by Jianying Zha
Wang gratefully resumed the life of a full-time writer. He had been, from day one, a reluctant bureaucrat. Despite a reputation of being “foxy” and “slippery,” he never felt he was temperamentally suited to be a high official. “I’m a straight man, I don’t mince my words when I talk, and I get excited easily.” When faced with the call of wielding brutal power to crush rivals or enemies, he admitted he was a “weakling.” “I simply can’t harden myself up to do it,” he said. Another anxiety was that the job would take too much time away from writing, which he was certain was his true calling. So he not only requested a three-year term limit, he also tried to keep on writing between official functions and while traveling. He would compose a few pages of fiction in the short interval between checking into a hotel room and going to a meeting. In this fashion he managed to publish a steady trickle of short stories and articles while serving as a minister.
Now a “civilian” again, he would rise early and go to his desk right after breakfast, composing without interruption until noon. In the next two decades he worked with joyous industriousness and produced a vast output: novels, short fiction, essays, criticism, verse, reviews, lectures, and autobiography. He even translated some John Cheever stories.
Some of his best nonfiction work came out of this period. Though his formal education ended after middle school, Wang is a prodigious, discerning reader with a gift for writing the kind of charming essay that combines erudition, analysis, and personal insight. In the early 1990s he turned his attention to classics and produced two series of widely admired essays, the first on the eighteenth-century masterpiece novel Dream of the Red Chamber and the other on the legendary late Tang poet Li Shangyin. Wang took on the famous texts with such fresh energy and scintillating intelligence that the pieces were a great pleasure to read. They also contained interesting insights on Chinese politics. Produced shortly after Tiananmen, it was apparent that Wang was delving into history to reveal deeply encrusted patterns of power and psychology and indirectly commenting on the contemporary. Ruthlessly clear-eyed yet compassionate, these essays reverberate between the past and the present China.
Wang also frequently reviewed the works of contemporary writers. These were broad-minded, judicious, thoughtful appraisals. Though chiefly a realist himself, Wang appreciated experimental writing and went out of his way to promote and help young Chinese modernists. But some of his most widely talked about essays were about high Party officials. One, for instance, was a commemoration of Hu Qiaomu, a Politburo member and propaganda chief with whom Wang had enjoyed a decade-long friendship. In Wang’s portrait, Hu comes across as a complex figure—at once an arrogant Party loyalist, a scared man, a persecutor, a protector, a harsh ideologue, and a talented man of aristocratic taste (Hu served as Mao’s secretary and composed many of Mao’s celebrated speeches and poems). Wang was candid about his own warm feelings, even gratitude, toward Hu, but didn’t flinch in his assessment of a man who spent his life as a devoted tool of Party propaganda. Chinese writing on such subjects has been either strident or evasive. Wang’s powerful, subtle portrayal was a breakthrough.
China’s landscape changed dramatically after 1992, the year Deng Xiaoping pushed for deeper marketization during his famous southern tour. As economic reform and growth accelerated, the Party enforced Deng’s “no debate” directive on the political front, muzzling the intellectuals and the media. While the population turned to the absorbing business of making money and accumulating wealth, literary journal circulations declined, as did college enrollments in the humanities fields. Intellectuals and writers, at the center of public discourse in the previous decade, splintered and scrambled to adapt: some built new careers and thrived in the marketplace, others grew anxious and felt lost.
It was a confusing, anxiety-ridden transition, and Wang, reemerging as a high-profile public figure, got himself in trouble repeatedly for his opinions. In 1994, when a reporter asked about his views of the Chinese Writers Association, Wang said that a system of writers living off the state has many problems. The remarks led to an immediate uproar among the many “professional writers” dependent on CWA stipends. How could Wang say this, they demanded, since he himself enjoyed the full VIP treatment of a former minister? As a matter of fact, ten years earlier, Wang had openly proposed to reform the CWA system by mixing reduced state support with market measures. Few had paid attention then, but the issue was explosive now that the government was cutting subsidies for so many state enterprises.
Wang also got involved in a debate known as “the loss of humanistic spirit” (人文精神失落). A group of Shanghai humanities professors fretted that rising consumerism was eroding social mores. Wang disagreed. He published a series of essays that eloquently defended the cultural diversity, market reform, and an end to China’s intolerant traditions in the name of utopia. He championed a hugely popular and controversial young novelist named Wang Shuo, whose “hooligan style” some had condemned as subversive. Throngs of scholars and writers joined in, but the debate was messy and confusing: many terms and ideas were so poorly defined that the discussants often argued with more emotion than clarity.
Then came the fateful battle of words that caused serious damage to Wang’s reputation. In 1994, a young Nanjing critic named Wang Binbin published an article, “The Too-Clever Chinese Writer.” Many Chinese writers, Wang Binbin contended, had welldeveloped survival skills but lacked the “bookish” courage to tell the truth when it was dangerous to do so. One of his examples was Wang Meng.
Wang flew into a rage. He fired off two essays right away, and one of them ended with four satirical poems. He rejected the demand for others to “be tragically strong” at all costs and at all times, and suggested that the young critic was attacking famous people, Red Guard-style, mainly in order to make his name. But Wang’s contemptuous tone grated.
His gravest miscalculation was his attack on Liu Xiaobo. In a piece entitled “Black Horse and Black Pony” (黑马与黑驹), Wang mocked Wang Binbin (the titular “black pony”) as a cheap copy of Liu, the “black horse” from the previous decade. Liu was a brave activist during the 1989 protests, and was put behind bars after the Tiananmen massacre. He spent the 1990s in and out of jail and labor camps. Kept under police surveillance and banned from teaching or publishing in China, he could write only for dissident magazines in Hong Kong or overseas, relegated to a shadowy existence in the marginalized dissident community.
In his essay, Wang mocked Liu ruthlessly:About ten years ago, a black horse appeared on the literary scene; he struck a majestic posture, as though he commanded the wind and clouds and could easily roll back ten thousand troops; he talked the grand talk of someone who considered himself original and everyone and everything beneath him; he killed in the east and hacked in the west, charging to the left and breaking to the right; he employed strong language to take reason under hostage, and wagged his tongue freely; he aimed especially at those who were famous and eminent to launch his attacks and hurl his curses, as though he was entering a no-man’s-land and a treasure chamber; he shouted his solitude while grabbing the megaphone, and he praised death as he invited fame and profits; his self-trumpeting and self-aggrandizement, his yelling and selling, have been mocked in private, but also attracted some eyeballs, and was even cheered on by a few youngsters who have always resented the famous and the eminent but were born too late to get a chance to put the tall paper hats on those heads and parade them at the street rallies.
After this caustic reference to the Cultural Revolution, Wang concluded, “He was a hero for a moment, but where is he now?”
The essay read like a piece he had dashed off quickly, surfing along with lithe dexterity and wit-laced panache, but the superior tone was chilling. How could Wang attack a political prisoner who was unable to speak publicly? And this while Tiananmen remained a big taboo and a deep scar in the national psyche. Many, including Wang Binbin, felt that Wang had sunk to character assassination. Several older writers came to Wang Meng
’s defense: it’s inappropriate, they argued, to demand truth-telling and self-sacrifice in absolute terms. But morally, the battle was already lost.
In Chinese cultural life, it was one of those moments of almost tectonic slippage, in which a fault line becomes a chasm. “Among young people, Wang Meng is finished,” a Beijing friend told me. “He really hurt their feelings.” In truth, Wang’s reputation among liberal intellectuals never fully recovered. The Shanghai scholar Zhu Xueqin tells me that he still finds the assault unforgivable. In Zhu’s mind, it was luojing xiashi (落井下石, dropping a stone over someone’s head after he falls into a well).
I had first met Liu in early 1991, at a small hot-pot meal celebrating his release from prison, and I recall the glee with which he mocked various cultural luminaries. There were raised voices after he told the fashionable young novelist at the table that the eminent critic who’d discovered and championed him was nothing but an ignorant trend-monger. He could be overbearing—even, at times, unbearable. But his critical lance was accompanied by genuine courage and political conviction. His role in Tiananmen wasn’t simply that of a cheerleader or provocateur: he tried to negotiate with the army for the students’ peaceful withdrawal from the square. And he may be the only Tiananmen leader who published a book exposing the movement’s moral failings, not least his own. In the same unsparing spirit that Wang wrote about intellectuals under Mao, Liu detailed the vanity, factionalism, self-aggrandizement, and antagonisms that beset the student activists and their intellectual compadres. He shed a harsh light on himself, analyzing his own complex motives: moral passion, opportunism, a yearning for glory and influence.
I have never discussed “Black Horse and Black Pony” with Liu or Wang. In the larger scheme of things, perhaps it could be shrugged off as merely one misfire. It was only one of many essays Wang dashed off on a series of interlinked debates. Yet the controversies evidently affected him deeply. More than a decade later, he wrote four chapters in a memoir about his arguments at the time. But he did not mention Wang Binbin or Liu Xiaobo by name. He said that back then his main fear was the recurring specter of the Cultural Revolution. On guard against any thinking that might push China back to the “ultra-leftist track,” he hastily defended market reforms and commercial trends, warts and all, as important steps forward for the nation. The cry over the “loss of humanistic spirit,” he thought, came out of those who felt marginalized in a new era, one that chased after the “material” rather than the “spiritual”—the latter being the traditional terrain of the intellectuals. He also recognized in this cry the specter of the Red Guard and the radical culture they grew up with, which, in his view, fed them with a narcissistic, inflated self-image as elite rebels. But after a century of critical destruction, Wang thought, it was now the time for construction. He was particularly incensed by the suggestion that China’s problems should be blamed on the lack of courageous martyrs among its intellectuals and writers, when so many of them had already been persecuted or executed, or had committed suicide. “Why are you so bloodthirsty? What about your own record?” he demanded. You could feel the heat hissing on the pages.
But Wang was also self-critical. He chided himself for rushing into these debates without a measure of sympathy for the other side. Why, he should understand that they are attached to their Red Guard youth just as he is attached to his underground Communist activist youth! He was too presumptuous and smug! He failed to see that the young people were fed up with him and his opinions! He had occupied the stage for too long!
In the end, Wang decided to “let it go”: “Some say good, some say bad. It’s absolutely normal. Most readers don’t care at all about these ink fights.”
He quoted Diderot to give himself a boost: “If I am attacked by everyone, I shall feel sad. If I am praised by everyone, I shall be too embarrassed to live on, because it would prove that I am a hypocrite.”
Although readers have become increasingly fascinated by his essays, Wang for a long time considered himself primarily a fiction writer. The measure of his writerly achievements, he seemed to think, largely depended on how his fiction work was regarded. So, shortly after he was released from official duties, he embarked on his most ambitious writing project: four interlinked novels he dubbed The Seasons Series (季节系列). It was a fictional chronicle of the People’s Republic of China, from its birth to the present era of reform, as experienced by his generation of revolutionary intellectuals. For the next decade, even as he traveled frequently and took part in periodical “ink battles,” Wang worked diligently on the novels, publishing them one by one until the last one came out in 2000.
The reception was lukewarm. The culture fever of the 1980s had given way to a focus on economic growth and entertainment. The rise of a lively pop culture—one increasingly drawn to the Internet and new media—further dampened public interest in serious fiction. But even among the literary community, The Seasons Series received mixed reviews. Critics complained that Wang’s narrative style, exuberant and witty at its best, has grown garrulous and showy. His language lacked polish and restraint. Descriptions and monologues were heaps of hyperbolic adjectives and set phrases, a murky torrent.
Once I was with Wang and Cui, she mentioned one of the Seasons novels and asked what I thought of it. Fumbling for a response, I said I hadn’t read it yet. It would have been more accurate to say I wasn’t able to finish it. Wang was quick to change the subject, but I could sense his disappointment. He clearly felt that the true value of these novels had not been understood. Nobody else, he felt, would have written about the Chinese revolutionary experiences with such candor and sympathy.
If you are wondering whether an important literary work has fallen victim to critical trends, here’s a sample from The Season of Carnival (狂欢的季节), taken from a long passage on Mao:He is memory, he is emotion, he is achievements, he is nightmare, he is struggle.... For the Chinese who tenaciously live on, he is their light and manto [bread], their hot pepper and grain liquor, their door god, their piperazine citrate and qigong . . .
. . . The old man’s Cultural Revolution really made a fine mess . . . with his own hands he destroyed the party he established, the country he established, the faith and the order he established, and then he destroyed the Proletarian Cultural Revolution he launched and led . . .
But after all, in the Chinese revolution and the world revolution, this was a people’s carnival, Mao Zedong’s poetic rhapsody. . . . It was a carnival of heroism and idealism, the thinking of the avantgarde. It was a carnival of willpower, of concept and language, of history created in search of a little new meaning.... Human life is a carnival—an experiment with the carnival, to be more precise.... Mao Zedong let the young people liberate themselves to the extreme for a time, got rid of all ropes and rules. It excited all of mankind, the entire world. It was a little cruel. But is all that obedience and rigidity not cruel to life and to youth? The Cultural Revolution was indeed thoroughly thrilling. That’s why the Berlin Wall was covered with West German Red Guards’ posters, and California’s Berkeley established the People’s Republic of Berkeley, and the French Culture Minister, the writer Malraux, greatly admired Mao Zedong, and later, many years later, the boxing fans all over the world watched on live television: Tyson tattooed his arm with a portrait of Mao. . . .
Okay, my rendering of the original into English is less than satisfying. Still, what is this? Nuggets of insight? Brilliance and complexity? Or is it a hodgepodge of pop philosophy in a bad novel? Setting aside the overwrought prose, what is the reader to make of the suggestion that the Cultural Revolution was just “a little cruel”?
A Cheng, a leading contemporary Chinese novelist widely admired for his elegant language and laconic style, once told me, “Mao is China’s Hitler,” and he is far from the only one to think so. In fact, since the death toll under Mao’s rule far exceeded Hitler’s genocide, it may be argued that Mao was far worse than Hitler. By some accounts, the 30 to 45 million deaths during the
1960-62 famine (mainly caused by Mao’s policies) surpassed the total death toll of all famines in Chinese history. “The most intolerable thing about Mao was not his ideal,” said A Cheng, “but that he took hostage of an entire population and used the lives of ordinary Chinese people in pursuit of his ideals.” Although a lot of data and forthright public criticism of Mao is still forbidden—the Party’s legitimacy is still bound up with him—many consider him a cynical despot and his rule the greatest catastrophe in Chinese history.
And then there is the havoc he wrought on Chinese culture and language. Many Chinese intellectuals use the term Mao wenti (毛文体, Maospeak) to refer to the kind of official language typified by People’s Daily editorials and CCP propaganda slogans. They held Mao responsible for violating the elegant, refined Mandarin vernacular with this crude, strident language of the new state, the language of the proletarian dictatorship that is full of hubris and lies. Some contend that, after decades of communist rule, Mao wenti has seriously and pervasively contaminated Chinese writing, like a linguistic poison, which partly explains why there has been no great literature since 1949.