Over the last year and a half I had the distinct honor to serve as the editor in chief of both Chinese Literature Today, a journal I co-founded in 2010, and Contemporary Chinese Thought, a journal I was deeply honored to inherit from its longtime editor in chief, Carine Defoort, as we began the work of merging these two great journals into the current title, Chinese Literature and Thought Today (or CLTT). Following in the footsteps of Defoort, the CLTT editors will continue to expand the journal’s interdisciplinary scope from a purely philosophical journal to one that explores a wider range of Contemporary Chinese Intellectual Life by featuring not only cutting-edge Chinese philosophical conversations, but also the literature, poetry, criticism, and cultural studies that you have come to expect from both journals. For those of you less familiar with CLT, I am happy to say this content will be delivered to you in the full-color design and format of CLT’s original parent journal, World Literature Today, one of the oldest continuously published literary periodicals in the United States.
The merger of the CCT and CLT journals is made possible by the support of the Harold J. and Ruth Newman Chair in U.S.-China Issues, which I hold as a co- director of the Institute for U.S.-China Issues. The institute also operates the Newman Prizes for Chinese Literature and for English Jueju, and houses the Chinese Literature Translation Archive and Special Collections. The original team of CLT editors, including Acting Editor in Chief Zhu Ping and Managing Editor Julie Shilling, will be joined by two new associate editors, Wen Xing and Zhang Chun. Together we will unite the best of both CLT and CCT as we continue to provide the finest English translations of and fresh critical essays about contemporary Chinese Literature, culture, philosophy, and intellectual history. CLTT grants the English-speaking world direct access to the latest developments and top-notch research in contemporary Chinese Culture.
In this issue, readers will find Part One of the special issue edited by CLTT’s Acting Editor in Chief Ping Zhu and guest editor Zhuoyi Wang that explores the dynamic ways in which labor has been and continues to be aestheticized in socialist and post-socialist China. How is the broad shift to digital and virtual markets creating new affective, aesthetic, intellectual, and cognitive forms of labor, and how are these being represented and commodified within contemporary social reproduction? Are we witnessing the collapse of aesthetics into social engineering? Has aesthetics become irretrievably abstracted into a function of interactive design wholly enveloped by the logic of transnational consumerism? Interestingly, responses to these questions can be found in China’s socialist culture as we see in Benjamin Kindler’s focus on Yao Wenyuan’s (and Li Zehou’s) engagement with the Aesthetics Debate of the 1950s and 60s. Next, Elise Huerta’s article examines the reappraisal of manual labor in the Mao era through the social representation of hands.
Virginia Conn’s article explores the utopian post-scarcity society without labor depicted in Ye Yonglie’s 1979 work Little Smarty Travels to the Future. Through close readings, Conn reveals not the absence of labor, but a world in which labor has become unmarked and thus un-acknowledged, hinting at ways in which social representation disappears the growing cognitive labor of today’s creative precariat. Finally, Hui Faye Xiao revisits the aesthetics and politics of representing tangible sensory experiences of women’s immaterial labor in socialist cinema to better understand the sociopolitical significance of socialist women’s liberation, which she argues cannot be reduced to a top-down utilitarian project of women’s liberation.
This issue’s featured scholar is Liu Zaifu, a leading Chinese intellectual in the 1980s whose early works enthusiastically engaged in social reforms and challenged Marxist orthodoxies, while his later work (after he went into political exile following the Tiananmen massacre) explored the vastitudes of migration, cosmopolitanism, and cultural marginalization. In this special section, Alan Huang brings readers along through his exploration of Liu’s complexly layered intellectual life, while Liu himself will expound upon his evolving notion of what constitutes literature itself. Finally, we have a front-row seat to a conversation on the evolving status of individualism in China between Liu and none other than Li Zehou, arguably the most well-known and influential modern Chinese philosopher.
The issue carries on CLTT’s legacies with translations of cutting-edge Chinese poetry and fiction. Short fiction by Soon Ai Ling and Han Song joins an extensive and moving micro-anthology of Chinese poets, including Zhang Zhihao, the late Ren Hongyuan, and the late Hu Xudong, who is remembered in a moving tribute by his translator Eleanor Goodman. Scholar Chris Song rounds out our poetry feature with a timely warning about the status of poetry during and after the COVID pandemic in mainland China as he questions where poetry and poetics can and will go from here.
Finally, this issue includes two conversations, one on the topic of translating Chinese literature and philosophy, as discussed by Sabina Knight and Kidder Smith, and another conversation between Shiqi Lin, Emily Goedde, Carlos Rojas, Hu Ying, and Liang Hong about Hong’s classic 2010 work China in One Village.
As we enter the summer of 2022, the world has reached an important inflection point fueled by unprecedented challenges. CLTT stands ready to tackle these issues from a genuinely transdisciplinary standpoint as we explore pandemics and virality, digital identities and emerging technologies through aesthetic, literary, poetic, and philosophical lenses. Now is the time to think differently and to move flexibly yet decisively across languages and traditional disciplinary boundaries to bring Chinese thought into today’s global conversations.