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)