An Inconsolable Cry: Yu Hua, Fictional History and China's Post-Mao Zhishifenzi

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An Inconsolable Cry: Yu Hua, Fictional History and China’s Post-Mao Zhishifenzi

Richard John Lee

ORCID 0000-0001-7534-8608

Submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

August 2018

Asia Institute, Faculty of Arts, University of Melbourne

This thesis is submitted in total fulfilment of the degree of Doctor of Philosophy.

Contents

1. Post-reform zhishifenzi and Fictional History...... 1

2. You’re not one of us: Coming of age in China ...... 37

3. Of faith, trauma and farce – Fictional History explains Mao-era China ...... 72

4. An impetuous brother ...... 124

5. The great emporium ...... 166

6. Lost souls ...... 207

Conclusion: An inconsolable cry ...... 240

Works cited ...... 246

Abstract

In this thesis I offer a cultural history approach to the issue of zhishifenzi identity in post-Mao China, and above all between the 1990s and the present. I examine the ideology of the zhishifenzi group – by which I mean both the stratum of educated people who saw themselves as having a leading position in the post-Mao reforms and also intellectuals belonging to that stratum who engage in critical discourse about thought and culture – by reading well-known works by prominent zhishifenzi writers and film-makers produced since the early 1990s. To examine these works, I introduce the category of Fictional History – fictionalized or fiction- inflected narratives of history which I see as reflecting the shared cultural perspectives of the zhishifenzi as a social group. I regard Fictional History as a means by which zhishifenzi assert a distinct identity and ideology, one that contrasts with that of other members of the Chinese middle class which emerged with the post-Mao economic reforms. I argue that Fictional History incorporates five different types of historical experience into a single socio-cultural perspective. These five experiences are: a particular experience of childhood, a particular experience of trauma in history, an experience and perception of marginalization by the rich in the post-reform period, a particular set of gender relationship experiences, and a particular narrative about experiences of social alienation and cultural detachment. It is hoped this research will assist in theorising the social behaviour and agency of an influential grouping in Chinese society as well as offering a new way of conceptualising recent Chinese cultural production.

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Declaration

(i) This thesis comprises only my own original work except where indicated in the preface; (ii) Due acknowledgement has been made in the text to all other material used; (iii) This thesis is fewer than the maximum word limit in length, exclusive of tables, maps, bibliographies and appendices.

Signed…Richard John LEE

Date…11 December 2018

Preface

I wish to acknowledge the people and the Commonwealth of Australia for providing the material support necessary to undertake this project.

Acknowledgments:

I wish to acknowledge the indispensable advice and assistance of Dr Lewis Mayo of the Asia Institute, University of Melbourne. I would also like to recognize the advice and support given me by the members of my advisory committee at the Asia Institute, Dr Zhou Shaoming, Dr Claire Maree, and Dr Michael Ewing. I also wish to acknowledge the assistance and hospitality of the librarian and staff of the Baillieu Library, University of Melbourne and of the librarian and staff of the Learning Commons of Victoria University.

我真感恩

1. Post-reform zhishifenzi and Fictional History

This thesis is founded on the proposition that social groups are who they are because of the stories they tell about themselves.

The social group this thesis studies is what I call ‘post-reform zhishifenzi ” and the stories that this group tells about itself are what I call “Fictional History”. The terms “post-reform zhsifhifenzi ” and “Fictional History” are chosen because they convey the historical and cultural specificity of both the social group and the set of stories that I see that group as telling about itself.

The Chinese word zhishifenzi - which literally means “knowledgeable elements” – goes untranslated in this thesis for two reasons. One is that it has two broad referents – “intellectuals” in the sense of people strongly engaged with problems of thought and culture, and “educated people”, a group understood as different from the “workers, farmers, soldiers and cadres”, who formed the four main officially recognised groups in Mao-era China. Because this thesis focuses on the work of people who were zhishifenzi in both senses - “intellectuals” in the sense of people engaged in critical analysis of thought and culture and “educated people” affiliated with the project of socialist China’s modernisation – the Chinese term is I feel the most appropriate way of conveying their identity.

The other reason is that this thesis understands zhishifenzi in a very specific sense – it refers to a distinct social category, namely, the social stratum of those who in post-Mao China were set apart by their education and by their mission to enact China’s technical and cultural modernisation in the era of reforms initiated after the death of Mao Zedong. Zhishifenzi were a clearly identified and self-conscious social grouping which was strongly identified with the project of reform, while being also attached to the institutions of the planned economy. What this thesis terms “reform-era zhishifenzi ” were the group of educated workers (and to some extent university students) who had state-backed employment in the period of Deng-era reforms (essentially from the late 1970s to the early 1990s). From the early 1990s onwards, 1 this group lost much of its coherence as a social category as economic change and the orientation of Chinese society more and more towards the market deprived it of its former prominence. However, this thesis argues zhishifenzi maintained their own distinct ethos through this period, and it is this group of “post-reform zhishifenzi on which this thesis focuses. (To clarify, “reform-era zhishifenzi ” refers to zhishifenzi in the years between c.1976 and c.1989 and “post-reform zhishifenzi ” refers to zhishifenzi in the years between c. 1990 and the present.)

“Fictional History” is a term that this thesis has coined to describe a genre of writing produced by well-known Chinese authors of literary fiction and producers of art cinema films that takes the history of modern Chinese society, above all in the Mao era and in the era of reforms after Mao’s death as its subject matter. This work is distinguished by its use of fictional forms and styles to depict historical themes and situations, even when these forms and styles are used in non-fictional works such as documentary films. Fictional History – which is invariably written with capital letters in this thesis – is understood as a distinctive cultural genre, unlike historical fiction, academic history produced by scholars and the official history produced by the Chinese state. This thesis argues that Fictional History is a distinctive manifestation of the social and cultural predicament of the zhishifenzi group when it was losing its social prominence between the 1990s and the 2000s and when it used reflection on history to express, explain and comment on its own identity and values.

Who are the Zhishifenzi ?

The origins of the post-Mao zhishifenzi as a specific social stratum can be outlined as follows: In the first decade after the death of Mao Zedong, three distinct groups of educated people became influential in the policy debates of the reform state in China. Each group had been shaped in their outlook by their different experiences of the Cultural Revolution. In the first place, the remnants of the established educated class had been traumatized by their persecution in the mass movements of the Mao period as elements of the ‘stinking ninth’ ( 臭老九 chou lao jiu ) category of black elements. Another distinct group were the revenant sent- down youth ( 知青 zhiqing ) who reflected upon their own experiences of being sent to the countryside in the late 1960s and early 1970s as evidence of the failure of the Maoist

2 revolutionary project. A third group of educated people was comprised of those who had been children during the Cultural Revolution and who were the first generation of students admitted to higher education upon the resumption of the system of university entrance examinations in the late 1970s – this latter group includes one of the key figures whose work is examined in this thesis, the novelist Yu Hua ( 余华). State policy and the events of the late

1970s and early 1980s provided the conditions for this group – made up of the combination of the three different subgroups – to emerge as a dominant social stratum and to exert significant influence over Chinese society in the years between the late 1970s and the early 1990s. This group who collectively constituted the post-Mao zhishifenzi was formally established by the reform state to provide social leadership while occupying roles that combined cultural and technical expertise. In this regard, we can argue that the key to the emergence of the post-Mao zhishifenzi was the humanist, scientific, and somewhat globalized education they received or delivered in a renovated higher education sector which generally eschewed Maoist ideology. It was the restoration of tertiary education based on entrance by competitive examination, and the state-supported technology and cultural institutions broadly affiliated with the Post-Mao project of socialist modernisation.

A strong sense of group identity and of social mission was characteristic of the zhishifenzi group in the years between the late 1970s and the beginning of the 1990s. Zhishifenzi , in the broad sense of the educated group affiliated with the modernisation project and in the more restricted sense of intellectuals engaged in critical reflection on matters of thought and culture, were in the “heyday of the reform” (the 1980s) acutely conscious of their own status as a discrete social group and strongly engaged in discussion about the past, present and future of China.

The aim of this thesis is to discover the distinct identity and world-view of this group of post- Mao zhishifenzi as this is proclaimed through the production of narratives of Chinese history.

The Zhishifenzi and the state It is frequently observed that in China, the state has historically been the chief actor in the formation of social classes and social groups. It was as part of the reform state’s plan to replace the principle of class struggle with scientific leadership that the post-Mao zhishifenzi

3 grouping was created. In so doing, we can argue that in creating the zhishifenzi in the post- Mao era, the state sought to restore the category of the educated class that had been present in the very early years of the People’s Republic. Vera Schwarz’s translation of the term zhishifenzi as "elements knowledgeable about the social whole” gives some sense of the broad understanding of the overall role of the zhishifenzi group both in the early years of the PRC and in the post-Mao period. 1 In the early PRC the zhishifenzi group was officially recognized by the state with a ranked position in the system of class status, the jieji chengfen. The post- Mao zhishifenzi – the zhishifenzi proper in terms of this thesis – was imagined to be a distinct, administratively recognized social group with values, mores, and traditions gained from a humanist education and a shared subjective generational experience. What distinguished the post-Mao zhishifenzi group from the group in the early People’s Republic was that it had the experience of the Mao years, and the Cultural Revolution in particular, as a collective reference point.

As noted above, formal post-Mao zhishifenzi identity had arisen and flourished under the social consensus of the early 1980s which had replaced the principle of class struggle with a purportedly more scientific or rational approach in dealing with social and economic issues, an approach that was widely promoted in the propaganda of this era and in the education system in particular. The post-Mao zhishifenzi group were beneficiaries of this change because they were the first generation since 1949 to have received a higher education in which the ideology of revolution had not been stressed. As part of its response to the ongoing political and social threat posed to the Party-state by enduring memories of the Cultural Revolution, the reform state devised a role for the first cohort of graduates to emerge from the system of competitive university examinations instituted in the late 1970s and offered them a formal leading position within the reform state. The sense that the zhishifenzi group had been given a special place in the project of the technological and cultural modernization of China lasted throughout the 1980s. The 1989 democracy protests can to some extent be seen as an expression of the enlightened and liberal ideals propagated by China’s higher education system and in the wider cultural world in the 1980s and adopted as the shared ideology of the zhishifenzi at that time. The suppression of these protests indicated the limits of the state’s

1 Quoted in U, E. (2003). The Making of Zhishifenzi: The Critical Impact of the Registration of Unemployed Intellectuals in the Early PRC. China Quarterly (173), 100-121. 4 tolerance for these ideals. After 1989 it became evident to the group of zhishifenzi whose work is referred to in this thesis as Fictional History that the social fractures generated in the revolutionary period had been left unaddressed and that these contradictions would continue to pose a threat to the stability of society. Essentially, this group of zhishifenzi commentators believed that the shift to a market economy in China, what I term elsewhere The Great Emporium , had recreated Mao-era social tensions which began to undermine the zhishifenzi social mission, a mission which up to this time had been supported by the state but which was now withdrawn. After the Tiananmen incident, we can argue, the political focus of the state shifted to creating a larger middle-class which would not represent an independent political force that could challenge the state, and it is one of the core arguments of this thesis that the state’s construction of a middle-class between the 1990s and the present deprived the zhishifenzi of the position they had had between the late 1970s and early 1990s. Jiang Zemin’s doctrine of the Three Represents – propounded in the 1990s – presented the Chinese middle-class as being an “advanced working class” who sold their labour in the same fashion as the proletariat, but who were distinguished by their education, upbringing, job status, and salaries. 2 This shift in the state’s relationship to society in the 1990s led, I argue, to the breakup of the zhishifenzi as a distinct social group.

In the wake of this process of disintegration, the zhishifenzi of the post-reform era realized that their early success and belief in promotion had proved illusory and that there remained only their spiritual distinctiveness as a basis for group identity. It was this identity which, this thesis suggests, was emphasized in distinctive narratives of history which were presented alongside a depiction of the cultural pathologies which the zhishifenzi believed to be the prime cause of their defeat. I argue here that the generation, or social stratum, of post-Mao zhishifenzi, though dis-established after 1989, retain a distinct identity and ideology which is expressed and sustained in the cultural form that I term Fictional History.

The Historical Context: The prehistory of the reform-era zhishifenzi from the late Qing to the Mao era. To understand the post-Mao zhishifenzi group it is helpful to look at some of its historical

2 The still officially-recognized theory of the “primary stage of socialism” (社会主义初级阶段理论 shehui chuji jieduan lilun ), holds that, following the reforms, zhishifenzi are a part of the working class which shares with workers and peasants the attribute of not possessing the means of production . 5 predecessors. Benjamin Schwartz has observed that the variety of terms for Chinese intellectuals has not been refined to a ‘crystalline precision,’ but to arrive at a more rigorous definition of the zhishifenzi it is important to examine how the principal categories of “knowledgeable social elements” have differed from each throughout China’s recent history. 3

In the late imperial era and to an extent in the Republican period between 1911 and 1949, a small educated stratum had a virtual monopoly on literacy and, figuratively, this stratum took the form of a thin layer situated between a vast peasantry and a small ruling class. The descriptor wenren （文人） refers to people who were literate, above all in classical Chinese. Because facility with words was the pre-eminent skill required in the running of a vast bureaucratic empire, the wenren as an overall category were associated both with government administration and with social leadership.

With the decline and fall of the imperial system, the broad category of wenren began to be challenged, above all by the emergence of people who might be considered intellectuals in the way that this is term is used to describe other modern societies. At the end of the Qing and in early Republican times, a group referred to as zhishijieji (知识阶级 , the intellectual class) began to be spoken of. It designated the educated elite or, more narrowly, the scholars and writers who participated in political and cultural debates. Intellectual historians suggest that the category of the zhishijieji began to be superseded when the New Culture and May 4 th movements of the early 1920s produced the kaiming xuezhe (开明学者 , enlightened scholars). Both the terms zhishijieji and kaiming xuezhe referred to an academic and artistic elite with relatively few members and, as such, could hardly be said to represent a distinct social stratum. (In this sense these categories differ from the displaced bureaucratic gentry class, the afore-mentioned wenren, which was a discrete social stratum). It is notable that the term zhishifenzi appeared in literary circles in the 1920s but was not widely used by the general population before the 1949 Revolution.

The Communist definition of intellectuals (who were referred to at the time as zhishifenzi but who are here called intellectuals to distinguish them from the zhishifenzi of the post-Mao era)

3 Schwartz, B. (1960). The Intelligentsia in Communist China. A Tentative Comparison. Daedelus, 89 (3), 604- 621. p.619 6 in the early period of the People’s Republic referred to those who had, at least, finished junior high school. The early years of the PRC were marked by an administrative exercise which redefined the category of intellectuals from a small educated elite to include a broader census category of "mental workers.” 4 Additionally, the word intelligentsia , borrowed from Russian usage, is used by scholars writing about this period to refer to the older pre-communist intelligentsia, the zhishijieji and kaiming xuezhe of the 1910s to the 1940s, who were objects of profound suspicion by the post-1949 party state. The critiques of the Hundred Flowers period in the 1950s, which were presented to a very large extent by the literary and academic intelligentsia, were met with hostility by the state which subsequently embarked upon a concerted effort to reduce the stature of this group. We can argue that from the late 1950s to the 1960s the Party reduced this older intelligentsia, who had been thought leaders in academia, government, the media, and the creative arts in the early years of the People’s Republic, to complete silence. In this period, a new intelligentsia group was prevented from forming by Mao’s insistence that revolutionary subjects would be taught by the poor peasants and workers, presented as the most politically advanced groups in socialist China.

In the view of the post-Mao zhishifenzi and many other observers, the logical culmination of this stance was that in the Cultural Revolution, higher level education was curtailed, and students were ordered to the countryside to labour with, and learn from, the peasants. In the reform period, these sent-down youth returned to the cities and energetically expressed their disillusion with the practice of Maoist revolution. As noted, this sent-down youth group, the zhiqing , is one constituent of the post-Mao zhishifenzi group. This group made significant contributions to reform-era zhishifenzi literary culture. Beginning with the 1978 story "The wound" ( 伤痕 Shanghen ) by Lu Xinhua 卢新华 ‘scar’ literature (伤痕文学 shanghen wenxue) was developed as a cultural expression of the zhiqing movement. 5 This writing formed one of the building blocks of reform-era zhishifenzi culture and is one of the antecedents of the post- reform Fictional History genre that this thesis examines. As we have seen, in the late 1970s and 1980s, state recognition, social terminology, and a defining belief in education as a basis

4 U, E. (2003). The Making of Zhishifenzi: The Critical Impact of the Registration of Unemployed Intellectuals in the Early PRC. China Quarterly (173), 100-121. 5 This body of literature and film has been documented by Michel Bonnin, Guobin Yang, Andreea Chiri ţă , and other scholars. 7 for social leadership, fostered the illusion that the new generation of university graduates and the other groups of educated people with whom they were affiliated, who collectively formed the post-Mao zhishifenzi group , were the standard bearers of a new era.

The historical experience that is narrated by the works of Fictional History that were produced in the post-reform era of the 1990s and the 2000s is in part a generational one and responds to the Cultural Revolution as an ‘originary event’, the experience to which post-Mao zhishifenzi respond as a key shared reference point. Mannheim has theorised that a sense of generational belonging arises from common experiences to which an epochal significance is attached. The Cultural Revolution, while experienced differently by the various generations who lived through it, left an “impress of a shared destiny” 6 upon the children who would become the core generation of post reform zhishifenzi (that is those who were children between 1966 and 1976 and came to adulthood in the years after Mao’s death). This shared experience of events that have epochal significance arguably generates a sense of identity more meaningful than the ordinary connections which bind other social groups. In a similar vein, Paul Ricoeur contends that originary events of this type engender a “community formed by time” which makes possible a connectedness between as well as within generations. 7 Additionally, historical dislocations and traumas of the kind exemplified by the Cultural Revolution can have the effect of arresting, or even turning back, a sense of generational membership, and so I note that some prominent established writers in China, such as Gao

Xingjian 高行健 (b. 1940), who were members of an earlier intellectual tradition and of another generation, begin to be influenced by the post-reform zhishifenzi critique of history and themselves produced work which can legitimately be counted as belonging to the genre of Fictional History.

The state’s suspicion of the reform-era zhishifenzi after the 1989 democracy protests, however, meant that the era of zhishifenzi belief in their leadership of China’s cultural and technological transformation was short-lived. For zhishifenzi from the early 1990s onwards, the opportunity to become relatively autonomous professionals through deepened economic reform was won at the cost of a loss of state support for themselves and their work, and of

6 Quoted in Dowling, W. C. (2010). Paul Ricoeur's poetics of history. Raritan: A Quarterly Review, 29 (4). 7 Ibid. 8 relinquishing their assumed influence in social affairs. Timothy Cheek has observed of intellectuals (a category he perhaps understands in a more narrow sense than the term zhishifenzi as it is used in this thesis) that since China’s economic reforms, the CCP has “…striven to isolate intellectuals from organising other social forces…by buying off the intellectuals with middle-class status and access to the fruits of reform…” 8 Since the 1990s China’s educated class – of which the post-reform zhishifenzi are a key constituent – has been obliged to share middle-class status with a new mercantile group, often with close links to the Party, which has become wealthy as a result of the economic reforms. The tension between the post-reform zhishifenzi and the other members of the new Chinese middle-class is a central concern of this thesis.

The state and the Chinese middle class in the post-reform era

As China’s economic and social reform began to create new forms of social stratification in the 1990s, the state’s rhetoric shifted more and more towards ‘profession’ and away from older socialist categories such as that of zhishifenzi (in the 1980s sense of the work). Additionally, after 1989 the state arguably felt that the 1980s principle of “letting the experts lead” was no longer appropriate if it had created a stratum of people whose assumption of a public leadership role might bring it into conflict with government policies. The upheavals of 1989, in which a state-nurtured and highly educated group of students challenged the status of the Party as the sole arbiter of China’s destiny, provoked a state response which simultaneously abolished the state job allocation system and other privileged connections to the state and effectively removed the formal socio-economic basis of the reform-era zhishifenzi as a distinct group. (Ironically, the state job allocation system and its rigidities were a major source of zhishifenzi discontent in the 1980s, and contributed to the 1989 protests). Henceforth, the old zhishifenzi group would contribute to the stability of the post- reform state by comprising a sub-set within a rapidly expanding middle-class, which included many people who were not of zhishifenzi background.

The ideology and constitutive identity of China’s middle-class between the 1990s and the present, and its relationship to production, consumption, and culture has been a concern of

8 Cheek, T. (2006). Living with reform: China since 1989 . Black Point, Nova Scotia, Canada: Fernwood Publishing Ltd. p.70-1. 9 both Chinese and western scholars since the early years of the 21st century ， when the middle-class was observed to be growing to a substantial size. It is clear, however, that Chinese sociologists do not yet agree upon the composition and characteristics of the Chinese middle-class. Orthodox methodologies designed to identify perceptions of class identity, such as surveys measuring social attitudes in China, have been undertaken, but the reliability of the harvested data inevitably suffers from the apprehension, if not the fact, that respondents may be wary of proclaiming a personal position on matters designated by the government as sensitive, and this includes perceptions of class identity. Alternatively, observational methodologies such as the monitoring of public discussions on websites and in social media as a way of understanding how people perceive their own social identities are hampered by increasing censorship by the State Internet Information Office. Furthermore, as late as 2010, it was claimed that internet users in China were mostly college students and white-collar workers (the educated middle-class), which would mean that we could take internet use as a criterion of class membership, but the rapid advance of mobile technology since then has meant that middle-class domination of China’s internet has ended, along with the internet’s utility as a tool for researching middle-class self-representation. 9

Studies focusing on economic behaviour, such as spending patterns, have yielded valuable insights into middle-class consumption but are unable to tell us much about subjective identity and agency; such studies need to be complemented by examinations of class-based perceptions of selves and others. Luigi Tomba’s ongoing research into the urban middle-class in China, and Anne Anagnost’s complementary research into the discourse of suzhi (素质 , quality) among members of China’s urban middle-class, have both shed light upon the state’s desire for a middle-class and have yielded important qualitative data on middle-class aspirations. Tomba’s argument is that the Party-state encourages universal aspiration towards joining the middle-class as part of a project of creating or strengthening wenming (文明 , civilization) and that the state promotes the ‘civilized’ qualities of the middle-class as being worthy of esteem and emulation. Tomba suspects, with good reason, that the state’s interest in expanding the middle-class is a tactic of governmentality designed to increase the number of

9 Liu, K (2008) ‘Media boom and cyber culture: Television and the Internet in China’ in Louie, K. (ed.) The Cambridge companion to modern Chinese culture . Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press., Ch 16, page 331 10 citizens who are self-regulating, thereby relieving the state of some of the burden of intensive oversight. 10

Anne Anagnost argues that the discourse of sushi , frequently understood as a distinguishing attribute of the urban middle-class, is designed to exclude peasants and migrant workers from urban areas, where suzhi is thought to be prevalent, thus mapping China’s cities as middle- class possessions. Anagnost has examined the suzhi discourse most particularly in middle- class ideals of child raising and concludes that the ‘quality’ of the child is what reassures the urban middle-class of its distance from the “backward masses” of China’s hinterlands. 11 Anagnost concludes that this intense desire of the state for a middle-class is not just individual but political, especially given the state’s urgency to maintain social order during the ongoing transformation of Chinese society. 12 Guo Yingjie has observed, however, that the values and the virtues of the Chinese middle-class are too often simply ascribed without enquiring as to whether the supposed members of the class actually hold them. 13 Guo argues that these assumptions are made because the purpose of scholarship about the middle-class in China is not to give an idea about the size, composition, or intrinsic characteristics of the class, but rather to promote the idea of this class together with that of its attractive qualities. 14

The market-led reforms of the 1990s facilitated the rapid accumulation of economic capital, which tended to overturn traditional (and, indeed, socialist) routes of class mobility in China to the point where there is now a discrepancy between class position, determined by

10 Tomba, L. (2004). Creating an urban middle class: social engineering in Beijing. China Journal (51), 1. Tomba, L. (2008). Making neighbourhoods: the government of social change in China's cities. China Perspectives (4), 48. Tomba, L. (2009a). Middle classes in China: Force for political change or guarantee of stability? Portal: A Journal of Multidisciplinary International Stusies, 6 (2), 1-12. Tomba, L. (2009b). Of quality, harmony, and community: civilization and the middle class in urban China. Positions: East Asia Cultures Critique, 17 (3), 591. Tomba, L. (2010). The housing effect: The making of China's social distinctions. In C. Li (Ed.), China's emerging middle class: Beyond economic transformation . Washington DC: Brookings Institution Press. 11 Anagnost, A. (2004). The corporeal politics of quality (suzhi). Public Culture, 16 (2), 189-208. p. 196, Anagnost, A. (2008). From 'Class' to 'Social Strata': grasping the social totality in reform-era China. [Article]. Third World Quarterly, 29 (3), 497. “The politics of quality” 12 Anagnost, A. (2004). The corporeal politics of quality (suzhi). Public Culture, 16 (2), 189-208. 13 Guo, Y. (2008). Class, stratum and group: The politics of description. In D. S. G. Goodman & X. Zang (Eds.), The new rich in China: future rulers, present lives. London: Routledge. 14 The reform-era state is generally held to believe that the middle-class will be the guarantors of social stability, but from the perspective of Marxist doctrine this is an odd position to take since in both Marxism and Maoism, the middle-class should not exist. The middle-class has traditionally been viewed by Marxists as a construct of the dominant ideology designed to offer (the vain) hope to the proletariat that they might one day, by means of incremental mobility, join the ranks of the bourgeoisie (in the sense of the wealthy capital-owning class). 11 economic factors, and notions of social position which involve factors that extend beyond a place in the world of production and income. Miao Ying has observed that true middle-class identity in China is seen to have a social and cultural foundation as its determinant, (an attitude that perhaps acknowledges the effects of the zhishifenzi ethos on the post 1989 middle-class). In this sense, there is an “imagined middle-class” which distinguishes itself culturally from the economic or “salaried” middle-class. In other words, a stratified “intra- class habitus has formed which is used mostly to distinguish one group’s superiority over the other.” 15 Miao Ying also observes that “points of contrast within the middle-class” are commonly made by exclusion and, as a consequence, ideas of belonging in the middle-class are determined more by social and cultural factors than by consumption patterns supported by a comfortable income. 16 Because of this, the number of people in China who can claim middle-class status and act accordingly is likely to be much fewer than the economic basis would suggest. Because the definition is founded upon exclusion by some members of the middle-class of those who would appear to be part of it on the basis of their income, Miao also points out that intra-class cohesion is likely to be weak.

It has thus become something of a scholarly consensus that the Chinese middle-class does not hold shared values and, in the absence of this, the term ‘middle-class’ merely describes an economic status. Our brief discussion has, broadly speaking, identified three significant components of the contemporary middle-class in China; the mercantile and managerial class, the professional class and the erstwhile zhishifenzi . It is possible that further analysis would identify other groups within the contemporary middle-class which hold distinct ideologies, but at the least, a major division can be observed between those who owe their middle-class status to education on the one hand and those who owe their status to wealth. David Goodman, indeed, draws a sharp distinction between the cultured middle-class (intellectuals and professionals), and the economic middle-class (entrepreneurs) as two distinct components of

15 Miao, Y. (2017). Middle-class identity in China: Subjectivity and stratification. Asian Studies Review, 41 (4), 629-646.p.641 The Chinese term baofahu 暴发户 (meaning a parvenu) denotes those who have the income but not the culture and refinement of the educated middle-class. 16 Ibid. 12 the Chinese middle-class. 17

This thesis thus does not challenge the idea of the existence of a Chinese middle-class and I am content to leave it to sociologists and economists to define the material conditions which have shaped social stratification in post-reform China. Rather, I propose to employ the methods of cultural history to detect the identity and ideology of one part of the contemporary middle-class in China – the post-reform zhishifenzi .

In this effort, I identify one important way in which post-reform zhishifenzi ideology and identity is proclaimed – within cultural texts produced by and for the zhishifenzi . I hope that a re-evaluation of the underlying foundations of class consciousness and of the dynamics of class relationships in China in the post-Mao period may unsettle some of the paradigmatic ways in which the Chinese middle-class has been viewed in the contemporary period, and draw attention to the importance of the zhishifenzi group within the larger middle-class. In sum, this thesis aims to examine the genre I define as Fictional History as a distinctive means of expression of a disestablished social grouping responding to what it sees as a moral crisis in China and to its own spiritual dilemma.

Self-definition and social categories In using the Chinese term zhishifenzi to refer to the social group whose culture this thesis examines my practice resembles that of Luc Boltanski (and the English translators of his work) in his study of cadres as a distinctive social category in 20 th century China, (although it must be noted that “cadre” does not mean the same thing in France that it means in China or in other socialist contexts). Boltanski has argued both that class formation can be subjective rather than objective, and that a class can form around an idea of itself based on education and professional tasks. 18 I further observe – as noted at the beginning of this chapter – that in addition to their position in the world of economic production, classes and social groups are distinctive because of the stories they tell about themselves. For post-reform zhishifenzi – or at least those members of this group who contribute to the cultural genre that this thesis labels

17 Goodman, D. S. G. (2008). Why China has no new middle class: cadres, managers and entrepreneurs. In D. S. G. Goodman (Ed.), The new rich in China: future rulers, present lives. (pp. 23). London: Routledge. 18 Boltanski, L. (1987). The making of a class : cadres in French society (A. Goldhammer, Trans.). Cambridge ; New York: Cambridge University Press.. 13

Fictional History – I argue that history emerges as a set of narratives within which their set of commonly-held moral understandings can be observed in action. Fictional History is a way in which different types of historical experience can illustrate a single group position. In a sense, therefore, the post-reform zhishifenzi made Fictional History, and Fictional History made the post-reform zhishifenzi .

I refer in this thesis, therefore, to a type of group unity which necessarily lies both within and above the usual socio-economic structures which commonly delineate group membership and which is sustained by common concepts derived from and reflected in narratives: both the meaning of those narratives and their form, in this particular case, as Fictional History. My broad claim is that, in the contemporary world, particular cultural narratives assist in the voluntary establishment of a common identity among those whose experience and world-view pre-dispose them to adopt the moral messages lying at the heart of those cultural narratives. 19

Methodology: What is Fictional History?

I have argued that central to the process of developing higher expressions of identity and class ideology, are narratives that demonstrate and articulate certain common features of identity and a distinct world-view founded in class or group ideology. As Reinhart Koselleck reminds us "…without common concepts there is no society…."20 It follows, therefore, that in a stratified society, certain narratives will become associated with the particular social groups by whom and for whom they have been produced. This is so because social groups

19 My point is that multiple forms of story-telling have flourished in contemporary China along with the new modes of social stratification which appeared after the reforms. In the post-reform period, zhishifenzi found that they no longer occupied a preeminent role as the audience for culture. Alternative narratives arose within a mass media catering to the population’s general literacy and to the increasing level of global sophistication of other audience segments. Though the state maintained some control over what could be discussed in mass media artworks, it was no longer necessary for literary authors to extoll state programs or transmit propaganda. Cultural and artistic production would more easily follow niche audiences so elite cultural practitioners, such as the producers of Fictional History, in response, pursued their own market segment, and produced work which appropriated narratives of history in ways which reflected zhishifenzi interests and the desire to maintain their sense of social distinctiveness. 20 Koselleck, R. (1982). Begriffsgeschichte and social history. Economy and Society, 11 (4), 409-427. To the extent that individuals within any society agree on such matters, it is easier to identify group purposes than it is to deduce purposes for the whole of society which by definition manifest greater diversity than the purposes of particular groups. 14 necessarily distinguish themselves from others by their own commonly-held moral understandings. These moral positions are generally claimed as essential and non-negotiable because a social group’s identity and distinctiveness is always, in part, expressed within and through the distinguishing traits to which it refers in bestowing belonging to those it deems to be its members. Story telling is a critical way in which these moral understandings and the sense of group identity that accompany them are articulated. 21

Particular social groups cannot have completely autonomous beliefs, purposes, and moral codes that they do not share at all with other groups in their own society, but they may, and indeed must, proclaim a distinct identity and ideology that differentiates them from their “others”. My argument is that it is a characteristic of post-reform zhishifenzi to discuss and interpret modern Chinese history, in public, as a way of discussing their own identity and moral distinctiveness, and that they do so with a specific form. After 1989, this discussion took the form of the genre I call Fictional History because a fictional or fiction-inflected narrative idiom was better able to represent the perceived trauma of Chinese history as the core possession of a particular social group. 22 These texts are produced after (and respond to) the failure of the zhishifenzi mission and so my argument is that by identifying the patterns of history which they believe have determined Chinese culture, the post-reform zhishifenzi producers of Fictional History locate themselves within this culture and find explanations for their own predicament.

In the present day, in China and in the world more broadly, the fragmentation of the mass media along moral, educational, and commercial lines suggests that entire classes, or

21 As the production of post-reform Fictional History is a commercial undertaking as well as a literary one, it is also necessary to point out that Fictional History flatters the tastes and sensibilities of its intended audience. Literary fiction, and art film generally eschew thematic sentimentality, require an understanding by its audience of symbolism and allegory, focus upon the complexities of the human condition, and of the multitude of forces acting upon an individual’s motivation, and its diction appeals to an audience which values allusion and shades of meaning . 22 It is arguably difficult in any environment for the common person to understand the forces animating political power, but, one can argue that in modern China this difficulty has been particularly acute. We can suggest that modern Chinese history contains ample material for the application of a creative imagination since much documented history appears, at least to this present generation, as either lacking or beyond normal comprehension. The fervour, convictions, and slogans of the Mao-era, seemingly unassailable at the time have, in a few years, been comprehensively repudiated, and now seem fictional. Similarly, in the present, we can suggest that the everyday need to negotiate fictions and fakeries gives a fictive air of unreality to Chinese daily experience and promotes alienation, which ensures that fiction retains a distinctive appropriateness as a device for representing Chinese historical experience in the modern era. 15 audiences, by virtue of their comprising a commercial ‘market segment,’ may find it relatively easy to adopt identities and ideologies arising from the consumption of narratives produced specifically for them. The texts examined in this thesis – literary novels, art cinema feature and documentary films – were produced (with few exceptions), after 1990 by writers and film-makers who share the experience of being small children at the onset of the Cultural Revolution and who later experienced the epochal transformations of the reform period as young zhishifenzi, and we can argue that they are created by and for a specific social segment in post-reform China, and reflect and construct that social group’s experience of history . These works are typically characterized by their examination of a historical setting spanning long periods in which shifting political circumstances are seen to be the chief driver of historical change. 23 Though I take these selected works as representative of the larger genre of Fictional History, and in so doing I treat them as cultural documents that speak of a particular historical experience rather than simply as works of literary or cinematic creation, my selection of individual works is largely based upon their interest to me and necessarily, and somewhat arbitrarily, exclude works that might otherwise qualify as important works of Fictional History.

The core of this thesis is a reading of the novels of Yu Hua (b. 1960), whose post-1990 work I take to be both representative and archetypal of what I have defined as Fictional History - an attempt to capture a meaningful class position upon recent Chinese history by the application of creative imagination. Yu Hua, together with other Chinese writers and filmmakers of his generation such as Mo Yan ( 莫言 , b. 1955), Han Shaogong (韩少功 , b.1953), Jia Pingwa ( 贾平凹 , b.1952), and Yan Lianke (阎连科 , b. 1958), and filmmakers Tian Zhuangzhuang ( 田壮壮, b.1952), Wang Xiaoshuai, ( 王小帅 , b.1966), and Hu Jie ( 胡杰 , b.1958), has written during a time when zhishifenzi group power was eroding under the state’s desire to create a “harmonious” and self-governing middle-class which would partly replace the zhishifenzi group which had challenged it in 1989. I argue that narratives of individual and collective historical experience are rendered in fictional form, in the sense that the experiences they

23 In Yu Hua’s novels, for example, the time frames of Zai xiyu zhong huhan, Huozhe, Xu Sanguan mai xue ji and Xiongdi all span the period from the period immediately before the establishment of the PRC up to the present day. Di-qi tian is set in the present, but includes retrospectives to the revolutionary period. This time frame is typical of other works of this period by other post-Mao writers and film-makers. 16 depict are not presented as those of actual individuals, but rather as those of social types whose experiences are symbolic of broader historical realities. This concern with history and its textures is what I regard as distinguishing these works from “conventional” literary or cinematic works. Furthermore, I argue that these works situate post-reform zhishifenzi moral and ideological understandings in broader modern Chinese historical experience partly as a form of resistance to the state’s desire for class homogenization and partly in response to acute restrictions on the public discussion of many historical questions in post-Mao China.

The Fictional History of Yu Hua and other fiction writers discussed in this thesis reflects, as I shall argue, contains both a generational perspective and an individual moral perspective distinguished by its being passed through the prism of an author’s imaginative creativity. Crucially, Fictional History, in contrast to other genres of history, and in particular scholarly history and the orthodox history of the state, engages with the past and the present by means of its imaginative and symbolic dimension, and it is for this reason that I include within the genre of Fictional History not only overtly fictional works but also documentary films which I see as having a strongly imaginative character. Equally, the application of imagination to commonly recognized, but unexamined, shared history is how Fictional History differs from historical fiction. Where historical fiction uses history as a setting to illuminate a fictional plot, Fictional History uses imagined characters to highlight the moral dilemmas which arise in living history. In summary, I argue that historical fiction is a variety of fiction writing, but Fictional History is a type of history writing, writing that also takes cinematic form in key cases.

Thus, my approach in this thesis is to examine literary and cinematic works not solely as if they were sources for scholarly history or simply as imaginative products, but as cultural artefacts that express a particular sense of identity and ideology, both within the past and the present. I propose to read these texts for metaphoric narratives which reveal important features of group self-representation, and, in doing so, I will argue that these works are the most elaborated forms of social discourse that deal with issues of group identity available to the post-reform zhishifenzi in the context of China between the early 1990s and the present. I suggest that the works of Fictional History offer insights into the post-reform zhishifenzi experience that are not to be found in other forms of discourse, such as the expository non-

17 fiction prose works which have consciously reflected on the state of Chinese society in the last few decades and beyond that.

The distinguishing and recurrent themes of Fictional History include a particular story about childhood, a particular experience of trauma in history, a perception of marginalization by the rich in the post-reform period, a particular set of gender relationship experiences, and a narrative about social alienation and detachment. By fictionalizing histories of trauma located within modern Chinese history, writers and filmmakers representing the post-reform zhishifenzi experience suggest that neither the autonomous social group identity of the zhishifenzi based upon childhood trauma and feelings of difference, nor a formal zhishifenzi class identity bestowed by the state and founded upon a social position won by education, have been sufficient to maintain a group distinctiveness in the face of cultural opposition to the spiritual values inherent in this sense of identity in the years since 1989.

The makers of Fictional History: The works selected for this study, (novels, feature films, and documentary films), are by well- known authors and directors, many of whom are prominent in the west. The diversity of individual artistic voices within the genre is wide, ranging from Gao Xingjian whose work is almost pure fiction, to Hu Jie ( 胡杰 b.1958) and Wang Bing ( 王兵 b.1967) whose documentary work selectively presents historical and contemporary fact, albeit in ways that I see as having a strongly rhetorical, and even novelistic character.

Furthermore, while I define Fictional History as a genre which has been produced since 1990 – what I call the post-reform era – I include some works that were produced between the late 1970s and 1989 – what I call the reform era. The latter works have been chosen because they are in my view important antecedents to the Fictional History genre.

It is helpful to have some broad context about the specific life circumstances of some of these practitioners of Fictional History. Yu Hua was born in Zhejiang province in 1960 to parents who were both physicians. 24 Yu was a middle school student when Mao died in 1976 and he

24 This is a curious fact because Yu Hua invariably depicts medical doctors in his novels as grasping, uncaring, and incompetent. It is likely, however, that Yu Hua’s distaste for doctors is founded upon his repudiation of the 18 studied dentistry upon graduating from high school. Yu’s first published literary works were avant garde short stories which became influential in the development of reform-era Chinese literature. The Chinese avant garde at this time experimented with the Chinese language and with new narrative forms to create a hybrid literature which flourished in the literary magazines produced in the first decade of China’s reform period. 25 Yu Hua has produced five novels since 1990; Zai xiyu zhong huhan, Huozhe, Xu Sanguan mai xue ji, Xiongdi, and Di-qi tian, and it is an examination of the themes of these works – the key Fictional Histories that are studied in this thesis – which supplies the thematic arrangement and structure of this thesis. 26

Since Yu Hua is a native of Zhejiang, it is unsurprising that Zhejiang has emerged as a centre of Yu Hua studies. An accomplished stylist in the Chinese language, it is also unsurprising that the local focus on Yu Hua study in the Chinese language journals is literary criticism. The Journal of Zhejiang Normal University has published a number of articles in recent years such as Yu Yongcheng’s and Wang Shouli’s 2008 overview of critical research on Yu Hua’s writing, Shi Lijuan’s, and Liu Lin’s 2009 overview, Yu Shu’s analysis of Huozhe as an example of the absurd and irrational in Chinese tragedy (2006), Hong Zhigang’s analysis of comedic elements in Zai xiyu zhong huhan (2009), Wang Shouli, and Zhu Qiong’s 2009 account of the 2007 critical controversies engendered by the publication of Xiongdi and Zhai Yejun’s reading of Xu Sanguan mai xue ji (2009). Other notable scholarship on Yu Hua’s writing has appeared in the Journal of Shaoxing College of Arts and Sciences (also in Zhejiang), Chinese Literature Young Writers , Shenzhou and the Xi’an Journal of Social Sciences .

Western critics have so far been less focused on Yu Hua’s novels than upon China’s two Nobel prize winners, Mo Yan and Gao Xingjian. In translation, Yu Hua’s short fiction from the 1980s-avant-garde period has been the subject of most attention in the West, perhaps

scientific/pragmatic view of personhood current in the revolutionary period which he views as a vocational characteristic of doctors. 25 Liu, K. (2002). The Short-Lived Avant-Garde: The Transformation of Yu Hua. Modern Language Quarterly, 63 (1), 89-117. 26 Yu Hua’s extensive commentaries and essays are excluded from examination in this thesis on the ground that they are produced to achieve a different purpose than his Fictional Histories and that they circulate in a different audience segment. 19 because of its startling originality of vision, and this attention has once again taken the form of literary rather than cultural criticism. Liu (2002) has written of Yu Hua’s abandonment of avant-garde short fiction after 1989 in favour of the large-scale history-focused works which are the subject of this thesis. 27 Wagner (1999) and Wedell-Wedellsborg (1996) have published studies of Yu Hua’s short fiction, while his novels have received recent scholarly attention by Li Hua (2011), and by Lin (2005). 28

Perhaps because Jia Pingwa has had few of his novels translated into other languages, studies of his work in English other than Wang Yiyan’s 2006 study, Narrating China: Jia Pingwa and his fictional world are rare .29 Gao Xingjian, on the other hand, has received significant scholarly attention in recent years. Gao Xingjian graduated in 1962 from the Department of Foreign Languages in Beijing as a French language scholar and, in the years following Mao’s death, was a director and playwright at the Beijing Art Theatre. His novel, Ling shan 灵山 (1990) is a product of what may be called his second career when, beginning in the 1990s, post-reform Chinese literature responded to China’s social dysfunction by examining its origin in historical trauma. Gao Xingjian was an important, though much older, contributor to the Fictional History genre alongside the younger cohort of post-reform zhishifenzi.

After coming into conflict with Party cultural affairs officials, Gao was no longer able to work in the theatre and began writing his two fictional narratives, Ling shan and Yi ge ren de shengjing (一个人的圣经 One Man’s Bible , (1999)), both of which were also banned in the PRC. 30 Coulter (2007) has published a study of Gao’s plays, but most Western critics have concentrated their study, as do I, upon the novels published since 1990. Tam (2001) has edited a book of critical perspectives on Gao Xingjian, Lin (2001) has studied the motif of

27 Liu, K. (2002). The Short-Lived Avant-Garde: The Transformation of Yu Hua. Modern Language Quarterly, 63 (1), 89-117. 28 Li, H. (2011). Contemporary Chinese fiction by Su Tong and Yu Hua . Leiden [The Netherlands] ; Boston Brill., Qingxin, L. (2005). Brushing History Against the Grain: Reading the Chinese New Historical Fiction (1986-1999) . Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press., Wagner, M. L. (1999). The subversive fiction of Yu Hua. CHINOPERL Papers, 20-22 , 219-243., Wedell-Wedellsborg, A. (1996). One Kind of Chinese Reality: Reading Yu Hua. Chinese Literature: Essays, Articles, Reviews, 18 , 129-143. 29 Wang, Y. (2006). Narrating China: Jia Pingwa and his fictional world. London ; New York Routledge. 30 This effort at censorship does not, in my opinion, diminish the importance of Ling shan to this thesis as it is clear that this works engages the dominant cultural issues of the time of its composition and, though Ling shan was written without knowing if it could be published in the PRC, there was an expectation that it would, one day, be read. Since both of Gao Xingjian’s novels were published in Hong Kong and Taiwan, it is also reasonable to expect that copies circulated in the PRC through informal channels. 20 individuality in Gao’s work, Zhang (2010) has critiqued the idea of transgressive memory in Gao’s novels, Moran (2002) has examined the imagery of nature in Ling shan , and Jeffrey Kinkley (2002) has examined Gao’s “Chinese” perspective. Lovell (2002) has examined the meaning of Gao’s Nobel prize and the reaction to his win inside China in Gao Xingjian, the Nobel Prize, and Chinese Intellectuals: Notes on the Aftermath of the Nobel Prize 2000. 31

Supplementing my examination of the works of these authors, and to illustrate that the mode of representation I call Fictional History became a leading form of cultural expression in a variety of art forms after 1990, I include in this study an examination of two feature films, Tian Zhuangzhuang’s Lan fengzheng (1993), Wang Xiaoshuai’s Wo 11 (2011) , two documentary films by Hu Jie: Xunzhao Lin Zhao de linghun (2004), and Wo sui si qu (2006) and one documentary film by Wang Bing, Tie xiqu (Xiu) (2003). As noted, I include these documentary films in the category of Fictional History because of their strong emphasis on the symbolic and the rhetorical.

Limits of methodology: Fiction and History While imaginative literature’s connections to culture are generally acknowledged, the contribution of imagination and narrative to history writing is a less clear-cut question. While in the West, the most elemental division in literature has long been held to be that between fiction and non-fiction, in recent years many scholars have argued that it is philosophically difficult to make this distinction in any more than a general way. Simon Leys observes that all literature, including history, is imaginative literature and that “Novelists are the historians of

31 Coulter, T. (2007). The New intellectual: Celebration of the individual in the plays of Gao Xingjian. [Article]. International Journal of the Humanities, 5 (5), 83-39., Kinkley, J. C. (2002). Gao Xingjian in the "Chinese" Perspective of Qu Yuan and Shen Congwen. Modern Chinese Literature and Culture, 14 (2), 130-162., Lin, S. L.-C. (2001). Between the individual and the collective (Gao Xingjian). World Literature Today, 75 (1)., Lovell, J. (2002). Gao Xingjian, the Nobel Prize, and Chinese Intellectuals: Notes on the Aftermath of the Nobel Prize 2000. Modern Chinese Literature and Culture, 14 (2), 1-50., Moran, T. Ibid.Lost in the Woods: Nature in Soul Mountain. 207-236., Tam, K.-k. (2001). Soul of chaos : critical perspectives on Gao Xingjian / edited by Kwok- kan Tam . Hong Kong :: The Chinese University Press., Zhang, Y. (2010). Gao Xingjian: Fiction and Forbidden Memory. China Perspectives, 2010 (2), 25-33. Coulter, T. (2007). The New intellectual: Celebration of the individual in the plays of Gao Xingjian. [Article]. International Journal of the Humanities, 5 (5), 83-39, Kinkley, J. C. (2002). Gao Xingjian in the "Chinese" Perspective of Qu Yuan and Shen Congwen. Modern Chinese Literature and Culture, 14 (2), 130-162, Lin, S. L.-C. (2001). Between the individual and the collective (Gao Xingjian). World Literature Today, 75 (1), Lovell, J. (2002). Gao Xingjian, the Nobel Prize, and Chinese Intellectuals: Notes on the Aftermath of the Nobel Prize 2000. Modern Chinese Literature and Culture, 14 (2), 1- 50, Moran, T. Ibid.Lost in the Woods: Nature in Soul Mountain. 207-236, Tam, K.-k. (2001). Soul of chaos : critical perspectives on Gao Xingjian / edited by Kwok-kan Tam . Hong Kong :: The Chinese University Press, Zhang, Y. (2010). Gao Xingjian: Fiction and Forbidden Memory. China Perspectives, 2010 (2), 25-33. 21 the present and historians are the novelists of the past.” 32 Hayden White has remarked that new forms of literature arise as a symbolic response to historical situations that render other means of representation, explanation, and understanding irrelevant or insignificant. In this connection, he argues that the essential contribution of novelists to history is to open up unlikely or unconsidered historical possibilities and to offer new methods for understanding history since “the conjuring up of the past requires art as well as information.” 33

For key cultural producers belonging to the post-reform zhishifenzi group, I argue that one response to social trauma and the erosion of their own group consciousness and identity in the 1990s was to develop the form of Fictional History to braid important aspects of their identity into the on-going narrative of Chinese history. The strength of Fictional History as a genre was in its ability to evoke this trauma in a meaningful way and so I observe in this thesis that the real significance of creative narrative lies in its capacity to elucidate subjectivity rather than in its reflection of objective historical phenomena. The insistence within many (but not all) works of Fictional History upon fictionality can be seen as challenging the idea of a monolithic historical ‘reality’ and of the authority of non-Fictional History to best represent it.

In applying narrative creativity to history, the idea is to create something which is more than history. Doctorow observes:

“The historian and the novelist both work to deconstruct the aggregate fictions of their societies. The scholarship of the historian does this incrementally, the novelist more abruptly, from his unforgivable (but exciting) transgressions, as he writes his way in and around and under the historian’s work, animating it with the words that turn into the flesh and blood of living, feeling people.” 34

Similarly, we can argue that for Gao Xingjian literature explains human history much better than the unknowable forces and currents of academic history in which the different voices of

32 Leys, S., -. (2012). The hall of uselessness / Simon Leys . Collingwood, Vic. :: Black Inc. ibid. (p.215) 33 White, H. (2005). Introduction: Historical fiction, fictional history, and historical reality. Rethinking History, 9(2/3), 147-157. p. 149 34 Doctorow, E L (2006) ‘Notes on the History of Fiction, ’ The Atlantic, August 2006 http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2006/08/notes-on-the-history-of-fiction/305033/ 22 individuals cannot be heard:

“When the great laws of history are not used to explain humankind, it will be possible for people to leave behind their own voices. History is not all that humankind possesses; there is also the legacy of literature. In literature, the people are inventions, but they retain an essential belief in their own self-worth.” 35

In a similar vein, Yomi Braester has observed that the study of non-western literature and film frequently takes place (in the west) as a component of Area Studies in which sociological (and historical) paradigms crowd out art. 36 This approach, he argues, has caused scholars to miss some important ideas about history contained within literary or fictional genres.

While it would be a mistake to read works of Fictional History as a guide to the correct and ‘true’ history of 20th century China, it would also be unwise to dismiss them as violating the ‘truth’ because, arguably, Fictional History is concerned with a higher truth than non-fictional historical truth – the emotional truth of a shared group experience. The artist’s claim to the reader’s attention, and the factor compelling belief in the story, is founded upon a mutual understanding of the nature of some aspect of human experience which will be regarded, for the purposes of the narrative, as the truth. Furthermore, this truth indexes a master narrative upheld as the truth by members of a particular social grouping. To help convey this truth, we can argue, both novelists and documentary film-makers employ images which suddenly clarify for the audience the implications of what they themselves have long been thinking. In this way narrative clarifies thought and unifies audiences with the reassurance that they are not alone in their moral positions. Fictional History may therefore be understood as an “unreliable” history concerned, nonetheless, with moral truth.

To reiterate, this thesis contends that the zhishifenzi group in post-reform China derived its sense of shared identity in part through the writing and reading of works that are referred to in

35 Gao Xingjian – Nobel Lecture. NobelPrize.org. Nobel Media AB 2018. Thu. 1 Nov 2018. https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/2000/gao/lecture/ 36 Braester, Y. (2003). Witness against history: literature, film, and public discourse in twentieth-century China . Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press .

23 this text as Fictional History. I therefore claim that artistic works are a vital and useful resource in establishing a subjective group identity. The post-reform zhishifenzi experience is marked off from that of other analogous social groups in part because some key members of the zhishifenzi class wrote and read Fictional History.

Narrative and identity A core contention of this thesis is that Fictional History is type of narrative representation through which the post-reform zhishifenzi group participates in an ongoing social struggle over meaning. 37 My argument in this thesis is that the post-reform zhishifenzi social position, like the position of other social groupings, influences and is influenced by ideas found in works of narrative, and that the selection of a particular set of narrative modes – what this thesis calls Fictional History. 38 Narrative is the pre-eminent means of self-representation because, as Alasdair MacIntyre observes: "…we all live out narratives in our lives, and it is because we understand our own lives in terms of the narratives that we live out, that the form of narrative is so appropriate for understanding the actions of others." 39 The significance of narrative to social group analysis is simply that individuals adopt stories, along with their moral understandings, to represent and locate themselves with others within the culture which those narratives describe.

Connections made between the culture’s stock of narratives and our own experiences form the basis of a spiritual fellowship with others which exists beyond the constraints of ordinary

37 Texts are edited, not merely to arrange and select information in a way that will assist interpretation, but also to fit the information into a matrix of concepts which are familiar and meaningful to the intended audience. In Fictional History, the literal meaning of the narrative provides an alternative perspective on Chinese history and the texts can be read in this way, but the metaphorical meaning involves the intersection of history and culture and the place of the zhishifenzi within history and culture . 38 Literature, and art in its widest sense, must be ‘read’ and this means that individuals bring their own, and their group, interpretive traditions to bear upon a text. Class habits of thought determine what sort of things a reader brings to a narrative, how that alters their perception of it, and how they frame it. Fiction explores, teases and tests moral standards but literary fiction does not usually impose moral judgements upon the reader, rather it reveals complex moral quandaries. When interpreting, we are tempted to apply our own moral understandings to fictional, but life-like, situations and so, in this way, when reading fiction, we see ourselves on the page and we are vitally engaged. 39 {MacIntyre, 2004 #191} MacIntyre, A. (2004). The virtues, the unity of a human life, and the concept of a tradition. In L. P. Hinchman & S. K. Hinchman (Eds.), Memory, identity, community: The idea of narrative in the human sciences (pp. 240-264). New York: State University of New York Press. p.249 24 time and space. A composite set of moral understandings arises from significant narratives which taken together suggest a master narrative, or world-view, affirming a commonly-held stance of identity and belief. A voluntary self-association with the moral traditions enshrined in creative narratives can be seen as the initial step in forming important spiritual connections with others. Meaningful temperamental connections, especially in the absence of other formal social or institutional connections, are entered into voluntarily and it is thus that these connections may transcend socio-economic limitations, as well as survive the disappearance of socio-economic forms of solidarity.

In Fictional History, post-reform writers and film-makers supplement the ‘facts’ of history with fictional truths. In so doing they depict Chinese history as a contested moral field. I argue in this thesis that the specific moral understandings which emerge from (or are depicted in) Fictional History are a unifying shared ideological and cultural possession of the post- reform zhishifenzi. 40 I argue as well, that it is a significant function of these works to explain the present state of Chinese culture and society by examining the defeat of humanist and enlightened ideologies (claimed as shared possessions of the zhishifenzi ) in Chinese history. I suggest that one key contribution of post-reform zhishifenzi to the understanding of modern Chinese history is the development of Fictional History as a nuanced way of focussing upon the moral dilemmas which arise from the perceived struggle between an intrinsic human nature and Chinese culture. 41 It is this struggle that post-reform zhishifenzi see as shaping modern Chinese history.

40 “ Studying the stories of individuals and situations in the past allows a student of history to test his or her own moral sense, to hone it against some of the real complexities individuals have faced in difficult settings… a study not only of certifiable heroes, the great men and women of history who successfully worked through moral dilemmas, but also of more ordinary people who provide lessons in courage, diligence, or constructive protest.” Stearns, Peter N (1998) American Historical Association, https://www.historians.org/about-aha-and- membership/aha-history-and-archives/archives/why-study-history-(1998) viewed 24 th May, 2017 41 Fittingly, for works that are presented primarily as fiction, post-reform Fictional History is never didactic nor is it uniformly complimentary about the cultural attributes of its audience. Fictional History does not lack the occasional element of provocation, although this is kept within bounds as readers, for all that they may wish to be challenged by art, are unlikely to welcome a narrative which they find either morally shocking or morally incomprehensible. 25

Summary of argument (Chapter summary)

Overall Summary: The five chapters following this introduction pursue the major and recurrent themes of core works of post-reform zhishifenzi Fictional History. The first section of the thesis, chapters 2 and 3, describes how post-reform zhishifenzi producers of Fictional History construct representations of childhood experiences within the period of the Cultural Revolution and how they reconstruct the cycle of faith and trauma which they identify as characterizing the period of Chinese history before their births. The second part of the thesis, chapters 4 and 5, is devoted to the description of zhishifenzi experience of the reform period following the death of Mao. This section assumes that the post-Mao zhishifenzi constitute a "finished group" with its own field of representations, structures, and systems of relating to other groups in Chinese society. The final part of the thesis, chapter 6, examines the dilemma of the post-Mao zhishifenzi as a disestablished group in contemporary society.

Chapter by Chapter structure:

Second Chapter In the second chapter, “You’re not one of us”, I examine how post-reform writers and filmmakers depict childhood as it was experienced and observed within the maelstrom of the Cultural Revolution, and how the social contradictions of this period formed the background against which post-reform zhishifenzi are understood to have been brought to a consciousness of a dominant ethos of bullying and exclusion within Chinese culture. These texts observe how children who are seen as implicitly or explicitly possessing the attributes of zhishifenzi are brought to a conviction that they are sentimentally and spiritually different from their peers, and so represent their childhoods as marked by a growing separation from others. The significance of this depiction to the adult zhishifenzi is the implicit recognition that Chinese culture infantilizes its citizens and that it favors the violent suppression of those who are arbitrarily deemed outsiders. Post-Mao zhishifenzi insinuate that they, alone in Chinese society, have attained a full maturity (a moral autonomy) and that this maturity has only been won through experiencing the personal hardships outlined in fictionalized accounts of history.

The family emerges in this chapter as the locus of a child’s first feelings of temperamental difference from those who surround him or her. Alienation of individual children from the affections and care of the family is seen to be motivated by the persistence of traditional power relationships which underlie the new ‘revolutionary’ ethics. In Fictional History accounts of school life, tactics of intimidation are used against children by authorities while other adults abrogate their responsibility to support the moral stances of defiance made by their children. In such circumstances children who feel a sentimental and spiritual difference from others tend to coalesce in substitute ‘families’ of fellow-feeling. In this way a nascent group consciousness develops upon the basis of a shared response to the injustice, exclusion, and absurdities of the Cultural Revolution.

In these fictional reminiscences of childhood, rural life is seen as inherently uncongenial to zhishifenzi. Peasants, as a community, are seen to be resistant to the transformational efforts of socialist ideology and tenacious in their desire to uphold traditional modes of life, including the culture of bullying and exclusion. Rural life provides few opportunities to young zhishifenzi and so China’s cities are depicted as something of a refuge for them.

The physical and spiritual transformations of adolescence frequently evoke feelings of alienation. In these texts, an ease with sexual behaviour is associated with those whose habits of life are marked by an insensitivity to others. Zhishifenzi anxiety over matters of sex is shown as accompanied by a heightened, and somewhat unnatural, aestheticism. This desire for beauty demands a transformation of the real world by the application of imaginative creativity. This method of creative transformation becomes a further marker of zhishifenzi difference. Zhishifenzi represent this narrative inventiveness both as a matter of spiritual survival and as a distinctive form of cognition.

In sum, the gap in sympathy between the zhishifenzi and other social classes in post-reform China is implicitly presented as having its origin in childhood experiences which have occurred in the particular circumstances of the Cultural Revolution. The essential element of this identity is a consciousness of their difference and exclusion from the rest of Chinese society.

Third Chapter A conviction that their own childhood experiences disclose a cultural pattern which can be applied to other periods of history forms the substance of the zhishifenzi historical and social critique in Fictional History. In Fictional History works post-Mao zhishifenzi extend this theory of history to explain the serial failures of measures designed to transform and modernize Chinese society. In the third chapter, “On Faith and Trauma ”, I examine how post- reform zhishifenzi narrate twentieth-century Chinese history as a cycle of faith and trauma. In these texts post-reform zhishifenzi demonstrate their view that trauma has been the inevitable consequence of the defeat, by means of cultural inertia, of ambitious schemes of social transformation. This trauma has had a cumulative effect upon Chinese society because its impacts have remained unaddressed.

In Fictional History, zhishifenzi writers and filmmakers portray the twentieth-century debates over Chinese social policy as marked by a quasi-religious fervor in which positions became entrenched as articles of faith, and opponents are persecuted as heretics. In this cycle of history, the proclamation of the PRC in 1949 is depicted as a time in which there was an enthusiastic sense of cohesion across all levels of society. The brutal treatment of landlords and the old gentry class in the program of land reform, however, began an almost immediate slide into the social ethos of division and exclusion which, for the producers of Fictional History characterizes the culturally-determined tradition of the exercise of power in China. In Fictional History the Chinese people’s gradual loss of faith in Mao becomes an illustration of this cycle of history. Mao appears, implicitly, as a tragic figure who succumbed, in the opinion of these authors, to the baneful influence of Chinese culture, and his defeat was shared by those who had believed in him and were betrayed by him. Though the post-reform intellectual narrative of history situates the origin of China’s present moral crisis squarely with the trauma of the Mao-era revolutionary period, it is implied that older and stronger forces were undermining schemes for a modern transformation.

An earlier class of knowledgeable elements within China manifest spiritual characteristics with which post-Mao zhishifenzi identify. This earlier group are shown as feeling the loss of faith in Mao and in the tenets of socialism as a trauma in itself. In response, some such as Lin Zhao, are shown as having turned towards other sources of faith, but most are presented as

28 having abandoned the idea of communal transformation and as retreating to an earlier faith in individual human potential. Now reduced to silence, many educated people who lived through the Mao period as adults begin to assume the position of observers, a position arguably reflecting the dilemma of the post-Mao zhishifenzi who were also reduced to silence in the post-Tiananmen period.

It is typical of the zhishifenzi historical critique presented in Fictional History that they see no meaningful ideology sustaining any period of Chinese history. Fictional History works zhishifenzi portray the Mao period in which they grew up as a society dominated by an official rhetoric of revolution which merely served as a fig-leaf for actions motivated by personal envy and spite. These texts show poor peasants, despite the propaganda extolling their leadership of the revolution, as taking no part in guiding it but as being conspicuously at the mercy of the teenage Red guards. The leadership of these young people is indicted as both brutal and imbecilic. The obsession with purported class characteristics in the Mao period is particularly condemned as based on nothing that could be justified empirically. Fictional History intimates that even Mao had a bad class background and shows those most frequently targeted for persecution on account of their class attribution in the Cultural Revolution as being entirely innocent of bourgeois tendencies. Though the victims of Chinese history are uniformly portrayed as innocent, punishing the innocent becomes so common that the community loses faith in the principle of justice. These texts argue that the common people, as a consequence, began to adopt the corrupted ideology of the Cultural Revolution in their dealings with each other and so civil social relations were irrevocably eroded.

Fourth Chapter The view of the producers of Fictional History that Chinese society inevitably regresses to familiar cultural norms is further illustrated in the fourth chapter, “An impetuous brother. ” Fictional History works assert that changes in state ideology and the adoption of the reform and open-door policies have merely altered the superficial environment in China and have left unaddressed the underlying moral crisis which is society’s historical inheritance. In the reform period, therefore, established social pathologies are manifested in novel ways.

Fictional History works depict the reform period as having been a time of renewed hope for

29 the knowledgeable class who were promised a place in the new scientific leadership which was to be the hallmark of the new era. These texts also point out, however, that the idea a new era is an illusory one, since no period of history can exist in isolation from the others: in Yu Hua’s terminology, they are all brothers, bound by ties that cannot be overcome. In these texts, the absence of a transition period in which the trauma of Mao-era historical experience could be mitigated meant that these traumas remained unaddressed. The trauma of modern history is held to have educated many in China that survival at all costs is the paramount consideration and that ethics are illusory, or at least contingent. As a consequence, the economic reforms simply provided an incentive to engage in economic modes characterised by antisocial fecklessness and exploitation.

The Fictional History of wealth in China presented in these texts articulates the view that the new social stratification based upon wealth is associated with a return to traditional manifestations of social division and exclusion. The temporal comparisons made in Fictional History between the reform era and earlier periods in Chinese history highlight what zhishifenzi see as the regressive impulses of Chinese culture, and the comparisons with the past also indict the rhetoric of historical progress promoted by the state. For post-reform zhishifenzi, wealth in China is not an inherently progressive force, and those who enjoy wealth in the present are depicted as behaving in ways that are morally, and even aesthetically, indistinguishable from the old landlord class. These narratives reflect an ongoing antagonism between two of the groups comprising the Chinese middle-class, the old zhishifenzi and the New Rich. These texts insist that the New Rich in China are the product of an intersection between modern economic policies, historical trauma, and old cultural traditions.

In these texts, revolutionary credentials are shown as having been the first commodity of the reform period that could be converted into wealth. The depiction of local cadres, especially those from the countryside, presents them as detached from the interests and the sympathies of those they govern. Farmers and ordinary townsfolk feel themselves the prey of those with power and money and this feeling is depicted as a central cause of apprehension in the early years of the reforms. Upright public officials are few and even these few become tainted by association with the others so that the entire stratum comes under suspicion.

Fictional History also makes the connection between wealth and transgressive sex, which was the second commodity seen to have become valuable in the reform period. The connection between money and sex is portrayed as marking a return to ‘feudal’ modes which is reflected in the lowered status of women in the reform period. In these texts, if they are not corruptly acquiring control of state assets while occupying positions of influence, people in China are seen to become rich in implausible and accidental ways, and thus there appears little real merit in becoming rich. The rich become so in the absence of educational attainment or taste and this fact tends to degrade both education and wealth. Again, zhishifenzi producers of Fictional History point out that a useful preparation for the accumulation of wealth in the reform period is a tendency towards bullying.

These texts suggest that social life in contemporary China is fundamentally selfish. In Fictional History post-reform zhishifenzi depict the money spent by the new-rich in China as being expended on superfluous vulgarities or upon the pursuit of power and celebrity, rather than upon charity and good deeds. Less to conceal their lack of learning than to embellish their celebrity, China’s new-rich also characteristically obscure their life history. Apart from showing that they have no taste in artistic and cultural matters, the new rich are depicted as without sensitivity to the feelings of others, and freely impose their defective tastes upon the wider world of social life.

Ultimately, in these narratives of the reform period, zhishifenzi writers maintain that it is an essential characteristic of their own group identity to maintain high moral and ethical standards, and this inclination constitutes a barrier to their becoming rich. The zhishifenzi critique of post-reform wealth is, therefore, essentially moral and cultural rather than economic.

Fifth Chapter This fifth chapter, “The Great Emporium,” examines the effects of the post-reform commoditization of sex and labour as further examples of the operation of an anti-modern tradition in China. In Fictional History , Chinese traditional culture is implicated in all the manifestations of contemporary social injustice. In this view, the renaissance of harmful cultural traditions has socially and economically disfranchised entire populations and has

31 encouraged the abuse of human rights and the tolerance of inequality.

Fictional History works set out to examine the effects of the economic reform on those who were its chief victims. These texts assert that, in the countryside especially, women’s social and family roles hardly changed in the revolutionary period, and women’s status, despite state propaganda, was always lower than men’s in the Mao era. Marriage customs from before 1949 are depicted in Fictional History to stress this continuity. It is observed that marriages in rural areas do not offer the bride the same level of agency as the groom. Later, in the revolutionary period, Chinese men are shown to have enacted ‘feudal’ notions of ownership by demanding that women adhere to a more conspicuous degree of sexual fidelity than they do themselves, and socialist-era parents continued to value boys above girls. These Fictional Histories, however, unsettle ideas of women’s inferiority by consistently portraying female characters as generally wiser and more able than their husbands.

Though criticizing the gap between the rhetoric and the reality, post-Mao zhishifenzi producers of Fictional History remain broadly sympathetic to the social projects of the revolution, and so it is something of a shock to them to see how these were so swiftly repudiated in the post-reform era. The attractions of, and demands made by, capitalism in China, at least in the view of the producers of Fictional History, have inverted standards of public decency and swept away personal ethics. In the uncertain social and industrial climate of the reforms, men use money and power to exploit and undermine women while women’s less preferential access to the fruits of reform frequently obliges them to trade their sexuality as a commodity. 42 Precocity in matters sexual appears to be a good indication of future prosperity in the reform era because it reproduces the type of competitive ruthlessness found in the business world. Sex and sexual consumption is depicted as an arena of masculine competition and display, especially for a type of modern urban masculinity which is informed in its character by the violence and trauma of recent Chinese history.

The lives and labour of the contemporary proletariat are also shown to have been commoditised, but in contrast to other newly-valuable commodities, their price has been

42 Attacks upon the integrity of women are made by men, but these texts also point out, perhaps somewhat satirically, that zhishifenzi men portray themselves as defenceless against seductive women.

32 sharply discounted. Those dislocated by the new economics have no choice but to leave their home towns in search of work and a better life. In the neglect and extreme circumstances in which they are forced to work, China’s contemporary proletariat work, and fight, and dream of a better future for their children, but the enforced brutality of their lives, and the structural changes around access to public assistance, render these dreams unlikely to be fulfilled. The producers of Fictional History assert that in the present circumstances, education is losing its capacity to facilitate mobility in society and is more likely, indeed, to present a barrier to becoming rich.

One hallmark of the new revolution, and the chief characteristic of the new society in the view of post-reform zhishifenzi , is that China is now a nation built upon fakes and fakery. Fake products, fake ideology, and fake identities are accepted by society because the concept of the authentic has been abused. For zhishifenzi , the abandonment of the authenticity of human life in the rush to get rich results, inevitably, in unhappiness. The artless and the simple, those who preserve in their consciousness and behaviour some of the aspirations of the revolutionary period, are exploited and abused by a new society which cuts down gentle souls with even more ruthlessness than did the Cultural Revolution, while even those who have benefitted materially from the operation of the great emporium are left hollowed and loveless.

Sixth Chapter The post-reform zhishifenzi no less than other people, find meaning both in their personal relationships and in the contemplation of their souls. In the sixth chapter, “Lost souls”, I observe that it has become a characteristic stance of post-1980s zhishifenzi figures as these are depicted in Fictional History to cultivate a critical and wry detachment from others in society which, for all its sophistication, engenders overwhelming feelings of sorrow and alienation. Zhishifenzi authors recognize that these feelings of isolation are relieved by distinctive modes of cognition which involve the composition of narratives. In these narratives, the phenomenal world is augmented by the imagination, and from this process arise alternative perspectives. These narratives may ease feelings of difference and exclusion from the rest of society, so as to transform the worst features of an unsatisfactory present, or simply alleviate boredom. It is thus that the application of imagination to their perception of

33 the world emerges as a powerful tool of cognition within which new meanings can be created.

In Fictional History texts it is argued that modern China has turned into a dystopia. At one level, what zhishifenzi learn about human nature from their own consciousness confirms the overall moral of Fictional History: that humankind manifests urges towards both civilization and brutality. It is an important part of the ideology of post-reform zhishifenzi that, in China’s history, the urge to brutality and destruction is facilitated, or at least easily invoked, by appeals to Chinese traditional culture. Significantly, it is suggested that Chinese religious traditions might have evolved to work against these urges in culture. Investigations into China’s resurgent traditions of folk religion, shamanism, and nature mysticism in these texts reveal that these traditions apply myth and creativity in such a way that destructive urges or imbalances within individuals and within society are exorcised.

Though zhishifenzi may attempt to break their detachment and alienation from society by means of established spiritualties, it is ultimately not possible for zhishifenzi to make the renunciations necessary, or to replace their established mode of cognition with religious faith. Renunciation, in these texts is a reflexive, even hateful, act which is in the end seen as opposed to the sovereign zhishifenzi virtue of humaneness. It is argued that the task of forging a meaningful life cannot be achieved by sublimating one’s individuality, but by practicing empathy. Illustrations of this type of humaneness survive, for zhishifenzi , even in the moral wasteland of contemporary urban China. Overall, however in Fictional History, post-Mao zhishifenzi are brought to the realization that schemes of social transformation are bound to fail and that it is not possible to change the world to suit themselves. Ultimately, zhishifenzi , in their own estimation, must live with a consciousness that their time has passed.

The principal Chinese language texts that this thesis studies are: Gao Xingjian. 灵山， Ling shan Taipei: Lianjing chuban shiye gongsi, 1990.

Jia Pingwa. 浮躁 Fuzao . Beijing: Zuojia chubanshe, 2005.

Yu Hua. 第七天 Di-qi tian . Beijing: New Star Press, 2013.

———. 活着 Huozhe. Hong Kong: Boyi chuban jituan youxian gongsi, 1994.

———. 兄弟 Xiongdi. Shanghai: Shanghai wenyi chubanshe, 2005.

———. 在洗浴中呼喊 Zai xiyu zhong huhan. Shanghai: Shanghai wenyi chuban gongsi, 2004.

English translations and sub-titled films:

Gao, Xingjian. Soul Mountain . Translated by Mabel Lee. Pymble, N.S.W: Flamingo, 2000.

Hu, Jie. "In Search of Lin Zhao’s Soul." (Xunzhao Lin Zhao de linghun 寻找林昭的灵魂) 100 mins. China: dGenerate Films, 2004.

———. "Though I Am Gone. （Wo sui siqu 我虽死去） 66 mins. China: dGenerate Films, 2006.

Jia, Pingwa. Turbulence: A Novel . Translated by Howard Goldblatt. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1991.

Ma, Jian. Beijing Coma (Rou zhi tu 肉之土) Translated by Flora Drew. London UK: Chatto & Windus, 2008.

Tian, Zhuangzhuang “The Blue Kite” ( Lan fengzheng 蓝风筝 ) Kino International, 1993.

Wang, Bing, -. "West of the Tracks. Rust” ( Tiexi Qu: Xiu 铁西区: 锈） Watertown, Mass. Documentary Educational Resources, 2003.

Wang, Xiaoshui. "I am Eleven” (Wo 11 我十一 )." Palace Films, 2012.

Yu, Hua. Brothers Translated by Eileen Cheng-yin Chow and Carlos Rojas. 1st Anchor Books ed. ed. New York: Anchor Books, 2010.

———. Chronicle of a Blood Merchant . Translated by Andrew F Jones. New York: Pantheon Books, 2003.

———. Cries in the Drizzle: A Novel . Translated by Allan Barr. New York: Anchor Books, 2007.

———. The Seventh Day . Translated by Allan Barr. Melbourne, Australia: Text, 2015.

———. To Live: A Novel . Translated by Michael Berry. New York: Anchor Books, 2003.

Except where noted, the translations from Chinese texts are my own.

2. You’re not one of us: Coming of age in China

Principal texts:

Yu Hua, Zai xiyuzhong huhan , (1991)

Yu Hua, Huozhe, (1992)

Yu Hua, Xu Sanguan mai xue ji , (1995)

Yu Hua, Di qi tian , (2013)

Tian Zhuangzhuang, Lan fengzheng, (1993)

Wang Xiaoshuai, Wo 11, (2011)

In this chapter, I examine the ways in which China’s post-Mao generation of zhishifenzi constructed fictional histories of their childhoods in the period between 1992 and 2011. These fictional histories, which span the Mao years from the 1950s to the early 1970s are not, I argue, primarily intended as mere personal reminiscence, nor as a documentary record of a particular period in Chinese history, rather they function primarily to provide a genealogy for the moral and aesthetic dispositions of the zhishifenzi group, as well as an explanation of the origins of the zhishifenzi predicament as this was experienced between the 1990s and the 2010s. I contend that this shared narrative serves two important purposes; first, it constructs post-Mao zhishifenzi group identity with reference to the distinctive consciousness of children who, it is implied, will later become zhishifenzi , and secondly it presents a historical and social critique of the Mao era, a critique upon which ideas of post-Mao zhishifenzi group identity are founded. Whether these Fictional History narratives from the 1990s to the 2010s were crystalizing and expressing views widely held

37 amongst the members of the zhishifenzi group or whether these narratives were creating or shaping a view that would be taken up by others is, I suggest, less important than the substance of the narrative which I suggest reflects a broad zhishifenzi ethos.

A key argument of this chapter is that the Fictional History of Mao-era childhood chronicles the various ways in which the child-zhishifenzi, (children who are implicitly or explicitly associated with zhishifenzi characteristics), experience a sense of difference from the social mainstream. Broadly speaking, this Fictional History depicts childhood as an experience and process of alienation. The zhishifenzi sense of morality, it is implied, was shaped as a response to childhood experiences of an absurd and amoral world which reproduced for everybody in Mao-era China the experience of being without autonomy or security and, therefore, of being in a child-like state. A core implication of this is that the plight of the zhishifenzi in the years after 1989 can be attributed to a culture whose distortions were already visible when the post-Mao zhishifenzi were children – above all in the period of the Cultural Revolution. 43

Specifically, the chapter contends that the fictional histories of Mao-era childhoods present the zhishifenzi -child as a victim or observer of a culture of licensed bullying, a culture in which the zhishifenzi -child (a child which is in almost all cases male) cannot fully participate. Bullying, a pervasive feature of childhoods throughout the world, thus emerges as a defining characteristic of Mao-era Chinese society, as both state ideology and cultural tradition conspire to license a culture of division. Significantly, it is not simply the adult world from which the child feels divided or alienated, but primarily the gang-like culture of other children. An unstated implication of this is that those who were bullies as children in the Mao-era are still bullies in the post-Mao world.

Even though the topic of this chapter is ostensibly childhood, it focusses heavily on the moment of transition from childhood to early adulthood and describes the individual and collective sense of difference that is experienced at the transitional moment, a moment at

43 I note that it was only after Mao’s death that the Cultural Revolution was established as having operated from 1966 to 1976. Prior to that the Cultural Revolution referred to the period from 1966 to 1969. For clarity, however, I use the post-reform consensus in referring to the period of the Cultural Revolution (1966-1978) since the salient point is that the policies which were implemented during the Cultural Revolution were still in place until 1978, particularly the closure of China’s universities and that there could not have been a zhishifenzi until after then. 38 which, by implication, a zhishifenzi identity is acquired. I assert that it is in the process of ceasing to be a child that that the fictional zhishifenzi subject begins to see him or herself as a zhishifenzi in the making. I observe that these emerging points of difference in the sense of self are consequent upon an alienation from peers on the one hand, and by means of a precocious awareness of the clash between social ideology and social reality on the other. In the first category, coming-of-age crises may arise at three core points: one) a sense of difference caused by varying attitudes to the onset of sexual desire and expression, two) a sense of difference forged by alienation from those who enact physical violence, and three) a sense of difference forged by a heightened sense of empathy with the suffering of others. In the second category, that involving the clash between ideological claim and social reality, a sense of alienation is engendered in susceptible children first by the clash that is experienced between their perceptions of the truth and the values proclaimed by the socialist education system, secondly by disagreement with official narratives about the status of peasant life and the value of human lives, thirdly by being the victim of arbitrary stigmatization, and fourthly by being the victim of the abandonment of moral norms licensed by revolutionary rationalism. The overall result of this alienation is to lead the child-zhshifenzi away from dependence upon familiar social structures to embrace a moral autonomy characterized by fellowship with other victims of exclusion, by implication the sense of common predicament that creates the solidarity of the zhishifenzi group.

Overall, this chapter suggests that the recurrent concern with childhood in the Mao-era that is found in post-reform Fictional History narratives is both an attempt to chronicle the shared experience that those who were adults (or at least teenagers) in the years after Mao’s death had had when young, an experience that had contributed to their zhishifenzi subjectivities and a deployment of an allegory in which children who are marginalised, excluded and bullied by their society are symbols of the predicament of the zhishifenzi as a social group. In this latter sense, the children and the childhood experiences depicted in these Fictional History narratives are both representations of an historical actuality and metaphors for what zhishifenzi are held to have undergone in modern Chinese history, both in the revolutionary era and after it.

Identity

Sex and maturity It has been noted above, that even though childhood is the core concern of the Fictional History of the Mao years discussed in this chapter, it is in many ways through the depiction of the onset of adolescence that these narratives proffer some of their sharpest images of an alienated child subjectivity. The onset of sexual maturity is traditionally a sign of the beginning of the transition from a childish to an adult identity, but the unfamiliar sexual feelings which accompany this transformation occur within an environment in which they are only referred to publicly by means of symbols and metaphors. Fiction and fictional reminiscence rather than orthodox history can be seen to be appropriate forms in which the doubts and insecurities of this life-stage can be represented. In these texts, zhishifenzi authors characteristically depict their younger selves as bewildered by the onset of puberty, shocked by the truths of anatomy, and astonished by evidence of sexual desire in refined adults and these responses become an important index of their spiritual development. In contrast, other young people indulge these new sexual feelings without evident guilt or perplexity, and this fact is also held by young zhishifenzi to indicate a significant point of difference between them and their peers. This sense of difference is strengthened by perceptions of the links between sex, power, and money in contemporary China that will be highlighted in later chapters. 44

One of the signal differences between the children in these texts who are implicitly affiliated with zhishifenzi subjectivities and those who are presented as their “others” is the easy facility with which those who will taste worldly success as adults in the reform era experience their sexual awakening. In Yu Hua’s Xiongdi , Li Guangtou – who will become a vulgar billionaire in adulthood – from an early age displays scant regard for the proprieties of social life and

44 We can argue that the fictional histories of pubescent sexuality in Mao-era China produced between the 1990s and 2010s were qualitatively different from works that touched on romantic and sexual themes dating from the late 1970s to the end of the 1980s. For one thing, the writers and filmmakers discussed here were recalling Mao-era childhood and adolescence from the vantage point of people beginning the transition to middle age rather than from the perspective of people still regarded as “young” (Marriage and parenthood being the key points at which youth is farewelled). In addition, the transformation of the ideological and economic landscape in China in the wake of the 1989 events arguably created a different perspective on Mao-era events from what had obtained in the dozen or more years immediately following Mao’s demise. These factors give the fictional histories surveyed here a different tone from what can be seen in earlier post-Mao texts.

40 cultural refinement. By spying on his parents’ love-making, the six-year-old Li discovers the pleasure of rubbing himself. By contrast the innocent Song Gang (neither a future tycoon nor a future zhishifenzi ) who is a year older, cannot understand the attraction at all and feels no sexual pleasure. Li enjoys rubbing himself so much, and has so little idea of the unseemliness of it, that he masturbates in public without any attempt at concealment. His precocity is much remarked upon in the town and is remembered in later years when the post-reform economy makes explicit, at least for Yu Hua, the links between sex, money, and crassness.

In contrast, in Yu Hua’s Zai xiyu zhong huhan, Su Yu, Guanglin, and the other sensitive boys – zhishifenzi in the making – feel that they, alone, are burdened with sexual guilt. Guanglin masturbates in the school toilets, a truly squalid place, but explains that in his youth, he had no place to go and that his choice was forced on him by circumstance. Perhaps it is the association with the uncongenial environment of the school lavatory, but Guanglin comes to feel that he is polluted, and begins to suspect that he has an alternative ‘beastly’ identity. In a measure of the exile he feels from his principles, Guanglin avoids Su Yu’s company feeling he is no longer worthy to share in Su Yu’s refinement. After some confusion, however, and much to the relief of Guanglin, it emerges that everybody at school masturbates, even Su Yu. The crass sexual behaviour of many of the non-zhishifenzi characters in Yu Hua’s novels thus contrasts with a squeamishness about the public acknowledgment of sexual impulses and behaviours that is shared by the adolescent zhishifenzi collectivity.

By extension, those youthful characters associated with zhishifenzi values in these texts are depicted as having a heightened appreciation of the aesthetic dimension in inter-personal affairs, and a corresponding tendency to favour imagination over the brute facts of human sexual desire. This is most directly dramatized in texts which depict post-Mao realities, which, it can be argued are constructed as extensions of developments in the Mao era. 45 Though the post-Mao consumption of sex as a commodity is condemned as a species of moral ignorance in these texts, it is also clear that Yu Hua, (especially), is happy to satirise zhishifenzi delicacy in these matters, which, by inference, is already manifest in stories of Mao-era adolescence. In this, he suggests that the post-Mao zhishifenzi may share similar traits of sexual repression

45 We may note here that the Mao era is represented not so much as being prudish and puritanical, but as a time when the coarser sexual expression that will be seen more overtly in the post-Mao era is already visible. 41 seen as characteristic of the western middle-class.46 Guanglin’s fear that he has cast off the tokens of civilization and become a beast, displays a hyper-sensitivity that is mocked by both the facts of natural impulses and the habits of normal, healthy men: Yu Hua suggests, most cogently in his portrait of Su Yu, that the unworldly nature of the young zhishifenzi aesthetic, renders its public expression liable to misunderstanding, or even mockery, by others, as is seen in the following incident:

In Zai xiyu zhong huhan, the teenage Su Yu’s bliss leads him, on a sunny day and in a moment of transcendental joy, to embrace a young peasant woman, a stranger, in the street. The young woman mistakes Su Yu’s purity of intent, feels she is under attack and screams. Su Yu’s immaculate impulse results in his denunciation as a sex pest and to twelve months servitude in a labour camp. Su Yu’s eccentric conduct is ample evidence of his difference from other townsfolk, and the public perception of this difference leads him to be identified with other dangerous and anti-social elements. Yu Hua observes that this type of heightened aestheticism, rightly or wrongly, had no place in the Chinese society of the Mao period.

Guanglin, a witness to these developments, begins to understand how sexual desire, even within the restrictive and puritan environment of the Cultural Revolution, effortlessly triumphs over spiritual refinement and overturns reason. He also begins to believe that the possession of some arbitrary physical attribute is frequently more attractive to lovers than the more profound charms of a future zhishifenzi . Guanglin is bewildered at the revelation that a pretty girl in his class, Cao Li, is attracted to a fellow student with hairy legs. In Guanglin’s opinion, the boy is neglectful of his studies, and his legs are ugly – their hairiness combining the qualities of an index of sexual maturity with those of a masculine animality. That the girl elected as the focus of his gentle fantasies should express preference for such attributes in a boy seems to him incomprehensible. To further confuse matters, Cao Li afterwards has an affair with Guanglin’s symbol of cultivated maturity, his music teacher. As a result of this affair with an underage student, the music teacher is sentenced to five years in prison, a consequence which confirms Guanglin in his new suspicions of the perils of desire. Overall,

46 As Kuvacic points out, “Moral inhibition of natural sexuality, based on prejudice and indoctrination, creates well-behaved, obedient citizens burdened with anxieties which annihilate the capability to oppose and rebel.” Kuvacic, I. (Ed.). (1979). Middle Class Ideology in Praxis, Yugoslav essays in the philosophy and methodology of the social sciences (Vol. XXXVI). Boston, USA: D. Reidel Publishing Company.

Yu Hua’s texts present sexuality and the sensibilities of the adolescent, future zhishifenzi as fundamentally incompatible. This is one key feature of the alienation of the zhishifenzi from the “others” in their society.

Social violence The issues relating to sex and zhishifenzi adolescent identity are closely connected with those involving violence in Mao-era China and the response of children to that violence. Fictional History accounts of life in the period of the Cultural Revolution, show children (i.e. those who are by inference the zhishifenzi of the future) as seeing that violence invariably arises from motives which have nothing to do with revolutionary ideology. In Wang Xiaoshuai’s Wo 11 (2011), which, as noted, depicts the period in the 1970s just before Mao’s death, the inconsistent justifications used to license acts of public violence provoke a moment of crisis for eleven-year-old Wang Han. The film’s central catastrophe is the murder and dismemberment of an important local cadre by the son of a “sent-down” intellectual – the local police are active in pursuing the killer arguably because his family background is that of a member of the class groupings on which Maoist ideology has declared war. However, the crime and the police pursuit of the criminal occur against a social background in which violence between contending gangs of young men in the streets of Wang Han’s village has been sanctioned by the local representatives of the state because it has revolutionary import and is therefore subject to no intervention by the forces of the law. It becomes clear to the child narrator of the film, however, that the young men’s revolutionary credentials are specious and act as a fig-leaf for their true motivations – sexual jealousy and tribal allegiance. The zhishifenzi -child is thus a witness to a culture of pervasive violence which has been both dressed up as revolution and licensed by the state.

As alluded to above in post-Mao Fictional History, violence and sexual exploitation are perceived to have a symbiotic relationship, and both are expressions of the culture of bullying. The sexual insecurities which lie at the heart of the young men’s revolutionary quarrels are an early-stage expression of the culture of abuse which leads to the commission of a sex crime against the murderer’s sister. It emerges in the narrative that the murdered cadre had used his control over Jueqing’s ‘sent-down’ family to rape her, so Jueqing’s brother, employing the rhetoric of the times, declares himself in revolt against the system, thereby claiming the

43 mantle or revolution as a justification for his violence. Wounded and fleeing from his pursuers, Xie Juequiang takes Wang Han’s new white shirt, the symbol of Han’s attempts to impress his peers, to staunch the bleeding. Politics and youth violence merge into an undifferentiated and incoherent mass.

Over the course of the narrative, the 11-year-old Wang Han is enjoined by his circumstances to learn to see things in their true essence. Wang Han’s father, a sent-down intellectual deprived of his autonomy by the forces that have consigned him to the countryside, hopes that Wang Han will become a painter, and devotes much of their time together teaching Han to ‘see.’ In the social sphere, moreover, Wang Han’s educated parents have attempted to protect their son from the senseless everyday brutalities of the Cultural Revolution, so Han is obliged to pick up fragments of information about the realities of the world in which he lives at neighbourhood gatherings or at the baths, venues where adults whisper in fear of being overheard. Echoing the depictions of the zhishifenzi child in the work of Yu Hua, the film shows Wang Han as also being obliged to decode the behaviour of adults using his new appreciation of the deranging power of sexual desire. Wang Han’s dawning maturity, both sexual and intellectual, helps him to understand Xie Jueqiang’s rage at his sister’s violation, and her father’s sense of powerless despair. The sentence of death imposed upon Jueqiang for ‘counter-revolutionary murder’ when this has occurred inside a dystopia of socially- sanctioned violence reveals to Wang Han his own moral road. Running with his curious school friends

behind the truck carrying Juequiang to the execution ground, Wang Han hears the official pronouncement of the sentence upon Xie Jueqiang and his moral plight is instantly clarified. Deflated and thoughtful, Wang Han stops, as he is no longer interested in viewing the execution: “I can’t remember if I heard the shots. Shortly afterwards, China experienced great upheavals. All these things are inscribed upon my memory. I was 11 years old.” 47 It is implied that in this moment of alienation from his peers, Wang Han ceases to be a child.

Another narrative film dealing with childhood enlightenment brought about by the violence of the Mao-era, Tian Zhuangzhuang’s Lan fengzheng , depicts Tietou’s last moment of

47 The film is set in 1975 44 innocence as occurring when Red Guards arrive to take his step-father and mother away to be struggled against. This moment is situated at the end of a series of misfortunes in which Tietou has been deprived of both his natural parents, two foster-fathers, and numerous uncles to the long series of Maoist political campaigns. Tietou, who up until this time has treated the convulsions of the Cultural Revolution as an entertainment, fights the Red Guards in an attempt to make them release his mother, but the Guards beat him en masse and he lies half- conscious and bleeding upon the road outside his home. Tietou looks up into the sky and notices the remnants of a blue kite, a symbol of childhood, caught and tattered in the bare branches of a tree and now realises that childhood is a state that we all must eventually leave.

The gentle soul Tietou’s gazing into the sky might be seen as exemplifying a pervasive feature of the zhishifenzi -child characters who are the centre of Fictional History narratives – a gentleness of spirit that sets them apart from those around them, and an empathy with those who suffer unjustly. Perhaps the great utility of the Cultural Revolution for the narratives of post-reform zhishifenzi was that it magnified and amplified the sort of moral contradictions which produce ethical crises in children. In this view, the Cultural Revolution was a test of human nature. In the narratives of 1990s and 2000s Fictional History, the departure from childhood is marked for the future zhishifenzi by a moment of moral clarity which cements within them the conviction of a fundamental temperamental difference from others. Equally important in this process is an ability to empathize with the suffering of others, a trait which is perceived as a key attribute of the child zhishifenzi .

Yu Hua echoes the famous story from Mencius in which Mengzi observes to King Xuan that the king’s clemency towards a condemned ox was confirmation of the inherent goodness of human nature. In a scene from Zai xiyuzhong huhan the boy Guanglin is troubled by the spectacle of the slaughter of a water buffalo in his village:

In later years, whenever I would think of how the buffalo tremblingly awaited its death, its modest resignation towards its own life, making no effort to resist, it would appear before my eyes as a disturbing, shattered scene (p.183).

“我在此后的岁月里，会战栗地去回想水牛死前的情景，他对自己生命的谦让，不做任何反抗地死去，使我眼前出现了令人不安

的破碎图景。

Later, in Huozhe , Yu Hua refers to the story again. When Fugui, now in his old age, has saved up enough to buy a buffalo to help him work his plot of land, he sets out for the livestock sales. On the way to the saleyard he notices a crowd of people gathered around a tethered animal, all of whom are anticipating its slaughter:

As the surrounding crowd were discussing how best to kill the beast, I saw the old cow crying as if broken-hearted and experiencing a sorrow too hard to bear. I felt pity for the cow who had tired itself out over a lifetime for people, but all in vain. Now old, with strength failing, it was to be slaughtered and eaten (p.290).

围着的人在说牛刀从什么地方刺进去最好。我看到这头老牛哭得那么伤心，心里怪难受的。想想做牛真是可怜，累死累活替人

干了一辈子，老了，力气小了，就要被人宰了吃掉。

Fugui purchases the elderly beast, much to the astonishment of the other farmers and significantly, he names the buffalo Fugui . In this re-telling of the story from Mengzi, Yu Hua seems to suggest here that human nature is indeed compassionate: it may be that empathy is innate within children or it may arrive only after a long experience of personal suffering, but in either case it indicates the presence of a heightened imaginative capacity.

In the circumstances of modern, and in particular post-1949 Chinese history, however, a kindly human nature and the possession of empathy generally mitigates against worldly success and leaves one liable to mockery and bullying. In Zai xiyuzhong huhan, Guanglin and his grandfather, Youyuan, share this imaginative capacity along with the suffering it entails. Youyuan, now an old man, sits alone and recalls the incidents of a life spent with his deceased wife, while Guanglin at the same time eases his loneliness in solitary reveries by the village pond - alternately weeping and laughing to himself as his memories unfold. Though the social situation of the village is presented as marked by violent idiocy, it is Guanglin and

Youyuan’s ability to transform memory into vivid experience which is considered strange and scandalous by those in their community and it is this that leads Guangcai to imagine that these two, his father and his son, are jinxes on him. 48

In his periodic forays into the world outside his imagination, Guanglin is attracted to the Su family’s gentility and gentleness. Dr Su, the village physician is “a doctor with fair skin and a gentle voice” 皮肤白净，嗓音温和的医生 (p.12), and for Guanglin and his brothers the everyday conduct, even the diet of the Su family, though hardly different from their own, is endlessly fascinating. As Guanglin observes them, the Su family are transformed in his own imagination as the archetype of a real family and a rebuke to his own family’s coarseness. Later, Guanglin meets the Su boys at school and his friendship with Su Yu is his first inkling that he, Guanglin, may not be as eccentric and unique as he had feared.

Su Yu, in his character and behaviour, manifests an air of transcendence, a sense that he floats above the mundane. This extreme expression of detachment is viewed as an oddity even by his cultured family. Su Yu’s slow death from an aneurysm is consequently unnoticed or is interpreted as another instance of his idiosyncratic behaviour; it is Su Yu’s alienation from orthodox conduct, and his disassociation from the mundane world, which places him beyond the assistance of those who could have saved his life. While the child zhishifenzi longs for a world of refinement, empathy, humaneness, individualism, and civility, Yu Hua observes that these longings exist on a level in which virtues may be transformed into vices by excess. As his physical body is dying, Su Yu’s consciousness gradually subsides and, as he lies in bed, one can argue that he is symbolically transformed into the incarnate representation of the Chinese zhishifenzi in the 1990s – someone who can think, dream, and imagine, but who is unable to communicate their own truths or to act upon them. 49

After Su Yu’s death, Guanglin adopts his friend’s mannerisms almost as if they were an inheritance. Now without a close friend, Guanglin walks alone and communes with his memories of Su Yu but is eventually drawn towards the companionship of a smaller boy,

48 Elsewhere, in Yu Hua’s Xiongdi, Song Gang as a pre-school boy believes the blacksmith’s story that the stars in the sky are the sparks from the forge which Tong has himself put there. Li Guangtou, however, abruptly assures Gang that blacksmith Tong is ‘bullshitting’ and that the sparks from his forge end up outside the door in a dust pan. 49 This is the same motif employed in Ma Jian’s Rou zhi Tu where Dai Wei narrates the novel from inside a coma. 47

Lulu, who is the victim of bullying by his schoolmates yet maintains a fierce defiance in the face of their assaults. Guanglin identifies the trait in Lulu which has drawn them to each other: “I understood how much he needed imagination and hope, for they were especially vital to me.” 我知道想象和希望对于他的重要和必需，事实上对于我也同样如此 (p.125). The gentleness and solitude of the gentle child faced with a world of bullies and bullying stands as one of the central attributes of the zhishifenzi subject.

Revolutionary ideology

This isolation of gentle children in the context of a brutal society is linked to a broader scepticism about the claims of revolutionary ideology, as this was enunciated in the Mao years. It is a key observation of this thesis that, in addition to establishing social identity by the depiction of common responses to shared historical experiences, the creation of new historical narratives in Fictional History has, as a sovereign purpose, the generation of historical and social critiques particular to the social class which produced them. Zhishifenzi claim in these texts their occupation of a unique position in modern Chinese history, a temporal position which partakes of both the revolutionary and reform periods. Chinese critics observe an important distinction between those who were adolescents or adults when the Cultural Revolution broke out in the 1960s and those who were still children in the last decade of Mao’s life, and thus were neither old enough to be Red Guards or to be part of the “sent down” or “lost” generation. In the Chinese literary journal Young Writers , Xu Songcheng, stresses the distinction between writers from China’s ‘lost generation’ and Yu Hua’s post-reform generation:

“As Zheng Nan has said, Yu Hua’s realistic fiction meets with the difficulty that compared with the ‘sent down’ generation, Yu Hua’s younger generation of writers had a relatively calm life course; they didn’t have to undertake the rural re-education of the Cultural Revolution period, and they have not had as much experience of the vicissitudes of life to use as a resource for their writing.”

…... 如郑楠所说，余华的现实主义创作遭遇了困境，相比 “知青群体 ” 而言，余华这一代青年作家的人生经历相对平坦，没有经

历过上山下乡和 “文革 ” 那段历史，没有丰富曲折的生活阅历作为写作资源 .50

However, although the most evident hardships of the Cultural Revolution fell upon adults, as these are narrated, the social upheavals of the Cultural Revolution were, even for small children, no less perplexing than they were for their parents and older siblings: in Fictional History texts this is manifested in the confusion that children feel when observing the ideological vicissitudes of the time. In the period in the late 1960s where the state had vacated any role in the promotion of social harmony and, instead, sponsored a rhetoric of division and class struggle, children were obliged to navigate their way without the Red Guards’ moment of joy. The post-reform zhishifenzi proclaim in the Fictional History texts studied here that their moral sense arose in reaction to the Cultural Revolution’s abandonment of the obligation to instil a love of social harmony in children. If the “lost generation,” the older siblings of writers and film-makers of the generation of Yu Hua and his peers, had enthusiastically cast off the vestiges of traditional culture and become the heroes of the Party's ideal, the younger children who are the focus of the narratives discussed here did not have this option, for they were more subject to the restraints of authority. 51

A socialist education: These reservations about revolutionary ideology are manifest most clearly in the representations of children’s experiences of education in the late 1960s presented in Fictional History texts. Post-reform writers and film-makers illustrate the attempt to introduce revolutionary values to children as an effort to control and intimidate them, rather than to enlighten or transform them. Sensitive children in Fictional History are depicted as troubled by the differences between ideology and practice, and by the disparity between what they have come to regard as natural honesty, and the ethics inherent in the formal education

50 许松盛 (2011) 论余华小说中的暴力与人性 , 青年作家，第 4 期下半月 51 Zhishifenzi theories on early childhood experience do not exactly accord with Western theories of generational consciousness. Mannheim, (quoted in Mendel, I. (2006). Mannheim’s free-floating intelligentsia: The role of closeness and distance in the analysis of society. Studies in Social and Political Thought, 12 , 30-52.), ibid. proposed the age range of 17 to 25 as the critical period when ‘‘present problems’’ become the focus for young people, while ‘‘the older generation cling to the reorientation that had been the drama of their youth.” As Schuman and Corning Schuman, H., & Corning, A. (2012). Generational Memory and the Critical Period. [Article]. Public Opinion Quarterly, 76 (1), 1-31. (p.4) point out, “…it is only as children approach adolescence that they begin to appreciate events beyond their own family and immediate neighbourhood. At exactly what age this occurs is likely to depend on both the nature of the external event and the aptitude and interests of the child.” 49 system of the Mao years. Post-reform writers and film-makers point out, however, that original revolutionary virtues were transformed into vices in this period by the enthusiasm with which they were adopted by the self-serving and the unprincipled. 52 Ultimately, children in the Cultural Revolutionary period were subjected to selfish authoritarian control by adults whose abrogation of moral responsibility was masked by a specious enthusiasm for revolutionary ideals.

In Yu Hua’s Zai xiyu zhong huhan , teacher Zhang adopts the techniques of the Cultural Revolution to inflict psychological terror upon his students. Yu Hua presents the policies of exclusion and suspicion enacted on a national scale as being reproduced in miniature, in town and village schools, to the same ends. He depicts the Cultural Revolution’s innate assumption that all are wicked at heart as obliging Zhang’s students to regularly examine their short- comings and to write self-criticisms despite their being actually innocent of the crimes to which they must confess. Children under these circumstances quickly learn that it does no good to persist in an ethical stand when opposed by a more powerful figure. When an innocent Guanglin decides not to write a self-criticism after an incident in the playground, he naively imagines that the fact of his innocence must prevail over Teacher Zhang’s injunction that students must criticise themselves. His friend Guoqing, a forward boy, warns that: “the criticism will go into your file” 检查要进挡案的 , and this makes Guanglin even more

52 Despite propaganda to the contrary, the old society in China was not so debased as to be wholly without any ethical sense. The challenge for the CCP after 1949 was to associate constructive morality with a communist mindset. Traditional ways were strong, however, so Mao’s administration concentrated upon the young as the key to socialist social transformation. Mao’s growing impatience with book-learning and his preoccupation with class struggle meant that schools, when they were open at all, ceased to function as educators along traditional lines and became, instead, a forum for promoting the political program of class struggle, exclusion, and resistance to accustomed forms of authority. It would seem an incongruity that schools became the location for much of the more extreme expressions of revolutionary fervour in 1966, but in schools, young Chinese adopted the ideology of the Cultural Revolution and applied it in their relations with others while at home, the family was simultaneously undermined and broken up. Efforts by the Party to instill a sense of nationalism in children through the education system can also promote cynicism. In the documentary Sunrise over Tiananmen Square (1998) Wang, S. (Writer). (1998). Sunrise over Tiananmen Square. In B. M. David Verrall, Don McWilliams (Producer). Canada: National Film Board of Canada. ibid., Wang Shuibo interviews Chinese people whose sympathy and tender feelings were cynically manipulated by educators so that these qualities eventually became discredited and were abandoned. In the film it is asserted that in the Cultural Revolution, Chinese children were told that the poor in America froze to death every winter and that ordinary Americans were counting upon the support of Chinese children to free them from a corrupt and grinding system of government. After the reform and opening up, Chinese people recognized that they had been misled and naturally felt indignation towards the domestic propagandists who misled them. It is implied in these texts that the blame they may attribute to themselves on account of their own gullibility led them to adopting socially corroding traits of selfishness and suspicion as a response. 50 determined not to write one. Teacher Zhang’s response to Guanglin’s protest is to terrify him by imposing a regime of isolation and exclusion and it is thus that Guanglin is forcefully brought to an understanding of both the limits of innocence and the limits of personal bravery. Guanglin gratefully assures teacher Zhang that he will write his self-criticism shortly. This can be seen as a condensed metaphor for the plight of the zhishifenzi in the face of authority.

Fictional History presents the Cultural Revolution as promoting false and unnatural behavioural archetypes, creating an omnipresent ethos of social division and class struggle based upon spurious criteria, personal insecurity, violence, and nihilistic selfishness, with children key victims of this. Yu Hua, and other post-reform zhishifenzi intimate that those of their generation who preserved moral virtue were obliged to discover their own spiritual path under conditions in which the transmission of culture from alternative sources, such as the family, was undermined by a pervasive paranoia. In cases where parents were intellectuals, as in Wo 11 , the desire to communicate to children something of an aesthetic or cultural sense is depicted as always conducted in fear of neighbourhood surveillance and constantly undermined by school and social authorities.

In Fictional History texts even though it is not claimed that there is justice for zhishifenzi children and their allies, it occasionally happens that the impersonality and randomness of terror consumes its perpetrator as well as its victim. When Guanglin is suspected by teacher Zhang of writing a mildly insulting slogan in chalk on one of the school’s walls, Zhang, rather than letting the slight pass, commissions two of Guanglin’s friends to act as informers and agents provocateurs to discover whether or not it is Guanglin who wrote the slogan. Guanglin, though (once again) innocent, is implicated by his friends’ report and falls victim to a revolutionary interrogation designed to extract a confession. Teacher Lin wrests a false confession from the sobbing and broken boy, assuring him that he will feel better once he has confessed. However, later that day teacher Lin is herself identified as the descendent of a landlord family and is arrested by a Red Guard detachment as a class enemy. Unobserved in the glare of this greater shame, Guanglin makes a miraculous escape. The arbitrary nature of these political struggles, rather than any concept of just retribution, is what conditions Teacher Lin’s fate.

Overall Fictional History presents a powerful picture of the Cultural Revolution by showing its injustices being inflicted upon children. In an environment in which ethical consistency and guiding moral principles were replaced by noisy accusations and the smears written upon ‘big character’ posters, it was sufficient to have been accused to be condemned – something that children sharply observe. The act of confession is easily made by the shameless, but a confession is only unwillingly wrested from an innocent child. Children energetically resist false accusations against themselves, but in ‘revolutionary’ circumstances, children also begin to understand that it is expedient to lie. Yu Hua’s narrative shows us how in later years, Guanglin is reminded of the resilience of the terror techniques of the Cultural Revolution when he makes the acquaintance of a famous Beijing poet. This poet is bullied and beaten by his wife who insists that he confess his mistreatment of her and write self-criticisms of his behaviour which she pastes up on the walls of their apartment for visitors to peruse. The traumas of Mao-era childhoods are revisited in the adult worlds of the post-Reform era: domination and bullying in the everyday lives of zhishifenzi adults are seen as recapitulating the brutalities inflicted on children in the Mao decades.

Thus, Fictional History suggests that the education of children during the Cultural Revolution was a process of disillusioning them about the values of justice, innocence, and truth and it is presented as being understandable that most children entered the reform period without any idea of these concepts. All children are powerless and dependant and, because they understand this themselves, they are generally unwilling to make unsupported stands upon principle, particularly since few family members are willing to support children against established authority, but in the Mao era, Fictional History suggests, this problem is made much more severe. In Yu Hua’s work when Guanglin and Zheng Liang are, once again, required to write self-criticisms because they do not quit their friendship with Su Yu after his public disgrace, Liang’s father beats him and forces him to submit. Guanglin understands, by then, the immateriality of innocence but hopes that he can win the support of his foster parents. Alas, Guanglin’s adopted father does not want to attract the notice of the authorities and swiftly repudiates his son’s stance. In a meeting with the headmaster he points out that Guanglin is a foster child and that he – as adoptive father – was not responsible for the formation of Guanglin’s character. Guanglin’s adopted mother, Li Xiuying, on the other hand, argues that the boy is honest because she tested him with a penny when he first arrived. Her

52 faith in Guanglin, who is otherwise utterly alone, moves him to tears of gratitude. Common moral decency, in a world of pervasive injustice, touches the heart of the child-zhishifenzi.

Other Fictional History depictions of the perilous environment of the Cultural Revolution also stress the breakdown of traditional ritual relationships between children and teachers. Post- reform zhishifenzi texts illustrate that the connection between schools, education, and civilization underwent a sinister transformation in the Cultural Revolution. In Wo sui si qu , Wang Jingyao speaks of Beijing in 1966 as a vast execution ground for teachers and intellectuals where there was “murder everywhere.” A scene in this film displays a grim slogan written in blood on the wall of a middle-school classroom, now converted into a makeshift prison. The incongruity with the room’s accustomed use as a classroom for educating fourteen-year-old girls proclaims, we can argue, for post-reform zhishifenzi, the true and lasting nature of the education obtained in it, and, by implication, the culture of the Mao era.

A personal sacrifice for the Party In Fictional History texts z hishifenzi view the tendency of the Chinese revolution to devalue individuality as arising not merely from revolutionary ideology but as a consequence of people becoming inured to suffering and injustice. In general, post-reform Fictional History observes that China in the Maoist period was – despite its own claims to the contrary – not an equal society and, worse, that it was the poor (those in whose name the revolutionary victory had been won) who benefitted least. Far from being a golden age of equality, the Maoist revolutionary period of the PRC is perceived in Fictional History to have divided Chinese society at the expense of the poor. In the grim calculations used to measure the worth of individuals in that period, the poor frequently had no value beyond the sacrifices they could make for the country. The ideal of sacrificing your own life to the Party, common in the propaganda of the time, is given a gruesome representation in these texts and for zhishifenzi , the tragedy of that period was that so many sacrifices were made – by the dominated – for a deception. This is particularly sharply observed by children.

It is implied in these texts that revolutionary rhetoric encouraged a ‘rational’ hierarchal ranking of human life which took no account of sentiment and in which the poor and powerless were relegated to use as nothing more than “bio-resources”. A key example is in

Yu Hua’s Huozhe , where the boy Youqing, who is without many opportunities to ingratiate himself with the authorities, is overjoyed when he and his friends are enlisted to save the life of his school principal, a high-ranking cadre, who has lost a lot of blood in giving birth. As it turns out, Youqing is the only student with the same blood type as the principal and so he earns distinction in being able to donate blood. The blood transfusion nurse kills Youqing by literally bleeding him dry. The doctor treating the principal mildly scolds the nurse: “you’re really an idiot” 你真是胡闹 , and then returns to the task of saving his patient with Youqing’s blood. When the anxious and grief stricken Fugui arrives at the hospital seeking news of his son, the doctor asks him: “How come you only had one son?” 你为什么只生一个儿子 ? Deploying the anti-individualist ethos of revolutionary society in China, the doctor’s question portrays the low value ascribed to human life and, more particularly, to children in this period. 53 The bitter irony is that the blood of the son of a landlord (Fugui) is used to save the life of a high ranking communist official. This incident stands as a core emblem of the abusiveness of the Mao-era with children as its iconic victims.

Fictional History implicitly indicts the way in which efforts to have the entire Chinese population reliant upon the thinking and leadership of Chairman Mao led to propaganda campaigns in which acts of heroism were reported as inspired by the Chairman. In the texts studied here, post-reform zhishifenzi express their unease over this type of fanaticism since, apart from being absurd, it creates a tiered system for determining the value of human life. Lives offered for the cause of the Party had value depending on how closely the life and death was held to be reliant upon Mao Zedong Thought. Yu Hua highlights the inhumanity of these attitudes in Zai xiyu zhong huhan when he portrays Sun Guangcai’s avarice as bringing him to a state of happiness that his youngest son, Guangming, has died a hero. 54 Guangming

53 As readers we are reminded of Lei Feng’s famous desire to be a rustless screw in the great machine operated by the CCP. Even if Lei Feng’s diary was not written by party propagandists, the type of self-negation of his own life was approved by the Party and promoted as highly moral. The Yan’an spirit of self-sacrifice, characteristic of the early years of the communist movement, is here taken to an inhuman extreme. 54 The ideal of being a hero was ubiquitous at the beginning of the Cultural Revolution as an archetype of communist virtue. Sheridan has discussed the varieties of heroic models promoted to the Chinese community which provided exemplars of moral self-sacrifice. Sheridan, M. (1968). The Emulation of Heroes. The China Quarterly, 33 , 47 - 72. Stories of communist heroes feature astonishing heights of self-denial (Lei Feng) or self- sacrifice (Ouyang Hai). In every case these heroes are motivated and guided in their heroism by nothing other than a familiarity with, and fervent love for, the works of Mao Zedong. These exemplars, seen in hindsight, are suggestive more of mental illness than virtue. In her study of the Song of Ouyang Hai , Wang cites Ouyang’s extreme impersonality: Wang, X. (2015). The Construction of the Image/Myth of a Martyr in the Cultural 54 drowns in the local stream when swimming with another boy whom he first saved from difficulties by pushing him towards the bank. Guangcai’s initial grief for his lost son is deeply felt but it later transforms into a grim satisfaction as he realises that as the father of a hero he might gain some personal glory and profit as a consequence of his son’s death. Unfortunately for Guangcai, Guangming’s sacrifice (accidental in any case) was not seen to be inspired or directed by any conspicuous love of the Party, nor was the act embellished with quotations from the Chairman, so the good deed goes unrewarded. Just as Don Quixote’s mind was turned to madness by reading too many novels about chivalry, Sun Guangcai’s natural foolishness is intensified by the stories of communist heroes that were ubiquitous in that period. Yu Hua arguably uses the story of Guangming’s specious heroism to cast doubt in the reader’s mind about the stories of small children conducting their lives according to the precepts laid down by Mao. Sun Guangcai and his eldest son, Sun Guangping, sit together and calculate the advantages that will accrue to them when the government bestows honours on them for being the family of a fallen hero but when this self-deception dissolves, Guangcai’s callousness returns to its original track and he abruptly demands monetary compensation from the family of the boy his son saved. Later, even Sun Guangming’s mother comes to believe that her son was a hero and laments that if he, (a boy of six at the time of his death), were still alive, then people in the village would not dare to insult her. 55

A noble heritage: One key feature of Fictional History narratives is that the post-reform zhishifenzi who produced these works commonly depict their background as rural. This is a further point of difference between them and the subsequent generations of intellectuals who originated in

Revolution: An Interpretation/Demythicization of The Song of Ouyang Hai. Comparative Literature Studies, 52 (1), 145-159. When Ouyang Hai saves a little girl from a well, he tells the girl that it is not he who saved her from the well, but the glorious Party. When the girl asks him about his name, he answers, “My name is the PLA.” Wang concludes that “The socialist regime tended to oppress subjectivity and originality by promoting emulations/imitations of exemplary models. She observes: there are always “ghosts” of martyrs haunting people's minds and overseeing their behaviours.” 55 This is similar to the “true” story of Wang Li-ch'ing, a 15-year-old boy who drowned while attempting to rescue a child from the river: “In his home our young hero lies in bed exactly as peacefully as he normally sleeps. People stand around him. The aunties in the neighbourhood remember the help he gave them. The greengrocers remember how quietly he came time and time again to wipe the counters for them. Transport workers remember how he helped them push their carts uphill, and children remember how this elder brother often taught them to sing revolutionary songs and to read Quotations from Chairman Mao . In every heart there is admiration, love, and grief. The uncles and the aunties touch his pulse again and again and listen to his heart. How they wish that he would come back to life again.” Sheridan, M. (1968). The Emulation of Heroes. The China Quarterly, 33 , 47 - 72. ibid. p.41 55

China’s post-reform urbanization. It sets the childhoods in these works apart from those of the generation that follows them. Fictional History indicts the spiritual state of the peasantry in the Mao era but locates many of the failings of the peasants in state neglect. These texts suggest that far from leading the revolution, China’s peasants had little sympathy for, or understanding of, socialism and virtually none had any idea of the necessity or purpose of Mao’s mass movements. Children are direct witnesses to this. In Zai xiyu zhong huhan , Guangcai – the father of the child whose death was chronicled above – is depicted as something of a stage-play peasant, a grasping and ignorant man whose cooperation in any sphere of life is guaranteed only by a conviction on his part that he will somehow benefit. 56 This portrayal, though clichéd, mocks the idea that Guanglin, his son, has been improved by his familial inheritance. Indeed, Yu Hua suggests that Mao’s thesis that China’s poor peasants thirsted for revolutionary action found no confirmation in Guangcai who, though undeniably poor, could hardly be likened to the famous ‘blank white sheet.’ Guangcai, it seems, has closely written over his ‘sheet’ with selfishness and foolishness – manifested in his indifference to his children.

While Yu Hua’s fictional histories do not present Guangcai as representative of China’s peasants in the early years of the 1960s, there is, at least as far as sensibility is concerned, a clear adversarial relationship between town and country in Yu Hua’s texts and in those of his generation. We can observe that the image of educational and cultural backwardness in China’s villages, evident in depictions of the hardships felt by the Shanghainese who were ‘sent-down’ to the countryside in Wo 11, which post-reform zhishifenzi identify as their objection to a Mao-era political ecology in which poor peasants were (theoretically) placed at the top of Chinese revolutionary society. For post-reform zhishifenzi, the Mao-era image of peasant life as culturally superior was absurd when evidence of this superiority was clearly lacking, (though lacking through no fault of the peasants themselves). 57 Inevitably, as Joseph

56 This is despite his name 广才 , which denotes ‘broad learning (or talent).’ 57 If idealization of the peasantry is resisted and refuted in these texts it is not because the peasants were inherently stupid or vicious, though some are portrayed in that fashion, but because the Party did not make good its promise to bring about a spiritual and economic transformation in the rural areas of China. Lacking opportunities or incentives to progress, the peasants tended to maintain and strengthen their allegiance to traditional and superstitious practices. To the extent that the mass campaigns of the Mao era really did depend upon the leadership and active participation of the peasants, Yu Hua implies that this was an unsound basis upon which to proceed. 56 points out, post-reform zhishifenzi identify themselves with ideas of modernity and progress and see these as opposed to the backwardness of rural life. 58 Their images of Mao-era zhishifenzi childhoods in the countryside are defined by their difference from the peasant- adults who are the reference points of those childhoods.

Rural backwardness is presented in Fictional History as creating a generational divide between peasant fathers and children who will eventually become zhishifenzi (or are objects of symbolic identification for zhishifenzi authors). Fictional History writing presents a strong sense of the incongruity between the Maoist idea of launching a “Great Leap Forward” into the radiant future and its reliance upon such unpromising material as the older peasant Sun Guangcai and it must be conceded that few representations of the peasantry in these texts depict them as enthusiastic or knowledgeable about their participation in public affairs. At the time the communes were established in Sun Guangcai’s district, a cadre asked him if he was satisfied with the new dining hall arrangements and he replied with his estimation that he could now eat much more now. Guangcai, as if to show that gluttony was not his only vice, mentioned to the cadre that having been away from home for three days he was also looking forward to finding his wife as soon as possible. Later in the afternoon Guangcai seeks out the cadre and boasts to him of how little time it took to fulfil his needs. The cadre is at first surprised but then disgusted at Guangcai’s bestial appetites. Recalling the episode later he sighed: “Peasants! They’re all like that” 农民嘛，都是这样 (p. 68). This characterization of Sun Guangcai is shown as being in stark contrast to his son, Sun Guanglin, who is shown to have inherited nothing of his father’s appetites or enthusiasms, and with Guangcai’s father Sun Youyuan who, as we have seen, spends his days in sentimental reverie. Sun Guangcai feels no need to treat his son or father well because he sees them as not being worth any investment of energy or attention: “In those days my father would often expose his scrawny chest, display his two rows of prominent ribs to the village-folk and tell them he was so scrawny because “I am infested by two worms” 那些日子我父亲经常露出精瘦的胸膛，将两排突出的肋骨向村里人展览，告诉他们他为什么瘦，那是因为 “我养了两条蛔虫” (p.175). We can suggest that Sun Guangcai’s calculation about the uselessness of his dreamy

58 Joseph, W. A. (2010). Ideology and Chinese politics. In W. A. Joseph (Ed.), Politics in China: An introduction . New York: Oxford University Press. 57 father and his dreamy son is, at least for zhishifenzi readers, evidence of the replacement of traditional Chinese filial relationships with a type of socialist rationality which takes no account of affection and treats both children and the older generation with contempt.

In these narratives, the Mao-era countryside offers nothing to ambitious young people, and so it is always a place to leave: the adolescent/young adult zhishifenzi is destined to move out of a rural world characterised overwhelmingly by boorishness. When the university entrance exam is reinstated after Mao’s death, Guanglin is admitted to a university in Beijing. Guangping, his elder brother, had been aware of Guanglin’s plans to apply to university and had even secretly repaid the one yuan his brother borrowed from a friend as the fee to sit the exam. This unlikely display of brotherly affection is provoked by Guangping’s grief at not having had a similar opportunity, even though he also had the intellectual ability. Guangping has become one of the last members of the ‘lost generation’ those whose youth was spent entangled within the Cultural Revolution and for whom there was no possibility of higher education or advancement. Guangping’s grief when he sees Guanglin off on the bus to Beijing is a reflection of his realization that it is too late for Guangping himself who must remain where he is, in the village of his birth. Knowing that he has no choice, the prospect of spending his life as a farmer is almost unbearable:

“After Sun Guangping graduated from high school and returned home to work the land, his self-confidence had sunk to a new low. I often saw my older brother lying in bed, staring at the wall. His dazed look told all. Given my own mood at the time, I had no trouble figuring out that his most ardent wish was to leave Southgate and start a new life. More than once I saw him stand at the edge of the field gazing as if he were in a trance, as an enfeebled old man, his face lined with wrinkles, his body caked in mud, trudged across the farmland. I noted the misery in my brother’s eyes. This grim sight struck a chord in him, making him wonder about the latter stages of his own life.”

孙光平高中毕业回家务农以后，脸上的自信就一扫而光了。刚开

始的日子里，我经常看到哥哥躺在床上睁着眼睛，那恍惚的眼神

使我理解了哥哥。我用自己的心请洞察到哥哥最大的愿望，那就是离开南门，过上一种全新的生活。我几次看到孙光平站在田头呆呆地望着满脸皱纹满身泥土的疲惫老人，从田里走上来。我看到了哥哥眼睛里流露出来的空虚和悲哀。孙光平触景生请地想到了自己命运的最后那部分。（ p.52 ）

For the zhishifenzi who has moved from adolescence to adulthood, leaving their villages to attend university in one of China’s big cities at the end of the Mao era is the transformational event of their lives, marking the definitive break with the world of their childhood (which is also the epoch of Maoism). Yu Hua points out in the above passage, however, that many bright young people were lost to the nation as the consequence of an ideology which the poor peasants – who observe and participate in the Mao-era system as adults rather than as children – knew to be false. Many peasants depicted in these texts, far from believing that as adults/parents they were the natural repositories of all the wisdom one needed to obtain in the world, were desperate for their children to escape their own experience of ill-use and poverty by means of gaining an education, and naturally they felt the closing-off of this route to a better life as an occasion for despair.

Of blood and belonging In narrating Cultural Revolution childhoods, China’s post-reform writers and film-makers suggest that the breakdown of fundamental ties of affection and responsibility within the family was partly inspired by ideas of social exclusion present in wider society at the time, casting children adrift. The theoretical basis for class struggle during the Cultural Revolution is universally seen by post-reform zhishifenzi as false and self-serving, but it was inevitable that a society fond of excluding and dividing eagerly adopted the specious truths of “origin theory” and “blood pedigree theory” and that these influences would affect family relationships, and children in particular.

In her introduction to The Red Mirror , Wen Chihua points out that blood has a particular significance to Chinese people. 59 Blood can transmit guilt and children can be held responsible, by virtue of sharing the same blood, for the acts of criminal or counter-

59 Wen, C. (1995). The red mirror: Children of China's Cultural Revolution . Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press. 59 revolutionary parents. In Fictional History, children are shown as sharing their family’s social disability as an inheritance of the blood. However, children could also be abandoned and excluded by their families on account of arbitrary differences from others. 60 I have claimed that for the zhishifenzi-as-child in Fictional History texts, seeing oneself as different is an essential part of their identity but in these texts there are also instances of exclusion levied against ordinary people who become the victims of historical factors beyond their control. The distinction between common persecutions resulting from human cruelty and rapacity, and the persecution of zhishifenzi as a result their pursuit of an alternative spiritual life, is important, but both types of persecution are depicted in Fictional History to illustrate how manifesting any real or imagined difference from the norm leads to tragedy.

Ma Jian’s Rou zhi tu (2008) illustrates the ways in which, during the Maoist period, children are afflicted by the social disability suffered by parents who are deemed to have committed political wrongs. Dai Wei’s father, a musician, was condemned as a rightist in the 1950s for shaking the hand of a visiting orchestra conductor.61 Dai Wei recalls that when he was four years old at kindergarten, the teacher sent him to stand outside during singing practice because, as the son of a rightist, he had “no right to learn revolutionary songs.”

Similarly, Yu Hua’s Xu Sanguan mai xue ji is an extended depiction of malicious social exclusion in Mao-era China, exclusion that passes from parents to children. In this novel, a crisis of legitimacy arises when Sanguan discovers that his wife, Yulan, was assaulted by her first boyfriend, He Xiaoyong, in a fit of anger before she was married to Sanguan. Sanguan, despite his certain knowledge that Yulan was a virgin on their wedding night, now prefers to believe that Yile, his first child, is not his natural son. Sanguan is willingly led to the conclusion that he has been cuckolded; this issue is complicated by the malice of neighbourhood gossips who speculate that Yile resembles He Xiaoyong more than Sanguan. This assessment is shown to be unsound when Sanguan closely examines Yile, Erle, and

60 In Yu Hua’s Xiongdi , for example Lin Hong demands that Song Gang act as if Li Guangtou does not exist, but Song Gang cannot. Li is his brother (Lin says: “step brother”), and Li Lan, to whom he made his promise to look after Li was his mother (Lin says: “stepmother”). The lack of a blood tie is important to Lin Hong, but Song Gang believes that ties of affection are at least as important as formal relationships. 61 In these works, whenever it is made clear how zhishifenzi fall victim to exemplary punishment, it is invariably for a specious or absurd reason. Never do the post reform zhishifenzi portray actual rightists or actual counter- revolutionaries because, clearly, in the opinion of these authors, such people do not exist. The point made is that unmerited punishment was adopted as a deliberate tactic of terror. 60

Sanle and decides that all three boys look like each other. However, in an environment where exemplars of moral responsibility are few, avoiding his responsibilities by denying paternity begins to appear as a viable option for Sanguan. Yile admires his father and is both brave and helpful, but when the former gets into trouble after cleverly beating up a bully, Sanguan begins to see the profit to be had from repudiating his son – sweetly asking his wife how much she and He Xiaoyong have managed to come up with to pay for the bully’s medical expenses. Desperate not to lose all of her household effects in compensation to the blacksmith father of the bully, Yulan tells Yile that he must approach He Xiaoyong and call him “father” three times. Yile obeys his mother unwillingly, because he has little idea who He Xiaoyong is, and then quickly leaves. Through this act Yile’s place in the family and his status as the first- born son is denied.

Sanguan’s repudiation of his son can be understood as being of a piece with the revolutionary state’s consistent evasion of its responsibilities to its citizens. Sanguan, like the state in relation to the citizenry, has created a profound fracture in his family which he justifies on the false basis that Yile’s blood and his own are different. The zhishifenzi -child is the victim of a patriarchal family-state structure which disavows its responsibilities. Blood theory, the national policy of the Cultural Revolution era applied here within the family, provides Sanguan with a specious basis for acts of exclusion directed at his children which simply serve his own expedient purposes. For zhishifenzi, we can argue, this is another illustration of their view that the true basis for social exclusion and discrimination in China, even before the Cultural Revolution, was always something other than that stated: rather than a real politics of class struggle underlying the blood theory, it is simply a mask for selfishness and cruelty on the part of those in dominant positions -- a selfishness and cruelty whose key victims are children.

Sanguan justifies his repudiation of his oldest son Yile to his two youngest children and tells them that He Xiaoyong is ultimately responsible for Yile and is the latter’s biological father. Sanguan tells his young children that their mother was ‘knocked up’ by He and that Yile is not their brother. He extracts a promise from the younger boys to rape He’s daughters when they are older. Sanguan thus recruits other members of his family to enforce his exclusion of Yile and, by establishing a basis for exclusion, Sanguan is obliged to consistently apply it

61 even as his family situation descends further into crisis. In the famine following the Great Leap Forward , Sanguan has little recourse but to sell his own blood so that the family can eat. The ensuing family trip to the Victory restaurant is not for everybody to share in, however. Sanguan argues that blood money cannot be spent on non-blood children, so Yile is obliged to make do with fifty fen to buy a roasted sweet potato while the rest of the family go to the restaurant to eat noodles. Yulan bristles at this discrimination, so Sanguan patiently, but brutally, explains the matter to Yile. Sanguan tells him that “if you were my son, you would be my favourite son of all,” and Sanguan cannot see that this appeal to human affection only makes matters worse. Yile, crushed by his father’s unfair discrimination proposes to auction his filial allegiance for a symbol of belonging. Yile declares “Xu Sanguan isn’t my real dad. He Xiaoyong isn’t my real dad either. I don’t have a dad…” and “…if anyone will buy me a bowl of noodles, I will be their son.” We can suggest that this stands as a symbol of the plight of the zhishifenzi -child that Fictional History constructs – such children are “orphaned” by acts of social exclusion, even when their own parents are still living, and willing to give themselves to anyone who will provide for them.

Significantly, Sanguan himself was an abandoned child. Sanguan tells Yile the story of his own childhood, explaining how his mother ran off with someone else, and how he got lost looking for his grandfather’s house in the country and was rescued by his fourth uncle. Sanguan tells the story for his own purposes, but it serves to indicate how hypocritical his own attitude towards his son has been, but perhaps suggesting that the exclusion from family structures that Yile experiences is part of a recurrent, and perhaps culturally embedded pattern. When Sanguan repeats “I could never be your real dad”, Yile leaves home and is seen around the town crying. Sanguan affects not to be worried about him, saying; “If a kid really isn’t your own flesh and blood, there’s no way he’ll ever become your own, no matter how well you raise him,” a stance which could perhaps be encapsulating a broader social disavowal of responsibility for the plight of bullied children.

Perhaps it is the sudden consciousness of his son’s undeserved suffering, or perhaps because he is shamed by the similarity of his words to the empty rhetoric of class struggle, with its disavowal of any sense of responsibility for fellow humans, and in particular for those unjustly excluded and victimised, but Sanguan begins to be worried about Yile and joins in

62 the effort to find him. Sanguan finds him crying next-door. Yile tells his father that he has come back because he thought that Sanguan loved him more than He Xiaoyong does. Sanguan blusters and continues to refer to himself as Yile’s stepfather, but he does take him out for noodles at the Victory restaurant. This episode is the beginning of Sanguan’s moral redemption and of the development of his new understanding of the factors between people which determine true belonging. We might argue that this suggests that in the bleak landscape of a brutalised society, some sense of hope is possible.

Sanguan’s new-found devotion to his son is demonstrated in the final part of the novel where during the Cultural Revolution, Yile having been ‘sent down’ to the countryside, becomes seriously ill. Yile is brought back home by his brother Erle (whose ties of affection towards his elder brother have never wavered), and the local doctors direct the family to take Yile at once to a larger hospital in Shanghai. Sanguan, in his transformed state, now appeals to his community to loan the money required for Yile’s treatment. The reader understands that since Sanguan’s purpose is now virtuous and humane his community, which had formerly shunned him, rallies to the cause. Sanguan is even able to raise a loan of money from He Xiaoyong’s widow. When it becomes clear, however, that in addition to accepting all these loans Sanguan will also need to sell his blood in all of the hospitals along the road to Shanghai, Sanguan finally symbolically accepts his son as a “blood” relative.

A concern for the self Redemptive transformations like Sanguan’s and Fugui’s are rare in Fictional History and they are always perceived to arise from the gradual onset of empathy with others at the level of the individual; particular fathers redeem themselves in relation to particular children. Fictional History suggests that beyond revolutionary ideology and beyond traditional familial cultural practices there is a type of natural morality demonstrated in such tasks as caring for children and animals and in coming to the assistance of those in need. Babies and small children are metaphors for helplessness in Fictional History, and their mistreatment and abandonment is held out as an index of social dysfunction, a dysfunction of which zhishifenzi are the primary victims. Post-reform zhishifenzi writers and film-makers intimate that, in the revolutionary period, a confusion of moral messages was responsible for the breakdown of natural morality

63 and of the relationship between adults and children. The zhishifenzi authors of Fictional History are chroniclers of this breakdown, and, it is implied, products of it.

Gao Xingjian’s Ling shan (1990) features a parable concerning an abandoned child. After attempting to visit a mountain Taoist, the narrator, returning down the mountain, discovers a small boy, who is sobbing and naked, having been abandoned on the road. The narrator picks him up and the child at once falls asleep in his arms. The narrator begins to feel a sudden gush of affection for this defenceless child: “You feel a warmth strike your heart such as you have not felt for a long time…” 一股温热打你心氏勇出，你许久没有过这种柔情 (Ch.74). The narrator’s feeling of satisfaction at having performed this humane act does not long endure, however, and he begins to be worried by the prospect of taking responsibility for the child. Regretting his earlier impulse, the narrator returns the now-sleeping child back to the place he first found him, sets him down, and runs away. The narrator’s repentance reveals his moral state: he lacks the bravery and conviction to assume responsibility for the child, he is unworthy of the child’s trust, and thus he is without the virtue necessary to find his own soul. His moral failure, we might argue, is a symbol of the failures of the individuals and organisations that were in loco parentis in the Mao-era who did not fulfil their duty of care to the innocent lives in their charge.

In Fictional History narratives, the abandonment of children, although it is encouraged by the moral ethos of the Mao era and justified by appeals to ideology, is always actually motivated by self-interest, reinforcing the sense of a moral bankruptcy that is all-pervasive in Mao-era society. In Yu Hua’s Zai xiyu zhong huhan , Guoqing, a friend of Guanglin’s, is abandoned by his father who wishes to get remarried. His intended spouse is a woman who already has a family of her own and does not want Guoqing. The monstrous, inhuman, and callous plan to desert an eight-year-old boy is put into effect with complete coolness. Guoqing’s father casually departs with the household effects on a cart, leaving Guoqing with ten yuan and some ration tickets. Guoqing’s relatives on his deceased mother’s side attempt to remonstrate with the father but he is adamant that he has moved on and is not going to look after Guoqing anymore. He demands that they stop shouting at him because if they do not he will not be able to live it down in his new neighbourhood. Guoqing remains alone and his material needs are provided for by a subscription. In the ensuing weeks, Guoqing still believes in his father’s

64 authority over him, and hopes that his father will one-day return for him. He is constrained in his pursuit of his own freedom by these self-deceptions but, eventually, when one day he meets his father on the street, his father makes it clear that they are now, and will remain, strangers.

Guoqing’s cry that his father doesn’t want him anymore is his coming-of-age realisation but more importantly, it is, we can argue, a condensed metaphor for the abandonment and neglect which defined Cultural Revolution society, and of all the exclusions that Fictional History sees as having been inflicted upon those who exhibited moral or social difference in the Maoist period. 62 Guoqing’s name, ( 国庆 National Day ), is a further sign of the parallel between his experience and the abandonments and exclusions experienced in the nation as a whole and particularly by the educated in the last decade of the Maoist era. Guoqing launches into long flights of reverie about the time that he spent with his deceased mother. He speaks of those days with nostalgia: “When he was orphaned he began to reminisce over his mother: this child of only nine years did not imagine the future, but rather was propelled into the past.” 他开始想象他的母亲，在无依无靠的时候，这个只有九岁的孩子，想象没有面对未来，

而是过早地通往了过去 (p.229) .

Being abandoned by those who should have supported him in his childhood, Guoqing ceases to feel that he is a child. At the age of thirteen he leaves school, finds work as a coal carrier and assumes the responsibilities and burdens of an adult. But this assumption of adult status does not coincide with emotional or intellectual maturity. When he proposes marriage to the family of an eleven-year-old girl, her appalled parents throw him out of the house and keep their daughter enclosed. Guoqing’s childish sense of heroism, and his conviction that he is now a man, leads him to attempt a rescue of his beloved, armed with a knife. He is easily disarmed by the police, however, and is taken away, sobbing like the child he really is, to an uncertain fate.

Elsewhere in Zai xiyu zhong huhan , Yuqing, a girl from Guanglin’s village who had run off with a travelling peddler, is rediscovered living in town. Her dream of escape has led to a squalid room, a career as a prostitute, and a fatherless son -- Guanglin’s new friend Lulu.

62 It also anticipates the dilemma of an earlier generation in Chinese society who would later feel the sting of abandonment when they had outlived their political utility. 65

Yuqing is arrested and convicted for “immorality” turning her son Lulu into an orphan even though he argues before the court that if they lock his mother away, there will be nobody to care for him. He points out, for the benefit of the court, that he is still a small child but these arguments are ignored. It is a curious fact in these depictions of China in the Mao period that the law is rarely present as a force to oppose injustice but usually intervenes to render bad situations even more unjust. Lulu’s appeal in the courtroom to the ‘natural’ laws of affection and familial relationships is a moral argument which exposes the artificiality of the prosecution’s concern with public morals. Children – as Fictional History’s spokespeople for the zhishifenzi predicament – are shown as helpless advocates of a natural morality in a corrupt and brutal environment.

Again, in Zai xiyu zhong huhan Sun Guanglin also becomes, for the second time, an orphan. Li Xiuying, Sun Guanglin’s foster mother, is fragile and highly strung so Guanglin’s household arrangements with his foster parents are decidedly odd. Sun Guanglin is treated as an attachment to the house, rather like a servant or a pet, and is obliged to adapt his behaviour to whatever eccentricities his new parents manifest. (Again, this seems to be an allegory for the position of the educated group – those who will subsequently be zhishifenzi – in the Mao era). It becomes clear that this small boy has, like many other children in this period, no security, and he is at the mercy of people who are self-obsessed and negligent. After his foster father’s spectacular implosion, Li Xiuying becomes unhinged – though it appears that little was needed to push her over the edge in any case. She leaves town for her maternal home but forgets to make any provision for her foster son, Guanglin. Like Guoqing, Guanglin has no means to support himself, so he borrows boat fare from Guoqing to return to his natural father’s house. On the way home, Guanglin encounters his grandfather who has forgotten the way to Guangcai’s house. Guanglin does not recognise his grandfather, but the grandson leads the old man back home. They arrive just as a fire is consuming the family home. Through this we see that for these two, home is no haven and they are both as unwelcome as a calamity. Guanglin’s exile in the countryside has resumed. The cycle of child/ zhishifenzi alienation is resumed and repeated.

Family dysfunction, the creation of new families and the great refusal In the above texts childhood is depicted as a state of insecurity in which any perception of difference or deviation from the norm can precipitate exclusion from one’s family, one’s peers, or from the care of the state. In Yu Hua’s novel Huozhe, Fugui rationalises as common sense his decision that he cannot afford to educate both of his children, so he gives his daughter, Fengxia, away to a family in town. The calculations which have informed this decision seem to accord with tradition, since Fengxia is doubly demeaned by being both female and disabled. Youqing, however, in a further instance where children are shown to be more naturally morally upright than adults, is unable to think of his sister in such pragmatic terms. Youqing does not understand why Fengxia needs go away and, after his sister has gone, he mourns her and is beaten by his father. When Fengxia subsequently returns home crying, she is unable to tell anybody what has happened, but Fugui is determined despite his disadvantages to return her to her new situation. In a sign that Fugui is beginning to understand that others have independent lives and needs beyond his own, however, he relents and brings Fengxia back home.

Because he is never taken into the confidence of his father, Youqing finds it difficult to act in a way which will please Fugui. Ten-year-old Youqing runs over twenty-five kilometres to school and back each day. Fugui criticises him for wearing out his shoes and so Youqing begins to run barefoot, carrying his shoes in his hand and putting them on at school. Youqing tries to help the family and tries to please his father, but he is frightened of him. He does not know how to resolve the contradictions between Fugui’s conflicting instructions – not to run barefoot in the snow on the one hand and not to wear out his shoes on the other. (Again, this seems to dramatize the predicament of the zhishifenzi in relation to the authorities in Mao-era and post-Mao China). As a result of his daily exertions, Youqing becomes an accomplished distance runner and easily wins the distance race at the school sports day. His gym teacher values him for this achievement and so Youqing begins to have a closer relationship with his teacher than with his father. Fugui is proud that his son won the race but cannot resist belittling the achievement by telling the boy that even chickens can run. He suggests that his son study hard rather than run hard: “You don’t go to school to study running, what’s the point of it? Even chickens can run” 不是让你去学跑步，跑步还用学？鸡都还跑 . On another day Fugui drops in on Youqing’s school and is enraged because he thinks Youqing is 67 talking and not studying. Fugui rushes into the classroom and hits his son. Youqing’s teacher objects: “What are you? This is a school, not your home in the country” 你是什么人？这是学校，不是乡下 . The endless sense of failing to meet the demands of the parental-state structure pursues the child-zhishifenzi wherever he goes.

From the parental perspective, Fugui is unable to think of his son, or of his daughter, as people who have an inner-life of their own. Fugui treats them both in ways that best fit with his own conception of who they are, as part of his own life and struggle. That Fengxia and Youqing inevitably develop independent affections, talents, and personalities and that they are both eventually lost to him helps Fugui to begin to understand that children’s lives have autonomous value. 63 For post-reform zhishifenzi reading themselves into this narrative, it is empathy and an appreciation of the individuality of others which guard civilization and prevent cruelty – Fugui moves from his former insensitivity to a state of understanding of the reality of the personalities of his children. Fugui’s ultimate conviction is that his own life’s meaning has been derived from his relationships and that these meanings transcend even the deaths of those he has loved. Fugui, as an old man, surrounds himself with reminders of his loved ones by naming various local animals after his family members and, in this way, goes beyond concern for humans to a compassion towards all things which have lives and suffer. 64 The insensitive father redeems himself by seeing the children that he has wronged as part of a broader world of living beings for which he comes to have empathy.

Yu Hua’s novel Huozhe , ( 活着 ) is usually translated as ‘To Live’ but the title is deliberately obscure. Fugui lives through many hardships, and feels some joys, and so he has, in a real

63 In his old age, Fugui assumes responsibility for the care of a little boy. Kugen is the son of Fengxia and, in his relationship with his grandson, Fugui demonstrates how much more empathy he has acquired from when his own son was alive. Fugui’s participation in Kugen’s childhood assists Fugui to make amends for missing Youqing’s. Even though well into the reform period, childhood in China remains fragile, and tragedy soon strikes when Kugen dies. Fugui surmises that Kugen choked on some beans which Fugui had given him as a treat but Kugen was already sick, poor, and overworked. Kugen found those poor beans exciting and enticing because he never had treats: “All the other kids in the village have better than Kugen’s beans, Kugen rarely gets the chance to eat beans” 村里是家的孩子都过得比苦根好就是豆子 . Kugen’s death leaves Fugui, after a long life of struggle, alone in the world. 64 Fugui, it must be remembered, was originally of the gentry class and it is somewhat ironic that he ends up becoming a transformed and contented peasant. Yu Hua’s point is that hardship causes suffering and injustice in the lives of China’s people, but this suffering can be turned to good account. That Fugui, an ex-landlord can become a bucolic success accords with Yu Hua’s tendency to make heroes of unlikely protagonists. The Yu Hua hero, of course, is a vivid contrast to the fanatic socialist heroes promoted at this period.

68 sense, lived. Fugui changes his ideas of what it means to live over the course of his life and so, in that sense, he has learnt a lesson in what it means to live . Ultimately, Fugui has been brought to an understanding of the value of all life and, in this sense, he identifies with all things which live – learning a compassion which extends to everyone and everything he has wronged or mistreated. The spiritual growth that Fugui and Sanguan undergo is evidence of their learning and progress, and is, perhaps, a sign of hope for the children bullied or excluded by their actions. However, we can observe that for zhishifenzi , the essence of brute human nature is that it is static, unchanging, and indicative of spiritual retardation. For zhishifenzi , who recognize that the practical adherence to their own ethical convictions are obligatory, the challenge is to uphold these standards in the face of suffering and persecution.

Who is my family? A consistent theme in zhishifenzi Fictional History is that true families, like nations, are built upon a network of sympathy and care rather than strict blood relationships – exclusion is an historical distortion of this. For zhishifenzi , whose relationships with their natural families are often problematic, one’s true source of support is frequently located outside the family. The creation of supportive bonds with like-minded others requires a prior acceptance of one’s difference from peers and a renunciation of more conventional means of support (including the family). A central question in the Fictional History narrative of childhood is the state of the person at the border between childhood and adolescence. In Fictional History texts, a coming-of-age crisis leads an individual to lodge a claim to moral autonomy, signalling the end of childish dependence – the state characteristic of those living through the Mao era. For zhishifenzi the progression towards this moral autonomy is marked by a period of equivocation followed by a somewhat despairing resignation. 65

In Wang Xiaoshuai’s film, Wo 11 (2011), the young protagonist, Wang Han, observes (of the late Mao era in which the film is set):

“You spend your life looking at other people, you imagine being born elsewhere, you dream of another life, but one day you realise it’s

65 This observation accords with the view expressed in these texts that childhood, in its sense of being a state of spiritual dependence, may be cast aside at any time in an individual’s life or, indeed, not cast away at all. Thus Wang Han, Tietou, and Sun Guanglin reach a state of maturity while still young but Fugui only experiences the end of his ‘childhood’ when, as an old man, he purchases his ox. 69

impossible: you’re just you, born into this family, at this time. Your dreams won’t change your life’s path, you have to accept it and respect it…” (Burley, trans.)

Since children generally tend to give most credence to the opinions of those in authority, and since children are instinctively aware that conformity with their peers is safer than individuality, the sudden realisation of one’s irrevocable and compelling spiritual separation from others is experienced as traumatic. Wang Han, along with similar characters in post- reform zhishifenzi narrative, recall the moments they became aware of their spiritual alienation as a dilemma and not (at least initially) as a moment of joy. For Wang Han in Wo 11 , Sun Guanglin in Yu Hua’s Zai xiyuzhong huhan , and Tietou in Lan Fengzheng, the time comes when they must each accept their spiritual difference from those around them as an ineradicable part of their identity. This acceptance is traumatic because it embodies something of Cavafy’s ‘great refusal,’ a choice which accords with their individual conscience, and is therefore ‘right,’ but which rarely leads to worldly happiness or success. 66

Concluding remarks

We have observed above that although childhood experience is generally crucial in establishing the personalities and identities which mark generational distinctiveness, children are rarely the subject of history. Childhood reminiscences are common in literature, but post- reform zhishifenzi are singular in being a class which narrates its childhood as moulded by revolutionary Chinese history. These stories of Mao-era childhood present both the sources of the zhishifenzi predicament and are allegories of it. The fictionalized narratives of childhood examined here describe a set of traumatic experiences which are an attempt to articulate zhishifenzi collective experience as a sustained metaphor, one significance of which is to pass

66 Che Fece ... Il Gran Refiuto: For some people the day comes when they have to declare the great Yes or the great No. It’s clear at once who has the Yes ready within him; and saying it, he goes from honor to honor, strong in his conviction. He who refuses does not repent. Asked again, he’d still say no. Yet that no—the right no— drags him down all his life. -- C. P. CAVAFY (EDMUND KEELEY Trans) 70 judgment upon, and to explain, the relation of the past to the present, but Fictional History is also employed by zhishifenzi to express their class sense of difference as this is reflected within Chinese history. 67

In the next chapter, I examine the ways in which Fictional History represents the political and social trauma of the twentieth century in China as a reflection, among other things, of zhishifenzi narratives of identity. We can observe that in all periods of history individuals are required to orient themselves within their culture and to answer the question: of what stories do I find myself a part, and is my perspective dependent upon what has gone before? I will examine some of the wider narratives of trauma presented by post-reform writers and film- makers which are part of the story-scape comprising the spiritual world and the psychic inheritance of the post-reform zhishifenzi.

67 Because the cognitive method of the zhishifenzi is perceived as relying upon the extensive use of metaphor, zhishifenzi sense of identity characteristically arises from aesthetic productions, rather than from academic or theoretical history. The ability to imagine alternative realities and to change history by the application of creative imagination is characteristic of zhishifenzi cognition and a vital component of class identity. 71

3. Of faith, trauma and farce – Fictional History explains Mao- era China

Principal texts:

Yu Hua, Huozhe (1992)

Yu Hua, Xu Sanguan mai xue ji (1995)

Yu Hua, Xiongdi (2005)

Hu Jie, Xunzhao Lin Zhao de linghun (2004)

Hu Jie, Wo sui si qu (2006)

Ma Jian, Rou zhi tu (2008)

Tian Zhuangzhuang, Lan fengzheng (1993)

Wang Xiaoshuai , Wo 11 (2011)

By fictionally representing their early experiences, post-reform zhishifenzi writers and film- makers present a case for generational solidarity derived from the environment in which these childhood experiences took place, as well as a group solidarity based upon a common response to those experiences. The defining characteristics of childhood experience in the period of the Cultural Revolution are narrated as being bullying and division for the child- zhishifenzi characters that are the foci of these texts and films: these narratives also observe that the negligent treatment of children has engendered lasting trauma. It is strongly suggested that the arbitrary allocation of out-group status results in profound personal and social traumas that include a sense of grievance and alienation which persists into subsequent historical periods, even after the originating ideology, the putative cause of the trauma, has been repudiated. In addition to creating narratives that approach history from the level of

72 personal experience – and above all the experience of children – Fictional History offers what might be seen as a broad explanatory account of the historical processes that have unfolded in modern China, processes that the fictional historians see as both traumatic, and morally and culturally determined. Significantly, Fictional History neither explains the traumas of the Mao years as products of the revolutionary process or as products of underlying cultural problems that the revolution was supposed to address.

I should emphasise here that this chapter examines works that are both overtly fictional and documentaries which examine real historical individuals. In using the term Fictional History to describe both types of works I do not seek to suggest that the documentary films examined are fictional in the sense of being invented. Rather I see the kinship between the two types of works as lying in their adoption of a similar stance on the events and in their deployment of a story-telling narrative style in which history is experienced as a set of personal tragedies that unfold in the lives of real or fictional individuals. This style, I suggest, is more akin to realist fiction than to either academic history or to the stylised works of official CCP historiography. It is the sense of history as both personal experience and as a moral process that I wish to emphasise in my grouping together of novels and documentary films from the 1990s and 2000s.

Whereas the previous chapter presented a picture of Mao-era childhoods produced by post- reform zhishifenzi writers and filmmakers that was strongly autobiographical in character, this present chapter examines the ways in which fictional historians represent the political and social violence of Mao-era Chinese history and perhaps modern Chinese history more broadly as something of a culturally-defined and culturally conditioned phenomenon. In claiming that modern Chinese history is marked by trauma, post-reform zhishifenzi argue that ideologies circulating in China in the Mao-era and by-implication in the post-Mao era as well, elevated political and social positions propounded by the state and espoused by those citizens who aligned themselves with the state into a fervid expression of faith which inevitably established contending parties of acolytes and heretics, creating a profound collective trauma. It is an important part of this theory of trauma, that membership of these two factions, despite the devastating consequences of being relegated to heretical status, are not based upon any objective profession of heresy but have more to do with the expedient exercise of power.

Where zhishifenzi -children bear witness to these struggles, the narratives of Fictional History also document the experience of those adults – parents, older siblings, or senior people more broadly defined – who are participants in the factional struggles of Mao-era China. Fictional History in this sense moves beyond an autobiographical to a documentary idiom. In shifting the focus from children to adults, fictional historians move from the recollection of their own recollected pasts to the observation and documentation of historical processes and of the individuals caught up in them.

Violence in the service of these Mao-era social faiths and the factions of acolytes and heretics with which they are connected is narrated as having a status approaching that of holy war, and so the perpetrators of violence claim an inexorable moral superiority over their opponents. Fictional History, depicts violence as it may have been subjectively experienced by the protagonists of the Mao era, and thus recruits the imagination of the reader in creating empathy for the victims of historical trauma (and perhaps for the perpetrators of violence as well). Writing of the literary recollection of Mao-era violence, Susanne Weigelin- Schwiedrzik has observed that “…members of (China’s) younger generation such as the prominent writers Yu Hua and Mo Yan, indirectly add to our understanding of memory and trauma in the context of culture. Their stories do not read as an appeal to the rulers to better take care of the people. They refer to the people in a very direct manner that sees their actions and reactions in the context of Chinese culture.” 68 Drawing on Weiglin-Schwiedrzik’s analysis, we can observe that post-reform Fictional History integrates trauma into the historical narrative in a distinct way: “Those who participate in defining the collective memory of the catastrophic event de-traumatize the trauma by integrating into the historical narrative that which is not integratable...” Because those who directly experienced the traumatic event in history tend not to participate in the shaping of the public recollection of the event, Fictional History preserves what post-reform writers and film-makers view as the cultural significance of the trauma that was experienced by the participants in the violence (those older than the fictional children who are the witnesses of the events and the textual surrogates for the post-reform zhishifenzi narrators/authors). The authors of Fictional History prevent the significance of the event for the whole of the Chinese people, although this means

68 Weigelin-Schwiedrzik, S. (2003). Trauma and Memory: The case of the Great Famine in the People's Republic of China (1959-1961). [Article]. Historiography East & West, 1 (1), 39-67. p.57 74 that the story must be different from the memories of those who lived through the trauma. As a result, these Fictional History narratives may sometimes incorporate elements of humour or absurdity. Indeed, in these texts trauma in Chinese history is represented variously as violence, neglect, exclusion, alienation and, (since it has no genuine justifying ideology), as farce.

The narratives of Fictional History texts suggest that the ubiquity of trauma in twentieth century Chinese history was exacerbated by a culture which facilitated violence. However, this does not mean that the trauma of recent history is deemed to have been inevitable. For the post-reform zhishifenzi authors of Fictional History, culture is not the sole determining factor in social behaviour; it is an aggravating factor. Accordingly, these texts and films indict personal failings as the decisive elements in the personal tragedies of those who were adults in the Mao-era. They avoid wholesale condemnation or pardoning of the participants in or perpetrators of this violence. It is a noteworthy feature of post-reform Fictional History that the desire to censure or blame prominent individuals in history is absent.

The orthodox history of modern China promulgated by the Chinese state in recent decades attempts to present China’s economic ascendency in the contemporary era as the outcome of planned developmental policies; this narrative has tended to elide much of the trauma of history. In this argument ‘the life we have in China today’ is understood as somehow contingent upon unacknowledged traumas. This state-sponsored narrative has implicitly constructed the violence and injustice of history as essential stages upon a journey to renewal. 69 The imposition of this grim type of officially-sanctioned order upon the trauma of history is also resisted in the texts of Fictional History. The works of Fictional History contend that revolutionary China’s traumas were of benefit to nobody. In addition, they argue that the perpetrators were as much damaged as the victims.

In summary, then, the object of the works of Fictional History is always to gather together the subjective meanings of historical events as these are imagined by those who witnessed these events and to explain these events: this applies particularly to those events that are seen as

69 Hu Jie, in Xunzhao Lin Zhao de Linghun (2004), interviews one of Lin Zhao’s school friends who offers her summary of the revolutionary period in China; “The proletarian revolution was trialled in Mao’s lifetime and those who represented the bourgeoisie with their freedom and their democracy were cracked down upon. The proletarian revolution was so cruel…it was tried, and it failed and is not pursued anymore. The bourgeoisie had to fail, however, otherwise we would not have the life we have in China today….” 75 being productive of wide-scale social and individual trauma. The reader (or viewer) arrives at a position which reflects the moral complexities demonstrated in the Fictional History narratives. In interpreting and explaining trauma, these works view the historical events of the Mao-era as involving intersection of culture, history, and ethics. History is depicted as a series of events that demonstrate the operation of the moral choices of individual historical actors and these choices are the means whereby audiences empathise and participate in the fictional world of the past and ponder challenges posed to their own moral understandings. The mass of resolved and unresolved moral dilemmas presented in these works ultimately leads to a type of moral synthesis in which the entire history of revolutionary China is comprehended within an ethical framework, and the entire history of China in the modern, revolutionary era becomes, thereby, a moral lesson for the reader/viewer. To the extent that zhishifenzi comprehension of this ethical framework differs from that of other groups in post- reform Chinese society, these differences are presented as marking the identity and ideology of the post-reform zhishifenzi . This sense of having “understood” the modern history of China as a story of moral failure in a way in which non-zhishifenzi in contemporary China may have failed to do, is part of what expresses and creates the shared experience of zhishifenzi as a social group.

Contending faiths

The works of Fictional History produced after 1989 attempt to provide an explanatory narrative of the whole course of the history of the Mao era from the 1950s to the 1970s. This narrative attempts to suggest what forces caused the history of this period to unfold in the way that zhishifenzi narrators saw it as doing. One core part of this narrative is that post- reform Fictional Histories identify revolutionary China’s traumas as entailing a struggle between secular faiths in which a hatred of apostasy is the animating force. This sense of the period as a struggle between secular faiths is arguably already visible in work produced in the heyday of zhishifenzi culture in the decade before 1989. Jia Pingwa’s Fuzao (1986), presents a quasi-religious fervour as an element in the national ‘inferiority complex’; he shows this

76 mindset as a product of the intersection between China’s ‘Century of humiliation’ rhetoric and its ‘Five thousand years of culture’ rhetoric. This intersection explains, for Jia Pingwa, the fanaticism and violence which he sees as accompanying the conduct of public affairs in modern China and in the Mao-era in particular. According to this viewpoint, China’s historical weakness, colonialization, and international isolation have provoked a deep desire in Chinese people at all social levels to recover national greatness. At the same time, pride in China’s splendid historical cultural achievements flatters the population into a state of pervasive resistance to spiritual, cultural, and educational reform. It is implied that the urge to recover Chinese greatness inspires fervent schemes which tolerate no opposition. However, the inevitable failure of these schemes, at least in the view of the post-reform zhishifenzi producers of Fictional History, is a consequence of an irresistible regression into traditional cultural norms which are anti-modern and thus retard progress. In chronicling the vicissitudes of the lives of Mao-era adults, who are the protagonists of Fictional History narratives, these arguments are explicitly or explicitly used as explanations.

Following on from Jia Pingwa and his peers writing in the years between the late 1970s and the late 1980s, post-reform Fictional History narratives strongly suggest that the educated stratum in China in mid-twentieth century saw the victory and assumption of power by the CCP in 1949 as the central plank of their hopes for national renewal. The focus of this faith, shared, it is implied, by the educated stratum with the common folk, was Mao Zedong. Fictional History narratives suggest that Mao’s recourse to traditional authoritarian modes of public administration after his assumption of power was somewhat inevitable, but it is the loss of faith in Mao which this reversion provoked that they present as being at the centre of China’s historical trauma. Perhaps the most explicit presentation of this is in Hu Jie’s 2004 documentary film Xunzhao Lin Zhao de linghun, where the famous archival scenes of jubilation as Mao announces the establishment of the People’s Republic atop Tiananmen in 1949 are depicted. The film shows Lin Zhao’s enthusiasm for Mao as similarly enthusiastic: it asserts that even Lin’s father was supplanted in her affections by the great leader. 70 In the early 1950s, the narrative asserts, whenever Lin thought of Mao she was “so excited.” She wrote “Now I need nothing more, I have little feeling for my family, I only have a red star in

70 Lin Zhao in a sense adopts Mao as a substitute father and at this time refers to him as 父亲 (fuqin , father). 77 my heart.” This faith, it is suggested, is what underpins the traumas of the subsequent period, although it might be further argued that because Hu Jie’s film is a documentary rather than a work of fiction, its implicit claim to explain the history of this period in terms of the personal moral commitments that drove it have an extra-level of tragic meaning, linking it to the agendas of Fictional History.

In the texts of Fictional History, the establishment of the PRC is consistently depicted as a moment in which contention ended and confidence and enthusiasm were widespread. We can suggest that the lingering enthusiasm of post-reform zhishifenzi for this period of history is reflected in these depictions, which do, however, have a certain elegiac quality. Accompanying the representation of historical scenes of enthusiasm is a rueful sense that this halcyon period of unity in the first years of the People’s Republic may have engendered the social consensus necessary for Chinese renewal but that the celebrations and the speeches of this era were not enough on their own, and what was needed was to take advantage of the popular fervour to begin lifting the consciousness of the people. However, the intellectual stratum of the period became complicit in the violent overthrow of the old gentry class which is presented in Fictional History as a savage omen of the social struggles to come. Lin Zhao, certainly, expressed the view at the time that land reform was vital to China’s development and the film depicts her working hard at dispossessing the landlords. 71

Though faith in Mao and in communism in these early years is presented as being overwhelming, it is intimated in the work of Hu Jie and other writers and directors surveyed here that the mainstream of Chinese intellectual conviction at the time was broadly humanistic rather than Maoist or Marxist. Wang Jingyao claims in Wo sui si qu that the educated class’s support for the Marxist program of equality and freedom was built upon

71 This resonates with the claims of scholars of the period from outside China. Shambaugh asserts that this foundation period of the PRC, from 1949 to 1955 was successful in establishing a strong base of ruling legitimacy Shambaugh, D. (2011). The foundations of communist rule. In W. Kirby (Ed.), The People's Republic of China at 60: An international assessment . Cambridge Mass: Harvard University Asia Center. (p.19) Images of land reform activities in Hu Jie’s film, we can suggest, reflect the genuine joy rural people felt at the land-reform policies of the Party at the time. The producers of Fictional History, however, suggest that in eliminating corrupt elements who were invested in maintaining China’s ‘feudal’ traditions, the Party made little effort to distinguish small-scale landlords and traders from the exploiting gentry class. It is broadly contended in the works surveyed here that the tendency of particular elements within Chinese society of the revolutionary period to judge and divide, and to deal out death in punishment for purported crimes, was not tempered by compassion or justified by proper judicial inquiry. The carelessness and indifference with which condemnations were made in these early years, is viewed in these texts as establishing a baneful precedent for later violence. 78 support for the principles of the Western enlightenment, and more contemporaneously, the principles underlying the Atlantic Charter. Wang’s later view is that the effort to fit Mao’s Stalinism into the scope of enlightened liberalism could not withstand the cultural exigencies of Chinese tradition. Mao’s growing antipathy towards the intellectual stratum from the mid- 1950s onwards is interpreted by Wang as a recurrence of China’s imperial tendencies. The trauma of the Mao-years, it is suggested, arises from cultural features that have historical roots that run back further than the revolutionary decades.

Furthermore, we can suggest that it is being argued by commentators such as Hu Jie that early manifestations of cultural authoritarianism in the revolutionary period established and reinforced ideas and practices of social exclusion of the kind we saw presented in the previous chapter. State indifference to the infliction of violence upon those of its citizens who were perceived to be enemies led to a dawning realization on the part of Lin Zhao and within the educated class that they had not understood Mao’s ideology. That the revolution became so profligate in taking human life was deeply troubling for the old intellectual class, but even more so was the unconcerned attitude of the party authorities and the political activists towards the deaths that occurred in this period. 72 The disillusionment with communist ideology and with the inhumanity of the leadership on the part of the intellectuals of the Mao- era is presented in these texts as an experience of a traumatic loss of faith in Maoism and its ideals.

Fictional History frequently likens the intellectuals’ loss of faith in Mao to the breakdown of a marriage and the destruction of family relationships. In these texts and films, the lives of Chinese people are symbolically joined with Mao on a personal level as if he were a family member or a respected guest. In Tian Zhuangzhuang’s feature film, Lan fengzheng , the first

72 At the funeral of Zhang Side, Mao said “All men must die, but death can vary in its significance. The ancient Chinese writer Sima Qian said “Though death befalls all men alike, it may be weightier than mount Tai or lighter than a feather”” Mao’s words were held to mean that the deaths of those who served the people were weighty, like Mount Tai, but others were as light as a feather. In fact, Sima Qian was talking about the means of death, haunted as he was with thoughts of suicide. Mao was mistaken in interpreting the historian’s words as applying to the objective value of an individual’s life. Ultimately the historian was saying that a person is responsible for their own life and how they manage it and their end can be ennobling - it can make one’s life (and death) as weighty as Mount Tai, or it can be flung away as easily as a feather. In this statement we recognize the humaneness and individualism which has been a constant among Chinese intellectuals up until the present. It does not license the wholesale murder of people whom the government finds politically objectionable. Lo, P.-C. (2002). Confucian views on suicide and their implications for euthanasia. Philosophy and Medicine, 61 , 69-101. (http://arts.hkbu.edu.hk/) 79 scene is of a young couple, Shaolong and Shujuan, renovating a room in a hutong in which they will live after their wedding. It is 1953 and their wedding is postponed so as not to conflict with the public mourning for the death of Stalin. The young couple are eventually married, however, and the guests sing in the new style of celebration: “In our great Motherland things get better every day, workers love labour, prosperity abounds.” A photograph of Mao on the living room wall is an explicit focus of the celebration and the newly-married couple bow towards the portrait seeking, in a sense, the leader’s benediction. In this film and in other works of Fictional History, the ubiquity of Mao’s portrait, and his image generally, undergoes a change in significance as time passes. The image of Mao, initially the benevolent father and honoured wedding guest, later looms over scenes of chaos and atrocity, culminating in the Cultural Revolution where his colossal statues and words carved in stone dominate landscapes of civic despair. Mao’s image is transformed in these texts to become part of the apparatus of the totalitarian system, serving as a warning that the Chairman is returning one’s gaze and interrogating the orthodoxy of one’s beliefs. 73

In the early years of the PRC, however, Fictional History presents the relationship between the people and the leader as characterized by the restoration of social justice. In Yu Hua’s Huozhe , Fugui is returned to his family with the assistance of the PLA after being abducted by a KMT brigade in the street of his home town. After the establishment of the new republic, Long’er, the gambler who had swindled Fugui out of his family’s wealth, is summarily deprived of his booty and, because he is unable to curb his imperious attitude to his ex-tenants, is executed by the new authorities on the grounds of being a despotic landlord. Fictional History shows us how those whose affiliation has been with the old gentry class but whose crimes have been venial also begin to understand the scope of the changes. In Lan Fengzheng Mrs Lam, the erstwhile landlady of Dry Well Lane hutong, expresses her apprehension to Tietou’s father about the rumour that class background is now to become permanent and will not depend on whether or not “bad” class elements have reformed. Post-reform zhishifenzi producers of Fictional History depict such contradictions as an indication that conciliation between social groups is gradually being withdrawn in favour of policies of social division

73 In the author’s introduction to The Red Mirror , Wen Chihua recalls her elementary schooling in Chengdu during the Cultural Revolution. There was the usual portrait of Mao above the blackboard and the teacher would warn the children that the Chairman was always watching to see who a Red child was and who was not. Naughtiness was punished by the teacher asking, “Who is watching?” (p.1). 80 based upon inherited characteristics. A similar attitude is depicted in Yu Hua’s Xiongdi , where Fanping’s father, the old ‘landlord,’ even many years after his dispossession from his meagre quantity of landed property, remains the source of his family’s persecution. Old Song is, in fact, an abject picture of poverty and submissiveness and it is impossible to rationally conceive that he might harbour any hopes of initiating a return of the old order or pose any threat to socialism. 74

Zhishifenzi authors from the post-reform era, perhaps reflecting their own imagined role as social managers, portray the early policy missteps of the revolutionary period as a failure of supervision, rather than as matters of the substance of policy – they do not definitively repudiate the revolutionary project. The implementation of the first mass movements, they suggest, was, in their view, deficient and left the common people unsure of their position. The establishment of the communes and the beginning of the Great Leap Forward are presented as illustrations of moments in the relationship between the state and the people in which ordinary people begin to express bafflement about, if not opposition towards, the government’s policies. When individual household cooking pots are compulsorily removed, a period of communal dining begins. In Huozhe, Youqing’s lambs become a sacrifice to the prodigality of the time. They are surrendered to the commune and devoured in the intemperate feasting in the communal dining hall. In the city, too, feasting in neighbourhood dining halls seems at first to indicate the “superiority of socialism” as a form of intemperate gluttony. In Lan fengzheng city people are shown as eating meat every day and as eating, moreover, as much as they like. The food is soon gone, however, and no more is forthcoming. Allegorically, in Fugui’s commune all the livestock has been eaten and only three draught animals remain to work the land. The communal food halls close and people are obliged to go back to cooking for themselves using replacement pots. A fantasy of utopian sharing is hereby mocked.

In Yu Hua’s Xu Sanguan mai xue ji , famine arrives soon after this point; beggars from the countryside come into town, the price of rice spirals and sometimes the rice shop does not

74 In these post-reform Fictional History works the point is made insistently that targets of class struggle did not cherish dreams of the return of the KMT, rather they were as well assimilated into revolutionary society as anyone else and later, far from posing a threat to the Party, their descendants were frequently the Party’s greatest supporters. 81 open at all. Normal life becomes impossible under the stress of starvation so the schools, the silk factory, and Yulan’s fried dough stand close. One night, lying in bed when the family has had little to eat, Sanguan tells his wife and children that he will “cook” for them individually, and that they can have anything they want. He says that he will cook with his mouth and they will eat with their ears. Sanguan then begins to vividly describe the process of preparing and cooking his own favourite dish – red braised pork. Because he so skilfully evokes that dish, the rest of the family, in their turn, order the same thing, red braised pork, and so Sanguan is obliged to “cook” it five times. In this odd and otherwise inexplicable scene, Yu Hua can be seen as drawing an association with Chairman Mao, whose favourite dish was, famously, red braised pork. 75 In this way the connection between the famine and state policy, and the beginning of a loss of faith in the leadership is made metaphorically. In this way too, Fictional History at once mocks and mourns the failures of the Party to provide for the populace that gives it political support.

Hu Jie shows Lin Zhao losing faith

Similarly, in Hu Jie’s rendering, Lin Zhao’s story is used to illustrate her passionate faith in the Party as well as the type of difficulties she soon became aware of but tried to repress. Lin had begun her adult life as an ardent communist. She was a member of an underground communist organisation before 1949 and wrote articles attacking Nationalist Party corruption. In 1949, just before the PRC was established, she moved to a communist-held area and enrolled in a school there. In 1950, she joined the land reform task force.

In the depiction of Lin Zhao’s life in August 1950, all students are shown being sent to help the peasants with the harvest. Testimonies from Hu Jie’s interviewees have it that, at this time, Mao’s ideas of class struggle, presumably vaguely understood before that time, began to make intellectuals who were not from peasant backgrounds feel deeply ashamed. Lin Zhao knew that her own parents were not counterrevolutionary, but she and her student friends nevertheless bound themselves to Party discipline despite their misgivings. As a young

75 Mao’s chef for many years was Cheng Ruming 程汝明 . He recalls the Chairman’s fondness for this dish in an interview http://www.dooland.com/magazine/article_90049.html 82 activist, she felt that the problem lay with her own thinking if she could not at once understand the necessity for the harsh treatment meted out to those with connections to the KMT. Lin Zhao “with the help of her fellow workers” came to understand that cooperating with the KMT as her father had, was in itself a crime. Rather than arguing with the Party’s ideology, she begins to blame herself for not realising the gravity of her father’s crimes, and she worries, moreover, that her class awareness is beneath the level required by the Party.

Hu Jie shows Lin Zhao’s experience of the anti-rightist purge of the mid 1950s as marking her progress from enthusiastic revolutionary through incremental stages of disillusion up to the point where her faith in Mao is lost. The film depicts Lin witnessing the personal attacks made upon those who had offered suggestions to the Party during the Hundred Flowers movement, and Hu suggests that her disquiet at this intellectual incivility from the state begins to suggest to her that the revolution in China is transforming into a totalitarian dictatorship. 76 Hu Jie accepts, and repeats in his film, the perspective upon the Hundred Flowers movement that the intellectuals and educated workers of the time were deliberately deceived by Mao. 77 In this view many people who were neither counterrevolutionaries nor opponents of the State but who believed they were helping to rectify the working style of the Party had their loyalty used against them. Hu Jie’s depiction of Lin Zhao’s assessment of this situation was that this method of trickery was not an appropriate tactic of modern socialism but fitted well with China’s broader cultural tradition of discouraging discussion of political alternatives. The melancholy result was that the growing intolerance of dissent facilitated the violent persecution of those who had been most committed to the revolutionary cause. This is the tragedy of those who were the forerunners of the zhishifenzi generation.

76 In Xunzhao Lin Zhao de linghun , Lin Zhao is portrayed as beginning as an enthusiastic and committed communist but begins to lose faith in the party after she experiences the Hundred Flowers backlash at Peking University in 1957. Without meaning to become a dissident, she feels she is driven to advocate on behalf of her friends and fellow students who are being publicly shamed and imprisoned. Hu Jie implies that Lin Zhao experiences a crisis of faith and is caught between her early catholic faith and her later faith in communism. This crisis is resolved as she identifies in Mao and the CCP, traits which fit into her personal critique of Chinese history. Lin maintains that Mao has been transformed into an emperor in modern clothes and that his totalitarian administration bears all the traditional tokens of “this land filled with medieval relics.” 77 Hu Jie, accepts the position that contemporaneous Hungarian and Czech protests against Soviet domination in the 1950s put Mao on guard against his own intellectual class because he saw that the European protests were led by the local intellectual classes. Hu Jie claims that Mao concocted a deliberate plan to flush out his opponents by permitting, indeed encouraging, critics to speak out and thus give them the opportunity to condemn themselves. 83

Hu Jie presents Lin Zhao’s history so that she begins to resemble something of a zhishifenzi patron ‘saint,’ and in depicting this period, before she is imprisoned, he characterises her moral transformation as of the same type as the zhishifenzi childhood ‘moment of realization’ crisis, presented in the previous chapter. In this crisis, as for post-reform zhishifenzi, Lin Zhao’s moral stand is an imperative in her life and dictates her subsequent renunciation of Maoist ideology. Hu Jie has constructed Xunzhao Lin Zhao de linghun primarily out of interviews with people who knew Lin Zhao in the 1950s. A consensus emerges from these interviews that Lin Zhao was correct in her analysis of the injustices surrounding the Anti- Rightist movement but that at the time it was impossible to be morally correct. Even those persecuted declare that it is hard for people in the present to imagine how much they loved the Party and how much they worried that they might indeed have been infected with bourgeois ideas. In one interview, one of Lin’s friends recalls asking her why, during the Great Leap Forward, she published an underground magazine, and Lin replied that she did it because “we cannot live like this anymore.” Lin’s friend’s loss of faith in Mao was, however, lagging somewhat behind Lin’s own, and so he began at the time to lecture Lin Zhao about the inevitable triumph of world socialism. The film suggests that Lin Zhao, could by this time only look upon these statements as absurd; she is depicted as offering no reply to her friend’s enthusiasm and as simply walking away. 78

It is rare, too, in any of these Fictional History texts to encounter a grass-roots CCP cadre who is depicted as competent and diligent and this is perhaps one reason why the persecuted intellectuals of the 1950s and 1960s remember themselves from the vantage point of the 1990s and 2000s as thinking that it was really they, rather than the Party, who represented the interests of China’s poor. An interviewee in Xunzhao Lin Zhao de linghun claims that the students at Peking University who had been accused of being Rightists three years prior to being sent to the countryside for re-education, became dissidents in earnest after meeting the starving peasants. The film depicts the underground magazine “Spark of Fire” that was edited and written by young intellectuals who were protesting the venality and dishonesty of the

78 Hu Jie’s method of driving his narrative by interviewing Lin Zhao’s friends illustrates the phenomenon that individual actors, having similar experiences, frequently construe their own history differently from others. Moreover, some interviewees are still haunted by their actions and omissions in those far off days but still grope towards a half-hearted self-justification. This personal dimension is a feature of Hu Jie’s films is another reason why I feel justified in treating them as Fictional History.

84 rural cadres during the Great Leap Forward. Hu Jie interprets Lin’s poem, published in the magazine as The Day Prometheus Suffered , as evidence of her incremental abandonment of Chinese culture and her spiritual movement towards the West. This alienation from Maoism is, it is suggested, one of the core orientations of zhishifenzi subjectivity.

Lin Zhao was twenty-eight years old when she was arrested in 1960. Hu Jie’s film draws visual attention to the spectacle of a small woman enduring the relentless persecution of the state. An archival document from Tilanqiao prison requesting further sanctions against Lin Zhao is read out in the film. It accuses Lin of referring to herself as a ‘freedom fighter’ and of ‘defiling socialism.’ It states that she especially sullies the mass political movements. Lin Zhao, by this stage, had become as vehement in her opposition to Mao as she had once been in praise of him. An interviewee tells how Lin was dragged from her sickbed in the prison hospital one day in 1967 and executed. Li Jingxian was a schoolmate of Lin Zhao who visited and spoke to the hospital doctor after the event. She says it seemed to be a morning but exactly where Lin was executed was unclear. She pours a libation of wine to Lin Zhao’s memory at the edge of the Peking University pond where they had sat and talked together many years before. She weeps, “I never thought she would suffer so much later.”

Fictional History recruits the sympathy of post-reform readers for this earlier intellectual group by evoking the suffering of its members and by suggesting that it came under attack for professing similar ethical values to their own. Lin Zhao’s narrative also underlines the hypothesis within Fictional History that Chinese rulers are drawn towards totalitarianism by their cultural inheritance and that their weapon of choice against their enemies is the violent resentments of a Chinese population riven by artificial distinctions. These texts argue that intellectuals’ faith in the Party was bound to their ‘original’ faith in humaneness and personal liberty and that when they began coming under attack as bourgeois recidivists, (“with their freedom and their democracy”), they submitted to their punishments, perhaps in the hope that by so doing they could demonstrate the supreme virtue of civility. The implication in these works is that the intellectual and educated classes in China, both before and after Mao, are sympathetically linked by this profession of civility, and that this civility has been treated contemptuously by the state and its representatives, and by the wider society in which they live.

Mao

In Fictional History works dealing with the revolutionary period of the PRC, and in the broader body of non-official discourse on this era, it is impossible to ignore the figure of Mao as the author of much of the trauma of the period. In these texts Mao is identified as the founder and leader of an administration whose policies inflicted trauma upon Chinese society, but more importantly, at least for post-Mao zhishifenzi , as the focus of their traumatic loss of faith in the potential for cultural renewal in China. However, Fictional History is more than simply an attack on Mao as a venal dictator, devoid of moral sense. Mao’s tragedy, in the view of these texts, is that his ambitions for change were undermined by his own cultural inheritance. Because of these ingrained limitations, Mao’s story is shown as one of gradual transformation from an idealist to an autocrat. The difficulty for post-Mao zhishifenzi in making this case is that successive administrations of the CCP have positioned themselves as the heirs of Mao’s charismatic leadership and have energetically denounced any reflections on the mistakes of the early leadership, particularly those originating from outside the Party.

We can note here that recent years have witnessed a revival in official censure directed towards those who engage in public scepticism about the Communist Party’s version of past events, and, indeed, the annual meeting of the National People’s Congress held in March 2017 in Beijing made the defamation of Communist heroes and martyrs a civil offense. It is unlikely, however, that these measures were implemented in response to the challenge made to China’s historical narrative by Fictional History since texts from this tradition broadly refrain from explicitly canvassing the failings of a man widely regarded in China as the symbol of the nation and a hero of the Chinese people – qualities, as noted, that Fictional History finds it difficult to overtly repudiate. Reflections upon the place of the Chairman in China’s history of trauma are more frequently made in Fictional History by means of metaphor and parable. Most notably, as we shall see, the character of Song Fanping in Yu Hua’s Xiongdi (2005), is repeatedly associated with Mao to the extent that we are invited to read Fanping’s fate as symbolic of Mao’s own.

It is widely observed by pre and post-reform knowledgeable elements in China that the Chairman’s wide influence, his domination of the politics of the PRC, his ambitious projects of revolutionary modernization, and his well-remembered and oft-quoted sayings transformed him, in death, into a legendary figure whose spirit is invoked upon all sides in an effort to legitimate their own positions.79 Fictional History texts and their forerunners from the heyday of zhishifenzi writing in the late 1970s and 1980s note the transformation, or apotheosis, undergone by Mao in Chinese folk belief. In Jia Pingwa’s novel Fuzao (1988) Mao and the top leadership are transformed by village fortune-tellers into supernatural objects of reverence. Mao, Zhou Enlai, and Zhu De are widely believed by farmers and other people from ‘ordinary’ backgrounds to have wielded great spiritual power in their lifetimes and so, in death, their images are presented in Fictional History as having displaced the old traditional spiritual deities and their power has been put to use as a medium of divination. That this modern Communist triumvirate has displaced the King of Hell and his attendant deities suggests to the rational zhishifenzi that belief in these old revolutionaries was generally a matter of superstition, at least among the peasants. Popular faith in Mao and the CCP leadership is expressed, by those who never lost it, in mystical devotion and manifestations of supernatural power although this sits oddly with the modernising rationality these leaders professed in life. 80 Zhishifenzi commentators, we might observe, see the old communist

79 Mao is also evoked in Fictional History through his own words and through the concepts he advocated. The argots of the Cultural Revolution and the mass of quotations from Mao that filled the everyday speech of the era have, in the reform and post-reform periods, entered the stock of Chinese clichés. In Fictional History texts, this linguistic phenomenon is reflected in the Chairman’s words being used inappropriately or to comic effect in the narratives. In Xiongdi , after being roughly ejected from Lin Hong’s house, Li mutters a quote from Mao: 而今迈步从头越，从头越。。。。。 (“ This is the start of a long march, a long march .” Ch.7) Later, when Lin Hong’s father is shooing Song Gang away, and Gang keeps turning around and standing in the road, Lin uses another of Mao’s sayings: 毛主席说得好：扫帚不到，灰尘就不会自动跑掉。 (As Mao well said, if one does not use a broom, dust is unlikely to disappear on its own). When Li’s scheme to court Lin Hong by sending a group of children to deliver his message is undermined and derailed by Zhao, Li’s vengeance and anger is expressed as wanting to wage a “class war” against the saboteur. Li correctly considers 阶级斗争 “class war ” to be the most puissant of all possible conflicts. In Xu Sanguan mai xue ji Blood Chief Li had said that, as a cadre, he was unable to 不拿群众一针一线 (take a single needle or thread from the masses ). This refers to one of the three main disciplines of the People’s Liberation Army which was dictated by Mao in 1947, but when the Great Leap famine descends, Blood Chief Li finds that he has “no alternative, things being so bad,” so he now takes a cut of each blood payment thereby “adapting” Mao’s theories into his own practice. 80 Barmé has argued that this type of reverence, common in China in the late 20 th and early 21 st centuries, is “…a manifestation of how an age-old living folk tradition had finally co-opted Mao Zedong and converted him into a native god.” Barmé, G. (1996). Shades of Mao: the posthumous cult of the great leader . New York: East Gate. ibid. Since the medium can control and supplicate the spirits, however, it may be conjectured, too, that transforming the revolutionary leadership into native gods is a type of exorcism – the populace establishes in the 87 leaders as less associated with the forces of modern intellectuality with which the zhishifenzi are associated than with feudal backwardness.

The link between the authority of the Communist leadership and popular “superstition” is prominently made in Fictional History texts. In Gao Xingjian’s Ling Shan , Mao in death joins the ranks of the myriad deities of traditional Chinese folk religion. Gao’s depiction of Mao’s apotheosis mirrors developments that have been widely observed in popular religious practice in post-Mao China. While after the establishment of the PRC, religiously-inspired folk dances and songs in rural areas were replaced with performances praising Mao, in the reform period these have returned to their original form. Equally, temples and buildings destroyed in the Cultural Revolution have in many cases been rebuilt. In areas with strong folk traditions, and in minority areas, Mao’s influence in the spiritual domain has barely outlived him, but in the south China world chronicled by Gao Xingjian, a landscape dominated by folk myth and imagination, Mao’s ghost now jostles for space with such supernatural manifestations as the mountain hexes and the fire god.

In these reflections upon the fate of Mao after his death, Fictional History works address not only the cultural basis for a continuing reverence for the leader in some sections of Chinese society in the post-Reform era, but also address the forces that zhishifenzi believe supplied some of the dynamics of the traumas of the revolutionary period. It is implied that Mao’s status amongst the masses was derived from a claim to traditional spiritual power that derived from his position as an emperor substitute. Fictional History narratives generally present Mao’s most ardent admirers as having an unshakeable and almost religious belief in his spiritual puissance in which they join with him as his acolytes; in his post-mortem transformation the superstitious character of the belief that was directed towards him during his life is brought out. In highlighting Mao’s post-mortem deification in popular belief, zhishifenzi observers identify both the nature of the devotion felt towards him by his uneducated supporters and the basis of his enduring influence upon them. Significantly, it is suggested that this urge to reverence and obedience works primarily on those in society who prioritize power in the conduct of social relations, and this is part of how zhishifenzi explain religious domain a power to control the forces which have ostensibly controlled it in the secular realm, enacting a kind of exorcism of the secular authorities.

88 the fate of the educated classes in the Mao-era and after it – the latter are victims of those whose submission to power is founded in their “feudal” mindsets.

The life and death of a symbolic Mao – The Fictional History of Song Fanping

If one strand of Fictional History emphasizes Mao’s identity as an object of collective religious devotion, another strand focuses on how the figure of Mao structured individual lives in the revolutionary decades of the People’s Republic. In Yu Hua’s Xiongdi , the character Song Fanping is explicitly and repeatedly paralleled with Mao. Song Fanping’s personal qualities reflect the pride and confidence of the early PRC. Song is a physical education teacher at the local middle-school and stands over six-feet tall, speaks in a ringing voice and is a fine athlete. Wearing his glorious red basketball shirt, Song Fanping performs the first slam-dunk ever seen in the town, much to the surprise and adulation of the watching crowd. Song Fanping’s physical strength and confidence, however, is matched with strong ethical convictions. In contrast to other townsfolk, he is helpful and solicitous of the welfare of his neighbours

Presented in contrast to Song Fanping’s bold and confident outlook, Li Lan is shown as embodying the shamed and cowed state associated with the old China. Li Lan has been beaten down by life and has been shamed by her relationships, and so always appears in public with her head bowed. Li Lan and Song Fanping first meet when Fanping retrieves the corpse of Li Lan’s first husband by wading into the cesspit into which this husband had fallen while attempting to spy upon the women using the latrine. The physical and moral disgust inspired by this mode of drowning ensures that no bystander is prepared to assist Fanping in recovering the man’s corpse. While the notorious filth of the village latrine is commonly used as a metaphor for a corrupt moral state in Yu Hua’s novels, (we remember that the drunken Sun Guangcai in Zai xiyu zhong huhan also dies by drowning in a public cesspool), in Fanping’s case, his sense of what is owed to the dignity of a human, and what is owed to the proprieties of social custom, prevails over his own disgust in performing this task. We understand that Song Fanping, by doing his duty, is protected and transcends, by means of his

89 virtue, what would pollute others. 81 Song Fanping truly serves the people – embodying the qualities that Mao has enjoined the people of revolutionary China to uphold.

Shortly after, Fanping’s first wife dies but Li Lan, who now thinks of Fanping as her saviour, is too abased to attend the funeral and follows the procession from a distance. Li Lan and Song Fanping are soon married, however, and this connection can be read as a symbolic marriage of the old and new China, or even of the Chinese people who await revolutionary transformation with their own saviour, Mao. Fanping has inspired Li Lan to lift up her head and in this the episode recalls Chairman Mao’s speech at the announcement of the inauguration of the People’s Republic of China, and that the era of humiliation had come to an end, that the Chinese people have “stood up.” For Li Lan, and for China, there is a chance to proudly lift up one’s head ( 骄傲地抬起头来 ).

Li Lan describes her feeling of being with Song Fanping:

“Ever since her ex-husband drowned in the cesspool, this timid woman had become used to feeling ashamed; she had become used to having nobody to depend upon, and now Song Fanping had given her undreamt of happiness, but even more important, Li Lan now had somebody to rely upon. What’s more, in her eyes, this support was so formidable that she felt from now on she had no need to hang her head when she went out; Song Fanping had made her lift up her head with pride.”

自从她的前任丈夫淹死在粪坑里以后，这个胆小的女人已经习惯了自卑，习惯了孤苦无依，现在宋凡平给了她做梦都想不到的幸福，更重要的是李兰从此有了依靠，而且这个靠山在她眼中是如此的强大，她觉得自己从今往后再也不用低头走路

了,宋凡平让她骄傲地抬起头来了。（ p.75 ）

81 When Song Fanping returns the body of her husband to Li Lan her shock at the fact, and the manner, of her husband’s death brings on her labour. Li Guangtou is thus born with a connection to the moral taint symbolized by excrement.

Yu Hua depicts Song Fanping as an exemplary man whose virtues have been moulded by the socialist ideals of the early Maoist administration. These personal virtues have a public dimension and cause him to be recognized by other people of conscience and authority in the town. The honour in which Song Fanping is held by the officials and managers of his town assists him in arranging the permits required for Li Lan to travel to Shanghai to have her migraines treated. Li Lan says that Song has the ‘gift of the gab’ but it is his decency and his frank and open good nature, and the consideration he shows to others without any hint of obsequiousness, to which well-intentioned people respond.

Song works and lives among the common folk, and this is shown to cause problems. On their wedding day, Fanping and Li Lan’s happiness is spoiled by the narrow-mindedness and crudity of their neighbours. After their boorishness embarrasses his new wife, Song Fanping’s manly honour provokes him to fight but he is persuaded, for the sake of communal peace, to offer his miscreant neighbours a symbolic apology. Yu Hua here foreshadows the sort of enmity and envy Song Fanping (and all who manifest moral virtue in debased circumstances) will attract from the truculent and ignorant among his fellow citizens. This truculence is a sinister force since it is the characteristic of those whose unreformed venality will later be let loose as Mao’s instruments in demolishing the ideals of the early Party.

Later in the narrative, when the Cultural Revolution arrives in town, the great parade is led by Song Fanping brandishing an enormous red flag. The boys, Song Gang and Li Guangtou, are immensely proud of their father and march with him at the head of the procession. The climactic height of this patriotic parade on the town’s bridge is emotional, joyful, and transforming. 82 The narrator of the novel now explicitly compares Fanping on the bridge to the image of Mao atop Tiananmen. Fanping accompanies a crowd to the Peoples’ Restaurant where he amazes everybody with his ability to expound the works of the Chairman ：

“Song Fanping had waved the biggest red flag ever seen in the history of the town, he had become the most important person in the history of the town. He sat there, his huge hands spread upon the table, with

82 Wordsworth’s poem on the French revolution in which he declares: “ Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive/But to be young was very heaven! ” (1805), captures something of the essence of revolution’s joyful appeal to the young. 91

every sentence he answered he said: “As Chairman Mao teaches us…” His answers seemed entirely those of the Chairman, not his own words.”

。。。宋凡平也就是挥了一下刘镇有史以来最大的一面红旗，就成了刘镇有史以来最重要的人物。他端坐在那里，一双大手铺在

桌上，他每一次回答时都先说上一句： “ 毛主席教导我们。。。。。。 ” 他的回答里全是毛主席的话，没有一句自己的话。

The boys now imagine that their father’s voice is Mao’s voice ：

“They felt that Song Fanping’s mouth was really Chairman Mao’s mouth, that Song Fanping’s flying spittle was Chairman Mao’s.”

他们觉得宋凡平的喉舌就是毛主席的喉舌，宋凡平喷出来的唾沫

就是毛主席的唾沫。

The metaphorical merger of the two persons of Song Fanping and Mao is now explicit. Next morning, Fanping gives each of his sons a Mao badge and tells them to wear it over their hearts. One badge depicts Mao over Tiananmen, the image of the commander of the Red Guards, and the other represents Mao as the red sun suspended over the Eastern Ocean with Mao radiant as the light of the East. In another sign of the portentous intrusion of force, however, the boys’ badges are almost immediately stolen by the neighbourhood thugs Zhao, Liu, and Sun Wei. 83 In a symbolic transfer, custodianship of the badges infused with the essence of Mao are now in the hands of Sun Wei, Liu and Zhao, each of whom are bullies and fools. When the boys go to complain to their father that their badges have been stolen, they

83 Mao badges are often depicted as having been seen as containing something of the essence of the Chairman himself, perhaps like the host in religious practice or like protective talismans worn by the superstitious. In Mo Yan’s novel 生死疲劳 (Sh ēngs ǐ Píláo – Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out, 2006) , Jinlong’s Mao badge is the tangible symbol of his leadership of the village rebel faction, but he loses it in a farcical accident. Jinlong’s Mao badge falls into the cess trench while he is using the village’s public latrine and retrieving it is impossible since even adoration of the Chairman has its natural limits. Unfortunately for him, the accident is witnessed by one of Jinlong’s personal enemies who immediately shouts that Jinlong must be a counter-revolutionary. This episode precipitates Jinlong’s fall.

92 find that Fanping has suffered an inconceivable reversal. Only yesterday he had led the parade, but now he is wearing the tall hat and placard of a class enemy. Song Fanping is being struggled against as the son of a landlord. Bruised, beaten, and despised, he now kneels upon the bridge which only the day before had been the scene of his glory.

The suddenness with which Song Fanping’s punishment falls upon him serves to highlight the absurdity and arbitrariness that determines his fate. The Red Guards seize upon Song’s ancestry and ignore his own personal qualities, his learning and worth, and so place more weight upon the surface than the underlying substance. Fanping obediently submits to his unmerited punishment, however, and we can argue that this depiction is typical of the image (and self-image) of educated people in post-reform zhishifenzi culture that they maintain the dignity and standards of behaviour which they feel are appropriate to civilized people.

Fanping is in disgrace, but he is not yet imprisoned, so he promises to take his family on a visit to the seaside. The trip is delayed because of two serial Red Guard home invasions and by the consequent need to repair the destruction caused in the house by their search for hidden property deeds. These invasions are motivated by spite and their only purpose is to inflict damage upon the house and suffering upon Song Fanping. The second of the home invasions is led by a group of middle-school students from Fanping’s school. Song Fanping and his sons are not able to set out for the beach until after sundown. The boys are at first excited by the unfamiliar sight of the sea at night but then begin to feel afraid. As the boys sleep on the sand, Fanping gazes solemnly across the great Eastern ocean over which there is now only dark night, the radiant figure of Mao Zedong is, at least for him, in eclipse.

Under attack by the Red Guards, and enduring his neighbours’ constant intrusions into his house, Fanping attempts to present a face of normality to his sons. The boys are perplexed at the placard their father is now obliged to wear and so, to help cheer them up, Fanping decides to transform his misfortune into an educational opportunity and to teach the boys to write some characters, beginning with those written on the placard. The sign reads: 宋凡平，地主 , (Song Fanping, dizhu ) meaning “Song Fanping, landlord.” The zhu in dizhu , however, is the same character appearing in 毛主席 (Mao Zhuxi , Chairman Mao) and the children, recognising this similarity, become excited and think that their father must be a “Chairman

Mao of the land.” The next day, Li Guangtou unwittingly precipitates a terrible beating of Fanping by mentioning this interpretation of their father’s placard in a public setting. A group of Red Guards from Fanping’s middle-school, hearing this remark, are incensed at the supposed calumny of the Party Chairman and they beat Fanping brutally for daring to compare himself to Mao.

Here Yu Hua seems to be cleverly reminding his readers, however, that Mao’s father was a landlord, just as much as Fanping’s – this further affinity between Song Fanping and Mao is made explicit by means of this linguistic trick. Yu Hua is also pointing obliquely to Mao’s hypocrisy over the matter of inherited class status and, consequently, to the emptiness of Cultural Revolutionary rhetoric. Song Fanping, who was associated with and inspired by the principles of Mao’s teachings, is under attack by those who justify their right to violence by the empty theory of inherited class characteristics. As a consequence of this last and more serious infraction against the masses – connecting Mao with landlords – Song Fanping is confined to a makeshift prison for class enemies run by the ‘red armbands.’

However, Fanping casually (and somewhat contemptuously) walks out of his prison and returns home on the day before he has promised to pick up his wife in Shanghai. When setting out for the bus stop at dawn, dressed in his famous red basketball shirt, Fanping waves goodbye to his sons, departing like the young Mao on his way to Anyuan. Fanping is walking towards his death, however, and this lends the scene, and this further comparison with Mao, a tragic poignancy. Because Yu Hua has linked Fanping with the qualities and ideals of the young Mao, his death becomes a metaphor of the death of those ideals, ideals that have been destroyed by members of the “masses” who claim to be acting in their name.

Song Fanping is beaten to death. The beating is savage and frenzied and is intensified by the rage felt by his captors at the lack of respect shown to their authority. They view the nonchalance with which Fanping walked out of their prison as a reflection upon their own intelligence and as the latest manifestation of his insolence and recalcitrance. We note that it is a distinguishing feature of those who are the perpetrators of violence in these texts that they demand the voluntary submission and the respect of their victims while enforcing physical punishment. Clearly, the power to physically intimidate others is presented as having the

94 same standing, for these people, as an argument. The Red Guards are shown as holding in utter contempt the bearing and the ideals that Song Fanping (and, by inference, Chairman Mao) represent simply because these arise from the life of the mind – engagement with which is the defining feature of the zhishifenzi as a group. The killing takes place at the bus stop, in full view of terrified bystanders and children. During the beating and stabbing, Fanping keeps rising from the ground and moving towards the ticket office, fixated upon achieving his purpose and doing his duty. His actions at his death, it might be argued, represented the self- image of the zhishifenzi struggling to do what they know to be right in the face of a world that attacks them.

Fanping is a strong man so his death is prolonged, even six men cannot finish the job; their wooden bats are broken and splintered and yet Fanping does not fight back but still attempts to board the Shanghai bus. Near the end, Fanping begins to beg on his knees but finds no pity: now the men renew their attack until they are exhausted. They go to Ma Su’s cafe to refresh themselves: “Those six red arm-banders were utterly exhausted as if they had done a day’s work on the docks.” 这六红袖章像是干了一天力气活的码头工人那样疲惫不堪。。。。。 Another group of Red Guards arrive and, not wanting to be left out of the action, continue the beating of the now prostrate Fanping. The first group, having finished their breakfast, re-join the fray.

This scene is notable for depicting how early in its course the Cultural Revolution incited extreme acts of violence and how these became normalized, even to the extent that there was no reticence about carrying out murderous violence in public. Fictional History narratives (and the zhishifenzi culture that they speak for) hereby suggest that Chinese society at the outbreak of the Cultural Revolution was not as stable or coherent as commonly believed and illustrate this contention by depicting the ferocity displayed by the gangs of men who roam the streets of Chinese towns and cities looking for individuals who capriciously become the targets of this ferocity. (This representation of Cultural Revolution violence is neither a refutation or an endorsement of Party-sanctioned histories of the period, which are critical of Cultural Revolution violence, but see it as a disruption of an essentially stable pre-Cultural Revolution social order, thrown into chaos by the machinations of the Gang of Four. In this case, it can be argued that Fictional History depicts the violence of this era as arising from

95 long-standing moral problems, problems which the revolutionary system had both failed to correct and had helped to produce.)

We see that for the narrators of Fictional History such as Yu Hua, and, arguably for post- reform zhishifenzi more broadly, ‘revolutionary violence,’ was a misleading term employed as a fig-leaf to conceal naked savagery. Ma Su, watching from her café, is appalled: “How can people be this vicious?” 人怎么会这样狠毒啊 , but the answer to this question is never systematically addressed. We have seen on Fanping’s wedding day that vulgar elements within society are familiar and a permanent presence, but the motivations or personal characteristics of the perpetrators of violence are never rationally explained. As readers, we are left to wonder, especially in the manifest absence of any evidence that these people subscribe to communist ideology, what their motives or ideology may be. These ‘Red Arm- Banders,’ all neighbours and townsfolk, have been transformed into conscienceless furies by their devotion to Mao who, himself having abandoned the idealism which so inspired Song Fanping, has proclaimed a class and cultural struggle in which the foolish and violent are made paramount. Fictional History and zhishifenzi commentators may reflect that bad elements are naturally enthusiastic participants of a revolutionary movement which does not demand study and reflection, but how can it be properly called a revolution in the absence of any guiding ideology? It is similarly left to the reader to speculate that the producers of Fictional History suggest that for some, inflicting horrific violence upon others in society is a pleasure impossible to resist.

This sense of some sort of underlying callousness on the part of the broader populace that Maoist revolution has either created or has failed to correct is emphasised in developments after Song Fanping’s death. His beaten, broken, and bloody body is left to lie in the empty lot in front of the bus depot where people walk past without offering assistance. The body is so disfigured that Song Gang and Li do not recognize it as their father when they come to meet their parents at the bus stop in the afternoon. As it begins to dawn upon them whose body it might be, the two boys go from person to person asking if it is their father outside on the ground. Now that fear for personal safety has replaced cooperation as a social ethic, however, nobody is prepared to assist these two little boys who have just lost their father. Bystanders tell the children to be off. The boys, quite naturally, begin weeping after they find out from

Ma Su that the shattered body is, in fact, their father’s. Attracted by the boys’ wailing, a crowd of onlookers gathers, and the boys begin to plead with the adults to help save their father. This pathetic scene is met only with heartlessness and monstrous indifference, to both the boys’ entreaties and to the dignity of Fanping’s body.

Ma Su eventually directs a bystander to help bring the body back to Fanping’s house. Much against his own inclinations, the bystander loads the body onto Ma Su’s cart. Song Gang wants the man to take his father to the hospital, but Ma Su assures him that it is too late and that his father is quite dead. Song Gang then weeps silently. Ma Su, a Buddhist, tells the man that he will be rewarded in the next life, but the man says that he fears that by getting involved he will be cursed for eighteen generations. Pulling the cart towards Fanping’s home, the children walk alongside, and their wailing disturbs the festive air of a patriotic parade taking place in the streets of the town. An acquaintance of the man pulling the cart comes over from the parade and wants to know who is lying on the cart:” Hey, who in your family has died?” 喂，你家谁死了？ The (as yet unidentified) man pulling the cart replies: “Your whole family just died” 你家才死了呢！ and further: “Damn you, didn’t you hear, your whole family is dead!” 他妈的你听着，你家的人死光啦 ! This, of course, is an inauspicious thing to say and so the other man, in a fashion appropriate to the times, wants to fight.

Although the cart-puller’s comment that the whole family has just died was made in exasperation, there is nevertheless a sense that what he said was, for China itself, metaphorically true. An image of human sacrifice, Song Fanping, who has been so much identified with Mao, is now lying dead on a mean cart, murdered by the inexorable forces of human savagery. Yu Hua implicitly associates this broken corpse with the man whose photograph has been present at all Chinese weddings and is on every wall in China in the early decades of the People’s Republic, and whose teachings have penetrated all corners of the country. The metaphor posits that the values of one closer than family, the best hope for China’s transformation into a modern and admirable society is now lying on the cart. What has definitively died are those positive qualities of Mao/Fanping which, had they been persevered with, might well have brought about a national transformation. Instead, it is suggested, savage human nature, in the service of traditional Chinese social and political

97 practices, have been let loose upon the land by a shadow Mao who seems to have repudiated his own teachings. For Fictional History, Song Fanping’s demise is the final symbol of a traumatic loss of faith; it is the death of the rosy hopes and enthusiasms of the early years of the PRC, hopes and dreams which, we can suggest, continue to shape the outlook of the post- reform zhishifenzi producers of Fictional History.

In Fictional History works, if ordinary citizens become involved in the outrages of the times, it is often as nervous spectators. When Li Lan returns from Shanghai, she collapses at the news of her husband’s death and, outside the bus station, in the place he was killed, she sifts the dirt with her fingers to find traces of Fanping’s blood. The grief of the bereaved widow and children is enacted before another crowd of onlookers who comprise something of a tragic chorus as they talk among themselves and exchange details of Fanping’s death by describing his martyrdom in vivid terms. The boys scream and wail at every sentence, at every new revelation, but Ma Su comes over to scold the crowd: “Shut up! Don’t say these things in front of his wife and children, you people are simply not human!” 别说啦！别当

着人家老婆孩子的面说这些，你们这些人啊，简直不是人！（ Ch.19 ）. Ma Su wonders how her fellow-townspeople can behave with such sudden brutality and generally expresses the view that such people cannot be human, and yet these people are almost certainly well- known to Ma Su, and probably even to Fanping. These are not demons; these are our neighbours.

In this scene, Yu Hua provides an example of the fictionalizing of history to construe the past from the present. Narrative details, such as the crowd who narrate the death of Song Fanping in the manner of a tragic chorus, are almost certainly the author’s invention. Far from being simply a work of fictional imagining, however, we can argue that the episode represents Yu Hua’s attempt to illustrate important historical turning points in the past which explain how Chinese society in the present has become detached from the suffering of others and whose morality has become unengaged and spectatorial rather than participatory. Furthermore, it can be contended that the author is partly making a statement about the debased state of Chinese society in his own times, but to account for the presence of this social pathology, Yu Hua narrates a past in which traumatic experiences must have caused the initial aggravating factor. Here Fictional History simultaneously presents the past and the present in a unified moral

98 framework.

Mortals have only one biological life, and when the Red Guards kill their enemies, their victims are removed permanently from the world. If death were simply the end, it would in itself be a total victory for human savagery. But there are further post-mortem humiliations and insults to the legacies of those of noble bearing. Fanping’s body is too large for the cheap coffin that Li Lan can afford and so the undertakers are obliged to saw off his legs to make him fit. This scene recalls the story from Ling shan in which Gao Xingjian’s narrator visits the mouth of the Yangtze River near Shanghai. He is moved to reflect that, in his childhood, the water was clear, and that large fish used to be caught; now there are none. An officer stationed nearby describes how, in the Cultural Revolution, prisoners were tied together at this spot on the river and were forced to walk into the water whereupon they were machine- gunned. The narrator’s reflection is that the more people who are killed in China the more there are, but the more fish are killed in China, the fewer there are. Both big fish and big people have been done away with, suggesting that perhaps this world is not made for them. This world, in the view of post-reform zhishifenzi , was not made for people like Song Fanping, was not made for idealists like Mao, and was not made, alas, for themselves.

Sun Wei’s story: Fictional Histories of arbitrary violence Fictional History narratives also depict victims of the Red Guards who are ordinary townsfolk rather than noble intellectuals. This may be because intellectuals are rare in the small towns which are the focus of many Fictional History works (arguably because many of the producers of Fictional History works grew up in such towns), and perhaps because Fictional History contends that Red Guards are never consistent in choosing the victims of their violence. In Xiongdi , the story of Sun Wei illustrates the insecurity felt by all who lived in a society fixated on division and exclusion. Yu Hua’s story portrays ordinary people driven to extremes of despair and madness by the inexorable force of brutality. Sun Wei’s father, who had been a guard at the makeshift Red prison in which Song Fanping was detained, is discovered to have had an (unsuccessful) grandfather who owned a rice shop before the Japanese war. That Sun is condemned as a capitalist indicates that the Red Guards are running out of obvious victims and have begun a wider search of the town’s archives to find more targets. It is perhaps not coincidental that Yu Hua indicts the specious ideology of class

99 struggle by making Sun Wei’s grandfather a grain trader because, once again, Mao’s father - as well as being a landlord - was also a grain trader.

Sun Wei is now shunned by his friends on account of his father’s new-found class stigma, and so he attempts to make friends with Li Guangtou. Li, however, has suffered bullying at Sun Wei’s hands too frequently and so he is wary of him. After being rebuffed, Sun Wei walks off quoting a line from Mao’s famous poem Changsha 1925: “Who, in this boundless land, is master of their own destiny?” 谁主沉浮 . This line has become Sun Wei’s favourite because of its rhetorical quality -- it is the sort of poem popular with schoolboys who intone it without reflecting upon its meaning. Its meaning, however, is poignant in the circumstances depicted in Yu Hua’s novel. Mao’s own words are used to highlight his personal failures. Mao, is lamenting in 1925 that the Chinese people are not masters of their own destiny. Yet when these lines are being recited more than forty years later in the Cultural Revolution, the Chinese people are even less masters of their own destiny as, indeed, Sun Wei’s fate will prove. The irony is that the responsibility for this state of affairs lies entirely with the idealistic poet of the 1920s who, if he were identified as a poet in 1966, would almost certainly have been made to wear a dunce’s cap.

In Fictional History, the reality and authenticity of suffering is set against the specious criteria used to choose victims. A common antic of the student Red Guards is to attack people who are wearing tailored trousers, or who have long hair, with razors and scissors. Sun Wei, who is proud of his long hair, is singled out for a haircut but he struggles while being held down and incurs a deep gash to the jugular vein. Sun Wei’s father had been sweeping the street nearby as part of his punishment and hears his son’s cries for help. Rushing to the scene, he finds his son dying and, naturally, attacks the Red Guards. More guards arrive who beat Sun Wei’s father and take him to the prison while his son dies on the road. Li Guangtou, who has been a witness to the attack, informs Sun Wei’s mother who rushes to the scene of her son’s death. Such is her horror and grief that her mind is turned by this tragedy and from that day she sits in the main street, weeping and wailing. She becomes insane and remains sitting at the site of the murder stark naked and unkempt. Sun Wei’s mother forgets where she lives and begins to wander the streets at night calling out for her son as if she were calling him

100 home for dinner. Nobody does anything for her. 84

Meanwhile Sun Wei’s father is being tortured in the prison. A feral cat is placed down his trousers, the soles of his feet are rubbed with a metal brush, and a burning cigarette is inserted into his anus. The Red Guards have jovial names for each of these tortures and gleefully go about their work celebrating violence as entertainment. Now Sun Wei’s father is in a state worse than death. His thoughts are the only part of him that do not experience pain, so he comforts himself by thinking of his son’s burial place; he imagines it as a green, peaceful spot and he thinks of his wife’s grief as she tends the grave and imagines how she must be waiting at home and how she must frequently try to come and visit him in prison. Finally, he begs the guards to let her see him next time she comes. He is then told, somewhat abruptly, that his wife has become insane and that she is wandering the streets naked. The authenticity of Sun’s feelings for his family are contrasted with the sort of savage and inhuman psychopathology which delights in devising novel forms of torture. The guards do not inflict extremes of violence for any identifiable ideological reason, and Sun Wei’s father does not endure extremes of suffering for any cause. Fictional History presents both perpetrator and victim of violence as expressions of basic human impulses that operate without the disguise of ideology. History here is not a matter of class relations or struggles between rival forces, but something driven by much more elemental forces.

Rarely do Fictional History texts affirm suicide as a response to the difficulties of living in absurd times, but Sun’s suicide can be seen as his own small revolution which, by associating the stages of suicide with memories of his loved ones, proclaim for zhishifenzi readers and authors the sovereign importance of affective human relationships which furthermore condemns the fundamental nihilism at the heart of human brutality. Sun thinks of his son, says “I’m coming…” 我来 as he drives a nail into his head with a brick. Now he thinks of his wife who will be all alone, he whispers “I’m sorry…” 对不起 , then drives the nail in further.

With a final angry roar, Sun yells to the guards “I want to kill you all…” 我要杀了你们！

84 This scene in Xiongdi recalls one of Yu Hua’s short stories. In Yu Hua’s short story 1986 , a madman, an ex- teacher at the time of the Cultural Revolution returns to the town in which he used to work, almost as a ghost from the past, and proceeds to inflict upon himself in public the various degrees of imperial punishment laid down in ancient times. As the teacher enacts upon his own body the punishments of Han dynasty times, it is clear that Yu Hua is pointing to a continuum of brutality in Chinese culture. For Yu, Chinese history repeats and re-enacts these brutalities. 101 and smashes the nail into his head the whole way. In this depiction of the debasement of an otherwise undistinguished fictional victim of the Cultural Revolution, zhishifenzi depictions of history show a society in which humans are without any real moral compass.

Fictional Histories of the perpetrators of violence

A fundamental presumption underlying Fictional History depictions of the Mao-era is that in 1949, China did not suddenly become a classless unity. Fictional History suggests that that Chinese society in 1966 contained many sociopathic elements who were unreformed (and unreformable) by the State’s thought-work. For post-reform zhishifenzi writers and film- makers, the Cultural Revolution represented the temporary ascendency of those elements in society which resented the ascribed social status of people who possessed cultural knowledge. 85 The producers of Fictional History argue that “class struggle” against intellectuals in the Cultural Revolution was a manifestation of the age-old struggle between civilization and barbarism, not as something that can be explained in a Marxist framework. 86 In other words, it is suggested in Fictional History that intellectuals of the time saw (and post- reform zhishifenzi still see) the violence of the Cultural Revolution as an attack upon

85 Post-Mao zhishifenzi react against the extreme view of some in the Party about the utility of intellectual work in a period of revolution. In this view everything intellectual had been decided, and all that was necessary was to follow Mao Zedong Thought. The new circle around Mao developed, in Uhalley Jr’s view a “… hostile world of their own imagination and making” in which the prospect of a war with either the USSR or the USA (or both) demanded that intellectuals not diminish further the revolutionary enthusiasm of the young or cause internal dissent at a time when unity was required. This circle came to believe that intellectuals manifested “consistent and determined feet-dragging and opposition” and had an unwholesome tendency to “theorise" and “study" such impractical issues as the existence of “humanitarianism.” Uhalley Jr, S. (1966). The Cultural Revolution and the Attack on the "Three Family Village". The China Quarterly, 27 , 149-161. 86 Stuart Schram writes that Mao worried about bad class elements because he felt that many Chinese had not been transformed. He called for more education to transform them by Marxism and spoke of the white sheet upon which could be written great things. Presumably Mao felt that his own class background had been transformed and he concedes that neither Marx, nor Engels, nor Lenin had working-class family backgrounds. As late as 1964, Mao stated that an individual’s class affiliation could be chosen, that you had the choice to adopt your family’s bad affiliation or you could come around to the side of the workers and the peasants. Later, the simple fact of an individual’s inherited class background was sufficient to attract repression and discipline and this background was indelibly inscribed upon every individual’s identity documents. Schram, S. R. (1989). The thought of Mao Tse-Tung . Cambridge [Cambridgeshire] ; New York Cambridge University Press.

102 civilization made under the cloak of ideology.

In Fictional History works the carnivalesque, visceral, and ecstatic joy of common folk at the beginning of the Cultural Revolution stands in direct contrast to the rejoicing of intellectuals and students at the time of the proclamation of the PRC in 1949. The popular joy associated with the initial stage of the Cultural Revolution is presented as being characterised by an appeal to the ideologically unsophisticated, to children, and to society’s bad elements. The idealism which motivates Song Fanping’s participation in the movement is swiftly overturned by negative forces. In Xiongdi , the Cultural Revolution arrives while Li Lan is in Shanghai. In the town, people march noisily along the streets: “more and more people appeared in the streets, singing and barking like a pack of dogs” 越来越多的人走到大街上大狗小狗似的喊

叫和唱歌。。。。。（ Ch.9）. At home, class enemies, identified as such even to children, become supine targets of abuse. The boys enjoy the change: “They knew nothing of the principles of the Cultural Revolution, they didn’t know that the world had changed, they only knew that every day in Liu Town was as festive and bustling as a holiday.” 他们不知道文化

革命来了，不知道世界变了，他们只知道刘镇每天都像过节一样热闹。（ Ch.9）. The Cultural Revolution is shown as having undergone dynamic change almost from its outset, quickly degenerating into brutality. Those chosen to be struggled against are, at first, the descendants of landlords and gentry, but Fictional History texts depict the movement as seizing on victims who appear to have offended society in no way at all – indeed, it is frequently the better, more socially responsible members of society who are seen to be targeted. Ma Su, for example, stands on the street, her hair streaked with blood, labelled a prostitute because she has a small daughter, (who stands behind her in the street while her mother is enduring her punishment), but no husband. Later, too, even though Li Lan’s silk factory has ceased production to carry out patriotic activities, as the widow of a landlord she is required to attend the factory every day to receive criticism from other workers, who are depicted as having no motive other than spite.

These impressions are found in works that depict the history of the period without deploying the structures of fictionality. Hu Jie’s documentary film Wo sui si qu argues forcefully that ideology was little in evidence when deciding whom to target. Wang Jingyao says that as

103 soon as the Cultural Revolution began, one of the teachers at his wife’s school, Yuan Shu’er, began to “cook up stories” about people she didn’t like. Bian Zhongyun, Wang’s wife, had the misfortune to become the object of Yuan’s slander and it was Yuan who led the subsequent struggle sessions, on one occasion grasping Bian by the hair and beating her. Vice principal Hu, depicted as clearly an innocent soul, attempted to report these atrocities to various government departments, but found that “nobody was on duty in those days.”

Similarly, in Yu Hua’s Xu Sanguan mai xue ji, the Cultural Revolution arrives and so the schools and shops close down while people are “hanging themselves from trees” or being beaten and imprisoned. Xu Sanguan opines that the Cultural Revolution is all about “settling old scores.” The courts and the police are shown as completely absent and there is no other justice than mob rule. It is the depiction of individuals beaten and abused by self-righteous but unthinking mobs which highlights the horror and injustice of these attacks for post-reform zhishifenzi . What is shown as the most distressing aspect of the behaviour of groups in this period is its challenge to fundamental standards of humanity – a broad vision of human dignity is what underpins the critique that Fictional History makes of the developments in this historical period. This sense of basic inhumanity and of the violation of fundamental human values extends back to the early years of the People’s Republic. In Ma Jian’s Rou zhi tu , when the land reform team takes over the village, Dai Wei’s grandfather owned two fields and a cow and was thus labelled an evil tyrant. The elder son is forced by the land reform team to bury his father alive under pain of his own death. The son’s mind becomes unhinged by this homicidal and patricidal experience and he is unable to return to his profession as a lawyer in Qingdao and has since struggled to manage as a peasant in his ancestral village. The novel punishment of murdering his own father, though (again) inflicted upon an innocent man, is held to reflect “the people’s anger” - which always exactly corresponds to the will of the land reform cadres – an anger which has become so extreme that ordinary standards of humanity no longer applied. That such sanctions were levied upon people with whom the perpetrators had lived for generations is understood in the frameworks of Fictional History as showing a layer of resentment, envy, and spite as lying beneath the surface of Chinese social relations, forces of which educated people are shown to be the most prominent victims.

Elsewhere it is the clamour of the masses, rather than actual violence, that is shown as forcing

104 compliance with the party line. Lan fengzheng depicts a parade in support of the public ownership of private shops and rental premises. 87 Mrs Lan owns the courtyard where Tietou and his parents live and, when challenged by the crowd she explains that she has already made the state a part owner in the property. What is significant here is that state policy in this period is disseminated and enforced by neighbours beating cymbals and yelling slogans. Recruiting the masses to implement and enforce policies, however, is shown as an effective tactic of government since this diffuses any criticism of their ill effects. If society itself is seen as complicit in the implementation of unjust or absurd policies, then the failures of those policies produce generalized social ill-will rather than specific threats that target the government.

Other narratives depict the enthusiasm of young people for the new revolution as expressed in shocking violence towards their older victims, invariably intellectual and invariably shown as innocent. In Hu Jie’s documentary Wo sui si qu , the girls at Bian Zhongyun’s school are said to have behaved in ways that were, even by the standards of the time, inexplicably brutal. 88 Over 100 students forced their way into Wang and Bian’s apartment led by the ringleader Yuan. House raids, 抄家 chao jia, and the pasting of big character posters calling Bian a pig and threatening to hack her to death if she “acted rashly,” are shown as having been an almost

87 Another interesting comment upon the nature of the Cultural Revolution can be seen in Xiongdi where the street marches and demonstrations of the Cultural Revolution become so intoxicating to Yu the dentist that when he becomes wealthy as an investor with Li in later years, he travels around the world from place to place participating in street marches and demonstrations irrespective of their purpose. It is significant that while marches and demonstrations were common in the period of the Cultural Revolution they have been utterly discouraged in the reform era. 88 Wo sui siqu depicts the tragedy of Wang Jingyao as one of a person whose youth was animated by a fervent belief in the type of humanism inspired by the Atlantic Charter and by the manifesto of the Communist Party. Part of this faith was a confidence in the European enlightenment and the judgement of history and so, in the Cultural Revolution when it appeared that the accustomed order has been inverted and where ordinary standards of behaviour had been abandoned, Wang became intent on compiling evidence of the chaos. Wang Jingyao’s wife, Bian, was a teacher, vice-principal, and party secretary at the girls’ middle school attached to Beijing Normal University in the 1960s. Wang’s life was irrevocably changed when, on 5th August 1966, Mao posted his message to “Bombard the Headquarters” and the students at Bian’s school enthusiastically responded. Bian became an early target for the surprisingly brutal personal resentments of her students, and after enduring struggle sessions, a home invasion, and beatings, Bian was at last beaten so severely that she died. Hu’s film can be seen as summing up the sense of impotence felt by the intellectual class in the face of the unexpected ferocity and genuine hate with which school students were transformed into supposed revolutionaries. Most disturbing for intellectuals were the unprecedented social inversions this transformation entailed. Under the blows of generational persecution, Wang loses faith in the revolution, but not in the verdict of history or in his interpretation of civilization and its struggle with barbarism. Wang maintains relics of his wife’s death and has kept photos of the big character posters stuck up by the Red Guards in his home. He suggests to the film-maker that these relics would make useful exhibits at a Cultural Revolution museum. 105 daily occurrence. Wang states in the film that he did not take the posters down for many months because he wanted everybody in the neighbourhood to see how badly the students had behaved. It would seem, however, that many households in that area of Beijing were occupied by teachers or other intellectuals and so most homes already had their own collection of threatening posters, and the neighbours were, consequently, not concerned with other people’s troubles.

Hu’s film echoes the general picture of this period in showing the destruction caused by the home invasions as substantial, with some families reporting that students had pulled up floorboards and even taken down ceilings looking for incriminating evidence. This would seem tend to attest to the students’ sincere belief that there really was something to find in these hiding places, but it is not reported that they ever found what they were looking for. The Red Guards are generally depicted as having smashed and burned the things that they took and, particularly in the area of Beijing where scholars lived, book burnings became common. According to Wang Jingyao, Beijing’s example was copied over the whole country and he estimates that in “Red” August 1966, over 1700 people were beaten to death. Since Hu’s film and other works similar to it do not disclose any evidence of actual counterrevolutionary activity, readers are invited to infer that those 1700 people beaten to death were all entirely innocent. In the views of post-reform zhishifenzi these actions are signs of nothing more than the force of human savagery.

Documenting the Cultural Revolution: Wang Jingyao and Biao Zhongyun’s story

Fictional History – both in its overtly fictional and its documentary forms – depicts the relationship between ideology and the violence and division of China’s Mao-era history as lacking any foundation in wider social or political reality. In these narratives ideology acts as to justify acts of personal enmity and revenge in which ordinary standards of morality are suspended. People are arbitrarily labelled as social enemies but their supposed trespass against ideological orthodoxy ensures that their punishment is condign. In Hu Jie’s Wo sui si qu there are multiple examples of this. A vice-principal at Bian Zhongyun’s school wrote an

106 account of the things she had witnessed at the school at the outset of the Cultural Revolution and which she entitled On Life Education . Wang Jingyao, Bian’s widower, reads on camera an account of a struggle session held against this vice-principal at Bian’s school. After a thrashing by her students, vice-principal Hu was obliged to confess that she had been following the capitalist road, that she was a counterrevolutionary and that she deserved the punishment she was getting. The vice-principal was further obliged to thank her tormentors, declaring that she was dammed to death and should have “smashed her own dammed head.”

The school caretaker was hiding in the school library as he witnessed these scenes. He is interviewed in the film and recalls that at this time none of the other teachers dared to intervene against the students who had abandoned their school uniforms in favour of boots and army fatigues. Lin remarks that “fashions had changed overnight” and, it would seem that for many people at the time, this radical gender inversion was wholly unprecedented and disturbing. Another teacher, from a different school, says the girls would hit their teachers with belts while screaming obscenities at them. She wonders “how could they have changed so suddenly?” A colleague of Wang Jingyao at the History Institute remembers him telling her about the attacks upon his wife and she wondered to herself how the movement could have developed like this, “making all the youngsters so cruel and brutal.” The transformation is inexplicable.

We can argue here that this view coincides with Mary Sheridan’s hypothesis (propounded more or less at the time that the upheavals of the Cultural Revolution were occurring) that many of the young people who were so enthusiastic about the Cultural Revolution had grown up in the early years of the PRC and had led lives which, up until that point, could be characterized as narrow and repressed. 89 Fictional History narratives in addition to insisting that the violence of the Cultural Revolution was never motivated by any genuine ideology, present the psychology of the Guards only as violent and self-deluded. For Fictional History the violence of the Cultural Revolution is not an issue of youth or class but one of human nature, and the clash between the students and their teachers is more a reflection of mutual but conflicting expressions of dissatisfaction with the progress of Chinese society since 1949, as well as a struggle between impulses towards civilization and those towards barbarism.

89 Sheridan, M. (1968). The Emulation of Heroes. The China Quarterly, 33 , 47 - 72. 107

In Hu Jie’s view the older generation of Chinese intellectuals, represented here by Wang and Bian, upheld a commitment to civilization and to personal transformation informed by the kind of humane sentiment which grew out of their experience of the Anti-Japanese War. This commitment, he suggests, demanded a level of obedience from those who made that commitment and that generation felt that they could not, even temporarily, step down from their dedication to that position. It is suggested that the rising generation of intellectuals represented by the students in the 1960s, however, had been instructed in the virtues of violent revolution and class struggle and were subject to no constraint in using violence to achieve their ends. When Bian was coming under attack from her students, for example, Wang suggested to his wife that she should leave town, but she refused on the basis that she had “done nothing wrong.” For Bian, as for so many characters depicted in Fictional History, it was a matter of justice. We have seen that Song Fanping, under savage attack maintains what he feels is his dignity as a civilized man, and we have also seen Lin Zhao refuse to compromise her idea of what constitutes civilized political disagreement and discussion. Bian and Wang, likewise, are rendered defenceless in the face of the attacks made upon them by their insistence upon maintaining their principles.90 The conflict that is displayed here is one between those who adhere to principle and those animated by violent passions.

The trauma of the Cultural Revolution was, of course, experienced differently by different classes in society, and it was attributed meanings, afterwards, in a way which reflects class standpoints. Fictional History is, this thesis argues, a depiction of this history from the viewpoint of the post-reform zhishifenzi. In their eyes what was distressing about punishment in that period was how little chance was given to the accused to offer a reasoned argument as a defence. Fictional History texts pursue a conscious and insistent distancing between victims and perpetrators of violence in China based upon what are considered to be their differing attitude towards the use of violence in social conflicts. Even where educated individuals have the ability to fight back against their attackers using the idiom of violence, as was the case with Song Fanping, it is rare to read depictions of victims physically resisting their tormentors.

90 Wang now realises that there was no escape for his wife, that “there was nothing they could have done and nowhere they could have gone.” 108

Punishing the innocent Instances of punishing the innocent, ubiquitous in these texts, are viewed in Fictional History as products of the erosion of a respect for the law, an attitude which, they observe, has persisted into contemporary Chinese society. In Yu Hua’s Xu Sanguan mai xue ji , Xu Yulan is accused in a big character poster of being a loose woman. This situation has arisen because of personal feuds and because of the absurd story about Yile’s paternity (narrated in the previous chapter). Yulan’s head is shaved at struggle sessions where she is required to publicly act the role of a prostitute. Yulan is publicly shamed for manifesting a looseness of which she is entirely innocent. As in so many Fictional History portrayals of victimhood in this period, however, nobody is concerned with her innocence. Yulan is made a scapegoat for the foolishness of her husband and the malice of the townsfolk. Similarly, in Rou zhi tu , the protagonist Dai Wei remembers that during the Cultural Revolution there was a red box placed under a portrait of Mao at the public baths so that people could report acts of political misconduct committed by their neighbours. It hardly needs pointing out that this open invitation to blackmailers and aggrieved revenge-seekers had a corrosive effect upon social bonds and trust.

A significant fear depicted in Wang Xiaoshuai’s Wo 11 is the activities of those who inform upon others. In one scene, a group of sent-down adults, including the eleven-year-old protagonist Wang Han’s parents, sing songs from their old life in Shanghai. A couple begins to sing an earthy matchmaker’s song, but they are promptly interrupted by a frightened man who tells them that they must sing only of the revolution. Later, Wang Han’s father explains to his wife that Red Guards have been attacking intellectuals at his theatre. He tells his worried wife that he is not “involved,” that he is just an actor and he has never had any wish to get involved. His wife urges him to keep his voice down because if somebody were to hear him he would be killed. It begins to seem to Wang Han that the adults in his life experience a type of cognitive dissonance arising from a conflict between their private and public personae and that fear of exposure constantly hangs over them.

Fictional History depicts the absurdity of punishment being allocated upon the basis of a bureaucratic quota system. A scene in Tian Zhuanzhuang’s Lan fengzheng film depicts a meeting of PLA officers in which the names of those to be sent for rectification are

109 announced. There is no implication that any of these officers are truly counter-revolutionaries or rightists, indeed the choice of names appears to be based on nothing systematic at all. For one officer whose name is announced, the shame and injustice of the accusation is too much to bear, so he shoots himself as his appalled fellow-officers sit in stunned silence. Again, in Lan fengzheng, Shaolong, Tietou’s father, attends a similar workplace meeting in which the workplace Party secretary is urging rightists to voluntarily come forward. Astonishingly, it is at this point that Shaolong gets up to go to the toilet. Shaolong is sentenced, as a result, to 22 years in a work camp.

Another noteworthy feature of the unjust punishments that Fictional History shows being meted out in this period was the publicity with which these were prosecuted. Public violence is depicted as having become a spectacle and an occasion for celebration and this adds to the trauma experienced by those who were victimized. In Huozhe , Chunsheng, a hero of the Civil and Korean Wars and now a cadre, becomes a target of the Cultural Revolution. He is paraded around town as a capitalist roader and is beaten by teenagers wearing red armbands. The film shows Chunsheng as clearly not a capitalist roader - this is just the modish term of abuse - but his offences, whatever they are, provoke his captors to extremes of public violence and inhumanity. Chunsheng on one occasion visits Fugui in the night. He has come to say goodbye because he is in despair and doesn’t want to live anymore. He says that as a soldier he saw horrible things and endured many hardships, but the injustice and shame of his treatment at the hands of teenage Red Guards is too much to endure. He says: “Fugui, every day I am hung up and beaten by them…” 福贵，我每天都被他们吊起来打 . Fugui’s sovereign principle is that you must withstand and hope that things may be better in the future. For Chunsheng, however, the shame and injustice of his treatment are intolerable, and suicide appears as an obvious response to the distress of living in a society which is productive of terror rather than security. 91 In Hu Jie’s Wo sui si qu , Lin the caretaker also recalls how many people came to believe that their lives were meaningless. Some dreamt of ways to commit suicide and Lin even relates his attempt to electrocute his mother and himself.

Documentary and feature films are of course distinguished from written text in being able to

91 The other possibility, assuming that Chunsheng kept his word to Fugui, is that he was murdered. Neither outcome was just. 110 employ a visual language to establish metaphors. In this way filmed Fictional History can refer to historical cases of injustice or atrocity without naming them directly. 92 In Lan fengzheng, Tietou’s second stepfather Lao Wu, a high-ranking cadre, is being criticized at work and big character posters have appeared accusing him of being a counter-revolutionary. Since accusations of this type gather a grim momentum, there are more and more posters denouncing him every day. He knows that the Red Guards will come to the house and that he will be taken away, so he offers his wife Shujuan a divorce. Shujuan is unwilling to accept a divorce to protect herself, so she inevitably suffers for her principles. In the final scenes of Lan Fengzheng , Red Guards arrive at Tietou’s stepfather’s house. The Guards break in to Old Wu’s bedroom, wake him roughly, and spill a container of medication on the floor. The lingering focus of the camera upon the scattered pills, and the image of the big character posters condemning Wu, perhaps suggest a comparison with the famous mistreatment and abduction of the diabetic Liu Shaoqi, the chief high-level victim of the Cultural Revolution. Shujuan, who arrives as the Red Guards are roughly carrying Wu away begs them to be gentle with him, telling them that he is ill and that he is “an old comrade and an old revolutionary.” The reply from the young Guard exactly mimics Mao’s denunciation of Liu Shaoqi: “You mean he is an old counter-revolutionary.”

For all the absurdity and unfairness involved in assigning punishments, the punishments are always shown as crushing in their effects. Fictional History works show that for intellectuals, punishments inspired by foolish misunderstandings magnify the trauma inflicted. In Rou zhi tu , for example, Dai Wei’s father is a prominent musician and had returned from the United States in the early years of the PRC to help build the new China. Unfortunately for him, however, on one occasion he shook the hand of a visiting US orchestra conductor and thereby incurred the label of Rightist. He vainly protests that it was customary for the orchestra leader (himself) to shake hands with an orchestra conductor. His 22-year sentence to thought

92 In film, associations with Mao are made visually, often with the aid of intercut archive materials. After describing Lin Zhao’s execution, Hu Jie’s Xunzhao Lin Zhao de linghun , displays a sequence of brief images from China’s Cultural Revolution; military parades, massed peasant labourers, children marching in Pioneer uniform, Mao addressing the Red Guards from Tiananmen, and the pallet upon which the betrayed Liu Shaoqi awaited his lonely death. Other images follow rapidly; of China’s atom bomb and of ranks of sent-down students marching behind red flags in the countryside, all suggesting a despairing narrative about the loss of individuality and genuine emotional expression at that time. In Wo 11 , the village square where the rival gangs of young men do battle, is dominated by a giant mural of the Chairman in beckoning pose, as if to call the rival gangs into the fray. 111 rectification through labour is served under all the horrors of camp life; he later recalls to his son his memories of the great singer who had to pick pieces of raw yam out of the stools of inmates to stop himself from starving, and of those who were driven by hunger to eat maggots.

The dictatorship of the proletariat in Fictional History

In Fictional History representations of the Cultural Revolution, political punishment, especially when it is imposed for no substantial trespass of the dominant ideology, exerts a chilling effect upon those not yet singled out for similar treatment. To ensure one’s safety from attack, people are shown as having begun to act as clients of the authorities, no longer expressing their dissent or doubts about government policy. In the view of the post-reform zhishifenzi , it can be observed , the fear engendered by trauma, together with the lack of meaningful efforts made by the state to educate the common folk, alienated the latter from full participation in revolutionary construction and caused them to lose faith in the state’s policies. In Yu Hua’s novels in particular, it is implied that China’s peasants, far from leading the revolution, were generally the pawns of Mao’s policies. In these texts there is an unambiguous contrast between the political rhetoric surrounding the idea of the vanguard role of poor peasants in China’s political reconstruction that was promoted by the leadership, and the bewilderment with which the government’s initiatives were met by these same peasants. In Huozhe , for example, Mao addresses his people late at night without showing any consideration for their needs as people who had to labour during the day. Fugui recalls that during the Cultural Revolution it was frequently necessary to leave a warm bed halfway through the night to assemble on the village drying ground to listen to Mao’s latest directives. The team leader would blow his whistle with all his might and the peasants, no matter how exhausted, would rush down to the drying field to hear the announcements. The team leader would be standing there yelling: “Everyone to the drying field! The great chairman Mao has some instructions for you!” (p.171).

Post-reform producers of Fictional History consistently contradict assertions that the Cultural Revolution, or indeed the revolutionary period taken as a whole, was in any meaningful sense a dictatorship of the proletariat, or even less, of the poor and middle peasants. On the contrary,

112 as it is depicted, the leadership begins to act in a style resembling that of the emperors of dynastic China. 93 In Lan fengzheng , for example, Zhuying is a member of a state performing troupe and is obliged to attend dances and to entertain the leaders. She does not want to undertake this ‘work’ anymore and cannot see the political relevance of it. She is sharply told by her superior that she should not get too arrogant and is warned that her application for Party membership is still being considered. She is reminded that “politics comes first.” The implication that Zhuying is required to act as a courtesan or sing-song girl for the leadership seems to suggest that the cultural weight of China’s imperial past is difficult to escape. 94

In Yu Hua’s Xu Sanguan mai xue ji, Mao is again the disembodied voice of authority which reverberates through the world of the poor who are supposed to be the leaders of the revolution. Sanguan’s two elder sons are sent-down to the countryside to be re-educated by middle and lower peasants after what is depicted as a series of oracular communications from the Chairman:

“Then later Chairman Mao began to talk. Chairman Mao was saying things nearly every day. When he said, “We must fight with words and not weapons,” everybody put down the knives and clubs in their hands. When Chairman Mao went on to say, “We must take the revolution back to the classroom,” Yile, Erle, and Sanle put on their book bags and went back to school, where classes had resumed. When Chairman Mao said, “We must make the revolution serve production,” Xu Sanguan went back to work at the silk factory, and Xu Yulan got up every morning to fry dough. Sometime after that, Chairman Mao stood on top of the rostrum at Tiananmen, held up his right hand, and waved towards the west, addressing millions and millions of students assembled on the square: “It is necessary that educated youth be

93 Chen Guangzhong’s novel Shengshi Zhongguo 2013 nian (2009) presents the apogee of absurdity as being reached in 1971 when Lin Biao’s mystifying defection was announced to the public and, after this, it was clear to the Chinese population at large that the leadership had been working for itself. Weatherley Weatherley, R. (2006). Politics in China since 1949: Legitimizing authoritarian rule . London UK: Routledge. p.88 argues that the Lin Biao defection detached the Chinese people from politics, especially in the cities, and that Mao remained popular only in rural areas. 94 It is perhaps possible that this scene invokes Mao’s known fondness for ballroom dance evenings with young women. 113

removed to the countryside to be re-educated by middle and lower peasants.” One day chairman Mao sat on the sofa in his study and said, “you may keep one child by your side,” and so it was that Sanle stayed by his parents’ side, graduated from high school at age 18, and started to work at the machine tools factory in town (Tr. Jones, p.180- 181).

The poor and middle peasants, far from being leaders of the revolution, are here shown as mere figures of rhetoric, a rhetoric that had to be deployed to preserve people from political attack. Fictional History suggests that for all the efforts people made to put a distance between themselves and others in this period, it was also necessary to exhibit one’s own orthodoxy publicly to survive. In Yu Hua’s Xiongdi , the big patriotic parades culminate in individual declarations, almost testaments, of orthodoxy. The town’s tradesmen affirm their revolutionary zeal and vow not to supply any class enemies. Wang’s ice lollies become, by virtue of his vehement denunciation of class enemies, a symbol of class brotherhood and consequently sell well as a talisman against any accusations of deviance. As the revolution progresses, tradesmen become involved in revolutionary ‘work’ and neglect their usual business. Tong stops making useful items in the smithy and spends his time making ornamental spear ends for revolutionary flagpoles. The Guans sharpen the spear heads then Zhang tailors silk tassels for the spears and makes red armbands and flags. Instead of real class politics, we see here a politics which is merely for show – a pantomime in which citizens must engage in all kinds of contortions to preserve themselves.

Hu Jie’s Wo sui si qu depicts the circumlocutions required to make oneself a small target. Wang Jingyao was obliged to write to his own workplace revolutionary committee leader to request time off work to attend the funeral of his murdered wife. This letter had to be written, in keeping with revolutionary etiquette, as a confession. Wang stated in the letter that he had been wrong in his attitude towards counter-revolution and that he would endeavour in future to amend his thinking. Only after this mea culpa does he mention his wife’s death. Wang was also obliged to conceal the shrine he built to his wife’s memory in his home because she had been labelled a member of a black gang and to commemorate her death was, in itself, a counter-revolutionary act.

114

Furthermore, Fictional History highlights how the hardships and inconveniences of revolutionary life were intensified by mass movements with overly-ambitious goals, starting before and culminating in the Cultural Revolution. Post-reform zhishifenzi broadly argue that natural common sense was one of the first casualties of these programmes. In Tian Zhuangzhuang’s Lan fengzheng , the Great Sparrow Campaign 大麻雀运动 is depicted as the entire neighbourhood beats pots and climbs roofs to catch and eliminate one of the ‘four pests.’ Tietou is a pre-school boy who is charmed by the idea of catching a sparrow, but he is too little to manage it. An older boy gives him a sparrow and Tietou holds it in his hand. Soon enough, the sparrow flies off, much to Tietou’s delight. The image of the understandable and natural delight of a little boy holding a sparrow acts as a sharp contrast with the awkwardness and foolishness of the townspeople on their ladders. Tian Zhuangzhuang suggests that in those turbulent times, it may have only been pre-school children who retained enough of their natural wisdom to understand the true significance of a sparrow. Through this image Tian’s Fictional History depicts the revolutionary era as a tragic violation of natural order and natural impulses. The false politics of the supposed dictatorship of the proletariat is unmasked here in a child’s freeing of an innocent bird that is the target of a revolutionary campaign.

Critiques of the revolutionary period as farce Since farce is the other side of trauma, Fictional History leavens the narrative of China’s trauma with scenes of farce in which the fearful ignorant are led by the vain-glorious to an inevitable failure. Mao’s idea that revolutionary consciousness and enthusiasm were sufficient to compensate for a lack of resources or knowledge frequently comes under attack in these texts. 95 Accounts of The Great Leap Forward in particular, are rich in depictions of misguided folly. In Huozhe , for example, the peasants attempt to melt down scrap steel by boiling it in a cauldron of water. This proceeding is suggested to the village head by Youqing, an elementary school boy, if they are to avoid burning a hole in the bottom of the cauldron. This broad satire highlights the foolishness of attempting a scientific and industrial revolution

95 Jiazhen and the others, whose turn it is to watch over the cauldron to see it does not boil dry, fall asleep from fatigue and hunger. When they awaken the cauldron has indeed burnt, but there is also an ugly lump of scrap metal in the bottom. The town celebrates the accidental smelting of a lump of scrap and a procession is deputed to present it to authorities in the county seat on national day. The team leader says that they will be able to make three bombs from the metal and drop them on Taiwan. This combination of savagery and ignorance is depicted as having arisen because the people have been thoroughly schooled in anti-KMT propaganda while their more practical education has been neglected. 115 designed to overtake Britain, with a population fundamentally ignorant of science, metallurgy, or even elemental physics. The contrast between this and the self-image of the zhishifenzi as an enlightened modern force is absolute.

The core implicit idea in Fictional History that China’s modern history has been marked by widespread trauma, and that the residue of this trauma remains in contemporary Chinese society demands, however, that these narratives do not fall prey to the charge that they embellish history with literary effects which dilute the responsibility of the perpetrators of China’s trauma by presenting history as simply farcical. Perry Link has condemned a tendency in Mo Yan’s fiction to treat sensitive topics from history with a type of “daft hilarity.” Link says that Mo Yan is not alone in this tendency, but he protests that wherever it is used, it has the effect of letting the Party off the hook, and of preventing people from taking a square look at history. 96 In addressing this charge against writers who would seem to be part of the broader cultural environment in which Fictional History is produced, we need to acknowledge that that for reasons already canvassed, alternative narratives of Chinese history tend to present themselves as fiction if they are to circulate unencumbered. Additionally, we can argue that by treating traumatic episodes of history with humour may expose the vulnerabilities of those who fear being laughed at.97 Post-reform writers and film-makers, as artists, must decide which account of the history of modern China will be true and intelligible for their audiences, and therefore, what genre and theme are appropriate to express it, and we can suggest that to some extent depicting history at least partially as farce resonates with the

96 Link, Perry (2012) “Today’s Communist leaders, worried that their power could suffer by association with these Maoist disasters, declare the topics “sensitive” and largely off-limits for state-sponsored writers. But a writer doing a panorama cannot omit them, either. What to do? Mo Yan’s solution (and he is not alone here) has been to invoke a kind of daft hilarity when treating “sensitive” events.” http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2012/dec/06/mo-yan-nobel-prize/ Does This Writer Deserve the Prize? Perry Link, New York Review of Books , December 6, 2012 97 A moral difficulty seems to arise, however, in the fictional description of trauma. Modern Chinese history as depicted by post-reform writers and film-makers is strongly characterized by episodes of physical and psychic trauma. Violence and trauma arise from specific historical events, so it is difficult to accept that these can be treated fictionally, as metaphors or parables, and much less that their depiction could be cast in literature as humour. On the other hand, victims of trauma find that authentic communication of their experiences of trauma is impossible because of psychologically limiting factors necessary to preserve one’s sanity. In this case, as Braester argues, fiction must step in and depict trauma in ways which examine the significance of trauma to Chinese culture. Braester, Y. (2003). Witness against history : literature, film, and public discourse in twentieth- century China . Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press. It may also be the case that those in Chinese society suffering from post-traumatic stress as a result of their experience of history may be more inclined to accept a representation of these events which employs the less threatening idiom of humour. 116 experiences of their audience. The artistic sensibilities, and perhaps even the experiences, of Post-Mao writers and film-makers lead them to depict the ignorant enthusiasms of the Cultural Revolution as farcical even though others see tragedy. We are again reminded that the search for ‘truth’ in history is always a search for subjective truth and to argue that the fictionality and emotionality in these works obscures the truth is to insist upon a ‘truth’ which is other than that sought by these writers and film-makers. By positioning works which depict the Mao-era tragically alongside those which depict the Mao-era farcically, and documentary works alongside overtly fictional ones, this chapter has sought to acknowledge the different elements which, it suggests, make up zhishifenzi Fictional Histories.

Community life in the PRC: The Mao era as everyday social reality In Fictional History post-reform writers and film-makers depict the ways in which the heated rhetoric and traumas of the revolutionary period began to change the way individuals and social institutions interacted, often in ways which were confused and confusing, but which become for all intents and purposes a variety of everyday life. In Huozhe , the Cultural Revolution begins in the town and, in the country, Fugui and the villagers do not know what to make of reports of fights between rebel groups. A 16-year-old Red Guard from the city leads a somewhat performative expedition out to Fugui’s village to uncover and suppress landlords and class enemies. In the clear absence of any capitalist-roaders or rich peasants in the village, she is obliged to make do with the village head whom she accuses of perpetrating a White Terror. This, of course, is absurd and the farmers politely point out that the village head does not exploit anybody. The head has heard enough of the methods of the Cultural Revolution to be frightened and cries: “going to the town is like going to the grave!” but since the Red Guard is determined not to return without a captive miscreant, she insists on taking him. The village head is marched off to town where he is beaten and denied sleep for a few days but then released. The lesson learned by the village head is succinct and is one which would afterwards be learnt by many: “Now I understand: every day I looked after you as if you were my sons, then, in my misfortune it was your turn, but nobody came to rescue me.” 我算是看透了，平日里我像护着儿子一样护着你们，轮到我倒楣了，谁也不来救我 (p.245) .

In Yu Hua’s Xu Sanguan mai xue ji , a stranger urges Sanguan to conduct a family meeting so

117 the family can ‘struggle’ against Xu Yulan. It is an odd conceit that strangers in this period felt qualified or entitled to interfere in another family’s affairs but, such was the importance of public accusation and repentance at the time, Sanguan agrees. Sanguan demands that Yulan tell their sons about her ‘affair’ with He Xiaoyong but she says that she is not going to speak to them about a matter which was, after all, tantamount to a sexual assault. Yile speaks and declares that he hates He Xiaoyong because he would not recognize him as his son (even though He Xiaoyong is not his father), and he hates Xu Yulan, his mother, because it is on her account that he cannot hold his head up in the town. On the other hand, he says that he loves Chairman Mao and Xu Sanguan. Mentioning these two is ironic because it is exactly those two, Mao and Sanguan, who are the direct and indirect authors of Yile’s misfortune. Yu Hua, apart from satirizing the capacity of struggle sessions to uncover the truth, points out the difficulty of persuading victims that the powerful could be at fault when a powerless and more specious scapegoat is available. In this way a profoundly morally compromised order is shown as infusing itself into everyday experience and thereby creating frameworks through which people interpret what happens to them.

As we have seen, sympathy for the victims of the revolution is shown as being moderated by people’s desire not to compromise themselves by association. In Gao Xingjian’s Ling shan the narrator recalls a scene on a train during the Cultural Revolution. The Red Guards beat a passenger and everywhere there are big character posters vowing to smash, kill, and strike - all the active verbs of revolutionary propaganda. The narrator’s uncle in Shanghai has been investigated as a Rightist element but manages to see out the Cultural Revolution. The narrator visits him to inform him that he could not finish his university course because the universities had closed. His uncle suggests that he become an observer and, indeed, this becomes the characteristic position adopted by intellectuals and zhishifenzi in China up to the present. To detach oneself from a society which has no moral compass is shown as the only way to maintain some semblance of ordinary life.

In Wo 11 , Old Xie, by contrast, cannot be reconciled to his banishment in the countryside and dreams of another life. His despair at the restrictions placed upon the exercise of his intelligence becomes the cause of his family’s problems. Xie has a diploma and previously had a good job in Shanghai, but now he feels he is wasted in the country and that he is of no

118 use at all in his current position – he cannot resign himself to his fate and live with detachment. Xie feels that he has been buried for ten years and he dreams of returning to Shanghai. When he is with Wang Han and his father after a sudden rainstorm, he breaks down and weeps, and he is shown in a pitiable state. Xie’s wife has died, his daughter has been raped by a local cadre and his son is a fugitive, having taken justice into his own hands. Xie doesn’t know what to do, he wants to escape but there is nowhere to go – he cannot simply “get along”. Xie needs to talk, needs some fellowship, but there is nobody to talk to. Wang Han’s father is a fellow intellectual but, while he inwardly sympathises with Xie, he can only reluctantly offer empathy or comfort because he fears associating himself with Xie’s despair. Loneliness is here shown as the other side of detachment.

Relics

The sense of alienation and hopelessness felt by Old Xie is, we can suggest, perhaps emblematic of the overall fate of intellectuals in the Mao-era in Fictional History narratives, but it is not the only response to the history of this period. The moral and historical meaning of China’s trauma remains contested, and though it is clear that post-reform zhishifenzi generally view the trauma of China’s revolutionary period as a manifestation of savage human nature acting within a cultural history of trauma, is also demonstrated in Fictional History texts that trauma can be used as a resource with which individuals transform their lives. For the positive figures depicted in these works, sympathy with the traumas inflicted upon loved ones, family, and friends engenders an empathy which is the true expression of civilized values.

In Xiongdi , after her husband has been beaten to death, Li Lan goes to buy mourning cloth but, in the shop, a stranger approaches her, shaking his fists and exclaiming “down with counter- revolutionaries.” Li Lan’s pride in Song Fanping, and her certain knowledge that he was not a counter-revolutionary, gives her the strength to ignore this provocation. When she collects the family photograph from the photographer’s studio, she takes a quick look at it while waiting

119 for a revolutionary procession to pass by. Her grief at seeing Fanping’s smile causes her to faint, and she collapses on the bridge. Bystanders are characteristically unhelpful, telling the two boys that she is “probably dead.” Tong eventually reassures the alarmed children that Li Lan has just fainted and that she will be awake soon. Song Gang touchingly tells him that he will be rewarded in the next life, a benediction he has borrowed from Ma Su. Though Song Gang simply parrots what he has heard, it is arguably nonetheless correct that appreciation for good deeds done will not be rewarded in this life. Kindness no longer has any currency.

Later, at Song Fanping’s funeral procession, only old Song, Li Lan, and the two boys are present. On their way out of town, the small funeral procession is presented as an eloquent contrast to yet another revolutionary procession in the town streets. A Red Guard approaches Li Lan and slaps her. The Guard accuses her of “shamelessness” for by so publicly accompanying the funeral of a landlord. She is defiant, however and refuses to feel shame. Li Lan is proud at this funeral of her second husband, but she felt only shame at that of her first husband. Oddly, in this period of moral inversion, Li Lan’s first husband, as a descendent of poor peasants, had a higher status than Fanping even though the former man’s life, and death, were notorious for their moral bankruptcy.

Li Lan dies many years later and is buried with the family portrait, three pairs of the ‘chopsticks of the ancients,’ and the blood-soaked soil from the bus depot where Fanping was clubbed to death. There are many affecting scenes in this novel, but as Li Lan is buried in poverty next to her martyred husband, pain and anger are swept away at the consciousness that we all share this ultimate fate and that Fanping’s positive qualities live on. The way Fanping responded to the brutality that eventually claimed his life remains a moral lesson, a gesture of defiance, and a great cause for pride. The ‘chopsticks of the ancients’ symbolise his humanity, resourcefulness, wisdom, and care for his family. Fictional History here shows the presence of moral commitments that overcome the trauma and savagery of the revolutionary struggles.

In a similar spirit, in Huozhe , Fugui is ultimately left on his own, his family having predeceased him. His long life and his suffering have taught him compassion and an understanding that: “When life confronts its end, there emerges an unbounded regret at

120 parting…” 生命在面对消亡时，展现了对往昔的无限依恋（ p.182 ）When Jiazhen was dying, she told Fugui that she does not have to worry now about her children because they have gone before, and she is happy that her husband will bury her as he buried her two children. Jiazhen’s death is particularly affecting. She began her journey as a wealthy and beautiful young lady and ends her life as a peasant’s wife, in a squalid hut after a life of hardship and illness in which both her children predeceased her. And yet she is content. Fugui’s recounting of Jiazhen’s death provokes the narrator’s reflection: “I caught the glimpse of a distant tranquillity…” 我看到宁静在遥远处波动 .

If Yu Hua argues for the permanence of love being a response to the trauma of history, it is true that in other Fictional Histories shame, guilt, and suspicion are shown as being as likely to endure as moral transcendence, albeit as a sign of an enduring sense of repentance. In Lan fengzheng , Guodong confesses to Shujuan that it was he who wrote a detailed report at work at the time of the rectification movement and he feels that this was the cause of what happened to her husband. He suffers a guilty conscience and calls himself a criminal. Shujuan tells him that Shaolong had told her at the time that she should not blame Guodong because he had no choice. Guodong, like many others at the time, was obliged to play a part under the direction of others. He did not know how complicit he would become and how egregiously his trust and faith would be abused. Perhaps because of his stress and guilt, Guodong has a heart attack and dies during the Great Leap Forward. His death, it is intimated, is a sign of his ultimate moral integrity, which makes his earlier compromises unbearable.

In Hu Jie’s documentary films, too, guilt can be long-lasting. Over the end titles of Xunzhao Lin Zhao de linghun , Hu Jie writes that “…some of Lin Zhao’s schoolmates, friends, and relatives refused to be interviewed or photographed,” and so the audience is invited to reflect upon the nature of a terror so durable that it exerts its influence upon participants more than 40 years after the event. If for some in China the past contains terrors too great to contemplate, Chinese people nonetheless live with the material and spiritual relics of those times; the Tilanqiao prison and the colossal statues of Mao, after all, are still in place. The filmmaker asserts that those who condemned Lin Zhao to death in 1967 are still alive, and this claim perhaps directs our suspicion and mistrust towards our otherwise benign-looking septuagenarian neighbours.

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In Wo sui si qu , the filmmaker finds the kind-hearted teacher who had written an anonymous letter to Wang after his wife’s murder. He, or she, was still frightened by the incident and would not talk about those times. He, or she, told the director in 2007 that “now is still not the right time.” Again, over the end credits of the film Hu Jie claims: “No student as perpetrator or witness of Bian Zhongyun’s death agreed to be interviewed” and thus Hu highlights a further source of lingering trauma, that of the many people in contemporary China who live with a consciousness of the criminality of their actions in the Mao-era. Fictional History both highlights and avoids this widely shared sense of complicity in the violence of that era.

Concluding remarks

If post-Mao zhishifenzi producers of Fictional History could draw upon their own childhood experiences of exclusion and bullying in the Cultural Revolution, they were required to exercise their imaginative capacity to examine the trauma experienced at that time by their parents, even when, like Hu Jie, they are producing non-fiction works about this period (documentary film makers depicting pasts that they did not experience as adults, must engage with these pasts imaginatively). This imaginative capability has been cited in the previous chapter as an essential tactic of post-reform zhishifenzi in transforming the grim reality of their own lives as children of the revolution, but in this chapter, this imaginative capacity is applied to historical trauma in the project of creating empathy and it is thus that the traumas of history establish, for post-reform zhishifenzi , a link with other educated classes, those who were adults in the early years of the People’s Republic.

It is common in narratives of China’s imperial history to encounter a depressing litany of descriptions of epidemics, earthquakes, famines, civil wars, peasant revolts, foreign invasion, and floods. Added to these in the twentieth century, we may observe, were the traumas and social divisions caused by disillusionment and the failure of political programs promising revolutionary social transformations. Fictional History depicts this trauma by engaging our own imagination and sympathies. Thus we hear in our minds Sun Wei’s mother wandering the streets calling her murdered son home, and hear the two pre-school boys howling beside the broken body of their father as spectators gossip unconcernedly, and feel the despair of old

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Xie who sobs in his wretched place of exile: his wife has died, his daughter has been raped by the local cadre and his son is a fugitive. Through its appeal to our emotions Fictional History, whether in the form of novels or documentaries, creates a past that is imaginatively real for us, and which also, it is suggested, is constructed as the emotional background for the experience of the post reform zhishifenzi group.

I argue that the nihilism identified in contemporary Chinese society by post-Mao zhishifenzi is shown in Fictional History as having had its genesis in the traumatic loss of faith in the project of modernisation pursued over the course of the revolutionary period. Fictional History observes how faith in Mao and in his revolutionary programme was replaced among China’s educated class by a faith in history and its documentation. The day after his wife’s murder, Wang Jingyao bought a camera and began to take pictures in the hope that these would be a witness to history. Wang is shown in Hu’s film as being convinced that his compilation of evidentiary artefacts, carefully preserved and stored in a suitcase, would one day provide eloquent testimony against the injustices of his times. It is not clear that Wang retained faith that the state would one day rectify these wrongs of history, but if he did he was almost certainly again disillusioned. Fearful of the potential impact upon its legitimacy and shaken by the democracy movements of the late 1980s, the CCP dodged the task of open social reconciliation in the 1990s and declared the open discussion of recent history off-limits. Fictional History, we may argue, is in part a product of the refusal to permit public discussion of this history.

The next two chapters show how Fictional History narrates the reform period and the post- reform period after 1989 not as a break from the social pathologies of the Cultural Revolution, but rather as constituting a new field in which those pathologies could operate. The rise of a new mercantile class with economic power informed by hooligan characteristics and corruption, are suggested as being the ultimate consequence of the unresolved traumas and distortions of the Mao era.

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4. An impetuous brother

Principal texts:

Yu Hua , Huozhe (1992)

Yu Hua , Zai xiyu zhong huhan (1991)

Yu Hua, Xiongdi (2005)

Yu Hua, Di-qi tian (2013)

Jia Pingwa , Fuzao (1986)

According to the Fictional History critique, the trauma of the past has engendered cultural traits of division, exclusion and bullying in Chinese people in the post-reform era. In the previous chapter we saw that Fictional History showed violence being used in implementing the Maoist scheme of modernization but that this violence soon escaped the bonds of revolutionary ideology. Rather than enforcing the submission of real counter-revolutionary elements in Chinese society, violence was used as a weapon against susceptible but innocent victims. These victims conspicuously included the educated elements of Mao-era Chinese society with whom the post-reform zhishifenzi feel a sentimental affinity. The use of violence against the innocent produced widespread social trauma, including not simply the educated, but ordinary members of society. Added to this trauma, however, was the failure of the Maoist program of revolutionary social reform in whose name this violence had ostensibly been committed. The failure of this program of reform precipitated a loss of faith and a type of cultural nihilism within the population at large in the post-Mao era which replaced the enthusiasm of the early years of the PRC. Fictional History shows this process of disillusionment in retrospect.

In breaking with Mao’s ideology of class struggle, Deng Xiaoping’s social and economic

124 reforms stressed leadership by scientific methods and the creation of an educated group whose members would assume these new leadership roles. These were the zhishifenzi of the post-Mao reform era (1976-1989). The post-Mao reform era zhishifenzi were thus educated in the intellectual milieu of the 1980s which eschewed Maoist dogma. Post-reform zhishifenzi – those active in the years after 1989 – argue that their experiences of life as children of the Cultural Revolution and their ‘scientific’ education in the reopened universities after Mao’s death in 1976 formed an identity which was closer to the old humanist tradition championed by figures such as Lin Zhao and Wang Jingyao, the two heroes of Hu Jie’s films. The hope of this group was that under their leadership and guided by their example, justice and compassion would be restored to a Chinese society which had been traumatised and racked by division and exclusion in the Mao years.

In the post-reform zhishifenzi analysis in Fictional History, however, the psycho-social effects of historical trauma (division, exclusion and bullying), were ultimately left unresolved and were thus permitted to become a cultural trait persisting from the Mao era to the post-reform period. Alarmed by the downfall of the Soviet Union in 1991 and under increasing threat from indigenous democracy movements in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the Party acted decisively against historical interpretations which blamed China’s predicament upon the mistakes of the early leadership and assumed an exclusive prerogative for the development of policies for social improvement. Also abandoned were ideas of revolutionary personal transformation and the idea that the common people should participate in politics. 98 The traumas of the Mao-era past were left unresolved and the post-Mao zhishifenzi ceased to have

98 Andreas points out that the new pragmatism installed 科学管理 , ( kexue guanli , scientific management) as the catchphrase of the new era and this meant, in effect, letting the experts lead. The dominance of the experts was not simply in the economic/technical sphere. Participation in state-level/government politics by non-Party members was circumscribed. Henceforth the CCP defined a citizen’s individual politics as consisting entirely of one’s legitimate work. It was the politics of coalminers to extract coal and the politics of students to study well. Engagement in politics in its familiar sense was reserved to the Party - hereby deemed a group of experts in politics – while, at least in the first generation after the reforms, zhishifenzi attempted to manage their lives and responsibilities along the newly promulgated rational lines. Other members of the community were free to pursue a fortune or to rust into obsolescence. Andreas also points out that the mass movements, for all their faults, at least included the common people in politics, and were, to that extent, democratic but in the 1980s, as Merle Goldman points out, the circle around Zhao Ziyang argued that economic progress was more important than democratic reform because of China’s low level of education and because of the lack of any democratic tradition. They argued for an authoritarian nurtured middle-class, for market reforms, and for economic decentralization Goldman, M. (2009). Repression of China's public intellectuals in the post-Mao era. [Article]. Social Research, 76 (2), 659-686. ibid. p.285.

125 meaningful influence in post-reform society in the decades after 1989.

With the ground prepared in this fashion then, it is no wonder – at least to the post-reform zhishifenzi - that the program of economic reforms undertaken after 1989 and particularly after 1992 exposed and deepened fractures within Chinese society. In this chapter I analyse the zhishifenzi critique of the reform and post-reform years as being the direct inheritor of the traumas of the Mao-era past. Post-reform zhishifenzi draw attention to the similarities between the violence of the Mao-era revolutionary years and the economic disfranchisement of the reforms. Ultimately, the post-reform zhishifenzi see the reform and post-reform periods as repeating the historical cycle of trauma.

An impetuous brother: Fictional Histories of the reform era

In this chapter, post-reform zhishifenzi producers of Fictional History are shown narrating the rise of a new mercantile class in the period following the economic reforms of the early 1980s, the period which was also the heyday of the zhishifenzi in the sense in which they are understood in this thesis. In depicting this new class, reform and post-reform era zhishifenzi narrators of Fictional History suggest that its ideology and world-view was at base shaped by the social upheavals of the revolutionary period and by the failure of the revolutionary socialist program of personal ethical transformation which precipitated a retreat to traditional modes of elite culture. Fictional History texts suggest that the social trauma of China’s revolutionary history affected Chinese society in ways that encouraged a concern for the self which, emancipated by the new opportunities afforded by the economic reforms, gave rise to a type of economic trauma. The reform and post-reform zhishifenzi view – a view set forth in Fictional History texts – of the New Rich as a by-product and manifestation of Mao-era trauma accords with their overall critique of Chinese society as marked by division, exclusion and bullying.

Post-reform zhishifenzi producers of Fictional History represent the early years of the reform period in similar vein to their depiction of the early period of the establishment of the PRC - as enthusiastically supported by all sections of Chinese society. The struggle for power in

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Mao-era revolutionary China had culminated in what post-reform writers and film-makers portray as the absurdities of the Cultural Revolution but, after Mao’s death, ultra-leftists were in retreat and Deng Xiaoping pragmatically asserted: “poverty is not socialism” 贫穷不是社会主义 . In 1979 the PRC government announced that it would no longer label landlords, rich peasants, and their children, (indeed, by this time their descendants), as enemies of the people, but would replace class struggle as a social principle with the principle of economic development. 99 Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea had, it was asserted, all recovered from the trauma of the middle century and had entered a period of prosperity and rapid urbanisation, but China was by comparison backward. The task for China in the years after Mao’s death was, therefore, Deng and his supporters argued, to create wealth

For all that the economic reforms represented a profound break with the policies of the past, it was less easy to erase the influence upon society of past trauma, and the legacies of Mao-era struggles. Kam Louie has noted that the arbitrary classification of modern Chinese history leads people to think that culture can also be divided into periods. In this view, a new culture begins with a new era, but this is rarely so. 100 Fictional History texts argue that elements of Mao-era revolutionary Chinese culture continued alongside new manifestations of culture engendered by the reform and opening process. What is called post-reform culture, therefore, includes not just the developments associated with the reforms but also those things that persist and live in the post-1989 present from the past, and indeed Yu Hua explicitly connects the Mao-era revolutionary period and the reform and post-reform periods by employing the symbolism of ‘brothers.’ 101

The Deng-era administration repudiated the violence and ideology of the Cultural Revolution,

99 Zhou, X., & Qin, C. (2010). Globalization, social transformation, and the construction of China's middle class. In C. Li (Ed.), China's emerging middle class: Beyond economic transformation . Washington DC: Brookings Institution Press. p.91. Quite apart from the social destruction wrought by the Cultural Revolution, China was poor. Roderick MacFarquar points out that China, which had seemed in 1949 to have had the best chance of all the nations of East Asia to regain post-war prosperity had, by 1979, not only not fulfilled its developmental potential but had even entrenched its place as an impoverished third-world country. MacFahquar, R. (2005). Mao’s Revolution: What Remains?: University of California TV. 100 Louie, K. (Ed.). (2008). The Cambridge companion to modern Chinese culture . Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press. 101 A similar point is made by Koll, E. (2011). A fine balance: Chinese entrepreneurs and entrepreneurship in historical perspective. In W. Kirby (Ed.), The People's Republic of China at 60 : An international assessment . Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Asia Center. (p.207) 127 but this repudiation stayed within manageable limits. Some, like Wang Jingyao in Hu Jia’s Wo sui si qu , would have to make do with an official apology and compensation for his wife’s death at the hands of her students. Prosecutions of those still flourishing in the community who had committed acts of violence during the Cultural Revolution were generally unforthcoming. In Wang’s case, when he brought a civil action in the reform period against Yuan Shu’er, the ringleader of the red terror at his wife’s school, he was informed by the court that the time period for lodging actions had expired. 102

Jia Pingwa, writing in 1986 in the reform era, indicates the fear felt by his characters that there was no certainty the reforms would survive political opposition and so, as a result, people approached these reforms tentatively. In Jia’s work the peasants, Mao’s chief constituency, supported the reforms because they promised an escape from the oppressive dictatorship of local officials. This was so even though, for some farmers, liberation from the embrace of the communes meant more work. In Yu Hua’s Huozhe , (published in 1992 at the beginning of the post-reform era) the reform period arrives and Fugui, by now an elderly man, must do all the work on his own little plot without assistance. He is old and frail and can barely manage his 1 ½ mu of land. By comparison in Jia Pingwa’s Fuzao from 1986 when local gossip discusses the prospects of a return to the collectives, the peasants are described as being terrified: “His news rendered them all thunder-struck” 但他带来的消息却使大家顿时怔住 (ch.5 ）

On the other hand, Fictional History suggests that some had become accustomed to the habits of life and to the discipline of the Mao-era and did not welcome the reforms. In Ma Jian’s Rou zhi tu , for example, Dai Wei’s mother complains that liberal tendencies in the reform era are ruining China and are antisocial, but Ma Jian clearly indicates that this comment is the

102 We can observe that the new society attempted to maintain a nice balance between rectifying the manifest brutalities of the past and provoking a civil war between victims and perpetrators. The easiest course to take was to make symbolic gestures through which some of the victims of the Mao era, such as Lin Zhao, were posthumously rehabilitated. In the case of Wang Jingyao’s attempt to secure justice for Bian Zhongyun, narrated in Hu Jie’s Wo sui si qu , the pragmatic calculations of the state agencies left Wang with a feeling of bitterness towards a legal and administrative system more concerned with political machinations than with justice. Wang’s idealism as an intellectual was expressed, as we have seen, by his faith in history and in what he felt would be the judgements of history, but it was also expressed in his faith that the institutions of a reformed PRC would dispense disinterested justice. That this did not happen was for him, and arguably, for post-reform zhishifenzi more broadly , an ominous sign.

128 result of a past trauma which continues to exert its negative effects into the future. As the first decade of the reform period culminates in the students’ protest in Tiananmen square, a protest in which her son takes part, Dai Wei’s mother begins to understand that the same authoritarianism which deprived her of her husband has returned to threaten her son. In despair she turns to the practice of Falun Dafa , and thus unwittingly finds herself an enemy of the people. Ma Jian’s novel communicates a strong sense of history repeating itself.

This sense of the resonances between the Mao period and the reform and post-reform periods is one of the key features that I identify in Fictional History works. In this chapter I focus particularly upon the second volume of Yu Hua’s novel Xiongdi (2005) which narrates the story of two step-brothers, Li ‘Guangtou’ and Song Gang as they leave behind their traumatic childhoods in the Cultural Revolution and join the adult world in the early years of the reforms. The novel traces their different trajectories from a horrifically violent and insecure childhood into China’s new age of opportunity. The two young men manifest great differences in temperament but are united by strong ties of affection and solidarity. Yu Hua’s novel depicts the social changes which followed the reforms and contrasts Li Guangtou’s unlikely prosperity with Song Gang’s inability to survive (literally) in the new conditions. Yu Hua suggests that the possession of characteristics once labelled ‘hooligan’ is more likely to ensure financial success in modern China than the more socially focussed qualities promoted, or at least given lip-service, in the Maoist revolutionary era.

In this chapter, I also examine Jia Pingwa’s Fuzao (1986) a reform-era narrative depiction of the impact of recent history upon the course of China’s reforms (a work that antedates the post-reform narratives that are the focus of my analysis). Jia’s novel is the story of Jin Gou (金狗 ) who is sixteen years of age when the PLA move into his district in the Cultural Revolution to confiscate weapons from the Red Guards and restore a tentative order. Jin Gou is next drafted into the army at the age of nineteen and serves in Gansu before returning to his village around the time of Mao’s death in 1976. Jin Gou, in contrast to depictions of the peasantry in post-reform zhishifenzi narratives, is filled with curiosity and the desire for a wider life. Jin Gou’s ambitions make him the enemy of the two clans who dominate the local and county governments. These clans, the Gongs and the Tians, were ‘ennobled’ in the time of the early Communist struggles against the KMT and are engaged in the post-Mao era in an

129 incessant rivalry to increase their influence and wealth. Presciently, given its publication early in the reform period, Jia’s novel highlights the problem of official corruption under the reforms and anticipates many of the other social pathologies which, at that time, were just beginning to emerge. Jin Gou’s idealism leads him to apply for a position as a reporter at the Party-controlled newspaper in town, but his crusading efforts on behalf of the poor begin to embarrass the local leaders. Like Song Gang in Yu Hua’s Xiongdi produced almost two decades later, Jin Gou’s ethics make him unwelcome in a place undergoing rapid transformation. Jia Pingwa depicts the misuse of power and the callousness of the Tian and Gong clans as a contemporary expression of characteristics of Chinese officials that are suggested to have deep traditional cultural roots.

Social divisions and the new middle class in post-reform Fictional History While Fictional History narratives are sceptical that China, even in the Mao-era, was ever in fact an egalitarian society, it is certain that, in the reform and post-reform eras, even the pretence of equality has been abandoned. Yu Hua’s Xiongdi (2005) is an extended narrative of the new stratification of Chinese society based upon wealth. Xiongdi is a satire about the type of person who has become rich in the post-reform era and a critique of the culture that has emerged under the leadership of this rising mercantile class. Since this newly rich class has displaced the leadership of the post-Mao zhishifenzi within China’s middle-class, the struggle between the two groups is represented as a conflict of ideologies, one which the zhishifenzi group portrays itself as having lost.

Class or group-based narratives of society are necessarily generalizations and distortions, but post-reform zhishifenzi essentially hold that the pursuit of wealth has caused a mercenary and pragmatic ethos to replace, both in fact and rhetoric, whatever egalitarian social ethic survived the Cultural Revolution. The post-reform Fictional History narrative of the reform era sets out to demonstrate satirically or critically that the poor are entrenched in their poverty and powerlessness if they cannot market their ‘suite of personal attributes’ profitably. 103 Post-

103 In the post-reform period conceptions of human life have transformed to the point where individuals are encouraged to see themselves as the possessors of a suite of ‘assets’ and to imagine their life as a business in which these assets are either successfully or unsuccessfully marketed. Social relationships and social strategies 130 reform zhishifenzi claim of themselves, however, that it is an essential part of their identity as a group to hold exactly the type of moral scruples which disqualify them from material success in the post-reform present.

What is at stake in the struggle between the mercantile and zhishifenzi ideologies is arguably leadership of the new middle-class. If the struggle for material leadership of the middle-class has been won by the new rich, post-reform zhishifenzi are determined to contend for the moral and ethical leadership of the class. I would suggest that post-reform Fictional History as a cultural genre is a product of and an instrument in this struggle for class leadership. This struggle takes place within an environment in which the state has established the middle class as social exemplars (without however officially designating them as middle class, a term too infused with “bourgeois” associations). Indeed, Fictional History narratives broadly confirm Alvin So’s observation that the state in China has continued to play a decisive role in the shaping of class relations since 1978. 104 The post-reform zhishifenzi producers of Fictional History still see the state as a decisive force in determining their own destinies and that of other social groups. Robert Weatherly argues that ex-president Jiang Zemin’s policy of the Three Represents reflected the fact that the middle-class had become a potential and distinct interest group, one which the state saw as a client and supporter. 105 Guo Yingjie has noted in this respect that the middle-class has replaced the proletariat as privileged political actors and this is reflected in ways such as the changing composition of CCP membership in the decades after the 1980s. 106 Li He has argued that state policy embracing the middle-class is an acknowledgement that the CCP itself has had to become, in the reform era, both more middle- class and more bourgeois. 107 Li further asserts that the xiaokang society which the CCP upholds as the aim of their economic and social policies, is in fact a middle-class society. Luigi Tomba, in his study of the proliferation of gated housing estates in China’s cities, refers

are transformed in light of market rationality and freedom becomes an issue of personal choice even though the choices are limited structurally. Gershon, I. (2011). Neo-liberal agency. Current Anthropology, 52 (4), 537-555. 104 So, A. Y. (2003). The changing pattern of classes and class conflict in China. Journal of Contemporary Asia, 33 (3), 363. p.363 105 Weatherley, R. (2006). Politics in China since 1949: Legitimizing authoritarian rule . London UK: Routledge. p.152 106 Guo, Y. (2008). Class, stratum and group: The politics of description. In D. S. G. Goodman & X. Zang (Eds.), The new rich in China: future rulers, present lives. London: Routledge. p.40 107 Li, H. (2006). Emergence of the Chinese middle class and its implications. Asian Affairs: An American Review, 33 (2), 67. p.67 131 to these status displays as buttressing the idea of middle-class self-discipline as a project of state capitalism designed to legitimate the rule of the Communist Party. Tomba argues that the CCP hopes to create the new Chinese citizen by the civilising forces of suzhi (quality). 108

As we shall see, the post-reform writers and film-makers who this thesis defines as producers of Fictional History do not necessarily see the middle-class as a whole as exemplifying the qualities of suzhi, 素质 (quality) or wenming 文明 (civilization). The core critique made in the works surveyed in this thesis is that ideals of revolutionary personal transformation attempted in the Mao-era failed and this failure to establish a modern consciousness has left the population reliant, in the reform period, upon earlier models of elite culture which are necessarily ersatz: real suzhi and wenming are lacking. Zang’s research suggests that this view is widely-held and that the possession of wealth does not form an adequate basis for status claims in the post-reform period. 109 He identifies a mentality of “wealth hatred” arising from perceptions of the illegitimate ways in which people have become wealthy and by the problematic behaviour of rich entrepreneurs. 110 Whyte, on the other hand, rejects the idea that wealth in China is perceived by common folk to have been won through illegitimate closeness to political power and suggests that Chinese people have not abandoned their belief

108 An example of the concrete consequences of this is the production of gated communities which shut out those of purportedly low suzhi . Tomba reports that by 2000 almost 83% of Shanghai’s neighbourhoods had undergone some form of gating and in Guangdong Province there were, at the same date, 54,000 gated communities. Middle-class residents of these private compounds are able to buy a level of autonomy from the state because their local activities are typically governed by private agents appointed by real estate agents or developers and these tend to be collaborative with residents rather than coercive. Tomba has argued that the perceived conservatism of the middle-class in China is understood by the state as being useful to social stability and to economic consumption. More than this, however, Tomba claims that the middle-class has become an exemplar of population improvement and of responsible self-government, qualities that are ascribed to the middle class’s suzhi . The CCP are concerned to pursue new forms of community government which rely upon the making of new subjects who are autonomous, contribute to the maintenance of social order, and who can be left to govern themselves at the level of their residential communities without the need for government intervention. Tomba, L. (2010). The housing effect: The making of China's social distinctions. In C. Li (Ed.), China's emerging middle class: Beyond economic transformation . Washington DC: Brookings Institution Press. p.204 This thesis, however, argues that the zhishifenzi , does not necessarily regard the members of the middle class who do not have zhishifenzi values or attitudes as possessing true suzhi . 109 Zang, X. (2008). Market transition, wealth, and status claims. In D. Goodman & X. Zang (Eds.), The new rich in China: future rulers, present lives . London: Routledge. p.54 110 Elisabeth Koll points out that the contemporary practice of administrators and others with close ties to government becoming entrepreneurs by taking over the ownership of state enterprises has historical precedents. In the late Qing period, ex-official Sheng Xuanhuai transformed the China Merchants Steam Navigation Company into a private company. Other bureaucrat entrepreneurs cited by Koll include Zhang Jian and Zhou Xueyi. Koll, E. (2011). A fine balance: Chinese entrepreneurs and entrepreneurship in historical perspective. In W. Kirby (Ed.), The People's Republic of China at 60 : An international assessment . Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Asia Center. p.198-9. 132 in a link between wealth and hard work. 111

We can argue that the differences in the perceptions of the relationship between wealth, power, culture and morality in the middle-class in China that are found in the work of scholars such as Zang and Whyte are at least partly explicable in terms of the values of the zhishifenzi stratum and how it perceives other members of the middle class – namely those who do not possess outlooks or attributes that zhishifenzi would endorse. Ultimately, the struggle for social influence and leadership of this newly privileged class is characterised by a contention of ideologies which merely serves to reinforce social group positions. Zhishifenzi members of the middle class – who have experienced the weakening of their position as a social group since the 1980s – are critical of those in the middle class who do not subscribe to zhishifenzi values and do not understand their personal or group identities in terms of the zhishifenzi sense of history. Guo reminds us that the values ascribed to the middle-class by Chinese sociologists are a product of the way in which they are studied. He argues that the new constituting social classes in post-reform China “…can hardly be seen as phenomena independent of the analysts’ volition and representation.” 112 There are good grounds for arguing that many Chinese scholarly analysts of the middle class approach the middle class from the standpoint of zhishifenzi culture. The contours of this culture, my thesis argues, are most clearly expressed in the works that I define as post-reform Fictional History.

Overwhelmingly, state theories of social interaction promoted in the post-reform period stress the absence of relationships of conflict and emphasise the creation of a harmonious society, 和谐社会 , but it is clear, at least in post-reform Fictional History, that zhishifenzi and the mercantile middle-class manifest widely divergent ideologies and identities, values that are in conflict, even where the groups that profess them may actually be collaborating with each other. The writers and film-makers who produce Fictional History identify the essential divide within the middle-class as moral, ethical, attitudinal, and spiritual and these differences

111 Whyte, M. (2009). Myth of the social volcano: Popular responses to rising inequality in China. In W. Kirby (Ed.), The People's Republic of China at 60: An international assessment . Cambridge Mass: Harvard University Asia Center. Whyte further claims that the urban middle class and the urban proletariat have lost their Maoist primacy and are therefore more likely to call for income redistribution and socialist measures. It would seem, however, that since urban folk are calling for assistance to be given to the poor, and not themselves, it is socialism that they miss rather than their Mao era primacy. 112 Guo, Y. (2008). Class, stratum and group: The politics of description. In D. S. G. Goodman & X. Zang (Eds.), The new rich in China: future rulers, present lives. London: Routledge. 133 are enshrined in cultural practice: this division, I argue is explicable in terms of a division between zhishifenzi and non-zhishifenzi ¸ a division that persists at the ideological level, even though the zhishifenzi group no longer exists as a discrete and clearly visible entity in the way that it did between the late 1970s and early 1990s.

Everything old is new again: brutality and wealth in the post-reform era

The works of Fictional History whose images of the Mao era have been examined above focus are paired with works that focus on processes of wealth accumulation in the reform and post-reform eras; these works are often sequels to or continuations of stories of the Mao-era, something which is most clearly the case for Yu Hua, the key “Fictional Historian” that this thesis surveys. The post-reform Fictional History of wealth accumulation in China present inequalities and corruption arising from the rush to get rich eventually as having overturned the revolutionary-era bases of social equality and replaced them with a neoliberal capitalist system in which social egalitarianism, already damaged by the trauma of history, was further eroded. Fictional History sees this acquisition of wealth as both a displacement of Mao-era values and a continuation of the everyday abusiveness which was found in the revolutionary period, and, as we shall see, in the pre-Mao era as well. In these texts Yu Hua and Jia Pingwa, especially, argue that, in the reform and post-reform periods, Chinese ‘impetuosity’ ( 浮躁 , fuzao ) which writers identify as negative characteristics of Chinese culture, found a new outlet to express itself in the economic sphere.

In Jia Pingwa’s Fuzao (1986) an (unnamed) anthropologist conducting fieldwork in the area around the Zhou river offers his analysis of the social problems of the reform period:

“For a long time China was a closed and feudal nation; since Liberation, even though China has been socialist, still the sediment of feudalism has remained deep and widespread; now China has come out of its confinement and has, moreover, been enlivened by great

134

economic changes, but this is just like a great wave which all at once breaks over the bank of tradition and surges forward towards a new modernity greatly awakening the consciousness of the Chinese people. There are some who recognize their true value while at the same time detecting something lacking; this is how they can easily go astray, use the wrong methods, and this is why there are some who will use any means to get rich even if it means defrauding the national community.”

中国历史上长期是封闭式的封建主义国家，解放以来虽然是社会主义性质，但封建主义沉淀的东西太深太厚，现在一经脱离这种封闭状态，经受高品经济的刺激而获得活力，这就像浪潮一样，一下子冲开传统生活的堤岸，向新的天地奔腾而去。在变革中，人的主体意识大大觉醒了。一些人认识到了自己的存在和价值，而同时他自身的素质太差，这就容易便他把方向搞错，把路子走歪，这也就是之所以有人为了自己挣钱而不惜任何手段去坑集体，

坑国家。 (ch.22)

The peasants, who are discussing the course of the reforms, then begin to talk about a case which stands as a practical illustration of the changes in society. The character Fuyun relates the story of a young man from a nearby mountain village who, by some miracle of diligent self-study, was accepted into college in the city and became friends with a professor’s family. In mysterious and unexplained circumstances, the young man killed the professor’s daughter, with whom he had been in an affectionate relationship. This circumstance is explained in various ways. Han Wenju, the ferryman, sees the murder as a crime of passion and suspects that the young man must have been feeling guilt at abandoning a girl in the mountain village. The anthropologist, on the other hand, views the tragic event as an illustration of the spirit of the times and cites the major social upheavals of recent years, consequent changes in attitude, the decline in public morality and discipline, and the widespread complacency about violence that is an enduring relic of China’s revolutionary history, as the essential factors in the boy’s derangement. The anthropologist believes that people in such circumstances naturally manifest sentiments of disaffection and dissatisfaction and feel a vague desire for revenge

135 which is compelled to emerge but is not actually focussed on any particular object.

The anthropologist is himself a zhishifenzi , and his appearance in this novel is significant as the direct portrayal of zhishifenzi characters is rare in the post-reform Fictional History works surveyed in this thesis – we can note that Jia’s work is from the reform era not the post reform era and is thus a product of the heyday of zhishifenzi culture. The anthropologist’s analysis of contemporary social phenomena differs from others in that his reasoning is informed by a historical consciousness. Han Wenju, though by no means a fool, lacks this historical consciousness, and so his interpretation of events is informed by his understanding of human nature. The ‘anthropological’ view of the matter, in its consideration of the historical background to cultural phenomena, accords with the zhishifenzi view that history is a determinative influence upon the present. It is also noteworthy that the anthropologist’s analysis avoids any mention of the differences of social class as an explanatory factor.

It is, therefore, one key difference between zhishifenzi and other strata in society that they apply their cultural knowledge to interpret contemporary phenomena. A core claim of the post-reform zhishifenzi producers of Fictional History surveyed in this thesis is that Chinese people carry as a psychological feature the common mindset of their specific historical environment, their culture, and that this is expressed in both a conditioned tendency towards self-abasement and a countervailing urge towards national and cultural glorification. The question posed by Jia Pingwa’s reform-era anthropologist is whether, after many years of isolation and backwardness, it will be possible for China to enter the modern world. Desirable and necessary social and economic changes were implemented within a few years of the end of the Cultural Revolution but these, in the absence of time to prepare the population educationally or spiritually, have themselves been felt as a source of trauma. Jin Gou, impressed by what he considers to be the scientific rationality of the anthropologist’s views, begins to feel that the nation will only combat “modernity sickness” through the adoption of widespread programmes of self-improvement and scientific education.

This larger sense of historical context and concepts of a Chinese cultural mindset as the source of social developments is even more explicitly presented in post-reform Fictional History narratives. Yu Hua narrates scenes from the ‘old China’ to illustrate both the eternal

136 difficulties of life and the persistence of cultural traditions which grow up around inequality, suggesting that the situation in the post-reform era has deep historical roots. Wang Ban has argued that the tendency to favour the theme of ‘change’ in history writing devalues memory and ensures that personal history comes under pressure to conform to this archetype. 113 We can expand Wang’s argument and suggest that Fictional History is an attempt to link the personal present with the historical past. Post-reform zhishifenzi producers of Fictional History refute the idea that trauma’s effects are swept away by the mere passage of time and so, in these texts, contend that neither the imperial period, the Republican period, the Maoist revolutionary period, nor the reform period can be understood if viewed in isolation. The present, they suggest, is a product of overlapping and intersecting pasts.

Historical antecedents: Images of wealth in the Republican era and after Yu Hua and Jia Pingwa present narratives of pre-revolutionary China to critique the idea of change or improvement by showing Chinese societies as having historically tolerated a high level of economic inequality and that, in this sense, current levels of social stratification are less representative of progress than of regression. That economic power was abused in the past and inevitably led to social trauma is an indication, for these writers, that it will inevitably do so. Before 1949 a gentry class used its wealth and power to oppress the poor, while now, in contemporary China, the poor are still oppressed but a different class is the oppressor. Wealth, in the opinion of the zhishifenzi , is not an innately progressive or positive force.

An example of this can be seen in Yu Hua’s Huozhe , which is a story of wealth. Over the course of the novel Fugui (a name denoting wealth ) loses one type of wealth but gains another, and so his story is offered as a parable of the meaning of true wealth. Before the revolution, the young Fugui flaunts his dissolute and generally disliked self in the town in which he lives by literally riding on the back of a prostitute. Fugui indulges his love of gambling but proves no match for the worldliness and corruption of Long’er who cheats Fugui out of his inheritance. Losing his property turns out to be a stroke of luck for Fugui,

113 Wang, B. (2003). History in a mythical key: temporality, memory, and tradition in Wang Anyi's fiction. Journal of Contemporary China, 12 (37), 607-621. 137 however, as it marks the beginning of his life’s future happiness. After the revolution, Fugui literally has good fortune; it is Long’er who is executed as a despotic landlord instead of Fugui himself, and Fugui is fortunate in the sense understood by zhishifenzi in that he takes the opportunity to grow spiritually.

The distorting power of money is evident, however, in the case of Fugui’s father who cannot live without his riches and dies on the same day that the family is obliged to move out of the manor-house and into a farmer’s hut. We can argue that what Yu Hua is suggesting here is that for zhishifenzi , the idea that wealth can, in itself, provide a satisfactory reason to live is absurd, and this view is reflected in the depiction of other social practices of the Republican period. An old family retainer, Changgen, has been forced to leave the family service by Fugui’s financial ruin and has no option but to become a beggar. Since it is only the rich who can afford to die of apoplexy, Changgen must survive as best he can but he continues to treat Fugui as the young master and grieves more over Fugui’s ruin than his own.

In the view of the producers of Fictional History, in the old society, much of what is identified as Chinese culture derives from the habits of the wealthy, and the poor, like Changgen, are depicted as little more than beasts engaged in a desperate struggle for life. In Zai xiyu zhong huhan, Yu Hua shows how in all periods markers of class membership are invariably used as instruments of exclusion and persecution. The description of grandmother’s first wedding, for all its magnificence and appeal to tradition, is fundamentally the frightening abduction and assault of a 16-year-old girl. Upper class moral standards have justified the consumption and abuse of women and it is suggested that it is no wonder that these abuses reappear in similar form in depictions of the reform and post-reform periods. Gentry life with her new husband’s family was, for the grandmother figure in the novel, strict and stultifying. Grandmother is condemned by her mother-in-law as immoral for watching two birds in the courtyard garden on a bright spring morning, and she is sent away. At this time people in northern China are escaping the approaching Japanese troops and grandmother, unable to return to her father’s home in her state of shame heads west, on bound feet, together with rest of the fleeing populace.

Sun Guanglin’s great-grandfather, on the other hand, was a famous stonemason in the old

138 society, but the disaster of building an ill-fitting dragon gate stone causes him a severe loss of face. Like Fugui’s father who cannot live without wealth, stonemason Sun cannot live without pride. A broken man, he retires from the craft while his son, Sun Youyuan, takes over the business until the Anti-Japanese war puts an end to prospects. Sun Youyuan’s subsequent misadventures are presented comically, but in narrating this astonishing series of events, Yu Hua reminds the reader that suffering springs from poverty and from extreme situations, and suffering will make itself manifest using whatever materials are at hand. Needing money for food, Youyuan attempts to pawn his dead father’s frozen carcass, but the clerks at the pawnshop refuse to take the corpse as a pledge. The desperate Youyuan gets into a fight with them, wielding the frozen corpse of his father as a weapon. Later, Youyuan picks some roadside herbs to give to his dying, and starving, mother and when she recovers a little, Youyuan decides to become a herbalist. His herbal concoction hastens the death of his first patient, however, and he is obliged to flee an angry mob while carrying his mother on his back. Joining the refugees on the road, he sets his mother down by the roadside for a moment and his mother is eaten by wild dogs.

Readers may be tempted to smile at the gallows humour of Youyuan’s saga but there is also much to pity. His attempt to pawn his father’s dead body may seem unfilial on the surface but we can also observe that, to Youyuan, this corpse was the only thing of value he possessed. Similarly, there are many elderly folk in China today who have personal experience of what it is to starve and know to what extremes the hungry are driven. Sun Youyuan is not morally compromised by his actions in these extreme situations, he does not steal or kill, (at least intentionally), nor does he take advantage of the weak, but neither is he a hero. There are no heroics in the flight from the Japanese, either, which is depicted in the novel as a rout in which the strong exploit the weak. Any notion that the fleeing Chinese assisted each other or made sacrifices for the vulnerable in their exodus are refuted in this account. By undermining the heroic quality of orthodox history writing, Yu Hua again stresses the sovereign influence of human frailty and of human reality in history. The fleeing hordes are not heroes, just as Sun Youyuan is not a hero, because they cannot afford to be. Just before the grieving Youyuan passes by, grandmother – still a girl in her teens - is raped by a pork butcher by the side of the road. Youyuan decides that he needs a wife and so he literally picks grandmother up and they set out together upon a new life. Their subsequent story is not so much a move 139 away from the brutalities of this period as a development from them. In Yu’s work the pre- Mao era is neither a “bad old days” from which China has escaped nor a lost world of elegance and freedom, but rather an historical period whose qualities continue to manifest themselves later on.

Cadres and the well-connected: Power and corruption in the reform era

The idea that the present recapitulates the past was found in other works of the reform and post-reform eras. Specifically, it is suggested that the developments of the reform period mirrored tendencies at earlier phases of Chinese history, above all in the alienation of those in positions of power from those who lack power. Dang Guoying is one of a number of scholars who have observed that the implementation of the household responsibility system and the dissolution of the agricultural communes resulted in cadres becoming detached from the everyday concerns of the peasants. 114 This is mirrored in Jia Pingwa’s Fuzao which narrates the nature and causes of the breakdown of the relationship between cadres and peasants – this work is particularly important because it provides images of the early process of wealth creation in the reform era, and traces it back to the structures of the Mao era. In Jia’s novel, the original revolutionaries of the 1940s, the cadre ancestors of the Gongs and the Tians, were virtually bandits whose activities nevertheless helped bring about the communist victory in the district. Though essentially bandits, these men had a certain integrity, but the next generation of leaders attained their positions by nepotism and had no interest in public service or any conspicuous sense of responsibility to wider society. Jia’s narrative can be seen as an early depiction of the phenomenon of the hong er dai (红二代 ), these second-generation reds inherited influence which they exchanged for wealth. In Fuzao , these officials have been traumatized by their experiences in the Cultural Revolution (Tian Zhongzhen, the village head, was only narrowly saved from being drowned while tied up in a sack) and are now determined to use their power to grant or withhold resources to enrich themselves. As a result, the peasants in Fuzao have become alienated from the local authorities and simply wish to be

114 Dang, G. (2002). Rural political developments challenge traditional leadership perceptions, In: What Is Going on with Our Peasant Brothers? Chinese Education & Society, 35 (4), 35-56. 140 left alone. Han Wenju, the ferryman, declares: “Officials don’t care about the people, but without the people where would they be?” 当官的不爱民，没有民他还给谁当官？ (Ch.13)

Most frightening for him is the prospect of returning to the old commune system where Tian Zhongzhen could exercise daily oversight. For the peasants, being able to keep a distance from Tian is the chief benefit of the reforms. 115 Power has simply been transfigured over the generations.

Han Wenju is adamant that he does not want a return to the old ways (i.e. those of the Mao era), yet he is entitled to regret that the ethos of social equality, which was at least the rhetoric in the Maoist revolutionary period, has been repudiated in the reform period. He complains that after the reforms, the rich are getting richer and the poor poorer and the mood of the people is at a low ebb. The fact that he states that the rich “ get richer ” serves as a reminder that China, even during the Cultural Revolution, was never an entirely equal society and that, aggravating these budding inequalities, little has been done in the reform to ensure that the new policies would be implemented with safeguards against the exercise of undue influence by local power holders. Han Wenju declares that something must be done by the central authorities to remedy the situation and we suspect that his faith in the Party hierarchy to rectify contradictions at the village level, is also a relic of the past. Han imagines that the authorities in Beijing must be so busy that they are not able to attend to small matters, but he does not doubt their willingness to do so. His comments suggest that, at least in the peasants’ view, as this is presented by Jia Pingwa, it is the lower levels of government; township, county, and provincial who are not at all willing to fight corruption. The centre, is however,

115 As noted, in the village depicted in Fuzao , local society is dominated by the Tian clan. Tian the sixth was kidnapped by the KMT but escaped and later attained a senior position with the local communist guerrillas. Tian’s outfit of CCP soldiers operated along the Zhou River, killing landlords and fighting the KMT. After liberation, the Tian clan were appointed cadres over the village and town, while the Gong clan, who were the leaders of a somewhat larger guerrilla band, held power at the county level. During the Cultural Revolution, when the main character Jin Gou is a schoolboy, he and his father notice a band of Red Guards throwing a large sack into the river When Jin Gou fishes it out he is surprised to discover that he has just rescued Tian Zhongzhen – at that time the assistant director of the local commune and the peasants’ bête noir . After the reforms, Tian Zhongzhen is involved in diverting public property to his own use but discovers that a complaint has been made to the Party disciplinary committee about his behaviour. He sends his deputy to see Tian Youshan at the county town to have the complaint deflected. Tian Youshan is Zhongzhen’s uncle and he gives Cai Da’an, Zhongzhen’s subordinate, a stern lecture about the correct way for Party members to behave. Despite this, the township secretary who made the complaint is “promoted” to be in charge of the county drama troupe which puts Tian Zhongzhen back into action. These machinations take place in full view of the local common-folk who thus have their cynicism of the complaints process confirmed. 141 to be trusted.

Whatever the attitude of the central government, the revolutionary-era injunction to “serve the people” has been replaced by directives from county level to facilitate economic activity, and so local cadres feel encouraged to deploy their resources in the most profitable way. 116 The impression is that, with the state having made the policy decision to pursue wealth, the Chinese people of the reform era are now engaged in this task with a level of enthusiasm similar to that seen in the mass movements of the revolutionary period. Reform-era writing, and post-reform Fictional History suggest that the same heedless enthusiasm that was responsible for the traumas of the revolutionary period is now implicated in the evolving reform-period traumas arising from the pursuit of wealth, a pursuit, which, like the events of Cultural Revolution is shown as leaving both the educated group and poor farmers and workers at a disadvantage.

In depicting economic and social administration in the early reform period, writers such as Jia Pingwa imply that the political mismanagement of the revolutionary era has been replaced after Mao’s death by actual corruption. In the absence of rational and systematic oversight, the powerful in society waste no time in taking advantage of their status to enrich themselves and their families. This process necessarily involves the subversion of core social institutions, such as the police and the courts, and leads inevitably to disaffection with and a crisis of belief in local leaders on the part the population.117

In these narratives, transgressive sex is frequently the sorcerer’s helpmeet of official corruption. Revolutionary credentials are shown as being the first type of capital which could be converted into an economic benefit in the reform period and we see that this type of capital can be converted into other benefits as well – of which sexual “favours” are pre-eminent. These texts note that women came under pressure early in the reform period, particularly in light of their unequal access to the mechanisms of wealth creation on offer, to commodify their sexuality in return for the sort of favours which could only be dispensed by the newly-

116 Han Wenju’s complaint about officials can be seen as an instance of a ubiquitous feature of Chinese literature in all ages and here reinforces the idea within Fictional History that improperly acquired wealth in contemporary China is a product of the persistence of traditional cultural forms and orientations. 117 An important post-reform Fictional History dealing with the alienation of the cadres from the people is Mo Yan’s 天堂蒜薹之歌 , Tiantang suantai zhi ge , The Garlic Ballads (1988). 142 rich and powerful. In Fuzao , the cadre Tian Zhongzhen has got a local girl, Cuicui, pregnant. He convinces her to get an abortion by promising her that her brother, who has previously failed the university entrance exam, will be offered one of the two positions in his gift as a trainee reporter. The other position Tian is reserving for Yingying, the daughter of his sister- in-law, with whom he is also having an affair. Tian plans to use these two sinecures to get out of the romantic difficulties he has found himself in, but Jin Gou uses Tian Zhongzhen’s sister-in-law to create trouble for Tien on account of his affair with Cuicui. Tian is forced to renounce Cuicui who dies of rage and of complications from her abortion. Jin Gou forgives himself over his own part in this affair on the grounds that it is all for the greater good (which he interprets as himself applying for one of the reporter’s positions), though this entails overcoming his oft-stated antipathy to becoming a cadre. He says: “these days if you want to get something illicit done you must become an official, but if you want to be an upright person and oppose illicit actions, you need to become an official” 现在的世道是，你要办某

私的事，你就得做官，但你要做一个正派人，要反某私，你还得去做官才成 (Ch.8). In his response to the sexual and other abuses carried out by corrupt officials, Jin Gou is portrayed as something of a peasant ‘everyman’ whose naïve outlook is shocked by the sort of corruption which has become commonplace in the city, but his strong moral sense prevents him from ever making any compromise with anything under-handed. 118 His victory over the temporarily eclipsed Tian Zhongzhen results in his being appointed as a trainee at the newspaper in Zhou city, the county seat. At the newspaper he discovers that most of the workers there are related to other cadres. In the city he also becomes exposed to the sort of low level extortion exacted from restaurant owners and tradesmen in which local agency cadres demand meals or money simply to do their jobs. Jin Gou writes an article about the practice, which is not published, but still has a beneficial effect. He is taught that there is a ‘correct’ way to advocate for the rights of the oppressed and that it is important not to be headstrong if he really wants to get things done. Above all, it is necessary to maintain the reputation of Party workers. The institution of economic reforms alongside the retention of an extensive local power structure and permit system created an economy based upon the selling of influence. According to Jia Pingwa, even at an early stage of the reforms,

118 Jin Gou’s bluff nobility is something of an echo of the earlier school of Xungen, ( 寻根 , roots-seeking ) literature. This is unsurprising given the early date of this novel (1986). 143 stratification and the gaps between social strata were accelerating and this was taking place because of access to political power on the part of the dominant groups. In Jia’s rendering of the times many are unable to take advantage of the reforms in these early days because they are not connected to the sources of influence in their area.

Jin Gou soon discovers another egregious example of official corruption and neglect. In meeting the Dongyang mountain folk, Jin Gou is struck by their poverty and by the inequality between urban and rural parts of the same county. Few of the benefits of economic transformation have arrived in this mountainous area and Jin Gou wonders whether he might write a story about the plight of the poor. A local cadre, who had guided Jin Gou around the county, says: “Dongyang county is socialist, and so you must not expose its dark side.” 东阳

县毕竟还是社会主义的县，总不能暴露它的阴暗面吧！ (Ch.14). Both socialism and state capitalism had failed the mountain folk but officials, instead of solving problems, hide them and talk instead about the road to wealth: “Why doesn’t the County Committee leadership make earnest efforts to publish and resolve the situation, rather than brag about their efforts in helping others become rich? This type of phoney deceit has become serious, with poor farmers eternally plunged into suffering.” 为什么县委领导不切实解决又不向上反映，而还到处吹嘘自己帮民致富的经验呢？这种一级哄一级的虚假现象竟这么严重，而永远

让那些农民泡在饥贫的苦难中吗？ (Ch.14)

In the new reform-era hierarchy, peasants and common folk are at the mercy of predators who can now wield the power of wealth as well as government authority. In Fuzao , the only weapon deployed with any degree of success against official oppression is publicity. Gong Baoshan, the county secretary, says that: “…our cadres at the upper level are all good people. If the errors of the people below are not rectified, what will they become!” 我们的高级领导干部都绝对是好的，就是这些下边人把党风全搞坏了！不处理还了得，把下边搞成什

么样子了嘛！ (Ch.26). Jin Gou has influence because he has a reporter’s status and uses the threat of publicity to embarrass wrongdoers. Jin Gou becomes a celebrity with the younger cadres at the newspaper, but he is also coming under suspicion from the more established elements. Jin Gou is told by his editor that he has the right spirit, but that his spirit is “turbulent” and that he must not let this turbulence find its way into his work. Han Wenju 144 asserts that Jin Gou would not have so much influence with the officials if he didn’t occasionally flatter them. 119 Jin Gou does not like to believe that he is involved in making compromises, but he must, and does, steer a course between perilous shoals.

So much are cadres held in suspicion by the other peasants in his village that when Jin Gou becomes a cadre, they speculate that a lust for power and money has ruined him: “Officials are all the same: when Jin Gou worked on his boat, he was a good fellow, but as soon as he became a cadre, he went bad straight away.” 人人不当官，当官都一般 ” 金狗当船工时，

他还算个好人，才要当干部了，就没好人的味了！ (Ch.11). Jin Gou, however, is merely imperious and inflexible because his principles derive from his background as a peasant. Jin Gou prefers the local township to “the perfumed temptations” of Zhou city and, because he feels that the city weakens and tempts him, he returns to White Rock Stockade as a bureau reporter. Jin Gou now wants to use White Rock Stockade as a base for taking the struggle to the Tian family in line with his new mission in life to oppose the corruption and venality of cadres and to become “a spokesman for the people.” The ferocity with which Jin Gou articulates his mission and the almost theatrical character of his indignation suggest their origin in a type of politics characteristic of the Mao-era. Jin Gou’s confidence that he can speak for the masses, particularly, is a dangerous relic of the political certainties of an earlier time.

Jin Gou is thus an ambivalent figure. While he stands against the corruption of reform-era officialdom, already on the road to converting power into wealth, as a figure who is not fully representative of the zhishifenzi ethos, (in the way that the unnamed anthropologist in the novel is), he is shown as someone who might bring about a return to the turbulence of the revolutionary period. In this way, Jia’s novel might be understood as documenting the hopes and fears of the zhishifenzi group during the reform decade of the 1980s, when the rich have not yet consolidated their power, but the lingering danger of return to revolutionary violence is still strongly perceived.

119 Dakong says that Jin Gou has finesse. It is common in all the texts examined in this thesis that Chinese government power is depicted as personal rather than institutional. Those having the need to solve political problems are obliged to negotiate between two seemingly irreconcilable forces by reading the political signals and approaching individuals at the appropriate level. It is important to determine current Party policy and to discover who are the best people to approach. It is also necessary to know who is under pressure and who is on the rise. 145

Corruption, cadres and wealth accumulation in post-reform Fictional History The critique of official corruption persists and is even more strongly stated in post-reform Fictional History than it was in Jia Pingwa’s Fuzao . In his most recent novel 2013’s Di-qi tian, Yu Hua focuses his satire on the corrupt and self-serving behaviour of cadres and the inappropriate status displays of the rich and powerful, in a text in whose opening scenes the dead and those who have not yet died mingle together in a crematorium waiting room. Even in death, cadres are jealous of their prerogatives –crematorium’s waiting room is separated by class. VIPs talk loudly while lounging in their comfortable chairs, while ordinary folk who have died sit up straight on their blue plastic chairs and murmur quietly. One of the deceased VIPs has organised a memorial to himself which is in the form of a full-scale replica of the Monument to the People’s Heroes in Tiananmen Square, complete with a copy of Mao’s calligraphy which has been counterfeited to form a paean of praise to the himself. Upon being informed by his fellows in the VIP area that such a monument is risky, he confidently reveals that he has paid hush money and has endowed a troupe of guards to stop people from finding out about the monument.

For Yu Hua in this work and others, the noteworthy characteristic of contemporary Chinese society is the resurgence of rigidly enforced structures of class privilege based on power and wealth. Officials and the rich occupy a higher place, at least in their own view, than those with cultural attainments or learning. The status of cadres encourages them to abuse their power as a matter of right. In the Tan family restaurant, government employees and officials have been banqueting upstairs, but never pay. It is revealed that private companies are obliged to settle the bill on a monthly basis as a gift to the officials. 120 Tan says that now that the economy has slowed, the monthly bills are frequently left unpaid, but the feasting continues and: “nobody dares offend government people.” 政府都门里的人谁都不敢得罪 (Ch.1).

In Di-qi tian with its blurring of the lines between the world of the living and of the dead Yu Hua narrates the life stories of characters whose lives have been blighted by official negligence and cover-ups. In this dystopia it is impossible to know the fate of missing people

120 Indeed, in the afterlife in the novel, the dead state that there are only two places where food can be guaranteed safe in China; in the land of the dead and at state banquets. 146 in Chinese cities whenever there is a disaster, because officials cover up the extent of it to ensure that their careers do not suffer. In a department store fire, the authorities list seven dead and two missing so that the casualty figure will be categorized as ‘serious’ rather than ‘catastrophic’. It emerges, however, that there were 38 casualties of the fire and that the lower number claimed by the authorities was agreed upon by threatening the families of the deceased or by paying them hush money. Elsewhere in the novel, property development companies with links to local authorities demolish old housing while the residents are still living in them. 121 At a peaceful demonstration of residents outside the city offices, agents provocateurs infiltrate the demonstration; they throw stones at the office windows, chant anti- government slogans and thus give the police a pretext to beat and arrest the protesters.

In the novel the police are depicted as being at once corrupt, brutal, and incompetent. In the afterlife Yang Fei, the main character in Di-qi tian , meets a recently-deceased man whose mentally ill wife wandered away from home one day causing him to be placed under suspicion by the police for having killed her. The police then tortured him in an effort to make him confess and inflicted such damage upon him that he thought it would be better to be dead, and so he made a false confession and was duly executed. Six months after his execution his wife reappeared, and the government was obliged to pay compensation to the man’s family of ¥500,000. Another policeman that Yang Fei encounters in the afterlife had once kicked a suspect so “adroitly” during interrogation that the suspect was emasculated. After fruitlessly picketing the police station for many years and embarrassing the policeman and his department, the aggrieved man one day entered the station and stabbed the policeman to death with a kitchen knife. Asked to account for the ease with which the murderer gained admission to the station:

“The police at the Public Security Bureau, when they heard these comments were indignant, they explained that they had no idea that this Li person had come to kill somebody, otherwise they would have stopped him. One police officer explained to his friends; usually anybody arriving at the station with a backpack is there to deliver a

121 In the afterlife, Yang Fei meets the couple who were crushed inside their house when it was demolished. Their deaths have also been hushed up by the authorities despite their little eleven-year-old daughter being made an orphan. 147

bribe, so how were we to know he wasn’t bringing a gift but bringing a knife?” 122

公安局里的警察听到这些议论后很不服气，他们说不知道这个李姓男子是来杀人的，否则早就把他制服了。有一个警察对他的几个朋友说，平日里背着包来公安局的都是送礼的，谁也没想到这

个人从包里拿出来的不是礼物，是一杀人的刀 (Ch.4).

In the economy of power and influence, money has displaced justice and responsible administration of the law. We can recall the calculations placed upon the value of children’s lives in Fictional History texts about the revolutionary period. The resonance between the revolutionary and post-reform indifference to the value of human life is another sign that the economic reforms did not accompany moral reforms. For post-reform zhishifenzi it is a case of 换汤不换药 (huan tang bu huan yao , Same old medicine, different water).

Though most cadres are depicted in Fictional History texts – and their reform-era antecedents such as Fuzao – as corrupt and grasping, there are some officials who are shown to be upright both in stature and in morals, but even these are contaminated by association with the others. This line of characterization again supports the impression given by these texts that the revolutionary period’s emphasis upon socialist morality, even if it was not widely adopted by the people, at least set a public standard of ethics which is lacking in contemporary times. In Jia Pingwa’s Fuzao , Commandant Xu Feibao is a revolutionary veteran and is devoted to performing good deeds. Commandant Xu embodies the simple virtues and self-sacrifice which are the hallmarks of the Yan’an spirit, and his honesty and earnestness evokes the early years of the PRC. A crowd of people assemble outside the county offices and beg Xu to

122 The vignettes in Di-qi tian are both shocking and absurd and yet they are all seemingly based upon real events which have made news in China in the last few years. Chinasmack , and other sites monitoring the Chinese internet, have a wealth of such stories, the following only a sample: http://www.chinasmack.com/2012/pictures/rainbow-river-unused-medicine-capsules-dumped-in-henan- ditch.html, http://www.chinasmack.com/2011/stories/hubei-anti-corruption-official-stabbed-10x-ruled-a- suicide.html, http://www.chinasmack.com/2011/stories/stolen-mobile-phone-revealed-bribes-paid-to-local- officials.html http://www.chinasmack.com/2011/pictures/government-tears-down-wealthy-wuhan-mans-extravagant- tomb.html http://www.chinasmack.com/2011/stories/village-woman-crushed-trying-to-stop-construction-in-henan.html http://www.chinasmack.com/2010/pictures/man-steals-for-dying-girlfriend-marries-her-while-in-prison.html 148 intervene on their behalf with the corrupt county government. Tian Youshan, however, clears them away. Tian Zhongzhen takes it upon himself to provide a feast worthy of this VIP and so orders his village folk to provide game. Hunting a bear for the feast, Fuyun is killed. Xu thus unwittingly becomes the cause of Fuyun’s death, but Tian Youshan declares that Fuyun actually died for the people, although we note that this is a sacrifice, which it is implied is, never demanded of cadres.

Threats to the wealth and power of officials are met with explicit sanction, and ordinary people are shown as being wary of trespassing on their prerogatives. However, because the business dealings of the rich and powerful are clandestine, people frequently trespass upon the prerogatives of the powerful without knowing it. In Fuzao , when Jin Gou is wrongly imprisoned and sentenced, Shi Hua appeals to Xu Feibao but he is reluctant to intervene in the case on the somewhat naïve understanding that it is inappropriate to put pressure on a court in a nation ruled by law. After becoming convinced of the miscarriage of justice that has occurred, however, he is sadly brought to the view that Gong Baoshan has behaved poorly and is giving the Party a bad name. A provincial committee overturns the case against Jin Gou and identifies the Gong clan as the murderers of Dakong. This episode, rather than providing evidence of impartial justice, provides a further illustration of the widely-held zhishifenzi contention that China remains a nation ruled by man rather than by law. When Jin Gou is released, an old man comes to him and asks for the address of an honest and upright official. Jin Gou replies that, these days, they can only be found on the stage.

The hooligan rich: The post-reform era as an age of immorality

In reform-era and post-reform era texts, the corruption of cadres, police and other authorities is an inevitable consequence of the persistence of an authoritarian system which is the source of these officials power, but not all Chinese are equally inconvenienced by it. 123 It is widely

123 David Goodman has that stated that the market reforms after 1978 distributed income to entrepreneurs and people with CCP state connections because the reforms preserved the power of the state. Professors, technocrats, 149 observed by critics that for those in contemporary China who have made significant amounts of money, providing that they do not stray into politics, few boundaries are imposed to curb immoral or illicit behaviour. In Fictional History post-reform zhishifenzi , however, express concern with the social consequences of encouraging citizens to concentrate upon their own self-enrichment while discouraging them from taking an interest in public affairs. For zhishifenzi (both those of the reform and post-reform eras), who have traditionally been state enterprise managers, civil servants and high-level knowledge workers, taking an interest in the public good is the index of an altruistic and engaged community. The self-centred mindset encouraged by the pursuit of wealth does not, in this view, take proper account of others in the community; rather, critics argue it encourages Chinese citizens to think of neighbours as either a potential resource to be exploited or as a competitor to be overcome. This view is strongly articulated in Fictional History.

In Yu Hua’s Xiongdi , Li Guangtou’s lesson from history is that lies, violence, and bullying are legitimate aids in becoming prosperous and solving difficulties. Li’s inherent character dispositions ensures his success in post-reform society; he is hypersexual, shameless, single- minded, theatrical, and blunt. Li has always been a hooligan, but standards of public behaviour tolerated in the rush to get rich have now made it easier for hooligans to prosper. Traits that were once condemned as personal failings no longer constitute an obstacle to success, indeed, they thought of as a positive requirement for success. Li Guangtou, we can argue, stands an emblem of what Fictional History sees has happened in the post-reform era.

From early childhood, Li has been used to calculating his risk and advantages in any situation. Song Gang and Li become close as children after they find, and eat, all of the White Rabbit candies that Li Lan had hidden in the wardrobe. For Song Gang, giving way to excessive gluttony is a matter for penitence, but Li reassures the conscience-stricken Gang that the matter can be easily covered up. Though Song Gang is older than Li by a year, he begins to

scientists, and others within the intellectual middle-class now found themselves devalued by the market. Culture had become a possession in the suite of attributes that individuals were obliged to market and, as we see in these texts, intellectuals in the post reform period felt uncomfortable with commodification and felt disadvantaged in the new art of marketing. Goodman, D. S. G. (2008). Why China has no new middle class: cadres, managers and entrepreneurs. In D. S. G. Goodman (Ed.), The new rich in China: future rulers, present lives. (pp. 23). London: Routledge. p.25

150 defer to Li’s seeming greater sophistication and knowledge of human nature.

When the second volume of Xiongdi opens, the two ‘brothers’ are teenagers and Song Gang has been living with his grandfather (the old landlord) in the country since his father Song Fanping’s death, while Li has been living with his mother in town. Li Guangtou’s rise to riches, foreshadowed in the opening pages of the novel, seems at this stage to be highly unlikely. Li’s atavistic mimicking of his natural father by peeking at women using the public lavatory marks his entrance onto the adult stage. Li is not at all embarrassed at being caught in a lewd activity, nor is he troubled at subsequently being paraded around the town as a miscreant. Li actually profits from his notoriety by charging men the cost of a bowl of ‘special noodles’ to tell them about the sights he saw in the lavatory. Li understands that he has acquired possession of a commodity which, in the absence of all ethical restraint, can be exchanged for other, more respectable, forms of capital. Li also understands early in his career that profits can be made from his customers’ hypocrisy. The chief victim of his notorious behaviour is Lin Hong, the town beauty, at this stage seventeen years of age, who was using the toilet at the time that Li Guangtou was spying on its occupants, and whose chagrin at becoming the chief draw of this lascivious commerce leads her to develop a fierce antipathy towards Li.

Li’s disgrace, while a thing of little moment to Li Guangtou himself, is a source of grief to his mother and makes him a laughingstock in the town. After leaving school, no enterprise will hire Li and so Tao Qing assigns him a job at the Good Works Factory, a type of sheltered workshop. At this time, Li’s moral turpitude is of such notoriety that it places him in the same category of social handicap as those having significant mental and physical impairments. We are invited to infer that Li’s disability is moral. Li soon becomes the factory director by exercising his talent for bluster and begins to turn the fortunes of the Good Works Factory around to the point that it makes significant profits. Li hits upon the scheme of using sympathy as a marketing strategy and so he photographs his disabled workforce and uses the photo to gain pity, and customers for the factory, in Shanghai.

Originally Tao Qing, who is part of the local bureaucracy, is amused by Li’s attitude to accomplishing his goals: “you just don’t understand the rules” 不懂规矩 (Ch.3). Li’s

151 disregard for conventional ways of doing things, however, is the principal reason for his success, and his attitude ensures that he never has to submit to any authority other than his own. Li’s official promotion to leadership of the good works factory is conceded, though Tao Qing says that there was a lot of resistance to the appointment because of Li’s past behaviour. Tao Qing advises him to curb his hoodlum behaviour.

On her deathbed, Li Lan shows that she has also been worried about Li Guangtou’s future and had enlisted Song Gang to help curb his ruffian behaviour:

“Song Gang, Li Guangtou is your little brother; I want you always to look after him…Song Gang, I don’t worry about you, I worry about Li Guangtou; if that boy can find the correct path his future could be prosperous, but if he takes the wrong road, I fear he will end up in prison…Song Gang, you must watch over him for me, and not let him take the wrong road; Song Gang, you must promise me, no matter if Li Guangtou may have done wrong, that you will always take care of him.”

宋钢，李光头是你弟弟，你要一辈子照顾他。。。。。宋钢，我不担心你，我担心李光头，这孩子要是能走正道，将来会有大出息；这孩子要是走上歪路，我担心他会坐牢。。。。。宋钢，你要替我看好李光头，别让他走上歪路；宋钢，你要答应我，不管

李光头做了什么坏事，你都要照顾他。 (Ch.26)

Song Gang, in tears, promises the dying Li Lan that he will watch over Li and that he will share everything he has with Li. Having made this commitment to Li Lan, Song Gang is now jubilant over Li’s official appointment as manager of the factory, as it seems that Li is beginning to take the right road at last. Song Gang makes a copy of the appointment letter so that: “in the future, we can look at this” 我们以后可以看这个 (Ch.3), and he even knits Li a jumper featuring a wave and sailboat pattern symbolising Li’s ship of prosperity: “This is called the great prospects ship” 这叫远大前程船 (Ch.3). Li does not, however, abandon his tendency towards sociopathic violence. Tutored by the environment of the Cultural

152

Revolution, Li resorts to physical violence even in the most unlikely of situations. Liu’s disparaging comments about Song Gang’s short story and Liu’s contemptuous dismissal of Song’s talent enrage Li to such an extent that he beats Liu severely in the street. Song Gang is upset that Liu had to be hospitalised and wants to visit to him and bring him some apples. Li Guangtou, however, expects that this kindness will only encourage Liu’s intellectual pretentiousness and this, indeed, proves to be the case. Li clearly understands human nature, but Gang feels empathy for suffering and understands the social proprieties. It is curious that in this episode Li demonstrates a keen literary sense which is derived from his ability to detect nonsense and which he puts to use in skewering Liu’s pretentions. Liu is both vain and talentless, but he is very much addicted to having the local reputation of an intellectual.

Li is entrepreneurial but is also without modesty and unable to resist commodifying and taking advantage of others. Attitudes to moral values – seen on the one hand as a sign of a weakness to be exploited, and on the other an inviolable framework for living - emerge as the essential distinction between the new-rich and zhishifenzi in the post-reform period. These new-rich are depicted as shameless and pleased with themselves for holding mercenary attitudes, and thus it is that, in his new guise as a factory director, albeit of a sheltered workshop, Li begins to think that he is a rare catch for those whom he is amongst. Utterly without evidence, (indeed, in the face of all evidence), he begins to think that the town beauty Lin Hong – who he has been spying upon in the public toilet – fancies him because he is a factory director. When Li encounters Lin Hong after some time in which he had not seen her, he is so struck with her beauty that he bleeds from the nose. Li’s unwarranted self-confidence leads him to single-mindedly pursue the unfortunate Lin Hong in a variety of unorthodox and theatrical ways which only result in shaming the girl. Li’s organising of a procession to the knitting factory in which Lin Hong works, at the head of his ‘idiots and cripples,’ attracts a festive crowd. The gatekeeper at Lin’s factory jokes that it appears as if Chairman Mao had come to visit. Li’s procession is, indeed, something of a burlesque reprise of the former Cultural Revolution rallies in the town, and Li clearly intends his rally to have a similar coercive effect upon Lin Hong. Unspeakably shamed by the fuss, however, Lin Hong makes her way home through the crowd with lowered head.

To the extent that Yu Hua presents Li as an illustration of the sort of qualities favoured by the

153 times, it is clear that the new-rich, in the view of the post-reform zhishifenzi producers of Fictional History, are unable to empathise or even recognize, the suffering of others. This emotional tone-deafness approaches a psychopathology. Totally unaffected by the failure of his earlier efforts, Li’s later scheme is to court Lin Hong by sending a group of children to deliver a love message to her, but this scheme is derailed by Zhao who persuades the children to change the original message to something lewd. Li’s anger at this interference is expressed as wanting to wage a “class war” against the saboteur and so Yu Hua again illustrates how much Li has been shaped in his thinking by the rhetoric in circulation during the Cultural Revolution. The implication is that Li does not understand the concept of class struggle, and so he uses the term incorrectly, but it is significant nonetheless that ‘class struggle’ is used by him to indicate the utmost degree of enmity. We can suggest that Yu Hua presents Li Guangtou’s ineptitude and coarseness as an emblem of the attributes of the new rich of the post-reform era.

Li brings Song Gang with him to most of these encounters with Lin Hong. Because Song Gang is able to feel both shame for his brother and pity for Lin Hong, he retreats to the background. Lin Hong eventually feels that the only way she can escape Li’s continuing attentions is to find a boyfriend, and so she begins to notice Song Gang. Paradoxically, Song Gang’s fulfilment of Li’s consequent instruction to avoid Lin Hong: “Whenever you see Lin Hong you must flee just as if you had seen a leper” 见到林红就像是见到了麻风病人一样逃

之夭夭 (Ch.7), is a further instance of the artless behaviour that begins to endear Song Gang to Lin Hong even more. Recognizing this development, Li attempts to become, at least on the surface, more like Song Gang and he begins to carry a book around with him while he is pursuing her. His crassness and vulgarity are ingrained, however, so when Lin Hong hears him make a typically crude remark she thinks: “a dog can't stop himself from eating shit” 狗

改不了吃屎 (Ch.7). That Lin Hong can recognize in Song Gang the sort of qualities she desires in a boyfriend is a temporary departure in Fictional History from the way zhishifenzi usually assess their own attractiveness, but this partiality towards dignity, artlessness, and humility does not endure, as we shall see. Here Yu Hua seems to be presenting an allegory of the fate of the zhishifenzi in the post-reform era in terms of the esteem in which they are held by the rest of society, contrasting it with the vulgar success of Li Guangtou.

154

Li becomes more and more convinced that he is an entrepreneurial genius and he quits the sheltered workshop with the conviction that if he is doing well with a motley collection of ‘idiots and cripples’ he will be able to do so much better if he could command a group of PhDs. 124 Interestingly, those representatives of the Liu town business community who are familiar with Li’s background and who know his character to be deeply questionable, nevertheless clamour to invest with him because they sense that his brand of bluster must be just the thing to make them rich in the new economic environment. Just as in the depiction of official corruption in the 1980s in Jia Pingwa’s Fuzao it is commonly accepted in the early period of the economic reforms that getting rich requires the assistance and talents of those in society who were formerly shunned. This belief reflects the understanding that a new paradigm was put in place after Mao’s death, and that moral standards were quite changed from what they had been in the revolutionary decade. When Li leaves for Shanghai the first time, armed with his map of the world, his investors are lost in fantasies of sudden wealth. Tong the blacksmith and the others have very little idea of the business world, or even of the world beyond the county boundaries, and so they easily misinterpret Li’s rascality as offering an asset in the wider world.

Intoxicated by their dreams of wealth, Li’s known indifference to proprieties are transformed by the townsfolk into affectionate quirks of personality. Tong recalls how as a boy, Li had rubbed himself unselfconsciously upon Tong’s waiting room bench and now all join in with stories of his doings which are, in essence, uncomplimentary and scandalous. None of those who tell stories of Li praise his honesty or prudence, nor do they present him as a moral exemplar. Their faith in his business acumen – his sole redeeming attribute – is shaken, however, when Li disappears and, with a characteristic neglect of proprieties, does not notify anyone of his progress. Eventually the investors return to their usual censure and condemnation of Li, right until the day he returns sporting a full beard and long hair. Ever the optimist, Tong speculates that Li is trying to model himself upon foreign businessmen and notes that Marx and Engels, (ironically his idea of Westerners), had full beards.

Li’s beard more reflects the long night of the soul he has endured when escaping from his personal predicament than any desire to emulate the personal style of German social theorists

124 In this, of course, he naively, and somewhat comically, overestimates the worth of PhDs. 155 and revolutionaries. Li reports that he has been unable to secure any contracts in Shanghai and that the investment capital is gone. Li has experienced something of a business lesson, however, and now considers these losses to be a minor setback and is philosophical about trying again. The investors, though, are devastated. Too late they wonder how they could ever have trusted Li, knowing what kind of person he was, and they curse themselves for their naivety. Li submits meekly to the beatings meted out to him by his investors because he is prepared to admit his blame, but he does however beats Zhao, a non-investor, who also tries to take advantage of the situation. After the evaporation of his capital, Li proposes re-joining the Good Works Factory, much to the joy of Song Gang and of his ex-colleagues at the factory, but this proposal is not at all to the liking of Tao Qing who is angry that Li has not observed the required bureaucratic niceties. Tao emphatically refuses to take him back, so Li begins a protest sit-in outside the county offices. Again, though Li has no money or influence, he is still able to take advantage of his intangible assets, in this case his talent for shameless publicity, and exchange them for what he needs.

As he is conscientiously attending to his protest Li, by chance, enters the recycling business. At the beginning, to make a small living, Li collects cast-off materials, but he has soon accumulated so much scrap that he becomes the ‘scrap king’ of Liu town and people come to him when they have something they want to get rid of. There is a symbolism in this idea of scrap, and of recycling, which is particularly apt for Li. Li, himself cast upon the scrapheap of society, begins to prosper. Yu Hua suggests here that success in the reform and post reform periods is frequently dependent upon chance, and while elaborate business schemes often come to grief, unexpected opportunities may nonetheless present themselves. Li pays back his debts to his original investors and, ashamed of having beaten him so badly, the investors say that they will allow Li to beat them for a year. Irritated, Li says: “You are judging a man of noble virtue by your own mean hearts” 你们是以小人之心，度我君子之腹 (Ch.21).125 Li even approaches his former investors and offers them a new chance to invest in his latest venture. He does not, by now, actually need their investment, but wishes to give them a chance to get rich in recognition for their earlier faith in him. Somewhat more cautious after their first exposure to investing, most of the original investors refuse. Li has now developed a

125 This is from 左传 ·昭公二十八年 , Zuozhuan, Zhao Gong year 28, and that Li should be able to quote it is one of the many extraordinary surprises which mitigate his usual depiction as a mercenary thug. 156 philosophy of business and he ruefully murmurs to himself: “It takes courage to be an internationalist warrior” 做一名国际主义战士需要勇气的 (Ch.23).

Yu Hua‘s depiction of Li’s character stresses the ways in which his ‘hooligan’ characteristics aid him, and yet Li is not entirely a lost soul. The meekness with which he submits to his investors’ wrath, his nobility in returning their investment when he was able, and his offering them the chance to invest in a proven and profitable business indicates that his business ethics, at least, are worthy of admiration. Wang the ice cream seller and Yu the dentist both invest in the new venture because regulatory changes affecting their usual businesses have threatened their viability and their backs are to the wall. Ironically, in another stroke of pure luck, they both become extraordinarily rich.

Meanwhile, the county government is at a loss to know what to do about Li’s ongoing demonstration and the mountains of scrap he has collected which now surrounds their office, so they belatedly offer Li his old job back. Various official delegations are sent out to convince him to leave, and eventually the County Secretary himself is obliged to deal with the problem. Upon meeting the County Secretary, Li cheekily offers him a job in his scrapyard, pointing out that Li would pay the official a better salary. Li says his business is a way of promoting socialism (with Chinese characteristics) and that it serves the people, so the state should support it. Li, like Dakong in Jia Pingwa’s Fuzao , appears to realize that his wealth has supplied him with those most rare of commodities in Chinese politics; influence over the government, and freedom from administrative harassment. The Fictional History of wealth in the reform period emphasises once again the nexus between wealth and power. Li understands that the ethos of the reform period favours his position and by the liberal deployment of reform-era buzz-words, Li convinces the county authorities that their interests are identical.

Yu Hua’s narrative echoes Jia Pingwa’s reform-era work in pointing out here that the type of qualities essential to business success in the post-Mao period are also the qualities best suited to dealing with the government. 126 Li weeps with emotion at the public inauguration of his

126 Andreas has argued that the old regime of leadership by those who possessed cultural and political capital is under threat from the rise in importance of economic capital in China. Andreas, J. (2009). Rise of the red engineers : The Cultural Revolution and the origins of China's new class . Stanford, Ca.: Stanford University 157 new business premises. Li alters the words of the propaganda song concerning the love of the masses for the Party and Mao by adding lines about the masses’ love for Li. It is as if Li is being married to what he believes is the essence of post-reform socialism. The association of Mao and the Party with a scrap business would almost certainly have been inappropriate in the revolutionary past, but with the support of local leaders, who are under pressure to create jobs and wealth, it now passes as patriotism. Li concocts a narrative of his impoverished youth so that he can thank Deng Xiaoping and the Party for providing him with an opportunity to build a magnificent business enterprise. Now Li can get business permits approved within a month. By flattering the local officials, and by means of his awareness of the things which will embarrass or glorify them, Li becomes a favourite with the officials and is appointed as a representative to the Peoples’ Congress. Later he is appointed to the standing committee of the Congress.

Here the Fictional History of wealth accumulation has suggested that wealth is the product, largely, of luck but that wealth, once won, has a tendency to multiply and colonize other places under its own impetus. Li’s new premises are opened with a fireworks display, official speeches, and a public celebration which lasts for an hour, and this further reinforces the impression that Li Guangtou is symbolically marrying his business. Li declares that even if a family member had got married, there would not have been so many guests in attendance, or indeed, if a family member had died there would not be so many at the funeral. 127 Li subsequently diversifies his business interests and eventually demolishes the old town and builds a new one. Liu town becomes modern, with wide roads and heavy traffic. People are obliged to buy their new homes from Li and the language of the town changes from dialect to putonghua . So dominant is Li’s presence that most people now begin to refer to Liu Town as Li Town.

Press.. Elizabeth Koll points out however that, at present, when mega-rich entrepreneurs begin to trespass into the realm of politics, the central government frequently finds commercial or legal pretexts to deter them. Koll, E. (2011). A fine balance: Chinese entrepreneurs and entrepreneurship in historical perspective. In W. Kirby (Ed.), The People's Republic of China at 60 : An international assessment . Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Asia Center. p.205 127 We remember upon reading this episode that at Song Gang’s wedding to Lin Hong, nobody from Song’s family attends and that at the funeral of Li’s mother and his father, virtually nobody attends. Li is correct about the unsatisfactory nature of these important personal occasions when set against the inauguration of his business.

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Li Guangtou is shown as having always felt that his success in business was a sign of intelligence and excellence. Now as his wealth grows, Li becomes a type of local emperor whose will is incontestable. Li begins to present a persona which readers are well aware bears no relation to his true self, but which is useful in creating personal publicity. Despite his wealth, he still wears his old tattered clothes but rationalises this by quoting a story from the Spring and Autumn Annals and by referring to the sufferings of the peasants before liberation. Li, of course, is not interested in the welfare of peasants, neither is he a classical scholar, but he usurps these positions in an act of deception which post-reform zhishifenzi would almost certainly see as tantamount to replacing the genuine in public discourse with the ersatz. Li, and those seeking his favour, re-write his history to expunge or re-interpret the inconvenient details of his hooligan past. This serves as a practical example, within the narratives of Fictional History itself, of how history is always at the service of vested interests.

It appears to be an essential quality in China’s New Rich as they are depicted in these texts that they crave publicity, and even notoriety. Li wishes that he could be front page news all the time and engages in various stunts to help achieve this outcome. Li is jealous of his celebrity and is furious when he hears that “writer” Liu has been claiming credit for Li’s celebrity. Liu, who has known Li Guangtou from birth, had earlier written a newspaper article embellishing Li’s background and outlining Li’s search for a ‘pure’ partner. When the article is republished throughout the nation under the title “ Billionaire crying out for Love, ” Li, upon reading it himself, says that 这篇写得实事求是。 (Ch.31) ( this article really seeks truth from the facts ) echoing, but also satirising, the oft-repeated slogan of the reform era. Of course, the article is a tissue of lies and in it Liu minimises the most notorious aspects of Li’s hooliganism. Li is pleased with this fabrication, however, and suggests that 历史终究是公正

的。 (Ch.31) ( In the end, history is always fair ). In later years, Liu becomes Li’s public relations manager and Li declares, probably ironically, that Liu is a genius. Li is aware that Liu is a hypocritical, lying wretch but believes that the times call for public relations and Liu is ideally qualified for performing this role.

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Money and power: Reform-era and post reform-era trajectories If Li’s relationship with the county authorities improves enormously after he became rich, Jia Pingwa’s Fuzao , suggests how in the period after Mao’s death some in China become rich to protect themselves from persecution by powerful officials and not as a result of mendacity. Lei Dakong’s story illustrates that fraud and corruption in the accumulation of wealth do not always arise from hooligan traits. Lei Dakong was originally a villager who brought corruption charges against Tian Zhongzhen and, afterTian’s return to power, removes himself from Tian’s jurisdiction by becoming a wandering hawker. Jin Gou views this as an ignoble and degrading profession and claims, moreover, that if everybody left town in this fashion, Tian would be able to turn unopposed from ‘a worm into a dragon’. Persuaded to return, Dakong and Fuyun start up a carrier business but Tian Zhongzhen begins to impose new levies and taxes to undermine their business. Tian’s determination to punish Dakong, however, tempts him into acting illegally so Jin Gou writes a report and offers a first reading of it to Tian Youshan, Zhongzhen’s higher placed relative, who has no option but to censure Zhongzhen and impose a fine on his shipping co-operative.

Lei Dakong has a clear idea of the new economic situation. He says: “these days if you exert yourself you will not make money, but if you don’t exert yourself you will make money” 现

在是出力的不赚钱，赚钱的不出力。。。。。 (Ch.7). Later he says: “these days people cheat me and I cheat them. Who doesn’t do the same?” 现在是人哄我，我哄人，谁不是

如此？（ Ch.7 ）. Dakong initially wants to open a shop selling silver dollars with Jin Gou, but Jin Gou, true to his background, is suspicious of any commerce which is not founded upon the production of useful items. Like Li Guangtou, Dakong’s first business venture ends in failure. He is arrested in Guangzhou, imprisoned for a few weeks and relieved of his profits by the police. He is obliged to make his way home without any money but when he arrives, again like Li Guangtou in Xiongdi , he is buoyant and is talking enthusiastically about new business ventures.

Just as ideologically-tinged rhetoric was employed in the Cultural Revolution to mask personal malevolence, so in the reform period the new ideology is used to justify self-serving acts of official corruption. In Fuzao , it is common for authorities to undermine and

160 manipulate the law until the public opprobrium becomes too great and this is no longer sustainable. The retreat from this position of official engagement in or tolerance of immoral acts is then invariably accompanied by the liberal quotation of communist maxims. Tian Zhongzhen, apart from his other vices, is accustomed to receiving sexual favours from the village womenfolk and when, with this in mind, he approaches Xiao Shui and is rebuffed he threatens that he will return the next day. Dakong and Fuyun, incensed at his behaviour, lie in wait for Tian to return and proceed to cut off his little toe as a punishment. Tian is able to keep the real reason for the assault against him kept quiet, however, and has Dakong arrested in White Rock Stockade. Jin Gou writes out a formal charge against Tian Zhongzhen but discovers that Dakong has been charged with the political crime of undermining the reforms. Evidence presented by Jin Gou and Xiao Shui makes the compact between Tian Zhongzhen and the police chief to punish Dakong untenable and the conspirators abandon their conspiracy in a storm of moral rhetoric. In Jia Pingwa’s work, it might be argued, some sense of heroic resistance to official corruption is maintained. It might be observed that in the post- reform works of Fictional History such optimism is no longer possible, as the zhishifenzi group mourns its lost position of social and moral leadership.

The lesson Lei Dakong has learned from his experience is that the only way he can protect himself from the corruption and oppression of Tian Zhongzhen is to make “a fistful of money,” so he decides to go into business in a big way. Dakong had only seven yuan in his pocket, but he turns this, much to the astonishment of his acquaintances, into a cascading loan of ¥70,000. As he says, “You can tell how important money is, these days, by the ease with which I have made all these loans.” Lei Dakong then rapidly prospers by entertaining officials and clients in the best restaurants, but he also keeps a record of the bribes that he is obliged to pay out in doing so.

Jia Pingwa, like the post-reform zhishifenzi narrators of Fictional History who follow him, points out that the rich in China have no incentive to act in a socially responsible way, particularly when the nexus between wealth and power leads to corruption. Those who wish to join the ranks of the wealthy have before them the unedifying example of those who are already rich. Han Wenju, meanwhile, wonders whether it could possibly be Communist Party policy for Lei Dakong to get so rich so quickly. He points out that in the old days people

161 maintained that for one family to get rich, ten others would have to get poor. Han cannot understand how economics can have changed so much. Jin Gou is aware of Lei Dakong’s unsound business practices and he attempts to warn Dakong against economic crimes, “particularly in a socialist country.” Jin Gou is also mystified by the new economics and by the changes in administration consequent upon them. Jin Gou still feels that hard work and application is the only sure route to wealth but Dakong really is involved in swindles.

Lei Dakong is himself aware of his situation and he feels his lack of integrity as a fall from grace. Despite his bluster and his wealth, he begs his village friends not to despise him. Jin Gou begins to feel that: “He realized that in the current situation only Lei Dakong and those like him were answering the call of the times” 他意识到在目前的形势下也只有雷大空这样

的人这样来干了！ (Ch.20). The local cadres, however, are all satisfied with the reforms. Tian Youshan says: “Our policy now is to let some get rich first, and we must protect the interests of these people who get rich, otherwise we shall be in error” 可我们现在的政策是让一部分先富起来，要保护这些先富起来的人利益，否则，我们就会犯错误

的 (Ch.24). The widespread idea that the rich in post-reform China are the progressive elements in society and that they should be supported has been satirised as a self-serving conceit by Yu Hua in his characterization of Li Guangtou, but the idea was expressed much earlier in the reform era into the mouth of the deeply corrupt Tian Youshan as his justification for the unequal treatment of the poor.

Jia Pingwa and, we can argue, zhishifenzi more broadly repeatedly characterise wealth accumulation in the reform period as socially regressive and corrupting – so corrupting that it can transform even an otherwise moral individual into a beast. Jin Gou meets Gong Baoshan’s son-in-law, who is proposing a business deal with Dakong. Jin Gou notes the type of transformation brought about by wealth; he thinks: “His smile was ominous like a gathering storm; he was like a wolf, or a tiger, or an evil spirit, or a goblin” 就是那满脸堆出

的笑容，都几乎酷像骤雨袭来前的鸟云，似浪，似虎，似魔，似妖 (Ch.21). Lei Dakong becomes involved with Gong Baoshan’s son-in-law as a strategy to offset the power of Tian Youshan, whom he has also bribed. Dakong used to be a victim of the Tians but in Jin Gou’s appraisal “now he reeks of deception,” 今天又是冒得邪乎 (Ch.24) and we understand that

162 this is the natural outcome of Dakong’s transformation by wealth. Becoming involved in commerce has transformed Dakong into a replica of those he used to scorn. For zhishifenzi commentators such as Jia Pingwa money, sex, and power are understood to exist in Chinese ruling culture as a corrupting nexus which is both inevitable and inescapable.

The image that Jia’s narrative presents is that officials, keenly feeling the desire to protect their riches and power, corrupt public institutions of justice in ways that are just as effective as those by which justice was corrupted in the Cultural Revolution. Jin Gou is arrested and charged with accepting a bride of ¥12,000 to write a favourable article about Dakong’s business. The charges against Jin Gou are baseless but, along with Dakong, Jin Gou has become a target for the Tians. The villagers look for people who can intervene to help Jin Gou rather than trust in making direct representations to the law. Jin Gou is eventually sentenced to seven years in prison, but, to protect themselves and obscure their own role in Lei Dakong’s swindles, the authorities have Dakong murdered in prison before he can be brought to trial.

Jin Gou subsequently writes a eulogy for Dakong condemning his pursuit of instant wealth but recognizing that he was a victim of the times. We can observe that Lei Dakong differs from Li Guangtou in Yu Hua’s Xiongdi in that Li is portrayed as being naturally “a hooligan” and therefore suited to becoming rich in the reform environment, while Lei Dakong was obliged to abandon his peasant integrity and to assume the vices of the New Rich as a defence against the powerful. Li Guangtou makes allies of his local officials by flattering them and by doing things for them which would give them ‘face’, while Lei Dakong – in Jia’s reform-era text – is portrayed as waging a clandestine war with the officials of Zhou city and this proves decisive in the end because wealth, for all that it does to provide licence for people to pursue their own agendas, is still understood as being subordinate to power in contemporary China. It is significant that these works portray new-rich characters as coming to a bad end. At the conclusion of the story, the rich are either dead or isolated and alone. Though many acquire wealth, nobody emerges wiser or more virtuous for doing so and, for zhishifenzi commentators, this appears to be the inevitable effect of the pursuit of wealth.

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Concluding remarks:

In writing the story of wealth accumulation in post-Mao China, zhishifenzi – both in the reform and post-reform eras – identify the presence of cultural practices which perpetuate social violence and division. Jia Pingwa suggests that the sediment of past trauma has determined people’s responses to the opportunities presented by the economic reforms. Lei Dakong’s statement of the new ethics, “…these days people cheat me, and I cheat them. Who doesn’t do the same?” is, we can argue, for zhishifenzi , the essence of the contemporary moral crisis in China. As Tian Zhongzhen’s sister-in-law says: “I hear that people look after themselves, and everybody is going crazy to make money, they keep it all for themselves even though the nation has so little, if this keeps up, won’t we all be in trouble?” 但听说现在

名管了名，都去发了疯地挣钱，钱金归了个人，国家倒缺了钱，这样下去，怕也不是

长法？ (Ch.5).

Jin Gou comes to believe that education is necessary to remedy the culture’s tendency towards impetuosity, but Jia Pingwa’s novel is ultimately sceptical that such an education can overcome the might of China’s negative traditions. Zhishifenzi narratives depict twentieth century China as having been dominated by practices of inequality and indifference to the fate of others, which, they argue, shows how much the population was in need of a modern transformation. Yet zhishifenzi texts also show how unsuccessful these programs of transformation have been. It is suggested that the revolutionary period’s formal emphasis upon social and personal morality, even if it was all too often used to justify a specious class struggle and was never widely adopted by the people, at least set a public standard which zhishifenzi commentators identify as being lacking in contemporary times. Careless indifference to moral values is now practiced openly and standards of public behaviour tolerated in the rush to get rich have made it easier for society’s bad elements to prosper.

In the texts of the reform and post-reform eras, zhishifenzi commentators point out that money, sex, and power exist in a corrupting nexus which forms in ways that seem to be both inevitable and inescapable. In these works, the corruption of cadres, police and other authorities is presented as a consequence of the persistence of the authoritarian system, held 164 to be deeply embedded in Chinese culture, which has survived, functioning somewhat uncomfortably along with the loosening of economic controls. Hierarchical cultural traditions are portrayed as being remain richly productive of inequalities in the post-Mao era. Jia Pingwa shows cadres – themselves suffering from the trauma of the Cultural Revolution – as having seized the chance to become wealthy in the new economic conditions and became corrupt.

Having examined zhishifenzi fictional depictions of how the developments of the reform period were influenced by China’s historical traumas and having examined the type of people seen as having profited from the reforms, in the next chapter I examine some of the narratives surrounding those who have been diminished by the reforms. Though they were by no means transformed into socialist subjects by the Maoist decades, some in China had adapted themselves to the spiritual milieu of the revolutionary period and these would, by holding to anachronistic values, suffer the tragedy of becoming obsolete in the reform period. Reform and Post-reform zhishifenzi view the loss of status and livelihood suffered by these as at least a failure of stewardship on the part of the state, if not a betrayal.

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5. The great emporium

Principal texts:

Yu Hua, Xiongdi (2005)

Jia Pingwa, Fuzao (1986)

Wang Bing, Xiu (2003)

In the previous chapter I examined zhishifenzi narratives of wealth accumulation in the post- Mao period and noted that the personal characteristics of the New Rich portrayed in these texts were held to resemble those which, in an earlier period, were condemned as hooligan and anti-social. These texts suggest that the trauma of revolutionary and even pre- revolutionary history facilitated the rise of this hooligan class. I have suggested that these works suggest that zhishifenzi see reform and post-reform Chinese society as characterised by rapacity and moral indifference and that this was the ‘brother’ of the violence characteristic of the revolutionary period. In this view, deep-seated cultural impulses towards social exclusion, division and bullying are expressed in the new idiom of market economics by those who had benefited from the perpetration of violence in the earlier period. These negative social elements were joined by another group in society who, schooled by the trauma of history, had developed instincts that gave priority to preserving their own safety and prosperity. It is implied that by leaving the trauma of the past unaddressed social division has been further entrenched as a characteristic of Chinese society and precipitated a moral crisis marked by selfishness and the abuse of power. In so doing the narrators of post-reform Fictional History – and its reform era antecedent – frame their understanding of their own times and its historical sources as moral critique.

Ostensibly, the sympathies of post-Mao zhishifenzi – both the narrators of Fictional History and the zhishifenzi group broadly defined – are with those in history who have suffered undeserved exclusion from society and from the world of power and wealth. The simple and

166 the lowly, peasants and workers, are presented as having always had few defences against the violence of history and in these texts this class is shown to have been the first to be left behind under the reforms. For zhishifenzi this is significant since, for all the rhetoric about the leadership position of workers and peasants in the revolutionary period, these latter groups were most immediately vulnerable to economic exploitation in the post-reform period. However, what is distinctive about Fictional History is the suggestion that the disadvantage of workers and peasants has been shared throughout Chinese history by individuals manifesting spiritual and imaginative qualities which set them apart from the rest of society. These qualities are implicitly associated with the zhishifenzi class who otherwise appear in these narratives as invisible observers, and thus it can be asserted that in these texts the zhishifenzi class lament their own perceived social exclusion and alienation by telling the story of the disadvantage of those who are economically exploited.

Social disadvantage in the reform period is depicted in these texts as marked by personal experiences of objectification and commoditization. In the great emporium of the reform period (and in its post-reform successor in the 1990s and 2000s), everything is for sale and everything has its price. The monetisation of social relationships is shown as having installed a rigid hierarchy based upon wealth and justified by its own ideology. In this chapter I examine how Fictional History portrays the operation of this new ideology of wealth, and how it offers an implicit critique of the idea that wealth acquisition was a solution to the problem of modernising Chinese society. For all the ideological polarity in Chinese politics over the twentieth century, the need for modernisation has always been a matter of a cultural consensus. 128 The contention between the various rival schools of political thought has been about the means of achieving this modernisation and of the qualities that the transformed modern Chinese subject would manifest. In Hu Jie’s Xunzhao Lin Zhao de linghun, for example, it is clear that the attraction of socialism to Lin Zhao and the educated stratum in the

128 Since the May 4th movement, intellectuals have shared the view that the population and traditional culture of China was degenerate. The acceptance of this view had led to the establishment of governments in China in which the ordinary mass of people played no part. Lin Zhao was typical in identifying the damage done by the meta-narrative of Chinese history, the ‘Five Thousand Years of Civilisation’ narrative, which, as Fei points out, Fei, X. (1953). China's gentry: Essays in urban-rural relations by Hsiao-Tung Fei . Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. encourages bellicose nationalism, a narrow transmission of power and engenders “a succession of tyrants.” The Five Thousand Years meta-narrative is useful, even today, to assert Chinese particularism and, indeed, those five thousand years are a bountiful trove for those wishing to emulate the authoritarian measures of the past. 167

1940s was the promise of a general spiritual transformation as much as the defeat of poverty – socialism was seen as a vehicle for modernisation. For post-reform zhishifenzi , in relation to whom figures like Lin Zhao stand in something of the position of prophets, the degeneration into totalitarianism and division that occurred in the lifetimes of Lin Zhao and her ilk is understood as representing the defeat of modernity by the forces of tradition and by the darker side of human nature. The objectification and commodification that is shown to have taken place in the reform-era, is, we can argue, configured in Fictional History as the outcome of the same forces that led to the derailment of the modernisation project by totalitarianism.

It has been suggested in the previous chapters that post-reform authors and film-makers express scepticism that the project of population transformation could ever have prevailed over the contrary impulses of traditional culture in China. The basic view of the producers of Fictional History is that the peasants and workers in the revolutionary period were culturally conservative and resistant to modernisation. 129 For zhishifenzi , the salient point is that the peasants and workers continued to hold on to traditional social values right up to the death of Mao and were thus unprepared for epochal change at the time the economic reforms were implemented. For the authors examined in this thesis, an underlying and essentially unchanging human nature is a better explanation for patterns of social change than the influence of any particular ideology, and it is on this basis that the phenomenon of wealth and power in the reform period is critiqued. The negative effects of wealth and power are a matter of the influence of long-standing social and cultural patterns that the changes of modern history have done little to alter.

Economic reform, after Mao’s death, is accepted by the producers of Fictional History as being inevitable but they suggest that the operation of the market economy, rather than answering all China’s needs, was distorted by the baneful influences of China’s historical and cultural inheritance and became a further source of trauma. At the point where China’s society and economy began to more closely resemble that of the West, post-reform zhishifenzi present in the works of Fictional History a sustained picture of China’s domestic expression

129 Meisner, M. (1986). Mao's China and after (Rev. ed.). New York: N.Y.: The Free Press. (page 412) Mao had felt that the transformation of the bourgeoisie into modern socialist subjects would be relatively easy, but Mao later abandoned the idea that intellectuals and others educated in elite Chinese culture could be progressive elements. 168 of capitalism as singularly rapacious and productive of inequality. In these texts, a traumatised, mostly urban-based group whose core interest was to protect themselves from the sort of insecurities of life experienced in the Cultural Revolution are shown as having mobilized to take advantage of the new economic opportunities by co-opting the vast conservative and under-prepared working population to provide the labour for the great emporium. An analysis of the morality of this phenomenon and of the effects upon the person of capitalist objectification, is a foundational concern of Fictional History.

Replicas: Fictional Histories of an ersatz world

One feature of the post-Mao reforms was the ’opening up’ of the country to foreign influences and modes of modern life which were entirely new to most Chinese. Zhishifenzi had been the beneficiaries of a wider education than many other people in Chinese society, and they may have been less astonished at the degree of cultural and material change which had occurred in the outside world since 1949 than were many other citizens, but the sudden influx of information about modern design and technology seems to have engendered a strong sense that the revolutionary period had isolated China from the modern world. Eager to establish themselves in the new globalized world, people in reform-era China sought to imitate many of the superficial features of modern life in the advanced consumer economies.

In Xiongdi , Yu Hua satirises the provinciality and lack of sophistication of the Chinese people at the beginning of the reform period. He implies that just as an earlier generation of farmers had embarked upon the Great Leap Forward without any technical or scientific preparation, so in the reform period, the Chinese people entered a mystifying globalized world without preparation. In this novel, one of Li Guangtou’s first international business coups is his purchase of thousands of discarded, but stylish, Japanese suits. These suits were once uniforms, possibly gakuran , and Li’s customers soon discover that each suit has a Japanese name sewn into them. An odd game ensues as people compete to secure suits with the most illustrious names in them. Zhao and Liu have pretentions to literature and are therefore

169 delighted to find suits with the names Mishima ( 三島 ) and Kawabata, ( 川端 ) while local administrators vie with each other to find suits bearing celebrated politicians’ names. Clearly Li’s customers see wearing these suits as a way to emulate Japanese cosmopolitanism. Indeed, it is suggested that in enthusiastically appropriating these Japanese identities by wearing the suits, the townsfolk have become imitation Japanese. Blacksmith Tong, who has removed the Japanese name from his suit and sewn in his own name, is disgusted. He tells Yu the dentist and Wang the ice-cream seller: “You people, as soon as you put on foreign clothes you forget your ancestors -- you haven’t even a bit of integrity” 你们这些人，穿上外国衣服就忘记了自己的租宗，一点骨气都没有 (Ch.25). Tong goes on to suggest that there were so many Chinese traitors during the war with the Japanese because Chinese people were so enthralled with foreign things. After enduring Tong’s criticism, Yu points out to Wang that the blacksmith is himself wearing a Japanese suit.

This incident, we can argue, documents the view of post-reform zhishifenzi , that modern China is conspicuously a nation built upon imitations, fakes, and fakery. Zhishifenzi generally scorn the counterfeit and the ersatz as evidence of cultural insecurity and an ignorance of anything beyond the superficial level. They suggest that for others, however, far from being a matter of shame, fakes are an element of the nation’s natural advantage, and that they are part of what will make it great in the future. Fictional History works suggest that the confusion of the fake with the real superficial with the substantial is present in all areas of life, and most significantly within personal relationships. In Di-qi tian , for example, Yu Hua narrates the story of “Mouse-girl” to illustrate how fakery infects people’s relationships and erodes identity until, in the end, nothing is reliably true.

Yu Hua suggests in his earlier novels that the most common use of fakery in contemporary China is to escape or obscure history – personal or collective. In Xiongdi, Li Guangtou’s virgin beauty contest attracts a horde of itinerant con-artists and fakers eager to take advantage of the gullibility of the townsfolk. A certain Zhou arrives in Liu Town selling two types of artificial hymen; Lady Meng Jiang , the cheaper locally made product, and Joan of Arc , which is more expensive and (putatively) imported. Zhou’s marketing pitch is that losing one’s virginity is not an irrevocable state; it is possible be a virgin over and over again, and it is indicated that this message resonates with a population who wish to forget their bitter

170 history. Presented as an indication of how rapidly standards of public morality are changing, the large crowd attracted by Zhou’s vulgar exhibition abandon notions of what is seemly to express in public and are led to become complicit in an absurd and lewd undertaking. Yu Hua contends in this episode that the people are fascinated by the idea of a renovation which is only superficial (and bogus), and that there is no understanding that what is required is a genuine spiritual renewal – the persistent concern of the zhishifenzi observer of Chinese society. The success of the sales pitch for artificial hymens is a metaphor for the impossible desire to escape the facts of history. In the great emporium or post-Mao China, it is suggested, Chinese people look for the means of changing their lives by purchasing the superficial and the fake. The spiritual qualities of cosmopolitanism and modernity, whatever these might be, are neglected while surface manifestations become the shared currency of the new consumer culture.

Yu Hua implies here that there is an inevitable trajectory downwards if one follows the logic of the Chinese version of capitalism. It is suggested that the certainties of the past have been replaced by a rush to become wealthy which is uninformed by notions of what is rational or reasonable. The only certainty is that those who stand upon their dignity are left behind. Later in the novel, in Hainan and upon Zhou’s suggestion, Song Gang agrees to undergo breast enhancement surgery as a way of attracting customers to buy Zhou’s stock of breast cream. Song Gang now finds himself metaphorically, and almost actually, emasculated by his own inability to prosper in the reform era. Song Gang’s role as a man is now to become a sideshow freak beguiling the foolish and ignorant into purchasing a fake and possibly dangerous product.

The dark arts of marketing and public relations were foreign to Chinese people of the Mao- era but entered the country with the economic reforms and were put to work to obscure the life-stories of those who had become wealthy and successful. Yu Hua implies that these concocted narratives respond to a profound need of the newly-rich to unify their entire life story as a success. So compelling is the desire to concoct these stories that the subject frequently starts believing in the fabrications. 130 In Xiongdi Li Guangtou, is shown to be incapable of finding love, obsessed as he is with his own affairs. The town gossips remedy

130 The talent of rectifying history is, of course, also practiced by historians – including fictional historians. 171 this absence by inventing a past for Li, after he becomes rich, which has more of the features of Song Gang’s experience than his own. The appropriation of Song Gang’s past history can perhaps be read as an indication, that Song Gang, in his poverty, is no longer worthy of it. Li Guangtou approves of these attempts to rectify the past because, for him, they represent what should have happened. Fictional History here draws powerful attention to the process by which people come to embrace fictions as history.

As the new narrative gains acceptance in place of the townsfolk’s authentic memories, the people begin to speak of Lin Hong as unfortunate, even foolish, to have spurned the noble Li’s affection. Liu and Zhao publicly squabble over the glory of having been involved in the shameful incident where Li was caught in the public lavatory peeking at women’s backsides as if this were an important historical event. Li comes to believe his fake life story and, after he seduces Lin Hong, he arranges for her to have hymen reconstruction surgery in Shanghai, so that he can feel that he has definitively corrected her historical mistake in marrying the wrong man. Li also buys the Good Works Factory, where he was originally the manager, and transforms it into a ‘research centre.’ Each of the workers; the disabled, blind, and ‘idiots,’ now receive a salary equivalent to a university professor. Superficially, this appears to be generous, but the workers are given nothing to do and are paid much more than they need. Li’s philanthropy is chiefly motivated by a desire to erase the traces of his former shame. 131

The narratives of the fabricated past of Li Guangtao, we can argue, show how it is seen that just as the material artefacts of post-reform life are commonly fake, post-reform culture, in the view of China’s zhishifenzi , is also derivative and inauthentic. The type of person who has become wealthy and powerful in the post-reform period is depicted in Fictional History works as prospering in the absence of learning or aesthetic taste. The newly rich, lauded as progressive elements, nonetheless spend their fortunes on vulgar and unnecessary luxuries, which seem to mimic the imperial style. 132 Overwhelmingly, zhishifenzi complain that, in the

131 There is, as well, an unwholesome reflection upon the worth of professors and academic research of which we cannot approve. 132 The artistic taste of the new rich in China is also satirized in Shengshi Zhongguo 2013 nian when a visit to the 798 art district in Beijing is curious for the fact that there was no local art on display, merely copies of European and North American art. French impressionist pieces are collected by Chinese tycoons who manifest a similar taste to that prevailing among the tycoons of Japan decades before. This scene is a contrast to the scenes in Wo 11 where Wang’s father risks his life during the Cultural Revolution to keep copies of impressionist works. Wang’s father is an artist and is confident in his own standards of aesthetic excellence, but for the newly rich of 172 reform and post-reform eras, the possession of an education has made a person unfit for life in China. This is also projected into the past: in Jia Pingwa’s Fuzao, Han Wenju blames his teacher for encouraging him to study hard because this meant that he gave up the opportunity to run off and join the guerrillas with the Gongs and Tians who now dominate the district. In the revolutionary days, the prerequisite for eminence was to have revolutionary credentials, but in the reform-era present it is to have money. Han Wenju had amassed some education but, neither in the revolutionary or reform periods has it paid him to have learning, and so he remains the lowly operator of the river ferry.

In Fictional History works (and in their reform-era forerunners) zhishifenzi commentators further make the point that if the revolutionary period was blameworthy for its inability to bring about the moral transformation of the population, the reform period is equally blameworthy for eroding the power of education as a socially transformative force. Exposure to a humanistic education was seen by zhishifenzi as the decisive transformative factor in their own lives, but Fictional History texts argue that since the dissolution of the zhishifenzi group in the 1990s and 2000s and the corresponding rise of the mercantile middle-class, formal education has become less and less able to enable intelligent people to achieve positions of prominence in Chinese society. 133

A resurgence of faith: Religious life in the age of fakes This sense of the power of real education and knowledge being eroded by the forces of ignorance and fakery – and ultimately to the cultural inheritance of superstition – can be dated back to the works of the 1980s. We can argue that the mystification of the reform and post- reform era populace by fake goods and false claims of all kinds is understood by zhishifenzi commentators as stemming from a culture controlled by the forces of superstition. In Fuzao, Jia Pingwa presents a tension between the rational and scientific views of the zhishifenzi

the post-reform period, art must be internationally affirmed as excellent before it can be considered an investment. 133 For zhishifenzi , we can argue, he chief benefit of education remains spiritual rather than material and this is why the class distinguishes itself from the common run of purely professional workers. Principally, the zhishifenzi wish to distinguish themselves from the mercantile group who, generally, do not owe their wealth to the attainment of a liberal education and for whom, indeed, education may have been experienced as a hindrance. 173 anthropologist, and the mystical wisdom espoused by the abbot and the local shamans. 134 In the final scene of Fuzao, Xiaoshui consults a troglodyte fortune teller because she is concerned about a dream concerning Jin Gou’s decision to purchase a modern motorboat. She is worried that the purchase may portend misfortune. The fortune teller is noteworthy because he divines the future with the aid of the spirits of Mao, Zhou Enlai, and Zhu De. Fortunately, Zhou Enlai’s fuji (扶乩 , spirit communication ) is reassuring with regard to the matter of the motorboat but zhishifenzi would note here the celerity with which folk culture in China has colonized these erstwhile embodiments of modernising rationality. Mao, Zhou Enlai, and Zhu De, each resolutely hostile to superstition in their lifetimes, are now linked with supernatural power. This victory of superstition is symbolically depicted when Xiaoshui leaves the fortune teller’s cave. A storm hits, the river breaks its banks, Hanju’s old ferryboat is washed away, and Xiaoshui is stranded on the fortune teller’s side of the river.

As well as being entangled with the phantoms of traditional culture , Fictional History – and its reform-era antecedents – suggests that China is a land still ‘haunted’ by the spirits of the revolutionary years and its deceptions. Post-reform zhishifenzi culture intimates that in China, political and military power is frequently linked with spiritual strength and that this strength is treated by the common folk as a more significant factor in ruling legitimacy more than are the details of policies, strategies, and negotiations which are the real constituents of power. The farmers’ propensity to view the world around them in spiritual terms results, is shown in Fuzao, as an urge to explain social phenomena as the earthly reflection of mystical power. The abbot and the local peasants believe in the post-mortem operation of the power of Mao’s spirit in the world, and the peasants also believe that the supernatural world reflects the phenomenal world in its political arrangements and that, naturally, Mao has a leading role in the afterlife.

The abbot attributes natural occurrences such as droughts and earthquakes to the supernatural and interprets these phenomena as foreshadowing other calamities such as the assumption of power by Hua Guofeng. Fuyun, on the other hand, declares that he doesn’t believe in the

134 For all that Jia Pingwa upholds scientific reasoning in this novel, he also implies that secular knowledge can be as mysterious and esoteric, at least to the peasantry, as the old beliefs. His scientific anthropologist therefore mysteriously appears and disappears throughout the course of the novel somewhat in the manner of the Earth god.

174 power of spirits, otherwise how could one order from Mao have been enough, during the Cultural Revolution, to have the monastery demolished? The Abbott claims that Mao’s spirit was stronger than the hundred spirits protecting the monastery, and this is why the monastery was destroyed. By comparing Mao’s spiritual power and the power of the hundred deities, Jia Pingwa suggests their fundamental equivalence; faith in these figures from recent history is as delusional, in his view, as faith in the legion of deities. Han Wenju rejects the abbot’s superstitions but still feels obliged to ascribe spiritual power to earthly leaders. Han says that he has seen a picture of the Central Committee of the Communist Party in the newspaper and that: “they all radiate a lofty spirit, so in my lifetime there will be no more turmoil and chaos of war” 都是有天下的气概，到我死也不会有兵荒马乱的吧 (Ch.17), which is, in itself, another expression of faith. Though allowing that faith is a necessary comfort in times of traumatic change, reform and post-reform era zhishifenzi suggest that the tendency of common people to attribute spiritual power to prominent politicians merely re-establishes the cycle of faith, trauma, and disillusion which has so marked China’s modern history.

In Gao Xingjian’s Lingshan – a work that will be discussed in depth in the next chapter – people have turned their backs on the rationality of former times and restored their superstitions. In a similar case to that mentioned above, the language of the Cultural Revolution has found a second life as a part of “superstitious” ritual. When the narrator consults a shaman in a small country town, the medium speaks of 牛鬼蛇神 (ox demons and snake spirits ), the same term used to label counter-revolutionaries in the Cultural Revolution. Gao Xingjian’s narrator is a zhishifenzi , however, a writer, and though he encounters many types of religious practice, he approaches them with a sceptical, almost anthropological, mind, which is the legacy of his education and temperament. Though he wishes he could find the surety and peace which are born of renunciation and conviction, he realizes that he is an intellectual and that it is impossible to change his own belief in rationality. Religion, it is suggested, is a matter of fakery, whether it be in the immediate aftermath of the Cultural Revolution, or in the era of deranged wealth accumulation in the 1990s and 2000s. The unifying theme is the sense of a populace in thrall to various kinds of false god.

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A sexual revolution: Commodities of the flesh and fake relationships

In Fictional History works the rush to become rich is seen to favour the well-connected and the unscrupulous, but participation in the race was widespread. In the view of these texts, market-led reforms swept away socialist culture because this culture had never properly established itself in the population and had a much weaker hold on the collective imagination than superstition. The inevitable result was a retreat to familiar cultural practices when the revolutionary period came to an end. Transgressive sexual behaviour, and the commoditisation of women in particular, became a feature of reform-era culture, and Fictional History intimates that this is a reproduction of much older cultural patterns. New economic and power relationships generated a market in commercial sex, the operation of which astonished those who had become used to the somewhat innocent, even puritan, sexual modes of the revolutionary period.

Yu Hua suggests that the New Rich, in their poverty of imagination and empathy, and in their preoccupation with the superficial, are isolated and incapable of loving relationships. In the view of these texts, the sexual success of the New Rich in China is presented as being a substitute for a love which they cannot feel. In Xiongdi , Li Guangtao’s early fascination with sexual sensation, to say nothing of his unselfconsciousness in expressing these impulses, denotes less a precocious maturity than an indifference to propriety. Li declares in the novel that although he has slept with many women, he has never slept with one that he has loved. Lin Hong refuses him, so he gets a vasectomy. Now sex, though abundantly available, is meaningless to him. It is simply another appetite. Li’s idea that he would have transcended the purely physical sensation of sex if Lin Hong had not rejected him is dishonest, of course, and this contention shows how little he understands the elements of genuine human intimacy. Li has become, as he says, disillusioned with the mortal world but he has revelled in his romantic martyrdom and in the bogus renunciation represented by his vasectomy. In the emptiness of his sexual conduct Li is constructed as the emblem of everything the zhishifenzi group finds wanting in its non-zhishifenzi counterparts.

It is noteworthy that Li Guangtou frequently bemoans the decline in standards of female

176 virtue though he is heavily implicated in undermining them. For all Li’s claim that, for him, sex is meaningless, he is seemingly obsessed with acquiring conquests and has become hypersexual: “He held up two fingers to say that during the day he pulled in money and in the evening, he pulled in women” 他伸出两根手指，说自己是白天挣钱，晚上在挣女人 (Ch.30). When he brings up the idea of a beauty contest for virgins with the local authorities, the moral qualms of the latter, whatever they may have been, are outweighed by calculations of the economic potential of the scheme. In this instance Fictional History narratives again illustrate again how wealth effortlessly sweeps away public morals when the rush to get rich is the sovereign concern of public life. The observation is also made that in an environment where a better life can only be purchased with money, it is easy to undermine the morals of the poor. In making this observation about the corrosive effects of wealth, we might argue that Fictional History reflects the concern of some contemporary Chinese Social Scientists. In a recent study by Chen Rongwu and Cao Jinqing from the East China Normal University Faculty of Sociology and the Institute of Public Administration in Shanghai it is observed that:

“One of the important factors in the commerce of women’s sex is that, in the process of urbanization it has become the ideal among rural women to long for a city life. The vast majority yearn to graduate school and to get married or by other means become a city resident, but in cases where neither of these is practical, finding temporary work in town is an alternative way of being in the city.”

女性性出卖的一个重要个体因素就是角色理想的驱使，在城市化进程中，农村女性十分渴望城市生活，绝大多数农村女性都渴望通过考学、嫁人等方式进入城市成为市民，而一旦考学、嫁人无

门，便通过打工的方式进城，选择在城市空间生存 . 135

In Fictional History, the new-rich and local authorities are ideally placed to exploit this desire by women to escape from the neglect and hardship of life in the countryside. This is what is

135 陈荣武 , & 曹锦清 . (2012). 女性性资本化现象的社会转型逻辑——以女性性出卖为例 . 华东理工大学学报：社会科学版 (2 期第 ), 51. 177 reflected in Xiongdi. The parade of the virgin beauties through the streets of Liu town is a vulgar and exploitative swindle which ironically recalls and contrasts the parades conducted along the same street at the beginning of the Cultural Revolution. Yu Hua’s point would seem that this lewd money-making fraud is, in fact, part of a new Cultural Revolution which, like the original, is also supported by a specious ideology. Opening the virgin beauty contest, a local political figure claims that the festival will bring about a rise in the people’s standard of living and the promotion of traditional culture while also fitting well with globalization.

Fictional History’s depiction of the disruption of virtue by commerce and by cultural forces grounded in falsehood and the deception of self and others, is associated with a wider sense of the disruption of life by economic forces. It is well known that participation in the upheaval of the reforms was not voluntary, and many people were forced to leave workplaces which they had considered secure and take up work of less status. In Xiongdi , these economically unsettled times are shown as providing fertile ground for the sexual harassment of women. Lin Hong’s workplace is uncompetitive after the reforms and workers are being laid off. Lin is harassed by the director of personnel who has the power to decide who remains in work. Lin Hong, whose beauty has never been anything more than a burden to her, is humiliated by the director’s broad hints. She is unable to stand upon her dignity and walk away from her employment, however, because Song Gang is injured and unable to work. Because of her desperate plight, Lin begins to abandon her dislike of Li Guangtou, realizing that she can no longer afford to hate him.

Eventually, Lin Hong can bear her daily humiliation at the hands of the director no longer and so she insists, much against her previous policy, that Song Gang ask Li for a job. Unwilling, but because he feels that he has let his wife down, Gang goes to see Li, but he is too self- effacing to ask for a job. Li discovers Lin’s plight, however, and to ingratiate himself with her gives her an allowance to pay for Song Gang’s medical expenses. Li also buys Lin Hong’s factory and sacks the personnel director. Now, despite what she knows about Li, Lin Hong becomes corrupted. Her new appreciation for the power of money in the reform period tempts her into believing that Li is a good man, and that she had been wrong to despise him. Li’s ability to provide the type of protection associated with strong masculinity highlights the contrast between Li and the ineffective weakness of Song Gang. It is ironic, of course, that

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Li’s assistance is offered as a means of taking advantage of Lin Hong and of his own brother, but the effectiveness of the scheme has expunged memory of many of the black and hateful aspects of Li’s character in the minds of those he wishes to corrupt.

In the Fictional History of the reform era Chinese sexual revolution, transgressive sex is an inevitable companion of both power and money. As noted above, it is intimated that these forms of sexuality bear a close similarity to traditional forms of the exploitation of women. We have seen how in Fuzao the socialist ‘nobility’ of the revolutionary period, families like the Gongs and the Tians, have become, in their later incarnation, a new exploitative and immoral gentry class. 136 Tian Zhongzhen, rather like the gentry bullies from old times, ‘visits’ many of the women in the neighbourhood much to Jin Gou’s disgust: “He thinks he has the right to fool with whomever he wants!” 他愿意弄谁，他有这个权嘛！ (Ch.4). Jin Gou’s peasant morality is also outraged when the newly-rich Lei Dakong demonstrates his knowledge of how to hire a prostitute in the county town. Dakong has been caught in a web of business relationships in which the consumption of sexual services is an indispensable feature of entertaining.

Women and the failure of emancipation in a culture of corruption These concerns of Fictional History with sexual issues resonate with a very wide set of ideas about modern Chinese history. Modern narratives of the state and history in China have been intimately connected with questions about the relationship between men and women. The reverse has also been true: modern Chinese debates about the relationship between men and women have been intimately linked with questions of the state and history. In Fictional History texts, including those of Yu Hua and the other figures discussed in this thesis, the focus on this nexus between political history and gender, is framed by a large-scale picture of the Chinese past extending back to the imperial era. A key element in the discussion of the gender and state power relationship in post-Cultural Revolution culture has been the questioning of the official Communist Party depiction of itself as being in the vanguard of creating gender equality in China and bringing ‘feudal’ social relations to an end.

After the revolution of 1911, Western political ideologies of emancipation contended for

136 The Story of the Whitehaired Girl ( 白毛女 bai mao nu ) is a famous expression of the story. 179 influence within the narrow circle of China’s intellectuals. Sudo argues that four images of the role of women emerged in debates around women’s rights in China at this time. 137 They were; women as “mothers to the nation,” women who were “equal to men in duty,” and women who were “seekers of new roles.” The fourth role was represented by a school of thought, which completely disavowed female citizenship. Despite conservative opposition, women’s rights were generally seen as a part of western emancipated thinking and it was believed in China that this thinking was responsible for the power and wealth of western nations. Though the Republic of China did not extend the franchise to women, links with international women’s movements provoked lively debates upon women’s emancipation up until 1949. Framed in opposition to the discourses of the Republic of China, Communist Party ideology insisted that women’s socio-economic inequality was the result of capitalist oppression and that this disability would disappear by changing the economic basis of society.

Fictional History unsettles this narrative of progress and with it, implicitly, the idea of “new China.” These texts show revolutionary political and economic change as not necessarily translating immediately, or at all, into wholesale social changes. Evidence from conventional scholarly history shows clearly that during the revolutionary period of the PRC, women continued to suffer socio-economic disability relative to men. In these analyses, attempts to bring about equality with men are treated as having been destined to fail because of the persistence of the patriarchal tradition and because of the negligent implementation of family policies. 138

If the key concern of the literary works of the early reform-era was to point to the continuities between traditional rural gender relations and what obtained in the Mao period, and to stress

137 Sudo, M. (2006). Concepts of Women’s Rights in Modern China. Gender & History, 18 (3), 472-489. 138 Demographers in particular paint a picture of the larger social and historical context. In their study into the historical and contemporary extent of son preference, Zhou et al (2012) Zhou, C., Xiaolei, W., Zhou, X., & Hesketh, T. (2012). Son preference and sex-selective abortion in China: Informing policy options. International Journal of Public Health (57), 459-465. are among many who argue that the sex ratio in China in the revolutionary period was normal by world standards but, in the reform period, developments such as diagnostic ultrasound made sex selection easier. Although women’s access to higher education has improved to the point where women now account for 48% of university graduates, the persistence of traditional attitudes and the imposition of the one child policy means that only 22% of urban residents expressed a preference for a daughter. In the early Mao years from 1950, it is observed, Communist ideological commitment to gender equality and pro-natal policies led to a normal sex ratio, despite China still being an impoverished agrarian economy. From the mid-1980s, despite huge socio-economic development and continuing improvement in women’s status, the SRB started to rise, from 106 in 1979, 111 in 1990, 117 in 2001, and 121 in 2005. 180 the social realities that contrasted with socialist claims to have brought about the liberation of China’s women, the focus of writing from the 1990s was the consequences to women of the expansion of the market. In many areas of post-reform life in China, both Yu Hua and Jia Pingwa present the consequences of economic liberalisation as a tendency towards the commoditisation of the personality in general, and the commoditisation of sexuality in particular.

As mentioned above, the reasons for the growth in the exchange of women’s erotic capital in the reform period has been the subject of a number of works, including the study of female sex work by Chen and Cao of the East China Normal University Institute of Social and Public Administration, mentioned above. 139 While such studies may suggest that Chinese women have mobilised their sexual capital as a means to survive in the post-reform market economy, Yu Hua and other producers of Fictional History assert that the social changes affecting women are not solely the product of the reform process and that loss of faith in ideology, the determination to get rich as a shield against tyranny, and the growing alienation typical of contemporary Chinese society all had their genesis in the trauma of an earlier time. In Xiongdi this commoditization and exchange of women’s sexual capital is presented as a process enthusiastically promoted by Chinese men. In the persistence of patriarchal privilege into the post-reform period, Yu seems to posit a continuity running across all the periods of Chinese history: this is shown by including narratives of sexual exploitation that span the whole of the twentieth century. Once again, the view that is articulated in Fictional History works seems to be that the increased role of private wealth in the post-reform period represents less a break with the past than the rise of a novel element enabling older cultural tendencies to flourish in a slightly different form.

The longue durée of female exploitation. Fictional Histories of female suffering in the Revolutionary era This contention that the commodification of women in the post-reform era reprises earlier patterns is established in Fictional History by extensive depictions of marriage in the pre- revolutionary and Mao eras. By extensively depicting the difficulties encountered by women

139 Chen, R., & Cao, J. (2012). 女性性资本化现象的社会转型逻辑 (n ǚxìng xing ziben hua xianxiang de shehui zhuanxing luoji). Journal of East China University of Technology (social sciences edition), 2012 (2), 24-34. 181 in the pre-reform era, and above all in the Mao era, the idea that the problems that women encounter in the reform and post-reform eras is set up. This section chronicles how Fictional History produces narratives of women’s suffering in the 20 th century as a way of “setting the scene” for what happens in the contemporary era.

In Yu Hua’s early 1990s novel Huozhe , Fugui in the early years of his marriage is shown as a negligent husband to Jiazhen. However, his gambling and whoring in the town do not seem to grossly violate pre-revolutionary Chinese traditions of masculine privilege. In one scene Jiazhen, pregnant with Fugui’s child, comes into town to tearfully beg Fugui to leave the gambling den and come home. Fugui is incensed, and embarrassed, at this trespass upon his masculine prerogatives. As Fugui gambles away his patrimony, the women of the house are limited to making impotent complaints; Fugui’s exasperated mother tells Jiazhen that: “men are all a bunch of gluttonous cats” 男人都是馋嘴的猫 (p.22). When Fugui has been swindled of his wealth, and has thereby precipitated his father’s death, Jiazhen’s father, a prosperous grain trader, calls him an animal, a beast. Jiazhen’s father arrives outside Fugui’s hut leading a bridal procession to reclaim possession of his daughter – it would seem that Jiazhen’s immediate fate is decided as a matter of contention between two men; her father and her husband.

However, in time Jiazhen eventually returns to Fugui and begins a new life with him as a farmer’s wife and thus she assumes her role of “mother to the nation.” Despite her prosperous background and the availability of alternatives to life with Fugui, Jiazhen believes that marriage, even arranged marriage, has a fundamental spiritual meaning and it is consequently her lot to share her husband’s poverty. This commitment is shared by Fugui’s mother: “My mother often said, as long as a person is happy, then poverty is nothing to be feared” 我娘常说，只要人活得高兴，就不怕穷 . The women in his household -- and he is now surrounded by three generations; his mother, his wife, and his daughter, are all supportive and do not utter a word of reproach in relation to their lost prosperity. Fugui rents five mu of land from the swindler Long’er and becomes a farmer. Fugui becomes used to coarse homespun clothes and declares that his body can no longer tolerate the feel of silk: “I felt like I was wearing clothes made of snot” 滑溜溜的像是穿上鼻涕做的衣服 .

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Yu Hua consistently constructs an image of rural areas of China as an environment in which few efforts to change the position of women have succeeded. His work, at least in this case, shows women represented in their age-old roles as a consolation to men, as highly resourceful, and as stoic. Fugui, for his part, accepts the tradition which treats women and children as auxiliary dimensions of the father figure. In Huozhe traditional rite-of-passage ceremonies, even during the Cultural Revolution, serve to demonstrate the persistence of such traditional attitudes to gender. Echoing the long modern tradition of intellectual critique of “feudal” Chinese marriage, Yu shows “traditional” Chinese men as viewing marriage as an opportunity to indulge their sensual desires and to materially improve the comfort of their lives, but women see the ritual as marking an important change of status. This is evident when Fengxia, Fugui’s daughter, begins to take an interest in village weddings when she becomes a young woman. Her disability, an inability to speak, makes her an unlikely prospect for marriage, however. She is mocked by the young men and women in the village for whom the ability to participate in such rites-of-passage are important signs of social belonging. She is one of the numerous characters in Yu Hua’s novels and in other works of Fictional History shown as suffering from social exclusion and ostracism.

In Zai xiyu zhong huhan , the gongs and drums, the procession to collect and escort the bride, the (comparatively) lavish food and treats, are the tangible symbols of matrimonial joy, but the behaviour of the village folk marks love and affection as having a secondary place in Chinese weddings. Here again Yu’s work reproduces the established modernist critique of traditional marriage. In these texts, the mercenary urges of parents and the deceptions of young men and women are shown as being as evident in the revolutionary period as they ever have been. Dreamers want to believe in the promises of young men, in the rhetoric of emancipation, and to be rescued from the captivity of their lives in the countryside, but those who dream of such things are depicted as naive. Even so, some young women resist: the scorned and misused Yuqing disrupts Wang Yuejin’s village wedding by striding into the courtyard where the wedding banquet is being served and dramatically hanging a rope noose in the tree. Yuqing’s dreams are only a source of pain to her, so two days after Wang’s wedding when a travelling peddler beguiles Yuqing with stories of his carefree life on the road she runs away with him.

183

Again and again, Yu Hua focuses on how matrimonial arrangements in China, both in the past and present, take little account of the wishes of women, marking it as one of the core tropes of his work, and we may argue, of Fictional History more broadly. Complementing these scenes of marriage in the Mao-era discussed in the above works, in Xiongdi Sun Guanglin narrates the story of his grandmother, from the time before the Japanese war. We have already seen how, in this vignette of life before the revolution, Fictional History reprises the long-established idea that Chinese family life treated young women as nothing more than possessions (an image that was pervasive in the writing of the 1920s and 1930s). A major concern of Yu’s work is to chronicle the fate of women when they were cast off by their natal families or those into which they had married. As noted above, Yu Hua’s perspective is that the proclamation of the People’s Republic of China in 1949 was not such a watershed moment for women that the morals and ethics of the vast majority of the Chinese people experienced a material change. 140

In another narrative of the lack of women’s agency in the revolutionary period, Xu Sanguan in Yu Hua’s novel Xu Sanguan mai xue ji , sells his blood for the first time as a young man and spends 84 fen of the proceeds in treating a local girl, Xu Yulan, to dinner. Sanguan now explains to the startled Yulan that because he has spent money on her, they must be married. He patiently lays out his qualifications for marriage, but among these there is no mention of affection, and his proposal of marriage has the character of a purchase in the market. Sanguan says that if she marries him, she will not have to change her surname, as Yulan is also surnamed Xu. Yulan’s father finds this aspect attractive and Sanguan takes care to bribe the old man with a bottle of liquor. Yulan, who has been going out with He Xiaoyong, is duly informed of her father’s decision in favour of Sanguan. She weeps and asks He Xiaoyong to repay Sanguan’s 84 fen and to promise to change his surname to Xu. He refuses, and so Yulan is obliged to go through with the marriage arranged by the two men. It is thus that Sanguan buys a wife for 84 fen and a bottle of liquor.

A comparable example of the relative worth of females and males occurs in Yu Hua’s Huozhe

140 This undermining of orthodox historical narrative is a recurring motif in the work of Yu Hua and this episode recalls an early short story of Yu’s entitled Death of a landlord in which, contrary to expectation and CPC propaganda, the landlord proves to be the hero who leads a platoon of Japanese soldiers into a trap thus precipitating his own death. 184 when Fugui decides that he is unable to give both of his children the same life opportunities. Indeed, in order to give his son the chance of an education, Fugui feels he must give Fengxia, his daughter, to another family so that the money saved on her upbringing can be used to pay for Youqing’s education. At 12 years of age, therefore, Fengxia who is both deaf and mute, is separated from her family and sent to the home of strangers. Youqing is extremely unhappy with these arrangements and would much rather not go to school if it means that he must thereby lose his sister. Fengxia, uncomprehending, is distressed at the separation from her family and some weeks later returns home alone, evidently traumatised by something that has happened in her foster home. Fugui, although his first instinct is to return Fengxia to her new family, is beginning to pity the suffering of those who depend upon him, however, and he decides that he will not force Fengxia to return “…even if the whole family should starve….”

These events are just some instances of abuses carried out because of poverty but it is not given to the reader to decide whether Fugui’s actions in abandoning Fengxia were prudent or unnecessary given the family’s economic plight. The salient feature of the story is that it was the girl child who was chosen to make the sacrifice for her brother and that this decision is seen as in keeping with social norms, even in the revolutionary period. We have seen in Chapter 2 of this thesis that Fictional History often depicts families in the Mao-era as sites of exclusion and, in this episode, Yu Hua highlights how women and girls frequently lived in families without secure tenure. In so doing, he not only recalls long-established critiques of gender inequality in Chinese society, but suggests that the family has a pathological dimension, above all in the way in which women are treated.

Fictional History works consistently present the dangers facing Chinese women as beginning right from the moment of birth. In Zai xiyu zhong huhan, Sun Guangcai is furious that his wife’s parturition has delayed the delivery of his lunch. When his wife recovers sufficiently to deliver his lunch to him, the only question he asks, sulkily, is whether the child is a boy or a girl. Guangcai’s question is a natural one, but since it is the only one he asks, it bears a sinister significance. Given his lack of enthusiasm as a father, and the sovereign importance he ascribes to his own self-interest, the reader may surmise that Sun Guanglin – a for it was he who was just born in this scene – owes his continued existence to the accident of his sex.

In Huozhe , the economic and social rationale for Fengxia’s being ascribed less worth than her

185 brother is challenged by the broad cultural imagery of the strength and endurance of Chinese women surviving under the difficult conditions of modern Chinese history, and by illustrations of their critical role in keeping threatened families together. The depiction of the fate of women in Huozhe illustrates the repeated concern in Fictional History to critically examine the bases upon which people are socially excluded; it is invariably demonstrated that these are spurious. When Jiazhen becomes bedridden, she attempts to keep doing as much of the housework as possible and even sews clothing in bed. Now that Jiazhen has become ill, Fugui reflects (accurately) that he has never brought her a single day’s happiness in her life. The reader is easily led to the conclusion that if circumstances had been reversed and Jiazhen had been in charge of the household, affairs would have proceeded more prosperously and harmoniously than they did under Fugui. Jiazhen, for her part, demonstrates extraordinary self-abnegation by expressing a grim satisfaction that her disease is incurable, because this means no money need be spent on medicines. Fengxia, in touch with her own mysterious source of feminine spirituality, simply refuses to believe that her mother will die. Jiazhen is persuaded by Fengxia’s faith and Fugui’s exhortation to her that she must live. In this emphasis upon survival, Jiazhen resembles another of the archetypes of Chinese femininity, the one ‘equal in duty’ to men. Jiazhen and Fengxia both enact the belief that, in China, it is woman’s duty to endure. This we can argue, sets up a pattern that is shown in the fate of women in the post-reform era, where female endurance in the face of suffering is again shown

Depictions of women as victims of Mao-era political injustice are often paired with representations that stress this dignified endurance under suffering. In the section in Xiongdi discussed already in chapter 3, Li Lan waits for Song Fanping in Shanghai but, uncharacteristically, he does not arrive. Upon returning home alone she discovers that he has been beaten to death as a class enemy. Li Lan’s strength upon discovering her husband’s murder is expressed in her instruction to the family: “(you) mustn’t cry…we must not let anyone hear us crying.” 不要哭，不要让别人听到我们在哭 (p171). She washes Fanping’s corpse and her grief and horror almost drive her insane. The damage to her husband’s body appals her, but she holds herself in check and stops herself from crying out. In the sad funeral procession, the family maintains a dignified silence until they have left the town behind and are safe from witnesses, whereupon: “amidst the broad fields, beneath the distant sky, they

186 wept together, they were one family” 田野是那么的广阔，天空是那么的高远，他们一起哭着，他们是一家人 (p186). Li Lan will not offer her husband’s killers the tribute of her despair, instead she demonstrates that she remains proud of him and that their pride in Fanping is the family’s inheritance from him.

Depictions of female stoicism, particularly in the name of keeping the family together, are prominent in Fictional History representations of the revolutionary era. Rarely does marriage seem to offer any kind of happiness. One of the few depictions of happy marriage in fictional history is the match arranged between Erxi and Fengxia, each in their own way shunned by mainstream society. In Huozhe , we generally see that an arranged marriage has more to do with a parent’s sense of duty and to the demands made by tradition than with the happiness and prosperity of their family members, but in depicting Fengxia’s wedding, Yu Hua suggests that if two people are good-hearted, a marriage – even an arranged marriage, can be happy. Fugui and Jiazhen note Fengxia’s interest in local wedding processions and become aware that it is time to find somebody to marry her. In keeping with rural tradition, they worry that Fengxia, if she remains unmarried, will have nobody to bury her when she dies. Fugui asks the village head to find a husband for Fengxia, and so the business of Fengxia’s marriage becomes, again, a matter of masculine concern. The village head locates a young man in the nearby town who also has a disability and is also looking for a bride. Fugui and Jiazhen are agreeably reassured by the crooked neck of Fengxia’s suitor, Erxi, because they can be confident that he will not look down upon their daughter. Erxi turns out to be brusque but generous, hard-working and decent. Fengxia is delighted with the match and with the prospect of attaining the social transformation conferred on a bride in traditional China. Fengxia does not question her own lack of agency in the wedding arrangements. For her, it is a great occasion and a rite-of-passage denoting her entry into full womanhood.

In later years, the happy announcement of Fengxia’s pregnancy evokes for Fugui and Jiazhen the eternal line of descent, the matrilineal, which embraces ancestors and the as yet unborn. As if to emphasise the connection between being born and passing away, Fengxia dies in childbirth. We have noted before that Yu Hua generally depicts doctors in China as contaminated in their conduct by the same pragmatic view taken of human life by state policy, and it is argued that this contamination affects doctors’ attitude towards the importance of

187 sentimental attachments between people. 141 Fugui sadly points out that both of his children died in childbirth; Youqing during Chungsheng’s wife’s labour, and Fengxia during her own. Fengxia’s baby survives and is named Kugen (苦根 bitter root ).

I have claimed that these depictions of marriage relations implicitly serve to challenge the Communist Party’s assertion to have brought feudal family relations to an end, and that this in turn sets up the idea that the reform and post-reform eras are beset by problems created by unreconstructed “feudal” traditions. The producers of Fictional History, like zishifenzi more broadly, believe that despite the official rhetoric of emancipation, women’s status in rural areas in the late 20 th and early 21 st century was, in practice, far more affected by traditional rural social custom than revolutionary ideology. In Fictional History the presentation of gender inequalities and the depiction of the failures of the wider revolutionary project to fulfil its promises are generally intertwined. Women are frequently portrayed as being the earliest to realise that political rhetoric does not match reality. In the film Lan fengzheng , Zhuying, as has been noted earlier in the thesis, is a member of a PLA entertainment troupe and is required to attend dance parties arranged to entertain the leaders. We have already observed, that as a serious young woman, she cannot see the political relevance of this duty and finds it repugnant. Upon informing the director of the troupe of her misgivings, Zhuying is commanded not to get too arrogant, and is warned that her application for Party membership is still being considered. She is reminded that “politics comes first” and this slogan effectively delineates the extent of her agency when it conflicts with the will of powerful men.

The idea that high-ranking cadres should have overthrown the landed gentry only to begin behaving in an exploitative and sexist way themselves shocks and disillusions Zhuying. She leaves the entertainment troupe to begin work in a dark and grimy factory. She feels now that she has been infected with disillusion and that if she continues to see Shuyuan, a PLA hero and uncle to Tietou, she will only get him into trouble. Like Lin Zhao, we may argue, she has a sense that she has undergone a type of awakening and that she is in opposition to the times, and also like Lin Zhao, she knows that she will be punished. Zhuying is arrested as a counter- revolutionary. The audience is aware that the extent of Zhuying’s counter-revolutionary activities is an unwillingness to act as a ‘comfort-woman’ to the leadership and so the

141 I point out again the curious fact that both of Yu Hua’s parents were doctors. 188 reflection is made that revolutionary values were stretched to include, under some circumstances, the exploitation of women. Shuyuan visits Zhuying in her prison where she tells him that she will never get out, at least not until she is old and grey, and tells him not to wait for her.

We can recall that in the film Wo 11 , a woman in Mao-era China is also figuratively consumed by men with political capital. The murder of Chen Kunfang, a leader of the local revolutionary committee and local strong-man, is in retaliation for his sexual assault upon Xie Juehong. Juehong’s father, Old Xie, had been ‘sent down’ with his family from Shanghai and could never reconcile himself to the stultifying life of the countryside. He feels that he has been left to rot and that his college diploma and his talent are wasted. At the bath house, Han overhears the young men gossiping that it was Lao Xie’s plea to Chen for a transfer back to Shanghai which gave Chen the opportunity to take advantage of Juehong. 142

In Fictional History depictions of revolutionary China, as well as coming under pressure to comply with the wishes of the powerful, women are portrayed as the frequent targets of accusations of sexual immorality in Mao-era public morals campaigns. In Yu Hua’s novel Xu Sanguan mai xue ji , there is a spiteful and groundless commerce in accusations of sexual licence between the women, none of it based in fact, which escalates into accusations made on the ‘big character posters’ which begin going up in the Cultural Revolution. As the target of one of these accusations, Yulan is assumed to be guilty and she is now obliged to play the role of a ‘broken shoe’ at the mass struggle sessions. In her naivety, she points out that Sanguan, her husband, is not being struggled against despite his actual infidelity. Later, a stranger tells Sanguan that his family should have their own struggle session against Yulan. The monstrous injustice of this treatment highlights the baselessness of the criteria used to condemn those marked out for social exclusion in that period of history. In this struggle session Sanguan confesses to his sons about his affair with Fatty Lin because he wants them to know “…that (he) is just as bad as their mother.” There is of course no comparison since Yulan is entirely innocent and Sanguan is not. What the incident arguably does is to trace a

142 In Wo 11 and in Fuzao , arbitrary acts of injustice by the state provide an environment in which corrupt local authorities can prosper. That the innocent and the weak are obliged to deal with injustice by petitioning the favour of local cadres confers upon them the lordship of misrule.

189 long-term history of moral bankruptcy in relation to sexual issues that stretches across the decades of the modern Chinese past.

In these particular Fictional Histories, neither Xu Yulan nor Ma Su (from Xiongdi ) are loose women, yet both are accused and punished based on local malice. Fear of being labelled a class enemy or a ‘broken shoe’ adds to the misery of a woman’s life since no evidence was needed to secure a conviction. In Fictional History, women suffer from the moral narrowness and suspicions of the times but, in keeping with a traditional double standard, men are exonerated from moral censure whenever their genuine trespass is discovered. In these texts few women are depicted as actually being immoral, (at least in the revolutionary period) and the Fictional History of women’s suffering implies that the great concern by the revolutionary state and society with women’s sex lives, especially in the midst of much greater dangers, merely entrenches men’s traditional prerogatives.

Gender relations in the post-Cultural Revolution era: Corruption, wealth and Fictional History We have seen that in Fictional History the revolutionary era was marked by the persistence of traditional attitudes towards women. This analysis conflicts with the official state narrative that cites state programs and propaganda efforts around women’s equality in that period as ushering in a golden age for women in China. In offering this critique Fictional History aligns with many scholarly studies of contemporary women’s attitudes to the Mao era. Commenting to Beverley Hooper on the idea that women in that period had achieved close equality to men, one young female teacher in Shanghai said:

“Anyone who puts forward such a narrow view didn't have to live in China during that period. Equality with men is only one aspect of the question. Perhaps men and women are equal in labour camps. What we want is equality with men in a society in which we all have a reasonable life.”143

Drawing in part on such dissatisfaction, China’s state discourse in the reform period changed

143 Hooper, B. (1984). China's Modernization: Are young women going to lose out? Modern China, 10 (3), 317- 343. 190 from an idea of class struggle to “development,” and the Chinese people became participants in the great emporium of a market economy in which men and women alike were obliged to promote and market their personal assets. The re-structuring of the State-Owned Enterprises (SOE), the dismantling of the danwei system, and the consequent increase in occupational insecurity, however, set up further structural barriers to women’s participation in the workforce and in education. Women in China, as elsewhere, were still allocated the burden of domestic chores and childcare and this resulted in a growing gender division of labour in the economy. Hooper observed in the early 1980s that many young women’s focus was no longer upon achieving socio-economic equality with men, but to marry well. 144 We can argue that these concerns are visible in Fictional History texts, and that the marketisation of relationships between men and women – of which the marriage market is one example – is one of Fictional History’s key concerns.

It is important, however, to note the great differences between rural and urban life in China. Fictional History is strongly concerned with rural contexts, and we can argue that it presents the broad zhishifenzi view that socialist ideas of women’s equality had far less acceptance in China’s rural areas in the Mao era than in the cities, and that subsequent developments have further eroded the influence of institutions which helped to advance the cause of women’s equality in these areas. In much recent scholarly work, such as that Cook and Dong (2011), it is pointed out that contemporary Chinese women’s choices in the countryside are compromised because of the retreat of the government in the reform period from providing family support such as child and elder care. 145 Under these circumstances, women are more likely to work in casual employment and more likely to drop out of the labor force altogether. Against this broad background it is hardly surprising, then, that Fictional History texts show women in China as feeling the pressure to exchange any personal capital they may have to survive in the new conditions.

In Jia Pingwa’s Fuzao , life in the reform-era city exemplifies for some people the ideals of pleasure, beauty and femininity – a life impossible in the village. Yingying’s story, like Yuqing’s story in Yu Hua’s Zai xiyu zhong huhan, establishes the city as a concrete symbol

144 Ibid. p.319 145 Cook, S., & Dong, X. (2011). Harsh choices: Chinese women's paid work and unpaid care responsibilities under economic reform. Development and Change, 42 (4), 947-965. 191 of escape for women from the drudgery of life in the countryside. In Fuzao , Yingying is attracted to Jin Gou because of his standing as a representative of modern youth, and because of his success as a candidate for the reporter’s position. Yingying’s sexuality is a resource which she uses to ensnare Jin Gou who feels that having debauched her, he has no alternative but to do the right thing by her. Yingying wants to move to Zhou city and escape village life but Jin Gou, who is less attracted to urban life, feels that he has been trapped: “a fine young man who desperately wanted to pull himself out…” 一个堂堂的男人家，一个极力想摆脱身处困境的他 (Ch.10), and thus a connection is drawn between the hedonistic attractions of urban life and the perilous sexuality of women.

In Zhou City, Shi Hua represents the type of urban and sophisticated femininity to which Yingying aspires. She is the wife of one of Jin Gou’s colleagues, old Xi, and she exudes sophistication. She is worldly enough to declare that even though some people from the country are rich, these days, you can still tell that they are peasants. She appears to know all about the latest films and pop singers but is really only semiliterate. Jin Gou begins an affair with her but accepts that this is simply physical, and so, once again it would appear that his residence in the city is seen as eroding his morals. It is by means of his sexual connection with Shi Hua that Jin Gou discovers the extent to which people are caught up in the corrupt Zhou Shen trading company business. It is implied that the exigencies of doing business in China mean that those who succeed, or even participate, in the business world develop a moral outlook which eventually excuses the consumption of transgressive sex. It is also implied that the essence of cosmopolitanism and sophistication in reform-era China is the consumption of sex. The old sexual cultures of corruption and exploitation acquire a new life in the world of the reform-era Great Emporium.

These images resonate with the broad picture in the scholarly literature and elsewhere that male domination of entrepreneurial and professional business networks in China’s cities in the post-reform period has relegated women to items for male consumption. Because success in business depends upon access to resources which are monitored by government or Party cadres, traditional networking practices ( guanxi ) have evolved in the reform period into an elaborate round of dining, drinking and “female-centered entertainment.” Sarah Uretsky’s research into the guanxi habits of China’s wealthy businessmen and government officials, for

192 example, identifies a new liminal space in which “mobile men with money” engage sexual services as part of a new “patron-clientelism.” 146 Uretsky argues that “extramarital relationships with female entertainers, lovers and ‘minor’ wives are part of masculine entitlement for elite Chinese men” even if they are officially forbidden. There are numerous echoes of this culture in Fictional History texts.

In Fuzao Jin Gou’s masculinity is expressed not so much in a negation of sex itself but in an appreciation of its ability to derange and trap men, and of a corresponding concern about the consequences of sexual entanglement with women. Jin Gou’s mindset, it can be argued, suggests that for Chinese males there is a deep distrust of women’s sexuality. At one level men in reform and post-reform era China routinely, almost dutifully, consume sexual services as an integral part of modern business practice and on another, women’s sexuality is something that men approach cautiously, seeing it as a lure or a source of power against which men are helpless. Jin Gou is led to an understanding of the power of sexuality when his crusade against local corruption lands him in prison. It is left to the pure Xiaoshui to approach Shi Hua for assistance in bringing Jin Gou’s case to the attention of Commandant Xu. Shi Hua uses a connection she has with Xu Feibao’s adopted son who demands that she submit to sex with him as the price of his co-operation. So, in this case, erotic capital is neatly exchanged for political capital.

In Fictional History texts, domestic, licensed, and unremarkable sex is set against a more dangerous type of sex associated with commoditisation, urban values, wealth, and corruption. Both Yu Hua and Jia Pingwa indicate that sexual activity is often corrupting and exploitative, and that men have few defences against this type of attack. The seduction of hapless male intellectuals by femmes fatales , for example, is almost effortless. In Yu Hua’s Zai xiyu zhong huhan a lascivious widow seduces Dr Su who is almost utterly immobilized by her attack. Later his son Su Yu says that he understands his father’s seduction and, now that he himself has been convicted of a sexual crime, he is comparatively happy at understanding this universal flaw in men’s characters.

146 Uretsky, E. (2008). 'Mobile men with money': the socio-cultural and politico-economic context of 'high-risk' behaviour among wealthy businessmen and government officials in urban China. Culture, Health & Sexuality, 10 (8), 801-814. 193

Masculinity

Fictional History may be critical of the relationships of exploitation in sexual matters in post- Mao China, but overall it presents men as having little incentive to overturn the system of patriarchal privilege, and so the more or less pathological situation is able to continue. Contemporary masculinity, in particular, is seen by Yu Hua as marked by a display of power in which consideration for others is absent. Most significantly, expressions of masculinity in the post-reform period are seen to be influenced by pre-reform trauma in their aggressive attitudes to woman and in their urge to dominate other men.

Arising as it does from lessons learnt in the Cultural Revolution, reform-era masculinity is depicted in fictional history as truculent and impetuous. Yu Hua depicts how the type of violent and intimidating masculinity reminiscent of the ‘red arm-banders’ of the Cultural Revolution; the type of masculinity representing the triumph of force and savagery over knowledge and empathy, has become mainstream in the urban post-reform environment, an environment defined by the ersatz and the false. In Xiongdi, (2005) the questionable products the itinerant salesman Zhou deals in all have some sexual connotation. ‘Apollo’ pills and ‘Zhang Fei’ pills are designed to “enhance” male erections; breast cream and fake hymens are desirable commodities to renew female sexual attraction. Zhou’s marketing technique is to appeal to the Chinese sense of inferiority and so he always has two types of whatever absurd product he is selling; the more expensive western one and the cheaper domestic brand. It is almost certain that the products are identical, but customers generally prefer the Western article, perhaps on the specious assumption that it is less likely to be a fake.

This sexual world of fakes is paralleled by another of aggressive male display. At a bath house in Fujian, Zhou and Song Gang encounter a patron who has brought his ferocious German shepherd dog with him into the baths. In a sense, the dog is a projection of the man’s personality. Zhou is impressed with this patron’s overbearing “machismo” which is expressed in an utter carelessness for other patrons’ comfort (and safety). This patron, as if to further indicate his contempt for the other patrons who have been buying up Zhou’s stock of Apollo pills, purchases some Zheng Fei invigorating pills to feed to his already intimidating dog. It is

194 noteworthy, too, that the male patrons in the bath house all doubt their masculinity to the extent that they are easily persuaded to purchase Zhou’s snake oil. It is clearly seen as necessary for men in the reform period to have impressive size and stamina if one is to compete with the ‘international warriors.’ Fictional History mocks a collective culture beset by anxiety about virility, metaphorical and literal.

We have seen that successful men such as Li Guangtou are depicted overwhelmingly as blustering and self-confident. The putative superiority of men is consistently undermined in these texts, however, by presentations of the foolishness of male characters and by the depiction of strong and capable woman characters. It is also true that traditional expressions of Chinese masculinity are shown in works of Fictional History as coming under attack in the reform period. The economic reforms are presented as having eroded the economic status and dignity of men, especially those employed in industries which were unable to flourish in the new environment. The central economic crisis in Xiongdi, for example , was the closure of local manufacturing industries under the stress of competition and of pirate capitalism. When Song Gang’s factory closes, his feet are set upon a path leading ever downward until, ultimately, he is obliged to join the ‘floating population,’ robbing him of his dignity, and, by inference, his manliness. The effects of economic “emasculation” through bankruptcy are even more starkly presented in works that are not overtly fictional in content. Wang Bing’s 2003 documentary film 锈 Xiu (Rust) observes an area of Shenyang known as 铁西区 Tie xi qu (west of the tracks).147 Heavy industry has been operating in this part of Manchuria since the 1930s, some of it established by the occupying Japanese, and the area was China’s industrial heartland after 1949. By the 1990s, the State-Owned Enterprises which had operated from these factories were losing money. Many thousands of workers, Shenyang’s urban proletariat, were retired, re-deployed or dismissed and the factories closed down one after the other. The stark and cavernous environment in which the few remaining workers go about their tasks is a powerful visual symbol of their new insignificance and powerlessness. Their masculinity is even more reduced than in the case of the posturing male big-shots in the fiction of Yu Hua.

147 This film is the first in a trilogy known as 铁西区 West of the Tracks . The other two films in the trilogy are, in English, Rails and Remnants . 195

We have seen that Hu Jie’s documentaries arrange historical facts and intersperse these with impressions to create narratives which disclose a particular world-view. Similarly, the documentaries of Wang Bing, though more observational and less editorial than narrative films, provide intelligible class perspectives which comprise a fictional history of China’s industrial workers in the reform period. In this film the landscape is dominated by the ruins of abandoned factories stretching for miles in all directions amidst the leaden skies and dirty snow of a Liaoning winter. Like an abandoned city, the weird shapes and relics of superseded industrial functions sit mutely beside the tangible evidence of prior occupation. Entire buildings are boarded up, stairways once thronged with people are now broken and lead nowhere. These industrial ruins evoke in the viewer the fascination common to all ruins, but for the remaining workers in these hulks, there is no sensation of wonder. Insecurity of tenure, poor pay, dirty and dangerous working conditions, and antipathy towards the management has engendered an unfocussed truculence and despair. Inside a smelting factory, through a wall of steam, the camera enters a wretched and filthy lunchroom dominated by bare lamps, deep shadows, and old mangled steel lockers. In the lunchroom, an invitation to play mahjong inexorably escalates into a fistfight. One of the workers has been drinking alcohol and now, bellicose and prideful, he is unable to govern his temper. Nobody has any sense of how to defuse the situation, and so the conflict escalates out of control.

The workers go about their business solemnly and unenthusiastically; there are no smiling, resolute faces, no glorious workers striking blows for the motherland. In another break room, in a hollow echo of the economic reforms, the workers discuss buying shares, but also wonder if they will get their wages next month as the factory is in arrears. Some workers discuss how a neighbouring valve factory has just received a contract from the Three Gorges Dam project. The workers are envious that those jobs will now be secure. The men talk about other jobs, and they talk about the army, but the consensus is that those who had the ability to find other work have already left, and the ones who remain have no choice. Meanwhile, near the factory entrance, the air temperature in the plant is so cold that water vapor forms stalagmites of ice on the floor which a worker has to manually chip off with a pinch bar.

The salary is distributed. In one of the legacies of the danwei system, a worker reveals that you get paid ¥200 if you come to work and ¥200 if you don’t and then asks, understandably,

196 why bother? A foreman admonishes the worker, telling him that slacking off is like “sabotaging the Party,” but the worker replies that slacking off is only sabotaging the factory bosses. The worker complains that he was promised that he would have a job for life and a pension, but now he does not even have regular work. He is hanging around the office hoping to be put back on shift. The foreman cannot promise anything but says there is a possibility that he may be able to get back to work in the new year.

The Shenyang smelting factory itself resembles a vast city. There is a labyrinth of passageways and stairways in every direction and of every shape. On the factory floor, the workers are subsumed by a vivid red fog, appearing as if they were toiling in deepest hell, yet these are the remnants of Mao’s proletariat in whose name the revolution triumphed. Much to the incredulity of the workers, the factory has been nominated as a ‘first rank state enterprise.’ Another worker talks directly to the camera: there has been layoffs, a cut in salary to ¥200. The workers have families and they need to buy food, and other family members are often out of work. He says permanents have been replaced with cheaper temporary workers. His wife used to work at the smelting factory but was laid off and now operates a vegetable business. He has to help in his wife’s business as well as coming to work. He despairs: who can you complain to? He maintains that his generation did not get much schooling, but now they make their children study hard so that they don’t end up like their parents.

These films show an economic order which is the opposite of the vulgar, testosterone-driven commercial world depicted in Yu Hua’s texts and in similar works of Fictional History. The male workers labour without images of virility, revolutionary or otherwise. This is a world in which commodity economies have not so much brought about corruption and fakery as created decay, it is a world in which revolutionary hopes have been corroded by the processes of reform; instead of steel there is rust.

An anachronism – Song Gang Fictional History narratives suggest that the shape of masculinity in China owes more to the trauma experienced in the recent history of China-- and to its traditional culture -- than to any influence from the outside world. In this sense, Fictional History appears to depart from the pattern that Kam Louie and other scholars have, in recent years, identified of an emerging manifestation of Chinese masculinity which draws its archetypes from Japan, South Korea

197 and Taiwan rather than from the west. 148 In Louie’s analysis, this expression of Chinese masculinity is more mindful of women and, therefore, softer and more feminine. This type of image, influenced by east Asian actors and singers, indicates how the new generations of those in China who did not experience the trauma of the Cultural Revolution or Tiananmen are creating new globalized masculine stereotypes suitable for contemporary urban life. In an earlier period, however, as the economic reforms were just beginning to demand the commoditisation of personalities, the possession of a gentle male nature was arguably something radically before its time. The times, it seems, called for a type of bellicose and insensitive masculinity, such as that represented in the character of Li Guangtou. In, Xiongdi, Yu Hua contrasts Li’s success in this post-reform economic environment, with Song Gang’s failure in the same context.

If Fictional History texts condemn the mismanagement, neglect, violence, and absurdity of the revolutionary period, they also make the point that this period featured an explicit aspiration to bring about a social transformation. The havoc of the Cultural Revolution is shown to have destroyed individuals, such as Song Fanping, who might otherwise have helped lead this transformation but, despite the violence and trauma of their histories, not everyone in China in this period is shown in Fictional History as having lost faith in humanity. Gentler human qualities are depicted as having survived in some individuals. Song Gang’s ambitions had been modest; indeed, he conceived no greater ambition than domestic contentment and was satisfied with his life in the Mao period. Sharing many of his father’s virtues, Song Gang becomes an anachronism when times change and, just as his father before him, was cut down for being caught out of time. The difference is that it is economic forces rather than political caprice which destroys him.

On the day of his father’s funeral, Song Gang is left in the care of his grandfather in the village while Li Guangtou returns to town with Li Lan. In the town the streets are full of Red Guards fighting each other so Li Guangtou is confined to the house while Li Lan is out being struggled against. Song Gang visits from the countryside from time to time and his progress against the backdrop of the disorder and violence of the streets is like that of the eye of a

148 Louie, K. (2012). Popular culture and masculinity ideals in East Asia, with special reference to China. The Journal of Asian Studies 71 (4), 929–943. 198 storm. Song Gang retains the qualities of a polite, well-mannered adolescent over the whole course of his short life. He cannot understand the meaning of the Cultural Revolution and genuinely wonders why a kind person such as Ma Su is forced to stand in the street and wear a placard condemning her as a ‘broken shoe.’ Song Gang is not an idiot, but he cannot comprehend the bestial side of human nature, and because he does not understand, he is never able to account for it or grasps its significance for himself or for Chinese society. Just as Song Gang is baffled by the Cultural Revolution, however, he is also baffled by the reforms and has no ability to engage with the new mode of life, especially in the world of aggressive pursuit of wealth.

Song Gang and his grandfather, the old landlord, make monthly visits to sell vegetables in the town market and Song Gang always leaves some White Rabbit candies for Li under his doormat. It is entirely characteristic of Song Gang’s generosity that he is saving these candies for his brother rather than eating them himself. Time passes and both the old landlord and Li Lan die, and so Song Gang returns to town to live with Li Guangtou. Song Gang’s bearing and his behaviour as he gets older resemble old-style values of scholarly gravity (though he is no great scholar) but the impression his seriousness makes is always improved by its frequent comparison to Li’s rambunctious bluster.

As discussed earlier in the thesis, Song Gang inadvertently becomes his brother’s rival for the affections of Lin Hong. Li uses his brother’s sentimentality for all that they have been through together to persuade him that he must not see Lin Hong. Song Gang’s memories of shared trauma with his brother are vivid in him and they tempt him to make sacrifices for his brother, but Li’s life experiences have taught him different lessons; he believes that it is vital to get what you want before somebody else can snatch it away. The unhappy and emotional Song Gang later attempts suicide a means of escaping the conflict between his two loves, but when he is rescued by Li Guangtou, Song Gang realizes that Li’s idea of brotherly affection is distorted and self-serving. Song Gang then decides to pursue Lin Hong for himself. Li is genuinely shocked and calls out, apparently without irony: “Get out! You value women above your own brother, you fucker!” 你给我滚！你这个重色轻友，妈的，重色轻兄弟的王八蛋！ (Ch.8)

199

When he marries Lin Hong, Song Gang’s bearing towards his new wife is such that he appears to the townsfolk as if he were Lin Hong’s pet -- trotting along behind her -- and this impression is indeed fully in keeping with Song Gang’s private conduct towards her. For a brief moment, in something of a socialist honeymoon, Song Gang and Lin Hong exemplify the content and happiness which socialism promised to all, but shortly the introduction of economic reforms begins to change the familiar basis of the town’s economy. Li, as we have seen, is one of the first to take advantage of the new opportunities but the result of his first foray into the world of business is a failure and so he is starving. Song Gang begins secretly giving his lunch money to Li, who nonchalantly accepts this arrangement as if it were his natural right. After Li begins his sit-in outside the county offices, Song Gang shares his lunch with Li by the side of the growing scrap mountain and they remember their bitter childhoods and are like brothers again. Song Gang is so worried about his brother’s state that he can neither sleep nor eat. Song Gang cannot understand why Li should have given up his good job as a factory director to pursue his rackety schemes and Song Gang’s conventional thinking makes him fret that Li still does not have a job. Li, for his part, maintains his protest against the county authorities and that his scrap collecting is his job.

Lin Hong, still burning from the shame inflicted upon her over many years by Li Guangtou, is happy that the latter has come to a low ebb. Lin Hong’s somewhat puritan moral system was formed in the revolutionary period of the PRC and stresses the traits of modesty and dignity. This value system is one to which Li has never subscribed, so the gulf between their perceptions ensures that Lin continues to despise Li and thus remains safe from him. When Lin Hong discovers that her husband is sharing his lunch with her bête noire , she emotionally and forcefully conveys to Song Gang her memories of the pain and humiliation that Li has caused her over the years. Lin Hong demands that Song Gang finally choose between them. Song Gang is caught, once again, between his two loves, but he resolves to sever his relationship with Li and in doing this, he utters the same words that Li taught him to use when he demanded Song Gang sever his relationship with Lin Hong.

Song Gang’s factory becomes one of the first State-Owned Enterprises in the town to close down. Li offers the newly unemployed Song Gang a job in his business when it starts to take off. Li correctly declares that Song Gang is too honest, and too easily taken advantage of, to

200 be put in charge of anything other than the finances. Gang, having made his promise to Lin Hong however, refuses the offer. Lin Hong reassures her husband that: “we have our state- issued jobs but he does not, and later on that will be a problem for him” 我们怎么说，也是有国家工作的，他没有国家工作，以后很难说 (Ch.26). This prediction turns out to be untrue, however, and shortly the economic profile of the town begins to change fundamentally.

The old is giving way to the new, and more job losses are evident. The Eternity Bicycle is now old and outdated; other workers at Lin Hong’s knitting factory ride imported brand bikes or even mopeds. Song Gang and Lin Hong continue to live their accustomed socialist-era lives with the exception that they now have a colour TV and a washing machine. Song Gang tries selling magnolia blossoms on the streets for a living, but he has no business sense and frequently gives away his flowers to those who ask for them. Lin Hong, who has always dominated her husband, now has to manage Song Gang as if he were a child or an idiot. Because she feels his new job is unmanly, Lin Hong insists Song Gang cease selling flowers, so he then looks for jobs in traditional industries. He gets a job at the river dock, but it is not a secure job and, after an initial flourish, Gang injures his back and has to stop work completely. It takes Song Gang a further year to find permanent work because he still refuses to approach Li Guangtou. Now working at a concrete factory, his lungs are damaged by the dirty and hazardous work and, after two years, he loses that job as well.

Economic reforms in Liu town prompt blacksmith Tong to abandon his trade and open a cutlery store which prospers. One of the victims of the store’s prosperity is Guan’s sharpening business which now closes down and precipitates the resolution of the younger Guan to leave town. Song Gang also begins to feel that there is no future for him in the town. Impaired in his health, and ashamed by his inability to provide for his wife, suddenly it seems a reasonable career choice to him to join up with a travelling charlatan. Without telling Lin Hong beforehand, Song Gang leaves town with the charlatan Zhou. He says that it is for her that he takes this step, but he leaves without her knowledge, and essentially abandons her. In Guan and Song Gang’s emigration, we perhaps discern the zhishifenzi view that labour migration in the reform period was a hardship imposed upon powerless people who had no other choice. Mobility of this type is not a matter of free agency and necessarily involves the

201 break-up of families. Iron rice bowl workers from China’s smaller towns and cities had no choice but to become part of a despised and exploited floating population. Much later, when Song Gang encounters young Guan on the road, Guan tells him that after two years wandering it is impossible to go back, and one is condemned to an itinerant life staying in hovels. The vast numbers of beaten-down people on the roads of China recalls the scene in Zai xiyu zhong huhan where a helpless population attempt to escape the advancing Japanese army. In both scenes there is no compassion, no mutual assistance, just a rapacity and selfishness born of desperation. Song Gang feels that Guan and his wife truly are: “a couple beset by trials and tribulations…” 对患难 (的)夫妻。。。。。 (Ch.45).

After many humiliating adventures Song Gang fails to make his fortune with Zhou and returns home to discover Lin Hong has gone to Shanghai with Li Guangtou. Song Gang is devastated to learn of his wife and brother’s behaviour. Song Gang understands that even his wife has now abandoned her long-held values and embraced the ethics of the great emporium. Man’s bestial nature is now associated in Fictional History narrative with economic, rather than physical, trauma. Li’s seduction of Lin Hong was achieved by offering her a security that her husband could not and, for besieged women, this security is vital. When Li consummates his long game with Lin Hong, she experiences enormous sexual pleasure and a significant amount of pain and this reflects the new aggressive masculinity associated with wealth: “Lin Hong began to believe the popular rumour that Li Guangtou was a beast in bed and that every woman who leaves his bed feels lucky to be alive” 林红终于相信群众的传言了，群众说李光头是一个牲口一样的男人，每个女人从李光头床上下来时都像是死里逃生。 Song Gang’s travels have imbued him with a consciousness that China’s social and business practices have irrevocably changed, but he had always resisted submersion in the new ethics by assuming a certain mental detachment and by holding in his mind the pure image of Lin Hong. That his image of purity and integrity should have succumbed to the new morality causes him to experience a terminal crisis of faith. In pain from his breast implant removal operation, he lies around the marital home and weeps constantly, looking at old photographs. Song Gang comes inexorably to the realisation that he is not suited to the changing times and that he is worthless. Eventually, he persuades himself that he has also been a worthless husband and that Lin Hong should never have married him. Song Gang writes a letter to Lin

202

Hong and another letter to his brother. In his letter to Li, Song Gang recalls their bitter childhoods, perhaps under the impression that Li has forgotten this.

The great irony of Song Gang’s situation is that Li Lan begged him to look after Li when, as it turned out, it was really Song Gang who needed looking after, and for him there was nobody. For all her bitter experience of the Cultural Revolution, Li Lan could not imagine that even worse developments in the future would cut down gentle souls with even more ruthlessness. Song Gang’s belated recognition that Li Guangtou had been acting in bad faith towards him had given him the courage to make his initial break with Li. After his wife tells Song Gang of the years of embarrassment and chagrin she suffered on account of the actions of Li, Song Gang finds the strength to shun his brother, fortified by his deep commitment to ideas of proper behaviour. It is Song Gang’s tragedy that he remains steadfast in this moral stance even though Lin Hong does not. Under economic pressure, Lin also realizes that life in China has changed and that her earlier principles are no longer tenable. Song Gang is now isolated in his ethical stance: he knows that his values are an anachronism.

The producers of Fictional History texts do not necessarily maintain that considerate and gentle people must always be left behind, rather they point out that in the specific environment of post-reform China, such qualities will always be, at times, a barrier to success. Song Gang’s failure to adopt the moral compromises demanded by the reforms meant that he lost everything; his job, his wife, his masculinity, and his life. Li Guangtou, because of his insensitivity to the feelings of others, effortlessly prospers. Li is masculine and potent while Gang is feminised and weak.

Song Gang commits suicide by lying down in front of a train. It is implied that, in his last hours, Song Gang’s mind had become disordered by his grief. For Li and Lin Hong there are mutual recriminations upon hearing the news of Song Gang’s death. Neither has the courage to see the corpse and they both accept that they will receive their retribution. Gang’s death shames them both, as do his letters to them, by pointing out the gap between his own simple understanding of life and their more functional and mercenary view of it. Lin Hong murmurs at his funeral: “regardless of what I might have done, you are the only person I have ever loved” 无论我做过什么，我一生僾过的人只有你一个 (Ch.28). Just as the significant social change of the Cultural Revolution required the sacrifice in blood of Song Fanping, so, it 203 seems, the great changes of the reform era have demanded the blood sacrifice of Fanping’s son, Song Gang. This apparent need for sacrifices recalls Lin Zhao’s despairing question as to whether it would ever be possible, in this land full of medieval relics, to have disagreements without bloodshed. Fictional History suggests that in China forces of conflict are constantly consuming human lives.

The defeat of Song Gang is not, after all, the type of shock which leads to lasting social change. After his brother’s funeral, Li visits the Good Works factory and he tells the story of his early life with Song Gang to the inmates of that institution, all that remains to him now of family. The idiots, deaf, blind, and crippled attend in silence. In the end, nobody is chastened; the reforms continue apace, and people get rich and the unthinkable becomes the new normal. At the end of Xiongdi , all are richer, but none are moral. Life goes on. Lin Hong, after a period of seclusion, accepts that she has fallen and now becomes the owner of a brothel, while blacksmith Tong has opened three supermarkets. He becomes very rich and is a client of Lin Hong’s. Li’s belated sentimental mourning for his brother leads to a boom in the price of Song Gang relics. He fantasises about doing something nobody else can do - sending his brother’s ashes up into space.

Concluding remarks

In these Fictional Histories of the reform and post-reform eras the ethical bases of life in the revolutionary period have been overthrown. Replacing modesty with mercantile values has led to the willful obscuring of the truth, a wholesale commoditization of the population, the reappearance of social practices from the feudal past, a renewal of superstition, an erosion of the values of education, and the appearance of rigidly defined and enforced ideas of class.

We can perhaps plot these Fictional History images of China’s past and present against the works of conventional scholarship and its conclusions. Joel Andreas has argued that the survival of the collectivist ethic in China was dependent upon the goal of a classless society,

204 and when this aim was repudiated in the reform period, China’s collective ethic collapsed. 149 Fictional History texts contend that, in the great emporium of post-reform China all things are for sale but the type of people who got rich first and are privileged in the market and are now able to entrench their privilege for the next generation are those whose ruthlessness and immorality had enabled them to survive in earlier periods. Women, workers, farmers, and those with outmoded ethical standards – and above all those who subscribe to zhishifenzi values – are shown as having to sell whatever they can at the price offered.

We have seen that Fictional History texts generally present a narrative which demonstrates that women in China have always suffered disadvantage because of a pervasive, if insecure, system of masculine privilege. Revolutionary era propaganda around women’s emancipation had difficulty changing traditional modes of personal relations and zhishifenzi argue that state programs to address inequality were not applied in a systematic way. Writers such as Yu Hua represent the reform period as intimately linked to the trauma of history which has always victimized women, and it is in this relationship with the patriarchal past that we must understand the exchange of women’s erotic capital in the present as the most recent manifestation of a long and continuing history of disadvantage.

In the view of post-reform zhishifenzi producers of Fictional History, everyone in China who has been unable or unwilling to manifest the new mercantile values has suffered a loss of status and dignity. Chief among those who have suffered in the reform period are those who were socialized into a genuine adherence to socialist values and socialist career and life choices only to see these disappear or gradually become untenable. The new proletariat in post-reform China suffers enforced mobility, poor labour conditions and low status. As Clifford has pointed out, ‘labour relocation’ is frequently used as term of denial for dislocation. 150 Fictional History echoes this claim.

It is significant, however, that opposition to the reforms is most frequently expressed by those who feel nostalgia for the legacy of Mao, and that these individuals are often part of the Communist power structure, rather than the victims of the process depicted in Fictional

149 Andreas, J. (2009). Rise of the red engineers : The Cultural Revolution and the origins of China's new class . Stanford, Ca.: Stanford University Press. p.219 150 Clifford, J. (1992). Traveling Cultures. In N. T. Grossberg (Ed.), Cultural studies (pp. 96-112). New York: Routledge. 205

History. Liu Xiaobo observed that whenever social tensions are exacerbated, people from the highest echelons of the Party to the broad masses “…pay homage at the altar of Mao and seek to negate the policies of Deng Xiaoping.” 151 Such conservatives ignore the view presented in Fictional History, that the social problems of today have been caused by the maladministration of the Mao-era and that “…any sustainable effort to transform China must negate Mao’s legacy.” Fictional History works present a view of the revolutionary period that many would regard as clear eyed, and do not take at face value the claims about social progress made for that era. However, zhishifenzi also lament that, in the reform period the aspiration towards social justice has been abandoned.

Zhishifenzi , after 1991, were no longer able to convincingly intervene in the administration of the state, for even if they performed the same functions, they no longer constituted an officially recognized, discrete social group. Fictional History, this thesis argues, has been an important means by which post-reform zhishifenzi have sought to represent Chinese history through the prism of their own understanding and experience. Many of the critiques made by zhishifenzi imply that post-reform Chinese history has been more traumatic than it might have been had they, the socially and technically knowledgeable zhishifenzi , been allowed greater autonomy and authority. There are, however, other factors retarding social progress in China which zhishifenzi regard as significant or even insuperable, and Fictional History chronicles this. The effects of the destructive power human nature, and the ways in which this aspect of humanity is linked to traditional culture is seen by zhishifenzi as having, time and again, defeated rationality. In the next chapter, Lost Souls, zhishifenzi writers and film-makers examine their own human natures and attempt to discover a means of living well in a society in which the moral crisis has hardened into dystopia.

151 Quoted in Barmé, G. (1996). Shades of Mao: the posthumous cult of the great leader . New York: East Gate. p.280 206

6. Lost souls

Principal texts:

Hu Jie, Xunzhao Lin Zhao de linghun (2004)

Gao Xingjian, Ling shan (1990)

Yu Hua, Di-qi tian (2013)

We have seen in the preceding chapters that works of Fictional History present the social exclusion and division in contemporary Chinese society as the inevitable consequence of unaddressed, long-term historical trauma. In this view, anti-social behavioural norms were inherited from the revolutionary and even pre-revolutionary past because the reform process did not properly repudiate them. What has changed in the reform period, in the view of post- Mao zhishifenzi producers of Fictional History is the idiom in which social exclusion is expressed, and the classes of people who are targeted for exclusion. Post-reform zhishifenzi writers and filmmakers remind their audience that while the economic reforms made many rich, this was achieved at the cost of increased social stratification, inequality, and exclusion. While the focus of much of their work is the underclass of those whose participation in the new economy is constrained by structural disadvantage – groups who include those who the revolution was supposed to liberate – it is implied that in the post-reform era it is the zhishifenzi themselves who have been socially excluded.

In viewing the present from the perspective of the pre-reform past, Fictional History works suggest that class struggles of the revolutionary era did not conform to any soundly-founded ideology. The victims of acts of social exclusion in the Mao-era are presented as having been entirely innocent of the charges levelled against them. In the subsequent reform period, Yu Hua and other post-Mao writers and filmmakers observe that the reforms were imposed upon all indiscriminately and that they disfranchised those in society who could not, or would not,

207 change their ethical and moral values to suit the changing times. Most significantly, this is presented in Fictional History as explicitly or implicitly including zhishifenzi as well as the working poor and the unemployed. The left-behind are, therefore, understood as being those who have made an ethical stand, one of which those who took it were usually unaware.

The zhishifenzi producers of these Fictional History works contend that because the Maoist revolutionary state had descended into injustice and absurdity, the post-Mao reforms were necessary and, in themselves, progressive. However, these reforms were distorted in their operation by internalized trauma from the past, trauma that is understood as grounded in deep seated cultural patterns. Inevitably, the failure of the revolutionary project of spiritual transformation is presented as having encouraged the resurrection of popular immersion in traditional superstitions, acceptance of abusive political practices, and the hardening of structures of social stratification.

This thesis has so far focussed upon Fictional History’s deployment of social critique as a reflection of zhishifenzi conceptions of their group’s history and identity, but in this chapter, I examine how zhishifenzi authors and film-makers discuss how it might be possible to live moral lives within the environment created by history. I argue that their way of thinking about these things indicates the importance placed upon the transformational power of imagination in zhishifenzi cultural production. I argue in this chapter that feelings of moral solitude and alienation are addressed in Fictional History through acts of narrative creativity. I observe that this facility for narrative invention is one of the hallmarks of Fictional History, and, we might argue, one of the distinguishing characteristics of the zhishifenzi subjectivities which produce it as a genre and to which it speaks.

In addressing this question of how Fictional History addresses the issue of seeking to live morally in a world that is corrupt, this chapter targets both works that have a high degree of fictionality – surrealist or magic realist works in which events that are outside the bounds of secular causality – and works which are overtly non-fiction – documentary films that chronicle events in modern Chinese history. In combining these two types of works, the chapter attempts to show that Fictional History engages with problems of morality as both historical and personal. The fictionality of these works highlights how zhishifenzi see history as a matter of imagination and subjectivity, while the non-fictionality of these works

208 highlights their conception of history as a matter of objective realities. Significantly, death and the fate of one’s person after death, is a core concern of these works.

Fictional History and the moral crisis

In viewing the world that history has made Fictional History works identify a general moral crisis in Modern China. Ci Jiwei (b. 1955 and himself a post-Mao zhishifenzi ) argues that large numbers of people in China do not bother to conform to ordinary standards of acceptable behaviour. 152 Ci Jiwei argues that a crisis of spirit inevitably develops into a crisis of justice and order as the moral exemplars of society and the institutions charged with setting moral norms lose their capacity to inspire belief and co-operation in people of ordinary moral endowment. This crisis, both in its historical manifestations and in its contemporary appearance, is extensively and repeatedly narrated by China’s post-reform writers and film- makers, and the works this thesis has defined as Fictional History exemplify this. It is not necessarily the case, in Ci’s view, that Chinese people believe that the Party’s moral norms are unjust and not worth adhering to; it is more that the spectacle of their frequent violation fails to inspire confidence in the possibility of moral norms being fulfilled. The example of non-compliance with ethical norms encourages others to violate them, and this situation sets up a circular problem which few in China have any idea how to rectify. 153

Fictional History works that take a surrealist or magic realist form are prime vehicles for expressing this sense of moral disillusionment. Yu Hua’s novel, 第七天 (Di-qi tian, 2013) focusses upon the deceptions, absurdities, divisions, and violence of contemporary life in China it a way that can be seen as the logical sum of the extensive critical social observations

152 Interestingly, it can be argued that even those in China who have not abandoned moral norms are also affected by the malaise. On social media, individuals and organizations who transgress ethical norms are denounced with the aim, presumably, of discouraging these sorts of behaviors. Ci Jiwei has argued, however, that just as ironic and critical detachment adds nothing to the solution of China’s problems, so the condemnation of miscreants on social media becomes a form of entertainment which channels outrage without providing real solutions. In this way expressions of moral anger are transformed into cynicism. Ci, J. (2009). The Moral Crisis in Post-Mao China: Prolegomenon to a Philosophical Analysis. Diogenes, 56 (1), 19-25. 153 Ibid. 209 made in his previous works. In this, his most recent novel, Yu Hua uses a magic realist or surrealist idiom to narrate experiences of life in contemporary Beijing to illustrate the fate of those whose moral outlook presents a barrier to their prosperity in the great emporium. Set in the afterlife and narrated as a series of reminiscences by various deceased people, Yu Hua’s characters have all met their deaths by the now familiar, but somewhat bizarre, methods commonly encountered in modern China; killed in forcible demolitions, police beatings, political assassinations, acts of official corruption, and botched organ selling.

In keeping with his earlier work, the common folk whose stories are narrated here display personal qualities valued by post-Mao zhishifenzi. 154 On the first day, Yang Fei wakes in his rented room to find that he has died. This could have been a startling realization, but for Yang Fei and the other characters in the novel, a passive acceptance of the absurdities and shocks of life in contemporary China extends even to the fact of feeling no surprise at his own death. Yang Fei had died while reading a newspaper account of his ex-wife’s suicide, an account so compelling that his attention is distracted from the explosion and fire which then lead to his demise. His soul is summoned to the funeral parlour which is the portal between the world of the living and the dead.

As noted previously in this thesis, Yu Hua’s sense of the resurgence of rigidly enforced ideas of class division in post-Mao China is illustrated in the novel depiction of the funeral parlour waiting room, where the dead of high status are separated from the dead who are poor and humble. Death’s waiting room is an unlikely venue for status display, but the dead cadres and millionaires appear to not perceive, even in death, the vanity of their worldly riches and fame.

As Yang Fei makes his way among the dead, the stories of how people came to die reflect the cartoon horrors of life in modern China. One couple were crushed inside their house as it was forcibly, and illegally, demolished, another was unjustly executed as a result of a confession extracted from him by a police beating. Li Yuezhen, Yang Fei’s foster-mother, was run down by a speeding black BMW after publicly embarrassing local authorities over their negligent disposal of ‘medical waste.’ The explosion which killed Yang Fei as he was reading about his ex-wife’s arrest and suicide occurred in the Tan family restaurant whose owner, Mr Tan,

154 The narrator of the novel, Yang Fei, is himself a graduate, albeit an ineffectual and undistinguished one. 210 reveals that officials frequently banqueted without paying their bills. It is shown that private companies are obliged to settle the bill as a form of corruption. Tan says that “nobody dares offend government people.” 政府都门里的人谁都不敢得罪 (Ch.1). All these deaths have been covered up by the authorities in an effort to smooth over problems in the public record.

Social relationships within the new structures of stratification In Yu Hua’s novel, China is a society in which the stages of prosperity are measured in iPhone model numbers and where: “In this whorish society there are more and more gold diggers,” 在这个笑不笑娼的社会里，势利的女人越来越多 (Ch 2) . All, however, feel the need to keep digging for more gold. Liu Mei and her boyfriend are so poor that they are obliged to rent living space in the network of Mao-era underground bomb shelters which still exist under the streets of Beijing. That these bunkers are still in use suggests metaphorically that, at least for the poor, Beijing remains a war-zone. (It is a documented fact that many hundreds of thousands of migrant workers and poor folk do, indeed, live in these bunkers, as well as in the city’s drains and sewers, and that this accommodation is the lowest and most abhorrent imaginable for humans.) If, in Xiongdi Song Gang suffers a loss of his masculinity through his poverty, these two young people, forced to live like rats, have suffered a loss of their humanity.

Despite their poverty Liu Mei and her boyfriend are driven by the capitalist deception that they will each one day find rich spouses or will acquire skills which will enable them to quit their exploitative and exhausting jobs. Their powerlessness entails ongoing humiliation and exploitation. After many insults to his dignity, Liu Mei’s boyfriend, Wu Chao, refuses to go out to find work: “…he was no longer willing to be bullied by anyone else,” 他说不愿意再被人欺负了 (Ch 7), so now the young couple’s lives in their underground bunker more and more resemble the scavenging habits of mice. One day Wu Chao collects enough scrap on the street to buy two steamed buns, and so the couple can eat again. Liu Mei, who is pretty, suggests to Wu Chao that she joins a friend who has a job in a night club. Liu Mei envies her escort friend’s possession of the latest iPhone and her own lack of this item then becomes, in Mei’s thinking, the symbol of her continued marginalisation in the new Chinese economic race. Wu Chao’s purchase of a fake Apple iPhone for Liu Mei’s birthday precipitates an existential crisis for Liu Mei who is upset that Wu has lied to her and that their relationship is

211 thus now tainted by the economy of fakes. This interposition of a fake is viewed as a blasphemy and a defilement. Liu Mei weeps; she declares that she would have been happy if he had given her nothing at all, but now Mei, profoundly disillusioned, publicly announces on the QQ website that she has decided to die.

In this text, and in other works of Fictional History, it is consistently the fate of those with gentle souls to be cheated and ground down by life. Yet for all their suffering, they manifest an enormous spiritual authenticity. That the lives of these innocent souls are destroyed so routinely by a society which has lost its ability to distinguish between value and price is an indication, in Fictional History, of the extent of China’s moral crisis. Indeed, so profound is this crisis that Yu Hua portrays the possession of a gentle nature as a hardship to the individual: “Every one of the self-mourners had bitter memories, painful to recall, of that departed world; everyone was a lonely orphan there” (p.158).

In Di-qi tian the moral indifference and contempt directed towards those without status is further illustrated in the response of netizens towards Liu Mei’s suicide announcement. Rather than helping, people on the internet begin to offer suggestions as to where Mei should go to kill herself. The apartment block opposite the entrance to the underground shelter is proposed, but she is energetically requested not to use this location by two of the residents living there. These two suggest the fifty-eight storey Pengfei tower as the ideal location for a suicide, and this suggestion eventually meets with universal approval. Liu Mei, after attempting to get in contact with the temporarily absent Wu Chao, ultimately dies by accident when she slips on some ice while being rescued from the top of the Pengfei tower by a policeman. Learning of her death after he returns to the city, Wu Chao is stricken with remorse and decides to sell one of his kidneys to pay for Liu Mei’s memorial. Predictably, in this society of fakes, he is operated upon by a fake doctor and so Wu Chao dies of septicaemia not long after Mei has been interred.

In the afterlife, Wu Chao and the other victims of the traumas of China’s modern history paradoxically enter a utopia in which the status-seeking and moral indifference of the phenomenal world is replaced by mutual regard and respect. The skeletons in the land of the unburied inhabit a type of cooperative community which might be seen as an ironic depiction of the objective of so many schemes of change in modern China, but which was never

212 actually realized. Now that they are dead, their souls are free and, as Yang Fei explains to Wu Chao:

“Go there… in that place the leaves of the trees will turn and beckon to you, the stones will smile, and the river water will greet you. There is no poverty, no wealth, no sorrow and no pain, there is no injury and no hatred…there, everyone who dies is equal.

He asked: What place is that?

I replied: It is the land of those who die unburied.”

走过去吧，那里树叶会向你招手，石头会向你微笑，河水会向你问候，那里没有贫贱也没有富贵，没有悲伤也没有疼痛，没有伤

也没有恨。。。。。那里人人死而平等。

他问：那是什么地方？

我说：死无葬身之地。 (Ch. 7)

Yu Hua’s vision of the dehumanising brutality of contemporary China is here placed in stark contrast to the persistence of human virtues demonstrated by alienated and excluded individuals who get their just rewards when they have died. In particular, love is shown as being able to transcend the many obstacles that institutional structures put in the way of happiness. 155 Yang Fei genuinely loved his wife Li Qing and she recognized, perhaps too late, that she had always loved him. Like Lin Hong in Xiongdi , it was the tragic fate of Li Qing to live in a corrupt and corrupting world where she was obliged to rely upon the support of the powerful and economically successful if she was to realize her ambitions. In their gentleness, neither Yang Fei nor Song Gang could provide this type of support and so they were both disadvantaged.

155 I note that this ‘redemptive love’ is a feature in all of Yu Hua’s work and that this dimension stands in contrast to the more mocking depictions of Chinese society evident in the productions of the generation of writers that followed his. I speculate that Yu Hua and the post-reform zhishifenzi producers of Fictional History who are the subject of this thesis do not believe, as younger writers seem to, in the need to radically unsettle the complacency of Chinese readers with regard to modern history, but it also possible that younger readers may not feel that this history has the significance which zhishifenzi attribute to it. 213

Since zhishifenzi figures in Fictional History works are frequently portrayed as alienated from their birth families, it is necessary for them to establish alternative supporting networks based upon genuine human understanding and moral regard. Yu Hua, perhaps as a part of his critique of the Mao-era idea of inherited class characteristics, has observed in his earlier novels that consolation for the alienated and wronged person is most frequently to be found outside the family. Again, in Di-qi tian , Yang Fei is an orphan. Yang Fei’s mother had given birth to him in the toilet compartment of a train while it was stopped at a station. Absurdly, the baby fell through the hole in the toilet on to the railway tracks just as the train pulled away. The squalling, newborn is picked up by Yang Jinbiao, a young switchman, who does not question for a moment that the baby has been sent by providence to be his responsibility. Jinbiao is an uncomplicated and generous young man, (he is twenty-one years old when he finds Yang Fei), and he is grieved by the idea that Yang Fei’s mother must have abandoned him. Yang Jinbiao becomes Yang Fei’s father by loving him and accepting responsibility for him from this moment on.

Yang Jinbiao’s morality is informed by ideas of correct behaviour toward other people but it does not rely on any official ideology or instruction. In Fictional History works, doubt is consistently cast upon the ability of imposed ideologies to affect human behaviour in the ways intended, and it is invariably pointed out that ideology is mostly used as a cover for the exercise of power. Love, for Jinbiao, entails unreserved commitment and his baby becomes so important to him that there is little room left in his life for his own needs and happiness. Encouraged by his friends to take a wife, he is subsequently persuaded to leave Yang Fei at an orphanage, but he is almost at once so anguished by this moral failure and by the act of prioritising of his own happiness over that of a defenceless and trusting little boy, that he escapes from his wedding and retrieves his son. In later years, after Jinbiao retires and becomes ill, it is Yang Fei’s turn to look after his father. Nearing death, Jinbiao recalls the time he attempted to leave Yang Fei at the orphanage and it is clear that this episode has continued to haunt his conscience through all the years since that time. Jinbiao decides that he should visit the scene of what he considers to be his most egregious moral failure. Old and sick, Yang Jinbiao dies at this place and his corpse is stripped of its clothes and money by a tramp. Moral integrity is here shown as working in stark contrast to a society driven by the forces of self-interest.

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Alienation, exclusion and fictional histories of the individual The question of the individual, and by implication of the alienation of the individual from his or her society, is one major issue that arises – perhaps indirectly – from Fictional History’s depiction of a morally compromised world. This is a core concern in much of the discourse about the educated group in modern Chinese history and was an important concern of post- Mao intellectual debates. It is widely observed that in the revolutionary period of the PRC expressions of individuality and autonomy were interpreted as bourgeois and were met with hostility. Merle Goldman has noted, however, that artists and intellectuals in China were able to debate, even in the revolutionary period, the possibility of alienation within socialist societies and the place of humaneness/humanism in socialism – both arguably individualist tendencies. 156 For their part, post-reform zhishifenzi writers and filmmakers outline in Fictional History works the sense and fact of being alienated from contemporary society, and observe that these feelings, along with the dissolution of their group identity, have encouraged zhishifenzi and their fictional surrogates into a retreat into detachment and isolation. It would appear, therefore, that even in China’s teeming cities, it is possible to be, at least spiritually, alone.

We have seen that in Fictional History zhishifenzi (or their fictional surrogates and analogues) tend to assume the role of invisible observers of Chinese society, but that playing this role has alienated them from active participation in society. We note that Yang Fei dies a single man: “I am alone and had nobody to come and mourn me…” 我孤苦伶仃，没有人会来悼念我。。。。。 (Ch.1) and, even though he has not always been alone, he manifests the detachment and separation from society which is a typical characteristic of zhishifenzi .157 In death, he recalls his relationship with Li Qing; “She was somebody capable of changing her own destiny, but I could only drift with my fate” .她是一个能够改变自己命运的人，而我只会在自己的命运里随波逐流 (Ch.2). As with so many others in Fictional History who are socially marginal in reform and post-reform China, Yang Fei, like Song Gang in Xiongdi , lacks the sort of qualities necessary to achieve success in an environment in which human

156 Goldman, M. (2009). Repression of China's public intellectuals in the post-Mao era. [Article]. Social Research, 76 (2), 659-686. This was one of the conversations shut down by the “spiritual pollution” campaign in which Gao Xingjian was targeted. 157 Yang Fei is college educated and had a white-collar job. 215 affection and decency are insufficient. When Li Qing meets a businessman on a flight who values her for her intelligence and creativity, she divorces Yang Fei though they are both racked by sadness when she does so. Yang sadly reflects that Li’s time with him was a detour and it was only after she left him that she found the right path. The businessman, (somewhat predictably), turns out to be a fraud and flees overseas leaving Li Qing to face the regulatory consequences of her husband’s commercial misdoings. Her story is featured in the newspapers because she commits suicide in her bath just as the authorities are breaking down the door of her mansion.

Di-qi tian chronicles the morally alienated Chinese society of the 2010s and the spiritual longings of those lost in it. Gao Xingjian’s Ling shan from 1990 depicts the same realities at a much earlier stage in the evolution of post-Mao society. The narrator of Ling shan suggests a host of reasons why he has become soul-sick and alienated; a feeling of powerlessness, his own persecution by the state, exasperation with his fellow zhishifenzi , boredom, and class bigotry. This acute form of alienation presents the narrator with a deep obstacle to attaining the tranquil acceptance which is depicted as the aim of life in the works of Yu Hua and other producers of Fictional History working in the 1990s and 2000s. However, we can argue that the ultimate point made by Gao Xingjian, Yu Hua and their zhishifenzi peers, however, is that meaning, though ultimately derived from one’s relationships with other people, is personal and can only be found within one’s self, and not through the transformation of the social order. 158

In Ling shan , the narrator wanly speculates: “By and large this world is just not arranged to suit humanity, and yet people must do all they can to survive in it. In attempting to preserve one’s true-born identity, one will either be killed, or go insane, or else be always fleeing” 大抵这人世并不为世人而设，人却偏要生存。求生存而又要保存娘生真面目，不被杀又

不肯被弄疯，就只有逃难 (Ch.71). He complains, moreover, that it is impossible to escape the infection of modern life. Wherever he might go he will inevitably encounter the same neighbours, the same stresses, and once again will be pulled into the banality of things.

In its extreme expression, detachment from the wider world can lead to an indifference to the

158 Even those who are redeemed by love, such as Fugui and Xu Sanguan in Yu Hua’s novels, are transformed at the level of the individual consciousness, rather than by participation in a supportive community. 216 suffering of others. In Beijing, the narrator of Ling shan is entreated to listen to a story told by a woman whose childhood friend was sentenced to ten years in prison for making a diary entry in which she expressed a longing to see her father in Taiwan. It is an index of the extent of the narrator’s detachment that he listens critically and without empathy to the story, his interest being sparked by what he believes to be the sordid lesbian aspects of the case and by his preoccupation with the physical ugliness of his informant. The woman telling the story must have believed that the narrator, as a knowledgeable and cultured figure, would be interested in her story and that he may even have been moved to do something about a case which is a clear miscarriage of justice. The narrator, however, manifests an impotent and detached intellectuality at odds with the calling of a zhishifenzi and listens to the woman with no more sympathy than if she was narrating a badly-composed short story.

Whatever responsibilities towards the community may have been felt by educated people in the past seem, in the era in which Ling shan is set, to have subsided under the weight of a despairing consciousness of the relentless brutality of life in China. Ling shan ’s narrator frequently demonstrates an unwillingness to engage with the plight of his fellows because he is preoccupied with his own persecution and overwhelmed by a sense of his own powerlessness. In one case a nervous man arrives at the narrator’s door and asks for help in getting his novel published. The narrator tells him that is extremely difficult for him to get his own works published and that he would do better to keep his name out of any attempt by the other man to solicit a publisher. In another story, a friend who is newly-rich comes to visit the narrator and brags about his wealth and possessions. He wants the narrator’s help in getting his daughter into a prestigious university, but the narrator says that he cannot do anything. Instead of extending compassion towards struggling, though flawed, human beings, Ling shan’s narrator philosophises: “Human narcissism, self-destruction, aloofness, arrogance, complacency and anxiety, envy and hatred all arise from this, the self (ego) assuredly is the root cause of human misfortune” 人自恋，自残，矜持，傲慢，得意和忧愁，嫉妒和憎恨都来源於他，自我其实是人类不幸的根源 (Ch.26) .

As Yu Hua’s Huozhe has illustrated, however, Fictional History suggests that there is no philosophy equal to the tenacious desire to live. The narrator of Ling shan is to some extent shaken out of his detachment when a routine chest x-ray discloses a dark spot upon his lung.

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The narrator begins to read the Yijing in a belated and perhaps forlorn response to a friend’s advice that “you must make an effort.” The narrator sits in an old burial ground, now a park, where the air is supposedly better, and at the hospital he finds himself chanting the name of the Buddha and reflecting upon the impossibility of miracles: “Fate is so hard and people are so frail; when facing adversity man is nothing” 命运就这样坚硬，人却这般软弱，在厄运面前人是什么都不是 (Ch.12). The diagnosis of lung cancer is ultimately mistaken but the narrator’s (temporary) escape from death awakens in him a new yearning for spiritual wholeness and an interest in the efforts made by others over the years to find meaning in life. The alienated indifference he has hitherto displayed is replaced by a spiritual quest.

The search for meaning and fictional history

The search for understanding that the narrator of Ling shan undertakes is represented as a tour through the south of China. In this aspect, the novel instantly recalls two earlier classics of fictionalized history, Wu Cheng’en’s 西游记 Xi you ji, (Journey to the West) and the 山海经 Shan hai jing , (Classic of Mountains and Seas). Gao’s narrative similarly eschews conventional temporal progression, lacks geographical exactitude, and features an array of travelling companions who do not exist in the normal sense. 159 Like Di-qi tian, Ling shan can be understood as Fictional History written in a surrealist or magic realist mode.

Ling shan depicts a journey in which the narrator attempts to find a location, Soul Mountain, which has become established in his imagination as a terrestrial haven in which the conflicts and contradictions of his soul can be brought into concord. 160 We can argue that the narrator is a Chinese intellectual everyman, a zhishifenzi , who has been led by unexpected circumstances to doubt his accustomed identity and ideology in the conviction that these no longer nourish his soul. In his belief that the trauma of recent history has damaged Chinese

159 There is, indeed, no actual evidence that the journey takes place at all, nor that the narrator has any of the qualities he attributes to himself because the novel insistently undermines our belief in its own claims to veracity. 160 It is tempting, particularly in light of some of the biographical details given by the narrator, to assume that the narrator and the author are the same, but this would be, in my opinion, an error of an elementary kind. As in so much fictional narrative that appears to be autobiographical, the narrator of Ling shan is, in a sense, a mask assumed by the author in order to achieve his narrative purposes. At an obvious level, the biographical details given by the narrator in the novel do not always match those known for Gao Xingjian himself. 218 society and contributed to the state of spiritual malaise, the narrator is determined to search in unfamiliar places, to find spiritual alternatives, and discover what remains of the good in Chinese culture after the upheavals of modern times. The irony embodied in his search, and the cause of its failure, is that he employs the techniques of analysis and rationality characteristic of a zhishifenzi to assess alternatives to analysis and rationality. In his account of his quest, the narrator comes to understand that just as he is incapable of renouncing civilization and becoming a wild man, and he is also unable to commit himself to the renunciations demanded by religion. As a zhishifenzi, the narrator already has a spiritual foundation – that constructed by the modernising agendas of zhishifenzi culture – and he must accept, and respect, the benefits and limitations of his zhishifenzi identity.

At one level we can suggest that the soul’s repose entails a bringing into harmony of the many facets of the zhishifenzi personality. Setting out upon his journey, the narrator addresses as ‘you’ various dimensions of his own consciousness with whom he converses. The narrator’s consciousness thus takes the form of multiple contending (rarely complementary) voices in dialogue -- a dialectic – and within these dialogues the reader can perceive the narrator’s attempt to uncover and reclaim what he believes is his natural, or natal, authenticity, something which has been polluted by his education and his life as an urban zhishifenzi .

If the soul is multi-faceted, it is also solitary. Aligning with the broad post-reform zhishifenzi idea articulated in Fictional History works that identity is shaped by feelings of difference, a recurrent motif in Ling shan is the difficulty, or even the impossibility, of authentic communication with others. While the narrator says that consciousness of one’s self pollutes relationships with other people because this consciousness gets in the way of true fellowship, we can observe that the conversation of the self with the self is the key concern of Ling shan . Because authentic communication with others is impossible, Ling shan ’s narrator explains that other people are often used merely as a mirror to reflect the self, and one is always searching for a reflection which is tolerable to ourselves. Consequently, for the zhishifenzi , the isolation of the soul stands as a barrier to complete understanding and empathy with others, and they are left to comfort themselves with the fragments of narratives:

“Ultimately, you are only capable of achieving memories, hazy, uncertain, and dream-like which, above all, do not give themselves to

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expression. Just as you attempt description, you are left with sentences, only the gleanings of language.”

。。。。。你所能得到的终究只有记忆，那种朦朦胧胧无法确定如梦一般，而且并不诉诸语言的记忆。当你去描述它的时候，也

就只剩下被顺理过的句子，被语言的结筛下的一点碴汁。 (Ch.54)

In the absence of meaningful connections with others, we can observe that zhishifenzi subjects distract themselves from the pain of their soul’s solitude by telling stories. Towards the end of the novel, the narrator of Ling shan compares his life to the activity of climbing mountains. At the top you lose interest in the mountain you have just climbed and begin to look forward to the next one in the distance. The urge remains after each disappointing experience. This is like life, and just as in life, to relieve the boredom and mitigate the effort involved in climbing, you invent stories. To the extent that these distractions are necessary, narrative creativity transcends art and becomes a vital spiritual force. This is one statement of the solution to the problem of authenticity for the zhishifenzi subject.

Dialectical reasoning in Fictional History

Zhang Yinde has described Gao Xingjian’s Ling shan as, among other things, the novelization of an anthropological expedition, and maintains that the novel can be read ethnologically as an indictment of ‘northern’ Han Chinese repression of the south.161 Zhang’s idea that the narrator is engaged in an anthropological field trip is apt, and this point recalls Jia Pingwa’s use of the anthropologist in Fuzao to embody an ideal amalgam of scientific analysis with folk wisdom. In this particular work of Fictional History, we can argue that the zhishifenzi soul searches for this type of reconciliation between opposites in the apprehension that the pain of the soul is due to an imbalance of influences. In the search for his soul, therefore, the narrator seeks to reconcile the contrary influences of north and south, of male and female, of nature and civilization, and of faith and rationality. In Ling shan , these contrary positions are advocated and represented by dimensions of the narrator’s personality

161 Zhang, Y. (2010). Gao Xingjian: Fiction and Forbidden Memory. China Perspectives, 2010 (2), 25-33. 220 which then engage in a constant debate, the end goal of which is a cognitive synthesis.

We have earlier observed that in Fictional History it is characteristic of zhishifenzi figures or their surrogates to develop an imaginative capacity in childhood which is applied to the transformation of an inadequate reality. The adult zhishifenzi urge to find their soul that is found in works like Ling shan can be seen as a development of the lonely child’s effort to create a more satisfactory present by means of imagination. The imaginative facility first developed in childhood becomes a means to comprehend the self. In claiming this ability, zhishifenzi proclaim the significance of fictional creativity as an element of cognition. The texts produced by zhishifenzi creators of Fictional History can be seen, therefore, as an alternative means of cognition employing fictional creativity. In this regard, we may note how the narrator of Ling shan discusses at one point the cognitive difference between fiction and philosophy:

“Fiction is not the same as philosophy because it depends upon the creation of emotional perception. If one sets up a self-derived, encoded signal which is then immersed in a solution of desire, when this sequence resolves itself into the creation of a cell having its own life and the capability to self-generate, this is much more fascinating than intellectual games, and just like life, it will have no end purpose.”

小说之不同於哲学，在於它是一种感性的生成，将一个枉自建立的信号的编码浸透在欲望的溶液之中，什么时候这程序化解成为细胞，有了生命，且看者它孕育生成，较之智力的游戏更为有趣，

却又同生命一样，并不具有极终的目的。 (Ch.52)

In employing a variation of the stream of consciousness technique, Gao Xingjian provides an illustration of how narratives told to oneself can be a way of creating meaning. The interplay between the fantastic beasts of the narrator’s imagination and the raw material of observation transforms the phenomenal world into a network of symbols to which the intrusion of emotion adds further complication. Consciousness, then, is forever creating new realities based upon concocted narratives and in this fact lies, as we shall see, a further explanation for the importance of narrative (and imaginative) creativity within Fictional History.

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Though the technique of applying narrative creativity to both history and the present was born of a compulsion to understand the world, and prompted by feelings of exclusion and difference, the technique becomes characteristic of zhishifenzi in the Fictional History genre as a distinctive means of examining their humanity. It is something of an irony, however, that the subjective nature of this mode of cognition, and its reliance upon individual narrative creativity, fosters an environment in which the subject, seeking relief from feelings of isolation, finds itself more isolated from the surrounding world.

The first dialectic: Sexuality and the folk tradition in Fictional History One of the means by which the narrator of Ling shan approaches the search for his soul’s repose is through his interest in the folk art and folk beliefs of south China. The narrator realizes that, if he is to apprehend his soul, he must try means other than those to which he is accustomed. Southern folk traditions are depicted as involving a convergence between nature and human life and this blending stands is held to stand in contrast to the type of analytical and cognitive sophistication exemplified by the Confucian, northern, and intellectual tradition which is thought to have formed the education and shaped the outlook of the post-Mao zhishifenzi . In one illustration of this contrast in Ling shan , the narrator retells the story of how the six books of music appeared on the earth, but Confucius rejected them and disposed of the books in the wilderness. One book of music flew into the sky, one into the sea, one into a temple, one to a village lane, another to a paddy field, and the last book, the ‘record of darkness,’ was found by a master singer, a shaman. The pure folk tradition, that blend of art and nature rejected by Confucius is therefore carried on by the heavens, by fishermen, by monks and priests, by village girls, and by farmers. In Ling shan the master singer’s book was confiscated and destroyed in the Cultural Revolution. Now the master singer has died, and nobody is able to sing the whole piece. A collector of folk songs, previously a teacher in a mountain village, rages that: “(we are) …a nation of people who have lost their souls” 一个丧失了灵魂的民族 (Ch.59).

The folk tradition is depicted in Ling shan as being under threat of extinction through neglect. In the novel the Miao master of sacrifices remembers the old times and the great and solemn sacrifices he performed them. Now, he says, people do not care. They have money, smoke cigarettes, and wear sunglasses. These vices stand as the tangible symbols of recent Chinese

222 history, familiar to zhishifenzi, but they also index, at least for the narrator, the defeat of intuitive ways of knowing by the intrusive rationality of the North. The folk tradition operates in an altogether different spiritual world. 162 A drum sacrifice song takes many days to perform and is represented as invoking such potent mystical power that it causes the death of the officiating priest. Just before he dies, the old man is alone on the riverbank and cries out: “To forget your ancestors is a sin!” 忘了祖先可是罪过。。。 (Ch.41) . Forgetting the past is, indeed, a betrayal of our ancestors, but it is a betrayal encouraged by those who stand to benefit from popular amnesia.

In Ling shan and arguably in Fictional History more broadly, the folk tradition, with its concern with life, death and sex, stands in opposition to the sexual moralities promulgated by the state. We have seen early on in the thesis that anxieties over sexual behaviour are manifested as part of zhishifenzi identity, and this perhaps partly arises as a consequence of having grown to maturity in an environment of sexual repression. We have also seen that in the post-reform period, zhishifenzi see themselves as disadvantaged in their sexuality relative to the insensitive but powerful New Rich.

In Gao Xingjian’s depiction, the folk tradition, women and sexuality are interlinked entities. In Ling shan , the women’s voices inside the narrator’s consciousness may be an amalgam of all the women the narrator has ever known, or they may simply be projections of his consciousness. 163 In his imagination, or his conscience, these women accuse him and so essentially reflect things he believes about himself: “you are incapable of passion…” 你止不住发火 (Ch.50) , and “your cold indifference,” “…hypocritical, you tired of her long ago but didn’t say so.” A fight between a male and a female voice in the narrator’s mind depicts the descent of an emotional relationship into banality and mutual repulsion. She threatens him with a knife; he tells her that she disgusts him and she weeps, begs to be loved, so he finally submits and is subsumed once again by lust. After sex he falls asleep and dreams of a vast

162 In Ling shan, as we shall see, Gao Xingjian discusses how history and legend together form folk stories in a manner that we can argue involves similar process to the creation of Fictional History. It is one theme of post- reform intellectual art that history is gradually transformed into folk belief or legend and so these beliefs become the basis for a type of historiography. We have seen an example of this in Fuzao where the reality of Mao’s administration had, with time, become a folk myth in post-reform China. 163 In fact, there is no reason why the male voice in the novel should be more ‘real’ than the female one. All that may be said for certain is that consciousness comprehends both male and female dimensions. 223 black tide. When the tide recedes, he sees animal-like humans goring, penetrating and slaughtering each other on the sand. He dreams of this for a brief moment while he is asleep in his partner’s arms. It is suggested that some kind of elemental and not fully human reality is connected with through sexual activity.

These forward and backward exchanges resemble the tentative steps employed in solving a puzzle, and we can suggest that it is an analogue for the zhishifenzi quest to understand the puzzle of their own experience. In looking for clues, the narrator tests some of the endlessly flexible and diverse narratives suggested by the occasion, by the intersection of his imagination with the impressions of the ‘real world’ around him, and by his cultural memories. The meanings generated by these exchanges are therefore entirely subjective and have no objective arbiter. At another point, for example, the narrator compiles a set of intersecting narratives of an encounter within a woman from the city, narratives that contain many details of modern Chinese historical experience. A voice in female guise interrogates the narrator; she says she wants real stories about him, she wants to know everything. He tells her of a trip to a fortune teller. In return she tells him of her mother who got ill and died at a work camp for cadres. She remembers the struggle sessions even though she was a small girl at the time. He tells her of the dance when he graduated from middle school. She says she does not want to hear about his dance partner. She refers to an earlier story, a rape under a bridge and brings in new detail, even though it was not her story, and accuses him of being involved in the rape, of looking and desiring. She says that she wants a story to make her happy. He tells a story of young men going to battle, fired up with patriotic fervour and liquor. They all fight, they all die, and are soon forgotten. Then one day it begins again. She falls asleep. As a condensed set of images of modern Chinese history, this encounter conveys a past which seems to lack any kind of overall coherence.

In later developments of the narrative we observe that the focus has moved to an understanding of the female experience of sex in which the narrator apparently empathises with the social and historical exploitation of women. The woman is disappointed by love and sex. She feels nauseated after sex and says that she is hated by her family who want her to move out. She only has her ineffectual and somewhat disreputable father in her life. The woman speaks of her hardships: she longs for peace and wants to follow the road to

224 nothingness. She yearns for death but is simple enough to desire a dignified and painless death, one which will attract the pity of bystanders. The woman then tells a story of being taken for the first time by her teacher. The narrator interrupts; he says the story is too abrupt. The narrator calls the woman a fox spirit and tells an alternative story of a wanton woman and the seemingly supernatural retribution meted out to her by the scandalised townswomen and of her subsequent leprosy. This disease spreads to all the men who’ve had sex with her and they also become lepers. Female sexuality thus shifts from being linked to sympathy with the exploited to being linked with contamination and exclusion.

Another story told from the female point of view deals with women’s anger and retribution. The narrator notices an altar attached to the gable of a house and this prompts him to invent a story about an old woman who once lodged there. In the story, the woman was a shaman and was driven mad by her man’s abandonment of her many years before. The story almost ends at this point but the shaman’s desire for revenge is picked up by the female dimension of his consciousness. She says she also wants revenge and wants to know how the shaman managed to get her revenge. This female dimension of the narrator insists that he tell her the whole story: ‘Tell me!’ The narrator says that the shaman seduced all the men of the village and then discarded them, just like her man had discarded her. This story does not entail the actual use of supernatural power on the part of the shaman, perhaps because the narrator is equivocal in his belief in such power, but the element of revenge in the story is comforting to the narrator. These vengeance stories are never conventionally moral – the narrator sets out to test conceptions of morality and justice by debating the matter between two different parts of his consciousness. 164 It is implied that there might, in fact, be any number of ideas about justice coexisting within a single consciousness and that moral positions taken upon justice are always contingent upon subjective identity. This raises at a more profound level the problem

164 Some stories told by the narrator of Ling shan can be read as indications of a yearning to transform his own experiences of powerlessness, trauma and injustice into vengeance and justice. In one story, the narrator’s friend was persecuted as a counterrevolutionary by Red Guards in Tianjin. He was dismissed from his position and was away from the city just before the 1976 Tangshan earthquake which killed all of his accusers, a wish fulfilment and a miraculous escape. The narrator also tells a story about a woodcarver who was commissioned to carve a statue of Tianlu o, goddess of the underworld. Many years before, when he was still a young man, the carver had raped a mute girl somewhere on his travels. Now it is the face of this girl which presents to his mind for the features of Tianluo. This carver has a premonition that the commission will be the death of him, and so it happens; he carves Tianluo as the mute girl and dies just as he finishes the piece. Order, it would seem, is restored in the world since justice exists in the supernatural realm. Justice supports a natural order which is more desired than evident. 225 of morality and its absence that appears as a foundational concern of the works of Fictional History.

Feelings of anxiety over emotional relationships can also indicate the presence of those other major symbols of repression in Ling shan – Han culture, urban culture, northern regional culture, communality, and Confucianism. 165 In the narrator’s description of a Miao festival, what is represented as a honest and simple way of choosing a mate is contrasted to the separation of the sexual impulse from love, and from the intrusion of status, wealth, religion, and ethics into relationships that obtains in Han culture. In the Miao festival, there is no shame and no anxiety around sex and relationships. When he is ‘called to’ by a girl who is singing in the festival, the narrator wishes he could respond, but he is incapable of doing so. He is old and, more importantly, he cannot shake off the burden of being who he is. Around him the Miao engage in simple love, while he stalks around among them, an outsider crippled by civilisation.

The novel portrays the narrator as discovering on his search the fact that sexual feelings have been tormented by civilization – above all the Han culture of the North – into neuroses, while the folk tradition of the south continues to celebrate these feelings as a natural and uncomplicated part of life. Many of the old ceremonies and folksongs encountered by the narrator on his tour are purported to have originated as fertility rites, even if they do not serve this purpose now. The artificial restrictions that surround sexual behaviour in the city are imposed in fear of disorder; a lawyer friend from the city tells the narrator about a crackdown on crimes of ‘hooliganism’ which has led to the execution of young people in the city for sexual crimes. The lawyer’s wife feels that inducing others to engages in acts of sexual immorality is rightly a crime, but it is nonetheless observed that if the men feel that if sexual desire is a crime, then all are guilty. 166 When they take a boat trip at night, they are serenaded by the boatman whose folk song, while lugubrious, openly celebrates desire and the

165 Elsewhere in Ling shan it is suggested that the zhishifenzi narrator ’s ability to empathize with the suffering of others is a cause of their failure to secure his sexual goals. The narrator meets, whether in fact or in his imagination is not clear, a cultural worker in a county town. He wants to make love to her, but she begins to weep, telling him that she is still a virgin. The narrator stops and decides that he cannot debauch a young woman simply to pass the time or to satisfy the needs of the moment. 166 It is unclear in Fictional History works why the Chinese state is seen as being so concerned to regulate pornography and other sexual matters. The stated reason is the protection of children although it is perhaps the case that one type of censorship, against pornography in this instance, is useful in justifying others.

226 attractions of women. The three zhishifenzi feel their blood on fire as they drift in the darkness listening to indistinct snatches of the boatman’s song. Even though the narrator makes a case for sexual liberty, he is unable to cast off his ingrained sense of propriety, however, and is obliged at last to abandon the idea of pursuing the sensual life as a means of approaching his soul and return to his accustomed life in the city.

The second dialectic: Nature and man in Fictional History The narrator of Ling shan feels compelled to find a refuge from the frustrations of his life in the city. He complains that, in the city, people have set themselves up as teachers, priests, punishers, leaders, and advocates simply by assuming positions of authority. In these circumstances he is always the object of gratuitous advice from specious experts, with regard to matters relating to how to behave and how to live. Turning to nature, he experiences a feeling of liberty. He describes a scene: “Such exuberant vitality absolutely demands to show off its lustrous beauty, irrepressible, neither seeking reward nor having any objective, (it) needs neither symbolism nor metaphor” 生命力这般旺盛，焕发出一味要逞献自身的欲望，不可以遏止，不求报偿，也没有目的，也不诉诸象征和隐喻。。。。。 (Ch.10). The narrator perceives the absence of artificiality in nature as a refreshing change from the exercise of his intellectual faculties which he blames for his spiritual malaise, even though he is aware that the mystical dimension of nature is imposed from outside, something present in the minds of those who observe it and not inherently part of it. Elsewhere, the narrator’s own imagination imposes his anxieties upon the natural world and reveals his psychological state. On a walk the narrator’s gaze is drawn to a hanging rock formation and he begins to imagine a scene suggested by the shapes of the cliff. As children see pictures in the rocks and clouds, so the narrator imagines a dark shaman looming over the figure of a woman who is beseeching the shaman to act.

In the narrator’s interactions with nature it becomes clear to him that humans are a natural amalgam of the rational and the savage. Recalling the trauma of the revolutionary period, the narrator understands that violence is not unnatural in humans but lies dormant beneath the veneer of civilization, and that its occasional expression must be managed in a way which minimizes its social impact. In a local museum, the narrator discovers an exorcist mask which artfully blends human features with the bestial and creates a unity more fearsome than either

227 of these elements on their own. These masks are said to have been used in folk rituals but their banishment from use on the grounds that they were superstitious objects in the early 1950s meant that they survived the destructions of the Cultural Revolution. It is significant that these masks were used in exorcist rituals designed to restore the balance of animal and human in suffering individuals who were seen to have manifested an imbalance of these forces. For the narrator, these masks represent both an instance of the unity he is seeking, and a concrete representation of man’s true nature as expressed in the trauma of history: “This highly intelligent human face is filled, at the same time, with barbarous brutality” 这张极为精明的人脸同时又充满兽性的野蛮 (Ch.24). We can see this as a symbolic instance of post- reform zhishifenzi , struggling to explain in their own narratives the brutality and cruelty of Chinese history, finding before them an analogous example of the techniques of meaning- making, and healing, through narrative creativity that they employ in their own cultural productions.167

Elsewhere in the novel, nature is shown to exist in an antagonistic relationship to human nature. The natural world is the setting for a struggle of tooth and claw, but in China’s wilderness areas, it is humanity which is most to be feared. The narrator meets an old botanist who reassures the narrator, who is worried about snakes: “Wild beasts are not terrifying; only man is terrifying!” 可怕的不是野兽，可怕的是人 (Ch.8). He visits a nature reserve where, in the 1950s, a naturalist had set up a breeding program for endangered species. Peasant poachers were upset by this restriction upon their activities, and they beat the naturalist to death. The local cadres would not stand up for an intellectual against the poor peasant masses, so the program for endangered species was abandoned and the remaining stock was eaten by the cadres. The current ranger is protecting and treating injured cranes which have also been hunted almost to extinction. Again, zhishifenzi detail the consequences of the substitution of politicised policies for sound professional management. 168 A lake, partially drained during the

167 Zhang has argued that the mask represents a ‘persona’ which can be assumed by the actor who performs in it to recover spiritual truths by means of narrative performance. Zhang’s contention is that the mask does not merely connote the blending of animal and human: “It is doubtless through the sacred eyes of the mask that the adult narrator allows himself the hope of finding once more this unformulated and primeval memory” Zhang, Y. (2010). Gao Xingjian: Fiction and Forbidden Memory. China Perspectives, 2010 (2), 25-33. p.33 168 The text argues that nature has its own laws, however, and the inexorability of these laws are demonstrated when the narrator encounters a peasant who was obliged to cut off his hand when it was bitten by a pit viper. The snake’s toxin is deadly, but it appears that they are useful in traditional medicine and are therefore widely 228

Cultural Revolution for farmland is shown as a further disaster. Despite mobilizing hundreds of thousands of labourers for the project, the resulting swamp was discovered to be unfit for farming. Now the trees have been removed, the tigers have gone, and a wasteland has been created by the hand of man. Poachers fish on the remnants of the lake using explosives but they can’t be caught and punished because they are too far away from the authorities. Here natural order is a victim of political disorder.

The narrator’s spiritual ideal is a retirement in which man can live at peace with nature, and although this state is encountered rarely in the world, the narrator is agreeably impressed by every instance of it he finds. The narrator examines a scroll painting by Gong Xian which he sees as endeavouring to represent the fusion of the human soul with nature. It is said that rather than being sent mad by the world, the artist retired to lead a simple life where he was not a recluse, nor did he turn to religion. He was also not the sort of artist who had such a rarefied aesthetic sense to permit him ‘to think of thrushes as vulgar.’ The narrator feels that these scenes of union with nature are hinting at something: “I believe that there must be a deeper significance to all this, but I am incapable of comprehending it” 我以为总有更多的意味，我永远也无法远彻理解 (Ch.33). This frank admission is a further sign of the narrator’s dawning realization that, in search of their souls, other types and classes of people have devised other ways of living and expressing spirituality. However, in the end the zhishifenzi search for an antidote to a life of analytical judgement and rationality is revealed in these passages as being naïve. The narrator, anxious to lay down his intellectual burdens, has ultimately no alternative but to accept them as an essential part of his own soul.

Overall, the odd mixture of nature mysticism and psychology which sets up the ideal of a human existence coming closer to nature, is embodied in those who flee from civilization to live alone in the wild. In Ling shan the narrator attends a cadres’ meeting within a wildlife reserve and they give him a rundown of their search for a wild man. Many people claim to have seen the wild man living alone in the depths of the forest and they report that he is frightening to behold, but harmless. The story of the wild man intrigues the narrator because the wild man has successfully abandoned society and this abandonment is a type of

poached. Though the State is unable or unwilling to stop local peasants infringing upon conservation areas, nature itself had exacted the sacrifice of the peasant’s hand as the price of his trespass. 229 renunciation which the narrator wishes to understand. The narrator meets an old school friend who lives in the area and likes telling stories, so he tells a story about how some workers caught a wild man in the mountains. In the story, the wild man turns out to be an escapee from a work camp, a rightist element, who has been living in the forest for over twenty years and hiding from the authorities. The school friend proposes an ending to the story in which the wild man, treated with sympathy by the workers, cries out that had he known that there were so many good and charitable people in the world he would not have endured so many years of unjust punishment.

The narrator is unsatisfied with this story, perhaps because the wild man’s revolt was in reaction to the unjust persecutions of the government rather than an explicit renunciation of society itself. Further, the wild man in the story repents of his time in the forest and attributes it to a misunderstanding about the goodness of people. Instead of continuing in his defiance of the morals of a society which had driven him to live like an animal, the wild man is pleased to be released from his burden. This attitude seems incongruous to the narrator because it seeks to explain people’s cruelty as characteristic of a specific historical time. Furthermore, the wild man seems to be labouring under the delusion – from a zhishifenzi point of view – that human cruelty and injustice have now come to an end. We see that in Fictional History narratives which offer moral meanings must have a ring of authenticity about them. The narrator would rather imagine the wild man as a true revolutionary whose renunciation was both voluntary and defiant because this attitude is what the narrator sees as meaningful. For all the romanticism inherent in the idea, however, neither the narrator nor his friend is prepared to make the wild man’s commitment. For a zhishifenzi, the act of renunciation made by the wild man is too difficult, because what is renounced is the essence of zhishifenzi identity – the civilized world and its values. The narrator declares later that, for him, it is too difficult to become a recluse because: “ultimately it seems that I am just an admirer of beauty” 充其量我只不过是个美的鉴赏者 (Ch.65), and this is a statement of the central zhishifenzi conflict presented in Fictional History, which finds life’s meaning in relationships with other people while, at the same time, feeling exasperated by other people.

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Third dialectic: Faith and reason in Fictional History We have seen that post-Mao Fictional History portrays the loss of faith in Mao and the revolution as fundamentally traumatic for Chinese people and for the zhishifenzi group in particular. We have also seen that the two heroes of Hu Jie’s documentary films, Xunzhao Lin Zhao de linghun and Wo sui si qu implicated Chinese cultural traditions in this loss of faith. In these two films, and in Gao Xingjian’s Ling shan, it becomes apparent that, even for zhishifenzi , faith in a higher power is a desirable, or necessary, attribute. One of Hu Jie’s narrative threads is the idea that Lin Zhao, in losing her faith in the revolution, discerned that the major obstacle to progress in China was Chinese tradition and culture. It is suggested that she deliberately turned away from the Chinese spiritual world and renovated her early Western and Christian influences and that, ultimately, her martyrdom fits into a Christian pattern.

Evidence of Lin Zhao’s knowledge of Western culture and of the Christian faith is cited in the film. Lin’s father adopted Christianity and the young Lin Zhao was sent to a religious school in Jiangsu where attendance at church was mandatory. In her teens she became convinced that revolution was the solution to social dysfunction in China and so revolutionary socialism replaced, (it is implied, temporarily), her Christian faith. In the months following the Anti- Rightist movement, Lin Zhao submits a poem: The Day Prometheus Suffered to an underground journal in which she critiques China’s political situation using imagery from Greek mythology: “the vultures ate your heart and lungs, your body is bound by the chains, but your soul is freer than the wind, and your will is stronger than the crag.”

Lin Zhao’s quality of fearless defiance is presented as mystifying to her friends at Peking University but is fully comprehensible if she is placed alongside such figures as Joan of Arc or any of the hundreds of other Christian martyrs. 169 Images of Lin’s suffering, the use of her blood to write her prayers to God, and her squalid prison cell echo symbols found in the hagiographies of Christian saints. Lin fervently prays to her rediscovered Christian God to give her the power to forgive those who are persecuting her. Denied access to writing materials, Lin Zhao writes prayers and invocations upon the walls of her cell, and on the

169 Similarly, in Hu Jie’s Wo sui si qu , much is made of Wang Jingyao’s admiration for Western religious statuary as the embodiment for him of the Western sensibility of suffering and pity, a sensibility he feels is absent in Chinese culture. 231 sheets of her bed, using her own blood as ink.

Saints and martyrs, it is said, must make allowances for the weakness of those with little faith, and Hu Jie outlines how Lin Zhao’s ‘apostles’ deserted her at key moments. Hu’s interviewees, in remembering and assessing their own participation in the events of that time, are regretful that they did not speak up when speaking might have helped but instead, fearing punishment, stayed their words while Lin Zhao suffered for saying what they themselves wished to say. In one recollection, a student friend of Lin’s recalls having encountered her in a café but is too frightened, or ashamed, to greet her. This friend goes as far as to say that on that occasion Lin Zhao had a divine light on her face.

Hu Jie presents a persuasive argument for Lin Zhao’s having abandoned her faith in Chinese culture, and this narrative agrees with the Fictional History position that the revolution was destroyed, at least partly, by the persistence into the revolutionary period of negative cultural practices around the exercise of power in China. It is also possible, however, to view Lin’s story as one of active identification with China’s intellectual and cultural traditions. Lin, after all, resisted what she conceived as totalitarian tyranny in a way befitting a Confucian scholar. 170 Lin Zhao was a person of learning and, though acquainted with western culture, was also thoroughly acquainted with the Chinese literary canon. In prison, Lin is said to have drawn comfort from this body of literature. In one episode from her narrative, Lin gives a friend a keepsake from his visit to her in prison -- a small figure of a sailboat made of blue raffia. The gift comes with a quote from the Tang poet Li Bai: “A time will come to ride the wind and cleave the waves, I’ll set my cloudlike sail and cross the sea that raves” 长风破浪会有时 /直挂云帆济沧海 .171 It is in this metaphoric sailboat that Lin Zhao makes her escape

170 According to some interviewees, Lin Zhao simply had the courage to speak common sense. At this “low ebb of history,” however, you could be condemned for that since even common sense was regarded as counterrevolutionary. 171 行路难金樽清酒斗十千玉盘珍羞值万钱停杯投箸不能食拔剑四顾心茫然欲渡黄河冰塞川将登太行雪满山闲来垂钓碧溪上忽复乘舟梦日边 232 from prison. I would argue, therefore, that in applying creative imagination to a dialectic of faith, post-Mao zhishifenzi aim for the sort of synthesis exemplified in Lin Zhao, who, as mentioned, can be seen as a forerunner and symbol of the zhishifenzi predicament. This is a faith system which excludes neither Chinese nor western cultural influences but combines them in a creative way, much as zhishifenzi in general seek to do.

Contradiction between the ostensibly individual nature of the soul and the need to participate in social organizations demanding the subjugation of individuality, illustrates the eternal tension between participation and renunciation that affects zhishifenzi subjectivities. It is the desire of maintaining one’s niansheng zhenmianmu (娘生真面目 native authenticity) within uncongenial social settings that provokes the longing to retreat from society and to merge into the celestial and natural domains that is seen so strongly in Ling shan . The renewal of religion in China in the reform years ostensibly provides the narrator of Ling shan with an opportunity to investigate the many ways in which humans have been searching for the divine over the course of history and so it is towards the Chinese religious tradition that the narrator of Ling shan looks when searching for his own soul. This quest is one side of the zhishifenzi

行路难行路难多歧路今安在长风破浪会有时直挂云帆济沧海

Hard Is the Road of the World

Pure wine in golden cup costs ten thousand coins - good! Choice dish in a plate of jade is worth as much - nice food! Pushing aside my cup and chopsticks, I can't eat; Drawing my sword and looking round, I stamp my feet. I can't cross Yellow River: ice has stopped its flow; I can't climb Mount Taihang: the sky is blind with snow. I can but poise a fishing pole beside a stream Or set sail for the sun like a sage in a dream. Hard is the way, Hard is the way. Don't go astray! Whither today? A time will come to ride the wind and cleave the waves; I'll set my cloud-like sail and cross the sea which raves.

233 experience that is portrayed in Fictional History.

The narrator meets a calligrapher in a country town who is a “torchlight Taoist,” a folk Taoist whose ‘superstition’ has been proscribed by the state. He is asked by an assembled crowd of townsfolk to sing a bawdy song, but he is wary of the police. Later, the narrator is made an honoured guest at the Taoist’s house where the priest performs a ritual for the assembled villagers. The narrator, however, watches the Taoist as if he were watching a dramatic performance, thus robbing the ritual of its inherent spiritual significance. The narrator, as a zhishifenzi , cannot suspend his critical faculty nor control his need to impose pre-existing narrative associations upon new experiences and this is reflected in his response to the singing of a mountain love song after the religious rites which evokes in his consciousness not the joys of love, but his past trauma as a sent-down youth.

The evening’s entertainment continues as the Taoist removes his priestly robe and orders the young people to go home. Now he begins to sing bawdy fertility songs. At the height of this revelry, the village head appears. The head turns out to be the Taoist’s eldest son who, in official mode, is worried about transgressing the regulations and so breaks up the gathering. It is symbolic that the rites are terminated by the priest’s son, who can be seen as symbolically representing a new generation which neither understands nor values their ancestors’ traditions. The narrator tells the young man that his father is an important folk artist and that there are some laws more important than the “regulations.” Again, the narrator does not understand the spiritual purpose of the rite, nor of the fertility songs, and treats them as art. Under the impression that he had put his accustomed habits of intellectual detachment aside and has meaningfully engaged with a vital remnant of China’s authentic tradition, the narrator reflects upon the ineffability of the event and how such opportunities can occur so fortuitously.

The narrator of Ling shan comes to understand that he will never achieve Taoist tranquillity himself, nor banish thoughts of self and of desire. Purity will always forsake him. At a Buddhist monastery the narrator overhears a conversation in which a father attempts to persuade his son to renounce his Buddhist vows by offering him a pair of basketball shoes which the boy must have once longed for. The young monk resists these material temptations, but he cannot put aside his feelings of love, so his religious vocation is undermined when his father tells him that his mother is ill. Gao Xingjian, arguably echoing wider zhishifenzi values,

234 portrays these difficulties of renunciation as evidence, perhaps, that renunciation should not be attempted, yet it is observed that nobody lives without comparable conflicts. The narrator meets another Buddhist monk who tells him that it is the absence of goals that creates the ultimate traveller. This further renunciation, the choice to abandon control of his life, is also beyond the power of the narrator who is conscious that he has always been travelling with a goal; he has named it and searched for it and that is why he shall not find it.

The narrator subsequently meets an elderly man with a staff who appears to be something of an enlightened soul. He asks the old man to direct him to Ling shan but the old man tells him that he must cross the river, it is not here. On his journey , the narrator suspects that people will not tell him the location of Ling shan because there is evil in his heart, and so he will find only demons there. We can suggest that this is an allegory: in Chinese terms, zhishifenzi are natural disciples of Confucius rather than Laozi, and are ill-equipped to adopt the spiritual truths of the more intuitive belief systems, and so will be unable to discover the truths that the latter have to teach. The narrator’s historical perspective as a zhishifenzi , and his own sense of individuality have, furthermore, made him suspicious of communes and hierarchies. The narrator understands that he has reached the endpoint of his search for his soul, the soul of a post-reform Chinese zhishifenzi . Though weariness accompanies him in his journey on his accustomed path, it is nonetheless his own path and he must persist in it because he cannot change.

Fictional History – a manifesto

In their search to understand their predicament and to discover some element of life in which they can place their faith, the post-Mao zhishifenzi producers of Fictional History apply creative imagination to an internal process of dialectic reasoning, something that is most powerfully articulated in Gao Xingjian’s Ling shan, written in 1990s at the beginning of the post-reform era, the era in which the zhishifenzi group loses the social authority it had perceived itself to have in the years after the death of Mao. I argue here that the result of their quest for a meaningful life is a synthesis which is founded upon a combination of intellectual and emotional reasoning. As we have seen, this combination of reasoning is the basis of

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Fictional History as a cultural genre. Producers of Fictional History contend that history is best understood by means of artistic creation, be it in fiction or non-fiction works. As Zhang notes in relation to Ling shan , “…Gao Xingjian prefers fiction for its ability to arrive at the truth, looming up from the gapped memory of history and from a questioning of identity, in a confrontation with the troubled past and the experience of trauma.” 172 The world that Fictional History builds is no less ‘real’ than any other since, as we have seen, experience itself consists of ‘dream-like memories’ which, above all, do not give themselves to prosaic or rational expression. The result of this process is that history is given meanings, and these meanings can form the basis of faith.

In Ling shan , Gao Xingjian suggests strongly that places have a history of stories. Gao employs Han and minority folk traditions, along with elements of stories contained in historical annals and the classics, to formulate “historical” narratives which transcend any of these sources by the addition of imagination. In one scene, the narrator comes across the remains of a large ruined compound and, wondering what it might signify, imagines several stories which may explain its ruined state and its history. These imagined histories indicate the narrator’s preoccupation with the exercise of authoritarian power. The narrator weighs up the merits of a number of stories to find the one which will most answer his purpose. In the first story, ‘second master’ lived here and, because he became ensnared in some court intrigues, he and his whole family were obliterated. In the second story, the ruins are the tomb of a Ming General who was exceptional in that he was allowed to retire with honour and wealth when all of his peers were executed. Extending this story, the narrator explains how the General was able to escape the fate of his fellow Generals at the first Ming court. It seems that he rushed home on the pretext of needing to attend his father’s funeral and thereafter feigned madness brought on by grief. When an investigator from the court arrived, the General pretended to be a dog, even eating a pile of dog dung, (although it seems that this was an artful concoction of ground sesame). The Emperor’s suspicions were thereby allayed, and the general was left in peace. For zhishifenzi readers of this story, the meaning is not bound to the particular historical circumstances of the Ming court or any other period but addresses the contemporary necessity to pretend to a type of insanity to avoid persecution in

172 Zhang, Y. (2010). Gao Xingjian: Fiction and Forbidden Memory. China Perspectives, 2010 (2), 25-33. p.29 236 the contemporary environment.

In a further variation of the story, a memorial arch was erected on the site to commemorate the virtue of a family who had nailed their daughter alive into a coffin because she became pregnant out of wedlock to her maternal uncle. In a bored moment, the Emperor was told the story and sighed with approval. The sigh set off a reaction down the chain of officialdom until the family felt obliged to immortalise their act of justice – and the Emperor’s sigh – in stone and at great expense. Lastly and most recently, during the Cultural Revolution, cadres changed the inscription on the arch to reflect their focus upon agriculture: “Learn from Dazhai, plant fields for the revolution.” Alas, now nobody reads the inscription, the Dazhai model has been discredited and the family’s descendants have gone into business and are too busy to change the inscription back.

Despite their genesis in the narrator’s imagination, any of these narratives of the ruined compound could be equally convincingly as history since there is nothing fundamentally ahistorical – in the sense of being obviously false – in them. The narrator asks: “(How can we) …distinguish between imagination and experience?” 而想像与经验又无法分清 ? Ch.52 ）. Even if there is a difference between history and fiction, the producer of Fictional History seems scarcely bothered by the distinction. The narratives of this particular location, which are presented as spanning a long period of Chinese history, have a function which is distinct from orthodox history – that produced by academics or by the state. Gao may wish to make a point that Chinese rulers, in all periods of history, have a tendency to resort to arbitrary or paranoid authoritarian violence. In this case, Gao shows a narrative from the “feudal” past, being juxtaposed with a similar narrative using the PRC’s agricultural policies. The Ming General in this story is a fictional creation, (or is he?), but the real Generals of the first Ming court are now so remote in the past for most people that they may as well be fictional creations. Post-reform zhishifenzi producers of Fictional History maintain that history almost always immediately partakes of the qualities of fictional narrative, eventually reaching a point when it is no longer distinguishable from fiction. The significance of this point for the readers of Ling shan and its peers is that trauma is eventually resolved into a narrative.

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For Gao and other post-reform zhishifenzi producers of Fictional History, history is comprehensible in all periods because history always enacts and re-enacts human nature. Orthodox history – state history and academic history – imposes artificial borders around historical periods and this leads readers to view the historical actors of these periods at a distance, as if through a telescope. The truths of history in the works of Fictional History and for their post-reform zhishifenzi narrators are not tied to historical details, nor are they bound by time. Ling shan insistently and repeatedly draws attention to its own factual unreliability and to the subjective nature of historical truth – making it one of the most overtly fictional pieces of Fictional History. At one point, the narrator of Ling shan goes to a museum and notices some artefacts with a form of writing on them which has yet to be deciphered. Looking at this script from various angles and thinking about it for a long time, the narrator says that it suddenly occurred to him that those inscriptions can be read in this way:

“History is a riddle, it can also be read as history is lies, and it can also be read as history is nonsense, and yet it can be read as history is prediction, and then it can be read as history is sour fruit, yet still it can be read as history clangs like a bell, and it can be read as history is balls of wheat flour dumplings, or it can be read as history is shrouds for wrapping corpses, or taking it further it can be read as history is a drug to induce sweating, or taking it further it can also be read as history is ghosts banging on the walls, and in the same way it can be read as history is antiques, and even history is rational thinking, or even history is experience, and even history is proof, and even history is a dish of scattered pearls, and even history is a sequence of cause and effect, history is analogy or history is a state of mind, and furthermore history is history and history is absolutely nothing, history ah! history ah! history.

Actually, history can be read in any way, and this is a major discovery!

。。。。。历史是谜语也可以读作。。历史是谎言又可以读作。。历史是废话还可以读作。。历史是预言再可以读作。。历史是酸

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果也还可以读作。。历史铮铮如铁也能读作。。历史是面团再还能读作。。历史是裹尸布进而又还能读作。。历史是发汗药进而也还能读作。。历史是鬼打墙也同样能读作。。历史是古玩乃至於。。历史是理念甚至於。。历史是经验甚而还至於。。历史是一番证明以至於。。历史是散珠一盘再至於。。历史是一串因缘抑或。。历史是比喻或。。历史是心态再诸如。。历史即历史

和。。历史什么都不是以及。。历史是感叹

历史啊历史啊历史啊历史

原来历史怎么读都行，这真是个重大的发现！ (Ch. 71).173

In this passage the ancient inscriptions, like history itself, require the input of creative story- making because their original meaning, (which in any case was just as subjective as the later interpretation), has been lost. Since the narrator is in a museum, and is contemplating history, it is natural that his imagination should attempt to assist him in finding a satisfactory understanding of the phenomenon before his eyes – this is the classic impulse of the zhishifenzi seeking to know and understand. Even though we know that the narrator has imagined or invented these meanings, and that his interpretation could not withstand linguistic or archaeological scrutiny, in the absence of any other translation we are unable to say the narrator’s interpretation is definitively wrong. Indeed, one or more of his interpretations may strike us as particularly apt and meaningful. The ultimate solution to the problem of history offered by the interpretation is, the narrative suggests, that history can encompass anything and that despite the many perversions of history which have rendered it suspect, in the eternal absence of definitive truth no historical narrative is inherently truer than any other. For the producer of Fictional History, it is no more incongruent to impose a meaning upon history than it is to impose meaning and purpose upon life itself.

173 Mabel Lee, trans.

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Conclusion: An inconsolable cry

In the first scene of Yu Hua’s first novel, Zai xiyu zhong huhan , (1991), the adult narrator, Sun Guanglin, recalls an early terror:

“It was at this time, as I serenely drifted off to sleep, it seemed as if a secluded road appeared before me winding through the underbrush. I began to hear the sounds of a woman’s cries in the distance, her hoarse voice echoing in that dark night. I remember that time, when still a small boy, I shook like a leaf…the woman’s cries persisted for a long time, I apprehensively and fearfully awaited another voice, a voice in answer to the woman's cries, something to console her, but nothing came. Now I can understand why I was so appalled at that time, it is precisely because I never heard an answering voice. There was nothing so able to cause disquiet than those inconsolable cries on such a desolate rainy night.”

应该是在这时候，在我安全而又平静地进入睡眼时，仿佛呈现出一条幽静的道路，树木和草丛依次闪开。一个女人哭泣般的呼喊声从远处传来，嘶哑的声音在当初寂静无比的黑夜里突然响起，使我此刻回想中的童年的我颤抖不已。。。。。那个女人的呼喊声持续了很久，我是那么急切和害怕地期待着另一个声音的来到，一个出来回答女人的呼喊，能够平息她哭泣的声音，可是没有出现。现在我能够意识到当初自己惊恐的原因，那就是我一直没有听到一个出来回答的声音。再也没有比孤独的无依无靠的呼喊更

让人战栗了，在雨中空旷的黑夜里。

In this thesis I have argued that images and symbols play a central part in the lives of post- Mao zhishifenzi producers of Fictional History and that for these writers and filmmakers and perhaps for the social group to which they belong, imagination is a distinctive tool of

240 cognition. Sun Guanglin’s recollection does not report a verifiable historical event but is rather a demonstration of the way in which Guanglin inhabits a world transformed by his imagination. Even as an infant, Guanglin senses the terror, powerlessness, and despair which will characterize his experience of childhood in China. We might argue that in this scene Sun Guanglin stands as a personification of China itself crying out in grief and anguish in the dark, wet night as the country’s children anxiously await an answering voice.

It is generally held to be axiomatic in the Confucian thought system that history teaches virtue, but the lessons of Fictional History are more obscure. If Guanglin’s experience of childhood is characterized by terror, his adult years have witnessed a journey which has moved through anger to acceptance:

“For a long time after I left Southgate, I was unable to look upon my hometown with any affection; it was merely a name, nothing more. Once, when a young woman politely inquired about my childhood and home town, I became furious and yelled: “Why do you want me to acknowledge a reality I have already escaped?”

我远离南门之后，作为故乡的南门一直无法令我感到亲切。长期以来，我固守着自己的想法。回首往事或者怀念故乡，其实只是在现实里不知所错以后的故作镇静，即使有某种感情伴随着出现，也不过是装饰而已。有一次，一位年轻女人用套话询问我的童年和故乡时，我竟会勃然大怒： “你凭什么要我接受已经逃离

了的现实 .”

And yet, many years later when he reads the ledger that documents the injustices and unmerited beatings inflicted upon him, Guanglin experiences a transformation, he no longer feels rancour: “Perhaps it is the character of memory, to leave behind mundane grievances, presenting itself unburdened” “也许是记忆吧，记忆超越了尘世的恩怨之后，独自来到了 ”

（Ch.10 ）. It is this somewhat resigned acceptance which must be seen as substituting for catharsis in Fictional History.

241

Sun Guanglin’s journey can be read as reflecting that of the post-Mao zhishifenzi as this is narrated in Fictional History. The insecurity and sense of exclusion characteristic of childhood experiences the Cultural Revolution were left behind when the individuals comprising the zhishifenzi group were offered an education and a mission within the reform state in the first decade after the death of Mao. It perhaps seemed at this time that tShe new zhishifenzi group had made a definitive break with the past. The hope entertained by this group for a new type of modern Chinese society governed by humanism and rationalism was overturned after 1989 and the resulting disestablishment of the zhishifenzi as a social category relegated them to a position of marginalization in post-reform China to which their response was a despairing resignation.

It is from the association of these feelings of resignation with historical experience that the subjective truths which are the substance of the post-Mao zhishifenzi social critique that Fictional History advances are revealed. It is this critique that forms the basis of the zhishifenzi group’s distinctive identity and ideology as this is articulated in works of Fictional History. Most importantly, post-reform zhishifenzi producers of Fictional History, and those in audiences who endorse their message, are marked by their conviction that China’s modern history, from late imperial times to the revolutionary era to the post-Mao reforms, has been the chief determining factor in shaping the post-reform present. Outside the post-reform zhishifenzi group, we can suggest that China’s history of social struggle in the twentieth century is largely ignored as an obsolete vestige, a barrier to progress, or even a mistake which has been corrected by economic development. In Fictional History Zhishifenzi claim that the effects of historical trauma are only magnified by a reluctance to discuss or acknowledge them and that leaving historical trauma unresolved perpetuates a cycle of suffering.

I have argued that Fictional History as a genre was created by post-reform zhishifenzi to respond to social change in modern China, to assimilate trauma into the historical and cultural record, and to express their own spiritual dilemmas. Zhishifenzi narrators express their opposition to regressive elements within Chinese culture which, in their view, have been responsible for the depressing cycle of trauma over the course of the twentieth century whose effects they suggest continue to shape the present. The failure of well-intentioned schemes of

242 social transformation encourages post-Mao zhishifenzi to turn away from mass movements and to examine the role of individual consciousness in the creation of historical reality. It is thus that zhishifenzi proclaim their belief in individual potential, in the dignity and worth of individual lives, in the importance of maintaining standards of civil behaviour, of the sovereign importance of history as an influence upon the present, and in the liberating potential of imagination as the basis of empathy.

It has been the aim of this thesis to explore these bases of zhishifenzi group identity as these are revealed through the narration of modern Chinese historical experience in the idiom of Fictional History. The wider implication of this group distinctiveness is to confirm that the contemporary Chinese middle-class into which the zhishifenzi group has been submerged in the post-Tiananmen period, is the site of spiritual and ideological contention between the zhishifenzi and other groups who do not share zhishifenzi outlooks. Fictional History proclaims the alienation of the zhishifenzi from other groups comprising the new middle-class in China. As a result of these contradictions, we might suggest that zhishifenzi believe that it is unlikely that the hopes invested by some observers in the idea of the middle-class as a catalyst for democratization will be realized. Similarly, though not challenging the legitimacy of the Party, the post-reform zhishifenzi group appear determined to critique policies and cultural tendencies which they regard as regressive, and so it is also unlikely that the state’s hopes for an exemplary and harmonious middle-class which can act as a stabilizing force in rapidly transforming society will be achieved.

On the contrary, Fictional History suggests that the tendency of Chinese culture to divide and exclude has engendered, in the reform period, a diversity of social groups with competing ideologies. Reduced to silence as a consequence of their disestablishment after 1989, many members of the zhishifenzi group express an ongoing sense of group solidarity that is conveyed in the aesthetic productions of Fictional History. A focus upon the Fictional Histories of Yu Hua and other complementary and exemplary works that I have chosen as examples of Fictional History as a genre has necessarily placed some limitations upon the scope of the study – I have examined only some of the works produced in this period which address or present China’s modern history and its traumas. My focus on Yu Hua and other male writers and filmmakers has also meant that I have not been able to demonstrate how the

243 body of post-Mao Fictional History reflects gender and other diversities within the zhishifenzi group. These issues await a more comprehensive study.

A further limitation of this study has been the necessary exclusion of historical and cultural narratives generated by the other groups comprising the Chinese middle-class – those who do not subscribe to the zhishifenzi ethos. In the zhishifenzi analysis, the economic reforms of the post-Mao period have facilitated the rise (in particular) of a mercantile class who have seized the opportunity to engage in new economic modes of antisocial irresponsibility and exploitation. In this period, those who enjoy great wealth are depicted as behaving in ways that are morally, and even aesthetically, indistinguishable from the old landlord class, and in this depiction Fictional History sees Chinese culture as imbued with a persistent anti-modern tendency. This critical depiction is sufficient to establish that there are contradictions between the group of newly-rich and the zhishifenzi group, who imply that the former are simply a reincarnation of the worst features of the pre-1949 social order, but this one-sided account clearly gives the New Rich no right of reply. It may well be that this mercantile group has alternative narratives of their rise to prominence and that these are proclaimed in other forms of aesthetic productions. The intersection of these narratives of history with a full description of competing narratives, including official narratives of history, also awaits further research.

Herzfeld’s notion of “cultural intimacy” indicates the significant barriers to obtaining meaningful cultural knowledge from a position outside the culture being examined. 174 In recent years, however, in the case of the culture of the People’s Republic of China at least this difficulty has been somewhat mitigated by that culture’s own desire to proclaim and define itself through narratives which are accessible to external constituencies. The expansion and fragmentation of the media in China since 1979 has favoured more diversified expressions of group identity, and I suggest that it would be a worthwhile study to examine the role of the media in catering to China’s new social diversity and how Fictional History might be construed against this backdrop. An understanding of the moral understandings of other social groups would perhaps place into critical perspective the zhishifenzi assertion that there is a moral crisis in contemporary China and would also be a useful index of the extent to

174 Herzfeld, M., -. (2005). Cultural intimacy : social poetics in the nation-state / Michael Herzfeld (2nd ed. ed.). New York :: Routledge. 244 which some degree of social homogeneity has been achieved, despite the negative picture painted by Fictional History. Having said this, in this thesis I have only been able to point to those values which zhishifenzi producers of Fictional History say that zhishifenzi possess , without being able to inquire as to whether they really do enact these qualities – which is a task for the sociologist or anthropologist and not the cultural historian. A further study of the ideologies of the groups comprising the Chinese middle-class would need to look beyond the zhishifenzi group’s own proclamations of its own value and virtues, to see how the claims of Fictional History appear to those who do not necessarily share its underlying beliefs and ideologies.

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Minerva Access is the Institutional Repository of The University of Melbourne

Author/s: Lee, Richard John

Title: An inconsolable cry: Yu Hua, Fictional History and China’s post-Mao zhishifenzi

Date: 2018

Persistent Link: http://hdl.handle.net/11343/219285

File Description: An inconsolable cry: Yu Hua, Fictional History and China’s post-Mao zhishifenzi

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