The Uses of Literature: Life in the Socialist Chinese Literary System (review)

This book is a major contribution to our understanding of the ways in which writers, readers, and cultural officials have interacted in the People's Republic of China. Perry Link provides valuable insights into the apparatuses of the control, editing, publishing, and distribution of fiction. He makes observations also on related media: the theater, film, radio, and television. His assessment is enlivened by an attempt to make comparisons with writers and bureaucrats in other socialist countries.

Despite the ambition and the useful results, a disquieting impression remains that much of the book is built on a relatively fragile edifice of several months' fieldwork at one moment in time twenty years ago. This issue of historical specificity threatens to undermine the usefulness of the study as a whole. China has changed beyond recognition in the last twenty years. Link acknowledges the rise of commercial pressures on writers, publishers, and officials since the early 1980s (see, e.g., p. 167 and p. 186 n. 76). He does not, however, address in any depth the implications of these changes for his picture of "life in the socialist Chinese literary system." The result is a freeze-frame of an untypical point in history where the Chinese literary scene has escaped the aftermath of the Cultural Revolution and has not yet fully fledged into a modern, highly profit-oriented system.

Perry Link, recipient of an early grant for American research in the People's Republic, spent the 1979-1980 academic year in Guangzhou at Zhongshan University and at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in Beijing. He clearly was an assiduous collector of information on the literary scene in that year and took the opportunity to interview a series of writers, editors, managers, and others in the periodical publishing and distribution businesses.

Link is particularly good in presenting what he calls the mechanics of literary control, stressing properly the important role of individual officials' changing tastes, generosity, and caution. The ways in which messages reached editors and writers to encourage or restrict greater boldness and experimentation are nicely set out. He may underestimate the extent of private disgruntlement (dissent may be too strong a word) among China's artists and writers at most stages since 1949. "Normally even the thought of dissent was absent" (p. 59) is a typical statement that deserves considerably more qualification than Link allows himself.

Another strength is Link's discussion of the cultural or social functions of literature in China before and during the twentieth century. He analyzes well "the cultural importance of morally correct public language" (p. 149; see generally pp. 143-154). The functions of heroes as paragons show considerable continuities both from before 1949 to the present and across official and unofficial literature and art (pp. 229, 247). This has clearly continued over the last twenty years as more semi-official fiction and tabloid-style journals have seized reader attention. The not infrequent careerism of writers is nicely contrasted with their often exalted public image. The Chinese state, after all, has always been singularly effective in co-opting intellectuals.

The reemergence of entertainment fiction in the 1980s as a release for readers from their captivity as "receivers of education" (p. 302) is well observed—unsurprising, perhaps, from the masterly scholar who brought the "mandarin duck and butterfly" fiction of the first half of the last century to our attention. Link acknowledges the issue of measuring quality in such a changing literary scene (p. 318) and questions the simplistic nature of Western notions of monolithic Chinese media (p. 209).

There are some unexpected lapses in the book. Link seems to think that young Chinese factory workers lived in apartments rather than dormitories (e.g., p. 223). The controversial film still in Dazhong dianying in 1979 featured not Chinese actors, as Link asserts, but Richard Chamberlain as a romantic prince, as is clear in the reproduction on page...