412 chapter twelve
‘having completed a certain level of formal, higher education.’ This is
awkward because many in the Popular camp hold degrees from uni-
versities of repute. Yu Jian and Shen Haobo are graduates of Yunnan
University and BNU respectively, and BNU is also alma mater to Xu
Jiang and Yi Sha, whom we will encounter below. Xie Youshun and
Han Dong, another two Popular polemicists of note, are graduates of
Fujian Normal University and Shandong University.
We have noted the Popular emphasis on the value of indigenous
culture and its rejection of Westernization. Of course, especially in
modern times, there is no such thing as a purely Western or a purely
Chinese culture. Incidentally, the reader will recall that Yu Jian has
identified Walt Whitman’s and other foreign poetry as having had a
tremendous impact on him in his years as a budding poet, also men-
tioning Pushkin, Lermontov, Shelley, Byron and Tagore as examples
of the Western literature he read during the Cultural Revolution, usu-
ally in a deserted library in Kunming. Yu’s extensive if eclectic ac-
quaintance with foreign literature in translation doubtless continued
afterward, as it did for most Chinese authors who rose to prominence
in the 1980s and 1990s.^8 While it may be an exaggeration to charge
the Popular cause itself with nationalism in any serious sense, as Wang
Jiaxin (#23) has done, authors such as Sun Wenbo (#81) and Geng
Zhanchun (#6) have a point when they observe that Popular ideas ride
the tide of reemergent nationalism in China at large. These are the
closing sentences of “The Light” (p17):
Poetry in Chinese of the last twenty years goes to show that my dream—
of rebuilding a dignity that the Chinese language had nearly lost since
[the Opium Wars], of letting modern Chinese obtain anew the glory
that the Chinese language once had, in the poetry of the Tang and Song
dynasties—that my dream is not at all a dream, but a magnificent road
to travel.Xu Jiang’s Vitriolic Clowning: “Ordinary People’s Right to Poetry”Poet Xu Jiang shares Yu Jian’s nostalgia for the glory of classical Chi-
nese language and poetry. In his “One Man’s Polemic” (ϔϾҎⱘ䆎
ѝ, #71), Xu writes (p97):
(^8) Yu Jian & De Meyer 1995: 28.