《卫报》:2008,新文化革命

卫战胜 原创 | 2008-01-28 12:41 | 收藏 | 投票

  中国的文学就像这个国家,规模庞大、变化迅速,但西方对其几乎一无所知。

  “仿佛一艘驶入视野的大型集装箱船。”总部位于北京的出版科学研究所的国际研究员保罗·理查森说,“一边装满了圣诞饰物、家电和运动服装,另一侧是堆积如山的图书、绘画之类的东西,我们对后者却毫无察觉。”他继续说:“若你要一般的《卫报》读者说出一个中国当代小说家的名字,他们多半答不上来。都说这是中国世纪,但我们还搞不清楚这意味着什么。”

  作为世界人口第一大国的中国,也是世界上消耗原材料最多的国家,如今又成了二氧化碳头号排放国,它正以势不可挡的姿态迈向自身的经济和政治命运。但是,随着北京准备迎接今夏的奥运盛会,这个经济超级大国的13亿人的文化生活对西方许多人来说仍是一个谜——他们的畅销书作家不为人所知,他们的最激动人心的作家的作品未被翻译成外文。再加上中国出版业的庞大规模,情况就变得愈发奇特。

  “中国的一切都规模惊人。”理查森说,“该国的图书出版业规模排在世界前三位。从数量来说,中国是世界上最大的出版市场——官方数据是一年60亿册,这还不算大量盗版书。2007年中国图书市场大约为40~50亿英镑,位列世界第四,排在美国、德国和日本之后,英国之前。如果以购买力平价计算,中国市场仅次于美国。”

  但是,中国的文学仿佛身处与地球平行的另一个世界,许多西方几乎闻所未闻。尽管不乏大作家、先锋诗人和畅销书作者,部分人一年就入账100多万英镑,但正如驻北京的翻译家兼记者埃里克·亚伯拉罕森所言,有些数字未必可信。

  尽管如此,对于想打入这个欠发达市场的出版商来说,机遇前所未有。据翻译家尼基·哈曼表示,中国人对书籍如饥似渴。“当你到大城市,就会看到书城,规模跟百货商店差不多,”她说。比如,北京图书城雇用了约700名员工,上架图书多达23万种。“上次我到武汉,当地人周日排队等书店开门。在书店里,你会看到人们坐在地上或蹲着看书,过道挤满了人,手推车里装满了书。书店里到处都是人。”

  与西方不一样,中国的大多数读者是年轻人。理查森说:“老一辈的人经历过文化大革命。他们是在一个十分不同的环境里长大的。他们大多喜欢看经典名著……现在新一代的年轻人对经典不感兴趣,他们身处这个变迁的社会,周遭的一切都在变化。触动他们的是这些。”(作者RichardLea英国《卫报》)

Chinese literature, like its country, is vast, rapidly changing and still hardly known to the west. In the first of two reports, Richard Lea investigates a literary culture in flux
"It's like a huge container ship coming into view," says Paul Richardson, an international research fellow at the Chinese Institute of Publishing Sciences in Beijing, "full of Christmas decorations, white goods and sportswear, but there's this other side to it, full of books, paintings and so on, which we are completely unaware of."

"If you asked the average Guardian reader to name a modern Chinese writer of fiction they'd be hard pressed," he continues. "If this is to be the Chinese century, we have no idea what that will mean."

 

A new cultural revolution



Chinese literature, like its country, is vast, rapidly changing and still hardly known to the west. In the first of two reports, Richard Lea investigates a literary culture in flux

Wednesday January 16, 2008
Guardian Unlimited


Browsing at an outdoor book fair in Beijing
What does it all mean? ... browsing at a book fair in Beijing. Photograph: Greg Baker/AP

"It's like a huge container ship coming into view," says Paul Richardson, an international research fellow at the Chinese Institute of Publishing Sciences in Beijing, "full of Christmas decorations, white goods and sportswear, but there's this other side to it, full of books, paintings and so on, which we are completely unaware of."

"If you asked the average Guardian reader to name a modern Chinese writer of fiction they'd be hard pressed," he continues. "If this is to be the Chinese century, we have no idea what that will mean."


The world's most populous nation, the world's biggest consumer of raw materials, and now the world's biggest emitter of carbon dioxide, China strides irresistibly towards its economic and political destiny. But as Beijing prepares for its Olympic extravaganza this summer, the cultural life of the 1.3 billion people who live and work in this economic superpower remains a closed book to many in the west - their bestselling authors unfamiliar, their most exciting writers untranslated.

It's a situation rendered all the more peculiar by the immense size of the Chinese publishing industry.

"The sheer scale of everything in China is overwhelming," says Richardson. "China has one of the three great book publishing industries in the world. Along with the UK and the US it publishes around 200,000 new titles and new editions a year, well ahead of the nearest rivals, Japan, Russia and Germany. It is by far the largest publishing market by volume - officially about 6bn units a year, but many more when pirated copies are taken into account. In terms of value the market will probably amount to around £4-5bn in 2007, which would put it fourth in the world - behind the US, Germany and Japan and ahead of the UK. If you take purchasing power parity into account it is second only to the US."

The Chinese literary world is like a parallel universe, almost invisible to many in the west, complete with big hitters (Su Tong and Jia Pingwa), innovators (Xi Chuan and Che Qianzi), and bestselling superstars (Han Han and Annie Baobei), some of whom are earning more than £1m a year. Though as the Beijing-based translator and journalist Eric Abrahamsen points out, these figures should be taken with a pinch of salt. "The number of books sold is a mystery to everyone," he says.

This is at least partly because of the unique constitution of the Chinese publishing industry. "Officially, publishing is still an activity reserved to the state. So unlike, say, printing or bookselling, no private or foreign direct participation is allowed," explains Richardson. There are some 570 state publishing houses, which until recently were insulated from the vicissitudes of the market. "Now they are 'cultural enterprises', are expected to become financially independent and are allowed to compete in each others' patches."

As always in China, Richardson continues, "things are more complicated than they would appear at an official level". Alongside the state houses are "cultural studios", private publishers that supply creative input for the state houses (which is legal), or simply buy ISBNs and publish themselves (which is not). "Meanwhile foreign publishers also cannot participate directly, but all the major international publishing companies have some form of representation in China and many have worked out forms of co-operation with Chinese partners that get under the wire."

None of which is making things easier for writers still adjusting to the new realities of the marketplace. "The writers get screwed left, right and centre," says Abrahamsen. "The whole publishing industry is a mess."

Underneath the confusion, however, there is an unprecedented opportunity for publishers to break into an underdeveloped market, and one which, according to the translator Nicky Harman, has an undeniable thirst for books.

"When you go to big towns you see these huge shops called shu cheng - book cities - which are the size of department stores." she says. Beijing Book City, for example, employs about 700 people and carries 230,000 titles on the shelves. "Last time I was in Wuhan people were queuing up on a Sunday morning, waiting for the shop to open. You find people sitting on the floor reading books, squatting on tables, crowding the aisles, filling trolleys. They're stuffed with people." And in contrast with the west, it's mostly young people. "The older generation matured through the Cultural Revolution," says Richardson. "They grew up in a very different world. So far as they do read books for pleasure, they're likely to read the classics.

"Now there's this whole generation of young people, who have grown up since the Cultural Revolution, who aren't that interested in the classics, but are deeply involved with the changes in society, the future, the terrific things happening around them. That's what moves them."

"The older writers will complain that young people aren't reading any literature," adds Harman, "but they read a lot more than our young people do. They're just not reading what the old guard want them to." And it's not just Harry Potter - though JK Rowling has been huge in both legitimate and pirated versions. Much teen fiction is not written by respectable middle-aged writers, but by young people themselves. Han Han, a superstar author who drives racing cars, found fame as a 17-year-old back in 1997. Zhang Yueran, whose sensationalist plot lines would carry parental advisories in the west, was first published in magazines at 14. "It's interesting and lively," says Harman, "but it's not great literature."

Young people are also reading online, with literature sites like Rongshu and Qidian publishing original work by established authors, finding new authors themselves and publishing their own content between hard covers. The scale is massive again, with Rongshu boasting two million registered users, daily page views of more than 5m and more than 1.9m works of literature on the site. But according to Michel Hockx, professor of Chinese at SOAS, the most striking difference between Chinese sites and their western equivalents is the status afforded online literature in China.

"The internet has a much more significant role in literature than it does here," he says. "It's taken very seriously, discussed very seriously and famous writers take part."

The general manager of Penguin China, Jo Lusby, is even more emphatic. "All credible interesting writing in China begins online at the moment," she says. "It's given an added boost because it exists in a relatively free space outside of the tight constraints of traditional publishers."

Writers and publishers are grabbing at all the multimedia tools the 21st century has to offer - blogs, audio, e-books. "Literature on mobile phones is massive in China," says Lusby. "The tube is so packed in Beijing you can't physically open a book, so everybody is reading on their mobiles." Penguin are working on a deal with a mobile company to put Penguin Classics on phones.

According to the London-based Chinese poet Yang Lian the web is also becoming increasingly important for poets. At a time when formal publishers or magazines are "almost all refusing to publish any poems", the strength of poetry on the net makes today "the most exciting time since 1949. The internet provides possibilities for poets in different parts of the country to meet each other day to day." They can discuss literature, give each other feedback and even get involved in joint projects. "It's like back in the 1970s," he continues, "just after the Cultural Revolution. Publishing poems on the internet, or printing books yourselves to give to your friends is just like how we older poets were working at the end of the 70s or the beginning of the 80s."

The difference between the 1970s samizdat poets and their online successors is the market - a force that Yang suggests has "woken up" the individuality of the Chinese people. "You can feel the reawakening of individuality even in the language writers are using," he says. "This is the foundation of any real literature."

But just as the market encourages some to pursue their own vision, according to Yang it can also be a temptation. "The whole country is now very commercial," he says. "A lot of novelists are trying to join the market, even though the market is totally controlled by the Communist Party ideology. Serious, individual thinking in China is very weak." With market values on the rise, he continues, poetry in particular plays a vital role. "In the face of commercialism, poetry demonstrates an extremely important and more serious side of Chinese culture."

Born in 1955, Yang's ambivalence towards the market is an attitude characteristic of the generation of writers who grew up during the Cultural Revolution, an attitude questioned by many of the younger generation.

According to Hockx, China's unique status as both post-modern and post-socialist gives relations between writers and the marketplace an added layer of complexity.

"To be unashamedly commercial in China is almost a literary position," he says. "The younger generation is moving away from the idea that literature is something to do with politics, that writers are in some sense the conscience of the nation." This produces the unusual spectacle of the government agreeing with some of its former critics in criticising this commercial work.

"All of a sudden writers are able to get huge deals for translation rights which didn't exist before," Hockx continues. "That's partly why some writers are becoming a little more commercial, a little less avant garde - they just want to cash in."

This rush to the market has led to a "huge explosion" in genre fiction, according to Abrahamsen, with martial arts, sword and sorcery, romance and crime fiction very popular. "It's sort of a release," he says, "as if people are saying 'finally we can sit down and read a romantic novel in the afternoon, rather than worrying'." He is less optimistic about the prospects for literary fiction, suggesting that authors are "writing for a population that doesn't want to think about their lives" and would rather just get on with making money. There is a small group of "very smart, very brave" writers trying to understand what's happening to China in a period of change so rapid that "people are living differently now to how they were even six months ago", but it is increasingly hard for them to find an audience for their work. "Almost nobody else is interested. The government's implicit deal is 'Don't ask too many questions, just do your thing'," he explains. "There are a lot of really disheartened writers who would like to put their heart and soul into writing, but who aren't doing it because most people aren't reading it."

The Nanjing-based poet and novelist Han Dong is equally pessimistic. "The fact is that readers' interest in contemporary literature is waning, the number of people who read any kind of literature is dropping, and the number of those who read contemporary work is dropping even more," he says. "If a writer is only motivated by the desire to be read, then the current environment is disastrous."

"It's possible to do good work, but it's hard," agrees Yang. "I was among the so-called Misty Poets - we were the founders of contemporary Chinese poetry after the Cultural Revolution. We had this magazine called Today, which began in 1978. Among our group were five or six important poets. Now, apart from me and one other, all the others have stopped writing.

"We are about 50 years old," he says, "which should be the most important time for a writer - our life experience is getting deeper, our knowledge of literature, our technique - but there's nobody actually writing any more."

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