between Chen Sihe and Yu Jian in their identical public pleas for the
restoration of minjianin contemporary Chinese literature. For the
former, the restoration is a way of examining historical truth and a
strategy for recovering meaning from neglected texts. For the latter,
the restoration is a return to lost values, a promotion of indigenous
aesthetics, and a protest against the forces of globalization, all of
which fit perfectly in the rising tide of nationalism in contemporary
China’s cultural discourse.
The attempts to describe their differences at the macrocosmic level
by the intellectual school and the minjian school are only the
beginning of this influential debate. To an objective observer, however,
their contending conceptions of poetry share more similarities than
both sides care to acknowledge. This is not say that they have nothing
to argue about but that they share the same concerns of upholding
poetry as a serious and meaningful art form in an era of uncertainty
and excess and of locating its cultural functions vis-à-vis other social
and political forces. Because of this and also probably due to a general
dissatisfaction with some publicity-hungry debate participants with
entrenched and extreme positions, many cool-minded Chinese critics
and those on the sidelines in particular have pointed out a signifying
commonality between intellectual and minjianpoets, such as the
following perceptive remarks made by Zhang Qinghua tuv
(b. 1963): “In today’s linguistic context, intellectuals and minjianare
supplementary but not oppositional to each other, particularly in the
sense that they both exist outside the system. From the perspective of
writing, one emphasizes vitality, the other depth; one orients towards
deconstruction, the other construction. Each complements the other in
its own strengths and weaknesses” (Zhang 1999: 26).
Zhang’s remarks, which bear the marks of disinterested
professionalism and scholarly objectivity, are interesting in two ways.
On the one hand, he seizes upon the intellectual and the minjianpoets’
shared marginal status and highlights their supplementarity while
downplaying their differences to allow room for inclusiveness and
tolerance. On the other hand, he offers a list of distinguishable
characteristics of the two schools that validates their claims to
different poetics. Zhang qualifies this list with the phrase “from the
perspective of writing,” by which he probably means artistic tendency
and aesthetic value as embedded in the act of poetic creation. This is
an interesting but also a popular way for a Chinese scholar to talk
about poetics at the basic operational level regarding a poet’s
prewriting choices and a critic’s after-writing judgment. If we call the
previously mentioned debate about the poet’s self-positioning vis-à-vis
Poetic Debate in Contemporary China 193