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.