avant-garde poetry from china 19borders and elsewhere. Meanwhile, inside China the cultural purge
that had started in the summer of 1989 limited the avant-garde’s ac-
cess to official publication channels. Poet and avant-garde advocate
Wang Jiaxin, for instance, soon lost his job as editor at the influential
Poetry Monthly (ߞ䆫). The unofficial scene, however, showed its resil-
ience in several new journals out of Chengdu, Shanghai, Beijing and
other places between 1989 and 1992. One called Modern Han Poetry
(⦄ҷ∝䆫)—with the Han in its title referring to the Chinese language
rather than ethnicity—was managed from Beijing but rotated editor-
ship between contributors in different cities, in an explicit effort to
unite poets and readers from all over the country.
Inside China, later in the 1990s new unofficial journals continued
to appear. Especially from 1993 on, after the purge had abated, possi-
bilities for official single-author and multiple-author book publication
increased. Still, the extraverted, collectivist atmosphere of the 1980s
was definitely a thing of the past, with objectifiable reasons for this
change lying in mayhem and money. If June Fourth didn’t fundamen-
tally alter individual poets’ voices, the massacre certainly caused them
to reflect on the future of an art that had been at the forefront of cul-
tural development not long before but now seemed futile in light of the
recent social trauma. Such misgivings were reinforced by lightning-
speed socio-economic change that appeared to have relegated poetry
and other elite practices in literature and art to irrelevance almost
overnight, at least in the wider public domain. As noted, not a few
poets who had published in the 1980s stopped writing altogether in the
1990s.
Yet, many others continued or began in earnest. In retrospect,
publication histories show that while on the surface—for example as
regards collective, high-profile projects—the poetry scene was less
bustling than in the 1980s, the number of published poets was in fact
rising.^27 Poetic production was becoming more diversified and, argu-
ably, more sophisticated. If, aside from the sociology of the scene, we
had to summarize textual developments in the 1990s in one word, this
would have to be individualization, or, in two words taken from do-
mestic terminology, Individual Writing (ϾҎݭ) or, less frequently,
Individualized Writing (ϾҎ࣪ݭ). Up until the end of the 1990s
it would be hard to identify collective initiatives in poetry or criticism
(^27) Van Crevel 2008a.