Consuming Literature
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Consuming Literature

Best Sellers and the Commercialization of Literary Production in Contemporary China

Shuyu Kong

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Consuming Literature

Best Sellers and the Commercialization of Literary Production in Contemporary China

Shuyu Kong

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About This Book

This book examines the changes taking place in literary writing and publishing in contemporary China under the influence of the emerging market economy. It focuses on the revival of literary best sellers in the Chinese book market and the establishment of a best-seller production machine.The author examines how writers have become cultural entrepreneurs, how state publishing houses are now motivated by commercial incentives, and how "second-channel, " unofficial publishers and distributors both compete and cooperate with official publishing houses in a dual-track, socialist-capitalist economic system. Taken together, these changes demonstrate how economic development and culture interact in a postsocialist society, in contrast to the way they work in the mature capitalist economies of the West. That economic reforms have affected many aspects of Chinese society is well known, but this is the first comprehensive analysis of market influences in the literary field. This book thus offers a fresh perspective on the inner workings of contemporary Chinese society.

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Year
2004
ISBN
9780804767378

CHAPTER 1

Breaking Away

WRITERS AS CULTURAL ENTREPRENEURS

1. The Socialist Literary System and Chinese Writers

In Socialist China, writers were often referred to as “cultural workers” (wenhua gongzuo zhe). This term in fact precisely defines most writers’ self-identity and social function in the literary system that operated during most of the second half of the twentieth century. As one scholar put it, through their writing, writers were able to “liv[e] as salaried company men and shar[e] in the political power.”1 In other words, they were state-controlled artists whose patron and employer was the Communist Party and the socialist state.
The official body that recruited, organized, supported, and regulated writers under socialism was the Chinese Writers Association (Zhongguo zuojia xiehui, commonly abbreviated to “zuoxie”). Established soon after the Communist takeover in 1949, and modeled on the Writers’ Union in the former Soviet Union, the Chinese Writers Association was far more than the professional association that its title indicates: it actually functioned as an official cultural bureaucracy mediating between writers and the Communist Party’s Department of Propaganda. Since the Chinese political leadership saw literature and art as an important vehicle for building militant socialism and conducting socialist education, the Communist Party over several decades maintained a monopoly over the patronage of writers through the Writers Association and various related official literary institutions at the local and national levels.
The Writers Association had two specific mandates. As Perry Link has noted, it both “provide[d] the Party with a means of monitoring and controlling creative writing and ”establish[ed] a clear-cut ladder of success for writers within the socialist literary system.“2 Thus, although it is true that the Communist Party took measures to silence, reform, and regulate “bourgeois” writers by means of various political and literary campaigns, it also acted positively through the Writers Association to build a new and thriving literary system that supported its own socialist ideals and to foster and train a whole new generation of socialist writers.3
With its central offices in Beijing and provincial and municipal branches throughout the country, the Writers Association—often in concert with the China Federation of Literary and Art Circles (Zhongguo wenxue yishu jie lianhe hui, or “wenlian”)—formed a vast network engaged in cultural and (by extension) political work. The association directly managed virtually all literary newspapers and journals, which were the main venues for literary publication in Mainland China. It also organized various cultural activities, such as training sessions (jiangxi ban) and writing seminars (bi hui) for young and amateur writers, and established a plethora of literary prizes at all levels to encourage more writing that followed certain aesthetic and moral standards. Also, the association exerted indirect control over writers by establishing a hierarchical system of patronage. The most established writers were appointed to important cultural posts in the association, from which they carried out administrative and ceremonial duties. Many ordinary members were also given paid positions in various cultural bodies as administrators, editors, and so on. A small minority of writers who had proved their talent could even become full-time professional writers (zhuanye zuojia), with salaries and benefits paid by the association.4
Membership in the Writers Association was a prerequisite for participating in literary lectures and seminars and in official excursions to scenic and cultural sites to broaden members’ “life experience.” It was also a precondition for applying for creative writing grants and sabbaticals. Perhaps most important, it was required in order to publish works in national and local literary journals. One could therefore say that the Writers Association was for many decades the exclusive “work unit” for Chinese writers.
This literary system efficiently transformed the vast majority of Chinese writers into state employees; inevitably, it also led them to view literature in utilitarian terms, since state-supported writers enjoyed high status in society as well as privileged lifestyles. Especially in the late 1970s and the 1980s, following the Cultural Revolution (1966—76), when the Writers Association system was restored after a ten-year hiatus, the prestige enjoyed by writers inspired many materially deprived but literarily gifted youth to engage in creative writing as a means to better their lives and climb the social ladder. Contrary to the common Western assumption that socialist control over art and literature had only the negative effect of suppressing creativity, most Chinese writers actually viewed the system as an ideal environment in which to fulfill their moral responsibilities toward society while at the same time treading the path to personal success and social status. Because of their close involvement in the political and cultural activities of the state, most Chinese writers prior to the mid-1980s could be seen as part of a “cultural priesthood” whose pulpit was constructed and monitored by the government.5

This stable and privileged position of writers as state artists began to be shaken in the 1980s, when economic reforms and emerging market forces started undermining the foundations of the socialist literary system.
First, in the mid-1980s the ideology of militant socialism began giving way to an emphasis on economic reforms, and the government began to withdraw much of its support from the cultural infrastructure. This placed serious financial pressure on literary institutions and in some cases threatened their very survival. This withdrawal was manifested in many ways, most notably through a reduction in financial allocations in real terms to the Writers Association. 6 Hit especially hard were the provincial Writers Associations. For example, in an open letter to Literature Press (Wenxue bao), the president of the Henan Writers Association, Zhang Yigong, declared: “I am searching for entrepreneurs (to donate money).” He also complained that the Henan provincial government had given the local Writers Association only sixteen thousand yuan for that year and that it was covering no vocational costs; as a result, the association no longer had the means to support its literary journal or theoretical studies, which had been the backbone of its activities.7
Cuts in government subsidies during the 1980s and early 1990s had profound effects on literary production throughout the country. For example, manuscript fees were ridiculously low, and serious writers now found it difficult to have their works published either in journals or as books. A major part of the problem was the crisis facing the literary journals, which had once been fully subsidized. At the end of 1984, the government began requiring all literary journals except for a handful of prominent ones with national circulations to aim for financial independence. Faced with declining subscriptions and shrinking subsidies, many journals either closed down or transformed themselves into trashy popular magazines.8
The Writers Association also became less enthusiastic about sponsoring national literary awards. These had once been an important way to reward favored writers and establish literary models. For more than a decade, the annual National Awards for short stories (Quanguo youxiu duanpianxiaoshuo jiang, started in 1979), poetry (1983), novellas (1981), and reportage (1982) had played an active role in developing stylistic trends and promoting new writers. In 1989, during the government’s political and cultural purge after the Tian’anmen crackdown, all of these awards stopped, and since that time the Writers Association has never bothered to revive them. After Tian’anmen, the Mao Dun Literary Award (Maodun wenxue jiang) for novels was the only official award to continue until the Lu Xun Literary Awards (Luxun wenxue jiang) were founded in 1998. And the Mao Dun Award was given out in irregular fashion, not every three years as it was supposed to be; only two awards were made in the ten years from 1989 to 1999, with much controversy among writers and critics alike over its unfair judging procedures. The prize-winning works were obviously selected more for their political correctness than for literary merit. As we shall see later, during the 1990s many unofficial literary prizes sponsored by businesses sprang up to replace the official awards; these offered much larger prizes and demanded much less ideological conformity.
The reduction in government support for the Writers Association also broke the “iron rice bowl” of the professional writers’ system. As early as the mid-1980s, some branches of the Writers Association had discarded the tenure system and were beginning to pay writers based on short-term contracts; their writers were now called “contract writers” (qianyue zuojia or hetong zuojia), rather than “tenured writers” (zhongshenzhi zuojia). For example, in 1986 the Shanghai Writers Association began contracting professional writers for four-year terms.9 This new practice was introduced on a much larger scale after 1992, when it was embraced by the associations in Hubei, Hunan, Heilongjiang, and Beijing. By the end of the decade, almost all provincial associations in China had adopted the contract method for recruiting new writers.
Some regional associations took the reforms a step further, recruiting promising writers from other regions to complete single-term contracts instead of going to the effort and expense of nurturing their own writers. For example, the Guangdong Writers Association received generous sponsorship from a local corporation from 1994 onwards, and was thus able to contract ten writers from all over China. During their two-year contracts, these writers could remain at their home bases, as long as the works they produced acknowledged the support of the Guangdong Writers Association and were publicized as such. Other provincial associations even made use of piecework contracts rather than term contracts—for example, the Nanjing Federation of Literary and Art Circles in 1996, and the Guangxi Writers Association the same year.10
Some writers debated whether literature should be completely commercialized in this way, or whether writers as “cultural workers” should continue to be fed by the state.11 In any case, the general trend throughout the 1990s was for the government to push new writers firmly in the direction of the cultural marketplace, while still supporting some older writers who had achieved tenure before the reforms.12
In the second half of the 1980s, almost in tandem with the government cuts, serious literature (yansu wenxue) also suffered a sharp decline in readership. This exacerbated the crisis facing the literary system and forced writers to seek other means of support.
Many factors besides economic reform led to this decline. First, a new generation of avant-garde writers was turning to modernist experiments with hermetic personal writing; others were simply ignoring contemporary issues in favor of exploring their cultural roots. These works certainly had their own literary and cultural value, and one might argue that through them contemporary Chinese literature was finally regaining its “artistic autonomy.” Undoubtedly, however, they did not have the same appeal for ordinary readers as works reflecting strong contemporary concerns—that is, the sort published in the years immediately following the Cultural Revolution.
Second, the explosion in mass media and other forms of popular culture distracted many readers. Video halls, dance clubs, karaoke bars, and popular music concerts, and of course pirated videos and the growing variety of television channels and programs, offered entire new worlds of entertainment to “starved” Chinese audiences, and this reduced the time they had for reading literature, especially if they did not find the works immediately relevant to their lives.
But perhaps the most serious threat to serious literature came from the boom in popular reading. Suddenly available were a multitude of fashion, entertainment, and general-interest magazines, and popular literature or “pulp fiction.”
Popular literature reappeared in China in the 1980s after three decades away. Its revival was signaled by the reprinting of traditional popular novels and historical tales (lishi yanyi) and by translations of classic foreign entertainments such as Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot mysteries and Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes detective stories. Soon after that appeared more contemporary works, often pirated, imported from the West or from Hong Kong and Taiwan. By the mid-1980s, a huge market for popular literature had been created, dominated by translations of foreign fiction, from Sidney Sheldon potboilers to Japanese pop fiction by Watanabe Jyunichi and Nishimura Toshiyuki. There were also Hong Kong Chinese martial arts tales by Jin Yong and Liang Yusheng, Taiwanese romances and personal essays by Qiong Yao and San Mao, and pulp fiction filled with sex and violence, either imported or locally produced.13
For the first time in several decades, the book market was offering ordinary Chinese readers light entertainment; before this, only serious literary fiction had been available. Despite their generally crude format and content, most of these books easily sold millions of copies because they were meeting a strong need for entertainment felt by a population that had suffered through ten years of Cultural Revolution, when virtually no popular entertainment had been publicly produced and distributed. Another reason for its success was that unlike serious literature, which was still largely produced by state-regulated publishing houses and literary journals, popular literature was from the very beginning dominated by and keenly aware of market forces. Thus, it was in this marginal and even despised area of publishing that market mechanisms first demonstrated their power.
It is true that state-run publishing houses—especially those in the South and in provinces distant from the central government—also published popular best sellers, using these commercially successful books to solve their financial difficulties and to subsidize more serious or academic works. However, the driving force behind the rapid spread of popular literature was the “second channel” (di er qudao)—that is, the unofficial publishing and distribution channels.14 With their own distribution networks—mainly street vendors and private bookstores and distributors—these books sold much more quickly and efficiently than state-produced titles. And since this sort of publishing was driven solely by the profit motive, book dealers quickly became adept at ascertaining and satisfying the needs of mass-market readers. They had to in order to survive. It is not surprising that with such a huge demand from ordinary readers, and as a result of second-channel business methods of production and distribution, popular literature thrived to an unprecedented extent.
One consequence of popular culture’s market success was that writers of “pure” or serious literature now found it difficult to get their works published. Confronted with this new competition on one side and with government cuts on the other, even houses that specialized in serious art and literature were reluctant to publish what was unlikely to sell well. In fact, as a result of the collapse of the state’s Xinhua bookstore system and the slow pace of economic reform in state-controlled publishing houses, by the late 1980s and early 1990s even quality literat...

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