“Getting Electrocuted”: Media and the Author in Postsocialist China

Abstract

This dissertation investigates how writers in the People’s Republic of China during the Late Reform Era (1989–2012) represented through media the existential challenges facing their profession and the institution of Chinese literature. During this period, the state began to divest from institutions such as Writers’ Associations and state-run publishing houses that had provided Chinese writers with a stable (although certainly constricted) existence. This policy shift forced Chinese writers to compete with successive waves of cultural imports from Taiwan, Hong Kong, and the United States; the television industry, which dramatically expanded in the late eighties; and a newly profit-oriented film industry. The apparent rise of audiovisual media tracked neatly with the increasing precarity and marginalization of the Chinese writer and the increasing atomization of their postsocialist readership. Because of the correlation of these trends, television, film, and eventually internet platforms became icons of the challenging postsocialist transition, media through which those challenges could be articulated, and sources of inspiration for new models of creative production.

By tracing transmedia phenomena and the institutional context that influenced literature during this period, this dissertation challenges the boundaries scholarship has established between different media and intervenes in a historiography of post-Mao Chinese literature which emphasizes the ruptures of marketization over the broader continuities of the postsocialist period. The first chapter traces the “punk literature” writer Wang Shuo’s construction and then deconstruction of a Chinese televisual aesthetic. In the next chapter, I place the reception of Jia Pingwa’s 1993 novel Ruined City in the context of the promulgation of the People’s Republic of China’s first copyright law in 1990, a context which illuminates the links between the logics of piracy, censorship, and authenticity in postsocialist Chinese publishing. The third chapter looks at how the ethos of the “cultural work troupe” (wengongtuan) shaped the writers Wang Anyi and Yan Geling, and how they sought to represent the experience of the wengongtuan with and through film. The dissertation concludes by using the connections between the writers Lu Yao and Maoni to posit a continuity between the media ecology of the socialist period and that of internet literature.