what was all the fuss about? 417Dilthey, among others. Together with his use of literary terminology,
this makes the following self-portrait problematic. It is taken from
“Who Is Doing Harm to True Poetry?” (䇕Ӹᆇⳳגⱘ䆫℠?, #35),
published in the July 1999 issue of Beijing Literature (࣫Ҁ᭛ᄺ) (p69):
I have no high-level degree, I haven’t lived in Beijing, that “center” of
theory, I haven’t read much of the foreigners’ lofty words and great wis-
dom.This statement is awkward in its differentiation between non-
Intellectual and Intellectual as corroborated by an alleged difference
of “high-level” and other degrees in tertiary education. As to Xie’s
own background, at Fujian Normal University he studied with Sun
Shaozhen, a veteran champion of the avant-garde who played a major
role in the early 1980s debate on Obscure Poetry. In 2006, Xie himself
was to become a full professor in the Chinese Department of Zhong-
shan University.
Contentwise, like Xu Jiang, Xie Youshun makes no groundbreak-
ing contributions to the debate, instead coming across as an admiring
disciple who repeats the teachings of Yu Jian. His long article “Poetry
Is Advancing” (䆫℠ࠡ䖯, #96), published in the April 2000 issue
of Mountain Flower, contains interesting reflections on colloquial diction
in poetry but stands out by a lack of poetry-historical perspective and,
again, by the virulence of his style.
Intellectuals such as critic Tang Xiaodu (#32) and poets Wang
Jiaxin (#51) and Xi Du (#28) took issue with Popular authors over what
may to an outsider appear as just one more ripple in the floodwaters
of text generated by the Polemic: specifically, the expression true face
(ⳳⳌ), used in the headline of Xie’s April 1999 book review. True face
means ‘true features,’ ‘true colors,’ ‘true situation,’ and was taken as a
grievous insult because it is political jargon, typically used for the expo-
sure of matters arousing moral indignation. Yu Jian, however, would
soon enthusiastically elaborate on the image of a true face, resulting in
some of the most deafeningly belligerent pages in the Polemic.
The Panfeng Poetry Conference, “Where Words Were Swords,” and the MediaDespite the relaxation of political control in the contemporary period,
in literary life in the PRC it is still true that much more can be spo-
ken without fear of censorship than written. Coupled with a continu-