14 chapter one
Mayhem refers to the violence of June Fourth and its aftermath. For
the atmosphere on the poetry scene, June Fourth was a catalyst in
the transition from the roaring, collectivist 1980s to private and so-
ber, questioning if not skeptical and cynical moods in later years. The
bloodshed of June 1989 and reintensified repression over the next
three years or so—until after Deng Xiaoping told the nation to keep its
eye on the money during his 1992 Southern Tour—meant a shocking
end to the Eighties, and traumatizing disillusionment for large parts of
the intelligentsia. Its direct reflection in poetry is complicated by the
fact that inside China, the portrayal of government action as violent
and repressive remains taboo in any kind of writing. To be sure, there
are poems that can be seen to be about June Fourth even if they don’t
explicitly address it, but the political sensitivity of this topic is such that
most if not all poets tread extremely carefully.^18 Palpable responses
aside, there is only so much one can read into particular types of si-
lence, including the silence of the many poets who stopped writing
altogether after 1989, something that was caused by not just mayhem
but also money.
Money, then, refers to the China of the 1990s and the early twenty-
first century, where, as economic whistle-blower He Qinglian writes,
“the championing of money as a value” has reached unprecedented
heights.^19 This period has seen poetry keeping itself afloat in a mael-
strom of consumerism, entertainment, (new) media and popular
culture, as marketization, commodification, commercialization and
indeed moneyfication—not a common word, but one that captures
the day-to-day experience—sweep through all spheres of life, includ-
ing elite practices in literature and art.
Some Avant-Garde HistoryA few contextual observations hold across the contemporary period in
its entirety. While mechanisms of literary censorship have remained
operational, political interest in poetry has declined, in a shift from
totalitarian pre-scription of compulsory form and content to authori-
tarian pro-scription of dissent. After high visibility in the 1980s poetry
has been subject to overwhelming competition by other distractions
(^18) Day 2005a: ch 11 and 2007a.
(^19) Cited in Liu Binyan & Link 1998: 22.