what was all the fuss about? 439Han proclaims an undisguised mission statement, making clear that
the Popular has a vocation which reaches far beyond a simple literary
preference (p8):
The Popular mission is to safeguard literature, and to ensure that in an
age that is growing more materialistic by the day and honors the balance
of power as its only standard, literature gets a chance to survive and de-
velop; and to protect the free spirit of art and its capacity for creation.As a whole the essay is impressive in its Begeisterung. To Han Dong, the
Popular appears to be rather like a way of life, a worldview or indeed
a religion, and at the very least part of the vision of poetry as a sacred
cause that characterizes his explicit poetics throughout. Leading up to
a brief, final section on the future of the Popular, as opposed to what
he calls the pseudo-Popular (Ӿ⇥䯈), Han concludes (p17):
The Popular in its true form means: (1) abandoning the arena of power,
and operating in unknown, dark and mute places; (2) the womb of the
independent spirit and the vortex of free creation, where what is up-
held is talent, steadfast character and a sensitive soul; (3) the necessary,
unyielding struggle that is carried out in order to protect the survival of
literature and art, in order to protect their expression and the right to
write (not the power to write).The highfalutin, moralizing tone of “On the Popular” comes in sharp
contrast with the Colloquial Poetry for which Han is famous, but it
blends well into the register established by other central contributors
to the Polemic reviewed above: Cheng Guangwei, Yu Jian, Wang
Jiaxin.
A Sense of Closure: The End of the PolemicIn the first half of 2000 many publications still addressed the opposi-
tion of the Popular and the Intellectual: again, mostly from the Popular
point of view. In March, for instance, the Social Science New Book Catalog
reserved yet another full page for blatantly partial, Popular coverage of
the Polemic, under the headline “Poetry Scene Explodes into Warfare
Yet Again” (䆫യݡ⟚থѝ, #92, 93, 94, 95), and in May it ran
a special feature entitled “Reflections on the First Anniversary of the
‘Panfeng Polemic’” (“Ⲭዄ䆎ѝ”: ਼ᑈডᗱϧ⠜, #97, 98, 99, 100)
that gave each camp its own page. By and large, however, these pub-
lications repeated or rehashed things that had been said before. Some
authors began to take a retrospective stance, Shen Qi (#101) and Xu