Should authors get mixed up in politics?

Wolfgang Kubin strikes back

What role should authors have in society? Wolfgang Kubin tells Oriental Outlook that contemporary Chinese writers have “sold out”; Chang Ping makes the case that writing is not incompatible with politics.

When Deutsche Welle interviewed Wolfgang Kubin in December 2006, the German Sinologist’s disparaging comments about contemporary Chinese literature touched off a storm of controversy in China. It was later revealed that some of his harsher remarks had been mis-translated, making him appear more dismissive than he really was; a slightly more nuanced critique appeared in a China Daily interview in April 2007

The current issue of Oriental Outlook magazine prints yet another interview with Kubin, in which he speaks highly of Eileen Chang, Lu Xun, and the early work of Ding Ling, but dismissively of most everyone else (including Göran Malmqvist, the only member of the Swedish Academy who knows Chinese).

Kubin also has a go at Ah Cheng, whom the magazine interviewed in a recent issue:

Wolfgang Kubin: When Can Xue and Yu Hua started writing, they imitated the works of others, so readers could not gain a sense of their lives. If an author hasn’t undergone anything—if he has no experiences—then there’s no way he’ll write anything good.

Of course, Yu Hua has changed a lot now, but he’s still problematic. For example, To Live, Chronicle of a Blood Merchant, and Brothers (I) retell the same story. He’s too successful. He has an agent in the US, so he doesn’t have to worry about anything. But an author ought to be honest to his profession, whether or not he gets any money from it. So in a certain sense, Yu Hua is the same as lots of other Chinese authors.

What’s Ma Yuan’s problem? He doesn’t write fiction anymore. Once, at a literary event in Berlin, he told me that he doesn’t write books anymore—he writes TV scripts. But that’s not literature. That’s garbage. Today he’s like Ah Cheng—he’s sold out. A serious author should not do that.

Oriental Outlook: I chatted with Ah Cheng for a while, and I found it hard to accept some of his opinions. He said that authors are beggars. But looking at the lives of individual authors, I sympathize with his viewpoint. Lots of people have been through difficult times. What’s your take?

Kubin: I disagree. I strongly disagree. Life is indeed an obstacle, but why doesn’t he write what he wants in the morning, and then write scripts in the afternoon and evening? He’s like a lot of other Chinese authors, who seem as if they’ve finished writing.

A commenter on Tianya’s Book Chat forum pointed out the irony of a translator complaining that authors have “sold out”:

What’s infuriating is his attitude. Kubin criticizes as an observer who hasn’t bent his back to do the heavy lifting. He draws a salary from a German university and receives manuscript fees from publishers, but at the same time asks Chinese authors to subsist on scraps—not that anything’s necessarily wrong with that, but he shouldn’t be so self-righteous about it.

And the zinger:

Kubin genuinely understands something about the last two decades of Chinese literature. He said, “China’s writers’ associations are useless. Only bad writers gain anything from them.” Didn’t Han Han say that? Heh, there are no new ideas, but great minds truly think alike.

One wonders what Kubin would have to say about Zhang Ping, a best-selling author who recently became vice-governor of Shanxi Province.

Zhang Ping in 2003

Zhang, well-known for his anti-corruption thrillers, was awarded the Mao Dun prize for The Choice, alongside Wang Anyi’s Song of Everlasting Sorrow and A Lai’s Red Poppies. A more recent work, The State Cadre (2004), tells the story of an upright official surrounded on all sides by scandal.

The election of a novelist as a provincial vice-governor has not been without controversy. Is a fiction writer really the person you want running your city? Writing about good cadres is not the same thing as being one, say the Internet wags. In an op-ed published in The Beijing News yesterday, Southern Metropolis Weekly editor Chang Ping (whose real name, coincidentally, is Zhang Ping), discussed the opposite question: do you really want your city officials publishing fiction?

Not long ago, Shanxi writer Zhang Ping was elected vice-governor of the province, launching a discussion over whether authors ought to become officials. Another bit of information that surfaced recently turned the question on its head: should officials become authors? This news item said that in recent years, Shaanxi officials have put pen to paper for the cause of literature and have published a large quantity of fiction and essays. “In Shaanxi, it’s common for officials to write, from the lowest levels to province-level departments, from the villages to the provincial committee: it’s definitely noticeable”; this includes vice-governor Zhang Wei’s novel Five Joys and lots of essays [published under the pen name Zhang Ye].

Looking at Chinese tradition, this is an extremely easy question to answer. The imperial examination system determined that only those who could write well became officials, and they had to continue writing well once they were installed. The emperors, who weren’t selected by examination, still mingled with the literati as one of them. The majority of those writings count as literature, primarily poetry and essays. Even political commentary like [Su Dongpo’s] “On Jia Yi” is still first appreciated from the standpoint of literature. This tradition has continued through the present day: Premier Wen Jiabao recently wrote the poem “Gazing up at the Starry Sky” (仰望星空) and Mao Zedong’s literary talent goes without saying. [Foreign Minister] Chen Yi wrote fiction and applied for membership in the Chinese Writers’ Association. Such things aren’t as widespread overseas, but there are still quite a number of officials who can turn a phrase: Mexican poet and Nobel laureate Octavio Paz, for example, served as a diplomat in a number of countries.

The imperial examination system did not leave us much of a legacy as far as the political system is concerned. In contemporary society, the number of people who are able to straddle the political and literary stages has fallen off. More than a millennium of history is evidence of a truth that any child can see: civil service and composition are two entirely different things. Some people today do not understand this fact: they say that officials who write fiction are better than those who play mahjong and visit karaoke bars. Writing can cultivate one’s character, you see, and one who cultivates a noble character will do good work. Li Zongqi, the director of the Shaanxi Province National Security Office who also plies his trade as a writer, wrote sympathetically, “Over the years I’ve written about family, about friendship, and about hometown nostalgia. Perhaps because I am always immersed in the world of emotion, I have become more even-tempered. In my work, too, I have learned to simplify the complicated and diversify the homogeneous.” Such people have made the same mistake as the ancients: they think that governing a country is simply exercising benevolent policies, and having good, kind officials use poetry and painting to educate the people in good manners.

Others may ask, if officials are bent over their desks writing fiction, who will have the time or energy to attend to the sufferings of the people? There is a certain logic to this question, but it doesn’t get to the real point. Officials who love literature may not necessarily pour all of their energies into writing fiction, while officials who are not writers will not therefore use all of their time to care for the concerns of the public. The long absence of a system for monitoring and inspecting officials’ work drove them to work tirelessly to win the hearts of the people. They took pride in throwing themselves into the day’s affairs and working long hours through the night. Indeed, hard work is one way to demonstrate administrative diligence and care for the people, but there is no simple equivalence between good officials and hard work. Experienced, able, and efficient officeholders may get twice the results with half the effort. And if that sort of official listens to music at night, or writes fiction, it’s no cause for concern.

Many people today have come to realize that politics is not an question of largess or time. At its heart, politics is about how power is granted, exercised, kept in check, and stripped away. With this as a starting point, netizens have brought up a number of worthwhile questions. For example, should Shaanxi officials’ novels be published? With which publisher? What fees can they accept? How should distribution be handled? Can they use ghost-writers? Will they use book publishing as a way to launder money? The country’s publishing industry is not yet entirely market-driven, so administrative authority still has considerable power to intervene. When you measure the power at the hands of a vice-governor or a National Security Office head against the literary talent they possess, which will turn out to be more useful in getting things published? Like officials who are sent back to get their PhDs—they look like they’re eager to learn, but in reality they’re just taking advantage of their position for personal gain.

When we go further down the road of checks and balances, we will discover that these are merely surface questions. What’s more important is whether these officials are concerned about the will of the people. If the will of the people has a genuine effect, then there is no need for everyone to discuss the above questions or attempt to enact all sorts of trivial rules. Officials will voluntarily avoid upsetting the public, or risk being voted out of office or fired by their superiors who are facing electoral pressures. Once we understand this logic, we will realize that issues like a governor writing fiction, an office head keeping a blog, an official showing respect to his parents, or whether a secretary is male or female, are all just pseudo-problems.