what was all the fuss about? 423Chen Chao, Tang Xiaodu and Wu Sijing himself were optimistic. Wu
says that one of the aims of the Panfeng conference was to provide the
said divergence with a platform for discussion.
Wang Wei’s other contribution to the Taiyuan Daily, “Voices of
Concerned Onlookers” (݇⊼㗙ⱘໄ䷇, #45), lists comments by
grand old poets Niu Han and Zheng Min and by critic Sun Shaozhen.
The former two choose their words carefully and avoid taking sides.
Sun Shaozhen, by contrast, appears not to be “concerned” at all, opin-
ing that the roots of the debate go back to the 1980s and its culmina-
tion was hence to be expected sooner or later. He feels certain that in
today’s China—different from the early 1980s, when Obscure Poetry
and “spiritual pollution” came under fire—avant-garde poetry will not
become a problem on high-level ideological and political agendas. If
the Taiyuan Daily written reports are impartial, its visuals are less so: a
single portrait of Intellectual Xi Chuan, next to photographs of Popu-
lar authors Yi Sha and Yu Jian, and a group portrait of Shen Qi, Han
Dong, Xie Youshun and Yang Ke.
On 31 July the Science Times (里ᄺᯊ) ran a full-page feature under
the headline “Quarrels after the Quarrels of ‘Panfeng, Where Words
Were Swords’” (“Ⲭዄ䆎ࠥ” ᰃ䴲ৢⱘᰃ䴲), giving the floor to five
spokesmen of the Intellectual camp: Wang Jiaxin, Tang Xiaodu, Sun
Wenbo, Jiang Hao and Chen Jun. Wang’s “More on the ‘True Face’”
(г䇜 “ⳳⳌ”, #51) is a furious indictment of Yu Jian’s distortion of
literary history and his deception of those outside the inner circle. In
“I See....” (ࠄ៥ⳟ...., #50), Tang Xiaodu concurs with Wang in ac-
cusing the Popular camp of indecent behavior, which may have been
taken as a compliment by the accused in light of their self-image as hip,
untamed rebels. Sun Wenbo’s “The Facts Need Clarification” (џᅲ
ᖙ乏╘⏙, #49) is a powerful piece, less worked up than Wang’s and
Tang’s diatribes. Sun points to inconsistencies and lies in the words of
Yu Jian and others, especially in their accounts of the Panfeng con-
ference. He attributes their exaggerations and improprieties to their
insecurity as poets. Sun’s article also shows that moralizing and ideolo-
gizing diction is by no means limited to the Popular side. In “The
Myth of Popular Poetry” (⇥䯈䆫℠ⱘ干䆱, #48) Jiang Hao, like Tang
Xiao du, reminds the Popular polemicists of the horror, verbal and
otherwise, of the Maoist years, and joins the ranks of those shooting
holes in Yu Jian’s private brand of argumentative logic. In “Who Does
Yu Jian Think He Is Fooling” (Ѣമᛮ䇕, #47), Chen Jun decries the