Jaarboek voor Nederlandse Boekgeschiedenis. Jaargang 24

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Maghiel van Crevel
From China with love
Unofficial Chinese poetry journals in the Leiden University Library

Leiden University hosts a unique collection of unofficial poetry journals from the People's Republic of China, with publication dates ranging from the late 1970s to the present.¹

Strikingly, it is in these journals that just about everybody that is anybody in contemporary poetry from mainland China first published their work.² In other words, in spite of - or, precisely because of - their status as ‘unofficial,’ these journals have had a profound impact on contemporary Chinese literature and culture. As such, they present fascinating material for book history as well as for Chinese studies, literary studies, and the sociology of culture.

There are a handful of similar, private collections in China and Japan. The Leiden collection is unique in that it combines a wealth of original material with online, research-driven, English-language documentation and contextualisation, and with online catalogue records and accessibility of the actual material to visitors from all over the world - and, crucially, in that it is safeguarded by a professional library infrastructure. Efforts to find funding for full-text digitisation continue. But how did the journals come to Leiden to begin with?

In 1986-1987, I was a student at Peking University. In China, the 1980s are remembered for a ‘high culture fever’ that followed the intensely repressive years of the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976). Literature and the arts in China enjoyed unprecedented diversity and experimentation, and there was a near-insatiable interest in new homegrown poetry as well as foreign poetry in translation. One would literally have to elbow-

1 The present essay draws on my ‘Unofficial poetry journals from the People's Republic of China: A research note and an annotated bibliography,’ which has scholars of Chinese literature as its primary audience and includes an annotated bibliography of the journals under scrutiny. This appeared in the Web Publications series of the Modern Chinese Literature and Culture (mclc) Resource Center hosted by the Ohio State University under the editorship of Kirk Denton, in 2007 (u.osu.edu/mclc/online-series/vancrevel2/). Readers looking for a more elaborate discussion, detailed references, and information on individual journals are advised to consult this publication. I am grateful to the mclc Resource Center for permission to revise and republish, so to speak. The essay is informed throughout by regular fieldwork since 1991. It has been updated in several places on the basis of my latest trip to China, in 2016-2017, and adjusted to address an audience whose primary interest lies in book history rather than Chinese literature.

2 In this essay, China and Chinese refer to mainland China and mainland-Chinese. The literary fields of Hong Kong, Macau, and Taiwan present very different pictures.

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and-squeeze one's way to the counter when new books came out. Outside class hours, I learned a great deal from translating Dutch poetry into Chinese, together with translator-cum-poet Ma Gaoming, toward an anthology that appeared in 1988.³ This provided an entry point into the poetry scene. Over the next few years, after returning to the Netherlands, I stayed in touch with poets and critics through (handwritten) snail mail. I visited China again in the summer of 1991, as a newly admitted PhD student at Leiden University - whose world-famous sinological library contained precious little contemporary poetry at the time, not to mention scholarship on same. So one of my briefs was to find these things.

It was not long after the government's violent suppression of the 1989 protest movement in Beijing and other cities, remembered as June Fourth. A crackdown since then on official, state-sanctioned cultural production had once again raised the significance of the ‘unofficial’ poetry scene, and triggered much cautious but determined activity, including the production of new unofficial journals. As such, my research started with a trip in every sense of the word, during a good ten breathless weeks of meetings with poets, critics, and other stakeholders in Beijing, Chengdu, Shanghai, and Hangzhou. I collected poetry and related publications like there was no tomorrow, and began to realise the sheer importance of the unofficial scene - and the insufficiency, at the time, of normal library acquisition methods that worked through formal channels.

This fieldwork laid the foundations of what has since grown into an archive of contemporary Chinese poetry, including that written by authors in exile. Sometimes through correspondence, but mostly during regular fieldwork visits that have taken me to other cities in addition to the above - Kunming, Xi'an, Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Dongguan, Harbin, Tianjin, Nanjing, Changshu, Dangtu, Changzhou, Suzhou, Hohhot, Zhengzou and more - I have continued to collect, in unofficial and official scenes alike: journals, individual and multiple-author poetry collections, scholarship on poetry, media coverage of poetry, and so on.

This would have been impossible without the support and the generosity of Chinese poets, scholars, and critics. They have made time for interviews, given me countless journals and books and pointed me to new publications and trends, and helped me locate unofficial material from as early as the 1980s and indeed the late 1970s. And they have been pleased to learn that since 2007, the unofficial journals have been part of the Leiden University Library Special Collections.

3 Ma Gaoming 马高明, M. van Crevel 柯雷 (compilation and translation), ‘荷兰现代诗选’ (Anthology of modern Dutch poetry), Guilin 1988.

Official, unofficial, and underground

In 1942, China was at war with Japan and with itself. The latter war was between the Nationalist Party and the Communist Party, and had been going on, with the occasional truce, for fifteen years. In the mid-1930s, this had forced the Communists into the legendary retreat-toward-victory that was the Long March, the Red Army's grueling 9,000

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km journey from the south-eastern province of Jiangxi to Shaanxi in the north. There, they established their headquarters in the barren hills of Yan'an. In subsequent years, many left-leaning intellectuals, writers, and artists made their way through the Nationalist lines to join the Communists in Yan'an. Their involvement with cultural work and their demeanour at large included a critical view of the Party, and were seen to reflect a bourgeois vision of literature and art. This incurred the wrath of Mao Zedong, who was the Party's chairman and the undisputed leader of the Communist cause.

In May and June 1942, in a series of ideologically charged mass meetings that offered a blueprint for the phenomenon of the political campaign in later decades, Mao laid down the law for artists and writers. This made literature and art an instrument of politics, famously meant to ‘serve the people.’ In 1949, with the founding of the People's Republic of China after the Communist victory in the civil war, Mao's vision became national policy. It remains a core tenet of the Communist Party's ideology today, with every single one of Mao's successors since the Cultural Revolution re-invoking it when they formally address the nation on matters of literary and art.

But Mao's original, wartime instructions are no longer enforced in practice, and things have loosened up a great deal in the Reform era that was ushered in by Deng Xiaoping in the late 1970s. As a result, an ‘official’ (guanfang 官方) poetry that adheres to government cultural policy - a ‘healthy’ poetry that sings the praises of the motherland, etc - has been outshone by what is known in China as ‘avant-garde’ (xianfeng 先锋) poetry. The avant-garde includes a variety of texts, all of which are different from official poetry in terms of form, thematics, and overall poetics. Most if not all avant-garde careers begin in an ‘unofficial’ (fei guanfang 非官方) poetry scene. Ever since the late 1970s, the unofficial scene has produced the journals represented in the Leiden collection. In addition to ‘unofficial,’ they have also been called ‘popular’ or more literally ‘from-among-the-people’ (minjian 民间), and there are other labels such as ‘exchange material’ (jiaoliu ziliao 交流资料). But a discussion of the niceties of these various terms would take us too far afield, and we will stick with ‘unofficial’ throughout the present essay, for clarity's sake.

The origins of the unofficial scene go back to a literary ‘underground’ (dixia 地下). The underground's first, isolated manifestations date from the late 1950s and early 1960s, with larger-scale networks taking shape during the Cultural Revolution, including loosely organised ‘salons’ and the breathtaking efforts of underground collectors like Zhao Yifan.⁴ At the time, politico-ideological strictures on literature and art in modern China were extreme.

As such, until the advent of the Reform era in the late 1970s, the metaphor of the underground denotes something very close to its literal meaning. Those inclined to write beyond the Maoist pale hid their manuscripts: by actual interment, under the floorboards, inside the wax of home-made candles, between the covers of less ‘sensitive’

4 M. van Crevel, Language shattered. Contemporary Chinese poetry and Duoduo, Leiden 1996, chapter 2; Liao Yiwu 廖亦武 (ed), ‘沉沦的圣殿: 中国二十世纪₇₀年代地下诗歌遗照’ (Sunken temple. Underground poetry in the 70s of the twentieth century - A portrait of the deceased), Urumqi 1999, part 3.

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material - in China, ‘sensitive’ means politically risky or forbidden - and so on. To write implies the desire to be read, but many authors would show their work only to their most trusted friends, sometimes not even physcially leaving it with them afterward. One spectacular story is that of Gan Tiesheng, said to have burnt his fiction after reading it out to a small number of friends. Underground meant secret, clandestine, and illegal, inasmuch as there was a functioning legal system to speak of. For authors and readers of newly written manuscripts, or of previously published texts outside a handful of works that constituted the Maoist canon, involvement in the literary underground could have grave consequences. These ranged from political and social ostracism to physical violence and incarceration. Notably, while some of the underground poetry written during the Cultural Revolution clearly has a political agenda, automatic assumptions that this holds for all such poetry do no justice to literary developments that would soon present themselves in the journals under scrutiny here, even if we recognise dichotomies of the political and the literary as the simplifications that they are.

Underground writing in this near-literal sense, actively withheld from the authorities, has continued to occur in the Reform era, in print and online, but is very effectively repressed by the authorities. Occasional glimpses of this material suggest that, as before, it often expresses socio-political protest against human rights abuses and the Communist Party's dictatorship, and that it is rarely of the literary kind anymore. The Reform era has given literature more space than ever before in the People's Republic, in official and unofficial circuits alike, and unruly literary texts hardly need to go into hiding now.

From underground to overground: what ‘publication’ means

Ever since the late 1960s and the early 1970s, the unofficial scene has produced its own varieties of poetry. In the final months of 1978, around the time of Deng's rise to power, the unofficial scene moved to the overground, when it ceased to hide from the authorities - and, for that matter, from other audiences; the latter point is one of the reasons why ‘samizdat’ is not necessarily an appropriate translation of the Chinese term rendered here as ‘unofficial’. This sea change was triggered by the appearance of two journals: Enlightenment (Qimeng 启蒙), with its roots in Guiyang but published mostly in Beijing, and especially the Beijing-based Today (Jintian 今天).

Containing texts written in the underground since the late 1960s, these journals were first displayed, page by page, as wall posters at various locations in Beijing, and appeared in conventional, stapled or bound, multiple-copy format soon after. Especially Today was a literary specimen amid a flurry of more politically inclined unofficial publications that mushroomed throughout China, as part of the Democracy Movement of 1978-1981.

Working outside the state-controlled publishing business, the unofficial poetry scene has since expanded in urban centers throughout China, in principle making its texts available to whoever is interested. In many places elsewhere in the world, the institutional notion of publication hinges on formal involvement by members of officially

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recognised, professional communities such as publishing houses and book reviewers. But publication requires a broader definition in discourse on Chinese unofficial poetry - and in discourse on other literary scenes where writers and politicians entertain conflicting visions of literature, and politicians have the power, and claim the right, to interfere. In such circumstances, publication means the making public of a text beyond inner-circle audiences hand-picked by the author, in whatever fashion: for example, through unofficial journals.

Figure 1. Enlightenment nr 1 (1978). From: C. Widor (ed.), Documents on the Chinese democratic movement 1978-1980. Unofficial magazines and wall posters. Parijs/Hong Kong, 1981

This point is illustrated by the difference between the Chinese terms fabiao 发表 ‘announce, make public’ and chuban 出版 ‘come off the press, publish’ (cf. German veröffentlichen ‘make public’ and herausgeben ‘publish’, i.e. ‘act as publisher of’; the English publish is ambiguous). In China, by no means everything that is made public is brought out by official publishers. Especially in the early years, most avant-garde poetry was not. Yet, it definitely counted as having been published in the above, broad sense.

From the 1950s to the 1970s, in the first three decades after the founding of the People's Republic, the state had exercised near-complete control over all aspects of literature, from the identification of desirable subject matter and literary forms to the selection and employment of writers, ultimate editorship of all texts, and authority over their physical production, publication, and circulation. In the Reform era, the state has shifted from a totalitarian approach demanding literature to promote state ideology to an authoritarian approach that no longer dictates what to write, but warns against what not to write (e.g. opposition to the leading role of the Communist Party, advocacy

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of Taiwanese/Tibetan/Uyghur independence, pornography, etc). At any rate, state sponsorship of some texts and censorship of others remain operational.

In poetry, from the early 1980s onward, unofficial publication spread like wildfire, and official publication was no longer the exclusive prerogative of members of the government-sponsored Writers Association. In this sense, official and unofficial scenes ceased being worlds apart. We return to their interactions below.

Significance

After exceptional visibility and popularity in the 1980s, unofficial poetry has continued to flourish in a niche area, as a small but tenacious industry with a well-positioned constituency. This is in evidence from various perspectives. First, from the early 2000s, literary historiography (e.g. by Hong Zicheng and Liu Denghan) and textbooks (e.g. by Chang Li and Lu Shourong) have increasingly recognised the overriding importance of unofficial poetry, and relied on unofficial journals for their coverage of the years since the Cultural Revolution.⁵ Second, literary events have reflected the informal hegemony of unofficial poetry ever since the 1980s. The Face of Chinese Poetry (中国诗歌的脸), for instance, an event in Guangzhou in 2006 that was organised by poets Yang Ke and Qi Guo and photographer Song Zuifa, drew overwhelmingly on the unofficial poetry scene. As such, it positioned itself inside a genealogy of high-profile unofficial ‘poetry exhibitions’ that goes back to by Xu Jingya's editorship of a spectacular tabloid called ‘Grand Exhibition of Modernist Poetry Groups on China's Poetry Scene, 1986’ (中国诗坛1986现代诗群体大展). Third, in terms of international impact, unofficial poetry has been the focal point of foreign attention to contemporary mainland-Chinese poetry ever since the late 1970s.

The issue of significance prompts a general observation, with reference to the above discussion of the notion of publication. While there are powerful China-specific factors to consider, unofficial poetry journals and related phenomena are of course by no means unique to China, nor is their significance the exclusive - if unintended - product of political dictatorship. Witness the opening statement on the homepage of the Little Magazine Collection in the University of Wisconsin-Madison Memorial Library, which holds English-language journals from the US, Canada, England, Scotland, Wales, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, and the Caribbean area among other places, and focuses on poetry:

Little magazines have long provided an important key to the understanding of modern literature. Characterized by their non-commercial attitudes and their penchant for the avant-garde and experimental, little magazines have continuously rebelled against established literary expression and theory, demonstrat-

5 Hong Zicheng 洪子诚, Liu Denghan 刘登翰, ‘中国当代新诗史’ (A history of China's contemporary new poetry), rev. ed. Beijing 2005; Chang Li常立 & Lu Shourong 卢寿荣 (eds), ‘中国新诗’ (China's new poetry), Shanghai 2002.

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ing an aggressive receptivity to new authors, new ideas, and new styles. Such publications usually have very small circulations, and are frequently shortlived; many die after publishing only one or two issues.⁶

This is a perfectly apt description of unofficial poetry journals in China.

6 www.library.wisc.edu/specialcollections/collections/little-magazine-collection/, first accessed in January 2007. Minor editorial tweaks aside, the opening sentence has since been adjusted to read ‘The Little Magazines (sic) Collection provides an important key...’ (accessed January 2017). It is a pity that the editors have shrunk the scope of their original, equally valid claim.

Proscription and permission

Further to the discussion of what ‘publication’ means in China, the notion of unofficial publication merits special attention. This notion has no self-evident place in discourse on literature in places where the authorities take less of an interest in literature, and where one's politics or its perceived reflection in writing will not thwart ‘official’ publication.

Unofficial poetry publications in China include journals, individual and multiple-author books, blogs and postings on social media outlets such as Weibo and WeChat (often loosely characterised as counterparts of Twitter and Facebook, which are blocked in China), and websites. The journals are normally not registered with the authorities, and may therefore not be sold through official channels such as bookstores and post offices. Out of self-protection, many explicitly state that they are not for sale, and only meant for cultural exchange and academic research. There are famous cases of journals applying to local government offices to register, but being stonewalled, and subsequently closed down by the police on account of... their failure to register. As is true for many aspects of public life in contemporary China, there are grey areas of activity between proscription and permission that shrink and expand along with alternating trends in national and local politics, of ‘tightening’ or ‘reining in’ (shou 收) and ‘loosening’ or ‘letting go’ (fang 放). A journal may not be registered but still obtain a printing permit, and yet carry a standard disclaimer saying that it contains only ‘material for internal exchange’ (neibu jiaoliu ziliao 内部交流资料), in some cases not just as colophon information but as part of the journal's very name. Such claims are demonstrably untrue, for the journals make no attempt to control their readership. In fact, they would love to see it grow uncontrollably.

Socio-cultural change in China since the late 1970s has been rapid and profound. In the process, outside the confines of orthodoxy, avant-garde poetry has appropriated an infinitely larger space than texts that directly address ‘sensitive’ topics, such as political dissent and pornography. From a literary point of view and with some historical perspective, one is more struck by the avant-garde's freedom than by the lack thereof. Yet, in China, cultural production has continued to have regular run-ins with political authority to this day, and the journals are no exception. There are many reports of jour-

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nals being effectively banned, even if they formally terminate publication themselves - following intimidation by the police, that is, as one reads between the lines in Chen Dongdong's memories of editing Tendency (Qingxiang 倾向, 1987-1990), to name but one example. Also, over the years, many poets and critics have got in trouble for their involvement with unofficial journals, even if they never came within shouting distance of political dissent or pornography .

For example: Liao Yiwu, left with a handful out of the 2000 copies of Poetry Groups of Ba and Shu (Ba Shu Xiandai shiqun 巴蜀现代诗群, 1987), after the journal was confiscated by the police. Or Zhou Lunyou, who spent three years in a labour camp on a charge of ‘incendiary behavior toward counter-revolutionary propaganda’ soon after June Fourth, in the early 1990s. His detention was connected with, if not exclusively based on, his involvement in editing Not-Not (Feifei 非非, since 1986). Or Shanghai poets Meng Lang and Momo, jailed for several weeks in April 1992 for possessing, producing, or distributing what the authorities deemed to be ‘illegal publications’. Their poetry libraries were confiscated, just like that of the above-mentioned underground collector Zhao Yifan in 1975. Or poets who are wary of making unofficial journals because such activity might put them in danger one day: of losing their regular job in ideologically sensitive environments like the media.

All this is not just about spectacular cases such as the above, but also about pedestrian inconveniences of working beyond the pale, not to mention the artistic frustration that can arise from continuously having to reckon with the possibility of political repression. Cold War visions of Chinese avant-garde poetry as artistically inclined guerilla warfare are inaccurate. Many avant-garde poets are highly educated, socially privileged people who generally have a good time, and who are not in the cloak-anddagger business. Yet, it is certainly not the case that anything goes. As such, while calling the present essay ‘From China with Love’ is tongue-in-cheek, it is also intended to convey something of the passion and dedication that fuel the machinery of the unofficial scene, in what is inherently an uphill battle.

Then, in regard to censorship in China, there is the general observation that the combination of purposely vague guidelines with the credible threat of harsh sanctions is highly effective in generating self-censorship - more so, for instance, than in the former Soviet Union.⁷ Those who produce unofficial publications risk being charged with nebulously defined political crimes that can entail long prison sentences. Official publishers additionally risk seeing their entire operation shut down.

7 See, for instance, P. Link, The uses of literature. Life in the socialist Chinese literary system. Princeton 2000, chapter 2.

Materiality, mobility, visibility

The early journals had ‘amateur’ or ‘primitive’ physical quality and formats, reflecting their limited access to means of production: low-quality paper, crude (mimeograph) printing, manual stapling. See, for instance, the cover and table of contents of Today # 2, from early 1979. These things later increased their status as collectors' items.

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Figure 2a and 2b. Today, nr 2 (1979), cover and table of contents. Leiden, ub, sinol. unpo.2

From the mid- and late 1980s onward, as resources became increasingly available to private users, the physical appearance of unofficial publications grew more sophisticated. See, for instance, the cover of the 1986 opening issue of Not-Not, and some (then) typographically adventurous pages containing the first six ‘steps’ of a poem by Zhou Lunyou.

After several years of reintensified ideological and cultural repression following June Fourth, this trend continued in the early 1990s, once Deng Xiaoping had reset the nation's focus from politics to money, during a ‘Southern Tour’ promoting capitalist experiment, in mid-1992. Many unofficial journals have since been physically indistinguishable from official ones, and surpassed them in aspects such as innovative formatting and illustrations. See, for instance, the cover of the 2001 # 17-18 double issue of Poetry Reference (Shi cankao 诗参考), but also journals like Tumult (Da saodong 大骚动) and Poetry and People (Shige yu ren 诗歌与人).

The illustrations are worth blowing up on-screen on the mclc website.⁸ For the Today Table of Contents shown above, this will convey a sense of the semi-handwritten feel of characters manually carved in wax, in the ‘primitive’ technique used for the journal's first two issues.

8 u.osu.edu/mclc/online-series/vancrevel2/.

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Figure 3a and 3b. Not-Not, nr 1 (1968), cover and poetry by Zhou Lunyou. Leiden, ub, sinol. unpo.25/1-10

Especially in the early years, most unofficial publications traveled privately if not (semi-)secretly through informal, personal networks. They were circulated by hand, so to speak. Such networks have continued to provide important avenues for distribution throughout the journals' history, but with a steadily decreasing need for caution or secrecy, except for the crackdown after June Fourth, roughly from mid-1989 to mid-1992. Still, circulation by mail entails the risk of journals being confiscated, especially if they are sent abroad. Average print runs are a few hundred copies, with some of the most successful journals occasionally reaching editions of several thousands. Individual copies, however, often have several or indeed many different readers, which enlarges their audience exponentially.

At the same time, they enjoy nothing like the sustainable availability made possible by official publishing operations, bookstores, and libraries. (Unofficial journals have sporadically been for sale in high-brow bookstores, taken there by their makers, not official suppliers. Reportedly, this has sometimes led to hefty fines for the stores.) Individual collecting efforts are therefore of paramount importance. Well-known collectors in China include the aforesaid, legendary Beijinger Zhao Yifan - whose collection met the tragic fate of being partially sold off as waste paper after his death; E Fuming, better known as Lao E (‘old E’), also based in Beijing, salvager of what was left of Zhao's collec-

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tion and himself a manager-like figure in the late 1970s operations of Today; poet Ya Mo, based in Guiyang and chronicler of the group that spawned Enlightenment around the same time and of other local poetry initiatives; and, in later years, scholars such as Liu Fuchun (Beijing) and Li Runxia (Wuhan and Tianjin), and currently active collectors of unofficial poetry journals such as A Xiang and Shizhongren.

Figure 4. Poetry Reference, nr 17-18 (2001), cover. Leiden, ub, sinol. unpo.54/12-22

A Xiang's collection is not unlike the Leiden collection, in that the lion's share of the material comes from the 1980s and the 1990s, including many famous early journals. It is in private storage in A Xiang's hometown of Dangtu (he now lives in Shenzhen), but may become more easily accessible through collaboration with Nanjing University in future. Shizhongren's Beijing-based operation, the Archive of Chinese Poetry (Hanyu shige ziliaoguan 汉语诗歌资料馆), has run for about a quarter century and is very impressive. His journal collection is the largest and the most balanced through time since the late 1970s, and he has recently had a house especially built for it; and his journal- collecting is part of a larger, sustained effort to document contemporary poetry, undertaken together with Chen Xia, his wife. Notably, documenting also includes publishing, i.e. vetting and physically producing, large numbers of unofficial individual collections by poets who cannot get officially published, for political or financial reasons (official publication can require subventions or private investment). This makes

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Shizhongren a producer of one category of the material he collects, but in the ecosystem of mainland-Chinese poetry as outlined in these pages, this makes perfect sense. Shizhongren also regularly conducts video interviews with poets throughout the country, no fewer than seventy to date. Even if he hardly has the time to edit this raw material toward the mini-documentaries he is planning to make about each poet - he recently finished the first, about éminence grise Ya Mo - it is very valuable, and it will hopefully be put to cultural and scholarly use at a later date. The Archive has long been visited by poets, scholars, and students, and it receives a steady stream of journals and books sent to Shizhongren by authors and others.

Scholars publishing outside China were early to write about the importance of the unofficial journals, just as they had been early to write about the phenomenon of underground writing during the Cultural Revolution. This is explained in part by the fact that, unlike scholars publishing inside China, they are free to discuss the unofficial poetry scene as a literary-social phenomenon. Inside China, the years of the Cultural Revolution itself remain largely off limits, as soon as one ventures beyond simply anthologizing the poetry itself into wider-ranging examinations of the literary field and its socio-political context; but since the late 1990s, scholars have been able to publish on unofficial poetry once this entered the public eye after the Cultural Revolution, from the late 1970s onward. There is growing interest in safeguarding the material under professional library conditions, in giving the unofficial journals pride of place in historical, literary-critical, and sociological research, and in collaboration between scholars and collectors based in China and elsewhere. The effort is as worthwhile as it is daunting.

The Internet really took off in China around the year 2000. It has since added an entirely new dimension to publishing poetry, criticism, scholarship, polemics, and so on, with shifting definitional and practical parameters, and the phenomenon of textual anarchy that comes with the Web anywhere. For contemporary Chinese poetry, the Web is home to exquisitely well-behaved official verse at one end, political dissent at the other, and floodwaves of unofficial avant-garde efforts of various hues and shapes in between. It is safe to say that the Web has taken over some of the functions of the unofficial print journals - and added new ones, including the advancement of poetry-related multimedia forms.⁹ This makes the journals' history from the late 1970s to the early 2000s extra special.

All the more so if one considers how much easier the making of both print and online journals has become in the 21st century, with the advent of technologies that bring publishing within the reach of individuals, as distinct from institutions; rising living standards, which make such technologies widely affordable; and the ‘marginalisation’ (bianyuanhua 边缘化) of avant-garde poetry in a society that has witnessed the rise of consumerism, popular culture, and nationalism - meaning, among other things, that to those with the power to stand in its way, poetry is not a high priority. Incidentally, calling poetry in today's China ‘marginalised’ reflects little more than the unthinking application of quantitative criteria that are unsuited to modern poetry in

9 See M. Day, ‘Online avant-garde poetry in China today’, in Chr. Lupke (ed.), New perspectives on contemporary Chinese poetry. Basingstoke 2007, 201-217; and H. Inwood, Verse going viral. China's new media scenes, Seattle/London 2014.

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countless places throughout the world. The popularity of the expression may be explained by the contrast with the rock-star status of the first generations of unofficial poets in the early 1980s - which was really an anomaly - and by the high status of classical poetry in the Chinese cultural tradition.

At the same time, while from the early to mid-2000s, the rise of the Web caused a dip in print, printed journals have since made a comeback, and their presence shows no signs of weakening. This is because of the (partcicularly) unstable, transient character of Web content in China, and because people like making print journals, and reading them. Also, perennial infighting within the unofficial poetry scene remains visible in (new) publications that aggressively carve out a space for themselves, and do so on paper. The Wild Side (Jianghu ‘江湖’), an ambitious journal started in 2014 and edited by Feng, is an interesting example. It reflects rather unforgiving views on the question of which poets and publications are entitled to wear epithets like ‘unofficial’ with pride, and have not sold out to ‘the system’ (tizhi体制) = the official poetry scene. In Feng's eyes, they are precious few indeed. His criteria are complete dissociation from any institutions, activities, or resources that are somehow linked to the Writers Association; truly independent publishing, i.e. without any funding that comes from the state, directly or indirectly; and the rejection of ideological and political strictures on writing. One could say that in addition to the official poetry scene, The Wild Side pits itself against what it sees as the establishment within the unofficial scene. It has a wide scope in terms of style and provenance, and it has published poetry by sex workers, an openly gay author, and political dissidents. But it has its playful sides as well, such as in a special on poets with monosyllabic names, including one called Rou ‘Meat’ and, of course, the editor himself, whose name means ‘Wind.’

Aesthetics and institutions

The Chinese-domestic category of ‘avant-garde’ poetry does not imply substantive reference to, say, the European interbellum, to modernism at large, or to generic usage of the notion of the avant-garde in literary theory. It is a specific category within Chinese literary history, occasioned in no small part by the desire for distance and distinction from official literature in the People's Republic. But of course, one can be distant and distinct from official literature in many different ways. As such, in practice, avant-garde poetry is a mixed bag of texts. Especially in the early years, its poetics was defined ex negativo, by dissociation from the thematics, imagery, poetic form, and linguistic registers that appear in the products of the state-sanctioned orthodoxy of official poetry. However, as noted above, the avant-garde has outshone orthodoxy in the eyes of audiences in China and elsewhere ever since the mid-1980s, and it has tremendously diversified. This has rendered orthodox poetics largely irrelevant as a point of reference. It enables the study of various trends in contemporary mainland-Chinese poetry in their own right; or, if one focuses on the ‘avant-garde,’ with the simple qualification that orthodoxy is not among these trends, rather than the assertion that every single one of them is different from orthodoxy.

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Complex relations between the aesthetic and the institutional have occupied practitioners and critics of avant-garde movements the world over. In Chinese poetry, on the face of it, such as in book titles,¹⁰ the notion of the avant-garde operates in the aesthetic dimension - where it gives the reader pause, since the kinds of writing that the term represents have long been a fairly dominant category, rather than the subversive, countercultural, cutting-edge phenomena associated with avant-garde literature in other places. Moreover, on closer inspection, the avant-garde in Chinese poetry turns out to be a catchall for different and indeed divergent poetics. Hence, aside from complexities in the realm of the aesthetic, it must also be institutional in nature.

As for aesthetics, if the reader will excuse a clichéd comparison, observations ex positivo would be attractive because defining blue as the colour of the sky on a clear day tells us more than defining blue as not the colour of grass, or not the colour of the sun, or not the colour of blood. If by now, almost four decades into the avant-garde's history, we can in fact make observations of this nature, one might be that an opposition of two general orientations or ‘camps’ in poetry summed up as the Elevated and the Earthly is of particular relevance in China, more so than elsewhere in the world.¹¹ Another might be many Chinese avant-garde poets' rich use of metaphor. Here, we are up against a difficult side of studying a phenomenon from our own time, i.e. its closeness; and the present essay is concerned with the discourse on the poetry that first emerged through the unofficial journals rather than the poetry itself.

Some unofficial journals and multiple-author anthologies consciously cast their nets wide, across geographical and poetical divides: e.g. the nationwide, collaborative Modern Han Poetry (Xiandai Han shi 现代汉诗). Others are regionally defined: e.g. the Hangzhou-based Hot City (Sake cheng 萨克城). Still others champion particular poetics. Wings (Yi 萨克城) and The Lower Body (Xiabanshen 下半身), for instance, do so explicitly, the former advocating Women's Poetry, and the latter advocating a loosely defined poetics of transgressive behavior coupled with attention to social justice. The Nineties (Jiushi niandai 九十年代) is equally clear about its preferred poetics, but shows this through its choice of texts rather than by explicit signposting, and provides an example of what are often referred to as ‘journals of kindred spirits’ or ‘soulmate journals’ (tongren kanwu 同仁刊物 / 同人刊物). Soulmate constellations may, however, also have regional hues. Several authors from Sichuan and several from Harbin, for instance, came together in Razor (Tixudao 剃须刀) in 2004, almost as an expansion of the 1990 meeting of ‘narrative’ poets Sun Wenbo and Xiao Kaiyu from Sichuan, and Zhang Shuguang from Harbin, in The Nineties and in Against (Fandui 反对). Regional definition, in its turn, does not preclude openness to contributors from elsewhere. Especially in journals from the mid-1980s, local line-ups are often complemented by a small number of poets from other places, with Xi Chuan (Beijing) and Chen Dongdong (Shanghai) as two examples of regular crossovers between the north and the south. In discourse on poetry and cultural production at large, the north and the south are

10 A recent, canonizing example being Tang Xiaodu 唐晓渡, Zhang Qinghua 张清华 (eds), ‘当代先锋诗₃₀年 1979-2009: 谱系与典藏’ (30 years of contemporary avant-garde poetry, 1979-2009: genealogy and canon), Beijing 2012.

11 M. van Crevel, Chinese poetry in times of mind, mayhem and money. Leiden/Boston 2008, 23-30.

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prone to transcend the geographical to begin with, and extend to the cultural and the ideological.

Just like ‘avant-garde,’ then, ‘official’ and ‘unofficial’ can refer to both aesthetic and institutional matters. This ambiguity has been put to clever use in debates and polemics within the avant-garde, and it more generally applies in various stakeholders' claims to cultural capital. No self-respecting avant-garde poet will accept being called official in the aesthetic sense, meaning that their work reflects orthodox preferences in thematics and so on. However, in addition to publishing through unofficial channels, just about every such poet sets great store by appearing in journals and books that are official in the institutional sense. These are formally registered publications, with a colophon containing library catalogue data, a fixed price, and so on. One can publish in institutionally official journals and books, or be a member of the Writers Association, and yet enjoy recognition as an aesthetically unofficial poet - even if these are controversial issues, as the above discussion of The Wild Side shows.

Yu Jian and Xi Chuan are cases in point. Since the mid-1990s, they have been the two most prominent contemporary poets in China, and gained international renown. While they are aesthetically of undisputed unofficial provenance, and the formative stages of their career unfolded through institutionally unofficial channels, both have published with major official presses. In addition, Yu Jian was employed by the Yunnan Province Federation of Literary and Art Circles as editor of the Yunnan Literature & Art Review (云南文艺评论) for many years during his parallel career as an unofficial poet. And both Xi Chuan and Yu Jian have been among the recipients of the eminently official Lu Xun Award for Literature. Rather than viewing this sort of thing as, say, damaging the credentials of avant-garde poets vis-à-vis caricatures of an orthodoxy that continues to ideologise literature, one might ask whether it is perhaps a sign of the unofficial scene changing the official scene. And notably, even if we bear in mind that the dividing line between official and unofficial aesthetics can be fuzzy, the opposite situation hardly occurs. Poets who count as official in the aesthetic sense rarely publish in journals and books that count as unofficial in the institutional sense.

To a large extent, then, ‘avant-garde’ overlaps with ‘unofficial,’ but there are differences. First, for all the ambiguity of both terms, the primary connotation of ‘avantgarde’ is aesthetic (e.g. private symbolism), and the primary connotation of ‘unofficial’ is institutional (e.g. private publishing). Second, this is borne out by their idiomatic distribution. ‘Unofficial journal’ is much more common than ‘avant-garde journal’. Then there is the notion of being ‘semi-official’ (ban guanfang 半官方). This is used, for instance, for journals featuring so-called ‘Campus poetry’ that do not qualify as official publications, but enjoy a measure of institituonal support from the university, in the form of infrastructure or endorsements by famous professors. But there is no such thing as being ‘semi-avant-garde’. Conversely, it is hard to imagine replacing ‘avant-garde’ by ‘unofficial’ in poet Shen Haobo's battlecry ‘Avant-Garde unto Death!’. Third, while the notion of the avant-garde often functions as a catchall for everything but orthodoxy, the rejection of orthodoxy is not part of its surface designation. The term itself does not negate another.

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Official and unofficial: from antagonism to coexistence

Cultural life in China displays increasing pluriformity, with commercialisation playing a complex and fascinating role, by no means simply ‘marginalising’ high art if we look at more than just the size of its audiences. This pluriformity and the ambiguities discussed above help to clarify how, in spite of a chasm of aesthetic difference, institutional distinctions of official and unofficial poetry have become blurred. Little remains of the antagonism that made them incompatible in the early years, up to the mid-1980s. Nowadays, they coexist in parallel worlds that regularly brush past one another, interact, and overlap, even if this is rarely recognised in so many words. Interaction and overlap occur, for instance, in book and journal publications that are official in the institutional sense but whose aesthetics sit squarely in the unofficial realm. These are often contracted and produced by aesthetically unofficial poets that have ‘gone to sea’ - that is, into business - as ‘book brokers’ (shushang 书商), who mediate between authors and publishers. While some of these publication have isbn numbers or book license numbers (shuhao 书号), this has long ceased to indicate any compatibility with orthodox aesthetics. There is a lively trade in these numbers, involving public institutions and private individuals and everything in between, and niceties such as the procurement of a single number for a multiple-author series of individual collections, for cost effectiveness.

Just like the institutional manifestations of the official scene, those of the unofficial scene include events - poetry readings, conferences, book launches, exhibitions, cooperative projects with other arts like theater and music, and so on - and, most importantly, publications. Many of the latter carry literary criticism in addition to the poetry itself, and foreign poetry in Chinese translation.

In spite of the fitful relaxation of government cultural policy from the late 1970s onward, the unofficial poetry scene retains its significance to this day. It does so not only because political repression persists, albeit at fluctuating levels, and not only if set off against the official ‘art of the state,’ whose quality hinges on being embedded in orthodox discourse. Rather, even as the boundaries are becoming blurred, the unofficial scene continues to thrive in its own right, at the heart of a lively poetry climate that is crucial to the development of individual poets, and of the poetry scene as a whole.

In closing

Building an archive of contemporary Chinese poetry has been like many other research efforts, in that gradually getting a sense of what is out there and what questions it raises leaves one with a paradoxical feeling. When I had just started, it seemed like I had a pretty good idea of what was going on. Twenty-five years and many new bookshelves later, I am rather more conscious of the limitations of the collection, especially as new names are flooding the Internet, but also as poets and readers of all kinds continue to hold unofficial print journals in high regard, and to produce new ones. Calling the Lei-

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den collection the tip of the iceberg would do it no justice, but it cannot lay claim to being exhaustive by any stretch of the imagination.

But the pursuit of exhaustion is perhaps an academic disorder. In addition, there is comfort in what my recent fieldwork reaffirms. The unofficial journals have left an indelible mark on Chinese poetry; the Leiden collection includes many groundbreaking and influential specimens; and in the big picture, the journals have been at the forefront of an explosion of creativity in literature and art that marks a watershed in Chinese cultural history.