MCLC: what Mo Yan's defender's get wrong

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: Rowena He <rowenahe at gmail.com>
Subject: what Mo Yan's defenders get wrong
***********************************************************

A shorter version of Link's response is available on the NYRBlog:

http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2012/dec/24/why-criticize-mo-yan/

===========================================================

Source: China File (12/24/12):
http://www.chinafile.com/politics-and-chinese-language

Politics and the Chinese Language: What Mo Yan’s Defenders Get Wrong
By PERRY LINK

The awarding of the 2012 Nobel Prize in Literature to the Chinese novelist
Mo Yan has given rise to energetic debate, both within China’s borders and
beyond. Earlier this month, ChinaFile ran an essay by Chinese literature
scholar Charles Laughlin called “What Mo Yan’s Detractors Get Wrong.”
<http://www.chinafile.com/node/2330> That essay was, in large part, a
critical response to an earlier piece <http://www.chinafile.com/node/2249>
in The New York Review of Books by Perry Link. We invited Link to respond.

In my view, Laughlin’s essay raises two important questions: 1) To what
extent, if any, are Mo Yan and other contemporary Chinese writers trapped
in a Maoist language that constricts their expression, and perhaps their
vision as well? and 2) Can writers who live under political censorship
nevertheless find ways to write to write well?

How Pervasive Is the Maoist Language Trap?

On this question, Laughlin takes issue with Anna Sun, who has written an
essay in The Kenyon Review called “The Diseased Language of Mo Yan.”
<http://www.kenyonreview.org/kr-online-issue/2012-fall/selections/anna-sun-
656342/> Sun finds Mo Yan’s language, on virtually “any page,” to be “a
jumble of words that juxtaposes rural vernacular, clichéd socialist
rhetoric, and literary affectation.” Sun attributes much of the problem to
Mo Yan’s schooling in Communist jargon and inMao-ti (Maoist literary
form), which Laughlin also refers to, calling it MaoSpeak. But Sun thinks
Mo Yan is stuck inside MaoSpeak and Laughlin thinks he is outside,
satirizing it, and that the satire explains the “jumble” that Sun finds.
Laughlin writes: “Mo Yan’s fiction is a resounding of satire of the absurd
banality of MaoSpeak from a much broader historical and cultural
perspective than that of socialist culture before Reform and Opening, and
this is why one would expect his fiction to manifest a variety of
linguistic registers.”

I agree with Sun. The problem with labeling Mo Yan’s jumble of registers
as “satire” is that much of it is hard to read as satire and at least some
of it seems quite inadvertent. Mo Yan’s Sandalwood Death, for example, is
set during the Boxer Rebellion of 1900, well before the advent of
socialist jargon, and yet characters in the story spout socialist jargon.
A young woman refers to her lingdaozhe, or “leader”—a word no one used in
1900. Is this satire? Of what? I think it is more likely that Mo Yan was
writing too quickly (which seems to me often the case), and allowed his
own conceptual habits to seep out unnoticed. Anna Sun is right to suggest
that Howard Goldblatt’s translations are “superior to the original in
their aesthetic unity and sureness.”

But how much do unnoticed linguistic habits reflect conceptual approaches
to the world—or even, as Sun suggests, shape them? Sun quotes George
Orwell that “if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt
thought.” This is from Orwell’s “Politics and the English Language,”
published in 1946, just a few years after the famous “Whorf hypothesis”
advanced the notion that different languages lead to different
world-views. Among Western cognitive scientists, Whorf has always been
controversial. Hence it is interesting that Chinese communists (although
there is no evidence that they borrowed anything from Whorf) have always
had faith in the same principle. Since the 1950s, the Party’s Propaganda
Department has disseminated lists of words for the media “to stress” and
“to downplay” as political needs come and go,1 and the unchanging
assumption has been that this word-engineering helps to “guide thought.”
There is much evidence that it works, too. I was recently talking with a
Chinese-language teacher whom I had not seen since 1989 in Beijing. Trying
to recall our first meeting, she asked me, “Was that before or after the
dongluan [turmoil]?” Teasing her, I asked, “What do you mean by dongluan?
Student dongluan or government dongluan?” She replied reflexively:
“Student dongluan, of course.” Then she peered at me for a moment,
realized what I had meant, and said: “Oh, yes! Government dongluan. The
massacre!” Then she went into a long apology to me: she herself had been a
student protestor in 1989, had been in Tiananmen Square in the days before
the massacre (but not during it); she was on the students’ side; she
agreed with me. And yet the phrase “student turmoil” now rolled off her
tongue as easily as “Wednesday.” How much conceptual baggage went along
with it? How much does this kind of induced linguistic habit reinforce
state power? And how much does this sort of thing affect Chinese writers?
Laughlin and Sun raise a crucial issue.

In 1993, the literary critic Li Tuo published a brilliant article on the
famous writer Ding Ling (1904-1986).2 Li argues that Ding Ling, a pioneer
feminist in the 1920s, idealistic communist in the 1930s and 40s, and
political prisoner in the 1960s and 70s, absorbed the outlook of Maoist
language during mid-career and apparently could not extricate herself from
it even after suffering two decades of punishment by Mao’s regime. “Once a
person enters within a certain discourse,” Li concludes, “to exit it
becomes extremely difficult.”

Li Tuo persuades me and, in my recent essay on Mo Yan
<http://www.chinafile.com/node/2249> in The New York Review of Books, I
argued that Chinese writers who have chosen exile, while paying a fearsome
price, at least have a chance to pull their language free. Ha Jin, I
wrote, “took the unusual step of departing not only China but the Chinese
language; he writes only in English, in part to be sure that even
subconscious influences do not affect his expression.” Laughlin says he is
“not yet convinced that this is the main reason Ha Jin writes in English,
but it would be a sad state of affairs if writers were so vulnerable to
the ideological baggage of their native language that they are unable to
create a healthy literary language with it.” Here it is crucial to
remember that we are speaking of not just any native language but a
specific one—Mao-language—which is much more freighted with military
metaphors and political biases than most. Mao-language has seeped into
daily-life Chinese and is still very much there. At the ends of banquets,
even today, mainland Chinese sometimes urge their friends to xiaomie
[annihilate] the leftovers; a mother on a bus, the last time I was in
Beijing, answered her little boy, who said, “Ma, I really need to pee!” by
saying, “Jianchi! [Be resolute!] Uncle bus driver can’t stop here.” Mo Yan
includes Mao-language in his jumble. Ha Jin wants out. (I cannot comment,
by the way, on Laughlin’s question of whether escape from MaoSpeak was Ha
Jin’s “main” reason for writing in English. Ha Jin told me his reason in
person, but did not say whether it was “main” or not. Laughlin suggests
there may be other, more main reasons, but does not name them. If he has
good information, I would be glad to hear it.)

Can Writers Living Under Political Censorship Find Ways to Write Well?

In my piece in The New York Review, I objected to Mo Yan’s pattern of
presenting panoramic surveys of twentieth-century Chinese history but
then, arriving at catastrophic episodes like the Great Leap famine,
deflecting attention by resorting to “daft hilarity”—shooting sheep sperm
into rabbits or forcing someone to eat a turnip carved to be a “fake
donkey dick”—while making no mention of starvation that cost 30 million or
more lives. Here Laughlin misunderstands my point about Mo Yan’s writing,
and I will take part of the responsibility. I may not have been clear
enough. I am not arguing that Mo Yan can only express himself this way
because his is stuck in the Maoist language-trap. If that were so, the
avoidance of taboo topics would be inadvertent, something the author does
not think about. But that cannot possibly be the case with Mo Yan or with
the many other Chinese writers who publish “inside the system” in China.
They all have to be aware of taboo topics, and either avoid them or find
ways to deal them only glancing blows. Mo Yan is but one of several
writers who use what I have called “daft hilarity” as a method. To name
just one other example, Yu Hua’sBrothers, another panoramic novel, is full
of daft hilarity. (Yu’s China in Ten Words, which discards the technique,
is more honest and considerably more moving.)

I have written elsewhere of what I call the “reverse magnet syndrome” in
post-Mao Chinese writing, by which writers “aim at the heart of Maoism and
begin to move toward it, but as they draw near are deflected in one
direction or another.”3 Late 1970s “scar literature,” the labor-camp
memoirs of Zhang Xianliang and Cong Weixi, and 1980s “avant-garde” writers
like Yu Hua, Han Shaogong, Su Tong, and Can Xue can all be shown (despite
all their other differences) to exhibit the pattern.

Laughlin disagrees with me, at least for Mo Yan’s case, arguing that “Mo
Yan’s intended readers know that the Great Leap Forward led to a
catastrophic famine, and any artistic approach to historical trauma is
inflected or refracted.” Laughlin sees Mo Yan as doing satire, not
cover-up, and when the point is put this way, I can, in a narrow sense,
accept it (even though my personal taste in satire does not extend as far
as donkey dicks). The problem, in my view, turns on Laughlin’s phrase
“intended readers.” Mo Yan has said in interviews that he does not write
with any particular readers in mind, so “intended readers” here needs to
be understood not as actual readers but as the kind of reader that is
implied by the writer’s rhetoric. In this meaning, “implied reader” is a
well-established term in literary studies, and it is fair enough to
analyze things this way.

My own worry is about the actual readers. How does “daft hilarity” affect
them? I hope Laughlin will agree with me that Mo Yan’s actual readers are
numerous, mostly young, and not very well schooled in Chinese history. To
reach the level of what Laughlin sees as Mo Yan’s ideal “intended reader,”
a young Chinese must leap a number of intellectual hurdles that Communist
Party education has put in place: first, that there was no famine, because
the story is only a slander invented by foreigners; second, that if there
really was a famine, it was “three years of difficulty” caused by bad
weather; third, that if the famine indeed was man-made, it still wasn’t
Mao-made, because Mao was great; fourth, that if it was Mao-made, people
died only of starvation, not beatings, burnings-alive (called “the human
torch”), and brain-splatterings with shovels (called “opening the
flower”), as Yang Jisheng’s book Tombstone
<http://www.chinafile.com/node/2127> documents.

For actual readers, Mo Yan’s giddy treatments of history divert attention
from things that are hard to look at but that still lurk in the culture at
deeper levels. Escape of this kind may be welcome to some readers, perhaps
most. In any case it is certainly welcome to the regime. Can Mo Yan be
unaware that the regime welcomes it? How could he be? Laughlin writes:
“surely Link doesn’t mean to imply that Mo Yan, by writing in this way, is
trying to whitewash history out of loyalty to the Communist Party?” But I
do, I’m afraid, mean something very close to this. I would use the word
“distort” instead of “whitewash,” and instead of “loyalty to the Party,” I
would say “in order to preserve his career prospects under Party rule.”
Laughlin writes that I expect “creative literature to approach historical
tragedies in the form of a documentary exposé, with statistics, graphic
images, and generous doses of authorial lamentation.” I think both he and
I know that this is a straw man, and that my feelings are not hurt to see
him impale it. Among writers who look honestly at cruelty, Alexander
Solzhenitsyn and Xiao Hong are two of my favorites. Neither employs
statistics, and both are about as far from “authorial lamentation” as one
can get. Their spare prose is especially powerful precisely because it
allows its enormous implications to be born and to grow inside the reader.

Laughlin raises a related question about art under censorship: Isn’t it
possible to live under political censorship and just ignore it—not
obeying, not defying, not satirizing, but writing about the very large
areas of life where the authorities don’t care and therefore you don’t
have to distort anything and don’t have to worry? He cites examples of
Zhou Zuoren, Liang Shiqiu [Liang Shih-chiu], and Zhang Ailing, who wrote
essays and stories in the 1930s and 1940s that did not, except
occasionally and tangentially, have anything to do with the Japanese
invasion of China. The Japan issue dominated most other Chinese writers at
the time, either because they lived under Japanese censorship or because,
living in free China, the imperative of resistance was so strong. Laughlin
asks a good question, and the three writers he names establish his point
that political pressures (unless they are severe, as during the late Mao
years) need not exterminate excellent writing.

I salute Laughlin in particular for his courage in juxtaposing the two
cases of Chinese writers under Japanese censorship between 1937 and 1945
and under communist censorship after 1949. It is a comparison that Chinese
historians are loath to make and that Chinese publishers would find
utterly untouchable. In general, the techniques of Japanese censorship
were much more mechanical, and less psychological, than those of Communist
censorship, but the fundamental dilemmas for writers were similar: Do I
collaborate? How much? Criticize? How? What are the risks and rewards of
my several options?

Two large differences in the background situations of Japanese and Chinese
Communist Party censorship need to be noted. The CCP magnifies one of
these and tries to obliterate the other. The first is that the Japanese
were invaders, and, anywhere in the world, there is added sting when
oppressors are foreigners. The second is that the Mao years of the CCP
killed about eight to ten times more Chinese people than the Japanese did.
One might say that the Japanese were crueler, with their head-lopping
contests and buryings-alive during the Nanjing massacre in 1937; but who
can say whether that was crueler than the gouging of eyes during the
Cultural Revolution or, in Guangxi in 1969, the ritual eating of livers of
slain class enemies, as Zheng Yi has documented in his 1993 bookRed
Memorial?4 Chinese education in the post-Mao years has magnified outrages
under Japanese rule and utterly repressed those that happened under CCP
rule. American parents, if they wanted an intuitive sense for the enormity
of the distortion, would have to imagine that their children come home
from school filled with hatred of the British for their affronts of
1775-83 and of 1812 and saying that the Civil War was a matter of “five
years of difficulty” occasioned by natural occurrences or some other kind
of bad luck. (The historical analogy is not perfect, but the size of the
lie is.)

Background differences notwithstanding, let’s join Laughlin in putting Mo
Yan side-by-side with writers like Zhang Ailing, who wrote under Japanese
censorship. Laughlin writes: “My point is not that Mo Yan is these
writers’ equal.” Let’s hope not. Zhang Ailing’s glowing, finely wrought
language is not just better, but far, far better than Mo Yan’s jumble of
registers, and her deep psychological perception makes a cartoon of Mo
Yan’s carnivalesque surfaces. But the point Laughlin wants to make is
different. It is that Mo Yan “forcefully asserts his particular vision
without regard to pressures to adopt and convey a political posture.” But
this point is just plain wrong. It is abundantly clear that Mo Yan,
beginning in the 1980s and continuing to today, is highly sensitive to
political pressures and calibrates his postures accordingly. The main
difference between him and the average inside-the-system Chinese writer is
that he is cleverer in his calculations and has more layers. Both Laughlin
and Mo Yan ask that we separate his political stances from his literary
art, but this cannot be done. Mo Yan’s stances are inside his art as well
as outside. His work shows political violence and corruption at local
levels but (respecting what everyone knows are the wishes of Party
Central) avoids conclusions about the system as a whole. And what about
daft hilarity as an approach to the Great Leap famine? Even if we speak
only of the “implied reader” and pure satire, can we imagine Zhang Ailing
treating the Nanjing massacre as a big joke? She did not do this. Could
she?

The Problem of West-Centrism

The Chinese phrase xifangzhongxinzhuyi does not translate easily, so
please pardon my awkward term “West-centrism.” I find West-centrism in
Laughlin’s essay, but the problem is by no means his alone. It is
widespread (albeit often unintended and unnoticed) in academe and in
liberal political opinion in the West.

When Anna Sun complains that she finds Mo Yan repetitive, predictable, and
a jumble of disparate registers, Laughlin parries: “This is a strange
argument to make about a twenty-first-century writer,” because “the world
and its literature have departed from the kind of moral certainty of
Dickens, precisely because of the crumbling of the moral foundations of
the world of imperialism and the industrial revolution.” The world now has
Woolf, Joyce, Pynchon, Rushdie, DeLillo, and others. Anna Sun apparently
is lagging behind.

What Laughlin calls “the world,” however, is not the world, but the West.
Literary scholars in the West rail against “hegemonism” and
“post-colonialism” but in fact practice these very things by establishing
trends and then measuring the rest of the world by how well it imitates
them.

Is Mo Yan really part of a flow that began with Dickens and Hardy and has
now come to Faulkner and García Márquez? Why should he be? Why is it not
quite all right for his “hallucinatory realism” (as the Nobel committee
called it) to be rooted in the storytelling tradition of his native
Shandong, which itself includes flights of fancy like talking animals and
aggrieved ghosts? In his Nobel lecture, Mo Yan paid tribute to the ghost
stories of Pu Songling’s Qing dynasty collection, Strange Stories from a
Chinese Studio. To me, his scenes of bloody fighting and machismo recall
Shuihuzhuan, a fourteenth-century collage of stories about rollicking
outlaws set in his native Shandong. His novels The Garlic Ballads and
Frogs show a moral certainty just as confident as Dickens’; do we want to
say that his flights of imagination in other works show how he has
catapulted himself through the experience of the West all the way to
post-modernism? What if his “disparate registers” are not a
“twenty-first-century response” to the “crumbling of moral foundations
after imperialism and the industrial revolution”? Why do we put him in a
Western bag?

After the “opening” of China in the 1980s, cultural elites promoted the
watchword “walking toward the world.” Writers liked to claim influences
from this or that famous foreign writer, even if they had read little or
nothing of the foreign writer’s work. Mo Yan illustrates the point in his
Nobel lecture 
<http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/2012/yan-lectu
re_en.html> when he says he “was greatly inspired” by Faulkner and García
Márquez, but in the next sentence says “I had not read either of them
extensively.” Westerners as well as Chinese have enjoyed and perpetuated
this West-centrism. How flattering that gifted writers from that
mysterious socialist country on the other side of the world see us as the
literary mainstream and forefront!

Westerners’ use of the word “socialist” for China sometimes illustrates
the same kind of condescension. The regime does, of course, call itself
socialist. But everyone who lives inside the society knows that it runs on
wild money-making, has huge income inequality, is very low in public
trust, has social safety-nets that are tattered or non-existent, and
manipulates words like “socialism” only when public performance, which is
done for the sake of political safety, demands it. Chinese society is
nearly at an opposite pole from socialism in a country like Sweden, and
yet Laughlin (again I don’t mean to pick on him personally; the practice
is widespread) several times uses the word “socialist” to refer to today’s
China. I worry not only about the factual inaccuracy of the usage but
about the subtle condescension in which it is embedded: You people on the
other side of the wide ocean have what we Western liberals call
“socialism.” Nice.

The late astrophysicist and human rights activist, Fang Lizhi
<http://www.chinafile.com/contributor/fang%20lizhi>, was good at pointing
out double standards in Western attitudes. When Communist dictatorships
fell in Europe, the Cold War was declared “over.” But what about China,
North Korea, and Vietnam? If the reverse had happened—if dictatorships had
fallen in Asia but persisted in Europe—would Washington and London still
have hailed the end of the Cold War? What if Solzhenitsyn, instead of
exposing the gulag, had cracked jokes about it? Would we have credited him
with “art” on grounds that his intended audience knows all about the gulag
and appreciates the black humor? Or might it be, sadly, that only
non-whites can win Nobel Prizes in this mode?

Pankaj Mishra, in a recent essay in The Guardian called “Why Salman
Rushdie Should Pause before Condemning Mo Yan on Censorship,”
<http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/dec/13/mo-yan-salman-rushdie-censorsh
ip> acknowledges that Mo Yan has offered deplorable support to China’s
rulers. But the main point of Mishra’s essay is that Western writers have
also been the handmaidens of power that oppresses people in distant
places. He asks, therefore, that people like Rushdie (and me, whom he also
mentions) “pause.” As a young man I protested the U.S. war in Vietnam; I
have never been a handmaiden to U.S. power and I admire some of Mishra’s
penetrating observations, for example that “Jane Austen's elegantly
self-enclosed world” depended on unseen “hellish slavery plantations” in
the Caribbean. But why does any of this mean that I should “pause” before
criticizing Beijing or its acolytes?

A certain kind of argument is often heard in debates over human rights. It
has several versions but they all fall into this pattern:

A: Country X has problem P.

B: On the contrary, country Y also has problem P.

 
In most conversations, people overlook B’s logical absurdity because the
real point is the advice that B is giving to A. If A is a citizen of
country Y, he or she should shut up about country X. But why, especially
in our increasingly globalized world, should this be? Must Salman Rushdie
hold his tongue about Beijing until London is squeaky clean? My guess is
that Pankaj Mishra, if you could shake him by the shoulders, would say (as
I would) that any citizen of any country should be free to criticize any
government anywhere that oppresses anyone. But his article does not leave
that impression.

Authoritarians in China and elsewhere regularly take the position that
foreigners should keep criticisms to themselves, and the reasons for their
position are obvious. The reasons why Western liberals often take the same
position are far less obvious but well worth probing. When I give public
lectures on human rights in China, I very often get questions from
audiences that ask, one way or another, “Why are you criticizing the
Chinese government when our own government is so bad?” I believe that,
despite its surface appearances, this kind of view depends on West-centric
condescension of the kind I discussed above. Let me explain.

In cases where a problem is found everywhere in the world, it hardly
follows that it is the same size everywhere. The kinds of problems that Mo
Yan and Liu Xiaobo present—suppression of speech to protect state power,
harassment and prison for “offenders”—can be found in democratic
societies, but to stand on that discovery and say “look, the whole world
is the same, so let’s calm down” is not only intellectually feeble but,
when uttered by people who live at comfortable distances from the true
suffering, is morally indefensible. How do you think a Chinese liberal,
sitting on a bench in a drab prison, would feel to hear an American
liberal, sitting on a couch with the Guardian, say, “You and I both live
with aggressive governments, my friend; I must pause before criticizing
yours”? Actually we don’t need to guess at the answer. Former political
prisoners from many places—China, Czechoslovakia, South Africa, Myanmar,
and elsewhere—have made it abundantly clear that during stays in prison
they craved any support they might get from the outside world.

I find the condescending attitude especially distasteful because its main
purpose is to comfort the condescender. In American liberal culture people
feel good when they express criticism of their own society. It shows
“critical thinking,” “independence,” and a generous broad-mindedness, all
of which one can congratulate oneself for having. (True independence, in
fact, is rare; the “critical” views one hears often show great conformity,
and one major source of the comfort I am referring to is the confidence
that one’s conforming expressions will be safe from attack by peers.)
Comfort is a good thing; I am not opposed to it. But to make the mental
comfort of someone in an armchair a higher priority than the spiritual and
physical torment of a prisoner is disgusting.

Laughlin worries that we bystanders in the West, while cheering heroes
like Liu Xiaobo (and again deriving comfort therefrom?), assume that
anyone who opts to work within the system is automatically craven. This is
a mistake, in Laughlin’s view, and here I entirely agree with him. So does
Liu Xiaobo, by the way. In his 2006 essay “To Change a Regime by Changing
Society,” Liu writes:

<<When people [like me] who engage in high-profile confrontation with the
regime hear about people who are [staying inside the system], perhaps
pursuing matters in more low-key ways, the high-profile people should view
the efforts of the low-key people not as errors but as contributions that
are complementary to their own. … The decision by one person to pay a
heavy price for the ideals he or she has chosen to pursue is insufficient
grounds to demand that any other person make a similar sacrifice.>>

 
Where Liu would disagree with Laughlin is on whether Mo Yan in particular
is one of those people pushing for human rights and democracy inside the
system. Some things Mo Yan does and writes look like pushes, yes; others,
far too obvious, look like acquiescence to the counter-pushes of the
regime. I am certain that Liu Xiaobo would find Mo Yan unnecessarily weak.

Does Mo Yan Deserve the Prize?

Charles Laughlin notes that I have published an essay called “Does This
Writer Deserve the Prize?” but do not answer the question. Fair enough.
The title of my essay was written by editors of The New York Review of
Books, and I did not see it until the piece came out. Let me address the
question now.

Ways to measure excellence in the natural sciences are objective enough
that the question “Did X really deserve a Nobel?” can be answered with
some confidence (if never certainty). For the literature and peace prizes,
though, the question is so beholden to personal impressions that consensus
is impossible. Henry Kissinger won a peace prize. If that happened, what
is not possible?

I can answer only the question, “Would I personally have chosen Mo Yan?,”
and I would like to restrict it further by adding the phrase “… among
living Chinese writers.” (Only living writers are eligible for the prize.)

The answer is no, Mo Yan would not have been at the top of my list. For
authenticity and control of language, I would rate Zhong Acheng, Jia
Pingwa, Wang Anyi, Liao Yiwu, and Wang Shuo more highly; for mastery of
the craft of fiction, Pai Hsien-yung and Ha Jin are clearly superior to Mo
Yan; for breadth of spiritual vision, Zheng Yi is one of my favorites. I
would also have put Yu Hua or Jin Yong (the Hong Kong writer of popular
historical martial-arts fiction) above Mo Yan. But those are only my
views. Please help yourself to your own.

________________________________________

1. See Michael Schoenhals, ed., Selections From Propaganda Trends, an
Organ of the CCP Central Propaganda Department (M. E. Sharpe, 1992).↩
<http://www.chinafile.com/politics-and-chinese-language#fnr1>
2. 李陀, “丁玲不简单：毛体制下知识分子在华语生产中的复杂脚色,” Jintian
(Today), no. 3, 1993.↩
<http://www.chinafile.com/politics-and-chinese-language#fnr2>
3. “Introduction” to Kang Zhengguo, Confessions: An Innocent Life in
Communist China (Norton, 2007). ↩
<http://www.chinafile.com/politics-and-chinese-language#fnr3>
4. See T.P. Sym’s translation, Scarlet Memorial: Stories of Cannibalism in
Modern China (Westeview, 1996).↩
<http://www.chinafile.com/politics-and-chinese-language#fnr4>