what was all the fuss about? 449a distinguishing characteristic of contemporary Chinese poetry when
compared to the recent past.
*Did things look different than before, once the dust had settled? Inci-
dentally, several Popular voices claim that the dust hasn’t settled to this
day. They are intent on continuing the struggle, so to speak. However,
the Polemic “proper” lost its real momentum early in 2000, and when
the many unresolved disputes flare up again—as they have done and
will continue to do—it is unlikely that they will substantially change
the issues or the stakes. They have in the meantime become the subject
of scholarly analysis.
One thing the Polemic did change was the atmosphere on the po-
etry scene, whether viewed from a moral or a pragmatic perspective.
Pre-Polemic days were of course not some sort of hunky-dory fam-
ily gathering, but what basic solidarity and mutual respect existed
throughout the avant-garde was seriously damaged. A development
that has been more tangible and more important—again, this is ac-
cording to Popular voices—is that the shake-up of reputations and
hierarchies has encouraged poets who would previously have suffered
from the phenomenon of obstruction, and given them concrete op-
portunities for publication. One example is the Epoch series, another
the frantic activity displayed by unofficial poetry journals of recent
years—such as Poetry Text, Poetry and People and The Lower Body—and
most of all on the web. Still, these things might also have happened
without the Polemic, just as slumbering conflicts might also have burst
out, or strategic ambition manifested itself, without Cheng Guang-
wei’s anthology. Leaving what-if questions aside, it is safe to say that
the Polemic spurred reflection on the life and times of the avant-garde
since the Cultural Revolution. It enhanced the retrospective reflex
that tends to occur at the close of decades and centuries, even if there
is nothing decimal to time itself.
In modern China, even more so than elsewhere, literary retrospec-
tives are prone to end by directing our gaze from the past to the future.
This illustrates a view of literature as a coherent body of self-evident
significance, moving through time with a sense of direction—rather
than, say, the somewhat unpredictable accumulation of artistic im-