avant-garde poetry from china 55taken to task for being insufficiently Chinese, and for being “foreign”
(ⱘǃᴹⱘ) and “Westernized” (㽓࣪). Such assessments are
still being made today, by specialist and non-specialist readers, and
occasionally lead to representations of this or that poem, oeuvre or
trend as being derivative material or second-hand news imported from
abroad.
A major part of the bigger picture is China’s precarious, troubled
relationship to the West and Japan ever since the Opium Wars, even if
in the contemporary period, things are not what they were in 1839. In
the cultural and academic realms, this geopolitical situation is reflected
in what is widely perceived as uneven exchange between national lit-
eratures and academies in the modern era, within contested notions
of “world literature” and “international” scholarship, usually mean-
ing scholarship in English. In plain words, modern literatures from
elsewhere—not just from the West and Japan, but also from Central
and Eastern Europe and from South America—have exerted greater
influence on modern Chinese literature than the other way around.
Similarly, Western theory is overwhelmingly present in not just inter-
national but also Chinese-domestic scholarship on modern Chinese
literature.
On interindividual and intercommunal levels, cultural and schol-
arly development rarely start from “purity” and usually involve some
measure of hybridity, and the long-term view tends to problematize
representations of influence as a one-way affair. A stock example is
how classical Chinese poetry influenced the modern Western poetry
that went on to influence modern Chinese poetry. In spite of such
qualifications, the issue of uneven exchange remains topical and sensi-
tive. Understandably so, for with regard to literature it activates ex-
plosive notions such as authenticity, originality, primacy, imitation,
inequality and subordination, and with regard to discourse on litera-
ture, it highlights the dangers of centrism and chauvinism in various
quarters. This has generated much debate involving Stephen Owen,
William Jenner, Michelle Yeh, Rey Chow, Perry Link, Zhang Longxi,
Zhang Yingjin, Andrew Jones, Gregory Lee, Huang Yunte, Bonnie
McDougall, Julia Lovell and many others, for poetry often focusing
on the work of Bei Dao. The discussion isn’t limited to Chinese lit-
erature and its relationship to other literatures but extends to the study