The Right Path in the Human World is Full of Vicissitudes

—Reading Liu Jiming's Novel Black and White

By Sishui Farmer

This summer, an unusually intense heat enveloped Wuhan, and while I was enduring the torment of this endless summer, I was fortunate to receive Teacher Liu Jiming's manuscript of Black and White. Thus I retreated into my small room, turned on the air conditioning to appreciate this masterpiece—no less than cool breezes to dispel the long summer, taking me on a marvelous literary journey.

Black and White consists of 3 parts and 9 volumes, totaling 1.2 million words. Its temporal span covers from the 1980s through nearly 40 years of reform and opening-up history, extending to a century of Chinese revolutionary history from the early 20th century. Through narrating the trajectories of central characters like Gu Zheng, Wang Sheng, Du Wei, and Ba Dong, and their intricate social relationships, it assembles typical figures from all social strata—from the highest halls of power to grassroots society—focusing on major events in China's centennial history, especially the reform era, sketching a broad panorama of social life encompassing both urban and rural, official and popular spheres.

The sounds of the era and characters' destinies reflect each other brilliantly; decay and decline clash intensely with vigorous struggle; black and white, beauty and ugliness, good and evil intertwine in this work, staging scene after scene of thrilling, deeply moving, and profoundly thought-provoking human dramas. We can even recognize those incredibly familiar and vivid figures in this novel, along with historical traces of a century of revolution and forty years of tumultuous reform.

This monumental work, which consumed five full years of creative effort, undoubtedly represents a major turning point and breakthrough in Teacher Liu Jiming's creative career. More importantly, it crystallizes his recent social practice and careful reflection. As he said: "Without these years of experience, there would be no Black and White. I have created an artistic world richer, broader, and more complex than Human境 [Human Realm]." I deeply relate to this, having had the privilege of standing with Teacher Liu during those dark, depressing yet passionate days, witnessing the era we now inhabit.

Great times demand great works; great works create great writers. Whether for Teacher Liu personally or for our era, the birth of Black and White is hardly surprising—indeed, it was inevitable. The greatest aspect of literature and writers lies in never being absent from their times, but rather serving as witnesses to their era—just as France's ascending capitalist society inevitably produced Balzac's The Human Comedy, Russia's revolutionary eve inevitably produced Gorky's Mother, and China's socialist rural upsurge inevitably produced Liu Qing's The Builders. In today's China, with reform and opening-up having reached this stage, a artistic masterpiece like Black and White was bound to emerge. Otherwise, what a regrettable disservice it would have been to the historical current and to literature!

With its weighty footsteps of the era and profound historical questioning, Black and White proves that China's advanced writers and revolutionary intellectuals rise up in adversity, always maintaining their unbending backbone. They have not failed the era's trust or the people's aspirations, writing brilliant chapters with their pens that will be forever recorded in history, leaving behind substantial testimony to their times.

Due to the work's grand and complex themes, its conception breaks through conventional single-thread narrative structures. Even in the author's previous work Human Realm, only two main narrative lines were employed—Ma La and Murong Qiu. Black and White, however, features four to five or more character and narrative threads. How to handle these multiple threads while maintaining order, avoiding chaos, and achieving unity despite apparent dispersion undoubtedly represents a new attempt and challenge for the writer.

Yet reviewing the entire work, we find all concerns were unnecessary. The author employs superb artistic techniques, using several closely connected central characters to create a seamlessly woven network of character relationships. The narrative touch moves freely, using typical social events as nodes, concentrating on displaying the stage where various characters perform against a foundation of broad strokes and detailed background. With proper tension and release, this constructs undulating plot developments. The entire narrative structure resembles a beehive, ingeniously fusing colorful characters and plots with China's centennial history, especially forty years of reform and opening-up. Each cell is a unique world while perfectly connecting to form a harmonious whole, demonstrating the author's ingenious and masterful construction.

Characters are the soul of fiction. According to classical Marxist literary theory, creating typical characters in typical environments is literature's primary task. Throughout history, outstanding literary works have invariably left behind brilliant character images, forming eternal galleries of artistic figures. What leaves the deepest impression in Black and White is undoubtedly these vivid character images, which remain lifelike in our minds long after reading.

Take Wang Sheng, for example—this character has appeared multiple times in Teacher Liu's works. Similar to Ma La in Human Realm, he is an intellectual who loves reading and thinking, stubborn and introverted yet pure-hearted. Like Ma La, during his spiritual growth he experiences internal struggle between two opposing "spiritual mentors" representing idealism and pragmatism respectively. After painful inner struggle, they finally break free from dark obscurity, refuse to submit to base sentiments, and choose to stand on the side of justice and truth. Ma La chose to struggle against capital and selfishness, leading peasants to establish cooperatives; Wang Sheng chose to expose Wu Bozhong, the monstrous product of capital-power collusion, even landing in prison. In Gu Zheng, we seem to see shadows of Murong Qiu from Human Realm—both are pure-hearted intellectual women who persist in their ideals, like two lotus flowers emerging unstained from mud. Compared to Murong Qiu, Gu Zheng is more action-oriented, making her rebellious spirit even more pronounced. Ultimately, she would rather lose her career and future than compromise in her struggle against evil forces, achieving great elevation in her ideological realm. If Wang Sheng and Gu Zheng achieve spiritual resonance through shared hardship and resistance, moving toward common purpose, then Tian Qingqing and Zong Xiaoxiao are their shadows, suggesting new hope is rising. Thus the revolutionary initial aspirations inherited from Anna, Wang Shengli, Luo Zheng, the old principal, and others continue to pass down through generations in history's great tide.

If the positive characters above shine brilliantly, then the following characters with negative qualities are carved even more deeply, penetrating to the bone. Particularly Song Qiankun—like the novel's title itself, he is a complex character where black and white are inextricably entangled. He is both an old revolutionary and actually a deep-hidden opportunist within revolutionary ranks, bearing profound class marks. Such people are extremely representative—they were speculators during the revolutionary era, capitalist-roaders in power during Mao's time, and became so-called ideologically open veteran cadre representatives during reform and opening-up. Historical development finally revealed their true nature as "genuine at both ends" [note: opportunists who adapt to whatever political wind prevails]. Such people must be as numerous as fish crossing a river in revolutionary ranks, which precisely explains why China's revolution was extraordinarily difficult. Song Qiankun's daughter, Song Xiaofan, inherited her father's opportunistic genes in her bones and developed them further. This can be seen from her successive husbands: during the revolutionary fervor she found Cheng Guojun, a Cultural Revolution rebel leader; in the era of bidding farewell to revolution and denouncing trauma, she found Li Xin, an opportunistic intellectual; and in the era of capital globalization and America's new Marshall Plan, she threw herself into the arms of Bai Wen, a comprador capitalist and descendant of Kuomintang agents—truly enjoying all the glory, never missing any good opportunity. There's also Lang Tao, who transformed from a scholar full of Western learning into a vulgar bureaucrat, representing the life trajectory of a large group of elite intellectuals of that era. Wu Bozhong and his son Du Wei elevate the ugly aspects of human nature almost to a philosophical level, developing them to extremes. Wu Bozhong's licentiousness, cunning, and deep calculation make him worthy of being a Mephistopheles-like [note: reference to the devil character in Goethe's Faust] demonic mentor, while Du Wei proves himself a prize student carefully cultivated by Wu Bozhong. He is sophisticated in worldly affairs, opportunistic, insatiably greedy, dissolute and unrestrained, yet ambitious. To get ahead and gain profit, he stops at nothing, regardless of right and wrong, truly applying pragmatist philosophy to its extreme. That such characters can perform freely on the front stage, enjoying success, doesn't this precisely demonstrate that the era provided them with such a grand stage!

In this work, we cannot fail to mention a special character who embodies both ice and fire, conspiracy and love—Li Hong. She is so beautiful and moving yet ruthlessly devoured by a corrupt and ugly world. She struggles alone but is not numbed by pain; her heart still burns with the flame of justice. It is precisely with her help that Gu Zheng obtains powerful evidence of official-business collusion, dealing a heavy blow to the corrupt clique. Li Hong's black-and-white life seems like a legend, yet feels so real.

Social environment is a great dye vat where all kinds of people undergo repeated washing and winnowing. There are those like Luo Zheng, the old principal, Wang Sheng, and Gu Zheng who maintain inner purity and remain true to their original aspirations, as well as dye-makers and dyed ones like Song Qiankun, Lang Tao, Du Wei, and Ba Dong. Trapped in this vast, boundless, bottomless dye vat, how difficult it is to maintain original aspirations, guard inner purity, and emerge unstained from mud! Yet precisely because of this difficulty, those noble souls shine even more brilliantly, their life force surging with passion.

As Teacher Liu said: "Novels are testimony to their times." Black and White perfectly embodies thoughtfulness within artistry, perfectly interpreting the meaning of testimony to the times. The novel adopts a grand historical perspective, using character destinies as warp and story plots as weft, stringing together major social events like pearls, vividly presenting the rich, complex, and magnificent panorama of social-historical development over forty years of reform and opening-up, extending to a full century. The author internalizes a series of real social events into the novel's artistic world, using them as nodes to form a clear trajectory of social development, revealing the direction of historical progress and the joys and sorrows of the masses. For example, the popularity of "scar literature" in the early reform period sparked an ideological wave of bidding farewell to revolution. The fictional work Xiangchun Street, characters Li Xin and Song Xiaofan in the novel are precisely projections of real existence. Even today, scar literature's ghost lingers, accompanying the reform era like a shadow, occasionally stirring up waves—doesn't this deserve our deep reflection? There are also allusions to River Elegy and similar works, depicting the transformation trajectory of liberal intellectual elites who were once all the rage, which is extremely typical. Through Wu Bozhong's "Yuan Ji Grand Method," we clearly see shadows of the once-sensational qigong master Wang Lin [note: controversial Chinese qigong master]. The Donggang incident evokes the earth-shaking Liaoning Tonggang incident; Chuyun Group evokes the once-glorious "Red Mansion"; the social practice narrated through Tian Qingqing is clearly a reproduction of labor unrest in a southern city; the Yanshan Association led by Hong Taixing is the real-world Taishan Association; the Marxist society that Tian Qingqing and Zong Xiaoxiao join likewise truly exists in reality. Being able to reflect these major, even sensitive events through fiction in artistic form itself demonstrates the author's realist spirit and courage to face reality directly. The author doesn't simply reproduce reality but, through artistic processing and refinement, makes the work both derive from life and transcend life—a profound embodiment of the author's persistent practice of the Marxist literary view that "social life is the sole source of literature and art."

The core of Marxist literary theory lies in the people's standpoint. As Chairman Mao pointed out in "Talks at the Yan'an Forum on Literature and Art": "Promising revolutionary writers and artists must go among the masses; they must for long periods and unconditionally go wholeheartedly among the worker, peasant, and soldier masses, into the heat of struggle, into the only source that is broadest and richest, to observe, experience, study, and analyze all people, all classes, all masses, all vivid forms of life and struggle, all raw materials of literature and art. Only then is it possible to proceed to creation." The creation of Black and White precisely follows such principles and approaches, which is why it displays differences from and superiority over general realist works. It stands completely on the position of China's vast majority of working people, conducting profound analysis of social-historical development. In Teacher Liu's words, it "strives to reveal reality that has been obscured, distorted, and castrated by various dominant and popular discourses." Therefore, the reality thus reproduced is necessarily different from, even opposite to, the reality in the eyes and pens of various elite authorities. Any writer's creation inevitably carries subjective factors, but only by standing on the position of the vast majority can the subjective world more closely approach the objective world, thus coming closer to the truth of things and nearer to truth itself.

The people are the creators of history and the driving force of social development. Singing and weeping for the people, voicing their hearts, is the natural duty of advanced intellectuals. Especially under today's conditions, how ambitious writers and artists should display this process of people creating history; how to uphold people's subjectivity, creating for the people and bearing witness for the times; how to defend and protect discourse rights belonging to the masses—these are undoubtedly major issues concerning the fundamental interests of the people. From this perspective, Teacher Liu Jiming's Black and White provides a perfect answer.

In conclusion, Black and White, with its magnificent structure, seamless layout, vivid and full characters, progressively layered plot, thrilling events, constitutes natural, profound, and broad narration. It can be called a pinnacle work of contemporary Chinese realist writing—an illustrated history of contemporary Chinese social development. Its birth opens new navigational markers for people's literature.