China’s Minor Literature
British literary magazine Granta has focused its latest issue on China during a time of growing geopolitical tensions. It introduces a contemporary Chinese literature written in the minor key by writers driven by political ennui.
The latest issue of Granta magazine includes selections include the doyens of Chinese literature — Yan Lianke and Mo Yan, winner of the 2012 Nobel Prize in literature — while also highlighting a younger group of writers associated with the so-called Dongbei Renaissance, a loose cultural movement emerging out of China’s northeast.
The London-based literary quarterly Granta was founded by a group of Cambridge University postgraduates in 1979. It was born out of the shards of an old student magazine, the Granta, which was important in its own way for publishing the juvenilia of writers like Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath. By the late twentieth century, the publication had changed in both form and scope. If Granta had insular origins — a student magazine at Cambridge — it now flung itself open to the world. Its first issue was on new American writing, featuring fiction, interviews, essays, and memoir, and including Susan Sontag, Donald Barthelme, William Gass, and Joyce Carol Oates among its authors.
Already from its earliest issues, you could get an impression of a sensibility. Granta had an intellectual air and yet wore it casually. It was more experimental than the mainstream literary magazines across the Atlantic and more curious about the world than the New Yorker, Harper’s, or Paris Review, publications whose attention continues to be largely focused on the United States and Europe. In contrast, Granta’s vantage was less fixed: at once postwar British and dispersed, or postwar British through being dispersed. It approached the world with a lightness lent it by a slight distance from Great Power politicking, offering a view not from Washington or New York but not from London, exactly, either.
In the 1980s, Granta embarked on a great globalization‒era adventure in travel writing. In doing so, it helped lift a supposedly trivial form into a canonized, even innovative strain of literature — travel writing that at its best suggested new ground for literary experimentation, struggling — and sometimes failing — to escape the genre’s penchant for colonial-tinged voyeurism. Country-specific issues on Pakistan, Japan, and India headlined the 2010s, and in 2002, just months after September 11, Granta published an issue titled “What We Think of America,” featuring reflections on the hegemon from Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Pakistan, and elsewhere. Meanwhile, in an age in which mass-market publications no longer made much room for photojournalism and reportage, Granta became an important home for both.
Its latest issue, hearkening back to this earlier era, is on China. The fourth issue under Granta‘s new editor, Thomas Meaney — and the second country-specific issue under his editorship; the first was on Germany — it brings together fiction, poetry, interviews, critical essays, memoirs, and photo essays. Its selections include the doyens of Chinese literature — Yan Lianke and Mo Yan, winner of the 2012 Nobel Prize in literature — while also highlighting a younger group of writers associated with the so-called Dongbei Renaissance, a loose cultural movement emerging out of China’s northeast. It is these Dongbei-based writers, publisher and One-Way Street editor Wu Qi tells the editors in an interview, who best capture the mercury of the country’s Xi Jinping–era mood: “The most fascinating thing about their writing is how they accurately capture the lost but resigned emotional structure that pervades society. . . . There is a disease of weightlessness, especially serious, in today’s China.”
A Disease of Weightlessness
The new issue comes amid the chilling of US-China relations. “Chimerica,” or the pre-2008 dream of US and Chinese comanagement of the global capitalist system, has been all but forgotten, replaced now by talk of a New Cold War. And yet commonalities as much as tensions define the United States’ and China’s past decade. Slowing growth rates and working-class restlessness have led, in both countries, to new nostalgias, new patriotisms, and new ruling-class attempts to fashion a new social compact.
Granta’s new issue features only writers and photographers who live and work in the mainland, and it opens a window onto the cultural world that emerged out of this context. For readers like me, more or less new to recent trends in Chinese literature, it offers bit of hinterland, in both geographic and historical senses: historical background through interviews and critical essays, and geographic range by taking us to edges of the country at once remote and representative, from the fly-by-night factories and migrant-worker bunks of the south to the rusting old Communist worlds of the north.
When Deng Xiaoping eased China into the world market in the 1970s, the country’s literature responded with a series of tight reversals. Decades of foreign literature were dumped overnight onto the mainland’s shores. Social realism and the sentimental cult of the worker or peasant hero gave way to bleak tales of rural misery and authoritarian excess. And then, a decade later, in the 1980s, came a “roots-seeking literature” that tried to keep Westernization and commercial nihilism at bay, looking instead to peasant traditions and vanishing regional cultures.
Today the sharpness of these turns has relaxed. New styles and subjects proliferate. Politics often enters novels and poems more subtly, at a slant. Granta’s new issue showcases this variety, bringing together playful postmodern mysteries and slyly fantastical scenes from daily life, quiet tales of queer curiosity and melancholy portraits of life on the outskirts of the marriage market.
The Laboring of Chinese Literature
Amid this impressive surplus of literary approaches, two particular trends in recent Chinese literature attract the attention of Granta‘s editors: the rise of “bottom-rung literature” and the Dongbei Renaissance. “Bottom-rung literature,” or new worker writing, is the name for the proletarian literature written by migrant workers and looked upon — a fitting postmodern irony — with hostility by officials of the People’s Republic. These are workers who flee their home provinces, where under the hukou system they’re required to stay, crowding into the backs of trucks under the cover of night and winding up in the makeshift outskirts of Beijing or Shanghai, or the silicon sweatshops of Shenzhen or Guangzhou, to work in the homes of the rich or the assembly plants of international capital.
In 2017, one of these workers, a forty-four-year-old nanny named Fan Yusu, published an online essay telling the story of her life. It was titled “I’m Fan Yusu.” It went viral and launched a literary movement. Two of the issue’s essays represent this “bottom-rung” current. Xiao Hai’s “Adrift in the South” is a worker’s report of “moving from one factory to another, always living through the same, hazy dreamscape of exhaustion” — portraits of the nameless millions who built Shenzhen. Han Zhang’s “Picun” is a dispatch from the fringes of Beijing, where Fan Yusu and other worker writers, together with Peking University professor Zhang Huiyu, have turned an ordinary migrant compound into a hotbed of working-class cultural institutions.
They built a museum, a theater, and a children’s library. But the authorities saw these institutions as obstacles to Beijing’s development and bulldozed them. Now only the library stands. The workers in Picun live under the constant threat of eviction, and though the stories and essays keep coming, even viral writers like Fan struggle to make a life out of literature.
This is one half of what we might call the laboring of Chinese literature. A culture long decorated with official proletarian images has been jolted, through the writing of today’s new workers, with an underground rush of realism. The second half comes out of Dongbei, the name for the three provinces — Liaoning, Jilin, and Heilongjiang — that make up China’s far northeastern tip.
Dongbei is often described as China’s Rust Belt. Once the glory of industrial Communism, the region’s steel plants began shuttering in the 1970s under the pressure of market liberalization. Yet like the Rust Belt in the United States, Dongbei, after decades of outmodedness, once again looms large in the Chinese imagination. As growth rates slow, old, futureless memories resurface: Dongbei’s scattered unemployed men, its hollowed factories and recreation facilities, and nostalgia for the imagined solidity of its mid-century industrial way of life.
These memories have come to the fore through a loose cultural movement called the Dongbei Renaissance. In 2019, two artists from Dongbei, the vaporwave rapper GEM and the alt-rock singer Liang Long, guest-starred on a popular comedy show, Roast!, where they mocked the backwardness of their home region and announced, with no shortage of irony, that Dongbei was about to enjoy a renaissance. The name stuck, and much of the irony evaporated, because meanwhile splashy cultural products kept tumbling out of the region, from TV hits (The Long Season) to stand-up comics (Li Xueqin and Wang Jianguo) to literature (Shuang Xuetao, Ban Yu, Yang Zhihan).
All three writers appear in Granta’s issue. Ban Yu’s “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” best captures the renaissance’s tropes: Old injured men, hustling and begging for work. Cold, windswept, Soviet-scaled landscapes, and just barely remembered feelings of solidarity and community, glimpsed here through the local soccer club, the Shenyang Lions. And overall, a troubled, comic weightlessness, the sense that no one has the luxury of taking their life very seriously. These are the hallmarks of a cultural movement equivocating between nostalgia and working-class social critique.
Workers’ literature and odes to postmodernism, surreal photographs of Chengdu and weightlessness in the Rust Belt: the range here has all the hallmarks of a classic Granta issue. For that very reason, something about Granta 169 feels old-school. Its perspective, alive to politics and international in outlook, looks untimely in an age of resurgent nationalism and cultural provincialism.
The rise of nationalism, the fall of literature into a minor cultural form: these are things that now hold true across China and America. But as Thomas Meaney writes in his introduction, this “is not necessarily a bad thing” for literature, at least in China. Writers can find more freedom in the margins. The pressure to represent the nation, weighing on Chinese literature both under Mao Zedong and in the anxious, upside-down early days of post-Deng economic liberalization, has begun to loosen up. “Relieved of domestic pressure to speak for the people, and foreign pressure to be paragons of dissidence,” writers can produce stranger and often more autonomous political work, no longer mercenary or monumental, in a minor key.
It’s fitting that this insight into the artistic benefits of slipping out from under the burden of the nation should appear in an editorial from Granta, a magazine whose virtue has long lay in keeping the confines of the nation at a distance. Its achievement, reprised in its new issue, has been to venture out, in quiet, angular ways, into the world.