Chinese Poetry in Times of Mind, Mayhem and Money

Front matter

Chinese Poetry in Times of Mind, Mayhem and Money by Maghiel van Crevel

BRILL

Chinese Poetry in Times of Mind, Mayhem and Money

Preface

One of my hang-ups is what it means to call something marginal, or more precisely, what it means to call avant-garde poetry from China so. I'll save this issue for a subsection of chapter One and the occasional relapse later on. Here I will only say that it is to do with a questionable mechanism that makes numbers the measure of all things, that this mechanism has sometimes been applied to not just poetry but also scholarship on poetry, and that on both levels it is often unwarranted and potentially deceptive. While I am aware that the poetry crowd in Chinese Studies and Literary Studies 1s smaller than the politics crowd or the fiction crowd, I'm not sure that this makes it marginal in any sense other than the quantitative, or that quantitative marginality is a bad thing. What's more, just like poetry's notorious undefinability and diatribes against its uselessness have never endangered its acknowledged right to exist—or rather the fact of its existence as an essential expression of humanity—so the scholarly study of poetry somehow always manages to hang on, regardless of the number of people involved. It appears, quite simply, to be worth it. On that note, and specifically in light of the dynamic modern manifestations of a civilization with a massive cultural tradition, it is good to see that the Chinese poetry crowd continues to attract new faces in China and elsewhere, and that the object of their fascination continues to generate new research. And it makes perfect sense, for there are many more things about the Chinese avant-garde to get hung up on than its marginality, as I hope this book will show.

The documented history of the avant-garde is roughly a hundred times shorter than that of Chinese poetry as a whole. Still, the amount of material that has become available since the late 1970s can feel overwhelming to the individual researcher—and yet it isn’t always easy to find, especially if one is based elsewhere in the world. To facilitate research, teaching and translation, I present this study in conjunction with three online research bibliographies published by the Modern Chinese Literature and Culture Resource Center: “Unofficial Poetry Journals from the People’s Republic of China: A Research Note and an Annotated Bibliography” (2007, see Works x PREFACE

Cited), “Avant-Garde Poetry from the People’s Republic of China: A Bibliography of Single-Author and Multiple-Author Collections” (2008a) and “Avant-Garde Poetry from the People’s Republic of China: A Bibliography of Scholarly and Critical Books in Chinese” (2008b).

I hope my work will be useful to others, with other hang-ups than mine.

MvC, February 2008

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Research for this book, including the collection of source materials, was facilitated by grants from the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO), the Faculty of Arts at the University of Sydney, the Faculty of Arts at Leiden University, the Leiden University Research School for Asian, African and Amerindian Studies (CNWS), the Leiden University International Office, the Leiden University Fund (LUF), the International Institute for Asian Studies (ILIAS), the Peking University Office for International Cooperation and the Research Center for the Theoretical Study of Literature and Art of the Faculty of Arts at Beijing Normal University.

In addition to anonymous reviewers who commented on journal submissions over the years, I thank Ernst van Alphen, Piet Gerbrandy and Petra Couvée, for what they have to say about poetry, and Michel Hockx and Michael Day, for what they had to say about this book once it was written. More generally, I am indebted to critical audiences at the academic institutions where I have presented this research, in classroom and conference settings. Steve Bradbury, David Godwin, Lloyd Haft, Oliver Moore and Simon Patton were among those kind enough to comment on my translations. Remy Cristini and Hanno Lecher of the Leiden University Sinological Library provided superb librarial and IT support.

As 1s true for my earlier work, I am deeply grateful to the many Chinese poets, scholars, critics and other readers who helped me find the poetry that this study is about and all that comes with it, including its performance and its many histories. They are too numerous to list here, but I wish to reiterate publicly the gratitude that I have conveyed to each of them in private settings. There is one name that cannot be left unsaid: Che Qianzi, whose art graces the cover of this book.

I thank the editors of the following journals, books and websites for permission to use previously published material. In order of appearance in the present volume:

Chapter One: The China Quarterly 183, reprinted as Julia Strauss & Michel Hockx (eds), Culture in the Contemporary PRC, Cambridge:

xii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Cambridge UP, 2005; Modern Chinese Literature and Culture Resource Center — Publications, 2003 and 2007; Sidse Laugesen & Anne Wedell-Wedellsborg (eds), Kineserne kommer! Dansk-Rinesisk poesi- Jestwal (The Chinese Are Coming! Danish-Chinese Poetry Festival), Aarhus: Aarhus University, 2004; CHYF) 3, The Drunken Boat 6-I/II. Chapter Two: Tamkang Review xxxvi-4, Full Tilt 1, Poetry International 2006. Chapter Three: minima sinica 2006-1. Chapter Five: Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 11-2, HEAT 8, Renditions 51, Seneca Review xxxiii-2. Chapter Six: Journal of Modern Literature in Chinese 3-2, Renditions 56. Chapter Eight: Journal of Modern Literature in Chinese 6-1, HEAT 5. Chapter Nine: Lu Jie (ed), China’s Cultural Scene at the Turn of the 21st Century, London etc: Routledge, 2008; Full Tilt 1, Index on Censorship 35-4. Chapter Ten: Olga Lomova (ed), Recarving the Dragon: Understanding Chinese Poetics, Prague: Karolinum Press, 2003. Chapter Eleven: Studies on Asia 2-1 and 2-2. Chapter Thirteen: Modern Chinese Literature and Culture Resource Center — Publications, 2007.

I thank the photographers whose work enlivens this book and their portrayees, as well as the authors and editors of the publications in which I encountered them, for permission to include the images in question. Their names are listed in the captions. Unfortunately, many of the photographers remain unidentified.

CONVENTIONS

Poem titles are marked by double angular brackets (e.g. «What the Eagle Says»), to disünguish them from journal articles, book chapters and so on (double quotation marks) and book titles (italics). Footnote numbers appear at the end of the paragraph that precedes the poem, out of respect for the integrity of the text. For the sake of consistency, this also holds for other indented quotations. Reference to untitled poems, the originals of which are actually called «Untitled» (JÆ) in Chinese, is marked by lower case after the first letter of the poem’s first word, and named after the poem's opening line, followed by four successive dots (e.g. «He opens his third eye....»). In poetry and other citations, three separate dots . . . indicate the omission of words from the passage in question.

As for my use of upper case in poetry translations (titles aside), this has depended on the feel of the original. Some of my renditions are in lower case throughout (e.g. Yan Jun); in others only names and the first-person singular Z are capitalized (e.g. Han Dong); in a third category the first word of each stanza also starts with upper case (e.g. Haizi); and in clearly punctuated texts the first word of each sentence 1s capitalized (e.g. Sun Wenbo).

The points of the compass are written with lower case only if their usage is strictly spatial or geographical: Haizi lived north of Beying, but a highly ideologized polemic produced a North-South dichotomy. Literary-critical terms are written with lower case only if they are of wide, multi-interpretable scope, as distinct from specific, localized literary-historical categories: hence, romantic poethood but Western Romantics like Byron and Shelley, and modernism but Socialist Realism.

Following current usage, for alphabetizing Chinese I have used Hanyu pinyin LHÍ #4) but only added tone marks when sound is truly important, and retained other transcriptions as they occur in bibliographical detail. The same principle has informed my use of simplified characters throughout, but of full-form characters for full-form publications as they appear in the list of works cited.

The narrative is entirely in English, with original forms given in parentheses for relevant terms and titles translated from other languages.

xiv CONVENTIONS

In most cases the original form appears at first mention, and the reader who wants to check at a later stage will have to consult the index. Some of the original titles are provided only when the discussion arrives at the text in question, and original terminology is repeated if the term in question features centrally more than once, at far-between points in the narrative. The titles of poems that are part of the discourse studied in this book and feed directly into the analysis are accompanied by the poem's year of composition or, if I have been unable to ascertain this, by its year of publication, followed by a question mark if the date 1s an estimation.

The characters for Chinese personal names are found in the index, which lists life years for all well-known avant-garde poets mentioned in this study, with their recognition as such measured roughly by visibility in multiple-author anthologies, unofficial journals, individual collections, literary histories and so on. This extends to precursors of the avant-garde such as Huang Xiang and Guo Lusheng, but not to authors such as Tang Xiaodu and Chen Chao, whose association with the avant-garde is primarily in their capacity as critics, even if they are published poets in their own right. Life years appear in the main text for poets whose work 1s studied in depth. With a few exceptions that are motivated by the narrative, I have not referred to “real” or “original” names (H, AS%4, e.g. Zhao Zhenkai for Bei Dao) that the authors in question haven't used in their capacity as published poets, since there 1s nothing real or original about them in the present context. In transcribing names, I have adhered to previous transcription in Western-language publications where it exists, even if this flouts the rules for Chinese (family) names (e.g. X? Chuan rather than Xichuan), and otherwise gone by those rules (e.g. Zhongdao rather than «hong Dao). For Beiling, Duoduo and Haizi, whose names have also been transcribed as Bei Ling, Duo Duo and Hai Zi, I have opted for the aggregated versions, basing myself on “real names" after all, for want of better reasons: Beiling's “real name" is Huang Beiling, Duoduo named himself after his daughter Li Duoduo, and Haizi’s “real name? was Zha Haisheng, which makes it unlikely that at in Harzi should be read as a family name.

From the material that was available to me I have picked author portraits that I feel convey the presence of the individuals as I have experienced this over the years during public readings, interviews and so on—rather than looking for pictures from particular times or occa-

CONVENTIONS XV sions that would establish some sort of historical linkage to the poems discussed or build an orderly line-up in which, for instance, Bei Dao should always be older than Yang Lian. Hence, in chapter Four the reader will encounter a Bei Dao who is younger than Yang Lian; and in chapter Two, a Han Dong who wrote the poetry under scrutiny some fifteen or twenty years ago; and so on.

Information that is not common knowledge and for which no source is given comes from fieldwork notes covering the years since 1991, when I started building what has since become an archive of avant-garde poetry from China.

Reliable access to the online resources consulted for this study is ensured through a dedicated citation repository of the relevant website and web page downloads in the Leiden University division of the Digital Archive for Chinese Studies (DACHS Leiden, see p475).

On the whole, as regards these conventions and the design of the table of contents, the introductory chapter One, the index and so on, I have tried to write not just for those who will read this book from cover to cover, but also for those especially interested in this or that chapter or piece of information, and to be sensible rather than rigidly systematic.

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Ix Honggl. «2e Cn re s Re s 40 “Li Hongqi killing himself” 2.0... 2. eee 40 The Coquetry School... 0.0.0.0... eese 42 Han Dong, eating)... oec tantea HR ae ee 45 Han Dong. soda eed EX wes Deeg eee a x 64 Tuem 5, WOUt-COVERs foe oe ess dem RR Ree OES Le EES 74 lor ——————————— es ey ae ae 92 Small Stahon. cse ee dit Wes tes LEGS Eas RR 99 The Poetry of Haizi i4. Mee sh sis e aeter Pes 99 Yang lidni.icenenc eR RE e dere PUn 138 Wans [1ax1n «us eundo ce og Radio n Ka dos 140 Bei Dao 3:252 E De eeu e SUD a e Sid 142 Xr Chuas sedii eiid eia ea a a E ated ed 188 PONI" 248 oun Wenbo: sss prm RIA Rude beeen 282 San Lichia ese uote deii Sariest she uud tee E 306 shen Haobo ur ERR ERES ahaa Rees 308 The Lower Body 1, front cover .. 1... 0.0.0 eee eee 316

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS “Turn-of-the-Century Poetry Polemic,” Taiyuan Daily...

Yan JÜN. P"

Yan Jun as support act for Hei Dachun and Vision ....

Chapter One Avant-garde Poetry From China: Text, Context And Metatext

Whatis Chinese poetry today? Following a quick look at former times, this chapter examines two phenomena that have been central to the situation 1n mainland China since the late 1970s: the unofficial poetry scene and the avant-garde. It then recalls salient moments in the avantgarde's history, with sketchy reference to context. After sampling four individual texts and identifying two overall textual trends, it considers metatextual images of poetry and poethood. Finally, it introduces the next chapters and explains what this book wants to do.

By text, I mean poetry, on the page and in recitation; by context, poetry's social, political and cultural surroundings; by metatext, discourse on poetry.

1. WHat WENT BEFORE

Chinese poetry boasts an uninterrupted, enduring tradition of a good two and a half thousand years. Early specimens are found in the Book of Songs (F2) and the Songs of the South (EFF), the latter with China's arch-poet Qu Yuan as its (co-)author. They remain popular to this day, with Chinese and foreign readers alike. So do the works of celebrated Tang and Song dynasty poets such as Li Bai, Du Fu, Li Shangyin, Su Shi and Li Qingzhao. Their lives span a centuries-long period that predates modernity by roughly a millennium and their works are widely seen as the pinnacle of Chinese literature, indeed of Chinese culture at large. And if poems from the Tang and Song have been canonized to the point of being imperishable to the mortal eye, there is a wealth of accomplished poetry before the Tang and after the Song, too.

Classical Chinese poetry comes in a variety of sophisticated, musical forms and styles. It employs archetypal themes that include the majesty of the natural world, the fate of kmgdoms and empires, and

© MAGHIEL VAN CREVEL, 2008 | DOI 10.1163/9789047442738_002 This is an open access chapter distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution- Noncommercial 3.0 Unported (CC-BY-NC 3.0) License.

the tragedy of the official whose advice goes unheeded by the ruler. The ruler's failure to appreciate his servant's loyalty also serves as a habitual interpretation of poetry that speaks of unrequited love. ‘This illustrates the age-old entanglement of Chinese poetry and politics, brought on by poets as well as politicians, and by poetry's readers as well as its writers. Writers are usually readers, too, and Chinese poets and politicians have coincided in the same bodies. Li Yu, the last emperor of the Southern Tang dynasty, 1s an example ofa thousand years ago. Mao Zedong is one from our time.

In China, such coincidence is perhaps less coincidental than elsewhere, in light of an ontological association of government and literature. In a traditional Chinese worldview both reflect the Way GB Dao, alternatively transcribed as Tao), a cosmic principle that determines the order of all things, from the changing of the seasons to human relations within the state and the family. According to a central component of traditional Chinese poetics, the value of literature lies in its capacity to “convey the Way": to praise, for instance, a virtuous ruler, or remonstrate with one unworthy of the throne. The notion of literature to convey the Way (OC UA SX3É) doesn’t contradict the ancient Chinese adage that poetry “articulates what is on the mind intently” or *verbalizes emotion” (EF zi 35), in Stephen Owen's and Zhang Longxi's renditions. Here, emotion and what is on the mind intently refer not to individual feelings and even less to 1diosyncratic obsession, but to the entire mental state that is appropriate in a given set of circumstances and will prompt equally appropriate expression and action prescribed by the socio-moral code of Confucianism—the sort of mindset, in other words, that one would want in a government official. This explains why in premodern times, imperial civil service examinations tested aspiring officials for their command of poetry. It also explains how it is that in a traditional Chinese view of literature one's command of poetry can be objectively assessed, and reading the poem is, in Owen's words, reading the poet.’

The specialists know better, but still: it is also our mortal perspective that is wont to divide Chinese poetry into classical and modern corpora whose size appears unbalanced. There is close to three millennia of the former and one century of the latter. Whether we will still call ourselves modern a hundred or a thousand years from today is not an acute concern, but such speculation and the limits of living memory aside, it 1s a fact that in the last one hundred years or so Chinese poetry has crossed several watersheds. It has moved from one language to another, from relative self-containment to vigorous interaction with foreign traditions and from entanglement with politics and society to the mixed blessings of autonomy—or, depending on one's perspective, of marginality.

After the last imperial dynasty had collapsed and the Republic of China emerged (1911), champions of change such as Hu Shi and Chen Duxiu advocated literature in a colloquial, modern language, in what has gone down in history as the Literary Revolution (OC^£ == fit) of 1917, triggered in the pages of New Youth GH £1 4E). Vernacular usage (Fi XC) was to supersede the classical Chinese (X £i X) that had been the exclusive medium of high literature. The classical and the vernacular were not different linguistic registers but distinct languages, as far apart as Latin and present-day French. Incidentally, for all their modernity, many vernacular texts from the first years and decades after the Literary Revolution were still anything but colloquial. They retained heavy traces of classical Chinese and incorporated many neologisms of foreign origin. A New Poetry GT is), in free verse as well as foreign and indigenous modern forms, set out to replace a time-honored tradition whose rigidity and elitism were now felt to thwart the development of a modern literature, and by implication of a modern society. The drive for literary reform was motivated in large part by social concerns and was by no means a purely aesthetic affair, so the Way was never far away. Crucially, however, now that poetry was no longer an integral part of officialdom, China's poets lost their self-evident social status. As scholars such as Lloyd Haft and Michelle Yeh have shown, they began to grapple with an identity crisis and problems of legitimation that continue to this day, forcing them to reconsider why, how, what and for whom they wrote.?

Ifin early modern times the marriage of Chinese literature and politics became uneasy, in the public sphere its fundamental validity was rarely questioned with any profound impact. The period up to the 1940s saw foreign-influenced experimentation and heated debate on the New Poetry and its social obligations, by authors whose work is regularly reprinted in China and has been translated into many lan-

? Haft 1989: “Introduction,” Yeh 1991a: ch 1.

guages: Guo Moruo, Wen Yiduo, Xu Zhimo, Bing Xin, Li Jinfa, Bian Zhilin, He Qifang, Feng Zhi, Dai Wangshu, Ai Qing, Zang Kejia, Tian Jian, Zheng Min, Chen Jingrong and others. At the end of the day the New Poetry’s practitioners were forced to engage with the crisis in which their country found itself, meaning imperialist aggression, crippling social problems, a world war and a civil war. Art for art’s sake, or art that could be construed as arrogating the right to remain aloof from its national and social environs, fought a losing battle. Tendentious though the metaphors of aloofness and battle may be, it is difficult to deny them access to this particular bit of literary history.

As Chinese leaders have done through the ages, Mao Zedong thought highly of the political potential of literature. In his 1942 “Talks at the Yan’an Forum on Literature and Art” (TE XE Zz X Z; AB WR _EMM EGA), he laid down the law for writers in Communist-controlled areas, subordinating their work to politics in so many words.? This meant a ban on many types of literature, including those of the so-called Individualist (^^ A XE X) and Humanist (Ai E X.) kinds. It also led to the active commission of literary works designed to advance the war effort against the Japanese and the Chinese Nationalists. In the People's Republic of China, established in 1949, these wartime rules for literature and art remained in force for decades after the war was over. Taiwan, now home to the Nationalist government of the Republic of China, and Hong Kong, still a British colony at the time, were worlds apart from the mainland, as 1s borne out by their subsequent literary histories.

In China, literature and art—production, publication, distribution, criticism, scholarship—came under near-complete control of the Communist Party and were institutionalized as ideological tools in state-sponsored bodies like the Chinese Writers’ Association (P ES JE ZA) on national and local levels. Successful and popular works in all genres treated of politically correct subject matter in politically correct forms. Their aggressively prescriptive poetics was that of Socialist Realism (HAZE X3 SE XE X.) and later the Combination of Revolutionary Realism and Revolutionary Romanticism (Em ISKE SCRI EMRE A454). For poetry this gave rise to a dominant trend known as Political Lyricism (WAFF T8 WF). Control and activism extended to issues of style that reached down to the sentence level and

* McDougall 1980, Denton 2003.

indeed that of the individual word. The mark this left on the Chinese language as it was spoken and written in the PRC over the next three decades and beyond, especially but not exclusively in public discourse, is known as the Mao Style or Maospeak ("E <4), with a predilection for political lingo, ideologically heavy abstractions and the grand gesture. Censorship, including systematically stimulated self-censorship, became the order of the day, and many writers abandoned their art for safer occupations. Those who continued to write but failed to toe the line risked punishment, ranging from harassment in their private and professional lives to domestic exile, house arrest, incarceration and mental and physical violence, especially during the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976). ‘This led, for instance, to the alleged suicide of famed fiction writer and dramatist Lao She—or effectively his murder by Red Guards. They were youngsters who had been instructed by Mao to “bomb the headquarters" and take the law into their own hands, but soon became the pawns of infighting within the Party that led the country to the brink of mass psychosis, economic collapse and civil war.

In the 1950s and the early 1960s there had still been a regular production of literary texts, albeit monotonous and predictable, with much banner-waving, heroic battling of sinister landlords, glorious steel production and so on. Also, while the People's Republic was incomparably less cosmopolitan and outward-looking than the Republic had been and went on to be in Taiwan, and the selection of works for translation was increasingly determined by the political loyalties of their authors and their countries of origin, foreign literature did continue to be published in 1950s and early 1960s China. But by the late 1960s, after the outbreak of the Cultural Revolution, literary activity in China came to a virtual standstill.*

2. THE UNOFFICIAL POETRY SCENE AND THE AVANT-GARDE

Ideological repression was now at a fever pitch. In a Maoist anti-intellectual outburst, schools and universities were closed, and urban high school and university students designated as Intellectual Youths (Al

* Yang Lan has shown that the production of new fiction did not stop altogether, but his research confirms the general picture of a literary wasteland (1998). Cf Hsu 1975.

IRA IF) were rusticated to learn from peasants and factory workers instead. This drive at reeducaüng the urban youths was frequently counterproductive and led to their disillusionment with official representations of reality, including state-sanctioned PRC literature and art to date. At the same time, in a quirk of history, Red Guard razzia's of public and private “bourgeois” libraries exposed many of them to foreign literature in translation. This acquainted them with texts that were normally not widely available because they were older publications or because they were for “internal” (P 7) use, restricted by the authorities for access by a high-level cadre readership: works by Baudelaire, Kafka, Akhmatova, Tsvetayeva, Kerouac, Salinger, Solzhenitsyn and many more. Inside the particular synergy of the tumult of the “Ten Years of Chaos,” estrangement from official culture, foreign inspirations and the exploration of their individual talent, the Intellectual Youths began to meet in informal, clandestine circuits for reading and writing that became the breeding ground of the poetry that this book is about.?

China's unofficial (4E' 77) poetry scene (FEZ) has its origins in this literary underground (H& F) during the Cultural Revolution. Strikingly, literary historiography and literary events show that it is in the un-official scene—as opposed to the official (#77) scene, also called orthodox and establishment in English—that everybody that is anybody in contemporary poetry from the PRC first published and developed their voice. Equally remarkable, most if not all successful contemporary poets subscribe to a designation of their work as avant-garde (464%), a category which is of narrower scope in many other literary histories. Hence, we should take a closer look at the notions of the unofficial poetry scene and the avant-garde as they occur in Chinese-domestic critical discourse. I have extensively analysed these notions elsewhere: they overlap, and each can be used in aesthetic as well as institutional senses, which are not always easy to separate.® Here, we first focus on their primary associations. For the unofficial poetry scene, these are institutional. For the avant-garde, they are aesthetic.

By scene I mean poets, poetry and their circumstances, including critics and other readers. The contemporary poetry scene as a whole is anything but homogeneous. Authors identify with the unofficial and

? Van Crevel 1996: ch 2 and 2007, Song Yongyi 1997 and 2007. € Van Crevel 2007.

official scenes and their subsets—regional, gendered, stylistic, medial—to varying degrees, ranging from high-profile organizational activism to dismissal of any identity that transcends the individual.

The Unofficial Poetry Scene

From an institutional angle, the unofficial poetry scene is that part of contemporary poetry that operates of its own initiative, outside the publishing business as formally administered by the state. After the underground preliminaries during the Cultural Revolution, the unofficial scene moved to the overground in December 1978, with the publication of the Beijing-based journal Today (SK). This was a landmark in PRC literary history, as the journal defied the state’s monopoly on literature. Today featured authors such as Bei Dao, Mang Ke, Shu Ting, Gu Cheng, Yang Lian and Duoduo," to name some of the best-known poets of the first generation that ventured beyond the Maoist pale. Since the early 1980s, as the state's grip on literature and art has progressively weakened, the unofficial scene has expanded in urban centers throughout the country—Nanjing, Shanghai, Hangzhou, Chengdu, Kunming, Harbin, Guangzhou—and made its texts available to whoever is interested. In a self-protective measure, these texts often claim to be aimed at “internal” exchange, in an ironic appropriation of orthodox terminology for a designation that is demonstrably untrue. Unofficial publications make no attempt to control their readership and would indeed love to see it grow uncontrollably. Tapping into highly effective, informal networks of poets and critics, the unofficial scene produces serial journals and one-time single-author and multiple-author anthologies, from the scruffy to the glossy, in print and online. It also organizes literary events such as poetry recitals and cooperative projects with other arts like theater and music.

In many places elsewhere in the world the institutional notion of publication hinges on formal involvement by members of officially recognized, professional communities such as publishing houses and book reviewers. In discourse on mainland-Chinese unofficial poetry, however, and in other literary scenes where writers and politicians en-

7 Usage of underground has continued after the Cultural Revolution but no longer denotes active concealment from the authorities. * Yang and Duoduo called themselves Fei Sha and Bai Ye at the time.

tertain seriously conflicting visions of literature and politicians have the power and claim the right to interfere, the notion of publication should be taken in the broadest possible sense. Publication then simply means the making public ofa text beyond inner-circle audiences hand-picked by the author. The point is illustrated by the difference between the Chinese terms Æ ‘announce, make public’ and HJK ‘come off the press, publish’ (cf German veröffentlichen ‘make public’ and herausgeben ‘publish,’ meaning ‘act as publisher of; the English publish is ambiguous in this respect). Not everything that is made public is brought out by an official publisher. Even if it rarely appeared between the covers of officially published books or journals until the late 1980s, unofficial poetry was definitely published in the said, broad sense.