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On 16 February, 2011, Murong gave an informal lecture at the University of Sydney, co-presented by the China Studies Centre and Confucius Institute. Given in Chinese, with English translation by Chen Minglu, an edited version of the talk is reproduced here.
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Thank you very much for inviting me here to speak today. I’m not a scholar of literary history and I don’t want to get into too much theory. I just want to share, as a reader and writer, some of my opinions on Chinese literature, especially Chinese fiction. I’m not saying that I’m necessarily correct, especially since a lot of my opinions come from my personal experiences, but I hope that after listening to me you won’t think I’m speaking complete nonsense.

About six years ago I was sitting in a café in Shenzhen with some friends who are also writers, and we were talking about literature. Suddenly, a guy turned around and asked me Are you Murong Xuecun? He asked what I did for a living and I said I write books. Why do you write books, he asked? What use are they?

I tell this story to demonstrate how insignificant literature is to the average Chinese person. To a lot of people literature really doesn’t have much meaning or value. That story was from six years ago, but things haven’t really changed much since then. China’s airports are full of bookstores, and these bookstores are full of books, but I can go into any of these bookstores and not be able to find one book that I can read. I discussed this with a friend of mine, a famous TV host, Liang Wendao. He agreed with me and said that Beijing Bookstore is the most shameful bookstore in the whole world.

The majority of the books you’ll find in China’s airport bookstores are about management, self-improvement, health, bureaucracy, and professional advancement. Their only concerns are with how to increase your wealth and professional influence – basically, how to move up in society.

Just recently a list of the bestselling books for 2010 was published and the number one bestselling work of fiction was Xiaoshidai [Small Age], a book by a writer called Guo Jingyan. The bestselling book on the non-fiction list was To Eat Back the Disease That You Have Eaten Out, by an author called Zhang Wuben. In China, Zhang’s nickname is Green Bean Zhang because he insists that green beans can cure any disease. Last year his theories were proved wrong, but his books are number one on the bestseller list regardless.

There are now 1.4 billion people living in China but, despite this huge number of people, it sometimes seems literature is dwindling in significance. About 100 years ago an author called Arthur Smith said that spiritual life is a very insignificant part of Chinese society, and I fear that this holds true for today. There are of course reasons behind this, one being that China is in the process of becoming a wealthy country after centuries of being poor. But there are also other reasons for this lack of regard for literature that are particular to Chinese society.

During the era of the Chinese Republic there were many masters of literature. In fact, those who we still call the masters of Chinese literature are all from that time, e.g. Lu Xun, Zhang Ailing. There are none who we call masters since then.

I describe the period of 1949 - 2000 as the low tide of Chinese literature. There was a brief renaissance after 1989, but apart from that it has been a relatively eventless period. The novels produced in this time can all be summed up as: novels about the republican era, novels about the countryside, and novels about the countryside during the republican era.

What’s more, this literature has all been informed by the same literary theory, the same ‘three principles’, these being: the red principle, the communist principle, and what’s called ‘the three highlights’. The three highlights states, that: among all characters, positive characters should be highlighted; among all positive characters heroes should be highlighted, and among all heroes, the primary heroes should be highlighted.

I often say that literature’s greatest enemy is not poverty, imprisonment, or violence, but the limitation of thought. And after all these years of control I think that most Chinese writers, including myself, are now stuck in a kind of thought prison. There have never been any masters of literature under a dictatorship. Last year an educational institution conducted a survey among children of twenty-one countries and Chinese children ranked second last in terms of imaginative capabilities. The country whose children ranked last for imagination was North Korea.

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All this said, though, I regard the year 2000 as a watershed moment in China, this being the time when people started writing and publishing on the Internet. This was the beginning of so-called Internet literature – a form of popular literature which, as far as I know, is unique to China.

I am a writer of Internet literature. Along with others, I started at this time to rebel against the ‘three principles’ – the red, the communist, and the three highlights. We started to write about real life, we started to write about urban areas, and we started to write fantasy. Over the last ten years Internet literature has really developed, and there are now a range of writers working on a variety of genres. There are realist writers, but also fantasy writers, romance writers, and writers of horror.

I have a theory that the development of a country’s literature always begins with the popular, and this is what we’re currently seeing in China. It's as if, originally I was standing on a dry riverbed. Then I felt a trickle of water, then I started to feel that grow to a stream, and I believe that this will grow to a river at some point soon.

For a long time, especially since Mao Zedong’s talk on the Role of Arts and Literature at Yen'an, there has been this issue of who literature reports to. In this talk, Mao said that literature should serve workers, peasants and soldiers, but I think such literature actually serves the interests of the leadership, in this case, the interests of the communist party.

Under the current system of Chinese literature, I can group Chinese writers into two groups. The first would be liberal writers, of which I’m an example; and the second would be government writers - those who receive salaries from the government. Liberal writers like myself care about the size of our audience and how well our books sell. As for the second group, I’ve met quite a few of these government writers, and they couldn’t care less about how their books sell. They care more about who the publisher is, and whether the book wins a prize – it doesn’t really matter to them whether they sell 10,000 copies or 20,000 copies.

Prizes like the Maodun Prize, the Lu Xun Prize – they matter to writers who work within the system. Rumour has it that last year a writer came to Beijing with 400,000 RMB in cash in order to buy a prize. Another story I heard from my friend was of a writer from Shandong province. Shandong is famous for its dates, and for years this writer sent dates to members of prize committees. He did this every year for four years and, eventually, the members were so touched that they gave him a literary prize.

Last year’s winner of the Lu Xun literature prize was a poet called Che Yangao who is also a party-state official from Wuhan – and these kinds of stories are common. I know at least three other stories of party officials who have won literature prizes but whose writing was never, and is still not, known to people.

So this describes writers working within the party system, but I can still see hope for Chinese literature on the whole. There is a literature website called Qidian [Starting Point] and every day there are 10,000 new novels published on the website. The most popular writer on this website is Tangjia Sanshao – he’s already received one billion clicks on his writing. People like me, who write on the Internet, would number no less than one million. I’m sure that among these one million people there will be some meaningful and significant work.

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Now I’m going to discuss something that I feel very passionate about, and that’s China’s censorship system.

Some works in China cannot be published, for example, the entire works of Gao Xingjian; Serve the People by Yan Lianke; Chinese Painting by my friend Wang Yuewen; and Shanghai Baby by Wei Hui. Jia Pingwa’s Waste City [Abandoned Capital, or Feidu] was banned a few years ago, although now it’s going to be published [see Artspace China interview with Eric Abrahamsen].

Censorship however brings its own kind of reward, and there are many authors like Wei Hui who have gained a lot from having their books banned. A few years ago there was a writer who brought a lot of money to the government trying to persuade them to ban his writing. My friend told me the story of this writer saying to the government, Wei Hui gained so much publicity from the banning of her book – can you do the same for me too?

That said, I would like to conclude with one or two sentences on the harm of censorship to literary development. When I started writing my first novel I didn’t feel limited at all and I thought I could write whatever I wanted to write. After I’d published another two or three books though I started to feel the boundaries – I knew exactly where the limits are and I realised more and more clearly what you can and cannot say, which topics can be touched on and which should be avoided. I started a novel called Cultural Revolutionary, which I abandoned after writing about 10,000 words. I started another called Last Person in China, but abandoned this after 30,000 words because the story involved China’s household registration system and I knew this would be considered a sensitive topic.

These two abandoned works, I feel, were better than any of my published work, but I still abandoned them because I know that they could not be published. Similarly, I often come across sentences that I know would be very powerful but I abandon them because I know that they will certainly be deleted. These aren’t only my experiences, but those of almost all the writers I know – of my generation.

However, we now have the Internet. These days, the bestselling authors in China are young people like Guo Jingming or Han Han, but there are also writers who concern themselves with more serious topics. There are still a lot of obstacles to free expression in China, but thanks to our era and thanks to increasing flows of information I believe that will eventually prosper in China.