable political discourse, and Sun Jingxuan paid the price of self-humiliation for his outspokenness. The combination of political and cultural critique in the poem boldly anticipates the most strident cultural iconoclasm coming out of the culture fever debates, especially the arguments presented in Heshang. In Spectre, Sun introduces many of the metaphorical techniques that Heshang’s authors later used: the inversion of ‘nationalist’ symbols such as the dragon and yellow earth, the identification of feudal authoritarianism with peasant culture, even the call for "fresh blood" and changed "soil" at the poem’s end parallels Heshang’s final lines demanding the fresh "blue water" of the West to cleanse the Yellow River of its ancient yellow soil, its peasant Chineseness.
Sun’s work is in the mainstream of Chinese intellectuals’ historical "reflection", and his poems consistently voice the iconoclastic theme of the intellectual’s unending struggle against a "feudalism" that is physically incorporated into the Chinese body politic. In the 1988 poem, History Here Ponders, Sun addresses the reader:
Yes, we must repent
Repent our stupidity
Repent our superstition
Repent our blindness
Dare to candidly admit our ugliness.
If a People are not willing to reflect, that People can never wake from dreams;
If History does not reflect, the tragedies of History must repeat themselves;
If you and I are not willing to reflect,
then we can only be that lamentable yet laughable Ah Q.
Ah! My people, don’t say that all is past
No! If people have no long view, then worries will be close at hand,
Our blood vessels still teem with breeding pathogens
The time to change our blood has arrived...
Today, in your and my soul
Isn’t there still a spectre?
And can’t the spectre’s cry still beckon the devil to be your friend and mine?
(Sun Jingxuan, 1990: 344-45).
In my conversations with Sun, he was even more vehement in his criticism of the Chinese physical and metaphorical body. He often cursed Chinese "blood" and advocated "hunxuer" (mixed marriages, literally mixed blood) as a way to reinvigorate a dying culture. His personal obsession -- also reflected in his latest works-- is soccer. He sees the failure of China’s national team as having tremendous symbolic importance for understanding the problem of Chinese culture. Not only does it exhibit the weak and corrupt nature of the ‘physical body politic’, but it does so in an international arena, in contrast to and conflict with other nation-states (here national cultures). As such, the Chinese soccer team brings back images of the ‘sick man of Asia’ and the recurrent uncertainty of China’s modern lot as a nation among nations. For Sun, the most significant event of 1989 was the Chinese national team’s loss to Hong Kong in the World Cup qualifiers-- how was this possible, and how could the team accept the loss with such equanimity? In his estimation, "the Chinese nation and Chinese society need some Lu Xun-style literature to insert the needles for a good letting of our poisoned blood." (Sun, 1990:400).
Sun struck me as person who was reduced from his former prominence. He had a good position as an officially recognized establishment poet, but his obsession with soccer and his rather bizarre efforts to be a salesman for Chinese products made him seem somehow irrelevant. In many ways, Sun Jingxuan’s life as an establishment poet was an inversion of the lives of the poets I came to know. Sun lived in an apartment provided by the government, complete with four rooms, a patio opening on the compound’s tree-shaded courtyard, and a large-screen television for watching his beloved soccer. The living room was filled with memorabilia of his trips abroad as an official ambassador of "Chinese poetry" to such destinations as Sweden, Switzerland and England. Alongside the souvenirs were product samples for which Sun solicited poetic advertising copy as his contribution to the latest incarnation of the "four modernizations" in the booming "socialist market economy." His comfort was reward for serving the State, and, in the view of some other Chengdu poets, for selling his soul.
Sun’s establishment position and complicity in the market economy estranged him from the poets of Chengdu’s "unofficial" scene even more than his 1981 self-criticism and lack of political commitment in 1989. As Michelle Yeh (1996:59) point out, poets in China today are "marginalized," alienated from the commercialization that has moved them from the mainstream to the fringes of cultural life. As a result of this marginalization (and of political repression), the poetry movement that had been so central to the intellectual development of the 1980s has (like Sun) lost some of its relevance, even to the point of disappearing in some places through the emigration of poets to the West. This trend is evident in Chengdu, and the poets who remain have had to adapt to survive economically.
The poets I knew from the post-Menglong group lived very differently from Sun Jingxuan. Far from enjoying official government support, they lived and worked under the constant shadow of the state, from the relatively minor annoyance of censorship, to the very real threat of arrest and re-imprisonment. With no sponsoring work-unit-- and, in some cases, no official identification-- they had to find their way in the "unofficial economy." Living arrangements varied from modest self-rented apartments, to black-market flop-houses, to the group’s office floor or the home of whatever friend would take them in. To earn their livings, they were self-employed publishing entrepreneurs, "flying knights" (fei xia) who stayed one step ahead of the law, exchanging bribes for book numbers and putting out what they called "trash" in order to raise money for movement-related publications, including collections of poetry. In publishing they found a way to subvert the consumer culture that had consumed Sun Jingxuan, a way to survive without selling their souls.
Pan Jiazhu was the most ambitious of these poet-entrepreneurs, and the one I came to know the best among the group. He described both the feelings of "marginality" and alienation surrounding his underground lifestyle, and the way he maintained his principles against the spiritually corrosive effects of commercialization and "the system":
Was it said by a Russian writer? I feel like a foreigner in my own country. Officially, I don’t even exist. I receive nothing from the state and I owe nothing to the state. There is a kind of freedom that comes from this alienation; I’m free to do things for myself and don’t have any obligations to a work unit-- only to myself... But sometimes I feel badly about the things I have to do to be successful. ... I can see how the system corrupts in my own case. I have to give bribes and break the rules all the time to publish my books... I have to buy a book number from the state publishing house, but all the money and work is done by me-- buying the book number is really a kind of bribe, but everybody’s happy. Then, to get around publishing restrictions [of 8,000 books] I have to pay more bribes and break more rules... But I hope that I do this to maintain a higher purpose-- there is something I remain true to that keeps me from being completely corrupt! You know, I use the money I make from publishing trash to publish books that have meaning--we’re not doing it for money, we’re doing it to get our message across.
I met Pan through Wang Tingxiang, who invited him to a meeting of the salon; the two had once been close, but their relations were strained by the events of 1989. Pan arrived late, just as we were breaking up. He was clearly different from the others, and he intimidated them in some way. I only spoke with him for a few minutes on that occasion, but he left me a strong impression... intentionally. He introduced himself as a dissident, involved in the democracy movement, and he told me that he had spent one year in jail. Then he told me about his publishing business, and showed the cover of his Chinese translation of Jonathan Spence's Gate of Heavenly Peace as credential. He told me all this as we prepared to leave, in English-- not so much for secrecy as to impress upon me his high level of proficiency in English. He invited me to join him and a group of his avant-garde poet friends for dinner and an extended conversation the next evening.
The "Post-Menglong" poetry group
I met Pan at the statue of Chairman Mao in the center of Chengdu, and we walked to his friends' workplace. On the way he filled me in on some background: he and his friends have been together as a close group for some time. They are all "dissidents" and just about all of them spent some time in prison after 1989. He identified the strong connection between avant-garde poetry and "the movement" beginning back in the 1970s. Then he compared himself and his group to Wang Tingxiang and other academics: "I used to be good friends with Wang, but look at him now [he's sold out]... They complain but I always ask them 'what are you doing about it' ? At least we live independently, by ourselves and outside of society." We passed into the courtyard of a government work unit (the first of many ironies) where his friends rented a small office in back. At first glance, it looked like any Chinese office, with the ubiquitous leather couch, tea cups and floating packs of Hongtashan cigarettes. Two differences struck me: first, they were all busy (definitely not a government work unit); second, most of them had long hair and beards-- extremely rare in the general population, but a badge of individuality not infrequent among Chinese artists. They didn't slow down for formal introductions (unusual), and it was only after we reached the restaurant that I really met them.
Their regular hangout was a 'Japanese fast-food' place two blocks away. It was cramped, noisy and crowded with a young, slightly 'up-scale' clientele, but we managed to squeeze into a relatively secluded room in back. A latecomer joined our party, and then the introductions began. Shi Guanghua, in his early forties the oldest in the group, was referred to by all as Shi dage (big brother). He is tall with a kind face full of mirth and an avuncular manner toward his brethren. Shi's involvement in poetry circles dates from the 1970s; this, and the fact that the business they all worked for is his, made him the natural leader of the group, a role he managed in a very low-key way. Xi, longhaired and quiet, was definitely the reserved poet of the group, and its youngest member. He often stuttered, but this did not keep him from chiming in when he had something to say. Song Wei is into rock and roll and looks the part. He is intense, with his long hair and wild whiskers, charismatic and very animated. Although only in his early thirties, Song was something of a child prodigy and had been writing poetry for a long time, almost always together with his brother, the reclusive Song Qu, who very rarely ventured out of the family compound in the countryside. Xiao Xiao, also thirty-something, was the only woman in the group. She seemed at ease with the often bawdy behavior of her fellows, whom she met through her husband, Wan Xia. Together they edited a two-volume collection of Post-Menglong poetry. Wan Xia (10,000 summers) came across as an 'angry young man.' He wore his bearded 'free spirit' look with defiant pride. He did not say much. Perhaps the two years he had spent in prison for his activism help explain his air of almost hostile reserve. Pan Jiazhu, ever earnest, serious and helpful, rounded out the group.
My first impression of their group personality was that they were very bohemian and very 'Chengdu'-- in fact they reveled in their local culture. When 'big brother' Shi introduced everyone he began to do so in putong hua (standard Mandarin). He was clearly uncomfortable with this, so I assured him (in my best approximation of the Chengdu dialect) that Sichuan speech was ok by me. They all laughed, and seemed visibly more at ease after this. Little did I realize how important this linguistic shift would be, for their discussion for the rest of the evening consisted mostly of turns of phrase, plays on words, and local colorful expressions. Over the course of the evening I came to feel that my new friends wore their provincialism with special pride, that just as intellectuals tended to identify with and even aspire to the cosmopolitan worlds of Beijing and the West, these poets quite consciously celebrated their local identity.
Of course, the most important way that local culture serves as their source of inspiration is through language. I remember three local expressions they used that evening which struck me as somehow representative of their attitude toward the world. In the first instance, since the liquor we drank, like so much Chinese medicine, was purported to be an aphrodisiac, they joked that Shi and Wan would be fine because they had 'old ladies', Pan and I (whose sweethearts were away) would have problems, and Xi and Song -- who never had a girlfriend-- would break out in welts. Then they used a phrase da shou cong that is a play on "shooting a pistol" and "beating the hand worm." Much of their busting had this colorfully lewd tone, and they enjoyed the jokes immensely, with an unabashed appetite for life. They also had disdain for the world of "the establishment." They had many invectives to express this, the one used most frequently was guaxi liulo, a variation on the shagua theme: not just 'dumb as a squash' but 'dumb as a rotten squash washed downriver.' Here again, they delight in both the flow of the language and the fact that it is popular and local-- a pride in provincialism, and a determination that poetry should be democratic (of, for, by the people). The last phrase summed up their ethic best of all: "da hunpa", ("wildly swing a mop"). They used this phrase to describe their mission as poets; it means to be a trouble maker, an iconoclast, to question authority and stir things up.
But they are rebels with a cause. By a simple twist of fate their company's phone number, when spoken, was a near homophone for "June fourth needs active struggle", and they got a big kick out of chanting this slogan when they answered the phone. They were committed to 'the movement' and to struggle, but the battle front was not just political, it was above all a social and cultural battle that they waged by creating and living a heterodox alternative to the prevailing system. From this perspective, their politics and the democracy movement were important as facets of their lives, and this is how they wanted to be engaged-- for their experience of the movement as a part of their lives, not for their lives as part of the movement.
As the talk wore on and the liquor wore through, we began to feel more and more comfortable in each other's company. I liked them and admired their non-conformity. How did they get this way and what do their expressions of individuality mean to them ? I related an insight once told to me by a young friend who had been a student activist during the 1989 protests: "My friend says that people in China start out with personality and character, but then, like stones in the river, they become rounded and alike-- do you think this is true ?" Shi Guanghua responded:
There is some truth to it... but it's not polishing by society, it's an individual willing to be rounded (yuanhua), willing to be like everyone else. You see 'roundness' is the symbol of Eastern culture: take the taiji symbol, or the smooth, rounded movements of taiji quan; it means completion, perfection as an ideal. Actually this idea of completion and perfection is a kind of closing off; it's rounded individuals bouncing off each other, closed off and not connecting...
Song Wei picked up on this idea of cultural critique and added a comparative dimension:
The symbol of the West is the trinity, the triangle, right? You see a triangle is sharp and penetrating; it is active and dynamic... compare that dynamism to the roundness of Eastern culture...
Shi broke in to return to his point:
The greatest literature of China goes against this ideal of completion...you know the Shuihu Zhuan [Water Margin Story, more evocatively translated "Outlaws of the Marsh" or "All Men are Brothers"] ? That's our favorite classic ! It is incomplete; the final chapters were added later to complete it. Hong Loumeng [Dream of the Red Chamber] is the same way-- incomplete but finished by someone else later.
Shi's invocation of the Shuihu Zhuan spoke volumes about the group's sense of identity, and we discussed it at some length. The Shuihu Zhuan is a kind of Chinese Robin Hood legend; it is a story extolling the loyalty of sworn brotherhood, a radically egalitarian ethic, and the fight against injustice. It is significant that this classic was also Mao Zedong's favorite as a young man. Later, in the waning years of the Cultural Revolution, he turned against it and specifically targeted the Shuihu Zhuan for criticism. The criticism of the Shuihu Zhuan focused on the "politically incorrect" gentry class status of the rebel leaders, but Mao's change of heart could also have been related to power-- whether one opposes or holds it-- underscoring the heterodox nature of this classic. Thus it is no coincidence that some of the students and workers protesting in Beijing during the spring of 1989 held portraits of the 'young Mao', while others acted out the major characters of the Shuihu Zhuan.
For the poets, too, the Shuihu Zhuan served as a traditional reference and wellspring for protest against injustice and the abuse of power by the orthodox elite. Shi Guanghua and the others related strongly to this heterodox tradition, so strongly that they carried the heterodox ideal beyond the specific act of protest into a creed for daily living. Shi explained:
We're all jianghu, we believe in that ideal... the jianghu believes in yi qi (personal loyalty, brotherhood)-- brotherhood above all else. They live outside of society; outside the law. The laws of society mean nothing to us. Brotherhood is the most important thing, the highest value. We believe in universalism, in the universal desire for freedom and self-dignity, individual expression... We can't stand the zaza wawa-- a person who is a little bit here, a little bit there...
If you look up the word "jianghu" in a Chinese-English dictionary (clearly an orthodox source) you will find this list of pejorative interpretations: drifter, swindler, charlatan, quack. But the term as I most frequently encountered it, and as Shi used it here in describing the group's ideal, evokes an affectionate portrait of the free spirit, something of a hermit yet not a misanthrope, living outside society and walking a life path of his or her own choosing. In the orthodox view, they are aimless roamers resisting control and therefore threatening; in their own heterodox identity, they are wanderers after truth, true to themselves and their brothers and resistant only to injustice.
The jianghu believes in "yi qi"; here again, a phrase packed with meaning and associations. "Brotherhood", as an explanation of "yi qi", captures the importance of the relational, of intense loyalty to friends. This loyalty is not blind or above principle but loyalty to a principle held in common: the idea of "righteousness" and "justice" (the "yi" of "yi qi"). This is what Shi means by relating "yi qi" to "universalism". The kind of brotherhood he refers to is not the divisive allegiance to a particular group but the commitment to universal values ("freedom, self-dignity, Individual expression"). They form the identity of their particular 'brotherhood' on the basis of each individual's commitment to these universal values-- they don't want any zaza wawa who are 'not all there', literally in pieces; people who waffle and lack commitment.
At this use of zaza wawa I thought at once of the tensions between these poets and the intellectuals they criticized for lacking commitment. In many ways these poets treated intellectuals as a kind of negative reference group: they (intellectuals) are 'inside' society, compromised by their establishment academic careers; we (the poets) are 'outsiders', independent and uncompromised. They couch their criticisms in rational argument and critical allegory; we are visceral and direct in our appeal to emotion. They just talk about change; we actually live an alternative. They remonstrate; we rebel. These ideas were a constant subtext to the many exchanges I came to have with the poets of Chengdu. On visiting my apartment and spying the shelves of books and articles about Chinese culture written by respected Chinese scholars, nearly all of them reacted with the same epithet -- gua xixide (extremely stupid)-- and told me I was off the mark. They didn't object to this author or those books; they had a disdain for the whole approach, the orientation, the intellectual enterprise itself. This disdain sometimes extended to other poets, those who "prostituted" themselves to the establishment and even to some of those many poets who emigrated to the West after June Fourth. Being an outsider does not mean abandoning loyalty to the brotherhood or commitment to the jianghu cause.
By coincidence, my English name is a pretty close approximation of 'old jianghu' rendered in Sichuan dialect. Pan brought this to the group's attention, and the moniker stuck. They then quizzed me on my Chinese name (Hua Youdao), and remarked approvingly on both the name and the story of how I got it. Most of the discussion centered around the "dao", and they clearly identified with the daoist tradition, especially the metaphysics of Zhuangzi. The fact that both my names are highly suggestive of daoism-- in both its popular and classical forms-- must have made them think of me as a kindred spirit, for they then said I was the only foreigner they liked. This may or may not have been true, of course, but the reasoning behind the statement is interesting:
Those other foreigners who have interviewed us miss the point. They come here and all they are interested in is our political point of view. 'Why do you oppose the Communist Party ?' They don't understand that it doesn't matter if the Communist Party or the Guomindang or anyone else is in power; I will still live the same life... It doesn't matter where you are in the world, all officials everywhere are 'bad eggs'!
Shi Guanghua spoke, but they all agreed. In their view to be labeled a 'dissident' is to be reduced to the interviewer's expectations of political 'theory', usually expressed in the opposition of "democracy" to "The Party." Instead, their political views are secondary to and grow out of their life values, and the really important thing to them is the non-conformist lifestyle, the heterodox alternative they present. Officials are 'bad eggs' because they "cheat" the people-- cheat them out of freedom, out of the possibility of self-expression-- and suppress individuality. This defiance of authority is a special kind of iconoclasm, one that targets a 'system' with deep cultural roots, yet is itself deeply-- and consciously-- traditional.
In this regard, I was fascinated that they intentionally model themselves after the "secret societies"of ancient China. Besides the Shuihu zhuan, they also mentioned the sworn "blood brotherhood" in San Guo Yan Yi (Romance of the Three Kingdoms) as a source of inspiration. This classic has special resonance for them since Chengdu was the ancient capital of one of the three kingdoms (Shu) and its emperor, Liu Bei, was one of the novel's famous "blood brothers." Another of these brothers was Guan Yu, later canonized as a god of war and patron saint of the paoge, a secret society that flourished in Sichuan until Liberation in 1949. I asked them about their interest in traditional culture, and the apparent paradox of avant-garde poets drawing so much inspiration from the past. Song Wei responded:
The most progressive elements are always the most traditional. I don't like 'pop' culture today; it's too shallow and 'floating' (fuzao). I like things with 'flavor' (weidao) and 'spirit' (jingshen). You see, there's really no contradiction between the tradition of China and the modernity of the West: it all comes down to what appeals to the individual, what the individual accepts as having meaning for him. Look at me, I love ancient poems and literature, but I also love the Western rock and roll of the 1960s. I don't understand the words, but I relate to the feeling: a direct perception of the spirit without the words.
Why did these apparent contradictions of tradition and modernity, China and the West, problems that have plagued Chinese intellectuals for decades, seem so inconsequential to Song ? Perhaps the answer lies in his high valuation of the individual, and his low regard for 'theories.' Song sees a society of individuals free to choose values according to their own 'taste'; once "ingested" these values become constitutive of the individual, and their origin or classification as Western or traditional is irrelevant. The establishment intellectuals’ urge to develop a consistent and totalizing ideology-- and, in consequence, to grapple with 'contradiction'-- is part of the orthodox attempt to impose the universal on the particular, the tyranny of conformity that Song Wei opposed as a poet and non-conformist beatnik.
The idea of poets as non-conformists is not an unlikely one, and the spirit of the group's poetry was closer to Ginsberg's than Emily Dickinson's. But the connection between poetry and activism was perhaps even easier to make in Sichuan, and the traditional sources of inspiration for their poetry lie closer to hand. Two giants of traditional Chinese poetry, Li Bai and Du Fu, are lionized in Chengdu; indeed, their memory is now part of the physical landscape. In Li Bai, Song Wei and the others found a model of eccentric individuality and personal freedom; in Du Fu they met a champion of the common people and crusader against injustice. Still, their road to activism-through-poetry was a circuitous one, diverted by the Cultural Revolution. Like many poets in the early 1980s, they reacted against the excesses of "politics in command" and turned inward to explore the long-suppressed subjective sphere of emotion. But the urge toward non-conformity and authentic self-expression soon pushed them past this stage. As Pan explained:
There was a change in the direction of our poetry, a kind of move toward 'post avant-garde', in 1986. Before then our poetry reflected the expression of individual feelings and was very subjective. But then all kinds of people started to write this kind of poetry and the meaning was being lost, becoming shallow. So we decided to move from introspection to a more realistic style and the fight against injustice...
In life as in art, they were committed to principle and motivated to engagement, and they spent time in jail for their beliefs. This attitude permeated the decisions of daily life. During dinner a controversy erupted because Wan Xia had run afoul of the censors. They wanted him to take one sentence out from one of his contributors, but he refused to change a single word; the original must stand as it is.
By the end of our conversation (around two in the morning, much to the restauranteur’s chagrin) my companions had infused the meaning of "the movement" into a form coopted from the Cultural Revolution, exuberantly shouting: "the spirit of June 4 lives on! Carry through the movement to the end !" When I asked them how their political engagement squared with their dislike at being called "dissidents" and their desire to be seen first and foremost as poets, Shi Guanghua dismissed the contradiction: "Look, we don't want to be leaders or officials. We just want to shake things up (da hunpa) and tell the truth." If the group had a political manifesto, this would be it.
"Telling the truth", of course, is a difficult and destabilizing endeavor, and one I had the chance to discuss with them on later occasions. But by the end of that evening, I had a lot to digest. Individualists, traditionalists, iconoclasts, democrats-- how did these first impressions fit together ? It struck me that Whitman's aphorism, "Do I contradict myself ?... I am vast, I contain multitudes" suited this group: they were political activists who wanted only to talk about their poetry; they were at once cosmopolitan and provincial in their outlook; they extolled the universal but emphasized the individual; they were consciously traditional, yet avant-garde and influenced by the West; they admired 'incompleteness', but they also criticized 'zaza'-- 'a person in pieces, not a whole sheet.' As I came to know them better, I realized that logical consistency was not as important to them as expressing in poetry the diverse traditions and experiences of their lives. Political protest was part of the poetry tradition they inherited, as was the exploration of subjective consciousness. They also found a source of inspiration in traditional Chinese culture, and in the particularity of local life, both in Chengdu and the countryside. Their emphasis on particular experience and memory rather than abstraction and theory, on "perception" (ganxing) rather than "rationality" (lixing) set the poets apart from other intellectuals, and that emphasis made understanding their personal experiences even more essential.
Pan Jiazhu
While most of the post-Menglong poetry group held "theory" in disdain, and resisted being labeled "dissident," Pan Jiazhu came to poetry from a background in literary theory, and readily identified himself as not just a rebel, but a political activist. He was also quite anxious to be accepted as a poet, and cherished the "cult of poetry"-- its sense of romance and martyrdom (Yeh, 1996:62-3)-- with an intensity that the others did not seem to need. His intensity might have come from feeling marginal within a group that was itself marginal in society: Pan was born in Henan in 1962 and raised in Anhui province, which made him the only non-Sichuan native in the group, and, despite his youth, he felt a strong generational bond with those (like Shi Guanghua) who experienced the Cultural Revolution. As he once expressed his "generational consciousness,"
The main feeling of our generation is loneliness...our writings are inspired by this feeling of loneliness; it’s what we feel about life...Once a famous Tang dynasty poet described life as the footprints left by a white crane in the snow. All you can see are the few prints--you don’t know where the crane is coming from or where it is going...we feel like that about our lives: we don’t know where it comes from or what direction it is going toward...
Pan’s feelings of "loneliness" could speak of not only his alienation from society, but his "difference" from the members of his own group, as well. By any standards, his training made him uniqe, for his brilliant mind and proficiency in learning languages led his parents to enroll him in the Nanjing School of Army Intelligence when he was fifteen years old:
I was interested in studying many things-- ancient Chinese, philosophy, aesthetics, literary theory... You know we were being trained to be spies; we used to listen to American military manoeuvers in South Korea !... We were trained to kill and had intensive training in English. They told us 'you are American', and to make us think like Americans, they taught us many interesting things-- we listened to and memorized speeches by Lincoln, Kennedy and Martin Luther King... finally I thought, 'they teach us to think like Americans, and then to kill them-- it makes no sense !'... While I was in the Army, I became a dissident, and because of my views I was given a different assignment than my Army Intelligence classmates; I became a teacher of literary theory in Army schools, first in Chongqing, and then in 1986 I came to Chengdu. After 1989, when I was arrested, I lost everything: my job, my wife, my papers-- even today I have no documents; I don't exist ! After the protests I was on the lam until September, when they caught up with me and arrested me. While I was in prison, I wrote to a lawyer friend of mine to get a divorce from my wife. I didn't want anything bad to happen to her, didn't want my bad name to influence her, so I divorced her. When I got out of prison-- exactly one year, September to September-- I left all my clothes behind and wore only a pair of jeans and a jacket. This is a tradition in China-- leaving the clothes you wore in prison behind and buying new clothes for a new life !
Pan’s experience in prison left him feeling embittered and betrayed, not by the Party-- he expected as much from the enemy-- but by his friends, specifically those who left China. He did not blame people who were really fugitives from the authorities, who had to leave China to avoid going to jail (after all he himself was a fugitive for some time, hiding out in the countryside). Pan saves his blame for those people who were out of jail (or never in), living legally, yet who chose to go to the West instead of sticking it out in China. The Party is happy to let such troublemakers go, he maintained, especially to a place where their influence on China will be minimal. Blame was not the main problem for Pan; he was concerned about the future of the movement. His feelings on this issue are complex, but he often confessed to a very strong sadness at the thought of the poetry movement’s unraveling under the dual pressures of repression and commercialization. Moreover, he was surprised by the desire to emigrate, a desire he could not understand. I asked him why, in light of his excellent English and admiration for American culture, he would not consider emigration himself ?
Sure, I’d like to go abroad and see what its like, to learn; but I could never move there to live...I’m like a tree that has grown in one place-- China. The tree has roots that cannot just be pulled up and put down somewhere else. The tree is too big, the roots are too deep--if you pull it up it will die...I have very strong feelings about my friends leaving. It makes me think of when I went to Tibet...we got off the bus at a place called "Black River" just after we crossed over into Tibet. I saw many Tibetan beggars throwing themselves on the ground to beg for money from the Tibetan merchants-- but they just cursed them and sent them away. I saw this and I had tears in my eyes, because this kind of cruel behaviour was not at all what I expected from Tibetan people....I feel the same kind of disappointment toward my friends who left; I thought I knew them, but they are not what I thought they were...I saw the same thing in 1989. There were leaders who got the students very excited, who encouraged them. But then they did not go out and protest with the students on June 4 and 5. They knew it was dangerous and that something would happen, but they protected themselves. Maybe these people can fool other people, but I can see into their hearts: in the most secret part of their hearts they are selfish... Things are different now. Relationships between people have changed. Before our friendships were very strong; we would get together often for meetings, we would drink together, go to the demonstrations together. Now everyone is concerned about money. You call them up and they way ‘sorry, I’m too busy". Because of this change alone I am opposed to the changes brought by the economic reform policies...
Pan Jiazhu’s complaint about the socialist market economy’s eroding effect on personal relationships resonates with the broad critique of consumerism in contemporary Chinese poetry circles analyzed by Michelle Yeh (1996:58-60). Yeh cites a poem by the Feifei co-founder Zhou Lunyou, written after his own stint in prison, as evidence of the economic "marginalization" of poets: "The blows of commodities are more gentle, more direct than violence/ More cruel, too, pushing the spirit toward total collapse." None of the post-Menglong group in Chengdu suffered for a lack of money. Even though they had no state-sponsored job, and even did not "officially exist," they proved more able than most to make it on their own in the entrepreneurial economy. But both communism and consumerism did damage to the soul of the movement, and the poets’ group solidarity was threatened by "selfishness" as well as outright suppression.
Another factor in the survival of Pan’s group was their jianghu ethic of brotherhood. The group’s revitalization of tradition in the face of marginalizing market forces allowed them to adapt to change and turn it to their advantage. Traditional culture was also a source for the group’s political consciousness. Ironically, most of them traced their first awareness of traditional Chinese culture to the iconoclasm of the Cultural Revolution. Pan dates his "discovery of my culture" to when he was eight years old, since "that’s when we began to read and learn about Confucius by criticizing him!" That paradoxical introduction to traditional culture informed his thinking when he came to reflect on the inter-relation of tradition- in- modernity through his poetry and his political activism:
You know, we were raised to be totally modern, to reject tradition quite thoroughly. But tradition is all around us and we were influenced by it when we were growing up. I’ll give you an example. I remember very clearly, when I was five years old, during Spring Festival, my father hung a set of duilian (rhyming couplets) around the door. He wrote them himself: the right hand said ‘a person must be loyal to ministers and filial to parents (yigen ren zhong cheng xiao zi)’ and the left read: ‘There are two important things: studying and growing crops (liang jian shi du shu zhong tian)’. These ideas are very traditional, and they had a very big influence on me. Especially this idea of loyalty...But as I grew up I began to ask myself, ‘loyalty to whom? The leaders of the Party kept changing-how could I be loyal to them? Who were they? It was very confusing; a long process of coming to feel that there was absolutely no connection between me and the government, the Party-- not even a little connection, none. So for me and my gerneration, we feel like strangers in our own homeland.
The juxtaposition of being raised to respect traditional values and then seeing the bankruptcy of the Communist Revolution’s values left Pan disillusioned, but it also spurred him to action, to become a poet:
I was brought up to believe in the power of the written word. My parents are both semi-literate, so when I was young I helped them read documents and announcements of policy. The impression this left on me was that the written words are very important, and that they were the truth. Now, when I want to write something., the first question I ask myself is "is it the truth?" It’s very ironic, really; all those documents were full of lies, but it taught me to respect the truth!
On one level, Pan’s statement can be understood as reflecting the post-Cultural Revolution "crisis of belief." The overpowering feeling of being marginal, lost in history and faced with the task of making sense of a society and culture of which one does not feel a part, results in an anomie that has pushed some past the brink of sadness and loneliness. As a tragic example of that anomie, Pan told the story of Hai Zi, a Beijing poet who committed suicide on the eve of the 1989 demonstrations. According to friends, there was no real ‘reason’ for his suicide, yet they were not suprised that he did it. To greater or lesser degrees they could all understand the feeling of emptiness that he could no longer endure. Pan was visibly upset at recalling his death, and he told of Song Wei’s nihilistic reaction to the news: "He drank for three days."
On another level, Pan’s tale of discovering "truth" in the falsehoods of the Cultural Revolution represents a positive-- or at least active-- expression of disillusionment: the formulation of a new value system in the vacuum left by the old. Thus Pan can hold the feelings of loneliness and sadness and turn them into an objection, a dissent to the status quo: "In China today there is really only one question: why do we have the freedom to do evil, but no freedom of expression?" For Pan and the other post-menglong group, poetry had to be engaged with the world, since the freedom of expression denied by the totalitarian system was meaningless if they only vented feelings of emptiness and loneliness in their poetry. Their self-expression had to aim at something higher, the creation of a new stance toward the world, which meant working out in their poetry a process of exploration that discovered both traditional values to be reaffirmed and new ideas to be adopted.
The experience of being a generation that ‘fell through the cracks’ of history, while traumatic, also provides an opportunity that makes Pan and his peers so fascinating and so important to understanding the different answers to the question of values in China today. Their encounter with traditional culture is sui generis, independent and "perceptual" rather than rational. In the same way, their encounter with and interpretation of Western ideas is unencumbered by ‘authoritative readings.’ But why should their "thrown-ness," their state of being ‘out of history’ make them so concerned about confronting history? One could just as easily imagine (and see for that matter) a rejection or apathy toward the past and a headlong rush to make it happen today. Pan mused on the importance of history and tradition to him:
Is it possible to be floating in a sea of values? To question and choose between different values...this has to include the essential (jinghua) values of traditional culture...I had a dream the other day that I was in the past. There was some dramatic historical battle taking place and sometimes I was watching it happen, sometimes I was part of what was happening. I woke up with the question ‘what is history?’ in my mind. I sat down to write about it...I believe that history is not facts, it is only this one moment, when the past is alive in our blood and bones, when there are real people living out history...
Here he seemed to be talking about the importance of choice, understood as a process of questioning, and about traditional culture and history as sources of self-definition in the present. To emphasize the idea that the past and the present are together in ‘the moment,’ Pan brought up Sartre and the existentialists, approving of their questioning attitude, and their relativism-- which made his next observation all the more interesting:
I believe in God. I don’t know what it is and I don’t want to make others believe in it...but I believe that there is a God and only God can judge what is right or wrong... When we choose to believe in something, we have a responsibility to our souls. The grounding for our behavior, that to which we owe responsiblity, is internal; it is a God inside.
Unlike the enthusiasm of some Chinese intellectuals (like Wang Tingxiang) for the transcendant, universal God of the Christian tradition as a moral antidote for China’s spiritual malaise, Pan’s idea of God is more like a deified self, immanent and particular, a conscience infused into his highest value: individualism. This truth within himself and to himself is what bridges the contradiction between his poetic self-expression and his political activism. Chinese traditional culture is an integral part of his "inner-truth." The values of traditional culture most important to Pan-- brotherhood, loyalty, a sense of responsibility-- are things that he believes to be universal (divine), but only understands in the particularity of putting them into practice.
Pan’s self-identity as a poet and a dissident is romantic, if we understand by that term a desire to be different, a thirst for martyrdom, and a kind of self-seriousness. Other poets I spoke with, inside and outside the group, sometimes found his righteous championing of principle grating, and felt that he needed to take himself less seriously, to abandon his intellect. But despite the fact that Pan is articulate and widely read in Western theory, he was known primarily as the group’s "political activist," not its "chief theorist." That role was played by Big Brother Shi, the founder and core member of the post-menglong poetry group.
Shi Guanghua
Shi Guanghua’s involvement in the poetry movement dates from the mid-1970s when he was a zhiqing in the Sichuan countryside. In our conversations he expressed no bitterness toward the experience, joking only that the statue of Mao Zedong in the center of Chengdu "explains it
all: Chairman Mao is holding up two fingers-- ‘two years in the countryside’-- but he has five more behind his back, seven years!" Shi used his time to reflect, to write poetry, and to develop a theory of poetry that draws on an understanding and acceptance of the Chinese traditional culture he encountered in the countryside. A statement of this theory appeared in the Chengdu-based poetry journal The Modernist Federation in 1985 under the title "On Wholism" (zhengti zhuyi). The manifesto gave the post-menglong group, already together in embryonic form, a distinct identity within the largely "experimental" Chengdu poetry scene:
We believe: The true nature of Chinese ancient culture is a kind of wholistic cultural state; its core thought is not the dualism of mutual nourishment in yin and yang, but the wholistic monism of "no ultimate yet the supreme ultimate." For Laozi and Zhuangzi the highest level is the "way", "unity", "nothingness." The highest condition for Confucius, too, was not "benevolence and propriety" but "harmony." The wholistic thought of Song Neo-Confucianism is even more prominent, and the Book of Changes is the most brilliant description of this wholistic cultural state. It not only takes a cosmology that includes humanity and organizes it into an ever-changing whole, but also considers the only essence of this whole to be the transcendant life force, its only character to by symetry. Because of this we feel that only with wholism can we truly begin to search for the great loving heart of our people’s culture.
But this is absolutely not a "turning back," not an infatuation with tradition. Searching for and tending toward the whole is the inevitable result of the development of twentieth century skepticism, the tendency toward an organic, wholistic network structure in the human sciences, the product of a comprehensive mode of thought... All of these explain that after the decline of a long age of cultural negativity, on top of the "wasteland," a great period of reconstructing humanity’s cultural background has arrived, and wholistic thinking will be this new culture’s most essential characteristic. Therefore, the wholism we bring forward is a mutually reinforcing counter-current of East and West, ancient and modern, a kind of profound mode of mental structure.
Shi established the group’s appropriation of traditional culture’s non-distinguishing logic against the prevailing iconoclasm of other poets and intellectuals. The theory of "wholism" was clearly part of the larger culture fever phenomenon, the search within culture for sources of self-definition, but while "wholism" did not negate tradition, it was not an unreserved "traditionalist" affirmation of Chinese culture, either. Shi Guanghua and those who grouped around him understood "tradition" to their own ends, as a deep strain of heterodoxy, contradiction, and flexibility that suited their goal of self-expression.
Shi discussed his understanding of tradition during a get-together at his apartment, which stood-- appropriately enough-- on the cusp of an old Chengdu neighborhood of alleys and wooden houses, and a seventies-era apartment block. He was remodeling his home, but the work was very much still in progress. A friend of Shi’s ( a painter, but remodeling was his ‘day job’) was doing the contractor work along with two young workers who came from the countryside west of Chengdu. In keeping with tradition, Shi took everyone out to dinner--including the workers for whom meals must be provided along with a place to stay (i.e. the apartment they are working on). Shi’s brother and another painter friend also showed up, so dinner was a big affair. The conversation roved around quite a bit, from the Korean War and the comparative analysis of Chinese and American martial prowess, to the endemic cheating and deception in China today (specifically in the context of counterfeit goods). This last brought up what would dominate the evening’s more private conversation: the lack of principles and the crisis of values in Chinese culture.
Back at the gutted apartment, Shi chacterized this lack of principle through the word hua (melting or turning into non-being) and the enduring influence of this concept on Chinese culture. He chose a historical example:
Why were there so many traitors during the anti-Japanese war? Some people just didn’t care; they only cared about themselves. Some people couldn’t get a good position in Jiang Jieshi’s army so they seized the opportunity to get a position under the Japanese. And some people thought that the Japanese could be absorbed (hua) like the Mongols and the Manchus before them. This idea of melting of turning one thing into something else is very strong in China. Even the name for China, which originally meant ‘brilliance’ and then ‘flower’ is itself twisted--it has this idea of melting written into it! That is why China has no principles; it’s like taijiquan always yielding always turning force from one direction to another. Chinese culture is flexible like that--sometimes it has principles, sometimes not...
This image of a flexible and yielding traditional culture was one the group frequently raised, not as criticism of an "unprincipled" national character, as the salon intellectuals saw it, but as acceptance or understanding of a particular cultural reality. Shi Guanghua understood principles in specific, situational terms, and he often saw contradiction as the mark of flexibility-- even in the emphasis on orthodoxy (zhengtong) in Chinese thought:
Orthodoxy is a perfect example of this kind of flexibility. There is always an excuse built in because orthodoxy is always contradictory. Now we have a ‘socialist market economy’ --that’s a contradiction! The same thing is true of ‘socialism with Chinese characteristics’. When there is a contradiction there is always an excuse [legitimation] for whatever you want to do. Really today there are only two slogans [in the new orthodoxy]: At the top they say ‘feel the stones as you cross the river’ (mo dao shitou guo he), and down below we say, ‘follow your feelings’ (genzhe ganjue zou)!
In the salon intellectuals’ arguments concerning the "cultural character" based on the "peasant personality," this "flexibility" would be taken as more proof that the fundamental concept in Chinese thought is ‘pragmatism’ (shiyongzhuyi). But Shi disagreed, preferring the idea of paradox:
No, it’s not so much pragmatism as contradiction and paradox. Mao Zedong really saw clearly when he wrote ‘On Contradictions’..Chinese has a saying: "change ten thousand times without leaving the originial aim" (wan bian bu li qi zang) but Jiang Jingguo had a better saying: "When everything changes I stay the same; when everything is the same, I change" To be contradictory means to be flexible, to have no principles...
Shi then told a story to illustrate his point that people will react completely differently in different contexts, at different times:
During the democracy movement in 1989 a group of young guys who hang out--streetboys doing business-- organized themselves and marched under the banner "Society University". Their leader was a guy named Tian Bing and he got up to address the crowd: ‘I’m doing business, and like all businessmen I don’t like disorder. When I heard about the demonstrations I thought, why are they making all this unnecessary trouble? It’s really uncool (que mo mingtang). Besides, my mamma always told me to stay away from crowds. Then I heard that there was a hunger strike going on, and I thought ‘people are steel, food is iron (ren shi tie, fan shi gong)’, if they are refusing food it must be serious. So I’ve come to see and I discover that there’s really something to it after all’ This guy was really moved by what he saw--he really cared about the students...But then was then and now everything has changed. During the demonstrations there were tens of thousands of people there; now you can only find a few thousand--and after the ‘reversal of verdicts’ you won’t find any one who wasn’t there. It’s the same as the Cultural Revolution... Sometimes you have principles, sometimes you don’t.
He said this with a shrug of the shoulders, without bitterness, as though the lack of principle he was describing were a natural reaction to the events. Given the repurcussions of admitting participation in the protests, "flexibility" was a practical survival skill, to be sure, and Shi seemed to be witholding blame. But later in the conversation Shi reflected on what he felt were the roots in Chinese culture of this flexible national character:
This idea of Dao-- Dao is too abstract, too high; nobody has a clue as to what it really is (mo ming qi miao). Everyone claims that they have it; they understand it inside themselves, and the Dao is always manifested through the person. It really means using everything as a means...Dao is kind of like God [unfathomable, unknowable] but there is a big difference: you in the West learn about God from one ‘classic’-- from the authority of the Bible. But China has lots of classics--all in contradiction with each other...Even the classics, the old philosophers were contradictory in and of themselves! Take Confucius; he was a philosopher of the ‘scholar elite’ --he is supposed to be all about ruling the country. But look at what he says, look at his ideals. Who is his favorite disciple? Yan Hui, who lived a simple and frugal life. Then there is his other favorite, Tian. There is a story that one day Confucius called all his disciples together and asked them what their ideals would be after getting power. One after another all the other disciples answered, telling about all the great things they would do with their power. Only Tian stayed silent, off to one side playing the zither. Finally Confucius persuaded him to tell his ideal. Tian said, ‘I would like to get some children and some good friends and go down to the river to swim; then play the zither.’ Confucius praised Tian; said that his own ideal was the same! Confucius was supposed to be concerned with governing, but he really had a lot of the Daoist hedonism in him (an pin le dao) --he’s full of contradiction! By the same token, Lao Zi, in the Daode Jing spends eighty percent of the book talking about governing and military strategy, even though he’s famous for ‘wu wei’ (effortless effort) and being mysterious-- contradiction.
This apparent critique of traditional Chinese philosophy could have been voiced by any cultural iconoclast in intellectual circles, but Shi Guanghua’s words held a different meaning. As the "wholism manifesto" and the poetry group’s jianghu ethic suggest, Shi in fact admires Daoism, and he admitted as much in the same conversation. His objection is aimed at the "abstract" Dao of empty, self-aggrandizing, "serious" poets. Shi’s own personality tends to be self-ironic; he tries not to take himself too seriously-- unlike most poets in China, including some of his closest companions. This attitude is consistent with his approach to the idea of contradiction itself. Rather than bemoan a contradictory "cultural personality" and blame it as the "lingering remnants of feudalism" in contemporary China that should be eliminated, Shi Guanghua revels in contradiction and paradox (as does Laozi). Just as "wholism" intends a supra-rationality that embraces opposition, the poet, in Shi’s view, should draw together the contradictions of experience, and from this express a higher-- though not abstract-- understanding of the world. The notion that Dao "really means using everything as a means" is not a critique of "instrumental rationality" but a reflection of the poet’s non-attachment to abstract principles, his freedom to choose the particular, and thereby bring contradictions together as a whole.
The role of the poet in making experience whole is played out by confronting history and the cultural tradition. Shi’s reflections on traditional culture are key to understanding his conception of the present condition of China, and the relevance of his own work. He feels that--however imperfect-- the old system of values was complete, ‘a whole.’ Now that whole has been broken; the continuity and life of the tradition has been cut down. He writes about this condition in his theoretical work, "The Background of Writing" (Xiezuo de Beijing), whose main argument he described that evening:
There is no way to become a great writer or to create a ‘great poem’ today because there is no background. Our cultural background is not Western and it is not classical Chinese. It’s not that we don’t have these cultures all around us: contemporary China has culture, but there is no ‘contemporary Chinese culture’. All you can say is that a piece of writing is doing something , nothing more, nothing less. The advantage of this is that writing can now be seen as a career, as something separate from politics...However, this state of affairs [lacking a contemporary Chinese culture] is very dangerous. You need a common culture to have a sense of community. Without this common culture everything is materialism; it makes people too selfish; makes the reforms turn into something else...This is a danger for development, a danger for ordinary Chinese people. Why is it so dangerous? Because there is no plan, no rules, no pattern for how to be a man, no moral standards--everything is scattered...
In this torn, relativistic state of Chinese culture, Shi sees the poet’s task as creating a whole community, mending the tear that separates past from present, tradition from modernity. How then does Shi’s "wholism" differ from any other effort to come to grips with the cultural identity crisis, or from any other orthodox system of moral standards? He would answer that he is "just writing poems" in the hope that it "is doing something," in other words, poets provide sources of inspiration for "how to be a man" by expressing the particular truth (or, better, truth in the particular) of their subjective feelings, perceptions, experiences. The "enlightenment" that poets give is therefore different from the "enlightenment" posessed by the State and by other intellectuals, who impose their own vision of moral standards by defining universal rationality in abstract systems, theories, and identities.
Shi Guanghua’s emphasis on the particular is reinforced by the central belief of contemporary China’s "cult of poetry": the idea that the poet’s life is even more important than his or her poetry. Thus Shi’s "wholism" had to provide a lived alternative value system-- the "ultimate poem"-- as well as a set of images that confront and embrace the contradictions and alienation of Chinese life. In light of this imperative to particularize poetry in living example, the post-menglong group’s Bohemian, jianghu lifestyle; their criticism of the zaza wawa; and their portrayal of political activism as an extension of art, all make sense. So too does the threat posed by consumerism-- what Shi Guanghua called the danger of "selfish materialism"-- since writing poetry for money strikes at the heart of authentic, "wholistic" self-expression, eroding poetry’s meaning by seducing the poet toward a motivation outside himself (viz. Sun Jingxuan). Shi and his group overcome the contradiction of being marginalized poets, writing for self-expression, yet living in an increasingly commercialized society, by supporting themselves and their poetry activities through a publishing enterprise-- one example of the new "career" possibilities for anti- "establishment poets" Shi mentioned.
Shi’s attitude toward consumerism-- if not his solution to the problem-- was shared by many poets throughout China. Similarly, in his conviction that "life is art" and the poet is more important than the poem, Shi Guanghua can be seen as part of the "cult of poetry"-- but his differences from that cult are even more striking. Michelle Yeh (1996:70) describes the marginalization of contemporary Chinese poets as exhibited in alienation from consumerism, in their emigration to the West and, especially, in the "ultimate poem" of suicide. Both of these trends found tragic expression in the figure of Gu Cheng, a poet who reached his zenith around 1984 (then considered, along with Bei Dao, one of the two best avant-garde poets in China), but who took his own life in Singapore in 1993.
I was in contact with the group in October of that year when the news of Gu’s suicide hit Chengdu, news of a good friend’s death that saddened them. As Pan Jiazhu related the story, Gucheng had recently emigrated to Singapore where he was living in poverty on an island far-removed from the city. To make ends meet he raised chickens in his yard. The authorities discovered this and ordered the chickens slaughtered in three days time. Gu was crushed. He killed all his chickens-- over 200-- in one day, then he killed his wife, burned down his house and killed himself. He was, Pan said, "a victim of the two greatest enemies of mankind, destitution and desparation." According to the members of the poetry group in Chengdu, Gu fell victim to his two fatal flaws: a sensitive disposition and a great desire to be famous, to be recognized and admired by others. His fall from grace, culminating in the forced slaughter of his chickens, led him from poverty to a desperate act of denial.
While some members of the group (especially Pan) attached a halo of cultish romance to Gu’s suicide, they did not wholly absolve him as a heroic victim. Shi Guanghua likened Gu to "a man without a home," who made himself irrelevant by leaving China, and then could not endure that irrelevance. Shi’s implication was that Gu Cheng ran away from his alienation instead of confronting it, and that his alienation was from his own inescapable "Chineseness."
It is just this alienation from Chineseness that Shi Guanghua and others in the group try to heal by confronting and appropriating traditional culture in their poetry/lives. In our conversation in his apartment, Shi did not praise Chinese culture, he accepted it since, in his words, "I can do nothing else." His elaboration was typically down-to-earth and ironic:
There is a joke about Chinese babies being born, poking their heads out and asking, ‘Is this America?’ When they were told it was China they went right back into the womb. Well, the government leaders heard about this and issued an order to tell the babies that they were being born in America, not China. One day an especially smart baby stuck his head out and asked ‘Is this America?’ His mother said yes. ‘If this is America, why are you speaking Chinese?’ And back in he went!
The point being, of course, that you can’t help where you were born, but you can’t avoid it, either; in acceptance of this fact, the individual’s only course is to draw on all the sources of experience to define who he is going to be. Shi emphasized this point by drawing a moral after the joke’s punchline:
You have to take responsibility for your own life. If I write a bad poem I don’t blame Chinese culture; I don’t blame the Communist Party--I blame myself.
Shi’s "particularist ethic" of individual responsibility is his reponse to the marginalization of poetry, and to the alienation of poets and other intellectuals from tradition-- wholism as rebuttal to iconoclasm. He does not blame "the system," either, but rather opposes it by trying to live out the "pattern of how to be a man" in his poetry.
Shi Guanghua’s "wholism" developed an ethic and mission that the defined the post-menglong group’s identity, a self-understanding they all shared but expressed differently. As Pan Jiazhu described the group’s and his own self-understanding:
All of us want to be taken seriously for our art and our thought. We are not just activists writing poetry from some political end. Our involvement in the movement is an outgrowth of our art, which is what I’d rather talk about. I write about what it means to be a man. That’s what is essential to every person’s life... For me as a poet, what’s important is the inner-life of creation and the solace of friends. My ideal life-- and it is the way I conceive of my life now-- is that of the hermit. I am a hermit and I write about the world through the eyes of a hermit... what I mean by ‘hermit’ is not necessarily someone who lives outside of society, but looking at things, at life, from a self-conscious perspective. It’s a kind of attitude, a consciousness, a way of looking at things. I write a lot for my friends. Many of my poems and essays are directed at people in our circle in Chengdu-- the "gang of four" including Song Wei, Shi Guanghua, Wan Xia and me. We not only dedicated poems and writing to each other but also share ideas and write for each other... More generally, I write for my daughter-- I’m sure that I have one somewhere! I write for her and future generations, so she can read my writings and look back and say ‘that’s how people lived.’
This idea of "looking back" and of the poet as a living link with the past was perhaps most readily apparent in the lifestyle and poetry of the group’s acclaimed "genius," Song Wei.
Song Wei
On his sixteenth birthday Song Wei wrote his first free verse prose poem. He remembers the title as "Birthdays are the bitter fruits of life" and the poem itself as "stupid (gua)". Of significance to him, with the benefit of hindsight, is that he was motivated by a deep sense of the passage of time. "I felt that time was passing me by, that I was sixteen but had not yet found my calling." This sense of moment and undiscovered destiny worked a transformation on Song Wei, expressed not so much in the content of his birthday verse as in the break toward independent creation that it marked. The term he used to describe this transformation, "huan jue" has the connotation of "illusion" or "hallucination," underscoring the suddenness, the dizzy impulsiveness
of change, and in many ways describing his life. My own memories of Song Wei share this hallucinatory quality, like a series of clear yet unfixed images, one eliding into another. Perhaps this is because of the different places we met-- restaurants, friends’ houses, tea houses, but very often bars and late at night-- but it is also because Song chose to present himself in a hallucinatory light, as a kind of walking poem of his own creation.
Of all the group, Song came closest to the jianghu ideal: wild in appearance, fond of drink (especially medicinal liquors), wandering from one friend’s house to another, wearing out his welcome and moving on. In Chengdu, he had no fixed address, but he was far from rootless. Song identified strongly, almost mystically, with his family home in the countryside of Muchuan, some distance south and west of the city. His spiritual bond to that place was central to who he made himself, and the bond was stronger in that his brother and writing partner, Song Qu, stayed there, almost a recluse. I never met Song Qu, and began to doubt the corporeal existence of Song Wei’s alter-ego (the brothers always published together) until I was assured by the rest of the group that Song Qu was real.
It seemed natural to question reality when in the company of Song Wei, for his commitment to the hallucinatory huan jue aesthetic was total, and one was never sure of the line between poetic imagination and real experience in his stories. This blurring of the real and the imaginary, the poem and life, was his point, after all, and explains his special ability to evoke the past in his poetry. Song Wei described himself as "traditional" and even "conservative," but as he indicated in my first meeting with the group, he believed that "the most progressive people are always the most traditional." To a certain extent, this paradox can be understood as reflecting the historical background against which Song Wei developed his aesthetic.
Up until the transition of his poetic style on his sixteenth birthday, Song’s poems were written in imitation of Tang and Song dynasty classical poetry. He emulated the classical form, and drew the stories from his own imagination. Still, the content was classical, if imaginary, and his poems dwelt on history, not the present reality. It may seem odd to talk about someone’s ‘pre-sixteen' poetry, but Song Wei was, by all accounts, a prodigy. At the age of seven he wrote his first poem in imitation of another prodigy (of the Tang dynasty), Luo Binwang. Luo’s "Goose (e)" begins with the lines "goose, goose, goose" , which Song Wei reformulated as "people, people, people." What led Song Wei to become such a precocious talent? His parents encouraged him, but they pinned their hopes on Song Wei becoming a musician-- at their urging he began piba lessons at the age of seven. He became quite adept and was slated to attend music school, but he failed the entrance examination due (he said) to a rivalry between his teacher and the examiner. Song Wei liked the piba and his parents’ initiative soon become his own passion--but throughout his childhood music shared his attention with another form of ‘cultivation’, poetry. Thus when his musical career aborted, he was more than content to concentrate full-time on poetry.
The Songs were shangren (business people) who worked as clerks in a bank. Song Wei didn’t talk about their class background and history, but I got the impression that they were from Chengdu and were sent down to the countryside around Muchuan. His parents were literate and relatively cultured, but they were not the guiding influence in Song Wei’s early fascination with poetry. His eldest brother was his inspiration. Song Ben collected poems from the Song and Tang and first exposed his adoring little brother to them. Song Wei admits that he "worshipped" his older brother and imitated him. Today he refers to Song Ben as a "wasted genius" because he no longer writes, despite the fact that by the early 1970's he had reached a high level of creativity and acceptance.
Of course, one of the remarkable things about this story of two ‘classicist’ brothers is its time setting. It is a story taking place in (yet out of) the 1970s, at the most authoritarian and repressive stage of the moribund Cultural Revolution. When the ten-year-old Song Wei was mimicking the poems of his brother’s (no doubt surreptitious) collection, the Chinese collective outside his room was slogging through the motions of the "Criticize Lin Biao and Confucius" campaign. Like so many others, Song Wei first studied Confucius and other traditional thinkers through official tracts of criticism. It took little effort to ignore the shrill layer of tired socialist denunciation and get to the text itself. Song Wei doesn’t deny that the Cultural Revolution had a profound effect on his family and on his own personal development. His parents were "usual suspects" and constantly pinpointed for struggle. Still, Song Wei’s discovery of poetry and the classics continued apace and apart from the larger society.
The story Song Wei tells of himself is out-of -time, and self consciously so. He doesn’t dwell on the historical context and its influence on him, but presents himself as not belonging to the present and being outside of society. From our time-bound perspective, however, we might venture some speculations about the extent to which the historical context did influence Song, and the ways in which his work reflects historical changes. While it seems odd that he would lose himself in the classical tradition amid the swirl of revolution, he may have found in it an escape from the pain and pressure of those times. Further, the imitation of classical poetry is not formally out of step with the slavish copying of dazibao or the whole panapoly of memorized, well-versed denunciations, revolutionary exhortations, formulaic adulations of Mao or scripted self-criticisms so characteristic of that era. In the same way, the moment he chose to begin his story, his sixteenth birthday, also hints at a parallel between his personal history and broader events in China. Is it coincidence that his desire to ‘come of age’, to "do something with my life...something different and important" should fall on August 1980, when the ‘reform and opening’ policy was getting underway? It could be, and we must take seriously his claim that it is coincidental, but his attitude fit the zeitgeist: personal hope and ambition flowering in an era of high expectations, the opening of a new age.
Song Wei cites as one of his earliest childhood memories finding himself alone in a doubanr factory, a large space that made him feel "small and insignificant." His latest poem also draws on this self-image, drawn from childhood, of insignificance. "Going to Chengdu by bus (Cheng che qu Chengdu)" tells of an experience he had as a child going to Chengdu for a music lesson. He was full of excitement on going to the big city and full of a sense of his own importance-- that he was somehow special and different:
One the way to the city, the bus stopped to let everyone piss. As I was getting back on the bus I saw a little boy the same age as me. He was sitting there and his head was lowered like he was thinking about something. I suddenly asked myself, ‘Is he thinking the same thoughts that I am?’ And it struck me that he thought he was important, too!...When we came into the city I saw all of the lights in all the windows-so many people, and each of them with their own lives, their own thoughts, their own feelings of being different and important...
The poem’s content was drawn from a past experience, but Song described the inspiration for this poem, the catalyst, as coming from a more recent experience that made him lose his sense of place and time in a hallucinatory moment:
It was a gloomy day, the weather was strange. I was at home with Xi Yangzhun when I saw him nodding off. I woke him up and said, ‘let’s go out for a ride.’ He lives on the outskirts of the city, and we rode around on all the small streets for hours...It was as though we weren’t in Chengdu at all but in a different space. I began to feel like it was a different time, too, as if we were somehow in the past. Then we got to a big road and the feeling left. But after we got home I couldn’t stop thinking about that scene from my childhood, and couldn’t write anything else until I got that image down in a poem.
The theme of the poem is an important and recurring one: the ambivalence Song Wei feels between being drawn into celebrating his self-importance and feeling humbled by his insignificance in relation to the world. He sees the poem as a kind of "self denial " (zi wo bianyi). This ambivalence toward the self and the valuation of the self can be seen in Song Wei’s interesting accomodation between the ideas of fate and freewill. In one conversation he returned to his sixteenth birthday as a kind of reference point. He spoke of "shouldering the burden" of his destiny so I asked him if he believed in fate, that each of us has a destiny which is foreordained. His reply was interesting:
Everyone has a destiny that is sent down from above, from the ‘dao’, but it’s a kind of objective set from above--it can only be reached from the rising power of man. It’s like this chopstick held in the air in the middle. The dao keeps puttings things on top of it, and I’m down below reaching up to try and grasp it...Life and destiny are a kind of cooperation between the dao and one’s own efforts...
It seems that this accomodation reflects his ambivalence toward his ‘self’ his ego. Song believes--and what child prodigy doesn’t?-- that he has a great destiny, yet he must humble himself, remind himself that this desiny can only be realized through his efforts, and that in this struggle he is just one individual in the greater whole of humankind; another grasping hand, another light in the window thinking its own thoughts.
Another example of this tension between greatness and insignificance can be found in the evolution of his poetic works. Song Wei’s most famous poem-- the one which received the most acclaim and attention-- was an epic written with his brother, "God says it is thus (da yue shi)." He was only seventeen when he wrote this poem, and critics likened it to Nietzche, and to Goethe’s "Faust" for its grand scope and audacity. The poem is thick, even obtuse, written half in classical language and difficult for even the most accomplished scholars to comprehend. It is vast, broaching the direct experience of the elements and the movement of the universe. Song Wei did not talk about this epic, but about his reaction to it and the subsequent development of his poetry: "After God says it is thus I felt the need to return to myself, to life, so I wrote Family Speech (Jia Yu) to get back to something basic."
Family Speech is a series of poems set in a family compound far from the city, closed off from the outside world, and in an indeterminate period of China’s pre-modern history. The stories are images of a self-consciously interior life, of a rejection of the world. In conversation, Song Wei strolls around these stories, not distinguishing between the real and the imaginary. The two stories he chose to recall give a taste of the overall theme-- a theme that is a continuation of the ambivalence toward the self:
I did something great, some big deal [God says it is thus?], but then I retreated to the family home. Lots of people come to me there; they had many big things for me to do, many things they wanted to join in. The next day I politely saw them to the door and on their way, and I returned to my reading...
The poem he referred to was Brave Men:
In the last few days, the fierce wind had died down a little
Several carriages stopped in front of my gate.
A group of kind looking men held out gifts
Their faces were grave but cordial.
One of them presented me silk and jade,
Ancient appearance, warm touch of the hand
They invited me to accompany them to the ends of the earth
To divide up gold
To go to the finest shops for my clothes.
I remembered on the same day many years before
Another band of thin men crossed the sea to visit
With books and compasses in their hands.
They tried to persuade me to move into the prosperous town.
In time, most of them found fame and success.
On each occasion, I stood up in the same manner to greet my guests.
Listened to the exciting stories of their heroism.
The host and all the guests kneeled before each other
To become brothers, plotting their rebellious deeds.
I served them a great feast. We sang loudly, hands clapping.
The lanterns burned all night.
But when the dawn came I saw them off.
The fierce wind blew again.
My heart had already resumed its calm.
Song’s poem reveals both his identification with the heterodox "rebellious" tradition of the Shui Hu Zhuan, and his desire to retire from the world and concentrate on self-cultivation and self-expression. The life in the countryside Song Wei describes is not that of the ‘average peasant’; instead he places himself within the gentry / literati tradition of championing the peasants’ righteous rebellion. Song’s stance does not deny the difference between his position and the peasants, but neither does it turn that difference into an abstraction of cultural backwardness or romantic vitality. In fact, Song’s "rebel literatus" ideal expresses the principles of "wholism" by emphasizing the responsibility of the educated class toward the peasants, and by trying to recover a traditional relationship with the life of the countryside, rather than modern alienation from it.
Song does not dwell on the exploitation inherent in this relationship in the "old society," but then his point is not to investigate historical reality so much as to construct historical images. These historical images, in turn, are the building blocks out of which Song creates his own self-image. In the poem, Song is non-heroic; that is, he joins in the "brotherhood," yet in the end chooses "calm" over "heroism." This is not the traditional literati’s choice of refusing to serve an immoral ruler, of "taking off one’s armor and returning to the countryside" (jie jia gui tian), but a more fundamental inward turn toward independence and the freedom of non-involvement. By choosing to stay rooted in the calm interior space of the countryside rather than go to the "prosperous town" with all its promise of glory, Song gives priority to exploring the subjective world of self-expression, rather than the objective realm of rebellious action.
Song Wei discussed another poem in the same Family Speech series that also draws on the theme of retiring to the countryside to explore the interior self:
We sat talking around the table, and my little sister walked over and opened the window--I don’t know why in that dark stuffy room it never occured to us to open the window. It was beautiful outside, the sun was shining and the mountain opposite the house was covered in snow. My sister looked out and sighed. I looked at her face framed with the mountain in the window and saw that the snow-covered mountain and my sister’s face were the same color. As soon as I saw her face, I was drawn back into the room, back to our conversation around the table...
The poem was In Illness:
After winter began, my family members fell ill in the inner-chambers
They drank yellow spirits, its cure widespread and fine.
Outside the gate a large band of men on horseback passed by,
Their metal weapons clanked as they brushed the white walls of my house.
My family all stayed together, safely, not lured outside
All wrapped their heads in cloth to get well,
To live their lives among lacquered furniture
Thinking of the glory of the family’s past.
How difficult it was for them to earn the right
To live this way, without having to set foot outside,
To warm themselves around the stove fire
Wringing their hands for warmth
With nothing more to do.
Alone, I thought of the characters in a book I had read
They too stayed clamly in their houses
Not concerned with names or reputation, they just wrote and drank.
That winter was quiet and clear
My family members scented their clothers in smoke
Or drank and admired the beauty of the drinking vessels.
Only my younger sister would get out of bed before twilight
To open the window. Out the window
Was the mountain. Oh, my sister who looked at the sky
At that moment her expression became one with that of the mountain
A thin covering of snow was as pure and noble as jade.
Here the interior life Song describes is a quiet freedom of aesthetic reflection, contrasted with the noisy violence of the outside world. He likens this self-absorbtion to illness, but only to underscore the pleasures of convalescence. The "cure" of "yellow spirits" suggests that Song sees traditional culture not as the pathogen of illness, but as a source of self-healing. The images of darkness, smokiness, pallor, the sedentary life of a voluntary shut-in, all point to a kind of unhealthiness, but Song Wei’s intention is not to facilely draw out the tired metaphor of "China the closed-off, walled-in repressor of individuality and hope." He almost celebrates the unhealthiness , or at least recognizes that it is neccessary to achieve a more true health:
When I wrote this poem is was reading the "Yellow Emperor’s Classic" (Huang di nei jing) and I came across the idea that "sickness leads the way to health"; that only through overcoming a serious illness can the balance of forces in the body be put in a truly stable order...
Song Wei does not glorify sickness in itself but sees it as a natural stage in the evolution toward true health-- the negation of the self to achieve a more balanced expression of the self.
The contrast between this musing acceptance of unhealthiness by Song Wei and the almost virulent rejection of "Chinese sickness" by the older poet Sun Jingxuan is instructive. Sun seems to advocate a ‘cult of athleticism’ to root out the virus of malaise and sloth from the ‘body’ of Chinese culture. He is an iconoclast, a bitter critic of tradtional culture, while Song Wei affirms and even defends Chinese culture. As much as Sun promotes the physical, Song admires the triumph of intellect over brawn. With great enthusiasm, Song once told the (apocryphal?) story of Confucius and Zi Lu:
Confucius was always sitting down and talking, and Zi Lu thought that they should be out training their bodies. One day the two of them were walking along and a tiger jumped out at them. Confucius was scared but Zi Lu grabbed the tiger by the throat and killed it with his bare hands. He was really proud of this but Confucius said nothing until Zi Lu asked for praise and Confucius cursed him for being too proud. This got Zi Lu mad: ‘I saved his life and he curses me!’ So he picked up a stone and hid it behind his back, planning to kill Confucius. Well, Confucius saw this and said to him, ‘killing a person with a stone is not as easy as killing them with spoken words, and the most effective way is with the written word.’ Zi Lu was so surprised at these words that he dropped the stone, defeated.
Song Wei was attracted to the idea that clever intelligence can always overcome physical force. This faith in the power of the word was an intellectual tradition that underpinned Song Wei’s self-image as a jianghu poet who, by extension of his poetry to life, was also a political activist. Despite the introspection of Family Speech and its rejection of the world (political movements) in favor of the home (self), Song Wei was no more a "hermit" than his friend Pan Jiazhu; his return to tradition was not an escape, but an acceptance and appropriation of whatever aspects of the cultural tradition he chose to use in creating himself. The connection between tradition and protest is illustrated in another poem series, "In-House Poems and Superstitions," (Hunei de shige he mixin), in which Song sees himself as the student of "Master Chai of Fang Mountain." In New Style of a New Generation in Our Minds, Song the student addresses his Master on poetry:
You see me, a vestige mixed among the people, a hoary head pushed to exhaustion
Ah, so many bad people, bad things
Their spirit pollutes me!
Please pass on this poem of grief and anger at the people’s suffering
This poem of morality and conscience, this poem of Chinese medecine
This poem of sincerity, not daring to hide and keep quiet.
Let me see, under skin and flesh,
The mysterious lightning of white bones, the soul’s fire;
Let me see how poetry’s baby obeys life, counters birth, struggles for freedom, bawling!
Ah, poetry, knife’s edge harsher than love,
Please scrape the poison from my bones, breeding between the knife’s point and bone
Our chance encounter on a narrow road, flickering out of the forge’s fire
...
Teacher Chai, I dare not believe that, in this age,
A diamond or a heart can summarize all the radiance of the sun
No! One poem cannot make you enlightened!
Please pass on undaunted poems, wholly lofty and unyielding poems
The steadfast poems of Yuan Jie, Qu Yuan, Li Bai; stubborn and eccentric poems
Oh, and those even haughtier, unrepentant
Crippled poems and words cut short, a moment of aborted love
In self-destruction, in ruin, in collapse ?
The poem, written in September of 1988, is filled with references cutting across time, in keeping with the theme of "passing on" a tradition. Early in the poem, Song ironically indicts the political repression of his own era, the "bad people and bad things" whose "spirit pollutes me," by turning the Party’s own rhetoric of "spiritual pollution" (jingshen wuran) against the Party. In the same vein, he expresses his rebellious spirit in the "unrepentant" stance of his poetry, literally "refusing to confess" (jubu gongren) or sell-out his principles, and resisting the censors who "cut short" (distort) his words. The traditional source of his protest is clear throughout the poem, not only in his invocation of rebellious poets of the past, especially Qu Yuan, but in the traditional literati’s sense of "grief and anger at the people’s suffering" (baitian minren).
At the same time, Song seems to criticize the elitism of this literati tradition, claiming that "One poem cannot make you enlightened!" In denying the possibility of "enlightenment,"-- xianzhi, literally being the "first to know,"-- is Song Wei consciously identifying with the heterodox, rebellious tradition as opposed to the state-serving, orthodox tradition of "establishment intellectuals" of his own day? Song’s denial of intellectual elitism is reinforced by his approval of "superstition," which he refers to as "mysterious wisdom" in other poems of the same series. Ultimately what Song identifies with is the intellectual tradition with roots in the countryside, a "wholistic" tradition that he seeks to reanimate in his own life.
Song Wei’s personality and behavior, as well as his poetry, further suggest this interpretation of the poet as, to some degree, "anti-intellectual." When he came to visit me in my apartment, Song dismissed all the ‘scholarly’ works I had collected on Chinese culture, and instead recommended books concerning traditional architecture and fengshui. He was especially enthusiastic about his family’s old home in Muchuan, and described it, complete with diagrams, at great length. His motivation was not nostalgia nor the love of a hobbysit, but rather the serious purpose of one who really believed that the arrangement and ‘style’ of these buildings and courtyards actually hold the key to understanding a kind of life-- his living poem-- a life that drew inspiration from traditional culture and the Chinese countryside.
It was significant that Song chose such a material, concrete medium for expressing his ideas on traditional culture. This intentional shunning of abstraction and equally intentional recourse to the particular, to "earthy" tactile experience was a common characteristic of all the poets of the post-menglong group, a characteristic that sharply distinguished them from other intellectuals, including the group that met in Wang Tingxiang’s salon. While they lived in the same city, the poets celebrated the particular and local as much as the salon intellectuals rejected the "local" in favor of a universal and cosmopolitan identity. It was also significant that the two groups had wholly different conceptual relationships to the countryside; the intellectuals blaming peasant consciousness for China’s cultural backwardness, the poets accepting Chinese culture, rejecting the very idea of blame, and finding a source of values in a "wholistic" relationship with countryside life.
The poets Pan Jiazhu, Shi Guanghua, and Song Wei showed me an alternative value system that they defined against both the totalitarian state and the cultural iconoclasm of the modern intellectual identity. Their aesthetic of "wholism" was a response to the contemporary Chinese condition of alienation, which they saw as arising from the state’s repression of individuality, and the iconoclast intellectuals’ self-isolation from "Chineseness." Their poetry was inseperable from their lives, and this ideal of a "lived aesthetic" explains how their prioritization of introspection and self-expression led to the apparently contradictory stance of political activism. In their jianghu ethic, the poets rebelled against the conformity imposed on them not only by the state and the universal rationality of the intellectual identity, but by consumer culture, as well. One source of their rebellion lay in their identification with traditional culture and with the countryside, which posed "brotherhood" against the "selfish materialism" of consumer culture, "earthy perception" against the "abstract rationality" of the modern intellectual identity, and "righteousness" against a repressive political system that stifled individual expression.
The poets identified with one aspect of China’s cultural tradition, but at the same time they sharply distinguished themselves from other attempts to revitalize traditional culture in contemporary China, especially the xin rujia (New Confucianism) movement. They were profoundly critical of Du Weiming’s vision of "tradition in modernity," which they saw as reinforcing authoritarianism-- anathema to the poets’ rebellious spirit. Their acceptance of traditional culture did not extend to what they perceived as Du’s anti-individual, anti-democratic definition of China’s Confucian cultural identity. This criticism of xin rujia was even more important in the early 1990s, when the Party began to coopt the interest in Confucianism that arose during culture fever, turning it to the ends of cultural nationalism. Intellectuals participating in the "National studies fever" (guoxue re), fostered by the Party to fill an ideological vacuum, also looked to traditional culture as a "source of the self," but the answer they gave to the questions of how to overcome China’s social anomie, and how to "build a spiritual civilization" emphasized the continuity between Confucianism and "socialist values"-- the very "universalism" against which the poets’ "particularism" rebelled.
From the widely accepted perspective that constructs the category "modern Chinese intellectual" in terms of that group’s political tension with the state, "poets" are a sub-category lumped together with writers, scientists, academics, engineers, and Party theoreticians by virtue of their education and their presumed "dissidence." Defined in this imprecise way, the broad category "Chinese intellectual" glosses over distinctions that some sub-groups (such as poets) find significant for carving out their own separate identity. In fact, it was just this defining criterion of "political dissent" that the post-menglong poets rejected, not because they did not oppose "the system," but because they wanted to be seen as artists first. Nor were they comfortable with their "intellectual" bedfellows, since they saw their "wholistic" aesthetic of self-expression as fundamentally different from the abstracting rationalism of the modern intellectual identity. Even their "marginal" lifestyle separated them from "establishment intellectuals" (and this would include the poet Sun Jingxuan) who lived and worked in government work-units.
The point is that identities are fluid, created categories. From an alternative perspective-- one that looks at identities constructed around the discourse of traditional culture, the countryside, and peasant consciousness-- the post-menglong poetry group stand outside the category of "modern Chinese intellectual" altogether. By the same token, the intellectual identity that is constructed around the discourse of peasant consiousness suggests the grouping of "modern Chinese intellectuals" together with agents of the Party-state, since (unlike the poets) both intellectuals and officials define their modernizing mission against the abstraction of a "feudal" peasant backwardness. This is a controversial perspective, but it should be taken as a qualification of the conventional construction of "intellectuals against the state," rather than the simple substitution of a different inclusive category. Both perspectives are valid, so long as they do not preclude other perspectives, and both hold very real implications for the way Chinese cultural identity is defined, and, by extension, for the way Chinese people live their lives. The value of the poets’ alternative outlook-- their wholistic appropriation of traditional culture, their positive attitude toward the countryside, and their acceptance of "Chineseness"-- is that it opens another window from which to view that central question of Chinese cultural identity.
A Philosophical Framework
While the poets were conscious of their "difference" from other intellectuals, and even conceived of their lives and work as presenting "another way," they did not describe this alternative identity in theoretical terms. I have used the categories "particular" and "universal" to contrast the poets’ definition of cultural identity with that of other intellectuals. These terms come from the philosopher Tu Youguang, whose ideas provide a framework for understanding the poets’ identification with traditional culture, and how it differs from the viewpoints of the iconoclast intellectuals of Wang Tingxiang’s salon, of the neo-traditionalist intellectuals of xin rujia and "national studies fever," and, not least, of Party officials. I came to know Tu Youguang through one of his students, my friend Zhao Juming, and met the circle of scholars and artists who surrounded Tu in Wuhan. Later, I had the opportunity to accompany Professor Tu at three conferences on Chinese philosophy focusing on Confucianism in contemporary Chinese society. Through these encounters, I was introduced to his philosophy, through which he presented another alternative construction of Chinese cultural identity.
Born in Henan province in 1924, Tu Youguang was poor but managed to receive an education in the four books and five classics by dint of hard work in the lineage school. He was an excellent student and was admitted to Qinghua university, where he studied philosophy under Feng Youlan. Tu also studied English, and became a skillful translator. After Liberation, he was sent to Wuhan to work as a government cadre, eventually settling into a job at the provincial Bureau of Animal Husbandry, where he worked until his retirement in 1979. Tu Youguang’s thirty years of work experience in the Hubei countryside profoundly influenced his philosophical outlook. The suffering that he witnessed there convinced Tu that the Confucian tradition in which he had been raised was fundamentally flawed. Taking inspiration from the peasants’ resilient response to political movements and hardship imposed from outside, Tu embraced Daoism, which he considered a "living wellspring of values" of life in the countryside. Tu drew on this wellspring to develop his own philosophy of life, beginning from the framework built by Feng Youlan, but in the end, departing from the path of his teacher.
Tu would have lived on in contemplative obscurity had he not been discovered as a local "man of learning" and recruited to a dictionary research effort in the early 1980s. His reputation moved Huazhong University of Science and Technology in Wuhan to hire him as a professor in their literature and philosophy departments. In 1985, Tu renewed his relationship with Feng Youlan, translating Feng’s Short History of Chinese Philosophy from English into Chinese. Then, as Feng was nearing the end of his Collected Works, and the end of his life, he chose Tu Youguang to be his assistant in completing the work.
I met Professor Tu two months after his return from Beijing, where he had arranged the funeral of Feng Youlan. Feng passed away just months after the two of them had completed the final volume of the New History of Chinese Philosophy series, a volume devoted chiefly to Mao Zedong thought. The story surrounding this last phase of Feng’s work in significant ways defines Tu Youguang’s philosophy as a departure from his teacher’s. According to Tu, Feng was forced to rethink the central axiom of his philosphical system in late 1989 and 1990 in response to June Fourth. After this event, Feng fell into a deep depression and did not speak for months. When he broke his silence, he spoke from Laozi: "The people have no fear of death, why threaten them with it?" (Min bu wei si [nai he yi si ju zhi]).
Tu described Feng’s deep despair as emanating from recognition of the tragic historical consequences of the central problematic in his "new rational philosophy," namely, the relationship between the individual and "principle" (li), or the problem of the "concrete universal." As Tu Youguang outlined Feng’s basic philosophical position to a symposium held in October 1990 honoring the thinker:
Professor Feng Youlan has consistently insisted that the function of philosophy is not the increase of positive knowledge in matters of fact, but the elevation of man’s sphere of living. He calls the highest sphere of living the transcendent sphere, which, according to this theory, is the centre of his philosophical creation. (Tu, 1990:1).
Tu points out that Feng never repudiated this conviction, holding fast to it even through the series of confessional self-criticisms he was compelled to make in 1949. The transcendent sphere both explained different subjective understandings of one objective reality, and represented the ultimate level of human consciousness-- higher than the "innocent," "utilitarian," and "moral" spheres-- where "man is a conscious, selfless citizen of the universe." (Tu, 1990:2, Feng, 1948:545-6).
Feng viewed his own philosophy as a synthesis of the main strands of traditional Chinese thought given coherence by the insights of Western logic. The aim of his transcendent sphere was no less than to bridge the separation of humankind from "Heaven" by developing reason to the point where it transcends itself, variously described in traditional terms as ren, dao, or nirvana. This enlightened state of consciousness was not separate from the world of lived experience, but an infusion of the "sulbime" into the mundane "performance of the common task."(Tu, 1990:4).
The problem for Feng was how to draw an ontological connection between the individual and the universal principle (li) of Heaven. Tu Youguang maintains that the problem was left unresolved in Feng’s 1948 Short History, but that Feng continued to grapple with the question in his subsequent work. Significantly, Tu points to Feng Youlan’s experience of revolution in the countryside, chronicled in the 1950 paper What I Learnt in Participating in the Work of Land Reform, as the catalyst that revealed a logical solution to the problem of the "concrete universal." Since class status (Li) could be inferred from individual cases (thing), but class categories were sometimes left ‘empty,’ Feng set the axiomatic starting point of his philosophy with the existence of the universal "kind" as ontologically prior to its concrete, particular manifestations.
In 1985, when Feng pointed out his revision of the New History of Chinese Philosophy along the lines set down in his Land Reform article, Tu Youguang realized that the logical coherence of Feng’s philosophical synthesis was achieved at the expense of the individual:
According to the new rational philosophy, what the individual follows is not the Li of the individual but the Li of its kind. It is not that the individual does not follow the Li of the individual but that there is no Li of the individual at all. In the new rational philosophy only the kind has Li which the individual follow and thus gains its Xing (nature, or character). It seems to the new rational philosophy that the "Li of the individual" is a self-contradictory concept.
In this light, it is significant that Tu ascribes Feng’s resolution of the "concrete universal" problematik to his experience of Land Reform and the discrimination of class status. In Tu’s view, Feng’s complicity with the Party’s policies mirrors his philosophy’s legitimation of the Party’s imposition of conformity to its universal socialist values. This philosophical complicity also foreshadows Feng’s profound disillusionment after the government crackdown on June Fourth, and his subsequent rethinking of the ontological relationship between universal and particular.
Tu describes both the implications of Feng’s flawed resolution to the problematic, and the opposing axiom from which he developed his own philosophy:
So far as existence is concerned, all that exist are single separate individuals. The existence of a kind is nothing but the existence of all the individual components of this kind. As regards knowing, it is to know the qualities and relations of individuals. The qualities and relations constitute the Li of the individual. The Li of kind is generalized from the Li of the individual. The Li of the individual is primary, and generality is derivative. This is not a denial of the Li of kind and generality. This is only to say that they are secondary. This is still less a denial of the transcendent sphere of living but an assertion of its being a realization of individuality to perfection. (Tu, 1990: 8-9).
In Tu’s reformulation of Feng’s "concrete universal," he gives priority to the particular over the universal, to the individual over the collective. This philosophical stand draws on Daoism, and interprets the history of Chinese thought with Daoism as the expression of (ontologically prior) individuality or the particular, and with Confucianism as the articulation of (ontologically derivative) authoritarianism or the universal.
Professor Tu’s conception of Chinese cultural identity became clear to me during the conferences I attended with him, and this conception can be understood in terms of two basic propositions: First, since the particular individual is primary, the "crisis" of traditional values in conflict with modernity is an illusion, or more accurately, the crisis is only a function of the impulse to create universal systems of value. Thus, in commenting on the contemporary significance of the Confucian tradition, Tu maintains that
Tradition exists in modernity. Modernity subsists in tradition. They consist in the same process of history. They are distinguishable in conceptions, but can not be divided into two separate things.
Confucianism, as an important component of Chinese tradition, is still alive in our contemporary life. Our contemporary life consists of relations, i.e., problems, of which the solution may be [found] in various principles (yuanli). Confucianism is one such principle. When we use it to solve our problem, it exists... If it is successful, we hold it; and if it is harmful, we give it up.
What really exists is the individual, which consists of particularity and universality. An individual action consists of its own particularity and a certain universality, i.e., a certain principle. When this principle is Confucian, Confucianism is alive in this action. (Tu, 1992a).
The principle expounded here also describes the poet Song Wei’s appropriation of traditional culture: the individual chooses values according to need and "taste;" once these values, from whatever origin, are "digested" by the individual, they become relevant and alive.
The eating metaphor is Tu Youguang’s, but he is not simply proposing a purely utilitarian relativism. Tu’s second proposition is that Daoism is the "main root" of Chinese philosophy, in that the Daoist tradition provides a framework for individual self-expression, and thus holds out the only true possibility of attaining "the transcendent sphere." At conferences in Xi’an and Beijing, Professor Tu presented a historical analysis of Chinese philosophy, arguing that Daoism has been the main root on which new developments of Chinese thought-- from Indian Buddhism to Western dialectical materialism-- have been "grafted." Confucianism, in this view, has proved a sterile environment to the growth of Chinese philosophy, unwilling to accept cross-fertilization. This analysis amounted to a stinging rejection of "new Confucianism":
Whether we decide to eradicate Chinese philosophy or not to eradicate it, Chinese philosophy can only continue to be developed on the main root, there is no other choice. If not developed on the main root, what continues to develop is no longer Chinese philosophy. (Tu, 1992b)
Tu’s rejection of new-Confucianism, and the cultural nationalism of its proponents, harkens back to his (and, eventually, Feng’s) recognition of Confucianism’s complicity with totalitarian power. Tu’s conclusion was a forthright assertion of the particular, and an emotional indictment of the tyranny of the universal:
The highest principle in the Laozi is "the Way of nature." "Nature" is "the self-so." This makes the particular fundamental. The mainstream of Confucianism makes the universal fundamental. As long as the universal is fundamental we can talk forever and we will still be killing people in the name of the universal. Only by making the particular fundamental, by deciding on the existence, value, rights, and respect of the individual, by developing on this main root, can Chinese philosophy become the spirit of the times in contemporary China.
At the conference held in Xi’an, Tu Youguang had been sitting down to read his paper, but he rose from his seat as he spoke these final words, his voice quavering with anger. The dramatic gesture of this white-haired gentleman, coming from an impeccable philosophical pedigree and speaking so boldly against the government’s brutality on June Fourth, had the desired effect. The hall fell silent and there was a sustained moment of common amazement, then reflection, then the chair called the session into recess.
The conference participants I spoke with expressed admiration for Tu’s courageous action, even if most of them disagreed with his views. In some significant way, his views were not relevant to them. It struck me that while Tu Youguang’s words were directed at them, he was almost speaking a different language from the rest. The other intellectuals at the conference presented papers that either tried to discuss the contemporary relevance of Confucianism to the task of "building spiritual civilization" and the "socialist market economy" (e.g. "Confucianism and Joint Venture Enterprises"), or tried to use the latest Western theories of post-modernism. Tu was out of step for both his refusal to "comply" with the Party-defined "needs of the nation," and for his rootedness in the Daoist tradition that flew in the face of alienated cosmopolitanism.
Tu was speaking a language the poets would have understood quite well, and his philosophical acceptance of traditional culture-- according to the needs of the individual-- as well as his prioritization of the particular over the universal, spoke not only to the poets, but for them. The "particularism" that Tu shared with the post-menglong poetry group stands in contrast to the universalizing tendency toward abstraction exhibited in constructions of a modern intellectual identity. Just as Tu and the poets shared a commitment to particularism in contrast to "establishment intellectuals," they also shared a common approach to traditional culture, and a common orientation toward the countryside, again, in contrast to other intellectuals’ alienation from peasant life-- thus the "particularism" of Tu Youguang and the poets contests the abstracting discourse of cultural iconoclasm and "peasant consciousness." The last voices I will introduce into this ongoing dialogue on Chinese tradition and cultural identity are those of the villagers living in Xiakou.
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This page last updated by Pam (pjleonar@email.uncc.edu) and John (jmflower@email.uncc.edu) on 02/20/00