MCLC Resource Center is pleased to announce publication of Jeffrey Kinkley’s review of The Anaconda in the Chandelier: Writings on China, by Perry Link. The review appears below and at its online home: https://u.osu.edu/mclc/book-reviews/kinkley2/. My thanks to Nicholas Kaldis, our literary studies book review editor, for ushering the review to publication.
Kirk Denton, MCLC
Writings on China
By Perry Link
Reviewed by Jeffrey C. Kinkley
MCLC Resource Center Publication (Copyright January, 2025)
Perry Link, The Anaconda in the Chandelier: Writings on China Perry Link. Philadelphia: Paul Dry Books, 2025. viii + 287 pp. ISBN 9781589881983 (paper)
Perry Link’s eminence as scholar and as public intellectual is well known to most MCLC readers. His pioneering scholarship on twentieth-century Chinese popular narratives and on the linguistic inventiveness of Chinese oral and written expression more generally is embodied in full-length monographs,[1] supplemented by studies of the circulation of Mao-era printed novels and unapproved hand-copied manuscripts, as well as essays on comedians’ dialogues (xiangsheng 相声) of the Mao and post-Mao years. Link’s 2007 essay on xiangsheng in the early People’s Republic of China (PRC) serves as a bang-up penultimate chapter for The Anaconda in the Chandelier.[2] The book prints in total thirty-one of Link’s 1998-2023 short and medium-length essays, book reviews, and prefaces, including a number of Link’s longer and more academic articles, together with their footnotes. Most are reprints—with revisions, says the preface, but changes are scarcely visible. Many of these contributions take on the dark task of explaining the finely tuned mechanics, psychology, and social psychology of Chinese Communist Party (CCP) control of Chinese communication through censorship, pre-censorship, and, above all, the creation of an unconscious, second-nature self-censorship among writers and the general public. Link calls the condition “fossilized fear.” That was the subject of a landmark monograph from Princeton University Press he published in 2000—on the “uses” of literature in China.[3] He updated the story in newsy and learned essays published in The New York Review of Books and various op-ed and human rights forums. (NYRB-related contributions make up about half of the essays anthologized in The Anaconda in the Chandelier.) The author’s expertise, Chinese friends and informants, and ever-critical yet always humanely empathetic social probings enabled what is probably now his best-known research: historical and biographical accounts of Chinese dissidence and protest. That focus, too, dates back to the 1980s, when he began to translate, edit, and publish short fiction and essays by freethinking PRC writers who surfaced, or, like Liu Binyan 刘宾雁, resurfaced, after the demise of Mao.[4] Consideration of the 1989 June Fourth massacre accelerated Link’s major collaborative academic projects and human rights activism, which includes documenting and explaining the before-and-after of China’s nationwide 1989 calamity, the Charter 08 movement, and the life story of the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize winner, Liu Xiaobo 刘晓波.[5] Through it all, Link has pursued yet another vocation: teaching in and administering Chinese language programs, while coproducing textbooks for them.[6]
All these facets of Perry Link’s academic dynamism and dogged activism are on display in the collection under review, along with several shared motivations and traits: love of the Chinese language in all its forms, written and spoken; admiration of Chinese popular culture and the enduring grassroots social, moral, and ethical values it embodies; consistent and disciplined adherence in Link’s own writing to the kind of directness, enlivened by irony, self-irony, and double meanings, that first attracted him to everyday Mandarin speech; constant attention to and continuing self-education in comparative perspectives drawn from diverse humanistic and social science disciplines; skepticism toward literary and social theories whose truth claims come from top-down deduction more than actual data; attraction to real-life conversations which, as translated in this volume, are revelatory enough to inform even literary and social science specialists; and, through it all, proud defiance of the studied unpopularity of the content and spirit of grassroots culture and opinion in the eyes of China’s modern officials and elite intellectuals. The early twentieth-century romance fiction Link wrote about, for instance, which was widely read in China’s cities and retrospectively designated by intellectuals as “popular” (通俗), is still called in Chinese “mandarin ducks and butterflies school” 鸳鸯蝴蝶派 writing, a term applied then and now rather indiscriminately to all sorts of generically disparate works notable for their lack of approval in official and intellectual circles—even despite the widespread acclaim accorded diverse online fantasy genres by Sinophone creators today. Dissidence, need it be said, is likewise branded as the opposite of “popular” in the political sense of “legitimately of the masses” according to the PRC’s official and publicly sanctioned discourse. Yet circumventions and circumlocutions persist in Chinese thought, speech, and writing, and they find creative expression among new generations and in new media despite all that. So, too, do the analytical explorations of these phenomena by the unsinkable Perry Link.
The essays selected for this volume appear in four groups, beginning with a section called “Captive China.” Its ten chapters make up the first third of the book and generally develop the theme suggested by the opening piece’s title, “The Chinese Communist Party’s Culture of Fear” (an essay from 2021). Other intriguing contributions concern “How to Deal with the Chinese Police” (2013; mostly based on others’ brushes with Public Security, not Link’s personal experience, but still persuasive); chapters reflecting on the 1989 June Fourth massacre and reasons for everyone to remember it, as well as on how some Chinese, notably the Tiananmen Mothers, have tirelessly persisted and suffered so that it might be remembered; popular views of official Chinese corruption, as revealed in novels and irreverent ditties; and Link’s own, plus critical Chinese intellectuals’, reflections on the dynamics of the CCP’s long uninterrupted rule of China and how best to understand it, beyond all the positive and negative distractions.
The book’s second group of chapters, five essays in all, is titled “Learning” and contains the work that lends its title to the collection, “The Anaconda in the Chandelier.” A quiet snake observing everything from above is a metaphor for the CCP’s ability to keep watch over those below and control them through the very unpredictability of what exactly will irritate it enough to drop down and asphyxiate them; “better safe than sorry” is the intended response. The political themes in this section are not unlike those in the first, but they are more personal. Some tell a tale of Link’s own disillusionment with the effects of the CCP on China, its society, and its culture, including the story of his learning in 1996 that he was barred from re-entering the PRC. Neither the exact timing nor the rationale of that encumbrance was entirely clear, since Link had been allowed to cross the border between 1989 and 1996. Other chapters deal specifically with the writing style of Nobel literature laureate Mo Yan 莫言, which Link does not applaud, and a book by Ha Jin 哈金, which he does. These are related to an essay in the prior section (pp. 63-74) that reviews English translations of works by Liao Yiwu 廖亦武, Han Han 韩寒, and Ai Weiwei艾未未.
The third section, “Teachers,” features ten chapters about personalities who inspired the author. The two lead-off chapters are sketches of beloved teachers at Harvard University: Rulan Chao Pian 卞趙如蘭 (1922-2013), who awakened Link’s love of Mandarin, and Ezra Vogel (1930-2020), who cared about every student, associate, and research informant he ever met, and insisted that theory fit the data instead of vice versa. Next are short essays about Liu Binyan, Fang Lizhi 方励之, Liu Xiaobo, and Xiao Qiang 萧强, a founder of China Digital Times, plus Link’s prefaces to books of fiction with heavy political themes from Eileen Chang (Zhang Ailing 張愛玲) and Chen Ruoxi 陳若曦, and then a memoir by Kang Zhengguo 康正果.
The fourth section, containing six essays under the rubric “Day Job Joys,” opens with an essay on “The Joys of Teaching Beginning Chinese.” After that come reviews of major translations of centuries-old Chinese literary classics that stimulated Link: David Tod Roy’s full rendition in English of The Plum in the Golden Vase 金瓶梅and Eliot Weinberger’s explorations of Chinese poetry in his Nineteen Ways of Looking at Wang Wei [王維] (with More Ways) and Weinberger’s collected essays in The Ghosts of Birds. Besides Link’s 2007 piece on xiangsheng cited near the beginning of this review, Anaconda’s closing essays showcase Perry Link as the eternal comparatist and inquiring philosopher (philosophy was his first field of study). He reflects on fundamental characteristics of Sinitic languages and their character-based writing system in a piece reflecting on an art exhibition by Xu Bing 徐冰 (creator of books written in imagined characters Xu invented using a graphic vocabulary of brush strokes familiar from historical Chinese characters), and in this anthology’s closing essay, which is framed in a more abstract and theoretical vein.
Collectanea, designed to embody both thematic diversity and thematic unity, are destined to be criticized for deficits in the one or the other, if not both. The unanticipated aspect of The Anaconda in the Chandelier in the eyes of this reviewer is occasional discord between the negativism projected by the book’s superstructure and the humane optimism in the essays themselves. (Link might chalk this up to a clash of CCP power dynamics versus true, grassroots Chinese values.) By superstructure I mean some section and chapter titles, back cover and promotional blurbs about the book’s “acerbic” essays (they are that in their logic, but not in their tone), and occasionally repetitious warnings about CCP misrule and betrayal of its mandate in the theme-setting first half of the volume (as well parts of the second half). Link’s observations are trustworthy, historically informed, not given to cherry picking, and full of exemplary anecdotes and other data of interest to specialists, not just the broad intellectual public served by the NYRB and global affairs forums.[7] Their content could form their own book, as a sequel to, say, Richard McGregor’s The Party.[8] The retrospective page-and-a-half preface to Anaconda suggests that the book might be about Link’s own journey from hope to disillusionment regarding CCP rule, but this volume is not a full or chronological memoir. Neither is it monothematic. The story of Perry Link’s intellectual evolution, like his story of social and cultural change in the China Mainland (and finally Hong Kong, in a short but startlingly detailed 2022 look at police interrogation after the democracy protests, pp. 60-62), comes across as an intriguing collection of pieces from a puzzle.[9] The author’s general reflections on history and memory are particularly thought-provoking (29-49).
Link’s analyses from 2012 and earlier about the CCP’s uninterrupted quest for unquestioned and permanent power look especially prescient today, in the age of Xi Jinping 习近平. The danger in obeying despotism in advance, as analyzed by Perry Link, and similarly in books by Timothy Snyder, looks uncomfortably relevant now to large swaths of what was recently thought of as the democratic world. Even when vindicated, Link is modest. He briefly mentions that he got Fang Lizhi and Li Shuxian 李淑娴 to safety in the U.S. Embassy grounds after the 1989 Beijing massacre, as if he were simply the right person at the right time. And he reflects on the personal and academic cost to him of now being barred from China (123-24). My biggest disagreement with him regards his negative evaluation of Mo Yan’s use of hilarity and magical realism as a fictional technique. (This is a different matter from Link’s and others’ criticism of Mo Yan’s broader “social impact” 社会效果 as a public intellectual, on which grounds Mo Yan is more vulnerable in my eyes.[10]) However, truth-telling in Mo Yan’s field of creative writing, unlike that in Fang Lizhi’s field of physics (as Link points out, p. 114), is a matter of opinion, not science. And although the precise effects of politics on literature and even private expression can be debated (Chen Ruoxi famously described how fear can inhibit private speech at home, too), the importance of politics, for better and for worse, cannot. The Anaconda in the Chandelier is a work of well-crafted essays that go down easy on first reading, then beguile us into protracted contemplation of the deep structure of contemporary China and the modern world.
Jeffrey C. Kinkley
Portland State University
St. John’s University, Emeritus
NOTES
[1] Perry Link, Mandarin Ducks and Butterflies: Popular Fiction in Early Twentieth-Century Chinese Cities (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981). Perry Link, An Anatomy of Chinese: Rhythm, Metaphor, Politics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013). See also Perry Link, Richard Madsen, and Paul G. Pickowicz, eds., Unofficial China: Popular Culture and Thought in the People’s Republic (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1989).
[2] That penultimate chapter is “The Crocodile Bird: Xiangsheng in the Early 1950s,” pp. 242-271, originally printed in Jeremy Brown and Paul G. Pickowicz, eds., Dilemmas of Victory: The Early Years of the People’s Republic of China (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 207-231. A classic earlier work of Link’s on the subject is “The Genie and the Lamp: Revolutionary Xiangsheng,” in Bonnie S. McDougall, ed., Popular Chinese Literature and Performing Arts in the People’s Republic of China 1949-1979 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 83-111. Other such works by Link are to be found in the journal CHINOPERL Papers.
[3] Perry Link, The Uses of Literature: Life in the Socialist Chinese Literary System (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000).
[4] Liu Binyan, People or Monsters?: And Other Stories and Reportage from China after Mao, ed. Perry Link (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1983). Perry Link, ed., Stubborn Weeds: Popular and Controversial Chinese Literature after the Cultural Revolution (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984). Perry Link, ed., Roses and Thorns: The Second Blooming of the Hundred Flowers in Chinese Fiction, 1979-80 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981).
[5] Perry Link, Evening Chats in Beijing: Probing China’s Predicament (NY: W. W. Norton, 1992). Zhang Liang [pseud.], compiler, The Tiananmen Papers, ed. Andrew J. Nathan and Perry Link (NY: Public Affairs, 2001). Perry Link and Wu Dazhi [pseud.], I Have No Enemies: The Life and Legacy of Liu Xiaobo (NY: Columbia University Press, 2023). The anthology under review rarely repeats content from the biography I Have No Enemies, which leaves the latter as a good companion to—longer, more detailed, and more specialized than—The Anaconda in the Chandelier.
[6] E. g., Ta-tuan Ch’en, Perry Link, Yi-jian Tai, and Hai-tao Tang, eds., Chinese Primer, variously 3, 4 vols. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Chinese Language Program, various editions, 1989-2021).
[7] The Anaconda in the Chandelier lacks an index and glossary of Chinese characters, which some readers might have wished for, although it does end with a list that briefly identifies persons mentioned in the text.
[8] Richard McGregor, The Party: The Secret World of China’s Communist Rulers (NY: Harper, 2010).
[9] For more pieces of the puzzle, see Jeremy A. Murray, Perry Link, and Paul G. Pickowicz, eds., China Tripping: Encountering the Everyday in the People’s Republic (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2019).
[10] For instance, Mo Yan agreed, “in June 2012, to join in a state-sponsored project to get famous authors to hand-copy Mao Zedong’s 1942 ‘Talks at the Yan’an Forum on Literature and Art’ in celebration of their seventieth anniversary. . . . Mo Yan not only agreed but has gone further than others to explain that the ‘Talks,’ in their time, had ‘historical necessity’ and ‘played a positive role.’” So writes Link in “Does This Writer Deserve the Prize?” (an essay whose title Link did not select or preapprove himself), NYRB, Dec. 6, 2012.