22 chapter one
priation of greater freedom of expression than exists in print culture.
The PRC government has at its disposal cutting-edge technology and
vast human resources for controlling web traffic, and predictions that
the web would mean an end to effective censorship have not at all
come true. Clearly, however, online poetry goes farther than print cul-
ture in testing the limits, quite aside from the literary merits of the texts
in question.
Another factor at play here is the sheer intensity of web traffic at
large among those parts of the Chinese population that are online, es-
pecially the urban young. On that note, it is safe to say that to younger
generations of poets and readers who have come of age in the Internet
era, the poetry experience quite simply starts on the web. For many it
stays there as well, for there appear to be increasing numbers of poets
and readers who hardly encounter poetry in print. Still, print editions
of online poetic production continue to function as tokens of cultural
consecration in the Bourdieuian sense. This has been observed for po-
etry on the web in other regions and languages as well, and it may be
because books still involve higher measures of editorial selection than
most websites and certainly than blogs, or because print culture per
se hasn’t lost its charms. Yet, according to Inwood, print culture no
longer has automatic relevance for China’s online poetry scene, which
is fast developing its own, internal dynamic. In all, research to date
suggests that the advent of the Internet has meant vastly more than
technical change and that its effects on the poetry scene at large may
be sufficiently far-reaching to make it a major topic of scholarship and
criticism, and a landmark for literary-historical periodization.^29
Online developments have an interface with multimedial poetry
performance that is crying out to be further explored. Performances
such as Hei Dachun’s recitals to the accompaniment of the rock band
Vision (ܝⳂ) and especially Yan Jun’s multifaceted shows are well
suited to (online) documentation. Yan combines poetry with electroni-
cally managed soundscapes and VJ-ing, often working together with
(^29) On the avant-garde and the Internet, see the DACHS poetry chapter, Day
2007a, Inwood 2008: ch 2 and Yeh 2007a: 31; for online poetry scenes in China at
large, Hockx 2004 and 2005. Loss Pequeño Glazier makes a convincing case for
“digital poetics” as being a fundamentally different type of writing from print poet-
ics, in both textual-critical and sociological respects, but also notes the continuing
weight of print culture in matters of cultural consecration (2002: ch 8, esp 156). Day
has signaled the latter point for the Chinese avant-garde (2007b).