448 chapter twelve
internalized this view. Albeit in a loose and abstract sense, they still
subscribe to a time-honored poetics of literature to convey the Way,
whether in a traditional or a modern frame of reference. This applies
to not just the text but also the author. Indeed, several of the simi-
larities in Popular and Intellectual discourse spring from what may be
called their shared poetal views, especially the sheer importance both
sides ascribe to poethood.
There are of course continuities with other polemics in modern
Chinese poetry and modern Chinese culture at large, and with the
phenomenon of abusive criticism as analysed by Michel Hockx for
the Republican era, with a premodern history leading back to third-
century statesman-poet-theorist Cao Pi’s famous declaration that
“Literary men disparage one another—it’s always been that way” (᭛
ҎⳌ䕏g㞾স㗠✊).^24 For one thing, the present chapter has shown
that the Polemic was a grim carnival of what Bourdieu calls position-
takings in the literary field. Of the substantive motivations behind
such position-takings, which Yeh identifies as recurrent in debates
throughout the modern era, one that obviously holds continued rel-
evance is that of cultural identity, embodied in oppositions of Chinese
and foreign, indigenous and Westernized, nativist and cosmopolitan.^25
Another perennial issue is poetry’s and the poet’s contested social po-
sition, meaning their visibility and the degree of their involvement in
and impact on socio-political development; but it is hard to say how
far this discussion has extended into society beyond the poetry scene
itself since the controversy over Obscure Poetry and the campaign to
Eliminate Spiritual Pollution in the late 1970s and the early 1980s. For
one thing, what was left of traditional associations of poetry with na-
tional essence (㊍) at the time has thoroughly broken down during
the avant-garde’s subsequent development. On a general note, social
change in the PRC has been so rapid and profound that it is unthink-
able that an event like the Polemic would simply be a reprise of an
earlier edition of more than a few years ago. More than anything else,
this is visible in the unbridled rhetoric that characterized the Polemic,
a crucial point being that substantial parts of the discourse displayed
unmistakable irony—which, as noted at several points in this study, is
(^24) Hockx 2003: ch 6. The translation of Cao Pi’s words follows Owen 1992:
58ff.
(^25) Yeh 2001: 5ff.