Why Fiction Matters in Contemporary China

Essays in this volume are themselves elegantly wrought, beautifully told narratives, conceived to assist readers in making sense of, and concomitantly to take delight in, distinctive forms of storytelling in modern China. Insightful, informative, intellectually stimulating — and above all, inspiring.

The work of Sinophone writers… significant amounts of it readily available in English, deserves far closer engagement than it currently receives. Wang’s study, elegantly written in its own right, is a masterful guide with which to start.

Why Fiction Matters in Contemporary China offers profound reflections on the poetics and politics, ethics and aesthetics of writing fiction in China's "new epoch" when state ideology and literary imagination contest and conflict. David Der-wei Wang shows us that storytelling, as transgression, transmigration, and transillumination, can speak back to and subvert the state's mandate for "telling [only] a good story of China." This book is a timely observation on contemporary China and its literature. It is necessary, and it inspires.

As people spend more time online consuming “tweets,” flipping through “posts,” and scrolling through “threads,” it is easy today to underestimate the power of a novel, the weight of a poem, or the impact of a story. In Why Fiction Matters in Contemporary China, David Der-wei Wang brilliantly illustrates the impact, relevance, and power of storytelling for both the nation and people’s everyday lives in China today. This is a hard-hitting and probing book that excavates the complex relationship between politics and narration, the national imperative and the cultural imagination. If I had to recommend a single book on contemporary Chinese literature, this would be it.

Fiction provides one of the most polemical ways to engage with Chinese realities. David Wang, in this masterly study, shows how fiction has come to step in whenever history failed to address the horrors of human experience in China.

There is an intricate relationship between the arts and politics in China that provides the artist with a lot more—at least potential—power (and responsibility) than in other systems. In the Great Preface to the ancient Book of Songs already, the poet is called upon, by way of his art, to criticize not just those below but those above as well. The Chinese, then, is a system that provokes engaged art, so to speak—both for and against dominant political Truth. In times of political closure, this power of the artistic world comes to play even more significantly. In Why Fiction Matters in Contemporary China, David Wang illustrates that poetic allusion and ambiguity are ways of offering alternative Truths. Even during the most coercive years of the Maoist era, when official propaganda proliferated with red heroes, they would take on entirely different colours in stories circulated underground. In China, then, fiction matters as an alternative way of and a response to speaking Truth—dark as it is, Chinese fiction begets hope and light.

One of the most prolific scholars of sinophone fictional realism in China’s long modernity 20th century, David Wang traces, in this book, some of the important gestures of what he calls the “storytelling turn” in modern China, elaborating different positions from Liang Qichao to Xi Jinping and by reading them (and their different ways of dealing with China as obsession) through the eyes of important (post)modernist thinkers such as Walter Benjamin, Hannah Arendt, Mikhail Bakhtin and Gilles Deleuze, opening up a new horizon for dialogues between China and the world. His book serves to decenter the discourse of storytelling by showing that, in China and far beyond, fiction may be taken not so much as simulacrum but as social communication, a carnivalistic enterprise, between mythmaking, fabrication and fabulation, a path to finding alternative Truths—an “anomalous form of historiography.”

Taking inspiration from Chinese President Xi Jinping’s recent call for leaders to “tell the good China story” (jianghao Zhongguo de gushi), David Wang examines the function of fictional narrative in contemporary China. At the same time, however, Wang offers two twists on Xi’s call. First, whereas Xi refers to China in the singular, Wang is instead interested in China as a plurality, offering detailed analyses of contemporary authors from mainland China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Sinophone Southeast Asia, and beyond, even as the stories of “China” that these authors tell cover an even broader spectrum. Second, whereas Xi is interested in “good” stories about China, Wang emphasizes that, for many authors, the process of telling “the good China story” often yields detailed explorations of deviance, perversity, monstrosity, death, and the demonic. As Wang explains, paraphrasing author Yan Lianke, it is sometimes only by “shin[ing] his light into the darkness” that an author can thereby help others to see the “light.”

At its heart, Why Fiction Matters in Contemporary China is both a testament to the inexhaustible energy and innovation with which contemporary authors have approached the task of “telling the good China story,” and also product of Wang’s own long-time and similarly irrepressible dedication to “telling the good story” about the relationship between modern Chinese literature and the social orders that inspire and are shaped by it.

Wang serves up another intellectual tour de force... Essential