Before 1999, the Internet in China had no dedicated poetry Web
sites. However, from the mid-1990s, simple discussion forums that
specialized in literature in general or poetry in particular existed as
part of Web sites attached to commercial entities and universities.
Among the most influential was Qinghua University’s Water and
Wood Qinghua\木^_; forums on commercial sites such as Sina
`a, Netease易, and Under the Banyan Tree榕树d(for an exam-
ination of this site and a comparison with pre-1949 literary practices
see Hockx 2004) also proved popular and influential.
Before a dedicated poetry Web site would appear, there was a first
poetry webzine, Limits e限, edited by the Chongqing poet Li
Yuanshengg元N, the first edition of which was published online in
March 1999 as an adjunct to the Chongqing Literatureij文lWeb
site (Li Yuansheng 2002). The Limits Web site was opened in
November 1999, and its influence spread nationwide as a result of this
and the publication of a reformulated third edition of the webzine, no
longer primarily devoted to the work of Chongqing poets. The site
also contains a section in which a selection of outstanding poetry of
the 1990s is stored, effectively constituting an anthology, and a section
containing scanned covers and introductions to various unofficially
published poetry journals. Limitslater opened a number of poetry
forums, and the Web site and webzine were the first to carry a forum
and a section for translations of foreign poetry. This much imitated
innovation is carried over from an increasingly common practice
among unofficial poetry journals since the mid-1980s, a tradition to
which Limitsclearly links itself.
A key figure in the development of avant-garde poetry on the
Internet in China is the Heilongjiang poet Sang Ke 桑n. Having begun
to use the Internet at his job in 1997, in October 1999, with the help
of net-friends, Sang became one of the first poets to have his own “col-
umn”opfor poetry and essays hosted within a large commercial site
(no longer extant, see Sang 2001). Not long thereafter, a visitor to
Sang’s site introduced him to a poetry forum where he met several
Internet poets, such as Lai Erq耳. Ultimately this resulted in the
establishment in February 2000 of the Poem LifeWeb site with Sang
as content manager, Lai Er as administrative manager, and White Jade
Bitter Melons玉uvas the chief forum moderator. Until 2005, a
webzine was published on the fifth of each month—the first true
webzine, in that it was notalso published in a paper format—and both
this and the design of the Web site have since been much imitated by
new Web sites and webzines. The Web site also opened dozens of
Online Avant-Garde Poetry in China Today 203