by Liu Xiaobo
The mysterious fusion of political taboo and clandestine eroticism found an even deeper and more artistic expression in Wang Xiaobo’s novel Golden Age. The most affecting part of this story is the description of the life of the main character, Second Wang, a young urbanite who is sent to the countryside during the Mao Zedong era. The great dictator had directed that these “rusticated youth,” as they were called, “receive re-education from the poor, low, and middle peasants.” But part of what they actually learned was the rudiments of sexual awakening—plain, coarse, unrestrained, and laced with the excitement of consuming forbidden fruit. High school students who had not quite dared to hold hands in the city, once they answered the call of the Great Leader and went to the countryside, with its “communal living” and militaristic “brigades,” suddenly found themselves in close proximity and with nothing to relieve the boredom except the presence of the opposite sex. Feelings of shame or wrongdoing associated with sex melted away. This led Wang Xiaobo to describe those “broad open skies,” where rusticated youth were supposed to “do great things,” as their place to “do great sex.” The empty fields of rural China provided a wide-open playground for a generation of young people who were escaping years of sexual repression in the cities. In the Mao era, sentimental love among spoiled urbanites had been viewed as part of a “capitalist lifestyle” that had to be eliminated.
Secret sex was an even more monstrous crime, especially for a woman. Caught in a “private connection,” a woman could be labeled a “broken shoe,” and there was nothing more despicable than that. As they prepare for sex out in the fields, Second Wang and Chen Qingyang, the male and female protagonists of Wang Xiaobo’s Golden Age, discuss the question of “broken shoes.” The local people already view Chen as a broken shoe, but she can set the label aside. (She was not a broken shoe, by the way, until Second Wang’s sexual aggression made her one.) Political prohibitions and ethical prejudices could still cause fear, but the thrill of eating forbidden fruit always remained as a counterweight.
Before the Cultural Revolution, no one would ever have dared to call the wife of a top leader a “broken shoe”; but during the Cultural Revolution, Red Guards hung a sign reading “Broken Shoe” around the neck of Wang Guangmei, wife of President Liu Shaoqi, who had come under vicious attack from Mao Zedong. When the Cultural Revolution was over, Liu Shaoqi and his widow were officially exonerated, and around the same time the term “broken shoe” also began to lose its connotation of evil. It became almost morally acceptable, and could even be applied to positive characters in novels. The change seemed to usher in an era of indulgence in which “sex” was redefined. The “broken shoe” label that people had once avoided like the plague had turned into a middle-class dream of prowling for “new shoes.” On popular television shows on the mainland today, it is easy to hear lines like this: “Marriage is like a pair of shoes. Only those who wear them once or twice can tell if they really fit.”
2. Enjoyment of Eros in the 1990s
In the nineties, popular culture came increasingly to be dominated and controlled by the market, and this spelled the end of its utility in undermining Party culture. Elite cultural figures, in pursuit of profit, rushed to join the new commercial culture, and as a result popular culture and Party culture began to converge. On the one hand, Party culture began more and more to rely on the trappings of pop culture to bring its messages to audiences. In an era of rising prosperity, the political dictatorship had special new needs for commercial entertainment with which to decorate its “happy” new order. And for its part, popular culture needed increasingly to rely on an authoritarian marketplace; it needed the major official media as platforms on which to sell its wares. Obsequiousness became the key to success in the mainland culture business. Each year the Party threw its extravaganza for Lunar New Year, and entertainers fell over themselves to appear on the show because they knew it was the biggest of possible stages on which to advertise themselves. At the same time, the sexual elements in cultural products, which originally had to have at least a bit of political flavor, began to lose all of it and became out-and-out sex for sex’s sake.
On January 26, 1991, I left Qincheng Prison in Beijing [having served a nineteen-month sentence for “counterrevolutionary instigation”—Ed.] and was escorted back to my home city of Dalian. When I got off the train, and was browsing through the book stalls near the station, an especially eye-catching magazine cover grabbed my attention. It showed a beautifully curvaceous nude woman, semi-reclined. The caption below read “Hot Enough to Wake the Dead.” Headlines on some of the other covers read “Exposé of China’s Biggest Sex Abuse Cases,” “Secrets of the Oral Fixation,” “Perverts Wandering Our Campuses,” “An Overwhelming Lust for BDSM,” and “I’ll Tell You the Secrets of Enjoying Sex.” There was even a headline for “Mao Zedong and His Second Wife He Zizhen.”
I was astonished. This was less than two years after the Tiananmen Massacre; Deng Xiaoping had not yet made his 1993 “Southern Tour,” which is normally viewed as the event that opened a second round of economic reform and restimulated China’s material appetites; the government was still shouting itself hoarse about “opposing liberalization and peaceful evolution [toward a Western model—Ed].” Two of the main points in the ongoing campaign to “oppose liberalization” were to squelch the private economy and to wipe out pornography. But as the books and magazines on the stands before my eyes quite clearly showed, the anti-pornography campaign had been useless. Not only had nothing been wiped away, pornography had grown wildly and had now far exceeded where it had been in the 1980s. Later, browsing through other book markets in Dalian and Beijing, I learned that nothing was selling better than sex and violence; a third kind of best-selling materials focused on secrets of the private lives of top Communist officials.
During the same years the works of the “serious authors” moved toward the sensationalism of “sex literature,” and the response was thunderous. Jia Pingwa’s Abandoned Capital and Chen Zhongshi’s White Deer Plain, both published in 1993, were big hits. Zhang Yimou’s film Judou (1990) spotlighted “incestuous passion,” and his Raise the Red Lantern (1991) laid bare the rampant jealousies among a bevy of wives and concubines and, under the dim light of red lanterns, their toe-curling sexual climaxes as well. The new prurience was visible even in the way the adultery theme in the American novel The Bridges of Madison County captured the imaginations of countless middle-aged wives in China. An uglier manifestation was the way the mainland media ballyhooed the news story from New Zealand about how the Misty poet Gu Cheng murdered his wife and then killed himself.
Cases such as these can be viewed as a roaring revival of Chinese literati traditions of “sex interest” among long-repressed mainlanders. Serious literature became the site of an “erotic carnival” within the newly emerging commercial culture. Passion for topics like adultery, incest, and polygamy, and exquisite appreciation of the finer points of extramarital love came to pervade the sexual cravings of the educated elite. The scholar-official’s desire for more than one wife was imaginatively transformed into the desire for a palatial home in which a red lantern would be lit each night. It is hard not think of the great seventeenth-century erotic novel The Plum in the Golden Vase, the late-Ming popular stories of Feng Menglong, or the modern fiction of Eileen Chang or Zhang Henshui.
The scholar-official’s dream for more than one wife could turn into real-life tragedy. Gu Cheng had both a wife and a mistress, but when the mistress left him and his wife asked for a divorce, his life fell apart. Anxiety—or call it madness—overwhelmed him and he murdered his wife with an axe and then killed himself. And what was the response of the mainland media to these events? It was to stir up a whirlwind of prurient interest. No one looked squarely at the brutal murder, or took the side of the murdered wife, Xie Ye. The spin was to see Gu Cheng as a romantic poet who “died for love.” A few people actually took advantage of the media frenzy to promote themselves. These included Gu Cheng’s mi
stress, a former lover of the mistress, and even Gu Cheng’s father, the poet Gu Gong. In popular lore a murder case—a husband had killed a wife—turned into a tale of love’s purity, and then into best-selling books that brought fame and riches to certain people.
3. A Carnival of Flesh in the Twenty-First Century
At the turn of the twenty-first century, women writers took over from men as the leading writers of eros. Even before the appearance of the “pretty-girl writers,” Lin Bai, a woman, made a splash by describing sexual experience among very young girls. Then the middle-aged writers Zhang Kangkang and Tie Ning began to publish erotic stories like “Love Gallery” and Woman of the Great Bath that became best-sellers. An Dun’s Absolute Secrets, purporting to record unfiltered accounts of female sexual experience, was popular for a time as well. But it was the younger generation of “pretty-girl writers” who hit the jackpot by “writing the body.”
The first of these was Wei Hui, author of Shanghai Baby (1999), which exposed the name-brand panties of a beautiful upper-middle-class girl while attesting to the special strength and vigor of foreigners’ erections. Drawing on old, colonial Shanghai, Wei Hui captures the mood of “good liquor and strong coffee”; drawing on the new Shanghai, she adds the pleasures of sex that were available to white-collar types in the toilets of bars. Sex in Wei Hui is a completely Westernized thing. Everything about the female protagonist, from her routine daily life to her pursuits of pleasure, is a knockoff of Western “cool”: Western brand-name clothes envelop her body; Western-style bars absorb her night life; Western-style music sets her moods; Western-style decadence marks her decline. Even the ways she has sex—her excitements, her orgasms—are the products of a Western lover. In the end, the ultimate expression of her self-love comes from lesbians—who are also foreigners. At each chapter head there is a quotation from a Western author, poet, philosopher, nun … The feeling I get from reading her book is rather like recovering from a Valentine’s Day of debauchery at a mainland Chinese bar.
In the novel Candy (2000), pretty-girl writer Mian Mian howls out an extended erotic confession and introduces us to the sensual landscape of Beijing’s Sanlitun bar street and the southern boom-city of Shenzhen. We meet young bohemians and celebrities of the rock music world, sex predators and lonely white-collar beauties, all accompanied by wild music inside the black night, sipping Western liquor and coffee, and shooting illegal drugs. The pleasures of casual flirting and one-night stands produce a decadent, hippie-esque mood. The sexual indulgences of this social elite included a reversal of the classic pattern of “the old ox eating tender grass,” i.e., the male-dominated tradition of rich old men looking for fresh-faced girls. Now, in China’s age of prosperity, there were also rich old women looking for virgin boys to educate; in some bars, the customers who kept coming back hunting for sex were wealthy middle-aged women. By this time, fleshly desire and spiritual decadence had lost the quality of rebellion against official ideology that it had had in the 1980s; now it was just hedonism, hedonism, and more hedonism.
After Candy came the autobiographical work Crow by Jiu Dan. Her crude style and subpar narrative ability put her a world beneath Mian Mian and Wei Hui, but that did not stop the press from touting her as another of the pretty-girl writers. Jiu Dan had nothing to offer readers beyond a raw exposé of the lifestyle of mainland prostitutes in Singapore, peppered occasionally with some reflections on the hardships of selling flesh in a foreign country. Jiu Dan hyped her book with the phrase “the absolute truth” and considered the “contrived flesh” of other pretty-girl writers to be beneath contempt.
While Wei Hui, Mian Mian, and Jiu Dan were trying to outdo one another to be the best pretty-girl writer, another competitor, Muzi Mei, came reeling across the sky and made them all look pale by comparison. Muzi Mei’s online publication Love Letters Left Behind lays all her private secrets bare, with special attention to the lower quarters. In diary form, she records the whole process—all the techniques, and every one of her squirms and groans—with all the men who have visited her bed. She rates each one for sexual ability and skill, and in one case even supplies the name of a male musician she has slept with. In the “Zippergate” case of former American president Clinton, it seems that the pressure of public opinion is what forced the woman, Monica Lewinsky, to release the evidence of semen on her dress; Muzi Mei, by contrast, is quite open about exposing every trace of her sexual activity to everyone on the Internet. The sex craze that Muzi Mei kicked off was enough to attract even China Central Television; its program Moral Observer interviewed Muzi Mei, allowing her to explain her obsession with one-night stands in terms of “human nature.”
These pretty-girl writers, engaged as they were in a “flesh-writing competition,” disparaged one another in interviews, and their squabbling itself became a hot topic in the press. Just as victory in battle goes to the brave, the relative stature of these writers in the public eye turned on whose self-exposure was most daring, most naked, most truthful. Each new arrival on the scene had to—and did—outdare the last. Muzi Mei’s sex diary eclipsed what had gone before, and the year 2003 went out as “the year of Muzi Mei.” She once quipped, “If a male reporter wants to interview me, he first needs to come to my bed; the number of minutes his love-making can last is the number of minutes he’ll have for questions.”
Not long after Muzi Mei’s interview on Central Television, a woman who said she was a graduate student emerged under the alluring bourgeois-romantic pen name “Green Eyes in Bamboo Shadows.” She had been writing on the Internet for some time, but had got nowhere in attracting readers. Now, inspired by Muzi Mei’s lower-body writing, she opted for a more radical method of body exposure—uploading nude photos of herself to the Internet. But this young litterateur still seemed a tad timid: she covered her sex with a palm leaf and cropped her head from the photos, leaving only her svelte limbs for view. It was just like a line from the poem “Song of the Lute Player” by Bai Juyi (772–846 CE): “Yet half-hiding her face with her lute.” The coy occlusion only accentuated the sex appeal, of course. The headlessness and the palm leaf lent a certain air of mystery, a space for the accommodation of sexual fantasy from netizens. What kind of face went with this body? Did the body really belong to “Green Eyes in Bamboo Shadows,” or was it a transplant from elsewhere? Is the missing part the face of an angel, or the stare of a frog?
Pornographic writing on the Internet has actually gone well beyond what the pretty-girl writers have done. It is easy to find examples that are more bald, brazen, and perverse; it’s just that the media have not made as much of them. The writers who use the pen names “Little Spiffy” and “Your Slave,” for example, have many works on group sex and mother–son incest. “Bourgeois-Bohemian” tells us about drugged rapes, peeping Toms, wife-swapping, incest, bestiality, science fiction sex, and more. Some specialize in “old men and virgins,” others in “old women and boys.” One has a special skill for depicting young men infatuated with women over 45. Many address the hot topic of sex between rich city men and young housekeepers from the countryside. Such works offer a smorgasbord of extras as well: drug fantasies, violent conquests, sadomasochism, and fetishes for feces and other excretions. There is even pornography written as children’s stories.
Many of these authors are masters of producing works in series. Critics divide them into different schools: the “promiscuity school” that specializes in wild oats and incest; the “brute school” that focuses on sadomasochism and other violence; the “exchange school” that covers adultery, multiple partners, and wife-swapping; and the “fantasy school” that explores sexual fantasies (science fiction sex fits here). Another way they are categorized is by fictional setting: “the campus school,” “the officialdom school,” “the marketplace school,” “the martial arts school,” and more. Erotic literature on the Internet now has its own set of critical prizes. There are prizes for best author, best new author, most improved author, most popular author, best work (long- and
short-form), and most innovative work. There are awards for contribution to the community and for cumulative achievement. All of this activity happens on privately managed websites. The circulation of works, the commentary, and the critical prizes have nothing to do with the government.
The Pretty-Girl Economy Blossoms Everywhere
On television and in other media, literary descriptions of the female body have turned into the exposure of bodies on screens. The “pretty-girl economy” of the early twenty-first century is not just underground sex services at dance halls, hair salons, and expensive hotels; it reaches far beyond that. Commercial advertisements of all kinds adorn themselves with pictures of beautiful women, and girls in pursuit of overnight fame rush to big cities looking for opportunities. Packs of young women register for schools in the performing arts, pushing tuition at such places ever higher. “Star classes” that fraudulently promise entrées to stardom have popped up everywhere. Women who have had sex with famous directors and producers, and then have felt cheated when their expected rewards did not arrive, have sometimes decided that indignation outweighs embarrassment and revealed all. One of these women let the world know about director Huang Jianzhong and demanded compensation for his failed commitments to her. Another woman, named Gu, took Zhao Zhongxiang to court, also demanding that he compensate her for the payment she made to him with her body.
Turn on TV today and you can find a cornucopia of slim bodies and pretty faces: innumerable beauty contests, fashion model contests, singing contests, and “Super Girl” contests—all vying for viewers. The honored male guests who bestow the awards (mostly high officials, rich businessmen, or celebrities of the entertainment world) have beautiful young girls on their arms. The contestants on stage wear less and less clothing, ever thinner and more revealing, and add flirtatious speech and coy body language.