what was all the fuss about? 443nal example of explicit-poetical consistency across the board is Cheng
Guangwei’s description of the Intellectual creative author as having
independent views and an independent position, and Han Dong’s
typification of the Popular as signaling an independent spirit and free
artistic creation.
At this point we may turn to author personalities to help explain
what the Polemic was all about, as Leo Ou-fan Lee has done for mod-
ern Chinese literary battles in the 1920s.^22 Geographical-cultural divid-
ing lines between authors were put forth by the Popular camp: (i) the
Intellectual capital versus the Popular provinces, (ii) the Intellectual
North versus the Popular South and (iii) Intellectual Westernization
versus Popular Chineseness. All three are each rhetorically smooth
and factually problematic. (i) Zhang Shuguang, for instance, labeled
a prominent member of the Intellectual camp, has always lived in
Harbin, and Popular firebrand Shen Haobo only began to write after
he had entered university—in Beijing, where he has remained ever
since. (ii) If, in addition to their current whereabouts, we take into ac-
count poets’ and critics’ provenance and their formative years, the list
of mismatches becomes much longer. Intellectuals Cheng Guangwei,
Wang Jiaxin, Tang Xiaodu, Sun Wenbo and Ouyang Jianghe are all
Southerners who moved to Beijing later in life, and Chen Dongdong
is a Shanghai resident to this day. (iii) Complicated though things like
literary influence and intertextuality may be, it is demonstrably un-
true—as is evident from the poetry that most polemicists didn’t deign
to discuss—that the Popular poets reject or mistrust the West. Why
should they, anyway? Conversely, it is equally untrue that the Intel-
lectuals blindly embrace the West.
Incidentally, even if Chinese poets look to the West or anywhere
beyond an indigenous frame of reference, a considerable measure of
Chineseness is guaranteed as long as they write in Chinese. Language,
both the abstraction and its varied manifestations throughout the
world, is rather more than a simple tool for dressing up some kind of
independent, unchanging content, and poetry is the art of language.
Before getting into all that and recalling the discussion of Chineseness
in chapter One, one might ask a question whose long history doesn’t
detract from its relevance today. Why should poetry written by Chi-
(^22) Lee (Leo Ou-fan) 1973: 19-27.