Prized Pulp Fiction: Hand-copied Literature from the Cultural Revolution

The last decade has seen a wave of Cultural Revolution nostalgia sweep over mainland China, virtually flooding the place with Great Helmsman paraphernalia, Red Guard kitsch and other Cult-Rev castaways. In the wake of the revival of those once so dominant voices, less-privileged discourses and little-studied cultural undercurrents from that stormy period have also surfaced. Under review here are six books that, each in its own way, seek to represent unofficial and popular voices from the period 1966-1976. Together, they form the core of an ongoing revival in mainland China of hand-copied literature (shouchaobenr) from the Cultural Revolution.

Scholarship of the last two decades has amply demonstrated that the "cultural desertification" during the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution was not as widespread or as devastating as Western scholars of China first feared. Although literary publications were scarce in both quantitative and qualitative terms from the onset of the Cultural Revolution in 1966 to its demise in 1976, it is now clear that many people continued to read and write creative literature during what was one of the bleakest and most censored periods in the recent history of Chinese literature.² Publisher Bai Shihong, the driving force behind the present-day revival of hand-copied literature, explains:

Soon after the beginning of the turmoil, a significant number of people who were slightly older and more literate than the Red Guard generation began taking up the pen secretly and independently of each other. By the early '70s, when the political climate had cooled down somewhat and a notion of private space was gradually restored, these writings began circulating widely.³

Often these texts were then copied by hand—typically elaborated and revised somewhat in the process—by people from all walks of life who shared a craving for literary nourishment—or simply for sheer entertainment.

After the thaw in literary and cultural policies in 1979, many of the estimated total of three hundred pieces of hand-copied entertainment fiction penned and circulated in this manner began to surface from underground. A few—most notably Di erci woshou (The second handshake) by Zhang Yang (b. 1944), a book-length novel circulated nationwide in hand-copied format in the early '70s—were even published officially to an enthusiastic reception.⁴ Others, including some of the most notorious and pornographic texts, popped up on the Internet. However, signs of an actual revival of hand-copied Cultural Revolution entertainment fiction only began to appear around the end of the '90s.

More than a dozen of the best-known hand-copied titles have found their way to mainland book markets since 1998. This is to a large extent the result of publisher Bai Shihong's efforts to orchestrate a literary revival with the dual aim of preserving and commercializing the peculiar cultural product. His attempts to interest cultural authorities—Beijing Qingnianbao (Beijing youth daily) and administrative staff at the Capital Library in Beijing—in the project eventually failed. According to Bai, the Capital Library reportedly...