8 chapter one
tertain seriously conflicting visions of literature and politicians have the
power and claim the right to interfere, the notion of publication should
be taken in the broadest possible sense. Publication then simply means
the making public of a text beyond inner-circle audiences hand-picked
by the author. The point is illustrated by the difference between the
Chinese terms থ㸼 ‘announce, make public’ and ⠜ߎ ‘come off the
press, publish’ (cf German veröffentlichen ‘make public’ and herausgeben
‘publish,’ meaning ‘act as publisher of’; the English publish is ambigu-
ous in this respect). Not everything that is made public is brought out
by an official publisher. Even if it rarely appeared between the covers
of officially published books or journals until the late 1980s, unofficial
poetry was definitely published in the said, broad sense.
One important feature of the unofficial poetry scene is its rejection
of the strictures of official cultural policy. In the Reform era, since
1978, such policy has seen considerable if fitful relaxation. This raises
the question why the unofficial scene should need to exist any longer,
for contemporary poetry has explored an infinitely larger space out-
side orthodoxy than that which continues to be off limits, with explicit
political dissent as an example of the latter. Still, the unofficial scene
retains its significance to this day. For one thing, political repression
does in fact continue at fluctuating levels. Many of the poets involved
are highly educated, well-connected people who generally have a good
time, and tired Cold War visions of the poetry scene as a theater of
artistically inclined guerilla warfare are grossly inaccurate, but it is cer-
tainly not the case that anything goes. Censorship and other types of
political interference with literature remain very much operational:
witness, for instance, the cultural purge that followed June Fourth
(݁噝ಯ), the violent suppression of the 1989 Protest Movement. When
it happened, the unofficial scene rallied together on a national level to
keep poetry alive.
More generally, there is ample reason to question Geremie Barmé’s
claim, made in an admirable study of contemporary Chinese culture
that is slightly marred by cynicism, that unofficial poetry stands out
only “against the gloomy backdrop manufactured by the state,” or
what we may call the art of the state—whose quality hinges on being
embedded in its own, orthodox discourse, except when it is viewed as
camp. In its own right, the unofficial scene lies at the core of a lively
poetry climate that is instrumental for the development of individual
poets and the poetry landscape as a whole. This is in evidence in lit-