Afterword

Afterword

As I finished compiling this anthology and closed the manuscript, the line of verse that Professor Kong Qingdong quotes in his preface came back to me: "Toward the unpolluted distance— / set out." The hundred-odd essays gathered here are the footprints left by a company that has already set out.

The Hong Kong edition of Black and White appeared in June 2023; the mainland edition came out in October 2024 and was pulled from shelves soon after. The Hong Kong edition, its circulation online, and the author's social-media accounts were all banned, and the hundred-plus essays on Black and White that had appeared on various websites and personal accounts were deleted almost without exception. And yet it was precisely this book—turned away at the door by every mainstream channel—that passed quietly from reader to reader, stirring a wave of literary criticism of a kind China had not seen in nearly half a century. Apart from the essays by scholars such as Kong Qingdong, Guo Songmin, Tang Liqun, Lao Tian, and Zhang Yongfeng, the overwhelming majority collected here come from the hands of ordinary readers—among them workers, farmers, students, teachers, doctors, and retired cadres. Some signed their real names; more wrote under pen names: Sheshui Nongfu, Zhiyao, Zuolun, Yiran Nini, Hongqi Manjuan Xifeng… Behind these names stands the silent majority of this country. That a single novel could move Foxconn workers to fill its pages with annotations, could move readers in the Northeast and the Yangtze Delta to organize one reading group after another of their own accord, could move perfect strangers to argue past midnight over Wang Sheng's awakening, the old headmaster's death, Song Qiankun's betrayal—such a scene of reading calls to mind the popular fervor for Ordinary World in its day, while in the clarity of its class consciousness it goes well beyond it. Literary criticism grew, in the beginning, out of the people themselves; it has only been monopolized by "the academy" for too long. The greatest value of this anthology is that it preserves this one instance of the people's verdict exactly as it was, as testimony for its time.

As the English translator and publisher of Black and White, I had thought I already knew this novel closely enough—translation is the closest form of reading, each word weighed between two languages. But what deepened my understanding of the work by another degree was the work that followed: adapting it into a forty-episode television screenplay. If translation is a close reading line by line, adaptation is a developing of the image shot by shot: you must rebuild every scene of the novel in your imagination, finding for every line its lighting, its camera angle, its rhythm of breath. It was in this almost merciless act of taking the work apart that I discovered the astonishing density of Black and White as a literary text.

First, its dialogue. At the very start of the adaptation we laid down an iron rule: "The dialogue stays; shots may be added." What began as reverence for the original proved, the further we went, to be the only sensible choice—the speech of the characters under Liu Jiming's pen, whether the old headmaster's lectures in the classroom, Gu Zhizhen's challenge at the joint meeting, or that long passage of "words from the heart" in which Song Qiankun recalls Wu Bozhong on his deathbed, is already dramatic dialogue of the highest finish, and any "polishing" could only do it harm. Second, its structure. A narrative in three parts and nine volumes, its many lines advancing at once, spanning a hundred years—broken down episode by episode, it reveals a precise inner order: the red-tasseled spear, the windmill, the bronze casket, that copy of The Communist Manifesto lying open on the old headmaster's desk—faint clues planted early that pay off a thousand li down the road; nearly every image finds its echo dozens of chapters away. The essay by A Wang on the imagery-objects of The Human Realm and Black and White, and Wang Yajun's series on irony, both bear out what I felt during the adaptation: this is a work that withstands being taken apart like a machine—the finer you take it apart, the more its craftsmanship shows.

It is worth noting that this adaptation was carried out with the deep assistance of artificial intelligence. Some friends found this puzzling: a novel that speaks for the laboring people—why should it lean on a technological tool forged by the great powers of capital? My own thinking runs exactly the other way. The printing press does not ask whether it prints the Bible or The Communist Manifesto; the internet does not ask what it transmits—a tool belongs to the one who uses it. Black and White spread within China chiefly through electronic editions, online serialization, audiobooks, and reader communities, these new media; its English edition reaching out to the world, its screenplay and its future screen incarnation, ought likewise to draw on the most advanced instruments of production this age affords. The picture drawn in the anthology's essay "Left-Wing Literature in the Age of Self-Media and Its Dissemination" is still unfolding. To make new technology serve the people's literature and art is itself a form of struggle.

From print to electronic edition, from Chinese to English, from novel to screenplay, and now to this eight-hundred-thousand-character anthology of criticism—the journey of Black and White is still under way. My thanks to Professor Kong Qingdong for taking the time to write the preface, and to every author in this anthology: your words are proof that true literature has never been the enterprise of the writer alone, but the shared creation of the writer and the people. My deepest thanks go to Mr. Liu Jiming—who, in a work of one million two hundred thousand characters, has told us that in an age when black and white are so often turned upside down, there are still those who set down, stroke by stroke: black is black, and white is white.

A book passes quietly from hand to hand; a company has already set out. Toward the unpolluted distance—set out.

Chen Gang
Florida, USA, July 2026