There's one fundamental problem with Chinese literature: China is not the most democratic state on Earth (although you are allowed to ritually throw shoes at its leader, as with Dubya). This means, in publishing terms, that unless the Western reader has a clear idea what is approved and what is dissident, we will continue to be swamped by a load of anodyne tomes (some very fat) about anything but what is going on in China right now.
If they are allowing criitical descriptions of the Maoist revolution to be published now, this is like publishing things in Russia about Stalin's murderous r?gime in order to distract people from the fact that Russia is getting more repressive all the time, anno 2009.
I don't believe that there has been much literary thought among Western reviewers and critics put into why we are being flooded with Chinese novels. It's just another new trend. Next year it'll be all those thousands of Arabic novels waiting to be translated. Chinese literature abroad is the extended arm of the drive every undemocratic nation has to promote a good image of its country abroad, so that it can sell things to foreigners that drool over Chinese villages (that are being swept away by "development"), while the leaders of the country run it as a dictatorship. It's part of trade & propaganda.
I repeat: it is time we started identifying, as we did with Communist Russia (aka the USSR) twenty-thirty years ago, the real Chinese authors. Until we get some more detailed picture of who is a Party apparatchik and who is a genuine dissident, I shall not be bothering with Chinese literature. Many visible Chinese authors either live abroad or write in languages other than Chinese. I would like to know more about the Chinese equivalents of Grossman, Rybakov, Solzhenitsyn, Zamyatin, and so on.
The Three Percent blog article referred to by Nnyhav does not yet fill me with enthusiasm. I think that Western critics are still so ignorant about Chinese literature as a whole literature, that they scrape together a load of authors' names uncritically.
The history of Western critics scraping together a load of authors' names uncritically is long and hasn't significantly improved over time. There's still the lazy assumption for many that the West (especially Europe) is the cultural and artistic center of the universe and that most non-Western art and literature is inevitably "oriental" and quaint.
From the standpoint of a long-time film lover I still cringe when I see sloppy critical shorthand for any Asian movie of a stately pace that it is "Ozu-like" (a reference to the Japanese filmmaker Ozu Yasujiro, who worked from the '30s to the '60s), displaying phenomenal ignorance of the filmmakers' previous works, the filmmaking traditions of the various countries and regions, and finally even of Ozu, the filmmaker they reference for lack of another name. The Taiwanese director Hou Hsiao-hsien left Western critics incredulous when he said that he had never seen an Ozu film into well past the point when he started directing his own - the audacity of the fellow! As for writers, although Indian authors (ones who write in English) are slowly gaining respect, outside of India most Western critics can reference two writers from the rest of the continent, both Japanese - Murakami and Mishima. I got a kick out of Murakami's bemusement when asked about the stylistic similarities between the two by an American interviewer who obviously knew no other Japanese writer.
That said there's certainly no reason to dismiss Chinese writers simply because China is not the most democratic state on Earth. It
is still frowned upon to criticize the Maoist revolution in a country where pictures of Mao - from living rooms to public buses - are as ubiquitous as pictures of the king in Thailand or of Ho Chi Minh in Vietnam. The official line remains that Mao was a pretty decent guy all said and done who made a few minor mistakes. Films and books criticizing the Maoist era are still routinely banned and often must be circulated underground or published in Taiwan. Even books that seem rather innocuous, like Gao Xingjian's
Soul Mountain - which I was reading on a train from Chengdu to Giuyang while sitting across from a doctor, an apparently well-read gent, who expressed astonishment that a Chinese writer had won the Nobel Prize for Literature (it simply
had never made the news there) - get banned for "negative portrayals." Unlike modern Russia, China is still run by "the party." A criticism of the Cultural Revolution is a criticism of the party, and I think all good novelists writing "historical" novels living under repressive regimes find ways to make references to modern times.
Living under the thumb of such regimes forces the genuine artists to find ways around censorship, and intelligent readers or filmgoers in those countries learn how to read between the lines. To use another cinematic example, Iranian cinema was the big explosion on the international scene in the '90s. On the surface so many of those films were sweet, gentle, children's films - but the filmmakers found subtle ways to allude to their society's ills at large, specifically the treatment of women and dissidents. Certainly the government couldn't go about banning kids' films (though more overt criticism, like Jafar Panahi's
The Circle and some of Mohsen Makhmalbaf's films did get banned), so that became a way for many Iranian filmmakers to be critical of the regime and sneak past the censors.
Much of contemporary Chinese writing published in English does appear to be more than a little empty-headed (dull Shanghai bimbos writing "exposes"), and there may be an element of "Chinese literature abroad is the extended arm of the drive every undemocratic nation has to promote a good image of its country abroad, so that it can sell things to foreigners," but in China you hear grumblings about how only films and books that present a
negative slant on the country (which would be their idea of what is exported for Western edification) get shown and translated. Chinese films and novels that showed up in the West were routinely banned in the '90s and more than a few got punished by the State (Tian Zhuangzhuang wasn't allowed to make movies for a full ten years after
The Blue Kite). What do you do? You sell out - as filmmaker Zhang Yimou most disgustingly has and, as has the New York Times article indicates, Yu Hua may also have done - you remain "banned," you emigrate, or you find ways to work around the system (Jia Zhangke admitted gleefully that though his early films were all banned they got huge circulation on bootleg DVD).
There are a number of worthwhile writers in China now, but you have to do a little digging in order to separate the pretenders from the genuine articles. I think
that, rather than not bothering with Chinese writers, is the way to go.
