Literature

posts related to modern and contemporary Chinese Literature

JCLC 12.1

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TOC: Journal of Chinese Literature and Culture, Volume 12, Issue 1 (April 2025)

I am pleased to share “Key Terms of Chinese Literary Theory,” the newest issue of the Journal of Chinese Literature and Culture (12:1), edited by Zong-qi Cai.  The new issue is now available in print and online. Browse the table of contents and read the introduction, made freely available, here: https://read.dukeupress.edu/jclc/issue/12/1

Journal of Chinese Literature and Culture
Key Terms of Chinese Literary Theory

Introduction

Introduction: Toward Establishing Chinese Literary Theory as a Viable Subject of Sinological Studies
ZONG-QI CAI

Ziran 自然 as a Term in Chinese Literary Theory and Its Conceptual Reductions
YE YE; XINDA LIAN

Literature and the Way: The Theoretical Foundation and Historical Development of Wendao 文道
LIU NING ; YUGEN WANG

A Literary Anatomy of the Binary Concept of Emptiness-Substance
LIU XIAOJUN ; BENJAMIN RIDGWAY Continue reading JCLC 12.1 →

Cold Window Newsletter 9.5

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Source: Cold Window Newsletter 9.5
On literary community
A personal reflection, one year in
By Andrew Rule

Today, something a little different. This idea has been percolating since a conversation I had this past summer with my friend and fellow Substacker Jing Jing P. We noticed that, while each of us examines China from a non-Chinese perspective, I tend to remove myself from my own writing, as though by passing myself off as a lofty, disembodied observer I can make my book recommendations carry more weight.

To mark the one-year anniversary of this newsletter, I’m putting myself back in the narrative. What does it mean for me, as a non-native speaker of Chinese, to write about Chinese literature?

The Girl by the Window by Edvard Munch (1893). “The window functions as a symbolic barrier, separating the interior from the outside world. The sense of mystery is deepened and complicated by the fact that we cannot see the expression on the girl’s face, nor do we know what she covertly observes. She in turn appears unaware that, as she gazes from behind the curtain at something unknown outside, the artist and implied viewer are watching her.” Image is in the public domain.

Summer 2025 was an oddly appropriate time for me to be rethinking my relationship to this literature. For the first time since I became paying close attention to new literary releases in China about five years ago, young writers were making headlines in China, but it was for all the wrong reasons. In a series of viral social media posts, amateur sleuths were screenshotting recent fiction that appeared to plagiarize (mostly) classic literary works—Yu Dafu, Zhang Ailing, even the Chinese edition of Madame Bovary. The screenshots were more damning in some cases than others, but even where the evidence was thin, the damage was done. At least ten young authors were thrust from the niche literary periodical circuit into the furnace of public discourse virtually overnight.¹ Continue reading Cold Window Newsletter 9.5 →

‘Literary anarchist’ Yan Lianke interview

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Source: SCMP (9/28/25)
‘Literary anarchist’ Yan Lianke on Chinese writers, the Nobel prize and censorship
Former soldier and award-winning author discusses the ‘tolerance and protection’ he has received and the state of Asian literature
By Yuanyue Dang in Beijing

Illustration: Victor Sanjinez

SCMP.

Chinese novelist Yan Lianke is considered a strong contender to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. Yan uses magical and absurd imagery to depict the realities of rural China, particularly the lives of ordinary people in the Mao Zedong era. His awards include the Franz Kafka Prize, the Lao She Literary Award and the Lu Xun Literary Prize. Yan is a professor at Renmin University of China in Beijing and a chair professor at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. In this interview, the former soldier considers the global status of Chinese literature and discusses the censorship of his books. This interview first appeared in SCMP Plus. For other interviews in the Open Questions series, click here.

In recent years, there has been a lot of discussion about you being in contention for the Nobel Prize in Literature. Does this put you under pressure?

I was born in 1958 and am now 67 years old. At this stage in my life, the prospect of winning any literary prize no longer exerts any pressure on me or my writing. Any pressures I face now stem from within my own existence and from literature itself rather than from outside the literature and my life.

Indeed, certain past laureates have sparked controversy among readers, and such debate is perfectly natural. Although there is broad common ground in the standards of good literature, literature is ultimately not a science – it is not mathematics, physics or chemistry. Its magic and greatness lie in its capacity for diverse interpretations: benevolent people see benevolence and wise people perceive wisdom.

Fine literary works excel precisely because they offer multiple angles for interpretation, inviting varied understandings and lively discussion.

In your writing, how do you handle sensitive events in contemporary Chinese history? For example, the Great Chinese Famine, the Cultural Revolution, the Tiananmen crackdown and the Covid-19 pandemic. Do you engage in self-censorship?

I believe in the simplest principle of literary common sense: any human experience is fair game for literature. No experience is inherently nobler or more deserving of a place in literature than another.

The distinction lies in which experiences the writer knows more intimately and can probe more deeply, and their attitude towards them. The criteria I use to decide what to write about and what to avoid are simply the life experiences that evoke a more visceral, painful resonance within me. Continue reading ‘Literary anarchist’ Yan Lianke interview →

Mirror: Selected Poems by Zhang Zao

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New Publication:
Mirror: Selected Poems by Zhang Zao, Translated by Fiona Sze-Lorrain
Zephyr Press, 2025
Bilingual, with an introduction by Fiona Sze-Lorrain and an afterword by Bei Dao

To purchase: Zephyr Press or Amazon

This bilingual posthumous collection is a detailed, retrospective look at Zhang Zao, one of the more brilliant poetic minds from China of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. He left China in 1986 and lived in Germany until his death at 47 in 2010.

The poems in this collection span Zhang Zao’s short career, beginning with “Mirror,” one of his earliest and best known works, and ending with “Lantern Town,” written less than two months before his death. As Bei Dao writes in his afterword, Zhang Zao “possessed both a thorough grasp of European literature and culture and an introspective understanding of the broad, profound Asian aesthetics: between the two philosophies, he sought a new tension and melting point.” Translated by Fiona Sze-Lorrain, Mirror is Zhang Zao’s first book to be translated into English and will be bilingual in Chinese and English on facing pages.

Mirror is the twelfth and final volume in Zephyr Press’s Jintian Series of Contemporary Chinese Poetry, which was launched in 2011 and has been curated by Bei Dao, Lydia H. Liu, and Christopher Mattison. It is also Fiona Sze-Lorrain’s fourth translation title (after Wind Says by Bai Hua, I Can Almost See the Clouds of Dust by Yu Xiang, and Canyon in the Body by Lan Lan) in the series. Continue reading Mirror: Selected Poems by Zhang Zao →

Writing to the Rhythm of Labor review

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MCLC Resource Center is pleased to announce publication of Richard King’s review of Writing to the Rhythm of Labor: Cultural Politics of the Chinese Revolution, 1942-1976, by Benjamin Kindler. The review appears below and at its online home: https://u.osu.edu/mclc/book-reviews/king/. My thanks to Nicholas Kaldis, our literary studies book review editor, for ushering the review to publication.

Kirk Denton, MCLC

Writing to the Rhythm of Labor:
Cultural Politics of the Chinese Revolution, 1942-1976

By Benjamin Kindler

Reviewed by Richard King

MCLC Resource Center Publication (Copyright September, 2025)

Benjamin Kindler, Writing to the Rhythm of Labor: Cultural Politics of the Chinese Revolution, 1942-1976 New York: Columbia University Press, 2025. xi + 280 pp. ISBN: 9780231219327 (paperback) / ISBN: 9780231219310 (hardcover) / ISBN: 9780231562638 (E-book).

In the final paragraph of this absorbing and challenging book, Benjamin Kindler declares that it has been written “in a spirit of critical—but unapologetic—solidarity with communist projects of past, present, and future,” with the hope for “a renewal of a communist politics […] so that future generations might one day cleanse life of all evil, oppression, and violence and enjoy it to the fullest” (234). The materials he assembles for this ambitious enterprise consist of revolutionary political, economic and cultural theory from four key periods beginning at the communist base at Yan’an and ending with the death of Communist Party Chairman Mao Zedong, and literary writings that embrace the theories of their day. Chief among the authorities, apart from Mao himself, are Zhou Yang 周揚, a champion of Soviet literary practice and the leading Party cultural theorist from Yan’an to the mid-1960s, and Zhang Chunqiao 張春橋, who advanced the more radical political agenda of the Cultural Revolution in the final decade of the Mao era. Authors of fictional works analyzed include the novelists Liu Qing 柳青, Zhou Libo 周立波, Bai Lang 白朗, and Jin Jingmai 金敬邁, and the short-story writers Li Zhun 李准, Hu Wanchun 胡萬春, Ru Zhijuan 茹志娟, and Duan Ruixia 段瑞夏. In the introduction and conclusion, and at points in-between, Ding Ling 丁玲 appears as a writer both transformed and transforming, an exemplar of the Maoist vison of the artist. Two issues dominate discussion: the role of the wenyi gongzuozhe 文藝工作者 (here rendered “culture worker”) as a transitional figure in socialist artistic production, and the question of remuneration for work, examined through debates over “bourgeois right” that draw on classic Marxist texts including Marx’s 1875 “Critique of the Gotha Programme.” And two authors cited in the introduction inform Kindler’s approach: the French Marxist Louis Althusser provides a focus on “temporality” and the different rhythms of work experienced by the peasant, the factory worker, and the writer; while the writing of the early twentieth century Chinese feminist He-Yin Zhen 何殷震 draws his attention to the “free and voluntary” labor of women as opposed to the money economy of capitalism. Continue reading Writing to the Rhythm of Labor review →

Self-Portrait as a Banana

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Dear MCLC members,

I am pleased to announce the publication of my new poetry collection Self-Portrait as a Banana (Poetic Edge, 2025). The book can be purchased online.  You are also kindly invited to attend my online book launch on 10 October. This is a free event but booking is necessary.

Book description:

Hongwei Bao’s latest collection, Self-Portrait as a Banana, is a candid exploration of his queer, diasporic, East Asian identity and cross-cultural relationships. Appropriating, subverting and queering cultural tropes like the banana, rice and beckoning cat, and identities such as queerness and Chineseness, this is a powerful journey. A bold, humorous and refreshing celebration of queer desire, identity and cultural differences.

Praise for the book:

‘In his second full-length collection, Hongwei Bao dwells on his experiences of migration and homecoming, using his own position in the queer East Asian diaspora to illustrate broader social themes. In poems of resilient optimism, he shows how one can counter prejudice by creating one’s own versions of home and belonging, within communities of one’s own choosing and devising. For all the breadth of their resonance, across a span of both time and space, the poems concentrate on the meaningful details of everyday life at a local level, where familiarity overcomes estrangement.’–Gregory Woods, author of A History of Gay Literature: The Male Tradition Continue reading Self-Portrait as a Banana →

The Southern Discourse in Sinophone Literature

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Book publication: The Southern Discourse in Sinophone Literature: Moving Borders (Routledge, 2025)

This post shares the exciting news of the recent publication of The Southern Discourse in Sinophone Literature: Moving Borders (Routledge, 2025), a groundbreaking volume that explores the dynamic intersections of Sinophone studies, transnational literature, and “Southern” cultural imaginaries. Edited by Chia-rong Wu (University of Canterbury, New Zealand), Min-xu Zhan (National Chung Hsing University, Taiwan), Alison Groppe (University of Oregon, USA), and Yenna Wu (University of California, Riverside, USA), this volume brings together contributions from an impressive group of international scholars across Asia, North America, Europe, and Oceania. The book is available both in print and digital formats, and its DOI is https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003594116.

The collection moves beyond a China-centered framework to examine “Southern discourse” as both a cultural and geographical concept, engaging with regions such as Taiwan, Hong Kong, Macau, Southeast Asia, and Australia, in addition to the Chinese mainland. The essays collectively interrogate themes of hybridity, migration, racial dynamics, gender politics, Indigenous consciousness, translation, and global South–North relations. The fifteen chapters provide fresh perspectives that challenge binary oppositions and highlight the fluidity of borders in Sinophone cultural production. This book is an invaluable resource for scholars and students of Sinophone literature, Chinese studies, comparative literature, diaspora studies, and cultural geography.

Posted by: Chia-rong Wu chiarong.wu@canterbury.ac.nz

Eileen Chang: The Performativity of Self-Translation

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Cover Eileen Chang: The Performativity of Self-TranslationNEW PUBLICATION: Eileen Chang: The Performativity of Self-Translation
By Jessica Tsui-yan Li
Leiden: Brill, 2025

Eileen Chang: The Performativity of Self-Translation by Jessica Tsui-yan Li focuses on the self-translation of Zhang Ailing 張愛玲 (Eileen Chang, 1920–1995), one of the most important Chinese writers of the twentieth century. Although self-translation is overlooked in most studies of her work, Chang’s literary achievements are attributed in part to her lifelong self-translation of her lived experiences and family sagas, as well as her bilingualism.

This book enriches current studies of self-translation by proposing a new hypothesis of theorizing self-translation as a performative act, characterized by its in-betweenness and the aesthetic freedom that the self-translator enjoys, contextualized within larger debates about translation and the specific practice of self-translation in Chinese history in comparison to its Western counterpart.

Suipian no. 7

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碎篇 // Suipian // Fragments
By TABITHA SPEELMAN
AUG 31, 2025

Welcome to the 7th edition of Suipian, my personal newsletter in which I share thoughts and resources that help me make sense of Chinese society and its relationship to the rest of the world. I am Tabitha Speelman, a Dutch journalist based in Beijing and Rotterdam. See here for more introduction to Suipian.

In its infrequent form, Suipian has existed for over a year now. I am taking this as an opportunity to rethink my rather basic newsletter practices and explore a bit more of what the platform has to offer. So far I have only made a start on a logo but let me know if you have suggestions! It’s a bit long at the top today, so if you prefer the links below you might also scroll right down. Thanks for reading and have a good end of the summer.

随笔 // Suibi // Notes

Sharing thoughts or resources related to my work as a correspondent

1. Culinary power

These last years I have been fascinated by – and personally grateful for – the overseas spread of a wider range of China’s immense cuisine. In Holland, restaurants serving the localized Chinese-Indonesian fusion that took off in the postwar era are struggling, but a new generation of eateries, with dishes and 小吃 from Chinese northern and central regions that were previously not represented, is doing really well.

For an article on this trend, which in Holland started around 2018, I talked to four Chinese entrepreneurs, who all described their business as “an experiment” that had not been easy. Chris Zhang (57), who makes Shaanxi noodles in Rotterdam, ended up as the only cook in his restaurant for three years after Covid and migration restrictions left both his noodle chefs stuck in China. Tingjun Zheng, who came to Holland as a teenager and started a business to find more community, had just renovated her “living room-style” 煎饼站 when she was evicted during the lockdowns. They were especially proud of the authenticity of their food, which, as Zhang put it, can be “better than much of what you get in China.” (See here for my story in Dutch, with great photography by Simon Lenskens.) Continue reading Suipian no. 7 →

Eyes of the Ocean

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NEW PUBLICATION: Eyes of the Ocean, by Syaman Rapongan. Translated by Darryl Sterk
Columbia University Press, 2025

Description:

Syaman Rapongan—one of the Indigenous Tao people of Orchid Island near Taiwan—calls himself an “ocean writer.” His works blend Tao folklore and accounts of maritime life with keen critique of the social, psychological, and ecological harms of colonialism. Eyes of the Ocean is his literary autobiography, both a powerful story of survival in a settler state and a masterful portrait of the Indigenous artist as a young man.

In colloquial and vivid prose, Syaman Rapongan depicts Tao beliefs in ghosts, practices of exorcism, and the parallel worlds that exist alongside the human realm. He recounts his difficulties speaking Mandarin in school, his experiences of racial discrimination and exploitation in Taipei, and his decision to return to Orchid Island to rediscover his cultural heritage, as well as his travels to visit other Indigenous artists in places such as Greenland. Eyes of the Ocean also tells the story of Syaman Rapongan’s formation as a writer, a practitioner of a genre of his own creation: colonial ocean island literature.

Introducing English-language readers to one of the leading Indigenous writers in Taiwan, this book shares a profound and deeply humane vision of Oceanic art and identity. Continue reading Eyes of the Ocean →

Cold Window Newsletter 8

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This month’s newsletter brought to you by: libraries and bookmarks.

Source: Cold Window Newsletter no. 8 (8/19/25)
The best Chinese short fiction of 2025, so far: A summer special edition
By Andrew Rule

Welcome back to the Cold Window Newsletter! It’s time to get back to my initial mission with this newsletter: calling attention to great new literary writing from China. Over the last few months, I’ve sampled nearly every new Chinese short-story collection that’s come out this year.1 I want to tell you tell you about my favorites.

Special: In search of the best new fiction in China

As of this summer, Chinese literary fiction is in a bit of a tough spot. Inside the country, there’s undeniable suspicion of literary writing affiliated with the cultural establishment: it is not a compliment to call someone 体制内, “inside the system.” A recent plagiarism scandal implicating many young establishment authors, and the schadenfreude with which their downfall was greeted on the Chinese internet, made this distrust abundantly clear.2 Outside of China, translators are working as tirelessly as ever to bring worthwhile stories out into the world, but there are still far too few young Chinese writers who get any sort of attention abroad (although I do think this tide is beginning to turn).

That’s why I decided to try reading everything newly published in China this year. This project was intended to be a pulse-check, an attempt to investigate in good faith the throwaway complaint that you see from Chinese readers online all the time: there’s no good literature in China anymore.

Surprise: that complaint is wrong. The five books below are some of the best I have ever read in Chinese. They’re mostly by women. They’re all by writers born after 1980. And, to a greater and greater extent as you move up my ranking, they all poke at the boundaries of today’s urban, technologized, hyper-globalized society, until it’s hard to tell what’s fantasy and what’s reality. That’s the kind of story that makes Chinese fiction worth reading right now. And it’s the kind that can only be written by young authors. Continue reading Cold Window Newsletter 8 →

Why ‘Soft Burial’ resonates today

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The cover of the English translation of Soft Burial.

Source: China Unofficial Archives (8/15/25)
The CCP’s Original Sin: Why a Historical Novel About Land Reform Resonates Today
By Ian Johnson

[中国民间档案馆 China Unofficial Archives is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support our work, please consider becoming a free or paid subscriber at the above link.]

Seen from today’s perspective, the early years of the PRC can seem like ancient history. Compared to problems facing people today—the end of term limits on top leaders, attacks on civil society organizations, ever-tightening ideological control, the refusal to discuss the origins of the COVID pandemic—events from the middle of last century might be regrettable but irrelevant.

And yet one campaign from that era continues to reverberate today: land reform—a violent, aggressive campaign of torture, murder, and mob rule that the Communist Party used in the late 1940s and early 1950s to bring huge swaths of Chinese society to heel.

Its importance has made it the ultimate taboo, the regime’s original sin that can never be discussed. Over the decades it has been possible to criticize some upheavals, even major ones such as the Cultural Revolution. But land reform is so fundamental to how the party took power that it remains off limits to criticism, portrayed solely as a benevolent campaign that brought fairness and prosperity to China’s long-suffering farmers.

This context is what makes Fang Fang’s 2016 novel, Soft Burial, so important. Independent historians had been exploring land reform for years before Fang Fang’s novel was first published by the People’s Literature Publishing House. But Fang Fang is one of her country’s best-known novelists, a 70-year-old member of the literary establishment. After Soft Burial was published, it won the Lu Yao literary prize (named after the writer Wang Weiguo, who went by the penname Lu Yao) and was widely discussed, until a left-wing backlash prompted censors to ban it. Continue reading Why ‘Soft Burial’ resonates today →

Coming of Age in Chinese Literature and Cinema

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NEW PUBLICATION: Coming of Age in Chinese Literature and Cinema: Sinophone Variations of the Bildungsroman
Edited by Andrea Riemenschnitter, Kiu-wai Chu, Mung Ting Chung
Amsterdam University Press, 2025

With the inclusion of twelve original articles by established and emerging international scholars, this volume offers critical reading of literary and cinematic texts produced in China and Sinophone communities between the 1950s and 2010s. The articles portray the lineage and mutations of the Chinese Bildungsroman, providing insights into the tensions between individual and society; nation and the world; and the multiple social, ecological, and virtual realities of recent decades. Concerned with how coming-of-age narratives have persistently returned and evolved over time, the book addresses themes such as family and social change; gender, class, and generational divides, local/global politics, and the ecological and posthuman turns in Chinese/Sinophone culture. It offers a fresh look on how the transnational and transgenerational journeys of Bildungsroman and coming-of-age narratives continuously transform and reinvigorate generic conventions, to explore adolescence as a formative social force and aesthetic experience in Chinese/Sinophone literature and film. Continue reading Coming of Age in Chinese Literature and Cinema →

Lyrical Experiments in Sinophone Verse

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I am pleased to announce our recently published title Lyrical Experiments in Sinophone Verse | Amsterdam University Press edited by Justyna Jaguscik, Joanna Krenz and Andrea Riemenschnitter.

Lyrical Experiments in Sinophone Verse: Time, Space, Bodies, and Things
edited by Justyna Jaguscik, Joanna Krenz and Andrea Riemenschnitter
360 pp. | € 146 | Hardback
Publication date: April 23, 2025

The 1919 May Fourth movement was the breeding ground for experiments by authors inspired by new world literary trends. Under Mao Zedong, folk songs accompanied political campaigns such as the Great Leap Forward. Misty Poetry of the 1980s contributed to the humanistic discourse of the post-Mao reform era. The most recent stage in Chinese poetry resonates with contemporary concerns, such as technological innovation, environmental degradation, socio-political transformations, and the return of geopolitical Cold War divisions. In search of creative responses to the crisis, poets frequently revisit the past while holding on to their poetic language of self-reflection and social critique. This volume identifies three foci in contemporary poetry discourses: formal crossovers, multiple realities, and liquid boundaries. These three themes often intersect within texts from mainland China, Hong Kong and Taiwan discussed in the book. Continue reading Lyrical Experiments in Sinophone Verse →

You Must Take Part in Revolution

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Source: China Digital Times (7/24/25)
Interview: Badiucao and Melissa Chan on Their Graphic Novel, You Must Take Part in Revolution
By Samuel Wade

You Must Take Part in Revolution is a graphic novel by Badiucao, political cartoonist and former CDT contributor, and Melissa Chan, a journalist who in 2012 became the first reporter to be expelled from China in more than a decade. The book was conceived in the wake of the 2019 Hong Kong protests, and follows the divergent paths of three friends in Hong Kong and Taiwan from their involvement in the protests through to 2035.

CDT: I’m sure anyone reading CDT is familiar with each of you separately. How did the two of you come to join forces?

Melissa Chan: I’d interviewed Badiucao for a piece I wrote for The Atlantic about Chinese creatives in exile in Berlin. And then, during lockdown, I was back at my childhood home and my old bookshelf, re-reading my comic books and graphic novels. One day I just reached out to him and asked if he’d ever considered producing sequential art. It was just a passing thought—I didn’t know it would be the beginning of a five-year journey that would end with 260+ pages of a published graphic novel!

Badiucao: I’d always believed the comic and graphic novel forms had special powers to communicate messages. And I noticed there seemed to be a general gap in terms of content touching on China, human rights, and resistance. So I had the intention to produce something. That’s been on my mind a long time. But you need a good story, too. And then it felt very natural to team up with Melissa who is one of the best journalists to have covered China and who is also a great writer. Continue reading You Must Take Part in Revolution →