Visualizing Modern China: Image, History, and Memory, 1750–Present
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Telescope #2: Yeren in Danger, Modernization to Blame
The Legendary Yeren Becomes Endangered
Pandas were not the only symbols of endangered wilderness to emerge during the mid- to late-1970s. In 1974, a local official in the mountainous region of Shennongjia in western Hubei Province (bordering Sichuan) began documenting sightings of mysterious creatures called yeren.27 Literally “wild people,” yeren are similar to North America’s Bigfoot and the yeti of the Himalaya. They have been known by many names in different times and places in Chinese history. Never, however, had the creatures received as much systematic attention as they did beginning in the late-1970s. As the restrictions of the Cultural Revolution loosened, an explosion of popular science books and magazines provided an ideal medium for spreading stories of yeren encounters. And with the renewed “friendship” between the U.S. and China, scientists and science hobbyists alike were exposed to the sizable literature on Bigfoot then sweeping the United States by storm.
In 1977, reports of yeren sightings in Shennongjia spurred scientists at key institutions to organize large-scale scientific expeditions reminiscent of those deployed the previous year on behalf of the starving pandas. In addition to ecologists and zoologists, paleoanthropologists were mobilized: their job was to determine whether yeren represented living descendants of the fossil anthropoid ape Gigantopithecus and thus a kind of “missing link” in the human family tree. Scientists worked with local people to interview peasant eyewitnesses, collect material evidence, and, most importantly, hunt for a live specimen. The hope of finding a living yeren was strong enough that a sculptor accompanied the expeditions with artistic skills poised to capture the creature’s likeness.28
Throughout the Mao era, the state had sought to use science to assert its control over an unruly nature—to tame nature’s violent temper and harness its valuable resources.29 The militaristic and authoritarian response to yeren reports in the early years perpetuated the notion that science should conquer nature (Figure 14.6, see website). Yeren trackers carried guns and were prepared to use them, and in the early expeditions a large number of soldiers accompanied the scientific teams. If some scientists doubted the existence of yeren, local people were ready to step up to the plate to bring in the evidence, dead or alive. One yeren hunter, Li Guohua, set off in 1977 to kill a yeren, bring its head to the scientific institute, and ask the scientists whether they still harbored doubts.30
Yeren also represented another kind of wildness that the state sought to subdue. Not only did rural people perceive them as dangerous in the manner of wild animals, but the state also saw a hazard in the “superstitious” stories rural people told about them. Scientists and state officials hoped to demonstrate that the supernatural creatures of legend were in fact respectable members of the primate order. This would strike a blow for modern science over “primitive superstition.”31 Thus, the initial responses to the yeren sightings often reflected firmly entrenched antagonisms both to the wilderness of nature and to the wildness of culture.
At the same time, however, a very different attitude toward yeren was emerging. The state response to the 1976 panda crisis had created an interest among scientists in rare animals and wilderness. Scientific research and writing transformed yeren from frightening monsters in peasant folklore into a precious and vulnerable species in need of state protection.
Pandas were clearly very much in the minds of the scientists conducting investigations into yeren. One biology professor noted that people had discovered fossils of pandas and of Gigantopithecus in the same areas, what he termed an “ancient ‘panda-Gigantopithecus belt.’” He suggested that the survival of Gigantopithecus through the eons could likely be explained in much the same way biologists explained the persistence of pandas: both had adapted to changing nutritional resources. Like pandas, he continued, Gigantopithecus (or yeren) were now on the verge of extinction. Protecting them was “an issue of great international significance in terms of politics, philosophy, and science.”32 Similarly, another scientist cited the possibility that yeren lived in Shennongjia as a compelling reason to create a nature reserve there.33 While there were many other good reasons to do so (including the existence of golden monkeys in the area), talk of yeren certainly added to the excitement over the idea, and in 1983 the reserve gained official approval. Such calls to save from extinction a creature whose very existence was not yet proven demonstrated the change in scientists’ and officials’ views of the wilderness that had taken place with the 1976 panda crisis.
Putting the Wild back in Wilderness
In other ways, however, yeren were quite different from the pandas who shared their battle with extinction. Yeren were neither cuddly like healthy pandas, nor weak and dependent like sick pandas. Even when perceived as endangered, they remained dangerous and wild. The cover of a book of short stories published in 1988 vividly demonstrates the way beauty, savagery, and power could come together in popular yeren imagery (Figure 14.7). When it came to celebrating the wild in wilderness, nothing was quite so powerful as yeren.
As symbols of the past, the primitive, and the wild, yeren offered a formidable challenge to modern civilization in general, and to the Deng state in particular. Using yeren to reflect on savagery was a means of re-envisioning the Four Modernizations as threatening to nature. The wilderness became a way of examining modern civilization and finding it wanting.
By the mid-1980s, writers of elite and popular literature began identifying in yeren a potent symbol of primitive purity in contradistinction to the ravages of modern society. The most famous of these was Gao Xingjian, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2000. His 1985 play Yeren captured the emerging significance of the creatures for Deng-era Chinese society, and his later novel Soul Mountain (Lingshan) expanded on some of these themes. Gao and other writers did not dwell on the yeren as savage beasts or dangerous superstitions; rather, they highlighted the yeren’s primitive human qualities and the ancient wisdom that legends about them preserved.
Figure 14.7 The cover of a book of short stories including Song Youxing’s 1985 story “A Yeren Seeks a Mate.” From: Zi Feng, ed. Yeren qiu ou ji [A yeren seeks a mate] (Beijing: Zhongguo minjian wenyi chubanshe, 1988).
In a short story by Song Youxing, “A Yeren Seeks a Mate” (Yeren qiu ou ji), first published in 1985, a female yeren abducts a human man to sire her child (Figure 14.7). When the man escapes with the child, the yeren dies of a broken heart. The use of a “wild person” as a symbol of human sentiment was striking to contemporary readers, who wrote letters to the author about their emotional reactions. A “single male” reader found the female yeren to surpass the human women of his experience in womanly virtue, while a “woman worker” said she “really empathized with this warm-hearted yeren girl.”34 One published review even criticized Song for making “the yeren seem more human than the human.”35
Yet this was precisely the strength of yeren symbolism. As “wild people,” yeren served as perfect subjects for exploring humanity and civilization. When the protagonist of Gao Xingjian’s novel Soul Mountain arrived in Shennongjia in the early 1980s, he wondered, “when the world is becoming increasingly incomprehensible, where man and mankind’s behavior is so strange that humans don’t know how humans should behave, why are they looking for the Wild Man [yeren].”36 An answer may be found in Zhou Liangpei’s 1986 poem “I Am Yeren” (Wo shi yeren), in which the yeren “I” tells the reader: “If we look at one another, we will see who still retains a tail / You are my bright mirror, and I am yours.”37
Yeren helped all three of these writers to reflect on social and political values. The suitability of yeren as a “bright mirror” lay first of all in their own primitiveness and thus their immunity from the evils associated with “civilization.” But it lay also in the connection between yeren and the “traditional” cultures that had preserved them in legend.38 Zhou Liangpei’s poem frequently refers to yeren through such images of the distant past as “the history book,
” “the life fixed in prehistory yet still living today,” and “the not-yet-civilized wildness.” Evoking the Daoist classics, he explained, “I only fear that people’s hearts are not ancient; it is a modern anxiety / The search for searching often resides in returning to the origin / The art of art often resides in going back to truth.”39 Gao Xingjian was engaged in a similar search for origins when he wrote Yeren. A character in the play gave voice to Gao’s concern for mountain shamans whose rituals Gao associated with “the origins of Chinese theatre.” “These days sorcerers are a rare commodity. If we want to understand the past, we must respect them and try to understand their ways. Like Wild Men, they are dying out fast.”40 Another character suggested: “We could link [yeren] with mankind’s evolution and countless folktales and legends and help to explain these myths. Perhaps we can give a new lease of life to some of those old stories, and . . .” At this point, we are told, the speaker’s “excitement turns to sorrow.”41 Gao feared that legends themselves faced extinction. If rehabilitating them through science was their best hope for survival, this was a sad state of affairs.
Intellectuals in the Deng era widely shared the interest Zhou and Gao expressed in primitivism, and changes in official policy regarding minority nationalities actually encouraged it. While still pursuing assimilation, officials began once again to encourage ethnic minorities to identify as such by wearing traditional dress and speaking their mother tongues (although only in addition to standard Mandarin).42 Accompanying this policy change was an intellectual movement known as “roots-searching” (xungen). In the late 1970s and early 1980s, the arts of minority nationalities inspired an artistic renaissance. Han Chinese filmmakers and novelists of the 1980s also eagerly tapped the subject of minority nationalities, whose “primitive” lives appeared to offer far more freedom than modern society permitted.43 For writers like Zhou and Gao, yeren’s wildness and association with “primitive” cultures evoked a similar sense of freedom. Sex played a big part in this primitivism: Han people delighted in imagining the liberal sexuality of minority nationalities, and yeren imagery likewise reflected this interest, which is apparent in recurrent fictional and scientific references to female yeren breasts, in addition to the vivid depictions of voluptuous yeren in images like Figure 14.7.
The use of yeren to question “civilization” from the perspective of “wild people” was one link between the romantic primitivism of roots searching and the seeds of an environmental movement in China. In Gao Xingjian’s play, yeren served as spokespeople for the forests. In one telling moment, an ecologist responds to news of a logging road under construction by asking, “What would our Wild Man think about that?”44 Zhou Liangpei’s poem echoed this concern. He spoke of Shennongjia as “trees full of ancient mosses” threatened by the “felling circle pressing closer.” He warned, “Cutting down [trees], capturing [wild animals], the great mountain falls into a terror from which it has no power to save itself.”45
Yeren trackers have also come to work directly for environmental protection. Li Guohua and Yuan Yuhao both participated as lay members of the 1970s yeren investigations; both went on to work for the Shennongjia nature reserve (Li as a photographer and popular science writer, and Yuan as a ranger). In the years yeren tracker Zhang Jinxing has spent camping in the wilderness in pursuit of his quarry, he has increasingly modeled himself explicitly on Jane Goodall, both in his immersion style of research and his commitment to educating the public about the importance of saving the wilderness (Figure 14.8).46
Figure 14.8 Posed with a camera and hiding in the brush, yeren tracker Zhang Jinxing is blurring the distinction between seeker and quarry, human and yeren. The photograph, by Sahid Maher, appeared in Anne Loussouarn, “What’s Out in the Woods?”, City Weekend, trial issue (2000), 9. City Weekend is a popular newspaper for foreign residents of Beijing. Zhang Jinxing’s appearance in an “expat” newspaper, together with the many articles about the North American Bigfoot in post-Mao books and magazines, testify to the transnational character of cultural phenomenon of interest in yeren/yeti/Bigfoot.
For many of the most devoted yeren hunters and popularizers, saving the environment has come to mean saving themselves, and searching for yeren has meant searching for their own souls. The poet Zhou Liangpei sought a “primeval soul not stained by the dirt of custom.” Zhou and others found such a soul by returning to nature. Li Guohua, who in the late-1970s claimed to want to kill a yeren and bring its head to the scientific institute, said a decade later: “My life came from nature, and I might end my life going back to nature. It’s as if my soul has been possessed by nature, possessed by yeren.”47 Nature offered a space away from the troubles of civilization to find oneself again. “In the pathless forest, to be lost does not count as being lost,” said the poet Zhou Liangpei.48 Zhang Jinxing has foresworn shaving his beard until he finds a yeren; his increasingly wild appearance adds to the jokes (which he encourages) that he has himself become the very thing he seeks (Figure 14.8).49
Yeren thus reversed the accepted civilized/savage binary. The all-too-human capacity for destruction was labeled “savage,” and people were called upon to reshape themselves in the image of nature—as caretakers of the forest that once sheltered our tree-dwelling ancestors. To quote once more from the poem “I am Yeren”: “I seek your protection, you seek my shelter / Heaven and earth are inverted and spinning in karmic retribution.”
History: One Picture or Many?
Pandas and yeren offer two “telescopes” through which to view the Deng-era Chinese wilderness and the Four Modernizations. Both reveal a perspective that wilderness has inherent value. This is a perspective quite different from earlier attitudes that characterized nature as a force to be conquered or a set of resources to be exploited. But beyond this shared recognition of the value of wilderness, the two views are very different. Through the first telescope, representing mainly state-sponsored documents on endangered pandas, we initially see a robust state using modern science and market economics to steward China and its wild pandas through the end of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first. This is a “high modernist” vision: modern political, scientific, and economic structures can make the world a better place. When we sharpen the focus, however, we begin to see a flaw: over-eager to engage in entrepreneurial economics, the state fell prey to corruption. Through the second telescope, representing mainly popular science and literary writings on the legendary yeren, a very different picture emerges. We see environmentalists critical of the state’s emphasis on modernization. They claim that economic development threatens to destroy the wilderness, leaving people spiritually bereft. In place of modernization, they call for people to embrace the pure, primitive, and liberating values symbolized by yeren. Thus, if we look only at the writings on yeren, the Deng era appears not as a time of “high modernism” but as a renaissance of primitivism.
What does it tell us about the historian’s craft if every time we look at a different case we get a different perspective on history? To begin with, it indicates that historical sight is limited by the subjective perspectives of the people we study and by the historians’ subjective decisions about what cases to select. Does this mean that history is inevitably subjective? We will close by offering two possible answers to this question, which represent two common philosophies about history.
Some historians would suggest that by bringing together our two cases (the pandas and the yeren), we arrive at a more reliable understanding of the Deng era. This would be like taking two telescopes and creating a single pair of binoculars. The advantage of binoculars is the advantage of having two eyes instead of one. The resulting stereoscopic vision provides a wider field of view and also makes possible depth perception, replacing a flat image with a view in three dimensions. Similarly, some historians would argue that by bringing two cases together we can achieve the stereoscopic vision necessary for a more complete picture of history. We could bring together the view of modernism (from the panda case) and the v
iew of primitivism (the yeren case) and conclude that only in historical periods dominated by the drive to modernize do people seek solace in the so-called “primitive.” Thus the apparent contradiction between the modern and the primitive is actually the very essence of modernism.
But other historians would disagree, saying that the two visions are irreconcilable: through the panda telescope, we see nature as a state management project, and through the yeren telescope we see nature as a refuge from the very notion of state management.50 They would conclude that the two different pictures reflect the enormous gaps between the perspectives found in state-produced sources and those in sources authored by intellectuals critical of the state. This is an increasingly common way of thinking about history, which denies that we can ever get beyond the many individual stories and arrive at one coherent, inclusive account. Supporters of this idea might propose replacing the “binoculars” metaphor with that of the kaleidoscope: our view of history shifts depending on what we look at and how we position ourselves.
Your answer to this question may well depend on how you see history—as a single, knowable entity, or as an elusive changeling that appears differently to each who seeks it.
notes
1. We thank Jeremy Brown for suggesting this language.
2. Archival forestry documents from Sichuan Province and Pingwu County between February and April of 1976.
3. Guo An, “Wo guo zui da de dongwu yuan—Beijing dongwu yuan,” Renmin ribao [hereafter, RMRB], May 6, 1956: 3; Zhou Jianren, “Guanyu xiongmao” [About pandas], RMRB, July 6, 1956: 8.
4. Sichuan sheng, Pingwu xian, Geming weiyuanhui, “Guanyu baohu da xiongmao de jiji tongzhi” [Urgent notice concerning protecting giant pandas], Pingge fa 76, no. 12, February 10, 1976, 1; Jiang Tingan, “Zai da xiongmao de guxiang” [In panda country], Bowu 3 (November 1980): 15.