objectification and the long-short line 247CHAPTER SEVENOBJECTIFICATION AND THE LONG-SHORT LINE:
YU JIANIn contemporary China, there are many fiction writers with all man-
ner of collected works (᭛䲚ǃક䲚ǃᇣ䇈ሩ冫) to their name
while they continue to write. Can Xue, Chen Ran, Chi Li, Mo Yan,
Wang Shuo and Yu Hua are but a few of those whose books have been
on prominent display in the bookstores for years on end. Especially
their short and medium-length pieces (ⷁ㆛ǃЁ㆛) tend to be fre-
quently re-published in new, reshuffled arrangements between equally
new book covers. Things work differently for poetry, if we disregard
the Complete Poems of Haizi, Luo Yihe, Ge Mai and Gu Cheng that
were occasioned by three suicides and one suicide-by-association, as
discussed in chapter Three. Republication of the kind that signifies the
re-confirmation of earlier success—as it does for fiction writers—has
occurred for few poets, primarily in the Blue Star Poetry Treasure House
series (㪱᯳䆫ᑧ, People’s Literature Press), an open-ended project
running since the mid-1990s. The stand-alone collections by Yang
Lian and Bei Dao mentioned in chapter Four are special cases, in
light of their status as “dissident” poets in exile, which made domestic
publication in the 1990s difficult for Yang and impossible for Bei Dao.
The Blue Star books are anthologies that survey individual, previously
well-published poetic careers. Different from fiction, however, the re-
confirmation of earlier success is embodied in a single anthology for
each poet and not in multiple re-issues by multiple publishers. Other
recent series such as the Midnight Subway Poetry Series (䳊⚍ഄ䪕䆫ϯ,
Qinghai People’s Press), the Dark Skin Poetry Series (咥Ⲃ䆫ϯ, North-
ern Mountains Literature & Art Press) and the Epoch Poetry Series (ᑈ
ҷ䆫ϯ, Hebei Education Press) constitute the overdue recognition of
poetic oeuvres whose unofficial reputation had not been matched by
their official publication track record to date, rather than reconfirming
earlier success.^1
(^1) For bibliographical detail on series and stand-alone collections, see Van Crevel
2008a.