Feng Min: Starting from China's Land

 and Reality

— Reading Liu Jiming's Novel The Human Realm

Source: China Writers Network | Feng Min | December 19, 2016

The Human Realm is Liu Jiming's latest full-length novel, years in the making. Its narrative draws the reader in with an irresistible sense of immersion, carrying me unexpectedly into the world Liu Jiming has created. The novel offers a panoramic, three-dimensional, and "synchronic" portrayal of the sweeping transformations that nearly four decades of reform and opening-up have brought to Chinese society, touching on numerous historical events and social currents. This portrayal is not the fragmented, entertainment-driven treatment so common in much contemporary fiction, but rather a rational reflection on history and reality — one that bears the unmistakable stamp of genuine intellectual inquiry. The Human Realm is a novel with "voices" — a cacophony of voices, like the full score of a symphonic work — and at the same time it presents a "polyphonic" structure: the multiple voices of the external world interweave, entangle, interpenetrate, and contend with one another, while within the writer (or the narrative voice of the work) two inner voices struggle and strain against each other. The novel's first half depicts the "great world" of humanity living alongside the land; the second half turns to the "small world" of the literary and intellectual circle — the two halves forming a relationship of correspondence and dialogue. Reading The Human Realm, I seem to see a dust-laden thinker who, having scaled the summit of reason, turns back with tender longing toward the fertile plains of feeling — a spiritual triumph, no less. It is precisely this quality that gives Liu Jiming his singular voice in expressing Chinese experience and Chinese stories. He carries within him a natural reverence for the harmonious order of the natural world, and a deep, abiding attachment to the small village on the Jianghan Plain called Shenhuangzhou. The people who live and struggle on that land, and the creatures and plants of the natural world — all have passed through the filter of the author's emotion, like patterns raised on a carpet, soft and textured to the touch. Those two charming little hedgehogs, Dalin and Xiaolin [Big Grove and Little Grove], have yet to leave my mind.

The artistic function of a novel is not merely to tell a twisting and moving story — more importantly, it is to create characters one cannot forget. In my view, creating memorable characters is far more demanding than telling a good story. When we think of classic novels about rural China, we think of Liang Shengbao in A History of Entrepreneurship and Xiao Changchun in A Bright Sunny Sky [note: Yanyang Tian, a celebrated socialist realist novel]. These "images of the new socialist man" fashioned through fiction were, in their day, known to nearly every household in China. Ma La, the protagonist of The Human Realm, both inherits this tradition and carries it further. Liang Shengbao and Xiao Changchun came to understand the historic transformation of their class position through the contrast between the old and new social orders, and in the changing economic system discerned the direction of historical development. As leaders of the collective economy, they embodied a selfless spirit of dedication and a sense of responsibility befitting those who are masters of their own fate. Ma La, by contrast, is carried through the turbulence of social transformation — from exhilaration to disillusionment, from setback to reflection, his fortunes rising and falling with the tides. Neither Liang Shengbao nor Xiao Changchun ever had to navigate the vicissitudes of individual fate or the mutations of human nature under a market economy. In this sense, Ma La is a richer and more three-dimensional figure than either of his predecessors, and a more genuinely tragic one. As a schoolboy, Ma La's heroes were his elder brother Ma Ke and the educated youth Murong Qiu. His brother's heroic spirit shaped him; Murong Qiu's books cultivated his love of reading. In acting as messenger between his brother and Murong Qiu, carrying books and letters back and forth, Ma La underwent his first awakening to love. After Ma Ke died a martyr's death — sacrificing himself to save the production brigade's seed grain — his brother became the driving force behind Ma La's lifelong struggle. It is no exaggeration to say that his brother played a decisive role in shaping Ma La's growth and character.

As Marx observed, philosophers have interpreted the world in various ways; the point, however, is to change it. In contemporary China, intellectual elites have often taken part in designing the blueprints for various reforms. Ma La, as an outsider, experiences this rapidly changing world from the margins — which gives him something the elites lack: a visceral, ground-level empathy with ordinary people. His decision to return to his hometown and build something there is the fruit of rational reflection; he throws his entire passion into the remaking of rural China, with Shenhuangzhou as his "experimental base." In Ma La one finds both the moral idealism of a European visionary and the chivalric spirit of the traditional Chinese humanist intellectual — the one who shoulders responsibility for all under heaven. Ma La's practice of establishing the "Tongxin Cooperative" [note: tongxin — "of one heart," or "united in purpose"] in Shenhuangzhou offers a profound lesson: in China, the question of land is historical, contemporary, and future all at once. Whether in revolution, in socialist construction, or in reform, it has always been the land question that lies at the center. China's future, too, cannot escape it. The specialized cooperative, as an emerging new form of economic organization in China's villages, is in the process of reorganizing China's farmers — and this will surely become an unstoppable historical tide. Ma La's tragedy closely resembles that of his mentor Lü Yongjia: both were pioneers. Lü Yongjia was a pioneer of reform and opening-up; Ma La is a pioneer of rural renewal. Pioneers often fail for want of sufficient strength, yet they exercise an immense guiding influence on those who come after. The value of the character Ma La lies precisely in this: he is both a prophetic thinker ahead of his time and a practitioner with his feet planted firmly in the earth.

Another major figure in The Human Realm is Murong Qiu. If Ma La's intellectual mentor was the liberal Lü Yongjia, then the greatest influence on Murong Qiu's worldview was the committed communist Ma Ke. Ma Ke was the Communist Youth League secretary of the production brigade; Murong Qiu was an educated youth sent down from the provincial capital to labor in the countryside. Murong Qiu admired Ma Ke's vigorous, can-do spirit and shared his ideal of shouldering the burdens of the world. Murong Qiu's distinctly intellectual temperament, in turn, deeply attracted Ma Ke, who drew much spiritual nourishment from the fine literary works she recommended. Two kindred spirits, they moved from comradeship to love. Tragically, a fire brought their young romance to an end — Ma Ke perished in the flames while saving collective property. This chance event in life altered Murong Qiu's destiny irrevocably. After the national college entrance examinations were restored, Murong Qiu gained admission to one of the top universities in the provincial capital and remained there as a faculty member, passing through a failed marriage along the way. As Murong Qiu's life unfolds, so too does the second half of The Human Realm, which gradually opens onto the "small world" of humanist intellectuals, drawn forward by the thread of her experience. This intellectual circle is rife with competition for fame and material gain, petty behavior, and at times even squalid conduct. Murong Qiu, who only ever wanted to pursue scholarship and keep clear of academic politics, cannot always keep herself untainted — at times she drifts with the current. Yet after coming into contact with Ma La, she subjects her own life to a searching self-examination. She resolves to change her way of living and her approach to scholarship, to return to Shenhuangzhou, and to explore together with Ma La the new questions and new paths of cooperative rural economics.

In The Human Realm, Lü Yongjia and Ma Ke are not characters who run the length of the narrative — both depart this world far too early. Yet these two figures profoundly shape Ma La and Murong Qiu. The contrast between them is striking: Lü Yongjia — gifted, prescient, a man of many talents — dies in pursuit of self-interest; Ma Ke — simple, steadfast, unwavering in his faith — dies in service to others. Yet Ma La, so deeply influenced by Lü Yongjia, and Murong Qiu, so deeply marked by Ma Ke, arrive at the same destination by different roads, from a new point of intellectual departure — both must bid farewell to their old selves and move toward a new one.

In sum, it is precisely because Liu Jiming fuses the subjective and objective worlds into a single unified vision that The Human Realm achieves a profound harmony of the historical and the aesthetic. The novel closes with an open ending: the fates of many of its characters remain in motion, and like Chinese society in the midst of its ongoing transformation, the work is full of crisis yet pregnant with hope. As Liu Jiming writes in his Afterword: "More than thirty years have passed. Chinese contemporary literary creation, having been buffeted by a dizzying succession of new terms and new trends, seems to have returned to its original point of departure. No amount of flashy and bewildering ornamentation can conceal the pallor and crisis within literature itself. Contemporary Chinese society and its literature seem once again to face a new round of setting out, a new round of release." One can only hope that The Human Realm will prove to be a harbinger of spring — drawing more writers like Liu Jiming, writers with a sense of responsibility and ideals, to set out anew from China's land and its reality, to welcome a new literary and intellectual "sunrise."

(The author is former Deputy Editor of Fiction Selection magazine)

Lu Taiuang: 

Rebuilding "The Mirror of the World"

— The Inspiration and Significance of Liu Jiming's Novel

The Human Realm

Editor's Note: Baoma has previously recommended the novel The Human Realm, its Afterword, and Xiang Jing's critical essay "The Human Realm: Retreat and Reconstruction." Today we present "Rebuilding 'The Mirror of the World' — The Inspiration and Significance of Liu Jiming's Novel The Human Realm," a critical essay by Lu Taiuang. The author argues that from the mid-1980s onward, as modernism and postmodernism rose to dominance, literature turned relentlessly "inward," producing works with almost nothing but interior psychology and no exterior world. The precise, realistic descriptions of flora and of Dalin and Xiaolin (the hedgehogs) in The Human Realm represent the return of environment to literary works — restoring the one-dimensional and flattened literary space while also enriching human feeling. Through an analysis of characters such as Ma La and Murong Qiu, the author argues that the novel reveals a kind of vivid, profound individuality rooted in reality. Works of realist literature like The Human Realm hold up a mirror for us, and carry far-reaching significance for the development of contemporary literature.

Part One

The flowers of the Chinese milk vetch are pink, growing in clusters like grapes; at the height of their bloom they are more dazzling than the morning glow, more resplendent than flame. In a farmer's eyes, the milk vetch is a true treasure: it can be used as green manure, fed to cattle and pigs, and it is a ravishing sight, a delight to the eye…

Strange as it may sound even to myself, what first seized my attention in The Human Realm — Liu Jiming's ambitious new novel, years in the making, running to more than half a million characters — was precisely this passage of description about a plant.

On a cursory reading, there seems nothing remarkable about it. The author has simply used a plain, realistic hand to bring before our eyes a flower common to the Hubei plains in the past, rarely seen today yet here reappeared — the Chinese milk vetch. In other words, the author has painted a picture: a picture of a southern village and countryside, a picture of the flowers and plants of that southern village. Yet read more carefully, and especially when set against the literary landscape of the new century, this passage reveals itself to be not merely unremarkable — rather, it becomes something fresh and even uncommon. Indeed, to put it strongly: within the writing climate of modernism and postmodernism — whether genuine or counterfeit modernism and postmodernism, that is another question worth discussing — that has prevailed since the new century began, we seem to have forgotten some plain and useful techniques of realist writing. And it is not only those so-called modernist and postmodernist writers who see no one and nothing in the world besides themselves; even writers who pride themselves on being realists seem to have lost the capacity for description. As a result, in the vast ocean of literary works, we can scarcely find a decent passage of description, scarcely a moving landscape. What we most often encounter is a novel's characters — who are in many cases simply the author himself — wallowing in self-pity, self-congratulation, and self-dissolution. And on the rare occasions when we do come across something purporting to be a landscape or a scene, it is almost invariably rendered in the most vaporous abstraction. Write flowers blooming, and you get "flowers of every color all bloomed"; write birdsong, and you get "all the birds began to call"; write a crowd, and you get "countless people." In this kind of "abstraction," the writer seems to have set every variety of flower before our eyes, sent every kind of bird singing into our ears, placed an innumerable host of people at our side — yet confronted with "every kind," "all," and "countless," we see no flowers blooming, hear no birds singing, see no individual people. Everything is here; the totality is here — and yet there is nothing here at all.

This is one reason why I was so struck by the milk vetch in The Human Realm — what a concrete, specific plant it is! Yes, I have grown weary of those endlessly murmuring interiors, those vague and vaporous so-called descriptions. Or rather, I had long been waiting for precisely this kind of precise, tangible description — long been waiting for a landscape this specific and unadorned. What made those "vast stretches of milk vetch as brilliant as morning clouds" on the Hubei plains such a surprise was, more importantly, the sense that perhaps they signaled the recovery of a literary space that had vanished long ago. Unlike the one-dimensional, flattened space that so many novels of the new century have presented to us, The Human Realm gives us a multi-dimensional, three-dimensional space. Its most direct sign is that "environment" — long absent from fiction — has returned, rendered with bold and generous strokes.

In my view, the return of "environment" through The Human Realm carries an enormously significant meaning for the development of contemporary literature, and especially of realist literature. In the writing climate of modernism and postmodernism that gradually took hold from the mid-1980s onward, writers declared themselves answerable only to the inner life, only to human nature, or even only to sensation and desire — and so the "inward turn" became the paramount literary direction, psychological portraiture became the dominant literary technique, and the external world — of which environment is the most essential constituent — fell into neglect. Objectively speaking, the "inward turn" has indeed provided us with an important literary dimension and produced works of considerable psychological depth. But the problem is that a long and unreflective commitment to that inward turn has caused us to forget that literature is simultaneously both the "rotation" of the writer's inner world and the "revolution" of the external world — and that the finest literary works are most often the product of a perfect alignment achieved only after the writer's inner "rotation" and the outer world's "revolution" have met in repeated friction and collision. What this means is that, in the course of their long inward rotation, our writers have too often become lost in the world of their own sensations, forgetting that without the impact of the external world, the inner rotation must eventually lose its driving force. They have forgotten that the external world is also an important stage on which humanity, the human heart, and human nature are revealed; that "environment" is the crucial space in which characters act and in which the human heart unfolds.

The passage about the milk vetch cited above is a fine illustration of precisely this point. If we consider the matter from Tang Caor's perspective, we realize that without the beautiful pastoral landscape set off by those cloudlike, radiant fields of milk vetch, without the "field of hope" jointly created by Ma La and the members of the Tongxin Agricultural Cooperative, without the atmosphere of that simple yet happy home built by Ma La and Xiaoguai — a lone bachelor and an orphan — it is difficult to imagine how this young woman, so steeped in the flashy and mercenary culture of the city that she had become dissolute and drifting, could have achieved her twofold reversal of soul and life, transforming herself from a despairing, drug-addicted girl who knew only hatred and grabbing into the pure-as-hibiscus, grateful and giving administrator of a music school for children. From this angle, we can say that it was precisely the beautiful milk vetch that opened the door to Tang Caor's transformation.

This tells us: as the real literary space is restored, our emotional lives will be restored with it.

On this point, the novel's portrayal of Dalin and Xiaolin offers an even more compelling demonstration.

Part Two

One morning, while Ma La was earthing up the kiwifruit trees in the peach garden on the outer bank — trees half-drowned and dying from the floodwaters — a familiar squeaking sound reached his ears. He spun around and saw two little hedgehogs that had appeared from out of nowhere, suddenly right in front of him. His eyes lit up — he recognized them: it was Dalin and Xiaolin. They had been missing for so long that he had assumed they'd been drowned by the flood long ago. Now, at the sight of their small pointed snouts and their bright, darting little eyes, his heart surged with warmth. He crouched down and gathered them both into his arms.

Even without reading the whole novel, even from this quoted passage alone, we can see that here the author has invested far more feeling than in the milk vetch passage. Or rather, through this passage, we see that as the novel's space continues to expand, so too does its emotional depth. But all of this begins with the origins and fortunes of these two uninvited guests, Dalin and Xiaolin.

After settling in Shenhuangzhou, Ma La had planted a kiwifruit orchard on the desolate outer bank. A full three years later, the kiwifruit trees finally bore fruit. "In early summer, every time he saw the tiny young kiwis no bigger than a thumbnail trembling and swaying at the ends of the branches — like the faces of infants sleeping soundly in their swaddling — Ma La would involuntarily slow his steps, afraid of disturbing these beloved 'children.'" In order to tend these beloved "children," Ma La and Xiaoguai, the orphan he had taken in, took turns keeping night watch over the orchard. One night, when it was Xiaoguai's turn, a fit of coughing broke out as midnight drew near, jolting him half-awake. He searched everywhere and found nothing. The following night, led by Ma La, both Xiaoguai and the reader finally discovered the truth:

That night, Ma La stayed in the orchard with Xiaoguai. As midnight approached, the coughing started up again. Ma La gave Xiaoguai a look, picked up the flashlight, and Xiaoguai grabbed the spade; the two of them went into the orchard one behind the other.

Beneath one of the kiwifruit trees, Ma La directed the beam of the flashlight at a fuzzy mass at the base of the trunk. At first, Xiaoguai took it for a heap of weeds — but after the light had shone on it for only a moment, the heap of weeds suddenly stirred, then thrust out a small pink face, a pair of mung-bean-sized eyes rolling about alertly; and when it opened its chubby little mouth, the sound it made was identical to the coughing Xiaoguai had heard.

A small pink face, bright darting eyes, a chubby little mouth — what vivid description, what an enchanting scene. Reading this, we cannot help but join Xiaoguai in his cry of astonishment: "A hedgehog! So it was this little creature doing the coughing!"

And so the two hedgehogs took up residence in the orchard, becoming members of the somewhat solitary household that Ma La and Xiaoguai had formed. They were later given the names Dalin and Xiaolin [Big Grove and Little Grove], and not only made Ma La and Xiaoguai's home no longer lonely but filled it with delight — going on to become the "goodwill ambassadors" of the orchard, giving every visitor who came there a taste of ineffable childlike wonder. Then, when Shenhuangzhou was inundated by a combination of natural disaster and man-made calamity, the villagers scattered, and even the members of the Tongxin Agricultural Cooperative were forced to accept government resettlement and leave. Only Ma La remained, keeping solitary watch over Shenhuangzhou, keeping solitary watch over the kiwifruit orchard, keeping solitary watch in his flood-ravaged home. And it was at this very moment that the long-vanished Dalin and Xiaolin quietly reappeared — returning to Shenhuangzhou, returning to the kiwifruit orchard, returning to Ma La's side.

We also notice that Xiaoguai returned to Ma La's side after Dalin and Xiaolin. This arrangement, this combination, this scene — at once desolate and warm — is extraordinarily suggestive. The reason lies in the novel's several vivid scenes of description centered on the hedgehogs — let us keep calling them Dalin and Xiaolin — which further restore the novel's space and further restore our emotional life. At this point, the author wishes to add a remark that may not be entirely superfluous: there is a currently popular genre called the environmental novel. He naturally supports this kind of fiction, full of goodwill and respect for the natural world. But in truth, from the fundamental standpoint of literature, if we can bring to life in a novel one plant, one animal, one landscape, one environment — as Liu Jiming does in The Human Realm — that may well be more valuable than writing several so-called environmental novels. For the flowers, birds, insects, and fish that come alive in a literary work — and, by the same token, the objects and people that come alive alongside them — may exert an influence far greater than that of any purely genre-based literature. Though this is also because, in the realm of environmental literature, we still have much thunder and very little rain; good works are few.

But the significance of the descriptions of Dalin and Xiaolin in The Human Realm is by no means so simple.

If we read those passages carefully, we discover that it is precisely Dalin and Xiaolin who gradually deepen and enrich the emotional lives of several related characters. First there is Xiaoguai: orphaned early, this child seized by suffering almost before he began, had scarcely any childhood at all — and even under Ma La's care, what he absorbed and learned was mostly the serious business of survival, with little of the playfulness of childhood. It was precisely the timely appearance of Dalin and Xiaolin that awakened the child's eye and heart within him, giving him the joy and happiness of a childhood — and thinking of it this way, what a valuable childhood experience that fit of coughing that gave him such a fright must have been! The same is no less true for Ma La himself. Surveying the whole novel, we find that Ma La's life is essentially heavy, serious, and austere. We might even say that due to the peculiar circumstances of his era and his family, he stepped into the adult world almost in childhood — and after entering that adult world, what awaited him were even weightier and more serious questions of life. The weight of it nearly crushed the breath from him, so that he struggled hard to "grow up," to "mature" — seen from another angle, how desperately he must have wanted to be naive and carefree just once. It is precisely the arrival of Dalin and Xiaolin that goes some way toward filling this void — consider that even the names Dalin and Xiaolin were ones Ma La found in a fairy tale. Of course, the significance of Dalin and Xiaolin to Ma La is still richer and more varied: beyond childlike delight, they also represent a broader sense of responsibility and duty. For the bond of feeling between Ma La and Dalin and Xiaolin is a sentiment of great breadth and generosity, and it is only on the foundation of this kind of feeling that the stories between Ma La and Xiaoguai, Tang Caor, and the elders of Shenhuangzhou can feel truly real and fully realized. And the timely return of Dalin and Xiaolin after the flood further warms and steadies Ma La, giving him greater resolve and composure as he continues on his path of reflection and seeking. Then there is Tang Caor: we have already spoken above of what the milk vetch means to her, and in fact Dalin and Xiaolin mean no less to her than the milk vetch — otherwise she would not, upon hearing Xiaoguai's account of Ma La and the two hedgehogs, have exclaimed: "This is itself a fairy tale." In truth, it was precisely the "fairy tale" jointly woven by Ma La, Xiaoguai, the milk vetch, and Dalin and Xiaolin that drew her, step by step, back from her wrong path and toward her original nature — and that is another "fairy tale" altogether.

In the face of such a "fairy tale," how could our hearts not be fully moved?

Yet this emotional richness must find its full nurturing within a restored social space.

Part Three

Watching Lulu so near at hand, close enough to reach out and touch that young face still with traces of immaturity, with a few faint pimples still faintly visible, the fine down on her cheeks almost discernible, Murong Qiu felt that her daughter, like a cloud drifting without anchor, was floating ever further from her. It was true — her daughter had grown up.

Lulu heard Murong Qiu's faint sigh. She quietly raised her face, and met directly a pair of eyes that were gazing at her — a gaze unmistakably a mother's and no other's, carrying within it a sorrow barely perceptible. Lulu caught it — and also noticed that on her mother's broad forehead, a breadth uncommon in women, there had appeared several deep wrinkles, as if freshly ploughed by a ploughshare, or carved in by a sculptor's chisel. And before this, in Lulu's memory, her mother's forehead had always been so smooth and even, almost as round and full as a young person's. A vague unease and guilt crept over Lulu's heart, and she called out instinctively again: "Mum…"

What faces these are! Or rather, what a wealth of meaning is written on these two faces! Yet the author makes no attempt to act as interpreter of those faces — as so many of our "modern" writers would do — but instead, with a sensitive and delicate brush, simply "paints" for us these two faces of such rich implication, each complex and nuanced expression upon them, and even that faint yet deep-drawn sigh.

The author has handed the right of interpretation over to us — and so we must decode it ourselves. Murong Qiu is one of the central characters in the second half of The Human Realm. The author's reason for placing such a figure in the novel is, beyond answering the age's question of "Where is China headed?" in a concealed dialogue with the first half of the novel alongside characters such as Ma La, to serve as our guide into urban space — allowing us to observe the earth-shattering yet all-pervasive transformations in urban society over the past several decades, especially the thirty-odd years since the reform and opening-up. More importantly, the author uses Murong Qiu in her role as intellectual — a social role of supreme importance since the beginning of the new era — to reveal the war without gunfire unfolding within the intellectual world: the divergent perceptions of, and covert as well as open struggles over, China's social transformation. As individuals, intellectuals may not seem particularly conspicuous; but if we regard them as a kind of social personality, their influence cannot be overlooked — least of all today, when power, capital, and knowledge have become the iron triangle of contemporary Chinese society. For the intellectual "drama" playing out in China's knowledge world often amounts to writing the "script" for China's social transformation, or to a "dress rehearsal" of the changes to come. Observing this group, therefore, helps us better understand the evolution of Chinese society. Regrettably, in contemporary literary works, intellectuals have been "overlooked" — either written too small (writers often imagine intellectuals as ineffectual individualists just like themselves, preoccupied with trivial matters and little else), or written too lightly (in some novels, intellectuals have nothing beyond the burden of their heavy flesh, the disorder of the senses, and petty academic rivalries over titles and research grants — a reflection, in some measure, of the writer's own projection). From this angle alone, Liu Jiming's creation in The Human Realm of a group of distinctly different intellectuals — Murong Qiu, He Wei, Kuang Xibei, and others — represents a valuable contribution to and development of contemporary Chinese literature. After all, since at least Qian Zhongshu's Fortress Besieged, we have rarely seen intellectuals rendered with any real distinction. Moreover, the author reveals "their" world from a dimension that is wholly original.

That original dimension is the pair of faces we mentioned above — and above all, Murong Qiu's face. That is to say, through a careful tracing of Murong Qiu's emotional journey, the author opens up her inner world and the emotional and spiritual worlds of He Wei, Kuang Xibei, and the rest — pulling back the curtain on the intellectual world's overt and covert debates, and ultimately drawing open the great historical curtain of China's sweeping transformation. In doing so, the author achieves a subtle balance between the interior and the exterior, the weighty and the light, the near and the far.

Were it not for the borrowed eyes of Lulu — a daughter's eyes — we could scarcely see the deep "wrinkles" on Murong Qiu's face, scarcely see that "barely perceptible sorrow" upon her countenance, scarcely see the "scars" inscribed on that face and in that heart. For in the great majority of moments, what she shows the world is the poised, composed, self-contained, and incisive quality of a true intellectual. Fortunately, the author lends us a "daughter's" pair of eyes, allowing us to see what would otherwise remain hidden — and how rich and inexpressible Murong Qiu's emotional world turns out to be: abandoned by Gu Chaoyang, she never remarried after the divorce, living on with her daughter as sole companions through the years; all the while, as emotion was deferred and time flew past and youth faded, she became not only a source of worry for her aging father but also a cause of "guilt" and "unease" in her daughter. And awkward circumstances crowded in one after another: being introduced by her middle-school classmate Pan Xiaoping as a kind of gift to some "old cadre"; being fixed upon and pursued by Old Yue — once "Young Yue," now her working partner, soon to become her superior — his emotional life as ragged and worn-out as a bundle of old wadding, his psychology warped and twisted. Murong Qiu's embarrassment and distress in all of this are beyond easy telling. Yet what humiliates and distresses Murong Qiu goes still deeper. The reason her emotional space has grown increasingly constricted and shadowy is not only personal, but also seems to involve the tricks of the age — or rather, it is because she has been drifting with the current of the times that she now finds herself in this predicament, unable to go forward and unable to go back. On this point, Murong Qiu's own reflection is notably powerful: "The love that had once set her heart pounding and her blood running hot had ended without issue with one person's sudden death and one era's quiet curtain-fall. For all these years she had remained single because she felt she had lost both the capacity and the courage to love."

Indeed, all of this is both a personal desolation and the desolation of an age — and more than that, the desolation of one who has turned her back on youth, on ideals, on the very era she once inhabited. We see that once Murong Qiu becomes conscious of this, she gradually begins to restore her own life and feelings, and seems also to be gradually restoring time itself and the age. This is why she sets aside the instinct of maternal love, agrees to — even encourages — her daughter Lulu, fresh from a prestigious university, to give up the chance to study abroad and a secure career in order to work with Kuang Xibei to found their own venture, "People's Livelihood Network." It is why she consents to the romance between her daughter Lulu and Kuang Xibei — a romance between teacher and student — and why she encourages them to go deep among the people, measuring the earth with their own feet, searching for China's path. For in her daughter's choices she dimly discerns her own youth, her own ideals. And so what Murong Qiu does is at once a transcendent form of maternal love and a form of self-redemption, of self-restoration. More moving still, we see her at the novel's end finally breaking free of the spiderweb that has held her captive, stepping again toward a wider world of reality: "She could no longer go on staying in that 'academic circle' exhaling its odor of decay. A thought suddenly struck her: next semester she would take her graduate students to Yanhe, to Shenhuangzhou, back to that village where she had once lived and labored — to carry out a true fieldwork investigation." Since the beginning of the new era, we have spoken of human nature, taking it as literature's ultimate aim. If that slogan still possessed a certain liberating relevance in the early new era, then from the standpoint of literary practice, in the new century it has become not even a fig leaf for literature. We have so many writers who claim to write about human nature, so many novels said to probe human nature — yet in my view, the sum total of all that human nature spoken of on lips and written on pages is no match for the human nature written on Murong Qiu's face, which is richer, more vivid, more profound. Because, at bottom, divorced from a deep understanding and a careful distillation of reality, all human nature will have nothing to attach itself to, nothing in which to embody itself.

Part Four

Murong Qiu stood on a ridge of earth at the water's edge, gazing out across the river. On the broad surface of the water she could see a figure swimming toward the center of the current. The water ran fast; a boat had just passed, and the waves surged, one crest higher than the last. Between the peaks and troughs the figure appeared and disappeared, as if it might be swallowed at any moment. By now the sun had already dropped in the west, and the last glow of the setting sun had dyed the surface of the river a deep crimson. The figure was like a blazing torch, cutting through wave after wave of rushing current, pressing steadily closer to the sandbar at the center of the river.

As the emotional current of characters like Murong Qiu is gradually restored, expanded, and set flowing freely, the deeper force of the novel begins to make itself felt: beneath this quietly flowing river of feeling, there rushes a torrent of thought. Driven by this torrent, not only is the lost literary space restored, but time itself — nearly vanished from literature — surges back around us like a river in flood, sweeping us into its embrace. Enveloped and carried within it, we see two phases of China — Revolutionary China and Reform China — unfolding before us in fierce collision, clash, and exchange, each revealing its own face and spirit.

The novel's portrayal of Revolutionary China is concentrated principally in the figure of Ma Ke. The author handles this with considerable skill: rather than leaping directly into the river of history to recount the story of Revolutionary China, he works mainly through the memories of Ma La, Murong Qiu, Dawanbo, and others — generating a pair of "retrospective" eyes through which we witness the growth and the untimely death of Ma Ke, this revolutionary youth, in a manner that serves as a metaphor for the growth and the untimely death of Revolutionary China itself. It must be acknowledged that, feeling keenly that the "wound narrative" about Revolutionary China dominant since the beginning of the new era had been carried too far — to the point where people had largely forgotten Revolutionary China's original aspirations — the author lavishes upon Ma Ke, and through him upon Revolutionary China, an abundance of feeling, consistently regarding him through eyes of youthful idealism, of praise and fond remembrance. He therefore barely touches on Revolutionary China's difficulties and setbacks. Yet this treatment, on one hand, does much to restore the balance of historical narrative about China, allowing Revolutionary China to appear for the first time before readers in contemporary literature in a just and upright aspect; and on the other hand, through Ma Ke — this revolutionary youth with his distinctly puritanical coloring — it intimates the difficult circumstances faced by Revolutionary China in pursuing its ideals, while his sudden extinction makes us feel that though the curtain of that era has been drawn, its legacy, and above all its youthful idealism, must not be forgotten — and still less betrayed. And in this, space is left for time to reconnect across its breach.

The novel's portrayal of Reform China is concentrated principally in Lü Yongjia. Toward this embodiment of the reform era, the author seems to adopt a more pronounced critical stance. Yet if we go deeper into the text, we find that as someone who lived through that era, the author, though not without a spirit of self-examination, self-critique, and self-analysis, cannot at bottom help investing in Lü Yongjia — and through him in Reform China — a substantial degree of identification and respect. The author's reflections on Reform China are built on a foundation of genuine recognition and affirmation. This, too, is what sets the author apart from his contemporaries, and especially his fellow writers of that era: lacking the capacity for reflection, many writers who came of age in the reform era have transformed their identification with the age into an unprincipled self-infatuation. Consider even the author's apparent "critique" of Lü Yongjia's dissolute personal life — is he not, in that very act, also "praising" him? His exaggerated virility, beyond being desire, greed, and rapacity, is also vitality, romantic spirit, and "literary quality." Not to mention that the author directly portrays his heroic bearing in the great tide of the market economy, and his observation that "capital is a wild horse that always needs someone to ride it" remains arresting to hear even today. Moreover, his reform, his entrepreneurship, contained still larger ambitions and aspirations. Before he went into business, his conversation with Ma La in the spartan dormitory of Hekou Town Middle School makes this plain:

Ma La said: "Teacher Lü, maybe we can both become remarkable entrepreneurs someday!"

"Entrepreneurs?" Teacher Lü suddenly shot up from his end of the bed, gave a snort through his nose. "Remember this: becoming an entrepreneur is only the first step of our undertaking. Once we've made enough money, we'll buy an island and recruit a thousand young men and women from all over the country — no, from all over the world — to come and live there. I've already decided: the island will be called 'Utopia.' Everyone on the island will be equal, with equal access to education, housing, and healthcare; each person free to choose their own way of life, provided they don't interfere with anyone else's. Neither socialist nor capitalist, bound neither by the state nor by the family — just as More described in News from Nowhere [note: the author refers here to Thomas More's Utopia*, which in this context is rendered in Chinese as* 乌有乡消息*, literally "News from Nowhere"]…"*

Indeed, Lü Yongjia staked everything and threw himself into the sea of commerce because he still harbored ideals — the ideal of a "Utopia." In that Utopia, beyond material abundance, there would be freedom and equality, democracy and civilization — in short, there would still be "news from Nowhere." And this is precisely what moved Ma La most deeply about him. If we connect this to the mainstream discourse of the time — that the first to get rich would lead the rest to common prosperity — we can see that the reform era, at its outset, genuinely harbored a grand ideal; and in one dimension, that ideal was in fact a continuation of the lineage of Revolutionary China. For was it not the utopian/ideal-state quality — shared by both critics and defenders of Revolutionary China alike — that served as their common key word? When all is said and done, both the Chinese Revolution and Chinese reform amounted, for the people, to a kind of "social contract": not only to achieve national wealth, democracy, and civilization, but also to realize the people's freedom, equality, and happiness. It is this "social contract" that links Revolutionary China to Reform China — even if their contents differ considerably. From this angle, the reason Revolutionary China was subjected to reflection and critique by Reform China in the new era was, in part, because of its betrayal of this "social contract." And the reason Reform China is now in turn subjected to a kind of final-flicker reflection and critique from Revolutionary China is equally because it has, to a substantial degree, betrayed its own "Utopia" essence and "social contract" spirit. On this point, the rise and subsequent fall of the Kunpeng Corporation founded by Lü Yongjia and Ma La is a telling illustration.

And this is the deeper significance of Ma La's return to Shenhuangzhou. Without this return, there would be no systematic contemplation of these two phases of China; without that contemplation, there would be no future. This is also why Ma La remained mired in protracted perplexity for so long — why, though already well past youth and having accomplished a great deal of effective work in Shenhuangzhou, he still felt he had not truly "grown up," had not stepped out from the shadow of the two "elder brothers" and "mentors" — Ma Ke and Lü Yongjia. It is why Ma Ke and Lü Yongjia would periodically argue and contend within his mind: he needed time and space to digest that fierce inner debate, which is to say, he needed time and space to absorb the legacies left by both Revolutionary China and Reform China. Fortunately, we see that he has gradually managed to bring together the inheritances of these two phases of China with some success — that he has already demonstrated an initial expression of this original aspiration in his ability, honed in the market economy, to ride the wild horse of capital, leading the old, weak, ill, and impoverished villagers of Shenhuangzhou to establish the Tongxin Agricultural Cooperative. Finally, guided and inspired by Murong Qiu, he at last overcomes that nameless yet acutely real sense of "shame" long rooted in his heart: "A powerful warm current seemed to surge into Ma La's heart; the body that had been so heavy suddenly lightened, as though he had been reborn — he seemed to have become an entirely new person."

"An entirely new person." Yes — Ma La is a "new person." He is an ideal personality, a personality of the future, distilled, elevated, and created by the author on the basis of history and reality. Through this ideal personality, this personality of the future, the author not only succeeds in connecting the broken threads of history — he also powerfully opens up for us a space that faces the future. This is another of the author's contributions.

We have already noted above that The Human Realm has created a number of distinctive literary figures: intellectuals such as Murong Qiu and He Wei; Gu Chaoyang, that "ambitious and supremely shrewd" new-comprador figure who appears as the enemy of his own people; bureaucratic types such as Ding Youpeng; and new peasant figures such as Guyu. But it is beyond doubt that the most important literary figure in The Human Realm is Ma La — for he is at once the product of a synthesis of Revolutionary China and Reform China, and the necessary embodiment of an opening toward the future. Around him, a new generation — Kuang Xibei, Lulu, and others, the "new people" that the future requires — is already pressing to emerge.

The appearance of these "new people" is of great significance to contemporary Chinese literature.

In 1908, in his essay "The Destruction of Personality," Gorky delivered a sharp indictment of the Russian intellectual and literary world. He wrote: "Whether the modern writer cares about the future of his homeland is a matter open to doubt. Social problems no longer stimulate his creative drive; the poet has become a mediocre man of letters. He has slid from the heights of genius and generalization down to the flat plane of trivial daily incident, groping his way among everyday events. Form has grown increasingly monotonous, words increasingly cold, content increasingly impoverished. Genuine feeling has been extinguished; passion is gone. The writer is no longer the mirror of the world but a tiny shard of broken glass flung into the street dust — incapable, with its fractured surface, of reflecting the great life of the world, able only to reflect fragments of an ignoble existence, splinters of damaged souls." Today, Gorky's words seem tailor-made for contemporary Chinese literature in the new century — so sharp, so accurate, so deeply thought-provoking. For too long, our literature has been mired in the dust and broken glass of every street, having lost its passion and destroyed its individuality. Yet relying on a holistic realist literary vision, relying on a formidable intellectual power, relying on a vigorous sense of responsibility — and of course relying as well on meticulous design and precise, detailed description, and on those "new people," Ma La, Lulu, Kuang Xibei — Liu Jiming, amid the pervasive dust and shards, has erected for us a vast mirror. Once more we can see time, and space, and the ten thousand things growing in the interweaving of time and space; once more we can see the people, the peoples, moving across the stage that time and space have formed together, and their beating hearts — and thus we can once again see the individuality of literature, the individuality of humanity, and even the individuality of China itself. This is what allows The Human Realm to transcend the general meaning of literature, and especially the "pure literature" fashionable today, and to win for itself a wider space of significance.

Perhaps this is a restoration of great importance.

Perhaps this is a beginning of deep significance.

(Originally published in Yangtze Literary Review, Issue 3, 2016)

Imagining a Better World: 

Symposium Notes on The Human Realm

Baoma | November 30, 2016

Editor's Note: Today Baoma presents the proceedings of the symposium on The Human Realm. On October 15th, more than twenty critics and scholars gathered at the 65th session of the China National Academy of Arts' "Young Arts Forum" for an in-depth discussion of Liu Jiming's novel. The Human Realm is a significant work: written under the historical conditions of the new century — a period of extreme capitalist expansion, with no way out visible for rural China — it confronts rural history head-on and reopens the question of socialism. Through the story of Ma La and Murong Qiu's return to their home village and the building of a cooperative, it links together village and city, "Revolutionary China" and "Reform China," while attempting to offer a solution to the problems it raises. Yet solutions to problems in literature are ultimately imaginary solutions. Ma La builds his cooperative primarily through personal charisma and ability, relying on the "tolerance" and cooperation of the institutional system and of capital — can he truly be called a "new person"? In the face of powerful capital forces, can a cooperative save the countryside? Ma La's failure is an inevitable one; the problems he confronts are the problems that the age has thrown at all of us. History in reality continues to unfold, and so the story of The Human Realm has not ended either. We will go on seeking answers amid contradiction and uncertainty.

Lu Taiuang (China National Academy of Arts):

At the invitation of Teacher Zhu Dongli, I will be chairing today's symposium. My sincere thanks to everyone for giving up their day off and making their way through the heavy smog to attend this session of the Young Arts Forum. The forum has now been held sixty-five times, but this is the first occasion on which we have devoted an entire session to a single full-length novel. We do so because we believe The Human Realm is a work of significance, one that raises many major questions — questions of contemporary reality, of thought, of aesthetics, of art — and therefore merits serious discussion.

After finishing this work, Liu Jiming wrote in his Afterword that he felt as if the ship had reached port and the carriage had arrived at its destination — as if he were ready to set down his pen for good. When I discussed this with Teacher Zhu, I said that if this symposium could, at the very least, dissuade Jiming from that idea, it would already be a success. Why do I say this? Looking at the content and structure of the novel, the entire "narrative" is unfinished: the characters of Ma La, Lulu, Murong Qiu, and the others are fully realized, yet still in the process of growing and developing. The Human Realm offers a panoramic review of more than half a century of China's transformation, but the history of New China is itself unfinished, still in a state of continuation and development — and this is what gives a novel so intimately connected to reality its quality of "incompletion." Furthermore, this book is both an important achievement and a heterogeneous presence within contemporary literary creation; drawing out what is genuinely illuminating within it is also very much the purpose of this symposium.

Many of today's literary discussions are little more than social occasions — a round of compliments and promotional exercises, rather like commercial advertisements. This tendency needs to change; critical ethics and critical dignity must be rebuilt. I therefore hope that everyone will speak freely today, avoiding neither major nor sensitive topics. Let truly serious criticism begin here, and let this symposium become a genuine feast of thought and of art.

Li Yunlei (People's Literature Press):

Let me begin with some thoughts on Teacher Liu Jiming's novel. Whether approached from the perspective of realism or from that of "telling the Chinese story," I feel that The Human Realm has, above all, restored the function of the novel as a form of thought — as a form of intellectual debate. It is a novel that engages with a number of major social and intellectual questions, incorporates significant events into a framework of intellectual inquiry, and unfolds within a field of multiple contradictions. This was a tradition of nineteenth-century literature, and we see it again in The Human Realm.

I believe that research and creative practice in contemporary literature are currently in a state of rupture. Scholarship on the "Seventeen Years" period, on left-wing literature, and on the socialist literary tradition occupies a leading position in the contemporary academy — including the work of Hong Zicheng, Cai Xiang, and Han Yuhai, as well as numerous publications by younger scholars, all of which have produced relatively deep research into the socialist literary tradition. Yet from the perspective of creative writing, the field remains confined within the intellectual concerns and the mental atmosphere of the 1980s. In terms of actual writing, many authors seem to feel that the closer their work resembles some foreign writer — García Márquez, or Borges, for instance — the better it is. In recent years, a number of authors have begun to draw on the traditions of Dream of the Red Chamber, of Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio, of the Classic of Mountains and Seas, and so on. What I feel has been overlooked in all this is a very important matter: the tradition of twentieth-century modern Chinese literature, and in particular the tradition of left-wing literature. No one seems to say: I want to write like Lu Xun, like Mao Dun, like Ding Ling. In this sense, I feel that The Human Realm resembles A History of Entrepreneurship — it is an important work that, under new-century conditions and in a new historical context, reopens the discussion of socialism.

The novel involves two main threads. One is the thread of Ma La, which addresses the question of how to pursue the path of cooperative development in the new century. Those of us who study literary history are sensitive to this: the most central question in the canonical works of the Seventeen Years period — Liu Qing, Zhao Shuli, Zhou Libo — was precisely whether to take the path of cooperativization, and how to do so. The same is true in The Human Realm, though the historical conditions and background are entirely different. The protagonist Ma La is, in a number of important ways, quite unlike what we generally mean by the "socialist new person." He has one dimension of the socialist new person, but he also incorporates qualities found in the writers and works of the period since the 1980s. Comparing him with Sui Baopu in The Ancient Ship, one finds in him a quality of "brooding thinker." The figure of Ma La in The Human Realm is in fact a fusion of the qualities of both Liang Shengbao and Sui Baopu. I feel that The Human Realm is an exploration, under new conditions, of socialist possibility — specifically, an exploration of pursuing cooperativization through rural reconstruction.

The other thread follows Murong Qiu's activities in the intellectual world. Through her exchanges and confrontations with others, through a critique of neoliberal knowledge and a self-critique of her own experiences, history, and intellectual formation, she reestablishes her connection with the people and with those at the bottom of society. The novel renders this process, captures Murong Qiu's inclinations and positions. These two threads interweave: on one side linked to the socialist-era explorations of the past, and on the other linked to the state of the intellectual world since the 1980s — at once a critical reflection and a new exploration. I therefore feel that this novel represents a profound grasp of the dilemmas currently facing socialist thought in China, a search for a way out from within those dilemmas. It is in this sense too that I regard this novel as an exploration of what might be called "new socialist literature."

Feng Min (Fiction Selection magazine):

I feel this work achieves three kinds of unity: first, the unity of history and aesthetics; second, the unity of content and form; and third, the unity of knowledge and action in the author himself as an intellectual — a unity of theory and practice. Those of us who read fiction often stress the importance of the opening tone. In this novel, I had barely finished the first page before I was drawn in — its unhurried pace carries a powerful sense of immersion, pulling me unexpectedly into the world the author has created. This world is, first, reflective in the representational sense: the work offers a sweeping portrayal of the transformations wrought upon Chinese society by forty years of reform and opening-up, touching on many historical events and the various social currents of thought that have profoundly shaped the minds of people today. Reading it made me think: there are quite a few works that deal with this same stretch of life, yet they always seem to me fragmentary. The Human Realm, by contrast, provides a whole, a unified historical account oriented by a coherent worldview and value system — something quite different. But it is also driven by a strong subjectivity, meaning that the author has a deliberate, conscious aesthetic pursuit. A work like this cannot be stylistically, linguistically, or structurally duplicated in any other work. We often encounter novels that feel familiar — we sense we have read something like this before. This novel does not give that feeling; it is unmistakably The Human Realm, a crystallization of the author's own subjective experience.

This book has an enormous cast of characters, a vast wealth of information; it gives me the feeling of a work with many voices, a cacophony of voices, very much like a full orchestral score — and it is also synchronic, with everything moving forward together. When we are young and read Anna Karenina, we tend to focus on the storyline of Vronsky and Anna; when we are older, with more experience behind us, we find ourselves drawn to the thread of Levin — this intellectual with his powerful practical spirit. It is like two parallel themes in music advancing together: that is polyphony. In The Human Realm, the characters carry on dialogue, debate, and contention with one another, and within the author — or the narrator — two voices struggle and strain. That is polyphony; that is the polyphonic novel.

Let me also speak of the characters. Creating characters is the artistic function of the full-length novel, and it is what distinguishes a full-length novel from a short or medium-length work. A short story can tell a single tale; a novel must simultaneously tell its story and create its characters, and in creating characters, must articulate the author's relatively stable worldview, value system, philosophy of life, historical vision, even their conception of time and space. The reason we regard some novels as merely stretched-out novellas is precisely that they have story but no characters: however long you stretch them, they remain novellas — the content is too thin, the range of experience too narrow. On the subject of characters: Li Yunlei just spoke of the image of the socialist new person. Reading Ma La, I thought of Liang Shengbao in A History of Entrepreneurship and Xiao Changchun in A Bright Sunny Sky. In Ma La, and in his brother Ma Ke, one senses the influence of those earlier figures — because Xiao Changchun and Liang Shengbao were household names in China of their day. Reading Ma La and Ma Ke, I felt no strangeness at all; there is a sense of continuity, a shared spirit and character passing through. But I also felt that there is more to it than that — I even feel that how to categorize Ma La is itself a question: is he a peasant or an intellectual? A peasant with an intellectual coloring, or an intellectual with a peasant coloring? It is genuinely difficult to say. In all my reading, I have not encountered a character quite like him before. Finishing this work deepened my conviction that it is not enough for a writer to sit in their study: one must return to the fertile earth in order to write a novel like The Human Realm — one with both intellectual depth and a richness of character and story.

Huang Deng (Guangdong University of Finance):

Having read some interviews with Teacher Liu Jiming, I found that he is consciously and deliberately engaging with the two major transformations since the new era: the first is the transition from the Cultural Revolution to the new era; the second is the transition from a planned economy to a market economy. Teacher Liu's novel deals with both major transitional periods, weaving together individual destiny and the destiny of the age, offering a personal response to the whole. Because the problems it addresses are both particularly sensitive and particularly large in scope, the novel carries enormous thematic resonance. In this context, Teacher Liu's conscious decision to take up again the tradition of grand narrative reflects his alertness to the great crisis that has beset creative writing since the legitimization of everyday-life narrative in the 1990s. Grand narrative fell into an awkward position in the everyday narrative that took shape from the 1990s onward — yet our age has increasingly revealed its essential face. In the present context, we are genuinely confronted with new crises. How grand narrative is to return to center stage is not merely a question of creative direction; it is a question of how social problems are to be expressed and represented. In other words, the overall context has genuinely changed, and Teacher Liu is acutely attuned to it, responding directly to the call of the present through his creative work. This is what I particularly admire, and it is why reading this novel is so deeply satisfying.

Many people have mentioned that reading The Human Realm resembles reading A History of Entrepreneurship or An Ordinary World. Yet in my own reading I felt more as if I were reading Midnight [Ziye, by Mao Dun]. I feel that the inner structure of The Human Realm closely resembles that of Midnight, which occupies a very high position in modern literary history as the work that opened up the literary mode of offering a personally interpreted, sociological account of China's social structure and future trajectory. The Human Realm clearly harbors similar ambitions, and what Teacher Liu faces and must address is very similar to what Mao Dun faced in his day. To put it another way: reading The Human Realm, I felt that this work did not move me so much as it convinced me — it set off a great deal of thinking. Teacher Liu wants to make a point through The Human Realm, to express through the fates of his characters his own understanding of Chinese society. But because the characters' growth and development does not arise from an inner logic of personal development, but rather from conformity to a set of ideas, the result is that despite the large number of characters in The Human Realm, most are functional characters — nearly every one of them bears a specific narrative function. In my view, the impulse behind Teacher Liu's writing of The Human Realm comes from his concern with reality, his desire to express through the work his understanding of China's social transformation and to use his characters to explain the secrets of that transformation. Because the writing is driven by ideas, in the actual execution there comes a certain sense of powerlessness in controlling the characters, and even some gaps. Take Lü Yongjia as an example: after he has completed the narrative task the author has assigned him, his death feels rushed — this moment comes across as forced and fails to convince me on literary grounds.

To summarize: Teacher Liu's writing is motivated by a large, encompassing concern and by great ambition. He wants to use the work to respond to many questions raised by reality — questions that are at the same time deeply difficult ones. In The Human Realm, the themes he faces and addresses are of the most sweeping magnitude, and the temporal and spatial dimensions of the novel are correspondingly expansive. In restoring the relationship between literature and reality, The Human Realm demonstrates the courage to confront the present directly: it is a work that does not retreat, that takes a stand, that has backbone.

Chen Fumin (Chinese Academy of Social Sciences):

Jiming's writing — and especially the effort and ambition displayed in The Human Realm — has attracted attention and, to a considerable degree, has won the support of many who share his artistic convictions and intellectual sympathies. This is a genuinely important strand within the current cultural diversity of China. No need to put it so circumspectly: whether one is speaking of the left-wing movement, or of a particular mode of engagement with contemporary and modern Chinese history — in the current context of capitalist relations of production, this kind of expression has been suppressed for many years. Yet amid that suppression, there has continued to be a tenacious expression and growth of the kind that Jiming represents. This is a remarkable thing in itself. This kind of expression amounts to leaving evidence for history: if we examine this historical period fifty years from now, and this mode of expression and this voice are absent, then that period of history will stand as a disgrace. In this sense, The Human Realm is intrinsically connected to China's socialist literary tradition and to the socialist movement more broadly. This is my overall assessment of the work.

The novel raises many questions worth discussing. The author has worked very hard at creating characters — this is entirely in keeping with my own conception of the novel. One of my complaints about contemporary fiction is that too many novelists have ceased to regard the creation of character as their primary task: one reads millions of characters and remembers almost no one. Today many novelists write only one facet of a person, extract a single scene, and have lost the will and the ability to present the panoramic fullness of historical life. Jiming has consciously taken this on, and deserves great credit for it.

Beyond its characters, this novel has a particularly close relationship to contemporary Chinese history. The first thing I noticed was the question of enlightenment — though what is especially worth probing is whether, when we discuss enlightenment, we can draw a clear line between it and the vaguely pervasive tradition of the Chinese literary intellectual, which has been a constant in Chinese culture since ancient times. I find this very difficult. Through fiction we can see that the enlightenment of China's rural intellectuals has very often been achieved through the literary-intellectual tradition, and first through that tradition before anything else. In this novel — in Ma La as much as in Lü Yongjia — across more than five hundred thousand characters, the text is punctuated by the titles of various novels corresponding to the characters at particular moments. In other words, when an intellectual imagines the world, the primary intellectual resources that constitute his thinking are not a modern, knowledge-based worldview but the literary-intellectual tradition. I regard this as a very serious problem. It has deeply influenced and shaped the type and paradigm of China's modernization. What I find particularly valuable in Jiming's novel is precisely that it objectively portrays the reality of a generation of Chinese people. Whether Ma La is an intellectual is a question worth debating — but he carries behind him the tail of the literary-intellectual's imagined world. I do not know whether this is being too hard on the literary intellectual tradition, too hard on a century of the modern intellectual tradition — but I have always harbored doubts about it. A rural talent's pathway to enlightenment runs through literature and the Chinese classical literary-intellectual tradition: this is the experience of our literary intelligentsia as it grows up. I have always tried to distinguish between the literary intellectual and the modern intellectual, and have always found it very difficult. I have long been reluctant to concede that the Chinese literary intellectual is a modern intellectual; I have always harbored this somewhat heretical view. The character relationships and the intellectual starting points in The Human Realm very faithfully portray the difficulties of Chinese modernity — something Jiming may not have consciously intended. As a pathway to Chinese modernity, there is nothing wrong in passing through the literary-intellectual as enlightener; but as that process advances, the question of how to overcome, step by step, this literary-intellectual habit of mind, and to form or establish a modern intellectual's worldview — that, I believe, is a significant marker on China's path to modernity, and it remains an unresolved problem. For when I say this, I am acutely aware that I myself am not a modern intellectual: I carry so many of the defects of the literary-intellectual tradition; I am no pure, uncomplicated product either. This ambiguity is something that must be confronted in the course of China's cultural modernization. To try to imagine the modern world through the literary-intellectual tradition is ultimately to find oneself in complete conflict with that modern world. From the very outset, then, the character of Ma La already contains within itself the seeds of his difficulties; there is a logical problem here — the weapons of criticism and the criticism of weapons are not the same thing. I think it is worth paying careful attention to how the construct of enlightenment built around Ma La's starting point, Lü Yongjia's characterization, and the aura of the Enlightenment placed upon them — which is also the aura of the literary intellectual — has contributed to, and also covertly contradicted, China's project of modern construction. I have in fact always reflected critically on the Chinese literary-intellectual tradition; I have suffered from it myself, and feel its tensions with the path of modernity very keenly. That is the first major issue — the relationship between enlightenment and the literary-intellectual tradition.

The second point, which I particularly admire, is that Jiming has written Ma La's entrepreneurial history. I feel that from the death of Lü Yongjia onward, the author is engaging directly and positively with this stretch of history. On the question of Lü Yongjia's death, I differ from Huang Deng: without that death, Ma La's rural entrepreneurship simply cannot get underway. Jiming's decision to let Lü Yongjia die at that moment is a deliberate one. The character of Ma La is written with great authenticity — Jiming has made a serious effort to observe and understand; it is not based on imagination alone, and he knows more than we do. The novel is neither like A History of Entrepreneurship — though The Human Realm also has a story of Ma La and Guyu buying rice seed — nor like the large-scale land transfers depicted in Wheat River by the Hebei writer Guan Renshan. It is a novel that, precisely in the new century, when capitalist relations are at their most extreme expansion and rural China sees no way forward, confronts rural history directly and offers its own answer. For this alone, I want to congratulate Liu Jiming sincerely: no one has confronted this particular stretch of history before; Jiming is the first to do so. We see Ma La facing several kinds of relationships: the relationship of land, the relationship of capitalist production, and the relationship of power — which requires him to go to the city to find his former classmates. This kind of figure combines the characteristics of the rural young talent, yet is quite unlike any previous example: he has been through the market economy with Lü Yongjia, has faced the relationship of power and the relationship of capital, and then returned to put his hands to the earnest work of "building a new countryside." He is a person who acts on his convictions. I have never encountered a character like this before, and he fills me with profound admiration.

In sum, I enormously admire and respect the aspiration and the ability that Jiming demonstrates in The Human Realm — his desire and his capacity to give panoramic expression to history and to handle complex historical relationships.

Han Yuhai (Department of Chinese Language and Literature, Peking University):

Most literary conferences I attend are essentially gatherings of friends and supporters. The first one I attended was for Zhang Yueran — her father is a fellow student of mine — who has been making her literary career in Beijing. Being on Zhang Yueran's support team was quite an "education": her "literary event format" was something we had never seen in the 1980s — it was a massive book-launch sales event for a publisher, with Zhang Yueran sitting in the center like a celebrity, and Mo Yan and me, the two loyal friends, sitting on either side pushing the book. This format was entirely unlike anything from the 1980s — the idea being to shape and market a star. I have also read the works of old friends. I read The Peaks of Heaven. Just now Fumin was speaking of the literary-intellectual tradition: reading it, I really did feel it — life cut off from the masses, theory cut off from practice, unchanged after all these years. Maintaining this "literary-intellectual tradition" for decades without a flicker of movement — that's actually quite something. Jiming is for me not only a friend but a comrade. The word has fallen out of fashion, but Jiming really is a comrade — different from the others and their works.

Yunlei just spoke of new socialism, didn't he. We are now in a moment when one era has ended but a new one has not yet arrived — or is just beginning. This is a global problem, not China's alone, and it is what makes Jiming's novel different from the rest. The 2015 Nobel Prize laureate, the Belarusian writer Svetlana Alexievich, expressed a similar thought; she has a passage that is quite striking — about how ordinary people desperately want to call Stalin back, to summon him once the era has ended and things have gone wrong. The environment and the circumstances we now face have changed. Today there are all kinds of new formulations and new theories, but these new theories have often been selectively shaped. Many people today are doing cultural studies, postmodernism, postcolonialism. When I was very young I read Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth and Black Skin, White Masks. Today those books have all but disappeared. Things like "Hong Kong people aspire to be superior Chinese," or "Taiwan is democratic while the mainland is authoritarian" — all of these are things Fanon once analyzed and critiqued, with more penetrating clarity than anything in today's postmodernism or postcolonialism. But even that kind of theory has become scarce. Fumin's criticism of the "literary-intellectual tradition" is correct: this tradition cuts itself off from "the wretched of the earth" — yet it is precisely this that Jiming has always kept at heart. From the perspective of China's rich twentieth-century history, this matters enormously.

Sometimes at literary conferences I feel that no one is quite getting to the point. Who writes well and who does not? What does it even mean to write well or badly? If commercial sales are the standard, then Zhang Yueran sells well — but what she produces is "school essay writing." A great many of our writers are not really writers at all; they are "essay writers." That is one standard. Then there are "literary intellectuals" like Yu Hua, who say: I just want elegance; I want to be free of ideas. Since when did having ideas mean writing badly? Editor Feng Min just mentioned Tolstoy — and she was absolutely right that as you get older, you find yourself drawn to the Levin thread in Anna Karenina, because without that thread, there would be no Tolstoy. Why should the Nobel Prize not go to Bob Dylan? I think it might go to Cui Jian one day. Cui Jian writes short pieces, but they are all ideas — the twenty-five-thousand-li Long March, airplanes and cannons — all ideas. Since when did having ideas mean writing poorly? I find the discussions at some literary conferences to be rather pointless. Just now someone said: this novel has too many ideas, that's a problem; but a novel with no ideas at all — is that a success? Without any ideas, doesn't that just make it a "school essay"? I feel that what our literature lacks most at this moment is ideas. We are in the midst of a momentous historical transformation — Chinese politics, economics, and every other sphere are undergoing major changes. How can literature not change? The biggest problem with contemporary Chinese literature is the lack of ideas. In the 1980s, when theory and creative practice were interacting, writers and critics could engage in genuine dialogue because everyone had something to think with, had ideas. How many of today's critics have an intellect comparable to Zhang Chengzhi's? If you have no idea what Zhang Chengzhi is writing about, how can you possibly engage with him? Sometimes one feels that Yu Hua and the like write very well — for years now, the story well told, the strange story, the rich and lively language. But put Yu Hua and Zhang Chengzhi in a room together, and gradually you realize it is like a student sitting with a teacher — Yu Hua starts to look more and more like a secondary school student; the things Zhang Chengzhi talks about, Yu Hua simply doesn't know.

The world is undergoing major transformations; what Jiming is writing about, most of our current writers and critics have no idea. What is the "three rural problems"? What changes are occurring in the world? Nobody seems to care — how can that be right? Advanced thought, advanced ideas, advanced values — this is what makes literature the torch that lights the way for the national spirit. Literature needs liberation of thought; it needs theory and ideas. What kind of modern literature can there be without thought and ideas?

Meng Dengying (Department of Chinese Language and Literature, China University of Youth Politics):

I am rather ashamed to say that since around 1995 I have read very little contemporary fiction. I have read a little here and there, but mainly I have been doing theoretical research. The Human Realm deals extensively with the countryside, and I grew up in a rural area, so I have a certain familiarity with village life. Moreover, since 2003 I have also been involved in the contemporary rural reconstruction movement and have been in fairly frequent contact with friends engaged in that work. There is also the fact that I am from Shaanxi, so I am relatively familiar with the works of Chen Zhongshi, Lu Yao, and Jia Pingwa — though many of those impressions are perhaps frozen at 1995. For all of these reasons, I came to Teacher Liu Jiming's novel with high expectations. I hoped for a major book that could write about young migrant workers — that could render the image of those young people moving back and forth between city and countryside. The lives of these young people traveling between village and city would surely carry threads connecting them to many of the rich and complex contradictions of this society. If a writer could gather that complex web of social contradictions into a single character, that would be the greatest possible contribution to contemporary literature. Lu Yao seemed to be writing seriously about young people along this thread, but he wrote only up to the mid-to-late 1980s, and no one seems to have continued that lineage of characters.

In recent years I have observed some friends engaged in ecological agriculture, and I have found that their understanding of the integration of human beings with the natural world is much more immediate and tangible than that of most people. In the process of urbanization, the feeling of closeness between people and nature has been largely filtered away, torn apart. In The Human Realm, Ma La also returns to nature; the novel makes a significant effort to render the integration of human beings with the natural world, the genuine emotional bond between people and the land. Many writers today are unwilling to write about this kind of feeling — or are simply unable to. In Lu Yao's fiction one can sometimes feel this quality; the novel's effort in this regard is very much worth affirming. From what I understand, the actual process of grassroots rural reconstruction has been extremely complex, full of struggles, full of vivid stories. Those university students who went down to support agriculture have had to match wits with township officials; sometimes it would take a week of negotiation before a compromise was reached. To show their support for the villagers, they would rather sleep on a dirt floor in a farmer's home than use the accommodation offered by the township government. The human relationships in all of this remain capable of further mining. I feel that a truly good long-length novel must render the kind of social transformation that is capillary in nature — fine-grained and pervasive throughout the social body. This novel is responding to several major transformations in Chinese society while attending to their complexity. The reform of the household contract responsibility system [baochan daohu], for example, was genuinely very complex. Let me raise a specific detail. I have read a number of Teacher Chen Zhongshi's works, including some that are generally regarded as less successful — written in the early 1980s. Frankly, I find those works quite interesting. Teacher Chen Zhongshi was influenced by the dominant political ideas of that era (which simply negated the path of collectivization), but he was a very honest man, and he did not lightly pass over certain real contradictions in the actual situation. In several of his short stories he writes about encountering grassroots rural cadres of the time, who would often raise questions that left him perplexed. By that point he had already moved away from township work, having become a culture center official. The thinking in those stories is actually quite complex; it is a pity he did not dig further. I also remember Chen Zhongshi in a television interview talking about his time as a township cadre, when he had helped to dissolve the collectives — the mixture of feelings involved. We know that Chen Zhongshi was deeply familiar with Liu Qing. As a township cadre presiding over the dissolution of the collective, he must have had complex feelings. He mentioned dividing a single ox among three families — since the three families could only draw lots to determine priority, the whole process dragged on until nightfall. After the ox had been divided, it was already quite dark; cycling home, he passed a stretch of paddy fields and his bicycle chain snapped. He got off to repair it, with silence all around. He said he thought of Liu Qing — Liu Qing's work had been about bringing the masses together, while here he was, engaged in breaking them apart. It is a pity that he did not pursue that thought more deeply.

As I said earlier, many people were shaped by the literary currents of the 1980s and pursued individual freedom, but subsequently, through their practical engagement in rural reconstruction work, gradually shifted toward a people-centered standpoint. This is something I can clearly sense in The Human Realm.

Cai Jiayuan (Yangtze Literary Review magazine):

Teacher Jiming showed me the first draft of this novel; it was originally a dual narrative, with Ma La as the main thread and Murong Qiu as the secondary one. Many adjustments were made in subsequent revisions — most notably, the structure was divided into two parts, forming a dialogic narrative, and the character of Murong Qiu was substantially deepened, with Lü Yongjia and others also receiving considerably more attention. After the work came out, it generated a considerable response here in Hubei. I organized a gathering of critics in the form of a reading group, and Teacher Jiming and I also conducted a dialogue, "Advancing by Retreating," which touched on questions from many angles. Today, I want to say something specifically about the character of Ma La. The character that Teacher Jiming has created gives us an excellent reference point for understanding contemporary Chinese literature, as well as Chinese history and present-day reality. In this novel, the plot itself does not seem to be the primary object of attention; the focus of portrayal is rather the collision between the fates of different characters and between their ideas and convictions — much as in the novels of Dostoevsky. The principal characters — Ma La, Murong Qiu, Lü Yongjia, Ma Ke, Gu Chaoyang, He Wei, and the others — are all individuals with independent consciousness, displaying a rich and varied intellectual luminescence. Ma La in particular is entirely unlike any other figure in the gallery of contemporary literature; he can be called a "new person of the century" standing upright on the vast and ancient earth — of great illuminating significance both for our understanding of contemporary Chinese history and present-day reality, and for reflecting on literary creation in the new era.

We know that new-era literature began with a rediscovery and reaffirmation of the "human," after which "pure literature" placed still greater emphasis on the concept of the individual, which became the mainstream ideology. But as "personal writing" and "private writing" grew louder and more insistent, writers turned the lens increasingly from "outward" to "inward," retreating into individual existence, growing estranged from — even suspending — social reality and history, pursuing the expression of the "self," the "small self," and the so-called universal human nature, no longer paying attention to shaping characters from within the process of social-historical development or to expressing human nature from within complex social relationships. Literature became increasingly untethered from the material world; characters became increasingly atomized, flattened, hollow. Since the 1990s, Teacher Jiming's writing has consistently moved against this literary mainstream, and in The Human Realm especially — adopting what he calls a posture of "retreat in order to advance" — it inherits and renews the methods of critical realism and socialist realism, creating a typical character in the figure of Ma La, one who can refract the essential nature of the age. Ma La possesses both a reflective character and a strong capacity for action; Teacher Jiming explores the depth and breadth of his inner spiritual world in the "inward" dimension, while at the same time giving him rich, substantial, outward form in the "outward" dimension. As Marx said, "the human being is the totality of social relations." Only by examining a character within multiple dimensions — political, economic, cultural, social — can one render complex human nature and establish the fundamental value of the human being. In the novel, Ma La plants a green ecological orchard, founds the Tongxin Cooperative, engages in agricultural market management and agricultural infrastructure construction, organizes villagers to resist the flood and oppose polluting enterprises — all of this in a field of complex social relations. His relationship with Murong Qiu in particular is one of mutual summoning, of each illuminating the other.

In the figure of Ma La, this "new person of the century," we see a new aesthetic taking shape. Teacher Jiming is striving to unify the "individual" person and the "social," "historical" person, placing that unified figure within a complex social-historical movement so as to reveal the complexity of human nature and the essential nature of the age. In an era governed by capital and power, a small person from the bottom of society — who has in fact long been circumscribed by an increasingly rigid social structure — finds that his struggle and his cries cannot penetrate the iron curtain of reality; his energy ultimately disperses across the boundless wilderness and cannot truly become the subject of history. Of course, Teacher Jiming still wants to endow him with the status of historical subject. Ma La has been writing a manuscript throughout the novel — an autobiographical work. This also seems to suggest that when the goal cannot be reached in the real world, Ma La still maintains his idealist passion, continuing to construct his own subjecthood through sustained self-critique. Thus he belongs both to the present and to the future: a "new person of the century" perpetually growing within the historical process.

Ji Yaya (October magazine):

I am now a professional literary editor and read manuscripts all day — the last genre I want to read is rural fiction. Their pain, their beauty, their nostalgia are all too similar; I fall asleep over them. But when I read Teacher Liu's work, I immediately recognized it as something different. On the subject of rural writing, I have always felt that there are only two genuinely complete and holistic narratives: one is Mao Zedong's class-based narrative of the countryside; the other is the enlightenment narrative of the "countryside/China" as metaphor. Everything else is experiential writing. The holistic narrative has one virtue: it conveniently summons a certain mode of action. New-era literature has been full of accounts of the rural transformation of the 1980s — as one teacher mentioned just now, Chen Zhongshi (author of White Deer Plain), recalling his time as a township secretary implementing the household contract responsibility system, also spoke of the complex emotions that grassroots cadres felt toward the cooperativization that Liu Qing and others had explored. Yet even so, no one has managed to provide a holistic interpretation of the rural transformation of the 1980s — not even An Ordinary World, which is regarded as an epic work about rural transformation. Li Tuo has described An Ordinary World as a reform novel — a narrative of the legitimacy of 1980s reform — but it does not resolve the question of where the countryside should go after the transformation of land tenure, ultimately remaining experiential writing that describes and interprets the reform. When I came across Teacher Liu's work, then, I felt certain that here at last was a book that contemporary literature had been waiting a long time for — a book that attempts once again to explain how the present came to be and where it should go. That is my first judgment about this work.

Let me look first at the novel's structural design — I would like to discuss this with Teacher Chen Fumin, who seemed earlier to be not entirely satisfied with the structure. Like Huang Deng's judgment just now, I believe the author's ambition is certainly not that of a narrative work in the classical sense. The true protagonist of this work I would call "ideas in motion." One of the most distinctive features of twentieth-century intellectual history is the linkage of ideas to practice — we have always emphasized going among the people, participating in reality, transforming the world. The structural design of the novel's two parts, in my view, reveals the author's intention quite clearly: it is a symmetrical design embodying the unity of knowledge and action, the alignment of understanding the world with transforming the world. The entire narrative structure is the plot-driven development of the above-stated convictions. Since the 1980s, the contemporary knowledge system has become increasingly specialized and academicized. In the first half, the author highlights the figure of Ma La — to borrow the novel's own phrase — as a "late-nineteenth-century Populist intellectual." This type of person's characteristic is that they operate outside the professional system, roaming the marginal zones; their goal is the transformation of the world. The protagonist of the second half is Murong Qiu, a representative of the academic intellectual, eager to escape from the decayed "academic circle" — a circle of self-replication and isolation within the professional system — which forms a precise counterpart to the first half. So the question of how to handle the relationship between scholarship, life, and action, and what kind of scholarship is genuinely necessary, becomes the question that an intellectual like Murong Qiu must grapple with. The author finally has Murong Qiu leave the academic circle and go to the village where Ma La is, to carry out a genuine fieldwork investigation. The confusions the author describes are of a kind familiar to those of us who have gone through professional training; I sometimes feel that the scholar's study is meaningless and that one would do better to go among the people and do practical work — so I am quite sympathetic to this structural design.

Another question I want to raise is how the subject confirms itself. In a certain sense, this work is one generation's accounting of itself. The mode of that accounting is a form of narration that traverses time, continually returning to the past. One source of the self is the sacrificed elder brother Ma Ke, representing the idealism of the red 1960s; there is also another spiritual source, Teacher Lü, the personality image of the vigorous primary accumulation of capital in the 1980s. I want to use a phrase from Raymond Williams to summarize: we continually encounter, on another road, the self that is walking toward the future. Through negation of negation, perpetually returning to the past, clarifying the path of how I came to be me — this is the integrity and honesty of the writer. But there is one thing that has not been clearly explained: how is it that people who have shared the same experience, the same generation, have become two groups unable to persuade each other? Consider, for instance, the two female characters among the educated youth — both representing different types: Murong Qiu and Pan Xiaoping. In the process of clearing the accounts of the self, it has not been explained how that split was formed; without that accounting, there is no way to speak about the new world if this problem is not resolved. How do the theories connected to action under the specific historical conditions of the 1960s and 1980s integrate with the realities of today? In the novel, a line is spoken: "I want to see the world with two eyes." But those two eyes may in fact be the same eye; the emotional structure we possess and our mode of judging the world may be one and the same. Now that global capitalism and other new things have entered the picture, rural problems have undergone many fine-grained and complex changes. How do we use different eyes and different perspectives to render those fine-grained changes? Teacher Han just spoke of 1980s literature and ideological writing, or literature aimed at action — these are in fact typical features of twentieth-century literature. What I want to say is that we have all already passed through the literary transformation of the 1980s and 1990s; the social-cognitive function of literature has already been placed under threat by the academicized institutional system and the disciplinary and knowledge systems. This is the current state of contemporary knowledge production. To discuss these major questions of contemporary intellectual history — using sociological approaches, economic approaches, many disciplines can enter. At the level of profound understanding and at the level of solving problems, what contribution has literary work made? This is a consciousness that ought to be deliberately cultivated — it is what one might call the "politics of aesthetics."

Zhang Yuanke (Modern Chinese Literature Museum):

Reading Teacher Liu's book, three key terms struck me with particular force: the sense of reality, intellectual depth, and mode of narration. For a period, novelists treated literature as a fragmentary collage, hoping thereby to reflect and construct a so-called reality and history — the idea that some fragment of experience could provide direct access to a certain truth or history became, for a long stretch of time, the prevailing mode by which we judged literature, and especially by which we evaluated a novelist's engagement with lived reality. I believe this was a mistake. Fragmentary writing has its own inherent limitations; it cannot provide direct access to reality or history, and it has come under increasing questioning. What kind of sense of reality, then, does The Human Realm offer? I feel there are several aspects worth noting: it is the aesthetic product of the author's immersive mutual engagement with real life; it is also the artistic crystallization of the author's use of powerful intellectual synthesis to integrate fragmentary experience, repeatedly testing that synthesis in the subtle and expansive places of the real world; it is the artistic achievement of the author's use of genuine feeling to connect detail, scene, and character, generating from them independent meaning; and ultimately it must manifest itself as a certain holistic claim — illuminated by which, history, the present, experience, and logic are opened up together, presenting an aesthetic realm in which both the "trees" and the "forest" are visible. It seems to me that among the full-length novels of the new century, works that take character as their center and can make those characters stand up are not many. As several teachers have already said, a character like Ma La is a new character — I agree.

The mode of narration in The Human Realm is quite distinctive. There was a time when we treated "narration" and "showing" as two opposing modes of storytelling, and debated which was superior; the extreme position was to treat narration as a retrograde mode, to criticize it and discard it. Those who held this view felt that narration was a domineering mode of storytelling, and ardently advocated the use of showing to represent a certain reality or history. There is also a third approach, which integrates narration and showing into a composite mode. In The Human Realm I found narration used as the entirely dominant mode — and notably, the narration is exceptionally slow. What is the effect of this? Narration is used as the primary mode, yet the result achieves the kind of linguistic effect that showing aspires to. I find this to be a distinctively original mode of narration.

Li Jing (Department of Chinese Language and Literature, Peking University):

In the Afterword to The Human Realm, Teacher Liu Jiming writes that this is the most important book he has written. And indeed it is: after finishing it, I could not help but feel that this is a work of synthesis, a "great book." To begin with, from the perspective of Teacher Liu's personal creative career, the appearance of The Human Realm has deep roots. He began by imitating the avant-garde, grew into a representative writer of the "new generation," developed in the mid-1990s his distinctively styled "cultural concern fiction," and then turned toward criticism and essay writing. Throughout this process, his writing style, his areas of concern, and his intellectual questions form a consistent lineage, providing multiple layers of preparation — in content, method, style, and even spiritual character — for the arrival of The Human Realm. The Human Realm is, on this basis, a "holographic image" of the current state of rural China. Furthermore, in the context of literary history, the figure of Ma La initially calls to mind Lu Xun's homecoming characters, and as one reads further, Gao Jialin in Life and especially Liang Shengbao in A History of Entrepreneurship come into view as well. The Human Realm consciously inherits and continues the tradition of left-wing literature, and especially socialist literature, and we can therefore naturally situate it within both the personal creative lineage and the literary-historical lineage. But what I mainly want to discuss today is the novel's other dimension — the touchpoints of thought it has given me "unexpectedly."

We know that following the implementation of the household contract responsibility system, the gap between rich and poor in rural areas widened, farming became increasingly unprofitable, and many farmers were compelled to leave the land. The Human Realm, however, does the opposite, making the attempt to "return to the countryside and to the land," sketching for us a holographic panorama of a "new rural China." The word "new" here refers primarily to a new kind of relationship between farmers and the land. More specifically: farmers participate in the productive organization of the cooperative to engage in localized, collective, scientific specialized production, thereby establishing a rational relationship between land, farmers, and the (world) market. Farmers are no longer the ignorant laborers condemned by the theories of modernization, but rational individuals who actively adapt to market rules and consciously organize themselves to resist market risks. The symbol "WTO" that appears repeatedly in the novel signals that Ma La and his companions face an increasingly powerful capitalist world market in the post-WTO era — yet Ma La and his companions also possess a global consciousness and a sense of crisis that previous generations of farmers lacked. Confronting the capitalist world market, "organization" and collective production have regained their rationality and urgency.

Another point in The Human Realm that stimulated my thinking is the unique figure of the protagonist Ma La. Ma La is first and foremost a reader. He loves books passionately; his first love was a librarian. He reads continuously, tracing out through books a lineage of "great works" centered mainly on nineteenth-century European realist fiction and socialist literary classics. He understands the world through "books"; "books" are his spiritual guides. And so The Human Realm also paints for us a picture of a "book-scented countryside." But as the story develops, I find that this "book scent" is ultimately no more than a fragrance, an atmosphere, a sentiment. When Ma La returns to the countryside to build the cooperative, he relies primarily on the experience and social connections he has accumulated through business — the worldly wisdom and perspective of someone who has "seen something of the world," and the capacity to keep adapting to the demands of the age (such as developing internet marketing). What this prompts me to think about is the question of knowledge construction for the modern farmer: what role does literary reading play in the everyday life of the modern farmer? What place and function does it hold in the modernizing transformation of the countryside? Or: how can the experience of literary reading effectively enter the living world of farmers, providing nourishment of meaning and value to sustain their heavy daily labor? How can professional knowledge, specialized skills, and literary experience be organically combined to bring farmers both material and spiritual abundance?

Several people just now have been discussing cooperatives, but one point deserves special emphasis: Ma La's cooperative is a "specialized" cooperative — a farmers' professional cooperative, an agricultural cultivation and marketing cooperative — whose primary purpose is to confront the market collectively and resist risk collectively. This is an economic organization centered on trade and profession, and it is markedly different from the cooperatives of the Maoist era. The second half of the novel is an exploration of the social function of intellectuals, calling for an organic intellectual closely integrated with China's rural world, and rebuilding the intimate relationship between the intellectual and the countryside, between the intellectual and the land. Does not the novel's ending show precisely Murong Qiu and the intellectuals she represents recognizing the various failings of the academic institutional system and attempting to return to "the field of hope"?

I also want to raise one further question. There is no doubt that Ma La is a capable and talented person in the village. But is he a "new person"? I feel that Teacher Liu's handling of this is somewhat ambiguous. Ma La relies primarily on personal charisma and personal ability to attract cooperative members, and is highly dependent on the "tolerance" and cooperation of the institutional system and of capital — he cannot truly initiate a social movement or social transformation. He looks more like a "chance" outsider, an "idealist" living in a garret with a windmill. The Human Realm is full of optimistic imaginings of the future, but its emotional register is not without its confusions and hesitations. Of course, this also faithfully reflects the true face of the current intellectual world.

One final observation: we must acknowledge that current literary evaluation standards are too narrow and too uniform. The ways in which literature engages with us include not only emotional impact and experiential resonance, but also intellectual stimulation and conviction. The beauty and power of thought itself constantly challenges the intellectual cultivation and the capacity for reflection of the literary critic. For instance, the rural reconstruction questions the novel explores have the capacity to absorb many disciplinary perspectives, and are themselves of classical importance. The question of "getting organized," of "rural cooperativization," has been a subject of thought since the generation of Liang Shuming; then came the socialist practice of the 1950s through 1970s. These theoretical explorations and historical experiences are important intellectual resources for confronting the present crisis of China's rural reality, and at the same time they constitute the intellectual resources we bring to reading and evaluating The Human Realm — posing a high challenge to the literary critic.

Xu Gang (Chinese Academy of Social Sciences):

I think we should leave more time for everyone to "argue" — the greatest value of Jiming's novel is precisely that it provides so many questions worth discussing, questions with no clear answers yet deeply connected to all of us. The most important thing about this novel is that it is grounded in reality and yet persistently reimagines a kind of utopia, a Peach Blossom Spring ideal, or more precisely, imagines a better world. Today's novels are generally reluctant to do this: our writers are far more practiced at imagining a worse world, pursuing the artistic effects of irony and absurdity. In the figures of Ma La and his two spiritual mentors — Ma Ke and Lü Yongjia — in these three figures in succession, we can see the unceasing pursuit of idealism in contemporary spiritual history. Ma Ke is a "socialist new person" who came of age in the Maoist era, possessing, like Liang Shengbao and Xiao Changchun, all the virtues of the socialist new person: selfless, diligent, steadfast, composed, and wise. He later gave his young life to save collective property. The spirit of revolutionary heroism, collectivism, and idealism that he embodies was deeply branded onto Ma La's inner world. Ma Ke's death in 1976 carries symbolic weight, signifying the end of an era. Then comes Lü Yongjia, also a utopian. Lü Yongjia is himself a figure of individual achievement in the new era, even a certain kind of intellectual pioneer, a nonconformist genius. He believes in the Enlightenment thought of the West and in the spirit of Dionysus — unrestrained, self-affirming, freedom-seeking, hoping to build a "Republic of Ideals" in actual society. His unconventional character and his boldly uninhibited style exercise a powerful attraction; even his way of life is part of his personal charisma. He has the personal magnetism of someone who dares to dream and to act, accompanied by a surging vitality — the energy of capitalism in its ascending phase. His ideal was to become an entrepreneur, to buy an island, to recruit a thousand young men and women from around the world, to establish a utopia, an equal society in which every person could freely choose their own way of life — provided they did not interfere with anyone else's. The personal magnetism of Lü Yongjia, his rapid rise to wealth followed by bankruptcy through speculation, and finally his early death from AIDS — all of this carries a very powerful symbolic significance. Then we come to the true protagonist of the story, Ma La, whose new idealism unfolds from the ruins left by both predecessors. His so-called rural professional cooperative is in fact a new form of utopian practice. Of course, it differs from the traditional cooperative in that it proceeds from an economic rather than a political or ideological angle. It confronts WTO accession, the abolition of the agricultural tax, and the arrival of capital in the countryside — a transformed social reality. On a rural foundation, it establishes a new cultural form of community. This community can embrace, with great warmth, those on the margins of society — the disabled, drug addicts, the homeless. It is at once an economic community, organizing the "scattered soldiers" of the farming population to face the competitive pressure of capital and technology; and a cultural community, in which every individual can find growth and redemption.

I still have some dissatisfaction with the character of Ma La. Ma La is certainly a strange person — so strange that he seems barely to inhabit our era. Is he a peasant, an intellectual, or a literary intellectual? It is hard to say. In the novel, the richness of his inner world is not rendered with sufficient fullness; how his growth, his intellectual tempering, his understanding of history and reality came about — we are never entirely sure. The novel gives the sense that we are always watching him from a distance, unable to make out his face clearly, seeing him in constant practice and searching, anxious, in solitary reflection, but never drawing close to him, never truly listening to him, never truly speaking with him. His inner world contains enormous contradictions; his two spiritual mentors Ma Ke and Lü Yongjia are constantly at war within him, and in the end he must face the world alone. The enormous inner transformation he undergoes, his anguish and his struggle — we are never quite clear about these. It seems as though after seven years in prison, the Ma La who walks out has suddenly become someone with the kind of penetrating insight into reality that Jiming himself possesses — which is extraordinary. Another issue is the question of continuity in the novel's two halves, as several teachers have already mentioned: the Ma La of the first half seems to turn abruptly into Murong Qiu in the second half, and the transition is problematic. But I think this has to do with the novel's implied reader — which is to say, an intellectual readership, specifically researchers in the humanities and social sciences. One inner logic of the novel is this: Ma La's utopian experiment fails because his understanding of the world is not yet deep enough. Hence, at the end of the first half, we have Ma La's dream, in which a figure emerges from a bank of mist — and this is the protagonist of the second half, Murong Qiu. The novel here implicitly expresses a set of expectations toward intellectuals like Murong Qiu: expectations about how they should, in a decisive break, bid farewell to that corrupt world of knowledge and set out on the new path of an alliance between the intellectual and the workers and peasants. In the novel, after Ma La version 1.0's rural transformation fails, the 2.0 and 3.0 versions of his rural reconstruction activity will certainly include a place for Murong Qiu — an increasingly important one. Therefore, the novel's expectations of Murong Qiu are also expectations of humanities and social science researchers: the novel calls upon intellectuals to engage in genuine self-examination and to make a decisive break with prevailing knowledge systems. This is the novel's greatest value.

Zhang Huiyu (Institute of Film and Television Art, China National Academy of Arts):

Before reading this book, I read Li Yunlei's assessment of it — and I wondered whether the assessment was perhaps a bit high, with his proposal of Liu Jiming as a "direction" for new socialist literature. Having read it, I feel the assessment is entirely apt. This is indeed both an important and an unusual book. I agree with Teacher Chen Fumin's judgment: for new-era literature, whether this book exists or not makes a real difference — with it, new-era literature is richer; without it, it would seem quite monotonous. This book harbors a very large ambition: to rewrite the history of the new era, to make a comprehensive historical assessment of that period. The two central characters are Ma La and Murong Qiu, and the entire story unfolds around them. Near the end of the novel there is a passage: "After that fire, dear Sister Murong collapsed as if struck by lightning and for a long time went about grey-faced and listless; I had a premonition that as she lost her love, we would also lose her. This was a fate that could not be escaped — for the individual as much as for Shenhuangzhou as a whole. Two months later, Chairman Mao passed away. Every man, woman, and child in the village wept… That year, my mind and body seemed to stop developing and growing. I became a child who would never grow up." His brother's death, Chairman Mao's death — Ma La remained forever suspended in that moment, refusing to grow up. Below this passage, Murong Qiu, standing before Ma Ke's gravestone, says: "Please forgive me for coming only now. All these years, I have not had the courage to face this gravestone. Because it buried not only my first love, but an entire era." Ma Ke's death has kept Murong Qiu stranded in that era just as Ma La has always seemed like a young boy who never married. Murong Qiu, too, after her divorce, never remarried. Both of them, in order to maintain a certain spiritual purity, have a quality of "asceticism" about them. What this book writes is the spiritual history and social history of these two people who "do not forget their original aspiration" — who remain forever in the days of their youth. Hence Ma La carries the characteristics of the "socialist new person": he is a man of action who leads people to build the cooperative; we can see much of the natural scenery typical of socialist realism. And Murong Qiu, on first seeing Gu Chaoyang, the agent of a transnational corporation, immediately says: you are a comprador bourgeoisie. This kind of perspective is quite particular. Let me proceed in a somewhat direct and blunt way to discuss the novel's theme, structure, and style.

First, the theme. This book is called The Human Realm (Renjing), drawing on Tao Yuanming's poem: "I have built my cottage in the realm of men / Yet far from the noise of horses and carriages. / You ask how this can be? / When the mind is far, the place becomes remote. / Gathering chrysanthemums under the eastern hedge, / In the distance I see the southern mountains." [note: from Tao Yuanming's Drinking Wine, No. 5] Renjing — the human realm — points toward a state in which one is still in the world yet enjoys the serenity of being "far from the noise of horses and carriages"; it inquires into a certain level of humanity or a state of human existence. This calls to mind the discussions of human nature and humanism in the early 1980s, such as Dai Houying's Oh, Humanity! and Lu Yao's Life. I believe Teacher Jiming wants to return to this fundamental question from the very beginning of the new era, and — after the failure of revolution and the failure of the 1990s marketization — to ask again: what is a truly human realm, what is a life truly worth living? As Ma La, quoting Levin in Anna Karenina, says: "If I do not know what I am, and what I live for, then I cannot live. And I cannot know this, so therefore I cannot live." It is carrying this new perplexity about life that Ma La returns to Shenhuangzhou, and that Murong Qiu finally comes to the same place.

Second, the structure. The novel is divided into two parts, the first being Ma La's story, the second being Murong Qiu's story. On the surface this looks somewhat like two parallel stories — one concerning new countryside construction in the new century, the other concerning a female professor reflecting on her existing research framework. Yet these two stories are also inwardly connected. Most obviously, Ma Ke is the shared spiritual idol of both Ma La and Murong Qiu. And the new rural cooperative in which Ma La is engaged and the state enterprise reform that concerns Murong Qiu both intersect with Gu Chaoyang, the agent of foreign capital — they have a common enemy. In my view, these two kinds of stories — rural and urban — are designed to respond to the dominant narratives about countryside and city that have prevailed since the 1980s. First, since the 1980s, rural people and farming communities — as rendered in the fiction of Jia Pingwa, Mo Yan, Liu Zhenyun, and Chen Zhongshi — have come to represent a selfish, instinct-driven, ignorant human type and a de-historicized, feudal space smothered by traditional culture. The Human Realm is different: when Ma La returns to Shenhuangzhou after his release from prison in 2000, he finds a depleted, declining village, and sets out to use cooperativization as a means of rural self-rescue. This rural narrative continues the socialist realist tradition of rural subject matter — it is a mode of narration in which the village itself is the subject. What attracted me most was Ma La's experiment in rural professional cooperativization, several aspects of which are rendered very well. First, cooperativization is the process of transforming people and endowing their lives with value and dignity. Guyu, for instance, is a migrant worker who has returned to the village after being injured; after joining the cooperative, he reflects: "In the city, he was no more than a migrant worker lighter than a stalk of straw — no different from an ant or a dog; if he died there, no one would give him a second glance. Only in Huixiang's eyes was he a man of substance. This gave him a little of the dignity of being human — a dignity that could only be found on this land that had given him birth and raised him." There is also the taking in of Xiaoguai, teaching him farming, allowing him to start a new life; Lü Yongjia's daughter Tang Caor also kicks her drug habit in the cooperative. The cooperative, in other words, is a place of human salvation. Second, the cooperative reorganizes the broken-down rural social relations and communal bonds, allowing the countryside hollowed out by urbanization to recover its vitality: for example, the cooperative arranged a loan to resolve the irrigation and drinking water problems of the farmland and households; for the New Year, it organized dragon dances and lion dances, restoring rural culture. The cooperative, in other words, is not only a resolver of economic problems; it is also a rebuilder of political and cultural order. Third, Ma La's cooperative for organic rice production stands in opposition to Zhao Guangfu's genetically modified cotton growing — two contrasting paths of rural development in the present moment. Finally, Ma La's agricultural cultivation and marketing professional cooperative is an economic and corporate cooperative, different from the political cooperative of the Maoist era. Second, the lower half of The Human Realm also enters into dialogue with two dominant kinds of urban narrative: the first is a reflection on the "thick and black" power-intriguing official fiction; The Human Realm reveals the web of mutual interests linking officials at various levels, descendants of revolutionaries, and foreign capital — the collusion of politics and capital is the fundamental cause of the layoffs of state enterprise workers and the failure of Ma La's cooperative. The second is a reflection on the genealogical fiction of Republican China in the manner of Yan Geling and Wang Anyi; Murong Qiu's and Lü Yongjia's parents and grandparents were also prominent figures of the Republican era, but The Human Realm does not write them in the style of Republican nostalgia — instead, it has Tang Caor transform the concubine's little Western-style mansion into an education center, a space of social value.

Third, the style. Much has been said about this already. This is a novel in the realist mode, creating typical characters in typical environments. First, The Human Realm is a text combining multiple characters and multiple voices, and is also a highly symbolic text. Ma La is like a traveler who allows various characters to open their hearts; many of the characters in the novel come with their own backstory — their origins and trajectory. Particular prominence is given to the voices of old rightists and old revolutionaries such as Murong Qiu's father Murong Yuntian and Ding Youpeng's father Ding Changshui, expressing their dissatisfaction with the present, and rendering the state enterprise worker Chen Guang's resistance to the sale of the enterprise to foreign capital, and the social activism of Murong Qiu's daughter Lulu. I noticed, however, that there is one character who can never speak — the dog named "Sheyuan" ["Commune Member"]. This is highly symbolic; the very name "commune member" brings with it the history of the people's commune. There is also the new generation of university students, like Lulu, throwing themselves into social activism. Second, a rich social panorama — the characters are not simply judged in moral terms as good or bad, but are understood by being placed within different economic relationships. Third, I would argue that the realism of The Human Realm is broader in scope than that of A History of Entrepreneurship or A Bright Sunny Sky, because both of those earlier works take for granted, as an uncontested premise, the institutional framework of the socialist state and the economic foundation of public ownership, whereas The Human Realm unfolds against the background of the dissolution of socialism and China's entry into globalization. The novel's two parts thus present a globalized structure that links everything from the Chinese countryside to Wall Street directly together.

Finally, I want to speak about the novel's future orientation — the question of whether Ma La is a new person or an old one. Ma La carries in his veins the dual bloodlines of the communist fighter Ma Ke and the spiritual mentor Lü Yongjia; these two spiritual pillars are themselves in fierce conflict, and therefore Ma La has two sides to him and is necessarily contradictory. Compared with Gu Chaoyang, Ding Youpeng, and Li Haijun, Ma La is a new person — a person with new thought and new feeling. But Ma La is also in some ways an old person: after the era of revolution comes the return to the pre-revolutionary era, and Ma La has the heart of the nineteenth century. The windmill house he inhabits is itself a kind of unreality, and therefore Ma La's failure is inevitable. This organic agricultural cooperative is a form of self-salvation by a marginalized community; it cannot resist the force of capital. Perhaps The Human Realm is using precisely this failure to represent the despair and the sense of helplessness of our age.

Liu Fei (Institute of Film and Television Art, China National Academy of Arts):

Let me say just a few words — consider it fulfilling a reader's responsibility. First, Teacher Feng was speaking earlier about the novel's characteristics at the level of voice, which she interpreted as different musical voices or parts. My own feeling was rather that it resembles a long-running serialized radio drama. Aside from a few places where dialect appears — where the text attempts to render a Hubei accent in written form — the language throughout is entirely standard Mandarin: fluent, with a tight narrative structure. At the same time, owing to both the advantages and the constraints of the full-length novel as a form, the narrative pace is very steady. As we know, the full-length novel is itself a product of the habit of reading for leisure and entertainment — whether we trace it back to the tradition of oral storytelling, or to the emergence of printed texts and reading-class audiences. This is reflected in things like the division of the text into paragraphs or chapters. Once a reader has grown familiar with the characters and the situation, they can read a little at a time, in different sittings, in an unhurried rhythm. Over time, these conventions have been continually challenged, giving rise to the various proportions of narration, argumentation, and lyrical expression that characterize the modern novel.

Returning to this particular novel: two things caught my attention especially. The first is the author's pursuit of a single, unified voice — one capable of penetrating into the inner world of every character and driving the narrative forward — which is what produces the radio-like quality I mentioned. The second may connect to a corresponding element in the plot: Ma La's attempt to transform the literary classics he read in his formative years from written text into a voice possessed of materiality and reality. From a plot perspective, he is also a person who is trying to exercise and fulfill the responsibilities of a father in the name of his elder brother. One could say he is a latecomer and an imitator; in the sense of classical realism, whether he achieves genuine growth depends on the degree to which his language and actions succeed in bridging the gap between his brother Ma Ke and Lü Yongjia, whom he regards as a father figure.

A third observation relates to a question I have been thinking about recently: the technological conditions of social production and daily life — specifically, the state of communications and transportation. If Shenhuangzhou in the novel is a closed space, a utopia cut off from the outside world, then how one arrives there and how one leaves becomes very important. Lu Taiuang mentioned earlier that the landscape in the novel is a dynamic one. My understanding is that this is the direct effect of the newly built concrete road described in the novel — only after the road is constructed can one have the impression of a landscape passing in motion. Of course, this last point is explained in the Afterword as being related to the long span of time over which the novel was written. In the decade or so of its composition, the transportation environment of Chinese society underwent major changes, which also presented a significant challenge to the settings of the realist narrative. For example — as several people have noticed — in the passage modeled on Liang Shengbao's trip to buy rice seed, the author, the protagonist, and the reader are all in fact confronted with the dissonance created by the coexistence of newspapers, letters, telephone calls, and the internet as simultaneous modes of communication.

Cui Qinglei (Modern Chinese Literature Museum):

I feel it is quite straightforward to pass a value judgment on this work: in the current climate, where literary quality is particularly emphasized, the appearance of this work carries a special significance — at the very least, from a literary-historical perspective, it fulfills a certain gap-filling function. From this work one can see the author's active effort to engage with and critically intervene in reality through literary creation; it also embodies a sense of mission and responsibility that literature owes to itself. I believe this creative stance is relatively rare in contemporary literature, and I personally endorse the work very strongly as a whole.

On the question of characterization, much has already been said. Let me add a few brief observations. It is clearly evident that this work has created a series of memorable characters, most notably the two central figures of Ma La and Murong Qiu. Yet compared to the classic characters of the 1950s and 1980s, these two are somewhat different: they are no longer sharply defined and clearly colored in the manner of earlier characters, but have become somewhat complex and ambiguous, even difficult to pin down. The inner substance of these characters is in a state of plurality, even of mixture. This may seem to contradict the word "classic" — yet I would argue precisely the opposite: it is precisely this complexity and ambiguity that makes them classical characters, because this is the authentic condition of characters in the new social and historical context. Take Ma La: he is the representative of the new character. In the novel, the formation of Ma La's individual thought passes through two important phases — the period of his youth growing up in Shenhuangzhou, and the period of his maturity. In each of these phases, Ma La has a different spiritual mentor: one is Ma Ke, and the other is Lü Yongjia. The spiritual qualities of these two figures are in fact very far apart — as Teacher Zhang Huiyu noted just now. It is the interweaving of these two very different spiritual qualities that constitutes the complexity of the character.

A further point on the dual narrative structure: this is not a particularly common structural choice in the full-length novel. I believe the author's adoption of this structure may reflect a certain intention — to illuminate the problems of rural China from two different social strata and two different perspectives: Ma La's life at the grassroots level of the countryside, and Murong Qiu's life as an intellectual. Although Murong Qiu is a scholar, her research direction is sociology, and she is a strong advocate of fieldwork-based social practice — in her spirit, I believe, she remains closely tied to the rural world. In writing Murong Qiu, I feel the author has not only rendered the intellectual's spiritual bearing; more importantly, through these two different perspectives, he focuses attention on the problems of rural development, conducting a three-dimensional survey of the historical changes and developmental challenges of the countryside. This is one of the important functions of the dual narrative structure. Of course, the structure also brings some problems — but on the whole, I consider it a well-justified choice.

Li Songrui (Art Review magazine, China National Academy of Arts):

Reading this novel, I experienced a quality of excitement. Why excited? Because I feel that Teacher Liu Jiming is grappling in this novel with genuinely hard problems. Grappling with hard problems gives a novel an inner tension. I do not read a great deal of contemporary fiction, but I feel that writers who genuinely grapple with hard problems are actually quite rare. Only writers like Zhang Chengzhi, when thinking through major questions, produce this sense of tension in the reader; most writers seem to write with remarkable ease. Liu Jiming's work gives me this same sense of tension. I was asking myself: how is it that difficult problems can be rendered in this way? Why does reading the novel feel so tense?

The novel has a dual narrative structure. One thread is the countryside; the other is the intellectual world. In the countryside thread, Ma La is searching for a spiritual father — one is Ma Ke, the other Lü Yongjia. After the loss of his spiritual pillars, Ma La is particularly lost, repeatedly thinking: if only Lü Yongjia were still here. But there is nothing to be done; he can only find his own way forward, continuously trying to understand the state of rural China and searching for a path. The intellectual thread closely resembles the rural one: Murong Qiu is a person who drifts with the current, following the mainstream values of the day. In the end she encounters He Wei's book, witnesses the various disputes and intrigues of the academic world, becomes somewhat confused, somewhat awakened, and by the novel's close she wants to take her graduate students on a genuine fieldwork investigation, to discover the limitations of received knowledge and to try truly to understand China's reality. Both threads point toward the same question: how to understand China's countryside, China's present condition, what path China's rural world should take.

How, then, do the two threads come together? Teacher Liu has handled this with particular poetic beauty. They are joined through a battered old copy of Song of Youth. Ma La, the moment he comes out of prison and returns to Shenhuangzhou, finds that old, much-worn copy of Song of Youth. The book originally belonged to Murong Qiu. Murong Qiu had lent it to Ma La and Ma Ke and never got it back before she left the village and returned to the city. Ma La brings the book to Wuhan and returns it to Murong Qiu. When Murong Qiu sees that copy of Song of Youth, worn ragged from the readings of so many years ago, she is filled with a new sensation. Earlier, Xu Gang wondered why Ma La undergoes a spiritual transformation after his release from prison. I believe the reason for that transformation is Song of Youth — the novel has the function of restarting memory, reactivating through its pages the memory of Ma Ke and of those passionate years. For Murong Qiu, Song of Youth also reactivates earlier memories: the academic activities, the publication of papers, all of it amounts to a kind of drifting with the current, and Song of Youth prompts her to reflect anew on her own way of thinking. This novel has two key words: understanding and memory. On one side, the understanding of China's social reality; on the other, the memory of the past.

When a novel's central theme is how to understand the developmental path of the countryside, one naturally thinks of A History of Entrepreneurship. Liu Qing declared that his novel was meant to respond to the question of what path China's rural world should take. The Human Realm also contains a scene of buying rice seed and other such moments that seem to echo A History of Entrepreneurship throughout. In order to write this review of The Human Realm, I reread A History of Entrepreneurship. My feeling is that the creative difficulty of The Human Realm is considerably greater than that of A History of Entrepreneurship. The theme of A History of Entrepreneurship is whether the countryside should choose the path of cooperativization or the path of going it alone. The answer is of course the former — the Party had already guaranteed the success of the cooperative path. Whenever Liang Shengbao runs into a problem, he immediately goes to the township Party secretary Lu Mingchang; when the secretary is unavailable, he goes to the deputy county Party secretary. These Party leaders are experienced, theoretically equipped, familiar with policy, and able to give guidance immediately. Moreover, Liang Shengbao is the Party's specially cultivated protégé. Although Liu Qing's writing was oriented toward solving a hard problem, the answer was already given before the writing began; in this respect, the creative difficulty was not particularly great. When Teacher Liu's The Human Realm sets out to address the hard problem of what path China's rural world should take, it faces very great difficulty. I feel that Teacher Liu himself does not know what the answer should be, what the future direction should look like — there is no ready-made solution; one can only keep feeling one's way forward. There is also an interesting aspect to this novel: its generic collage. This too is a demonstration of the author's craft. When Teacher Liu writes Ma Ke's diary, the language, seen from our present-day perspective, is somewhat old-fashioned — the values are dated, the mode of expression dated too. Teacher Liu consciously imitates this older idiom, successfully bringing memories of a past era into the present context. Beyond this, he draws on many other literary works — Anna Karenina, How the Steel Was Tempered, and others — which, together with Song of Youth, reactivate in the present day the atmosphere and ideals of the 1950s through 1970s, using the traditions of the past to issue a challenge to the present age. Teacher Liu is continually using memories of the past to mount a new challenge and assert new values against the current age. In my view, it is precisely this opposition of two sets of values that fills the novel with tension. Yet this challenge also seems very feeble. I feel that this is where the power of a realist work manifests itself: Teacher Liu does not endorse one side and then write that side's ultimate victory. The combined force of capital and power is enormous; we are utterly unable to shake their existence. This hard problem cannot be resolved in life, and in the novel this translates into the failure of Ma La and his companions — there is no way out. In my view, the fact that the hard problems raised in the novel cannot be resolved is precisely what drives the reader to think further, and this is also what makes the novel deeply affecting.

Zhu Dongli (China National Academy of Arts):

I have read this novel by Brother Jiming carefully and find it to have a great many distinguishing features — one could say it makes contributions on multiple fronts, genuinely providing many new points of support from which we can think further about many contemporary as well as historical questions. For instance, the novel gives expression to several traditions present in China over the past few decades; to write multiple traditions and multiple intellectual lineages into a single full-length novel and develop them through concrete detail — this has been rare in so-called serious literature for many years now. Two traditions are raised in the novel: the revolutionary tradition and the enlightenment tradition. These are the two most important traditions in twentieth-century China, intertwined yet succeeding and displacing each other in turn. The manner in which the heirs of these two traditions in the novel — Ma Ke and Lü Yongjia — meet their deaths is very interesting. Ma Ke dies in fire; fire is the ultimate expression of revolution, and one might say that revolution in the end devoured its own sons and daughters. Lü Yongjia dies of AIDS — the ultimate expression of the individualism, or the sexual permissiveness, that the enlightenment tradition advocated. The deaths of both figures are symbolic: they signify, and portend, the interruption of both traditions. The novel opens in the year 2000 — which in my view is precisely a new starting point in contemporary Chinese history. China's social transformation began in the late 1970s and was completed by the late 1990s: the traditional working class was transformed into a hired-labor status, and new class relationships and social structures took shape — a process reflected in the celebrated book of that time, Research Report on China's Contemporary Social Strata edited by Lu Xueyi, which divided Chinese society into ten strata, with workers ranked third from the bottom. Almost simultaneously, in 2000, the concept of the "Three Represents" was put forward — a re-articulation of the ruling party's foundational purpose. Economic transformation, social transformation, and the transformation of the ruling party were thus all completed at the turn of the century. Brother Jiming's novel opens in 2000 — which is to say, a new page has turned, history continues, and it goes on. The earlier revolutionary tradition, the earlier enlightenment tradition — both were indeed interrupted; the visible, tangible tradition was broken. But it will leave behind relics, extending like spiritual inheritance into the next era, into the new century. In this sense, the story of The Human Realm has not come to an end. We also hope that Jiming will keep writing; our forum will keep meeting. When Jiming's next work is published, we will gather again for another symposium, compare the two works side by side — that will carry a very particular meaning.

(Proceedings of the 65th Young Arts Forum of the China National Academy of Arts, October 15, 2016)

Li Songrui: The Space and Possibility for Thought to Appear

— Reading Liu Jiming's Novel The Human Realm

Original Published at 1st issue of Literary Theory and Criticism 

The relationship between literature and thought seems to be a question without a ready answer. On one hand, most literary histories tend to employ terms drawn from philosophical inquiry — classicism, realism, modernism, existentialism — to characterize literary production across different periods, implicitly suggesting that literature is an alternative form of expressing thought and theory. On the other hand, writers' various efforts to accommodate thought within their literary works have frequently met with skepticism. The American philosopher George Boas once declared: "The thoughts in poetry are often hackneyed and false, and nobody over sixteen reads poetry merely for what it says." Wellek and Warren went even further, arguing that "if we analyze many poems celebrated for their thought, we often find that the content amounts to no more than commonplaces about human morality or the vicissitudes of fate." Evidently, these scholars believed that the ideas a writer attempts to convey through literature are of little consequence and cannot serve as a measure of a work's artistic merit — what truly matters is that which makes literature literature. And yet many writers have been unable to resist the temptation of thought, finding themselves drawn irresistibly to "preaching" their understanding of life to readers within their works. The most characteristic example is Leo Tolstoy. In Anna Karenina, Tolstoy was unwilling to submit to the wishes of most readers and concentrate his energies on depicting the love affair between Anna and Vronsky; instead, he repeatedly "entered" the narrative, using the voice of Levin to express his reflections on life, pouring out a series of opinions on specific questions of ethics, rural land reform, political economy, philosophy, and religion, and intervening in the intellectual debates of Russian society in the 1870s. This prompted even the ardently admiring Nabokov to find Levin's long-winded preaching unbearable, and to fantasize about "kick[ing] the glorified soapbox from under [Tolstoy's] slippered feet and lock[ing] him up in a stone house on a desert island with a barrel of ink and a mountain of paper — away from the ethical and the didactic, from the things that distracted him and prevented him from concentrating on Anna's white neck and the black curls at its nape." In contemporary Chinese literature today, pondering the meaning of life and discoursing about one's understanding of society feels rather "outmoded." Once Chinese writers grew tired of the writing mode of socialist realist fiction from the 1950s through the 1970s — in which literature served as a gloss on the grand narrative of social-historical development — what remained truly worthy of attention was nothing but "the black curls at the nape of the white neck." And so writers turned their pens toward the subtle and winding recesses of human nature, indulging in various formal innovations, no longer willing to bear the responsibility of thinking through questions of society and human life; literature accordingly lost the space and possibility for thought to take root and grow. Against this background, Liu Jiming's new full-length novel The Human Realm, published in 2016, presents itself as something rather unusual. Interestingly, this work also makes repeated reference to Anna Karenina, and its protagonist Ma La has a particular affinity for precisely the Levin whom Nabokov found so insufferable. As the novel describes: "Levin's plain, unpretentious character as a practical man; his weariness of life among the Moscow gentry; the series of reforms he implemented on his estate; and his lying in a haystack thinking those expansive, abstruse thoughts about why human beings live and what kind of life has meaning — all of this exercised an attraction over Ma La that he had never felt before. He took a deep liking to this somewhat odd, unconventional character that Tolstoy had created." If Tolstoy used the figure of Levin to express his reflections on the difficulties facing Russian society in the 1870s, then Liu Jiming's repeated invocation of Levin and his expression of fondness for him manifests an effort to reimplant into contemporary Chinese literature the tradition of thinking through social questions and exploring paths of human life. And so the novel The Human Realm becomes a rare case study, helping us examine what new qualities literature acquires when it attempts to accommodate thought.

Part One

The Human Realm is structurally divided into two parts, each centering on a different principal character: the first half follows Ma La, the second Murong Qiu. In the first half, Ma La has grown up in rural Shenhuangzhou in Hubei Province. Having lost both parents at a very early age, this protagonist seems forever to be searching for a spiritual mentor capable of guiding his path through life. He begins by regarding his elder brother Ma Ke as a spiritual father, moved by Ma Ke's selfless and self-abnegating devotion to building the people's commune during the Cultural Revolution. Yet Ma Ke dies in 1976, sacrificing himself during a fire in a bid to save the commune's seed grain, and Ma La loses his anchor and support in life. Before long, however, he encounters Teacher Lü Yongjia at a local teachers' college. This freewheeling yet brilliantly intelligent man becomes Ma La's new spiritual mentor, and Ma La even resigns from his public post to follow Teacher Lü into business. Just as their jointly run Kunpeng Corporation is flourishing, however, Lü Yongjia suddenly dies of an unspeakable illness, and the company falls into crisis after becoming implicated in a major smuggling case, landing Ma La in prison. After serving eight years, Ma La returns at the dawn of the new century to his home village of Shenhuangzhou, where he "retreats" — reading and thinking about the path ahead. Finding that the villagers have scattered south to find factory work, and that the countryside has grown steadily more desolate, he resolves to establish the Tongxin Cooperative and lead the remaining villagers in a collective venture. Regrettably, despite his strenuous efforts and initial progress, Ma La is unable to resist the combined encroachment of a transnational corporation and the local government on the village's land, and the Tongxin Agricultural Cooperative is left in precarious straits. In the second half of the novel, the narrative centers on Murong Qiu, chair of the sociology department at W University. During the Cultural Revolution she was sent to Shenhuangzhou as an "educated youth," and, like Ma La, was profoundly moved by Ma Ke's selfless spirit, falling deeply in love with that young production brigade leader. With Ma Ke's sacrifice and the end of the Cultural Revolution, Murong Qiu leaves Shenhuangzhou and gradually lets the ideals of building the people's commune that she once held fade from memory. Unable to break free of the mainstream values of society, she has become "a person who drifts with the current" (p. 434), ensconced in her ivory tower, studying sociological theory with little bearing on actual life. Yet her earlier meeting and love affair with Ma Ke seems to prevent her from entirely forgetting her former youth and ideals, and she cannot fully subscribe to the mainstream values of society. At an academic conference, Murong Qiu encounters the scholar He Wei, who conducts fieldwork on rural problems, and witnesses the marginalization He Wei suffers within the mainstream academy; she suddenly becomes conscious of the limitations of her own research and begins to reflect critically on herself. By the novel's close, Murong Qiu has decided to leave "the 'academic circle' with its odor of decay" and "take her graduate students to Yanhe, to Shenhuangzhou, back to that village where she once lived and labored, to conduct a genuine fieldwork investigation" (p. 488).

The link connecting the two halves is a dog-eared copy of the "red classic" from "the passionate era" — Song of Youth. When Murong Qiu arrived in the village for her "sent-down" period, she brought with her a collection of literary books that transformed this remote village into a local center for the dissemination of knowledge. Drawn to Murong Qiu, Ma Ke would often ask his younger brother Ma La to go and borrow books from her. In the back-and-forth of borrowing and returning, Ma Ke and Murong Qiu drew ever closer and became lovers. But the sudden fire and the return of the educated youth to the cities meant that Ma La never had the chance to return the battered copy of Song of Youth to its owner. After his release from prison, Ma La returns to Shenhuangzhou, where he chances upon that old book, and the memories of his brother Ma Ke are reawakened. One might even say that Ma La's ultimate decision to establish the Tongxin Cooperative and walk the collective path with his fellow villagers, rebuilding a rural community, is intimately connected to the memories of sacrifice, devotion, youth, collectivism, and revolution that Song of Youth unlocks. When Ma La travels to Wuhan and returns the book to Murong Qiu, that relic of a former year likewise delivers a powerful jolt to its owner, prompting her to return to Shenhuangzhou to find Ma Ke's gravestone, and to reflect that "the most precious period of her own life had forever followed Ma Ke, and remained on that soil" (p. 473). Her renewed encounter with Ma La also causes Murong Qiu to discover that the young man of former years "had such penetrating insight into things that it surpassed many scholars who had devoted themselves specifically to researching the 'three rural problems'" — and moreover that "his concerns extended far beyond the 'three rural problems,' encompassing all the contradictions, difficulties, and hopes of contemporary China, all with genuine and original perception," making her "involuntarily think of the Russian Populist intellectuals of the late nineteenth century" (p. 488).

From Liu Jiming's structural design of The Human Realm, it is evident that this is unmistakably a work about understanding and memory. By "understanding" is meant that both Ma La and Murong Qiu are continually striving to understand the extraordinarily complex society of China, and above all the Chinese countryside. Ma La especially: he first embraced the spirit of collectivism during the Cultural Revolution, then plunged into business in the "new era" — seeming to enact, in the vicissitudes of his own fate, the shift between the emphasis on equality characteristic of the 1950s through the 1970s and the centering of economic construction in the post-reform era. After his release from prison, Ma La brings both sets of experience to bear in a renewed effort to understand the various difficulties of Chinese society and to think through what path China's farmers should take. Equally, Murong Qiu's choice to step out of the ivory tower and conduct genuine research in the countryside is driven by her desire to shed arid theory and come to a real understanding of Chinese society. Notably, what ultimately prompts both Ma La and Murong Qiu to make their respective choices is the memory that the worn old copy of Song of Youth carries — memory of Ma Ke, of collectivism, of a vanished era.

Part Two

From Liu Jiming's structural arrangement alone, one can see that this work possesses a very strong intellectual quality. The author attempts, from the dual dimensions of the peasant and the intellectual and within a comparatively broad historical depth, to render the difficulties and problems facing Chinese society, to reflect on how to correctly understand China's history and social reality, and to explore the path that Chinese farmers should take in the face of economic globalization. As a result of this pursuit of intellectual substance, the most pronounced characteristic of both Ma La and Murong Qiu is their habit of earnest study and deep reflection: they are either diligently reading or sustained in thought, which is also why the novel is filled with discussions of questions of agricultural production technology, land system reform, national food security, and the like. For readers captivated by "the black curls at the nape of the white neck," this content clearly amounts to tedious "preaching" that has no business being the subject matter of literature. Yet from another angle, the inclusion of this intellectual substance in fact expands the expressive space of literature and challenges the excessively narrow understanding of literature that has prevailed in China's humanities since the 1980s. In truth, an emphasis on the intellectual character of literature — thinking through social problems and exploring paths of human life within creative works — has always been a tradition of twentieth-century Chinese literature. Mao Dun's Midnight, Zhao Shuli's Xiao Erhei's Marriage, and Liu Qing's A History of Entrepreneurship are all outstanding works that emerged from this tradition. Mao Dun explicitly stated that Midnight "naturally raises many questions, but the one question I set out to answer was the Trotskyists' question: China has not taken the road of capitalist development; under imperialist oppression, China has become still more colonized." Zhao Shuli frankly acknowledged: "The stories I write are all about problems I encountered in my grassroots work when I went to the countryside, problems I felt would obstruct the progress of our work if left unresolved, and that therefore needed to be raised." And Liu Qing, in explaining the significance of A History of Entrepreneurship, pointed out that his writing was meant "to answer for the reader: why did socialist revolution come about in China's countryside, and how was this revolution carried out. The answer is to be expressed through the process of action, thought, and psychological change that characters of various classes in one village undergo over the course of the cooperativization movement. The unity of this thematic idea and this scope of subject matter constitutes the specific content of this novel." Evidently, thinking through the difficulties and challenges facing Chinese society at the time, resolving the hard problems arising in real life, and exploring what model of social development the Chinese people should choose — these were the fundamental driving forces behind these writers' creative work. And it is precisely because novels like Midnight, Xiao Erhei's Marriage, and A History of Entrepreneurship resonate with the historical destiny of twentieth-century China that they have become literary classics. The Human Realm stands without question on the extended line of this tradition. In order to signal to readers his work's relation of inheritance to this tradition, the author even models certain character configurations and plot structures on these earlier works — and in particular on Liu Qing's A History of Entrepreneurship. For instance, the competition between Ma La's cooperative in Shenhuangzhou and the "large grain-producing household" Zhao Guangfu's cooperative reminds readers of the open and covert rivalry between the Lighthouse Cooperative led by Liang Shengbao and Guo Zhenshan's mutual aid group on Hamatian. And Ma La's journey to Changsha to purchase the newly developed high-yield hybrid rice variety "Nanyou 2611" corresponds directly to the celebrated scene of Liang Shengbao traveling to Guo County to buy rice seed. While these echoes may give readers a sense of familiarity — even prompting questions of staleness and lack of originality — they allow us to perceive the author's artistic effort to reactivate, in the present day, the twentieth-century Chinese literary tradition of thinking through social problems and exploring paths of human life.

On closer examination, compared to A History of Entrepreneurship, the Chinese society that The Human Realm confronts has undergone earth-shattering changes — and this is precisely what causes it to employ entirely different methods in thinking through the difficulties and hard problems of its own era. In Liu Qing's pages, the path of agricultural cooperativization is an unquestionable "truth." As the author himself put it: "The novel selects a successful revolution guided by Mao Zedong Thought, not a failed revolution guided by any erroneous thinking." Liu Qing therefore guaranteed from the outset of his writing that no matter what difficulties Liang Shengbao encountered, he would ultimately achieve victory in the cooperativization movement under Party leadership and the guidance of Mao Zedong Thought. Neither the rich peasant Yao Shijie's covert sabotage of solidarity among the poor peasants, nor the old Party member Guo Zhenshan's outward compliance and private pursuit of individual enrichment, nor the middle peasant Liang Dalaohans various suspicions of the Lighthouse Cooperative — none of these is capable of posing any real threat to Liang Shengbao and his cooperative enterprise. Even when Liang Shengbao encounters contradictions and difficulties he cannot resolve, he can always obtain guidance and assistance from the Party branch secretary Lu Mingchang or the deputy county Party secretary Yang Guohua. This gives the narrative tone of A History of Entrepreneurship a spirit of confidence, optimism, and forward momentum, yet it lacks any genuine collision and confrontation between opposing ideas. The Human Realm is entirely different. Both Ma La and Murong Qiu, confronted with the extraordinarily complex Chinese society and with different possible paths through life, feel deep anguish and bewilderment. Faced with a countryside whose able-bodied young workers have all but entirely deserted it, Ma La is simply powerless to realize his "utopian" vision of rebuilding a rural community, and can only retreat step by step before the combined assault of transnational capital and state power. For Murong Qiu, although she cannot be called anything but successful in the academic world — with the respect and recognition of her peers and seniors, and the administrative position of chair of the sociology department at W University — none of this has enabled her to speak about China's social problems with genuine confidence. And when Murong Qiu witnesses the senior academics who wield academic authority excluding and suppressing the scholar who has the courage to confront the serious problems of China's countryside, she is deeply bewildered and begins to doubt her own scholarly path. Beyond this, the problems that the novel's narrative touches on — the massive outflow of rural labor, the enormous threat to China's food security posed by the expansion of transnational seed corporations, the potential health risks of genetically modified crops to the Chinese people, the impact of international market fluctuations on Chinese farmers, and the environmental pollution of the countryside — are all far from any path to solution. All of this means that this novel is simply unable, as Midnight or A History of Entrepreneurship could, to provide clear, unequivocal, unassailable answers to the problems arising in real life; it can only enumerate a series of difficult problems besetting Chinese society and lay them before the reader for reflection. As a result, the narrative tone of The Human Realm has somewhat less confidence and optimism, and somewhat more hesitation and anxiety.

Part Three

Liu Qing's A History of Entrepreneurship and Liu Jiming's The Human Realm are therefore two entirely different kinds of works. Drawing on relevant passages from Schiller's On Naïve and Sentimental Poetry and Lukács's The Theory of the Novel may help us better understand their differences. For Schiller, the essence of literature is nature: either the depiction of nature, or the expression of a longing for nature. In ancient Greece, the living environment was relatively limited and not yet separated from nature, which allowed literature to depict nature in a natural manner — it was thus naïve literature. With the development of the age, the human living environment gradually expanded, reason came to govern all of society, and humanity was permanently separated from nature. Writers could only reflect rationally on themselves in their writing and express their longing for nature; they were no longer capable of depicting nature, and literature correspondingly became sentimental literature. This mode of understanding literature was later inherited by Lukács in The Theory of the Novel, with "nature" as the central concept replaced by "totality." In Lukács's view, the living world of the ancient Greeks was relatively limited, enabling them to fully understand their world and to live in it freely and familiarly, without feeling in conflict with it. Literary creation of that period was therefore able to grasp and depict the totality of life — the most typical form being the epic. In modern society, however, the vast expansion of the human living world means that human beings can no longer fully comprehend their environment; the world reveals its alien, mysterious, and terrifying face to humanity. In this situation, the totality of life is irretrievably lost; the writer can only reflect on life but can never truly understand life itself. Lukács goes further to argue that the novel is the epic of modern life: although it cannot grasp the totality of life, it expresses the writer's longing for that totality. Drawing on Schiller and Lukács: since Liu Qing was able to fully understand the world of his Hamatian, whereas Liu Jiming finds himself perplexed by Chinese society today, the stylistic character of A History of Entrepreneurship is closer to what might be called naïve literature or epic, while The Human Realm more resembles sentimental literature or the novel. And the quality of hesitation and anxiety that the latter displays is precisely what provides the space and possibility for thought to genuinely appear in literature.

In the era when Liu Qing was writing A History of Entrepreneurship, the socialist path of development, the cooperativization movement, and the prestige of the Communist Party all enjoyed the broad support and affirmation of the people. Liu Qing, a steadfast believer in the communist ideal, never needed to defend his beliefs within his works, and thus had no need to open up debate and confrontation between different positions and viewpoints. In A History of Entrepreneurship, accordingly, the content of life as rendered and the ideological convictions the author held closely reinforced one another, with little friction. The vicissitudes of the characters' fates and the direction of narrative development aligned closely with the policies of the Chinese Communist Party, the socialist model of development, and even the "inevitable direction" of historical progress. Social life on Hamatian naturally contained contradictions, wavering, conflicts, and even counter-currents — but none of this was sufficient to constitute an intellectual challenge to Liu Qing. The behavior of negative characters such as Yao Shijie, Guo Zhenshan, Bai Zhankui, and Liang Daolaohang all conformed perfectly to their respective class positions as rich peasant, army ruffian and village idler, and wealthy middle peasant; criticizing, educating, uniting with, and transforming them therefore had its corresponding methods and formulas. Although Liu Qing, owing to the disruption of the Cultural Revolution, never completed his creative plan — A History of Entrepreneurship, Part Two came to a permanent halt at the moment when Guo Zhenshan's mutual aid group and Liang Shengbao's Lighthouse Cooperative were preparing to launch a production contest — readers in fact never worry about Liang Shengbao's fate. The novel's optimistic, confident narrative tone is more than sufficient to convince readers that Liang Shengbao will certainly win the final victory, that the cooperativization path will necessarily succeed. This state of high integration between the life-world rendered in the writer's work and the ideological convictions he holds — in which the former cannot overflow the theoretical presuppositions of the latter, and the latter therefore cannot be tempered and renewed before the full complexity of life — makes it very difficult for creative new thought to find space in which to grow.

It should be noted that neither Schiller nor Lukács, when dividing literature into naïve and sentimental, epic and novel, was rendering a judgment about the relative artistic merit of the two categories. They were only discussing how the relationship between human beings and the world they inhabit determines the character of literature. Although in sentimental literature and the novel, the separation of humanity from nature — or humanity's inability to comprehend the world it inhabits — gives rise to a reflecting subject capable of self-reflection, this does not mean that the artistic value of these two forms is higher than that of naïve literature or the epic. Great literary works can emerge from naïve literature as well. To discuss A History of Entrepreneurship in these terms, then, is neither to "accuse" it of being a mere illustration of the policies of the Chinese Communist Party, nor to "criticize" Liu Qing for lacking the capacity to generate new thought; it is to point out that in that era of high integration between ideological conviction and social life, there was simply no real-world necessity for the independent development of new thought.

The Chinese society that The Human Realm confronts is far more complex than that of the 1950s and 1960s. Shenhuangzhou has long since ceased to be a field of hope; it is a bleak and declining place. The capable and energetic young people of the village have all left to find work in the cities; only the old, the weak, the sick, and the disabled remain in the countryside, living lives without prospect. With the long-term implementation of the household contract responsibility system, the rural public facilities — irrigation systems, roads, communal spaces — built at great cost in labor and materials during the 1950s through the 1970s have gone without maintenance and can no longer function. The loosening of CCP grassroots organizations in rural areas has turned farmers into scattered sand, leaving them at a disadvantage in market competition. As The Human Realm depicts: Guo Dongsheng was originally working as a migrant worker in Wuhan; because he was a Party member, he was dragooned by the township leadership into returning as branch secretary of Shenhuangzhou village. But after returning, Guo Dongsheng neither lives in Shenhuangzhou nor participates in agricultural production; he returns to the village only when there are tasks to carry out — tax and fee collection. Following China's entry into the World Trade Organization, domestic agricultural production became a link in the international trade system, subject to the violent impact of international price fluctuations. Beyond this, questions of genetically modified crops and environmental pollution have become deeply entangled with every link of China's agricultural production. The state of the intellectual world in The Human Realm is, as with the problems of the countryside, equally complex and anxious. The mainstream intelligentsia controls academic resources and academic power, yet is captivated by playing with various imported theories from the West, unable to genuinely address Chinese problems from a Chinese standpoint. Yet when certain scholars, grounded in fieldwork, think seriously about China's social reality, they provoke attack from the mainstream intelligentsia. Liu Jiming incorporates all of these problems besetting China's countryside and intellectual world into his scope of reflection, giving the Chinese reality depicted in The Human Realm an unusually messy and sprawling character. Reading the novel, one can clearly sense that the author's ideological convictions are far from adequate to the task of handling the social content the novel presents — it is full of anxiety and tension. The accumulation in real life of so many unresolvable problems places far higher demands and challenges on the writer's intellectual resources, capacity for thought, and insight into lived reality. When social content and ideological conviction exist in a state of high integration, thought loses the possibility of further development because it is not tempered by the abrasion of life; but the challenge that a messy and complex social life poses to thought provides a space in which creative thought can grow. In Liu Jiming's work, this is manifested first in the side-by-side presentation of multiple and varied intellectual positions.

As the above analysis has shown, the protagonist Ma La is forever searching for a spiritual mentor capable of guiding his path through life. His first object of emulation is his brother Ma Ke, whose socialist spirit of emphasizing equality and collectivism moves Ma La profoundly. But Ma Ke's sacrifice occurs almost simultaneously with the end of the Cultural Revolution — as if in metaphorical intimation of the termination of this intellectual lineage. Ma La subsequently receives Lü Yongjia's "enlightenment" in the 1980s and is deeply attracted by the free-spirited, unconventional charisma of this liberal thinker. After the two set up the Kunpeng Corporation together, Ma La is further won over by Lü Yongjia's audacious, undaunted spirit of daring to think and act. Yet the novel arranges for Lü Yongjia to die of a sexually transmitted disease, and for the Kunpeng Corporation to collapse through legal transgression — implicitly signaling the failure of the enlightenment and liberal thought that Lü Yongjia represents within the Chinese context. After Ma La's release from prison, the author has him bring both sets of experience to a renewed examination of twenty-first-century Chinese society, causing him to encounter: Ding Youpeng, the county magistrate of Yanhe County, representing the governing-cadre type produced by the corporate-style management of government; Gu Chaoyang, representing the professional managers of transnational corporations; Li Haijun, representing the comprador agents of international capital giants operating in China; Zhao Guangfu, representing the large-scale grain-producing households seeking economies of scale; and Guo Dongsheng, representing the grassroots cadre who has severed his ties to the countryside. In the novel, Ma La is almost like a journalist, "visiting" each of these figures in turn, recording their various pronouncements, and fully exposing their intellectual states. The function of the second protagonist, Murong Qiu, is similar: she is used to present the scholar He Wei, who thinks about Chinese problems from a standpoint grounded in Chinese reality; the academic authority Zhuang Dingxian, who privileges Western theory and quantitative models; and Kuang Xibei, the representative of the young intellectual with a passion for social critique.

Beyond their side-by-side presentation, The Human Realm also strenuously renders the debate and collision between these various intellectual positions, giving the work an atmosphere of intellectual contention — in some respects directly intervening in the current debates unfolding within China's intellectual world. One particularly suggestive moment in the plot: when Ma La, after his release from prison, returns to his hometown to pay his respects at his brother Ma Ke's grave, he suddenly sees in his mind's eye Lü Yongjia and Ma Ke "trading arguments heatedly." Lü Yongjia accuses Ma Ke of having thrown his life away for nothing by sacrificing himself to save the commune's seed grain. Ma Ke counters that this view is "a philosophy of self-interest and a bourgeois outlook on life, through and through" (p. 58), insisting that a person should live like Pavel Korchagin — so that when looking back on one's life, one has no regret for time wasted in idleness. And in the second half of The Human Realm, Murong Qiu finds herself directly in the midst of a sharp confrontation between opposing intellectual camps at an academic conference. Scholars like Hu Anmin and Liu Guotao, with their overseas study backgrounds, when addressing the "three rural problems," are either inclined to discuss policy questions at the macroscopic level, or tend to compile large quantities of data and construct theoretical models. Their presentations earn enthusiastic applause from their academic peers. On the other hand, He Wei — a scholar who attends to the emotional lives and living conditions of grassroots farmers — is met with indifference and suppression from the academic community when he criticizes neoliberals and the mainstream academy as having "more or less become interpretive instruments and appendages of market economic theory and mainstream ideology, having entirely abandoned the critical standpoint and the concern for humanity" (p. 327). Although one can see from the novel's narration and intent that the author has a clear left-wing orientation, in presenting these specific intellectual clashes his narrative tone maintains a basic objectivity and neutrality — liberal figures like Lü Yongjia are not subjected to caricature, enabling readers to fully understand the inner logic of two opposing intellectual positions and to arrive at their own reflections.

What deserves particular notice is that this intellectual debate and confrontation is manifest not only at the level of content but also permeates the formal level of the novel — and it is here, without question, that the work makes its distinctive contribution as art. Liu Jiming is a writer who thinks assiduously and reads voraciously; readers frequently find fragments from many classic works appearing in his pages. For example, in his earlier full-length novel Rivers and Lakes (2010), the author would regularly insert passages from famous works like Chekhov's short story "Vanka" into his own text. The Human Realm continues this practice: passages from Anna Karenina, How the Steel Was Tempered, Song of Youth, and other works appear frequently throughout, serving as important means of illuminating characters' inner worlds and intimating the direction of the plot. Song of Youth in particular becomes the key connecting the novel's two halves. Especially notable is the diary that Ma Ke kept during his lifetime, discovered alongside that battered copy of Song of Youth. The author does not summarize the diary's contents in indirect speech, but quotes it at length, transcribing it over a dozen pages in the novel. Viewed today, these diary entries are saturated with the political language that was fashionable during the Cultural Revolution, and seem somewhat antiquated — clearly different in character from the fluent, spare narrative language of The Human Realm as a whole. To some, this kind of language might even seem repellent. Yet the diary's descriptions of such scenes as digging pond mud, harvesting rice, picking cotton, electing the production team leader, and the love that grows in the course of shared labor — all of this resurrects a vanished era, allowing readers to feel the passion for life saturating those pages. There, laborers throw themselves heart and soul into the land, and the land gives back to them dignity and confidence in the future. Contrasted with the Shenhuangzhou farmer Guyu, migrant worker in a big city, who reflects that he has become "no different from an ant or a dog; if he died, no one would spare him a glance," and laments that "the dignity of being human — that could only be found on this land that gave him birth and raised him" (p. 159), those extended passages of Ma Ke's diary seem to speak for a vanished time, registering a solemn protest against our own. The Human Realm thus uses two different styles to "collage" together two different eras, two different intellectual positions and models of development, setting them in confrontation and collision, and thereby completing its critique of the contemporary moment.

Conclusion

When we assert that The Human Realm possesses a very strong intellectual quality, perhaps many will raise objections — after all, although the novel touches on many problems within Chinese society, it does not offer any genuine solutions. But considered from another angle: since the end of the Cold War, alongside the victor's proclamation of the "end of history," the logic of money, developmentalism, and the behavioral norms of neoliberalism have seemed to become the universal truth holding universal sway. To see through their absurdity and emptiness therefore becomes an act of defying the tide of history — one destined to meet with suppression and negation. Just as we see in The Human Realm, mainstream intellectuals of the type represented by Zhuang Dingxian treat Western-derived theory as sacred; any questioning or challenge will be met with their hostility and suppression. And when an era has only one voice and one mode of thought, it closes off the prospect of adequately understanding the full complexity of lived reality. In this context, a work like The Human Realm reveals its important value. It consciously renders a rich and complex range of social problems within its text, creating opportunities for different intellectual positions to find expression, and deploying various means to let these intellectual positions engage one another in debate. Thought that has been stigmatized is allowed to speak again and to challenge the mainstream intellectual world of today. This novel, therefore, on one hand touches profoundly on the complex problems of Chinese society, and on the other breaks the monopoly of the mainstream and the powerful over thought, winning for heterogeneous ideas a small piece of sky. Although the iron laws of reality will not tremble because of a single novel, imagining the possibility of an alternative reality in the world of the imagination may perhaps make some small preparation for an eventual change. If the blade of thought must be tempered sharp by the whetstone of complex lived reality and the contest of opposing ideas, then Liu Jiming's The Human Realm provides, in precisely this way, the space and possibility for new thought to appear.

Li Yunlei: The Possibility and Exploration

 of "New Socialist Literature"

— Reading Liu Jiming's The Human Realm

Contemporary Writer Review, Issue 4, 2017

Part One: The Tradition and Transformation of "Socialist Literature"

In contemporary Chinese literary circles, there exists a remarkably interesting phenomenon: a rupture between creative practice and academic research. On the research side, since the 1990s the most productive body of scholarship has been devoted to left-wing literature and socialist literature. Whether in the works of Hong Zicheng and Cai Xiang or in the explorations of younger scholars, the richness and complexity of left-wing literature have been profoundly illuminated, placing this scholarship at the very forefront of contemporary literary studies — and in doing so, bringing into sharper relief the importance of writers like Zhao Shuli, Liu Qing, and Ding Ling. By contrast, the creative community seems not yet to have emerged from the intellectual atmosphere of the 1980s. In the horizon of "going out to the world," writers may draw on Western authors, on Latin American writers, on Eastern European writers; in telling "Chinese stories," they may draw on the tradition of Dream of the Red Chamber, or of Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio, or of the Classic of Mountains and Seas. Yet the tradition of twentieth-century modern Chinese literature — and in particular its left-wing literary tradition — is treated with studied indifference, even ostentatiously avoided. Have we ever heard anyone declare an intention to inherit the tradition of Lu Xun, of Mao Dun, of Liu Qing? Apparently not. In my view, the primary reason is that the creative community remains immersed in a sensibility that equates beauty with things foreign, and lacks the cultural confidence, the artistic sensibility, and the intellectual capacity to confront history, confront reality, and confront itself.

In this sense, the appearance of Liu Jiming's full-length novel The Human Realm is of considerable significance. The novel's most distinctive feature lies in its exploration of socialism within a new environment, and this encompasses two dimensions: first, Ma La's persistence in and innovation of rural "cooperativization" in the new era; second, Murong Qiu's re-examination and rethinking of socialist ideas at a moment when liberalism is rampant in the intellectual world. These two dimensions are relatively independent yet mutually connected within the novel.

The Ma La of the novel does not subscribe to "cooperativization" from the outset; his thinking has its own twists and turns. In his youth, under the influence of his elder brother Ma Ke and the educated youth Murong Qiu, he possessed an idealist temperament. In the 1980s, he followed his spiritual mentor Lü Yongjia into the waves of commerce, rode the swells and troughs of the marketplace, and ultimately landed in prison. After his release, he reexamined his path in life, returned to Shenhuangzhou, and took up the unfinished work of rural construction that Ma Ke had left behind — building a better home through the cooperative model. In Ma La is concentrated the intellectual journey of a generation. Like most people born in the 1960s, he was shaped by socialism in his youth, turned in adulthood to embrace a philosophy of the strong individual and liberal ideas, but unlike most people, he — after a major setback in life and after painful reflection — rediscovered the faith of his younger years and set about realizing it in the practice of rural reality.

Ma La's exploration is both a search for the values and direction of his own life and a gathering-up of reflections on the future fate of humanity. In Ma La we can clearly discern the shadows of "socialist new persons" like Liang Shengbao and Xiao Changchun — yet the differences are equally clear. Both Ma La and these earlier figures pursue the path of "cooperativization," but Liang Shengbao and his kind were going with the tide in a favorable broader environment, confronting the backward consciousness of "old-style peasants" and animated by an upward-striving optimistic spirit. Ma La is different: he has about him a quality of calm stillness, because he is swimming against the current in his environment and confronting circumstances that are far more complex and difficult — the abandonment of farmland, the outflow of labor, capital going to the countryside, the setback of socialism on a world scale, and so on. Amid all these adverse conditions he holds to his reflections and explorations, holding to the new path of "cooperativization" he has chosen for himself. In him there is something of the heroic, but it is tinged with tragedy. In this sense he also comes close to Sui Baopu in The Ancient Ship — both are brooding, pensive thinkers, both are re-examining twentieth-century China and searching for the future of the countryside. But The Ancient Ship of the 1980s is more intellectually turbid; Sui Baopu's predominant experience is one of contradiction and negation. Thirty years later, Ma La's judgment of history and reality is clearer, his commitment to his chosen path more steadfast and self-assured. A further dimension deserves emphasis: whether we see Ma La as closer to the "socialist new person" or closer to the "brooding thinker," he has his own subjectivity and independence, his own spiritual world and inner aspirations — and this makes him sharply unlike the protagonists of most contemporary fiction, who are mired in material concerns, desire, or the routines of daily life. In Ma La we see a new understanding of the human being, as well as the author's inheritance of literary tradition.

If Ma La's movement toward "cooperativization" is primarily enacted through practical work in the countryside, Murong Qiu's intellectual transformation is achieved primarily within the realm of knowledge — through critique and self-critique. As the daughter of an old family and as a former educated youth, her life experience has its own particular character; after returning to the city, she has spent her career in universities and intellectual circles, moving from student to teacher. Immersed in discussion of the various problems facing the sociology academy, she becomes increasingly aware of the importance of the standpoint and feeling underlying knowledge. As an intellectual, she also confronts a choice: to speak on the side of capital and power, or to speak from the standpoint of the people at the bottom of society. This is not merely a question of morality or conscience but a practical question of survival: the forces of capital and power threaten and seduce, they are enormous in their strength and pervasive in their influence, reaching even into a person's family and deepest "self." In these circumstances, to speak for the people requires not only courage and conscience but stubborn, sustained struggle — requires not only clearing away the relationship between knowledge and capital and power, but intellectual critique and self-critique. This is an arduous process, one that reaches into personal life and the inner world. In the novel, Murong Qiu ultimately chooses, amid complex contradictions, to stand with Ma La — allowing us to see a glimmer of hope within the intellectual world.

Structurally, the novel's first half centers on Ma La and the second half on Murong Qiu. The connection between them is primarily emotional and spiritual. As the lover of Ma Ke — Ma La's elder brother — the educated youth Murong Qiu left a beautiful and deep impression on the young Ma La's heart. Ma Ke's death in the fire while saving collective property burned a long-lasting scar onto both Ma La and Murong Qiu — a shared pain, a secret that is difficult to put into words. Afterward, the two set out on very different paths in life and found themselves in very different domains; yet Ma Ke's death, as a spiritual event, deeply shaped both their visions of the world, enabling them, at a time when neoliberalism is flooding in, to return to their original heart and look again through Ma Ke's eyes — and this is one important reason why they were ultimately able to transcend themselves and transcend their era.

The value of The Human Realm lies not only in its persistence in a socialist orientation, but also in the fact that it fully renders the complexity and difficulty of holding to this kind of reflection and choice in the present context, allowing us to see the continuation and transformation of the "socialist literary tradition" in the present day. From this angle, we can say that Liu Jiming faces a far greater predicament than Liu Qing or Zhao Shuli faced in their day. Yet we can see that in The Human Realm, Liu Jiming, with deep reflection and great courage, holds to the spirit of realism, restores the tradition of the novel as a "form of thought," and reopens the question of the possibility of "socialist literature" today. This places him, like the explorations of Hong Zicheng and Cai Xiang, at the forefront of contemporary intellectual and scholarly life; it also shows us that literature must rethink our history and our reality, and that true artistic creation can only be realized within the most immediate experience of life and of one's era.

Part Two: The Novel as a "Form of Thought"

The appearance of The Human Realm prompts us to rethink the proposition of the novel as a "form of thought." The novel serves many social functions. One is entertainment and diversion — most characteristic of popular fiction, which in today's era of mass culture and surging internet literature is the most prevalent and fastest-growing type in contemporary China, varied in style. A second is the recording function: the writing and preserving of history or reality, recording important events, typical characters, modes of life and feeling in novelistic form — in this sense the writer has been called the "secretary" of the era, through whose pages readers can arrive at a clearer, more vivid, and deeper understanding of history and reality. A third is the intellectual function: the writer not only records events and characters of history or reality, but makes their own response and reflection on the important intellectual questions of an age — and in this sense the novel becomes a "form of thought."

In literary history, the novel as "form of thought" has not only enormously raised the value of the novel as a form, enabling it to participate in the raising and construction of important intellectual questions; the novel's distinctive qualities have also more fully rendered the richness, complexity, and inner contradictions of modern thought, expanding our ways of feeling and understanding the world, allowing us to see the spiritual predicaments of modern people and the directions and efforts of their attempts to break free. In the works of Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Sartre, Camus, and others, we can feel the fascination of the novel as "form of thought."

In contemporary China, writers genuinely possessed of intellectual capacity are few, and Liu Jiming is one of them. Over many years, he has not only expressed through fiction his observations and reflections on contemporary society, but has written a large body of essays on thought and culture; the journal Tianxia [All Under Heaven] that he founded is itself a journal of intellectual culture. In his cultural and intellectual essays, Liu Jiming's range is broad and his thinking acute. What he concerns himself with includes both practical and theoretical questions, both Chinese experience and global problems — or rather, he has a sensitivity and self-awareness with respect to contemporary Chinese problems, and is also clearly conscious of the context in which those problems are being discussed. On this basis he has gradually formed his own problematic, his own methods of thinking, and his own discursive standpoint: rethinking the socialist experience within the context of globalization, and placing emphasis on the particularity and significance of the Chinese path. In this sense he is different from liberal intellectuals, and different from writers who simply critique or celebrate the system; he is someone who, after experiencing the twists of history and the upheaval of circumstances, has come to appreciate anew the force of left-wing thought and the value of the socialist experience.

Unlike his intellectual essays, where he expresses his views directly, in The Human Realm Liu Jiming places intellectual expression within a narrative and intellectual structure, within the shaping of characters and the arrangement of plot. The author is not merely expressing his own viewpoint, but placing his viewpoint within a dialogic and contestatory horizon — fully displaying the overall tendency and the different internal dimensions of the thought through the contradictions and conflicts between different positions, viewpoints, and perspectives, and through the protagonist's self-contradictions and the process of his thought's formation. This mode of writing not only allows us to see the richness of thought; it is also related to the distinctive nature of the novel as a form — in a novel, the reader may be less concerned with the expression of a particular viewpoint than with its inner contradictions and complications, and their effect on story and character.

In the novels of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, we do not fully understand those parts concerning the Russian Orthodox tradition and the thought and reality of nineteenth-century Russia — yet when these ideas are combined with the protagonists' fates and their inner contradictions, they take on a compelling fascination. It is precisely through these characters and their intellectual debates that we enter the depths of nineteenth-century Russia and of human thought, searching amid layer upon layer of contradiction for the way forward for humanity.

On this point, the traditional left-wing and socialist literary tradition also has its historical experiences and lessons, which must be sorted through and thought about in historical and theoretical terms. In the 1920s through 1940s, Chinese left-wing literature was full of critical vitality; yet after entering the period of "literature of the people," the situation underwent complex changes. On one hand, "critical orientation" was transformed into "constructive orientation"; on the other hand, intellectual contradictions were transformed into concrete line struggles — as in the central conflicts of A History of Entrepreneurship and A Bright Sunny Sky — which to a certain degree actually weakened the complexity and importance of thought itself. One can see that the victories achieved by the protagonists of those novels come relatively easily, deriving primarily from the author's own identification with the essential nature of history and its direction of development. But precisely because these victories come too easily — without engaging deeper contradictions in life and thought — their authority was itself too easily overturned once circumstances had changed.

In socialist aesthetic theory, "truthfulness" and "tendentiousness" form an important pair of categories. In the creative practice of the Seventeen Years period, however, emphasis on "tendentiousness" sometimes led to the neglect or even cancellation of "truthfulness" — and this is the root cause of the formulaic and conceptual tendencies in the literature of that period. Yet the other side of the problem is this: without "tendentiousness," without an overall understanding of and identification with the direction of historical development, our literature easily falls into a naturalistic quagmire of "truthfulness" — infinitely magnifying the value of life and its details at this particular moment, without being able to think about and grasp historical truth in its totality. Since the 1990s, writers' enthusiasm for rendering everyday life, private life, and even bodily desire — their extreme emphasis on technical "detail" — has been entirely a consequence of losing a broader horizon.

The Human Realm, appearing in a new cultural context, restores a broad intellectual horizon, restores the function of literature as a "form of thought," and restores the important value of literature as a mode of intellectual debate. In literary history, literature's contribution to social progress through the raising and discussion of important intellectual questions — through the debate, contention, and argument among different intellectual and artistic schools — was once one of literature's most important social functions, and was the reason literature commanded attention and respect in the public sphere. But in China, once mass culture arose, this important function of literature fell into decay. The Human Realm allows us to see the passion and courage of a writer intervening in intellectual debate — a debate that exists both within the text and between the text and the contemporary cultural context.

Within the text, Ma La's exploration of "cooperativization" in the new historical period constitutes both a historical debate and a contemporary one, bearing on the question of what road China's countryside — and China as a whole — should take. Cooperativization was one of the most important questions confronting China's countryside in the twentieth century: around it, not only were there divisions of opinion in the 1950s, but those divisions have continued into the new era and into the new century today. The difference is that in the 1950s, commitment to the "cooperativization path" was the mainstream of public discourse and thought — classics like Three Mile Bay, Great Changes in a Mountain Village, and A History of Entrepreneurship were all born in that environment — while since the 1980s, critical reflection on the "cooperativization path" has become the mainstream. This is connected both to the adjustment of actual policy and to the mainstream tendencies of the literary and academic worlds. From the late 1990s, as the "three rural problems" became more prominent, discussion of China's rural problems in the sociology community became more vigorous, with many sharply opposed viewpoints; within this discussion, understanding of and attitude toward "cooperativization" has been one of the focal points of debate. In The Human Realm, Liu Jiming places Ma La within an exploration of the new type of farmers' professional cooperative, connecting this to Murong Qiu's academic reflection on neoliberalism, and responding in a complex and inclusive spirit to the various dimensions — historical and contemporary, theoretical and practical — involved in "cooperativization," while gradually making his own standpoint clear in the course of the writing. In Liu Jiming's portrayal of Ma La and Murong Qiu, we can see this implied attitude.

At the same time, outside the text, The Human Realm forms a relationship of intellectual debate and tension with the current mainstream of the literary and academic worlds. In the context of "pure literature" that has taken shape since the new era, and in the entertainment atmosphere of mass culture since the 1990s, The Human Realm — not only discussing important intellectual and social questions but also exploring the "cooperativization" path and the new possibilities of socialism — can be called a transgression against certain established aesthetic principles and "collective unconscious." But from another angle, Liu Jiming's pioneering quality lies precisely here: he has reactivated the tradition of socialist literature in a new context, and restored the force of the novel as a form of thought.

Part Three: "The Chinese Story" and New Realism

In terms of creative method, the most striking feature of The Human Realm is its inheritance of the realist literary tradition. Here we need to reconsider realism.

Now that we are living in the twenty-first century, when we reflect on twentieth-century literature from a global perspective, we find that it is not as vast, rich, and far-ranging as nineteenth-century literature. The dominant lineage of modernism and postmodernism, with its focus on technique, interiority, and innovation, caused literature to lose its broad horizon and artistic ambition, becoming progressively more refined, trivial, and mediocre. If we set aside the pursuit of novelty and strangeness, and measure literary works by a different standard — whether they depict or reveal the richness of human life and the inner world; whether they create new typical characters for new human experience; whether they have had an important influence on the human spirit in the course of history — then we can see that twentieth-century literature falls far short of nineteenth-century literature in achievement, and that even within twentieth-century literature, modernism and postmodernism are inferior to realism. This is true on a global scale, and it is equally true in China.

"Realism" is a rich theoretical system with a complex and varied history. To speak of realism today requires confronting both theoretical-historical questions and practical ones. Historically, nineteenth-century critical realism was one of the peaks of realism; one could say that twentieth-century European-American modernism and Soviet-Chinese "socialist realism" were both efforts to transcend critical realism — the former driving its explorations into the spiritual and inner dimensions of humanity, the latter attempting to reconstruct the relationship between realism and life from a constructive rather than a critical angle. "Socialist realism" suffered from the formulaic and conceptual tendencies generated by its dogmatization, and ran into difficulties in its concrete practice; both China's "realism — the broad road" and the Western "boundless realism" represented theoretical efforts to correct or expand it. In the 1980s, new artistic currents flooded in, and realism was for a time regarded as a backward and outmoded creative method; modernism from the West gave rise to Chinese "avant-garde literature," which became the dominant literary current of the period.

Yet looking back thirty years later, we can see that the avant-garde literature that was so dazzling at the time is rarely read today, while the realist works that were considered "backward" can still move today's readers — An Ordinary World being the prime example. This allows us not only to reflect critically on the aesthetic norms established since the 1980s, but to see the enormous vitality of realism. And the appearance of The Human Realm once again demonstrates realism's inner creative energy.

In postmodernist theory, the dissolution of "grand narrative" once exercised considerable influence on Chinese literature — behind avant-garde fiction, new realism, and new historicism alike lurks the shadow of this current. From where we stand today, what this current dissolved was the concern with the laws and driving forces of historical development, redirecting literary attention toward the depiction of individual desire, mood, and daily-life states. In the historical circumstances of the new era, this had its element of justification — but for us now, the problem has shifted to another register: can contemporary people deeply immersed in individual desire, mood, and daily-life states reach the developmental currents of larger history? Can they give a clear account of where they came from and where they are going? In this sense, thinking about and grasping history from a macroscopic angle has become a genuine necessity.

One of the inner meanings of the "telling the Chinese story" that we advocate is precisely this: to attend to individual life experience from the macroscopic perspective of China, to combine individual stories with the Chinese story, to rebuild a new kind of "grand narrative," and to think about and grasp the fate of the individual and the fate of China as a whole. In this regard, contemporary writers need to start from their individual life experience and reach out to feel the pulse of history and the age. In this dimension, The Human Realm penetrates deep into the spirit of the age through the realist brush, and in its response to and reflection on the age's major questions, shows us one way of telling the Chinese story.

Ma La, Murong Qiu, and indeed Lü Yongjia, He Wei, Gu Chaoyang, Lulu, Kuang Xibei, and the other characters in the novel are all individual "persons" — yet their interweaving stories allow us to see the face of an era. The author has not fallen into the fragmentary narration of modernism and postmodernism; through the realist mode he has fashioned a series of character portraits and, in an overall sense, expressed his own reflections on and attitude toward the questions of the age. In this sense, what The Human Realm tells is precisely "the Chinese story." It also allows us to see the new development of realism in the contemporary moment, and its capacity to rescue literature from modernism and postmodernism.

If we probe still further, we find that the realism of The Human Realm is neither critical realism nor socialist realism; it is neither a realism centered on the individual, nor a realism that wholly adopts the standpoint of the people. The realism of The Human Realm is suffused with a romantic spirit; the windmill, the kiwifruit orchard, the hedgehogs all carry symbolic resonance and poetic atmosphere. The protagonists the author depicts are intellectuals or "peasant-thinkers"; what the author focuses on is the process by which they gradually free themselves from money, power, and received knowledge systems, and approach the standpoint of the people. In this process they need not only to overcome the manifold external obstacles, but also to overcome their own elite consciousness and habitual modes of thought. This is a long road — and we can see that even at the novel's close, the process has not been completed; it has barely begun:

"Murong Qiu was filled with a deep agitation. But it was precisely this agitation that reawakened the long-dormant impulse in her heart: she could not go on staying in that 'academic circle' with its odor of decay. A thought suddenly struck her: next semester she would take her graduate students to Yanhe, to Shenhuangzhou, back to that village where she had once lived and labored — to conduct a genuine fieldwork investigation."

What the author presents here is not a conclusion, but an open-ended future.

Or we might say: the realism of The Human Realm is a new realism — a realism with ideals, with a future, with poetic atmosphere.

Part Four: The Possibility of "New Socialist Literature"

Liu Jiming's exploration in The Human Realm allows us to see the possibility of "new socialist literature." Here, we refer to the Chinese literature of the 1940s through the 1970s as traditional socialist literature, and to literature produced since the new century that carries socialist intellectual elements or tendencies within the new context as "new socialist literature." In contemporary China, there are not many writers or works that can be considered "new socialist literature" — but the birth of such literature in contemporary China has its inevitability and its distinctive character.

Since the beginning of the new era, the intellectual and academic mainstream in China has adopted toward traditional socialist literature primarily a posture of skepticism, critique, and critical reflection. But since the 1990s, as China has been increasingly incorporated into the global capitalist system, and as internal disparities in wealth, between urban and rural areas, and between regions have widened, more and more intellectuals have come to recognize anew the value of socialist thought. In the literary research world, the left-wing and socialist literary tradition has received renewed scholarly attention; in the creative domain, new artistic currents such as "grassroots literature" have surged forward. Looking back at "grassroots literature," we can find that among its representative writers, the fiction of Cao Zhenglu and Liu Jiming carries to varying degrees a socialist intellectual orientation. In Cao Zhenglu's works — That Place, Neon, Asking the Vast Sky — and in Liu Jiming's Tea Egg, Between Us, Husband and Wife, and others, the authors are not merely attending to the grassroots; they are connecting to the socialist intellectual and cultural tradition, exploring the way out of social problems from the standpoint of the people at the bottom.

In The Human Realm, Liu Jiming's reflections and explorations of socialist literature in the contemporary context are expressed with the greatest concentration and clarity; we can regard him as the pioneer of "new socialist literature." Comparing traditional socialist literature with "new socialist literature," we can see that the two occupy different historical environments and cultural contexts. Traditional socialist literature was born in a socialist state during the Cold War; in the course of its development, it combined a spontaneous people's standpoint with regulation by the mainstream ideology, and was also constrained in creative method by aesthetic principles such as socialist realism. "New socialist literature" is different: after the collapse of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe in the early 1990s, the traditional socialist bloc led by the Soviet Union disintegrated, the so-called free world won without a fight, the Cold War ended, and history moved toward its termination — this was liberalism's account of history. But contrary to their expectations, China — persisting in the path of socialism with Chinese characteristics — rapidly rose; and with the attacks of September 11, 2001, and the financial crisis of 2008, capitalist countries in Europe and America also encountered their own crises. At this moment, rethinking capitalism and its world system became an important question for the scholarly community.

In China too: in the clamor for "farewell to revolution" in the 1980s, the Chinese scholarly mainstream had largely treated the experience, thought, and history of socialism as a negative asset; but from the mid-1990s onward, an increasing number of scholars came to recognize the need to re-examine and affirm the socialist experience and the path China had traveled. Although in the overall intellectual landscape of globalization, marketization, and privatization such voices were relatively faint, they allowed us to see new hope and new strength.

In this historical and cultural context, what "new socialist literature" shares with traditional socialist literature is its commitment to the people's standpoint and the socialist ideal. But its differences are as follows: (1) "New socialist literature" is literature that persists in exploring socialism in a new historical period — or more precisely, at a time when socialism is at a low ebb on the world stage. (2) "New socialist literature" does not originate from the advocacy of a mainstream ideology, but is a spontaneous, self-conscious creative tendency of writers and intellectuals. (3) "New socialist literature" has no particular creative method prescribed for it, but needs to draw lessons from and critically reflect on the theory and practice of traditional socialist literature and arts from both positive and negative angles.

On the other hand, we can also see that, relative to classic works like Three Mile Bay, A History of Entrepreneurship, and A Bright Sunny Sky, the "cooperative" in The Human Realm does not directly equate to the socialist path, and the protagonist Ma La differs considerably from "socialist new persons" like Liang Shengbao and Xiao Changchun. But if we incorporate the historical and literary experience since the beginning of the new era, we can see that the author is precisely retelling and re-examining the possibilities of socialism in a new context. And here it is possible to open up a new intellectual and cultural space: within the lineage of traditional socialist literature, "new socialist literature" can attempt richer and more pluralistic modes of inheritance, accommodating more complex and subtle experiences of life and of the age.

Of course, "new socialist literature" is only a tentative designation; it has not yet become in China an intellectual and artistic current with any real momentum. But the creative practice of Liu Jiming and Cao Zhenglu, and the appearance of The Human Realm, allow us to see the possibility of "new socialist literature." The development of any nation's literature must be built on a profound understanding of its own history and culture. The socialist practice of twentieth-century China not only completely transformed China's destiny but transformed the configuration of the entire world. The Chinese revolution can be called one of the great miracles of human history; China's reform and opening-up can equally be called one of the great miracles of human history. Only by deeply understanding socialism and its development in China can we more deeply understand our own history, and more deeply understand ourselves. In this sense, "new socialist literature" can only be written by Chinese writers, and will constitute the distinctive quality of Chinese literature.

After The Human Realm, we hope to see more "new socialist literature" appear. We also believe that "new socialist literature" will necessarily bring more vitality and energy to Chinese literature — allowing us to transcend the cultural atmosphere and configuration of consumerism, to see the footsteps of humanity exploring a way forward amid hardship and difficulty, and to see the light of reason and of ideals gleaming in the future.

(Source: Contemporary Writer Review, Issue 4, 2017)