Between Undercurrent and Mainstream: Hand-copied Literature and Unofficial Culture during and after the Cultural Revolution

ABSTRACT

Based on newly available source materials and recent research by other scholars, this article revisits the “hand-copied book” phenomenon during and after the Chinese Cultural Revolution and views it in a new light. By treating this phenomenon as a sociocultural practice and emphasising the more popular entertainment-oriented genres among hand-copied books, the article underscores the complexity of unofficial culture that goes far beyond concepts of elitist resistance and oppositionality. Moreover, it brings a trans-temporal perspective to the study of the production and reproduction of hand-copied books and examines the social signification of these books, including their state “coronation”, ongoing literary debates and commercial “repackaging”, which extended well beyond the Cultural Revolution into the Reform era. The article proposes that in order to better understand the cultural power and social significance of hand-copied literature, we need to extend the analytical frame to the more recent period, which gives us evidence of the interconnections and continuities, as well as the disjunctions, between cultural production and consumption in different historical periods of China’s socialist regime.

KEYWORDS:

• Hand-copied books
• Cultural Revolution
• underground literature
• The Second Handshake
• unofficial culture
• trans-temporal influence
• social circulation
• commercial repacking
• social texts
• collective production

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Mr Zhang Yang with whom I had many conversations on the fate of his novel; I also want to thank the colleagues who attended the workshop “Between Revolution and Reform: China at the Grassroots, 1960–1980” in May 2010 at Simon Fraser University, and gave me many constructive comments on my presentation, which I have subsequently incorporated into this article. Lastly, I’d like to thank the two anonymous reviewers for their enthusiastic and encouraging comments.

Notes

1 In this article, “hand-copied texts” (shouchaoben) refer to creative writing copied by hand and then circulated secretly among groups of acquaintances, especially during the late Cultural Revolution.

2 These individual endeavours have been recorded and collected in two influential overseas literary journals, Today and Tendency (Qingxiang), both of which have frequently published memoirs, recollections and archive materials on underground literature and unofficial writing and activities during the Cultural Revolution.

3 In recent years, among the many attempts to write histories of the Cultural Revolution, grassroots oral histories including reportage literature (ji shi wenxue) and memoirs (huiyi lu) have become common. In the 1990s, more than 40 memoirs were published by former sent-down youths (Qiu, 2003). For more on these memoirs, see Bai (2001), Liao (1999), Yang (1993; 2002), Zhang (1999), and collections in the journals Today and Tendency.

4 It was only after the Cultural Revolution that a few famous writers of hand-copied books were identified, either because of political persecution in the cases of Zhang Yang and Kuang Haowen, or because their works were chosen to be officially published after 1978, as with Bei Dao, Jin Guantao and Liu Qingfeng.

5 Inge Nielsen (2002) interprets the refusal of Beijing Youth Daily and the Beijing Capital Library to purchase and publish endangered hand-copied books as due to financial considerations. Yet their calculations, given the Chinese political context in the late 1990s, would doubtless have included both economic and political risks.

6 In fact, before Bai, there were a few pirated editions of the novel published by book merchants under different names, such as Heart of a Young Girl (Harbin chubanshe, 1998) and Manna’s memoirs (Harbin chubanshe, 1998) (see Nielsen, 2002).

7 In his promotional materials, Bai also tried to justify the publication by claiming that it may help to locate the original author, as happened with the stories in Undercurrent, because he wanted to “pay the bill for a whole generation’s reading” – in other words, to pay the authors for their work. In the end, Bai’s attempt to publish Heart of a Young Girl through Inner Mongolia People’s Publishing House was blocked by the General Administration of Press and Publication, and the Heart of a Young Girl stopped beating before it even reached the market (see Zhong & Chen, 2010).