Internet Literature in China by Michel Hockx (review)

Amid the unwavering global interest in the ways the Internet transgresses boundaries in postsocialist China, a systematic book-length study of Internet literature in China, which offers a refreshing look into how the literary intersects with the political and moral aspects of the postsocialist state, seems timely indeed. Michel Hockx, author of Questions of Style: Literary Societies and Literary Journals in Modern China, 1911–1937, has shifted his focus from the modern to the contemporary period. The spirit, however, has remained the same—his new study is yet another meticulous inquiry into what might be the most conspicuous literary phenomenon of a China that is forever changing and renewing itself—only that this time he tackles the widespread presence and enormous, albeit transient, popularity of Internet literature, made possible by the emergence of new media technologies since the 1990s. Combining a self-conscious sociological approach with the latest techniques of web archiving and preservation, Hockx traces, over the span of more than a decade, the rise, development, and what he perceives as the ongoing decline of Chinese Internet literature. The result is this interdisciplinary study of the complex phenomenon of China’s Internet literature, which promises to fill in a significant gap of worldwide scholarly debate on the country’s postsocialist condition.

The introduction successfully situates the study in three crucial areas of scholarly research: the global research on electronic literature, China and the Internet, and postsocialism. After a critical literature review, Hockx demonstrates how his study fits in and contributes to ongoing debate on postsocialism, for “the postsocialist condition is nowhere more recognizable than on the Internet” (p. 17). In the chapters that follow, the author examines literary experimentation carried out in a variety of forms on the Internet including chronicle diary, narrative poetry, microblog writing, erotic fiction, and sinophone poetry, and in so doing reveals the aesthetic, moral, and sociopolitical implications of Internet literature. With firsthand materials collected from interviews and systematic archiving, the author is able to incorporate into his panoramic overviews well-founded case studies as he examines the ingenious literary efforts by writers from the famous such as Chen Cun to the relatively obscure like Wen huajian, and from the serious and highly experimental like Yao Dajun to what might be termed the obscene and the vulgar such as Datui (Thigh).

One of the book’s greatest strengths lies in the easily discerned sociological approach that informs the literary research. The author’s interest, it must be recognized, goes beyond literary texts per se to touch upon online websites’ underlying mechanisms and the ways in which they operate and interact with different actors, both institutional and individual, to sustain their business models. In particular, Hockx pays special attention to the state regulatory context, the legal environment, the existing publishing system, and moral censorship. The case study helps reveal the diverse, specific ways in which Internet literature transgresses limits—from the artistic and the stylistic to the technological, from the moral to the social and the political. In the end, the book demonstrates how Internet literature in postsocialist China brings about literary innovation while at the same time maneuvering and interrogating publishing norms, pushing the limits of the country’s publication regime, moral sensibilities as well as literary consensus.

The range of websites and forums, types of writings, and groups of writers tracked and covered in this book seem to be something close to overwhelming; the author’s approach, however, is highly selective in terms of the kinds of genres and authors he chooses to deal with or leave out. Some very popular genres of Internet literature such as science fiction and the martial arts fiction, for instance, do not receive analysis in this volume, and the latest, promising developments to move Internet literature into the realm of mobile apps, which are in fact becoming increasingly popular with young people in China today, as the author observes, are mentioned only briefly, leaving room for future researchers on this exciting topic.

Throughout the...