418 chapter twelve
ing prescriptive streak in scholarship and criticism that is visible in
questions of the type Whither Chinese literature? and the frequency
of shoulds and oughts in the answers, this adds to the importance of in-
stitutionalized, spoken exchange. Since the late 1970s there have been
many ambitious conferences on New Poetry where funding from state-
sanctioned institutions hasn’t precluded forays far outside orthodox
literary discourse and sometimes near-exclusive attention to the avant-
garde. It was at one of these events, held from 16 to 18 April 1999, that
the Popular-Intellectual Polemic burst out into the open.
The organizers of the Panfeng poetry conference, so named after
the hotel near Beijing where it took place, were the Beijing branch of
the Writers’ Association, the Contemporary Chamber of the Research
Institute for Literature of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, the
literary journal Beijing Literature and the editorial board of Poetry Explo-
ration. The conference was officially entitled “Turn of the Century:
A Seminar on the State of the Art and Theory-Building in Chinese
Poetry” (Ϫ㑾ПѸ: Ё䆫℠߯ᗕϢ⧚䆎ᓎ䆒ⷨ䅼Ӯ). As usu-
al, in addition to scholars and critics, many poets were in attendance.
This illustrates the generalization that demarcation lines between the
literary and the scholarly, or the creative and the critical, tend to be
less clear-cut in China than in many countries in the West.
The Panfeng conference is remembered as a head-on collision be-
tween the Popular and the Intellectual. Whether this confrontation
was consciously planned, and by whom, is in itself irrelevant to the is-
sues of the Polemic. Suffice it to note that various commentators have
emphasized the “strategic” (ㄪ⬹ᗻ) behavior of certain participants
in the conference and in the Polemic at large. There was much talk of
conscious attempts in the run-up to the conference to help the Polemic
make media headlines beyond specialist circles, and of phone calls by
Popular activists trying to persuade their Intellectual fellow poets and
critics to put on a show of fierce, irreconcilable conflict.^10 Be that as it
may, the conference generated enough publicity and collective memo-
ry to become a metonym for the entire debate, as witnessed by the fact
that this is now remembered by many as “the Panfeng Polemic” (Ⲭዄ
䆎ѝ).
(^10) Personal communication on several occasions since 2000, with Tang Xiaodu,
Wang Jiaxin, Zang Di and others.