Shu Yanxiang | The Human Realm and the Literature of the Seventeen Years and the Cultural Revolution — and Its Transcendence

Liu Jiming's full-length novel The Human Realm (upper half) will undoubtedly become an important text among the full-length novels of 2016 and indeed of the new century as a whole. Though it depicts only the history of a village called Shenhuangzhou in Hubei Province across a span of several years — from the autumn of 2000 to the period around the abolition of the agricultural tax — it absorbs the entire legacy of the literature of the Seventeen Years, the Cultural Revolution, the New Era, and the new century, presenting a new face and new characters for the rural novel, with illuminating significance for future rural narrative.

Part One: The Human Realm and the Cooperativization Novel

The cooperativization movement began in the 1950s and culminated in the establishment of the People's Communes. A History of Entrepreneurship, Great Changes in a Mountain Village, The Golden Road, and Spring Tide in Spate all offer panoramic depictions of this movement. In A History of Entrepreneurship, Liang Shengbao establishes a mutual-aid team, and Guo Zhenshan establishes one as well. In The Golden Road, Gao Daquan establishes one, and Zhang Jinfa also establishes a mutual-aid team. In Spring Tide in Spate, Li Ke establishes a mutual-aid team, and Li Chunshan likewise. In The Human Realm, Ma La establishes a professional cooperative, and Zhao Guangfu also establishes one. All of these mutual-aid teams feature a struggle between the advanced and the backward — even the reactionary: Liang Shengbao contends with Guo Zhenshan, Gao Daquan with Zhang Jinfa, Li Ke with Li Chunshan; and in exactly the same way, Ma La contends with Zhao Guangfu — and without exception, the former in each case prevails. Ma La's cooperative grows rice, Zhao Guangfu's grows cotton; they even compete at festival time — one organizes a dragon dance team, the other quickly forms a lion dance troupe. Ma La's cooperative plants quality rice seed without chemical fertilizers or pesticides; Zhao Guangfu's cooperative grows Bt cotton, but he has no grasp of the risks of the international Bt cotton market. As a result, by the time the novel ends, Zhao Guangfu's cooperative exists in name only, while Ma La's organic rice has good prospects and more and more people are joining his cooperative. This pattern of rivalry and its outcome is also the descriptive mode of cooperativization fiction from the Seventeen Years and Cultural Revolution periods.

Ma La also stands in a relationship of spiritual inheritance with Liang Shengbao, Gao Daquan, and Li Ke. The membership of Liang Shengbao's and Gao Daquan's mutual-aid teams consisted primarily of poor and hired peasants — and so does Ma La's. At the start, his Tongxin Cooperative has only five or six households, composed of poor families and those with weak labor power. Guyu's family had been fined for evading the family planning policy and had earned nothing from migrant work; returning home with no way to make ends meet, he talks with Ma La and they immediately see eye to eye and join forces. Sister Hu's husband was killed falling from a construction site in the city, leaving her alone to raise two children while farming. Cao Guangjin is a man in his fifties with chronic rhinitis whose son and daughter-in-law are both working in the city, leaving him and his wife to farm alone. Xiaoguai, who joins the cooperative later, has lost his father to a mining accident and been abandoned by his mother; an orphan, he supports himself by driving a motorized rickshaw, but gambling costs him not only the rickshaw but nearly his life — had Ma La not found him, he might have died. These elderly, weak, sick, and vulnerable people manage, under Ma La's leadership, to turn their lives around and amount to something.

This is because they have a leader who is kind at heart, understands technique, and understands management — just as in A History of Entrepreneurship and those other novels. Equally, Ma La receives support from those in authority — only the branch secretary Guo Dongsheng and Mayor Ding Youpeng who support him have lost the halo of being embodiments of the Party, and have instead become companions and old schoolmates personally close to Ma La; they are not loyal cadres executing the line of the leadership, but cadres with their own personal interests to pursue. In Spring Tide in Spate, Li Ke uses his demobilization pay to purchase draft cattle for the mutual-aid team; in The Human Realm, the chairman of the Tongxin Cooperative, Ma La, uses his own savings to purchase rice seed and fund the cooperative's various startup facilities. The cooperative's very first act after its founding is to buy rice seed — which cannot help but bring to mind Liang Shengbao buying rice seed in A History of Entrepreneurship. The relationship between Guyu and Zhao Manyue in The Human Realm also recalls the relationship between Liang Shengbao and Gaixin in A History of Entrepreneurship.

Part Two: The Human Realm and the Literature of the Cultural Revolution

The inheritance relationship between The Human Realm and The Golden Road and Spring Tide in Spate has already been touched on; here I wish to focus on the relationship between The Human Realm and the educated-youth propaganda and educated-youth literature of the Cultural Revolution period. The educated youth of that era were divided into those sent to work in production teams and those who returned to their home villages; for both types, the mainstream discourse held that serving in the countryside was honorable. In 1974, People's Literature Press published Morning Glow — a short story collection about educated youth going to the mountains and countryside — which included Feng Zechun's "The New Generation," the story of a production team leader and his daughter Li Yuhong. Li Yuhong is a returned educated youth: first she serves as her father's assistant and head of the women's group in the production team; after marrying into the Red Flag Commune's Great Leap Forward production team, she is elected production team leader, heading over a hundred people. Her father, somewhat worried about how production is faring under her, goes to check up — only to find she is doing splendidly.

In The Human Realm, Ma Ke — Ma La's elder brother — is, like Li Yuhong, a returned educated youth. He studies under the poor peasants' association chairman Guo Dawan, forms a youth shock brigade, works tirelessly hauling pond mud and bringing in the rice harvest, burns the oil lamp at night to study Selected Works of Mao Zedong, rereads On Practice and Organize Yourselves, studies the deeds of Jin Xunhua [note: an educated youth who drowned saving state property and was celebrated as a Cultural Revolution martyr], uses Pavel from How the Steel Was Tempered to encourage himself, reads A Bright Sunny Sky and aspires to emulate Xiao Changchun, and develops a vague tender feeling for the educated youth Murong Qiu. Had Ma Ke not sacrificed his life saving the quality rice seed in the team's storage building, he and Murong Qiu would have formed a revolutionary family, and Murong Qiu would have become a fine example of a young woman rooting herself in the countryside — much like the celebrated model of the Cultural Revolution era, Xing Yanzi [note: a famous educated youth model figure of the 1960s–70s who voluntarily stayed in the countryside]. Ma Ke's diary in the novel is barely distinguishable from Lei Feng's diary [note: Lei Feng, a model soldier and political icon of selfless dedication whose diary was published posthumously]. Ma Ke has always been his younger brother Ma La's idol — and even decades after his death, this idol status has not wavered. All of this demonstrates the inheritance between The Human Realm and the literature of the Cultural Revolution.

The Golden Road has Uncle Zhou; Spring Tide in Spate has Old Man Songlin — they serve respectively as the wise counselors of Gao Daquan and Li Ke. The Human Realm has a similar figure in Guo Dawan, mentioned earlier. He appears already in his seventies when we first meet him; whenever Ma La faces a difficulty, it is Guo Dawan who resolves it or who offers guidance. The relationship between Ma La and Guyu also resembles the relationship between Gao Daquan and Zhu Tiehan in The Golden Road.

Part Three: The Contribution of The Human Realm

All this notwithstanding, we cannot say that Ma La is simply a resurrection of Liang Shengbao, Gao Daquan, and Li Ke in the new century. His image is far more complex than theirs. His growth has been shaped both by the spiritual guidance of his poor-peasant brother and his poor-peasant Uncle Dawan, and by the spirit of the protagonist who swims the Yellow River in The River in the North [note: a celebrated 1984 novella by Zhang Chengzhi]. The novel devotes considerable space to depicting Ma La watching his brother and Murong Qiu swimming in the Yangtze, and then to Ma La in adulthood, returned to his home after many trials, regularly contending with the river current to train his body and draw strength. Consider this passage:

"… On the broad surface of the river, a figure could be seen swimming out toward the center of the current. The water ran fast; a freighter had just passed, and waves rolled one higher than the last. The figure appeared and disappeared amid the crests and troughs of the waves, as if it might be swallowed at any moment. The sun had by now sunk in the west, its lingering rays painting the river surface a sheet of fire-red; the figure seemed like a torch burning fiercely, cleaving through one surge of rapids after another, moving stubbornly toward the sandbank at the river's center — drawing ever closer."

Reading this passage, one easily thinks of certain passages from The River in the North.

Ma La's other guide is Teacher Lü, who accomplished a more important transformation in Ma La's life: Lü changed Ma La from a young Red Guard [note: 红小兵, literally "red little soldiers" — the Cultural Revolution's children's equivalent of the Red Guards] with a head full of revolutionary heroism into a new person of the 1980s who believed that "knowledge is power." Lü showed him the force of the commodity economy and the process of capital formation; he even led Ma La to understand that in the socialist period, capital still had a character of primitive accumulation. Following Teacher Lü, Ma La ran a company, handled sales and regulatory approvals — experience that would play a crucially important role when he later established the Tongxin Cooperative.

In The Human Realm, Ma La's establishing the Tongxin Cooperative is spiritually continuous with Liang Shengbao's, Gao Daquan's, and Li Ke's establishing their mutual-aid teams. Yet every reader understands that this is a different era's text; Ma La is not a simple resurrection of Liang Shengbao and Gao Daquan in the new century. In truth, the ideals harbored by Liang Shengbao, Gao Daquan, and Li Ke are all expressions of the utopian spirit that has long existed in both the East and the West. There is nothing wrong with celebrating the utopian spirit — but one must also see that utopia in reality is fated to fail, fated to meet obstacles at every turn. The literature of the Seventeen Years and the Cultural Revolution, however, treated the path from mutual-aid teams through higher-stage cooperatives to People's Communes not only as the correct road for China's peasantry, but also evaded the impracticality of these forms in their actual implementation and the resistance they generated among the people themselves. The Human Realm does not evade the bankruptcy of this utopian experiment. The Tongxin Cooperative ultimately becomes a sacrifice to capital's expansion: when the Chufeng Group prepares to relocate its heavily polluting chemical fertilizer plant to Shenhuangzhou, not only will the Tongxin Cooperative and Zhao Guangfu's cooperative cease to exist — the very homeland of the Shenhuangzhou people will cease to exist. Ma La wants to join forces with Zhao Guangfu, fight the flood, and save the cooperative — but it is all in vain. The windmill on top of the small building he constructed in Shenhuangzhou once gave people a sense of mystery and hope; but by the time the novel ends, we understand it was nothing more than Don Quixote's windmill, and Ma La himself is a Don Quixote-like figure. And yet human beings must have ideals — in this sense humanity needs the utopian impulse, needs Don Quixote-like figures. So we cannot deny the enthusiasm of the Chinese people in the 1950s for building cooperatives; it is simply that this enthusiasm was not combined with reality. The literature of the Seventeen Years and the Cultural Revolution that reflected the cooperativization question set out from enthusiasm and disregarded reality, attributing the resistance to cooperativization to the sabotage of class enemies such as landlords and rich peasants — which was rather naive. The Human Realm depicts a new-century utopia, objectively depicts its bankruptcy, and does not attribute this to class enemies; it even allows Zhao Guangfu — who stands opposed to Ma La — to set aside old grievances when defending the homeland and join hands with him. All of this causes The Human Realm to stand both in connection with the literature of the Seventeen Years and the Cultural Revolution, and to transcend it — making it a valuable new text.

Liu Jiming is a writer who thinks deeply. Years ago he wrote a novella called Enlightenment [note: published in Selected Fiction, Issue 10, 2012], whose central character is Qu Boan. In the 1980s, Qu Boan is an enlightener, an idol of the intellectual world — but in the new century, for the sake of his company's interests, he forces the people of Chunshu Island from their homeland, making them homeless. Once upon a time, when Qu Boan had been classified as a rightist, the people of Chunshu Island not only took him in but helped him survive the disaster; the island girl Jiang Zhonglian not only cured his illness but married him. Yet when he rises to prominence, he not only abandons Lianzi but also turns the very homeland on which all the Chunshu Island people depend for their livelihood into his development site; even the toon trees the islanders regard as their life are cut down and cease to exist. The enlightener has degenerated — this is Liu Jiming's intention in writing Qu Boan, and the power of the work is evident.

Now he has offered us The Human Realm, giving us a new dimension for rethinking the cooperativization novels of the Seventeen Years and Cultural Revolution. That the people of Shenhuangzhou lose even their homeland under capital's expansion, and that Ma La — a new person of socialist literature — once had a flourishing enterprise, only for his rural experiment in the manner of Liang Shengbao to end in ultimate bankruptcy: all of this invites deep reflection.

The novel's title, The Human Realm [人境], comes from the Eastern Jin poet Tao Yuanming's fifth poem in the series Twenty Poems on Drinking Wine:

I built my thatched hut within the human realm, Yet hear no clatter of carriages and horses. You ask me how this can be so? When the heart is far, the place grows distant of itself. Beneath the eastern hedge I pick chrysanthemums; In the distance, unhurried, I behold the southern mountain. The mountain air at dusk is fine; Birds fly homeward, one with another. In all this there is a true meaning — I wish to speak of it, but have already forgotten the words.

Liu Jiming directly uses the lines "I built my thatched hut within the human realm / Yet hear no clatter of carriages and horses" as the epigraph at the novel's opening. The novel's principal character Ma La does indeed share Tao Yuanming's ideals: he hopes to transform Shenhuangzhou into a Peach Blossom Spring [note: Tao Yuanming's celebrated utopian idyll], and like Tao Yuanming, he combines farming in Shenhuangzhou with writing. Yet just as Tao Yuanming's ideals could never ultimately be realized, so too with Ma La: a great downpour combined with the Chufeng Group's intervention, and his homeland faces catastrophic ruin.