Popular culture is booming as the days of the "cultural revolution" (1966-76), when the public was only able to see no more than a dozen Peking operas and ballet shows and listen to a few revolutionary songs, fade to a distant memory.
Nowadays, television stations offer dozens of channels round the clock. Pop music blares out in almost every store in urban centers and small towns alike.
The soaring success of popular culture, from films to youth culture, has become a marked phenomenon in the country's drive for market economy and modernization.
It has effected several changes in contemporary Chinese literature as well. Literary stars are rising. Consumerism has become a fashion, while writers feel themselves drowned by things fashionable.
In different ways, these changes have altered the salient effect that literature, by tradition, should have on mankind and society.
Creating stars
More than a decade ago, literary creation was largely confined to an established elite of writers. They were known only to the people -- professionals or amateur literature lovers -- who read literary magazines and fiction.
But as the market economy expanded into the sector of book distribution and marketing, a special group of "book entrepreneurs" has been nurtured to capitalize on the profits to be had.
And creating stars is one way to reap good profits.
Yu Qiuyu, formerly president of Shanghai Drama Academy, was one of the earliest and brightest of such stars. He rose to fame several years ago with his series of essay-styled books in which he narrated his own observations of a myriad of cultural and historical anecdotes and his journeying to related locales.
For several years, reading the well-packaged Yu's essay series was something of a fashion and a status symbol for the cultured and a ticket into the life of the so-called "culture elite."
Later on, there were efforts to make a few other already established writers such as Hong Ying (Daughter of the River and K: The Art of Love and Summer of Betrayal) and Chi Li (Comings and Goings and The Troubled Life), into popular stars.
By the end of the 1990s, the book entrepreneurs began searching for talented teenage writers, nurturing them and helping them win fame by publishing best-sellers.
Interestingly, the hotbed for the young literary savants was a magazine called Buds, which, along with several Shanghai-based universities, started a national writing competition in 1997.
Han Han (The Third Way), then 17, won the first prize in that year's writing competition, and since then, has remained high on the list of best selling young writers.
Several of those on the star list nowadays began their rapid ascent by winning the competition and fall into the category of "writers born after the 1980s."
Other young wordsmiths have been turned into idols. For instance, Guo Jingming, 21, a college student, is one of them.
Newspaper descriptions of him seem to be as much focused on his celebrity and appearance as his written works. One wrote, wearing "long hair dyed bright yellow, which covers, off and on, his eyes...
"It would be hard to notice that pair of eyes is actually blue (thanks to contact lenses). A thin blue band tied around his forehead, its ends hanging down to his shoulder..."
Last year, Guo ranked 93rd on the 2004 Forbes Chinese Celebrity list, and made around 1.60 million yuan (US$195,000) from his novel City of Fantasy. Launched onto Beijing's book market in 2003, it has sold over 1.5 million copies.
In traditional society, literary works touch the hearts of the public with their rich cultural and spiritual quintessence.
But when writers are packaged into stars, they become images, the wealth of their ideas and imagination emptied.
Unfortunately, the mass media has accentuated this with their obsession with the cult of celebrity.
For instance, the popular media have seldom discussed the merits and ideas in Yu Qiuyu's essays. Instead, they have dug into Yu's dubious activities during the "cultural revolution" or his marriage and romances, and followed closely the law suits he has been embroiled in.
Consumerism
The boom in popular culture targets consumers. And literary works which have entered mainstream popular culture have invariably succumbed to the symbols of consumer fashion.
Anne Baby, an alias for the popular Beijing-based freelance writer and website editor, has created the most representative example of such a consumer protagonist of the times with her latest novel, Flower on the Other Side (Bi An Hua).
The story is about an "I," who is 25 years old, single, and making a living with a computer and editing work for several magazines. She spends the money she makes on non-fat milk, orange juice, barley wheat, apples, green vegetables and coffee.
In three months, the "I" sold some 300,000 characters of works, downed three bottles of tranquilizers, consumed 30 packs of Double-Happiness cigarettes, went on 80 shopping trips, spent 50 evenings sat in a bar and dated several men...
Here, literature has become an exact symbol of commercial products that attempt to plunge the reader into a virtual world of desire and materialism.
Besides a pursuit of popular appeal, many writers have invariably been driven by the fear of going out of fashion, as fashion is the weather vane, showing the direction of consumer trends.
Eager to keep up, writers pursue new trends and ingredients rather than the depth and weight of literature.
As Qiu Huadong, a young writer, says, "What is a novel like in the age of the mass media? I believe an important feature of a good novel is one that contains the most information. Otherwise, some novels will perish in the information garbage."
In Confession (Gong Ci), one of his latest new novels, Qiu made use of tabloid newspaper stories about the amorous affairs of well-known film director Zhang Yimou.
Varied themes
The commercial success of many forms of popular culture have inspired not only book entrepreneurs, but also novelists themselves to bundle their literary creations according to easily recognized themes, from true life stories, detective stories, romantic novels to kung fu.
In China, an emerging theme is "reform." These novels, rendered in realistic style, touch upon contemporary society and politics. Despite the commercial success of such novels, the public has been growingly more interested in discussing the rights and wrongs portrayed, rather than the literary achievements of their authors.
Zhang Ping, best-known for his social and "reform" novels, has been criticized for the lack of literary appeal in his works.
However, other critics have enthused over Zhang's very attempts at creating new literary approaches in his narratives.
Several years ago, Zhang, in his Ambush from All Sides, touched upon official corruption. He told the story in a style close to Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes, breaking a traditional Chinese format for such novels.
In his new book Government Official (2004), Zhang chose to follow the set formula that justice will prevail.
However, while narrating the story of a city's government reshuffle, Zhang delved into the psyche of every protagonist involved. He knitted analyses of each individual and every small detail of officialdom so closely together that he created a new style of the contemporary Chinese novel from the viewpoint of political psychological analysis.
Hai Yan, who has successfully established himself as a writer of crime and punishment, has not departed from established ingredients in such novels: a masculine male detective along with a few passionate female protagonists and involved love/hate relationships.
But Hai Yan has also tried to deviate from the set trail. In his latest novel, Deep down in the Prison, his story could have ended when police close in on the protagonist, his lover and her daughter on a cliff, along with a suitcase filled with cash.
Instead, Hai Yan continues his tale with the life and mental changes of the protagonist in prison, thus creating his new narrative style of telling two completely different stories in one novel.
Despite the serious efforts of writers like Zhang Ping and Hai Yan, many in literary circles believe literature has somehow sold out to consumerism and popular fashion.
They suggest it is a consequence of the loss of humanism, or the neglect of the study of values, capabilities and concerns for society and people.
Writer Lin Bai, based in Tianjin, once wrote: "In this age, we've lost our (spiritual) home; the body is our home."
It will require efforts on the part of writers to pursue the true spirit of literature and rediscover the dynamism and energy in serious literature to reverse the current trend and make breakthroughs in literary creation.
(China Daily April 12, 2005)
