Reception of Taiwan Literature in 1980s Mainland Ying Qian1 Abstract: In 1979 the mainland decided to promote Taiwanese literature as preparation for re- unification. Taiwan writers, such as Bai Xianyong, Nie Hualing and Yang Qingzhu, were published for the first time in mainland literary magazines, marking the beginning of cultural exchange between two sides of the Taiwan Strait after decades of insulation. While official promotion of “serious” literature from Taiwan remained to a large extent political as writers and writings were selected to suit ideological requirements, throughout the 1980s, popular writing from Taiwan, printed via commercial channels, became widely spread and hugely popular in mainland China. This paper seeks to examine receptions of Taiwanese literature, both official and popular, in the mainland society and the various discourses it evoked. Modernist sentiments of writers like Bai Xianyong and Nie Hualing, and nativist views of the “native soil” school were visions of various modernities in the Chinese-speaking world, but these visions did not enter significantly into discourses in 1980s mainland due to an over-emphasis on writers’ political stances. However, popular writings from Taiwan, such as the writings by Qiong Yao and San Mao, entered via market mechanism through the periphery provinces, and therefore managed to circle around politics and bring new visions and languages to mainland’s younger generation. Even though cultural exchanges across the Taiwan Strait began as a harmless rhetoric for re-unification, they gathered momentum of their own, and in the case of the singer Hou Dejian, his songs and presence in the mainland even became explosive in the end. Literary and cultural exchanges with Taiwan offered fresh inputs and challenges to the mainland in the 1980s, and were an important part of the cultural history of China in the years following the end of the Cultural Revolution. 1 Author is a visiting graduate student and lecturer at the Humanity Faculty of Charles University, Prague, the Czech Republic, and a Ph.D. student of at the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations, Harvard University, USA. 1 Introduction Two events of significance happened on the New Year’s Day of 1979. In the South China Sea, for decades the People’s Liberation Army of China had shelled the Taiwan-held islands of Quemoy and Matsu every two days without fail, first with live ammunition and then with cartridges filled with propaganda leaflets. However, on the first day of 1979, they quietly stopped operation.2 On the same day, Ye Jianying, head of the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress (NPC) in Beijing, issued a New Year’s Day “Message to Taiwan Compatriots”, which called for negotiations with Kuomingtang (KMT) leaders and a return of Taiwan to “the embrace of the motherland at an early date.”3 Needless to say, both events were closely related to the announcement made two weeks earlier by the American President Jim Carter, on December 16, 1978, on the United States’ recognition of Beijing. With American support, the date of reunification seemed close at hand, and the Beijing government started immediately to reach out to Taiwan after decades of hostility and insulation. The best way to call the “orphan of Asia” back to the motherland, determined by the Beijing leadership, was through literature. In February 1979, one month after the delivery of Ye Jianying’s New Year message, Taiwan novelist Bai Xianyong’s short story “Yongyuan de Yi Xueyan” was published in the first issue of a new Beijing literary magazine called Dang Dai (Contemporary). Approved and arranged by the central literary bureaucracy, this was the first publication of any literature from post-1949 Taiwan in the mainland, a gesture towards openness. With months, nine important literary magazines, including magazines in Shanghai, Anhui, Fujian and other provinces, followed course and published sixteen short stories from five writers from Taiwan.4 2 Frank Ching, “A Most Envied Province,” Foreign Policy, No. 36. (Autumn, 1979), p.122. 3 “Text of NPC Standing Committee Message to Taiwan Compatriots,” Xinhua, December 31, 1979. Quoted in Frank S. T. Hsiao and Lawrence R. Sullivan, “The Politics of reunification: Beijing’s initiative on Taiwan,” Asian Survey, Vol. 20, No. 8, (Aug., 1980), p.789. 4 In 1979, the nine literary magazines that published literature from Taiwan were: Dang Dai (当代), Shanghai Literature (上海文学), Chang Jiang (长江), Qing Ming (清明), Shi Yue (十月), Xin Yuan (新苑), Shou Huo (收获), Zuo Ping (作品), and Anhui Literature (安徽文学). Among the stories published, seven were from Nie Hualing, three from Bai Xianyong, two from Yu Lihua, two from Li Li, and two from Yang Qingzhu. Among the five writers, only Yang Qingzhu was living in Taiwan; the rest already emigrated 2 While political climate changes in 1979 led to the initial opening of cultural exchange between the mainland and Taiwan, throughout the 1980s, literature and popular culture from Taiwan entered the mainland through various channels, official and unofficial, state-sanctioned and market-driven. Who arrives through the official channel depends on the changing political climate on the mainland: authors writing in the modernist tradition, such as Nie Hualing, Bai Xianyong and others, were promoted at the beginning, but soon they were replaced by authors from the “native soil” camp, whose works bore closer resemblance to socialist realism. Authors arriving through commercial channels won stellar popularity on the mainland, filling the void of entertainment literature on the mainland. Some popular writers, such as romance novel writer Qiong Yao, and personal essay writer San Mao, became fads among mainland youth. In a 1992 survey of 1,500 people in Beijing, Qiong Yao ranked first among eight authors for name recognition (85.8%), higher than the Beijing nihilist writer Wang Shuo. When asked which of the eight authors they had actually read, Qiong Yao again ranked the first (71.8%).5 So far little work has been done on the reception of literature and popular culture from Taiwan in the mainland between 1979 and 1989. One exception is a study done by Thomas B. Gold, which focuses rightly on sociological explanations such as economics and technology but does not provide interpretative readings of particular authors who had huge mainland followings.6 Nimrod Baranovitch, in a book chapter on the return of popular music to the mainland in the late 1970s, discusses the influence of Deng Lijun, a Taiwan popular singer, in passing.7 Perry Link, in his masterly cultural history The Uses of Literature, mentions the appearance of literature from Taiwan in 1979 and the from Taiwan and were living in the U.S. See Liu Denghan, Taiwan wenxue ge hai guan (Taipei, Fengyun shidai, 1995). p.182. 5 Liu Xiaobo, “Toushi dalu renmin de wenhua shenghuo”, quoted in Thomas Gold, “Go with your feelings: Hong Kong and Taiwan Popular Culture in Greater China,” The China Quarterly, No. 136, Special Issue: Greater China. (Dec. 1993), pp. 914-5. For name recognition, the second and third were Cultural Revolution writer Hao Ran (79.8%) and nihilist Beijiing writer Wang Shuo (70.3%), and fourth was martial arts writer Jin Yong (64.3%). For actual reading, the second was Hao (69.8%), and then Wang (57.4%) and Jin (55.2%). 6 Thomas B. Gold, “Go with your feelings: Hong Kong and Taiwan popular culture in Greater China”, The China Quarterly, No. 136 (Dec., 1993), pp. 907-25. 7 Nimrod Baranovitch, China’s New Voices: Popular Music, Ethnicity, Gender and Politics, 1978-1997 (University of California Press, 2003). pp. 11-13. 3 subsequent popularity of Qiong Yao and San Mao, but his main focus rested solidly in the writings on the mainland. 8 This paper attempts to recover, if only partially, the reception of Taiwan literature and popular culture in the mainland society and the various discourses it evoked. The first section of the paper examines the state effort to promote Taiwanese studies and publication of Taiwanese writing in the mainland, focusing on the discourse concerning the modernist and “native soil” camps and the narrow interpretive possibilities restricted by ideology. The second section of the paper examines the writings of Qiong Yao and San Mao, two female Taiwan writers who had huge followings among the mainland youth. The writings of Qiong Yao and San Mao, arriving from the new channels of commercial publishing allowed by economic liberation, became much needed companion to the mainland youth as they tried to strengthen emotional ties within the domestic space to which they returned, or attempted to carve out a space of freedom for themselves aside from social roles prescribed to them. These popular writings to a large extent influenced the sensibilities of mainland youth in the 1980s, particularly their ideas about private life, romance and “technologies of the self.” This paper does not provide a comprehensive coverage, but offers itself as a point of departure, a cursory look at an important chapter in the cultural history of Greater China in the 1980s. The decade between 1979 and 1989 was an exciting one both for the mainland and for Taiwan. Understanding how the mainland started to read literature from across the Taiwan Strait could illuminate on the changing relations between center and periphery, high and popular forms of literature, and the complexity of cultural politics and popular response. 1 The late 1970s were eventful years on the mainland. The Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) just ended. In 1977 the university entrance examination, after nearly a decade of suspension, was restored and drew millions of young people heartened by the possibility of returning to higher education. In December 1978, at the Third Plenum of 8 Perry Link, The Uses of Literature: Life in the socialist Chinese literary system (Princeton University Press, 2000).