12 chapter one
institutional distinctions have become blurred. Little remains of the
antagonism that made them incompatible and indeed mutually exclu-
sive in the early years, up to the mid-1980s. Nowadays they coexist in
parallel worlds with their middle ground awaiting further exploration,
as John Crespi and Heather Inwood have noted.^15 Official and unoffi-
cial scenes do occasionally brush past one another and indeed interact,
even if such interaction is rarely explicitly recognized. It occurs, for
instance, in institutionally official book and journal publications whose
aesthetics are clearly of the unofficial kind. These are often contracted
and produced by aesthetically unofficial poets that have “gone to sea”
(ϟ⍋)—that is, into business—as book brokers (кଚ). While these
books and journals usually have ISBN or book license numbers (кো),
this has long ceased to indicate any compatibility with orthodox aes-
thetics.^16 There is a lively trade in such numbers that involves public
institutions, private individuals and everything in between, and niceties
such as the procurement of single numbers for multiple- author series
of individual collections, for cost effectiveness. Crudely put, one can
now buy the status of being an officially published poet, at prices to the
tune of RMB 5000 and up. It is common knowledge that this happens
all the time, even though it is illegal.
Distinctions of orthodoxy and avant-garde, and of official, unof-
ficial, underground and so on, also operate in other media and genres
of literature and art in China: theater and performance, music, film,
painting, sculpture. They do so in similar or comparable fashion, from
utter incompatibility to fluid interaction. As part of a society that has
been transformed in the past three decades and continues to be in
flux, these distinctions are anything but static. They reflect an ongo-
ing, multidimensional dynamic of forces ranging from government
ideology and cultural policy to personal initiative, the market and the
politics of place, from the local to the global.
(^15) Crespi 2005, Inwood 2008: passim.
(^16) On the interaction of official and unofficial circuits in poetry and other arts
forms, see Edmond 2006 and Liu (Melinda) 2004. On book brokers, also called
“book agents” and “book traders” in English, see Kong 2005: ch 3.