Revolution Has Only Hit Pause 

— It Will Return

— Reflections on Reading The Human Realm

By Xiao Kaikai Published in: Left Review, March 6, 2025 (Remarks delivered at a readers' discussion of The Human Realm; title added by the editor)

The male protagonist of The Human Realm is Ma La, and the female protagonist is Murong Qiu. Taking Shenhuangzhou and the intellectual and academic world surrounding Murong Qiu as its principal settings, the novel addresses the grand theme of the sweeping transformations that people and society have undergone since the era of Reform and Opening-Up. What Murong Qiu and Ma La carry within them is, in essence, the trajectory of change in both rural and urban life experienced by the generation of educated youth who were sent down to the countryside during the Cultural Revolution. I feel that The Human Realm also represents a kind of critical socialist inheritance of Liu Qing's A History of Entrepreneurship — an inheritance inflected with its own independent reflection. Within a new environment, it carries out an exploration of socialism along two lines: one is Ma La's persistence in rural cooperativization during the new period of Reform and Opening-Up; the other is Murong Qiu's re-examination and rethinking of socialism within the academic world.

Murong Qiu inhabits two worlds simultaneously — the university environment on one side, and the broader academic and intellectual world on the other. She has moved from student to teacher, living and working within higher education and the knowledge-production sphere. As various problems are debated within sociological circles, she seems at times to suffer a kind of inner splitting, because on the one hand she can feel the crucial importance of the standpoint and emotional investment that lie beneath any body of knowledge, while on the other hand, as someone who experienced the "sending down" to the countryside, she still carries within her a certain quality of identification with the people — and so she is forced to confront a spiritual choice: do I stand with the privileged and powerful, or do I stand with the people at the bottom? This may appear to be a question of personal morality, but in reality it is a concrete question of class. Because capital, power, and privilege ultimately exercise an influence that is everywhere and all-pervasive — reaching even into a person's thought and inner self. In these circumstances, to stand with the people at the bottom requires not only courage but sustained, persistent struggle. I came across a remark in some commentary on the novel: "What is needed is not only the courage to overturn the table, but the confidence to overturn it, and the capacity to overturn it." In the arc of Murong Qiu's story, she largely achieves this — at the end, amid complex and contradictory choices, she chooses to stand alongside Ma La. Throughout this process, she must have passed through critique and self-critique, and in doing so offers us a glimpse of hope for the future. I think the ending is very well crafted — open-ended, opening onto a broad horizon. This includes the sense that the Ma brothers seem to have walked different paths and inhabited different eras. Yet Ma Ke — Ma La's elder brother — functions as a spiritual presence who shapes not only Ma La's soul, but the worldview of everyone around him: Gu Chaoyang, Lulu, Kuang Xibei — all of them, too, have a Ma Ke-like figure in their lives, exercising on them influences both good and ill. For Ma La, having Ma Ke at his side — even in memory — is what enables him, amid the tide of the market economy, to return to the original point and once again examine the problems of the age through Ma Ke's eyes.

I feel that The Human Realm and Black and White [note: another novel by Liu Jiming] are in some sense companion volumes — independent of each other, yet spiritually linked, connected by something almost dreamlike. In Ma La we can see Liu Jiming's own intellectual journey. Like most people born in the 1960s — my own mother is also a child of the sixties — there is in youth a lingering residue of socialist influence; then in young adulthood, like Wang Sheng in Black and White, one may embrace a certain neoliberalism and perhaps appear to tilt toward Westernized thinking. But after experiencing personal setbacks and being tossed about in the waves of the era, after painful reflection, one may arrive at a negation of the negation — rediscovering the youthful emotional attachment to socialism, and being able to act on it. [note: "negation of the negation" — a concept from Hegelian and Marxist dialectics, referring to the process by which a position is negated and then the negation is itself negated, yielding a higher synthesis.] In the novel, Ma La enacts this through practice in the countryside; in Black and White, Wang Sheng enacts it through struggle in the judicial sphere; in real life, more ordinary people enact it by doing their work well, raising their children, and pursuing their own path through ordinary means. It may look ordinary, but I think it represents a practice that is plain yet extraordinary — an exploration of one's search for the values and direction of one's life, which also concentrates one's reflections on the future fate of everything from the individual to the Party and the nation.

So in Ma La one can see the shadows of Liang Shengbao from Liu Qing's A History of Entrepreneurship and Xiao Changchun from Hao Ran's A Bright Sunny Sky — a kind of homage Liu Jiming pays to those predecessors, or one might say, a homage to the era of the Chairman. Yet there is a difference. Both pursue the cooperativization path, but Liang Shengbao goes with the tide in the favorable environment of the Chairman's era — he is the embodiment of that generation's era, its optimistic and upward-striving spirit. Ma La is different: his is a spirit of contending with the age, of wrestling with the times, of swimming against the current — because his era presents conditions utterly unlike Liang Shengbao's: the three rural problems, the outflow of rural labor, the capital-going-to-the-countryside model promoted by figures like Wen Tiejun, and socialism beginning to enter a trough on the world stage. In these adverse conditions, he still chooses to put his ideas into practice — to enact this new form of cooperativization through work in the countryside.

A few days ago I saw a group discussion about the distinction between heroes and elites. It occurs to me that Ma Ke — Ma La's elder brother — is the kind of hero produced by the socialist era from within the masses themselves. By that definition, I think Ma La equally qualifies — though he carries with him a feeling of being at odds with his times. Looking again at the sequence from Liang Shengbao to Xiao Changchun to Ma La, these three characters in fact reflect the transformation of China from the twentieth century into the twenty-first — viewed from the perspective of the countryside. Ma La in particular — capable of making his own judgments about history, the present, and the future in the era of Reform and Opening-Up — is a very well-realized character. His rural path is also, I feel, a homage to works like Three Mile Bay and Great Changes in a Mountain Village. Liu Jiming has written this as an exploration in literature, and he has placed it alongside the female protagonist Murong Qiu's reflection on neoliberalism within intellectual and academic circles — one thread writing the past, one the present; one writing theory, one writing practice. Though nothing is stated explicitly, the people's standpoint is made clear beyond any doubt.

So-called "pure literature" does not in fact exist. Even if the author makes no explicit declaration, the author inevitably writes their standpoint into the characters they create. Just now on Douban [note: a popular Chinese social media and review platform], I read a review of The Human Realm saying it may be the most important literary work since the beginning of Reform and Opening-Up — with just one reply below it. I was tempted to add a comment of my own: that the later Black and White and The Human Realm are complementary to each other. Rather than discussing them in isolation, it is better to read them together within an integrated historical vision — to place them in the larger sweep of history and read them as grand narrative. Some people may say we should now oppose grand narrative. But I believe grand narrative also speaks of class. The grand proletarian narrative of the Chairman's era is something we support — nobody stood up to oppose it. Why then do people say nowadays that we should love concrete individuals rather than grand narrative? Because in the waves of the market economy, grand narrative has been transformed from its former proletarian character into a bourgeois one.

So if we probe further, we find that what The Human Realm speaks of is a kind of grand narrative that has vanished — a commemorating of that past era, a proletarian grand narrative observed with fine-grained attentiveness from the perspectives of the countryside and of intellectual life. It may appear to rest on a sense of reality centered on the individual, but what it precisely embodies is a sense of reality grounded in the standpoint of the people — a realist sensibility shot through with a spirit of deep reflection.

Liu Jiming's exploration in this novel, as the commentaries have noted, allows us to see the leading wave of a new socialist literature taking shape in the age of Reform and Opening-Up. Because we know that as Reform and Opening-Up has gone deeper, the three great disparities — between urban and rural areas, between regions, and in income — have continued to widen; and so the literary current of grassroots literature has surged forward with growing force. The grassroots literature we speak of today — from Liu Jiming to Cao Zhenglu — is broadly connected to the socialist intellectual and cultural tradition, and the shadow of social transformation is visible throughout. Tracing the path from Liu Jiming's earlier works — the short story Tea Egg — through The Human Realm to Black and White, what lies behind the change is a shift in people's emotional identification with the era and their rational understanding of it. The times change — but people's pursuit of fairness and justice, of equality, of having the people's masses as represented by the proletariat be the true masters of their own lives, has not changed. Whether in academic circles or in the countryside, in the city, among workers or peasants or intellectuals, their pursuit of the people governing themselves has never wavered.

And so: revolution is dead, long live revolution — revolution has hit the pause button, but after the pause, revolution will come back.