Person:

Tian, Xiaofei

This paper examines a group of anonymous poems thought to date from the second century AD. Ostensibly straightforward and transparent, the poems tantalize the reader with a protean quality, for it is often difficult to determine who is speaking what to whom. This impression is confirmed by the diverse and often conflicting interpretations made by late imperial Chinese commentators. How do the poems do this? What are the possible consequences for the later development of classical Chinese poetry? These are the questions I address in this paper, with particular attention to the poems' ambiguous personae and incomplete narratives.

In a long tradition of the construction of the Three Kingdoms imaginary, a new chapter has opened at the turn of the twenty-first century in cyberspace, as a group of young Chinese female fans have produced a body of works based on premodern historical and literary texts and on modern movies and TV series about the Three Kingdoms period. This essay explores interrelated issues of media, fandom, and gender in fan production on the Chinese Web by focusing on a particular subset of these fan works, namely male-homoerotic fiction and music videos (MVs), known in fandom slang as “slash” (danmei tongren in Chinese). Although Three Kingdoms slash is but a small part of a vast network of fan production, it nevertheless embodies certain issues that are of central importance for our understanding of contemporary Chinese society: the interface of tradition and postmodernity, the classical literary canon and contemporary popular culture, a super-macho world with traditional patriarchal values and an ultra-female world with bourgeoisie urban sentiments, and, last but not the least, the market economy and state ideology. I argue that the larger scope and impact of cultural change in contemporary China are comparable to the watershed changes that happened in the much-discussed Tang-Song transition in Chinese history, and with its diversity and multiplicity, complications and contradictions, conservatisms and progressiveness, the Three Kingdoms fandom and fan production are like a prism that refracts the dazzling light of these immense sea changes.

The essay opens with a brief survey of Three Kingdoms slash, followed by discussions of their cultural and literary significance through an analysis of specific examples of both. In the last part of the essay, I contextualize such fan production by examining fan activities both within and outside of the fan community, exploring the communal space in which fan productions are posted and received, and offering some general observations on the complex economy of fans, actors, and media producers. I conclude with some preliminary remarks on the larger changes in contemporary Chinese society embodied in this complicated, multifaceted, and multidimensional cultural phenomenon, as well as on the methodologies that enable us to better appreciate it. I argue that, though slash is a global phenomenon, Three Kingdoms slash offers a special Chinese twist by adhering and yet departing from the cultural tradition; and that pleasure, especially the sexual pleasure that binds slash authors and readers together, plays a powerful role that must not be underestimated in our evaluation of slash fandom. Ultimately, writers, producers, actors, and fans are together enacting “a social performance” complicated by the ever-watchful Chinese state, and the authoritative ideological discourse and its contestation both play a prominent part and are inseparably intertwined in fan production based on literary and media fandom.

Of the three powers—Wei, Shu, and Wu—that divided China for the better part of the third century, Wei has received the most attention in the standard literary historical accounts. In a typical book of Chinese literary history in any language, little, if anything, is said about Wu and Shu. This article argues that the consideration of the literary production of Shu and Wu is crucial to a fuller picture of the cultural dynamics of the Three Kingdoms period. The three states competed with one another for the claim to political legitimacy and cultural supremacy, and Wu in particular was in a position to contend with Wei in its cultural undertakings, notably in the areas of history writing and ritual music. This article begins with an overview of Shu and Wu literary production, and moves on to a more detailed discussion of Wu's cultural projects, both of which were intended to assert Wu's legitimacy and cultural power vis-à-vis Wei and Shu's claims to cultural and political orthodoxy. Ultimately, this article implicitly asks the question of how to write literary history when there is scant material from the period under question, and suggests that we perform textual excavations and make use of what we have to try and reconstruct, as best as we can, what once was. A good literary history of the Chinese medieval period, the age of manuscript culture and that of heavy textual losses and transfigurations, should be written with the awareness of the incomplete and imperfect nature of the data we do have, and incorporate the phenomenon of textual losses and transfigurations as well as some reflections on the underlying reasons into its narrative and critical inquiry.