410 chapter twelve
no part in the avant-garde’s history either, which would retroactively
make its authors disappear from the unofficial journals that have been
instrumental in this history. As the avant-garde was originally defined
in opposition to orthodoxy and has effectively outshone it since the
mid-1980s, hostile identification with orthodoxy is a damaging impu-
tation for any avant-garde author.
Yu Jian characterizes Intellectual Writing as elitist, artificial, alien-
ated and fake, and Popular Writing as sensitive, honest, accessible and
authentic, and belonging to ordinary people. In line with his ideas
on the hard and the soft, Intellectual Writing is located in the North,
more specifically in Beijing and the Standard Language, as the center
of orthodox, political ideology; and Popular Writing is located in the
provinces, more specifically the South and its regional languages, as
the heartland of Chinese culture. The opposition of North and South
extends into one of foreign and Chinese. Yu ties Intellectual Writing to
foreign-colonial traditions and what he calls the slavish Europeaniza-
tion of a Chinese language that draws on Western-language resources
(㽓ᮍ䇁㿔䌘⑤). Exile poetry doesn’t count as Chinese. Popular Writ-
ing, in its turn, taps into the Chinese experience and into pride taken
in indigenous traditions, such as the classical poetry of the Tang and
Song dynasties. He concludes with a remark on the possibility that
some languages are better suited to certain tasks than others (p16):
For poets of the Chinese language, English is a language for the web, a
Standard Language for the cloned world that leads the way in our time’s
economic activities. But for poetry the world needs Chinese to take the
lead. The historical consciousness of the Chinese language and its natu-
ral poetic qualities make it a poetic language par excellence that can
effectively maintain human memories of the earth and the connection of
humankind’s spirit with the old world. I am of the opinion that in the fi-
nal two decades of this century, the world’s most outstanding poets have
dwelled in the Chinese language. But on this point we remain silent, we
keep it a secret and don’t spread the word.As noted in chapter Eleven, the assumption appears to be that for-
eigners don’t read Chinese, and one wonders why those parts of the
world that lie outside China should be kept in the dark if the world’s
best poets are really writing in Chinese. These things sit uneasily with
the importance Yu Jian ascribes to the Chinese language for the well-
being of humankind. Then there is the sad lot of languages which are
neither English nor Chinese, disabling them for leadership in matters