Out of the Smog He Came

(Preface)

Kong Qingdong, Beijing, June 26, 2026

Asked to write a preface for A Study Anthology on "Black and White," I could not help but recall the famous preface that Qu Qiubai [note: Qu Qiubai (1899–1935), an early leader of the Chinese Communist Party and a literary critic; his 1933 preface to a selection of Lu Xun's essays is a landmark of modern Chinese criticism] once wrote for a selection of Lu Xun's occasional essays. The wish to borrow that preface as a way of voicing my feeling for Liu Jiming has been with me a long time. What stayed my hand was the fear that Liu Jiming's enemies would think I had praised him too extravagantly: Liu Jiming—fit to stand beside Lu Xun? For one must remember how many perverse gongzhi [note: 公知, "public intellectual"; once a term of respect, now used mockingly in Chinese online discourse for liberal-leaning intellectuals] and self-styled trenchant members of the "nation-hating brigade" [note: 恨国党, a derisive online label for those seen as reflexively running China down] have likened themselves to Lu Xun.

Let me begin, then, with Lu Xun's own words. In "Afterword to The Grave" [note: the closing piece of Lu Xun's 1927 essay collection The Grave] he wrote plainly: "Because I come from the old ramparts, I see the lay of things the more clearly; and when I turn my spear back to strike, I can the more readily deal the strong foe his death-blow."

And so came Qu Qiubai's vivid figure:

Lu Xun is Remus [note: in Roman legend Remus and his brother Romulus, abandoned as infants, were suckled by a she-wolf], reared on the milk of a wild beast—a rebel son of feudal-patriarchal society, a turncoat vassal of the gentry class, and at the same time a candid friend [note: 诤友, a friend who dares to offer blunt, correcting criticism] to certain romantic revolutionaries! By his own road he returned to the embrace of the wolf.

If we set aside the question of whether the praise runs too high and look only at the figure itself—does it not closely resemble Liu Jiming's own turning-about? One year the gaokao [note: China's national college-entrance examination] essay topic was "The Turning Point." When students of some later day write on that theme, might they not cite the example of "the noted writer Liu Jiming"?

Qu Qiubai pressed the point further:

Lu Xun advanced from evolutionism to the theory of class, from the rebel son and turncoat vassal of the gentry to a true friend—indeed a fighter—of the proletariat and the laboring masses. Through a quarter-century of struggle, from before the Revolution of 1911 [note: the Xinhai Revolution, which overthrew the Qing dynasty] down to the present, out of bitter experience and deep observation, he came into the new camp bearing a precious revolutionary tradition. At last he declared: "At first I loathed this familiar class of my own and did not in the least regret its collapse; later, schooled by facts, I came to hold that only the rising proletariat has a future."

Hold this passage against the course of Liu Jiming's own life. Has he not likewise passed through a quarter-century—perhaps more—of struggle, and, bearing bitter experience and deep observation, arrived at last in the camp of the proletariat?

Liu Jiming's path is, in truth, a fairly representative one among Chinese intellectuals of these past decades. Many who are "of the Left"—or who have been "turned Left"—began on the "Right," or as "neither Left nor Right." When, wittingly or not, they stood within a non-Left camp, they too meant to save the nation and its people; they too believed that "democracy and freedom" could save China, and were willing even to suffer and be martyred for the creed—which is precisely why I salute many a right-wing intellectual. But given time, the truly conscientious and capable among the Right undergo a natural turning-about—like the sunflower leaning toward the spring sun [note: 葵藿仰阳, a classical image of the mallow or sunflower forever turning to the sun, connoting steadfast devotion]—turning toward the standpoint of the people, toward the standpoint of the proletariat; of this, history and present reality furnish abundant proof. For even if the old camp holds good men and cherished dreams, its standpoint is, in the last analysis, out of joint with time and place; it misleads the nation and wrongs the people. That standpoint dooms the camp as a whole to rot. Just so with the rotting of the Kuomintang [note: the Nationalist Party (Guomindang), defeated by the Communists in 1949]: it came not because such party chieftains as Wang Jingwei and Chiang Kai-shek were men of bad character, but because the class they spoke for, and the direction in which they were leading China, made the party, taken whole, inevitably a "Fleece-the-People Party" and a "Harm-the-People Party" [note: puns on 国民党 Guómíndǎng—刮民党 guāmíndǎng, "scrape/fleece the people," and 害民党 hàimíndǎng, "harm the people"]. The early Communist leaders had all once been members of the Kuomintang; that they could beat it in the end owed not only to their having chosen the right standpoint, but to their knowing that old camp all too well.

Here is how Qu Qiubai accounted for the sources of Lu Xun's fighting power:

From the scholar-officials of the late Qing, the "old reformers," the Chen Xiyings [note: Chen Xiying (Chen Yuan, 1896–1970), a Western-educated professor and Lu Xun's celebrated polemical adversary] … down to the latest literary youths of the treaty-port-rogue type—all of these he had taken the measure of in person. The darkness of executioner-ism and corpse-ism; the vulgarity, self-deception, selfishness, and stupidity of the petty proprietor; the tramp's shameless counterfeit of nihilism; the shameless, hypocritical, venomous, play-actor's parody of the gentleman; the revolutionary in a false mask—these twenty-odd years of "loathsome" high society made him feel, to the marrow, the rottenness of those old forces. Precisely because he had himself burrowed into that old camp and seen through every root of its disease, his criticism was uncommonly sharp and exact.

Many marvel that Liu Jiming, so short a time on the Left and the author of not so very many theoretical essays, should strike with such devastating force. The secret was told long ago by Qu Qiubai: he watched the manifold ugliness of the old camp too long, and knew it too deeply. Does it follow that any "right-wing writer" at all, with a mere shake of the body into a "left-wing writer," would command such fighting power? Of course not. And if one would prove Liu Jiming's singularity—prove how intimately he knows that old camp—then Black and White is beyond doubt the finest dissecting-room and exhibition hall for the purpose.

Open the resplendent three volumes of Black and White, and the great flood-tide of China's hundred years surges within. Ba Jin [note: Ba Jin (1904–2005), a major modern Chinese novelist] once wrote a "Revolution" trilogy and a "Torrent" trilogy, yet the highest artistic achievement among them is a single book, Family; the rest are not full or rich enough. And the success of Family, too, owed much to his having come out of that old world where old-style great households lay thick on every side—he knew the old Chinese extended family all too well. Yet Ba Jin's own family—his "family of origin," to borrow the gongzhi psychologists' phrase—was not so dark and sinful as the novel paints it; his own home life was in fact warm and kindly. Leaping beyond personal feeling, from the vantage of society as a whole, Ba Jin brought a furious indictment against the harm the feudal household did to the young. And though Ba Jin was himself an anarchist, hundreds upon hundreds of young readers, a copy of Family clutched to the breast, set off instead for Yan'an [note: the Chinese Communist base of the 1930s–40s, and a byword for revolutionary aspiration].

In the real life of today there is neither a Yan'an nor a Jinggangshan [note: the mountain base where Mao Zedong and Zhu De launched the rural revolution in the late 1920s]. Yet hundreds upon hundreds of young readers, having finished the three volumes of Black and White, truly perceive the nature of China's hundred-year history—and so discern, too, the contradictions and tasks of the present. As Mao Dun's Midnight [note: Mao Dun (1896–1981), major modern novelist; his 1933 novel Midnight anatomized Chinese society] settled the question of the nature of Chinese society in the 1930s, so Liu Jiming's Black and White lays bare the shifting nature of that society across a full century. This is why, in my review, I called this powerful work a demon-revealing mirror [note: 照妖镜, a mirror of Chinese folklore that exposes the true form of any demon] and a milestone: it lights up the hidden and the minute, and is at once firm and richly full. Its weight surpasses the sum of all Liu Jiming wrote before; having produced such a monument, he may be said to have no regret left in this life.

Nearly half a century ago, in 1978, Zhang Jie [note: Zhang Jie (1937–2022), noted contemporary writer] published "The Child Who Came from the Forest" in Beijing Literature and Art; it won that year's National Outstanding Short Story Award and caused a great stir. Though its plot—a flute-playing boy sitting for the conservatory examination—flattered the fashion of "scar literature" [note: 伤痕文学, the late-1970s literature voicing the wounds of the Cultural Revolution], beneath it ran a narrative logic that used the plain purity of nature to dissolve the turbid perils of real life. Liu Jiming, though he knocked about for years within the gongzhi camp, seems never to have let go of that pure flute of his. This "child," come from who knows which forest, has not blown a solitary flute-air of individualism, but struck up a whole symphonic poem called "Black and White." A saying much in vogue today runs: "The country is the people, and the people are the country" [note: a maxim associated with Xi Jinping]. Black and White gives vivid play to the hundred-year windings—the joinings and partings, the loves and grudges—of the people and the country.

In 1981 there was a film called She Came Out of the Mist, which told how a young woman who had lost her way [note: 失足女青年, a euphemism for a young woman fallen into vice] was helped back by society; in the China of those years people were still warmly urged to forsake evil, turn to good, and walk toward the light. And so the "rightists" of that era, too, exalted the goodness of human nature, believing that once there was "Reform and Opening," life would be just as the theme song of The Sweet Cause [note: 《甜蜜的事业》, a popular 1979 film; its theme song, "Our Life Is Full of Sunshine," became a national favorite] sang it: "Our life is full of sunshine." Liu Jiming's Black and White runs a spectral analysis on that dazzling sunshine—separating out not only black and white, but the whole hooped color-code that composes Chinese society: red, orange, yellow, green, cyan, blue, violet. Liu Jiming is so sensitive to this sunshine, so clear-eyed about it, because he comes from the camp where the sunshine was slowly going out. To borrow the film's title: he came out of the mist—and out of a mist thick with poisonous haze. Bearing the hurt and the brooding menace laid on him by the mist and rain, the thunder and lightning, of a world under Voldemort's [note: the arch-villain of the Harry Potter novels, here a figure for a dominating dark power] rule, he can not only feel the true sunlight but also make out the "evil beneath the sun"—for the new camp is not without its bad men and its fools, not without its own fogs and errors. Because the symphonic poem of black and white plays on, this Study Anthology on "Black and White" is one crystallization along the road of that continuing. It should be seen not as some sanctimonious "academic summing-up" of one writer and one book, but as a call to muster [note: 集结号, literally the bugle sounding troops to assemble]—as those famous lines that Shu Ting wrote for Gu Cheng [note: Shu Ting (b. 1952) and Gu Cheng (1956–1993), leading poets of the "Misty" school]:

You believed in the fairy tale you had written,
and became yourself the deep-blue flower within it;
on nothing but a single, simple signal
you mustered the ranks of the stars, the milk-vetch, and the katydids
and set out
toward the unpolluted distance.

Let us, together with Liu Jiming—come out of the smog—and his fellow travelers of every varied cast, set out once more toward that unpolluted distance.

Kong Qingdong
Beijing, June 26, 2026