what was all the fuss about? 421Like Zhang Qinghua’s, Jing Yi’s assessment of the debate comes
across as impartial. She notes the tendency of the Popular camp to
abuse the Intellectuals by calling them names like “pseudo-poets” (Ӿ
䆫Ҏ), “comprador-poets” and “domestic exile poets” (ݙ⌕ѵ䆫
Ҏ). Like Zhang, Jing Yi wonders how much of the Polemic is really
about poetry. She observes that the Panfeng clamor also gave belat-
ed expression to Popular frustrations over a March 1998 conference
called “Seminar on ‘Post-New-Tide Poetry’” (“ৢᮄ䆫╂” ⷨ䅼Ӯ) to
which major Popular poets such as Yu Jian and Han Dong had ap-
parently not been invited—New Tide Poetry (ᮄ䆫╂, literally ‘new
poetry tide’) being one of the many names given to the avant-garde
over the years.^12 The difference between these two well-written reports
is that, whereas Zhang is inclined to an optimistic view of things, Jing
Yi is disappointed that the debate hasn’t yielded any theoretical in-
sights.^13 She goes on to analyze it in terms of the corporeal (㙝䑿) and
the cerebral (༈㛥), which she links to the Popular and the Intellectual
respectively, and concludes by calling the Polemic a tragic incident.
The summer of 1999 saw a flurry of additional publicity. On 26 July
the Taiyuan Daily (ॳ᮹) dedicated a full page to the Panfeng con-
ference and its background, featuring articles by Jing Wen, Tang Jin
and Wang Wei. Jing Wen is presumably a pseudonym: “Turn-of-the-
Century Poetry Polemic” (Ϫ㑾ПѸⱘ䆫℠䆎ѝ, #43) is an abridged
version of Zhang Qinghua’s report in Poetry Exploration and Beijing Lit-
erature. Tang Jin’s “Dangerous Trends at the ‘Panfeng Conference’”
(“ⲬዄӮ䆂” ⱘॅ䰽ؒ, #44) is an acerbic piece with orthodox
overtones. Tang points out that the conference had little time for tex-
tual analysis and criticizes the poets for their self-importance. Wang
Wei’s “Some Background and Other Things” (㚠᱃Ϣ݊ᅗ, #46) is
a record of the words of conference moderators Wu Sijing and Lin
Mang, both senior figures on the poetry scene, Wu as a scholar and
Lin as a poet and an editor. Lin Mang observes that at a time when po-
etry is allegedly in danger of losing its readers, heated debate is a good
thing. Wu Sijing calls the Post-New-Tide conference of the previous
year a harbinger of divergent trends in criticism which have now come
to the surface. According to Wu, in 1998 Xie Mian and Sun Shaozhen
expressed skepticism toward current developments in poetry, while
(^12) Huanglin 1998, Shen Qi (#10): 23.
(^13) Cf Zhang Qinghua 2002.