The flourishing market-oriented economy which promotes consumption and materialism in China is deeply influencing China's contemporary literature.
The creators and acceptors of literature and cultural symbols are both involved in this dramatic social change. They are being controlled, changed and assimilated by it or trying to rebel against it. Thus the conflict gathers momentum.
Contemporary Chinese literature has experienced dramatic ups and downs since the late 1970s, from large-scale reprinting and sales to being ignored or forgotten.
Many critics and writers themselves have placed blame upon the changing society that is becoming more and more commercialized. The success of a literary work is judged more by its sales than its content.
Consumerism and an increasingly commercialized society have effected changes in contemporary Chinese literature.
Modern China has undergone a series of economic and social changes. Until the early 1980s, modern Chinese literature maintained its strong ideological characteristics, reflecting and portraying political events that effected changes in the society and in the people's lives.
Now as the society is going more and more commercial and consumerism has begun to dominate daily life, contemporary writers no longer feel duty-bound to follow the major historical and social changes.
Many of them turn to personal issues and private experience and these become the rich soil in which contemporary Chinese literature grows.
When writers no longer knock on the gate of history, even stories on rebellion and revolution lose their radical tint and become descriptions of daily activities.
For many writers, literature has become a part of a society that pursues consumer products, just like pop music, fashion and TV commercials.
The younger generation of writers has developed a natural sensitivity for the popular values of consumerism.
They don't revolt against but fully understand these values, such as money, body image and success. At the same time, they express their own admiration and criticism of a society driven by consumerism, or they disclose its absurdity.
Wang Yuan's Everything Has Its Price (China Youth Press, 2000) depicts the spiritual situation of contemporary urban people in a commercialized society. The novel tells about the emotional involvement of an easy-going woman with a man named Yin Li, who has a mobile phone and a car.
Whether their relationship is love or desire is hard to judge. A happy-go-lucky affair, neither romantic nor impassioned, everything seems to be so easy and natural. It is surprising that the writer depicts such a plain situation in such an interesting way.
They have desires, but they don't pursue them deliberately. Those desires are only natural acceptance of the reality created by a society of consumers.
On the cover of the novel is printed a signal part of it:
"I like Yin Li not because he is rich, but because he has a car and a mobile phone. I don't like all his fortune, but only the part that brings convenience to communications."
This woman named Xu Yingzi used to have a boyfriend, but broke up with him because of a misunderstanding caused by a lack of channels of communication.
Xu wanted to find a man with a mobile phone and a car, so that they wouldn't have misunderstandings. But actually, she cannot really communicate with Yin Li, despite his mobile phone.
What does she want? The title of the novel, Everything Has Its Price, seems to be the principle of commercial society.
The heroine, however, does not want to pay the price. She wants to possess things like a mobile phone and car while keeping her personality.
Under the cover of the happy-go-lucky life attitude is a deep emptiness. In their stories about contemporary commercial society, contemporary writers do not clearly reveal their stance. Their thinking and criticism of reality is vague, and their excessively loose writing style makes it hard to see their inclinations.
Some writers have maintained their idealism, but with stimulation from the increasing consumerism in society. They portray consumption as a contradiction, trying to establish a transcendent social ideal and aesthetic credo.
One of a few contemporary idealists, Zhang Wei came up with How Can I Not Remember Shu Kui after several years' hibernation.
Set against the contradictory background of consumer society, the novel tells the story of a pure idealist's failure with a sense of poetic absurdity.
Admiration and passion for devotion to the arts has a strong power sometimes, such as in the 1980s China.
To Chun Yu, the hero of the novel, there are no concrete and real things, but only absolute metaphysical concepts. He believes that the arts are the uppermost, and his art and life are mixed together.
Chun Yu never submits to nor compromises with his environment. Whether in his village, his loft-like studio or on his island, the environment accommodates him and gives him a sense of harmony.
Chun Yu, however, is never satisfied with his environment. He yearns to change reality constantly, through which he can reach his utopia.
Zhang Wei has always sharply criticized the commercialism of modern society. Obviously he has been looking for a transcendent spiritual faith through which he can criticize and then turn his back on reality.
The degree of his criticism is reflected in the absolute attitude toward life and arts that he gives his hero.
However, Zhang doesn't go beyond reality too much in his novel. Chun Yu ends up a loser that nobody understands. He looks like a Don Quixote, except that there are a few more Sancho-type followers around him.
In his sharp conflicts with commercialism, Zhang Wei establishes a unique standpoint and obtains freedom of artistic expression. Of course Zhang's mocking and rebellion cannot exist outside a consumer society, but only creates a special scene within it. His exaggerative style, absurd poetry and uncanny themes inevitably become a part of consumer society.
In the rapid development of Chinese society, the changing appearances of the cities, the huge floating population, collapsing old houses and arising skyscrapers create strong visual impacts.
This breakneck urbanization excites many contemporary Chinese. Its rhythm and speed can be reflected in contemporary literature as well.
Quite a number of women writers are especially good at describing the streets, shops, lights and shadows, which endow their works with a taste of the vogue.
For example, Wei Hui's Crazy like Wei Hui begins with:
"I like to get off from the last subway train, walking slowly past the silent aisle covered with tinpot granite, walking into the huge shadow of the midnight. ...
I also like to sit on the rails of the green fields beside the sidewalks, expressionlessly staring at every leg in the skirts that flash past my eyes. ...
I also like to sit in a small restaurant filled with blue-collars and gray-collars, trying hard to gnaw a pile of crisp bones."
These descriptions are similar to MTV videos or the lyrics of pop songs. Together with the leading symbol of the commercial society - urban advertisement - they are constructing the current system of visual symbols.
There is no reason to believe that abundant descriptions of external feelings of a consumer society leads to the externalization of contemporary novels.
Actually writers like Wei Hui express the restless mood of urban youth very vividly. With young writers, speed and a sense of change is the main element of their perception of commercial society. Fashion is their belief, and also the mark that the society leaves on their texts.
The aesthetic taste of commercial society influences not only the young generation of writers who write about modern urban life, but also elderly writers.
Even Yan Lianke, who has always written about the hard life in the countryside of China, tends to fuse the aesthetic taste of commercial society into his writing.
In his recent work Hard like Water, the abundant sexual descriptions are obviously related to the aesthetic taste of the consumer. In the post-1949 Chinese literature up till the early 1980s, sex was suppressed, and even the gender of the characters was blurred.
Yan does not use sexual revelries to rewrite a time of sexual suppression, but to tear apart the absurd historical background, and creates a more absurd and crazy power of life to rival the irrational political movements in the first two decades of New China.
Since the early 1990s, many writers have been complaining about the fact that contemporary Chinese literature suffers from a serious concussion from commercialism and consumerism.
However, consumer society also provides contemporary literature new sensibilities, new life resources and values, and new means of distribution and acceptance.
(China Daily June 27, 2002)
