From Writer to “Guerrilla”

Zhou Ziheng · Posted on the WeChat account Forever the Red Streamer, May 31, 2026

On the map of contemporary Chinese left-wing culture, Liu Jiming is a figure all his own. He is at once a writer and an editor, a thinker and an organizer. From the avant-garde writing of the 1990s, to the narratives of the “bottom layer” of society in the new century, to his turn in recent years to “Marxism-Leninism-Maoism,” his intellectual path has run clearly and steadily to the left. And one important thread running through that path is his persistent effort to build positions for left-wing culture: from founding the magazine Tianxia with money he raised himself, to founding and editing the Zhongliu Series, to running writing workshops and operating his own media, Liu Jiming has tried, by means of “guerrilla warfare,” to open up room to survive for marginalized left-wing voices. This process is at once a breakout attempt by left-wing culture in a “post-revolutionary” age and the transformation of an intellectual from “writer” into “fighter.”

1. The Tianxia Years: An Idealistic Experiment in “Going Beyond Left and Right”

In 2011, with funds he raised himself, Liu Jiming founded the magazine Tianxia (All Under Heaven). According to press reports at the time, it was hailed with the phrase: “In the north there is Dushu, in the south there is Tianya, and in the center there is Tianxia.”[1] The positioning itself reveals Liu Jiming’s ambition: he hoped to build a forum that could stand on equal footing with those two strongholds of ideas and culture in Beijing and Hainan.

The makeup of Tianxia’s contributors was distinctive. Its writers included leftists such as Wang Hui, Huang Jisu, and Kong Qingdong, and also figures of the right such as Xiao Gongqin, Qin Hui, and Xu Jilin.[2] This arrangement of “left and right governing together” embodied the idea Liu Jiming held at the time, “going beyond left and right to rebuild consensus”: in an age when the intellectual world was splitting ever more deeply, he tried to build a platform for pluralistic dialogue.

This idea fitted the stage his own writing had reached. Before the publication of The Human Realm, Liu Jiming was in transition from “cultural concern” to “narratives of the bottom layer.” Though he had already turned left, he still kept an open attitude toward “multiple perspectives.” The attempt to found Tianxia was more like a left-wing intellectual’s effort to realize the ideal of a “public forum”: he hoped that a platform led by the left could make room for dialogue between different positions.

This idealistic experiment, however, lasted less than two years before the magazine ceased publication. The reasons were partly external, such as money, but they also reflected the predicament of “going beyond left and right” itself: as the left and right camps grew ever more polarized, the room for a “middle ground” shrank drastically. There was an episode along the way. In 2012, when Tianxia was on the brink of closing for lack of funds, the US-based scholar Li Tuo put Liu Jiming in touch with Wang Hui, the Tsinghua University professor known as the leader of the New Left and director of its Institute for Advanced Study in Humanities and Social Sciences,[3] and Liu traveled to Beijing specially to discuss running the magazine jointly. They had already reached agreement on cooperating when the publication number shared with a magazine in Guangxi was withdrawn, and a chance that might have brought Tianxia back to life came to nothing halfway.

The closing of Tianxia was an important “disenchantment” for Liu Jiming: at a time when “the literary world had degenerated into a sordid fair of fame and gain, even into part of an ‘iron triangle,’” trying to build “bridges” inside the system or on its edges was futile. This understanding laid the ground for the more radical “guerrilla warfare” that followed.

2. The Break: From Writer to “Guerrilla”

The year 2017 was the turning point in Liu Jiming’s thinking. That year he publicly reported online that Chen Yingsong, vice-chair of the Hubei Writers Association and head of its Literature Institute, was suspected of violating Party discipline, which led to a defamation suit with Fang Fang and Chen Yingsong.[4] The case ended with Liu Jiming losing. But for him, the meaning of the affair went far beyond winning or losing in court. He later wrote in “To You”: “When the literary world had degenerated into a sordid fair of fame and gain, even into part of an ‘iron triangle,’ I resolutely hurled the javelin in my hand. From that moment I was no longer merely a writer, but a fighter, or a guerrilla.”

The metaphor of the “guerrilla” came first from a piece by Zhang Chengzhi about Che Guevara.[5] It meant giving up the illusion of winning a voice inside the system, and turning instead to flexible, marginal, non-institutional ways of fighting. The change showed itself on several levels.

In his channels of communication, he no longer pinned his hopes on “those paper magazines inside the system,” but “mainly on the internet, as the main platform for publishing my work and related information; not only a platform, but a position, a trench.” He opened a Weibo account and a personal WeChat account, and spread his ideas through his Random Thoughts, a series of essays in the Weibo form, using “fragmentary, popular, and highly interactive forms” to lower the threshold for left-wing ideas.

In his place in the institutions, he broke openly with the mainstream literary world. In 2019, after he received an intra-Party warning for “improper exercise of the right to report,” he left Wuhan for Britain, shut himself away to write Black and White, and began a “period of intellectual self-exile and reconstruction.” In this period he was no longer vice-chair of the Hubei Writers Association. Though he still held his rank as a senior professional writer (grade two of the full-professor rank), in the stance of his writing he had already become an independent intellectual “outside the system.”

In his inner identity, he completed his transformation from “left-wing writer” to “Marxist-Leninist-Maoist.” The Russia-Ukraine war was the “key catalyst,” which led him to “shake off entirely the influence of ‘pure literature’ and write explicitly from a proletarian standpoint.” He began a systematic critique of the “nationalist left,” which he held “obscured class essence,” and set about “rebuilding communist faith.”

This series of changes formed a “transition zone” between Tianxia and the Zhongliu Series. In the Tianxia period he was still seeking dialogue with the system and with the liberals; after the break, he was ready to “face the pack of wolves alone.” But how far can a lone, unsupported “guerrilla” go?

3. The Zhongliu Series: Carrying On a Tradition, Rebuilding a Position

In August 2020, the Zhongliu Series, a substantial journal of thought and the humanities, published its first issue. The timing is telling. Because of the pandemic, Liu Jiming was stranded in Britain, saying publicly that he was “writing in seclusion on an island far from Wuhan”; his lawsuit with Fang Fang and Chen Yingsong had only recently been settled; he had just finished the first part of Black and White; and it was the crucial period of his turn to the left.

The very name of the Zhongliu Series was a manifesto. Zhongliu (Midstream) was the name of the magazine Wei Wei founded in 1990, and before he died Wei Wei left the words “Continue the revolution; never surrender.”[6] By taking up the name, Liu Jiming plainly meant to carry on the tradition of the “old left” that Wei Wei represented, the tradition that held fast to the belief in “continuing the revolution” after the revolutionary tide had ebbed.

Unlike Tianxia’s “going beyond left and right,” the Zhongliu Series nailed its colors to the mast: “Marxism-Leninism-Maoism as its fundamental aim.” The schools its founding statement promised to embrace included “traditional Marxism, young Marxism, the Maoist left, the liberal left, statism, nationalism, democratic socialism, Trotskyism, and others.” This vision of a “left-wing united front” differed in essence from Tianxia’s “dialogue between left and right”: it no longer sought dialogue with the liberals, but tried to build a platform for pluralistic dialogue within the left.

The two special sections of the first issue, “In Memory of Wei Wei” and “Back to Marx,” marked out the journal’s spiritual coordinates clearly. “In Memory of Wei Wei” paid tribute to the left-wing tradition and carried it forward; “Back to Marx” reaffirmed its theoretical foundations. The list of contributors to the first issue could fairly be called glittering: a posthumous work by Wei Wei, Samir Amin, Wang Hui, Zhang Chengzhi, Li Tuo, Cao Zhenglu, and Liu Jiming himself.[7] Zhang Chengzhi’s verdict was brief and to the point: “One more position. Wonderful!”

The word “position” appears again. From Tianxia to the Zhongliu Series, from “platform” to “position,” the change of vocabulary reflects Liu Jiming’s new understanding of the nature of left-wing cultural work: it was no longer a neutral “marketplace of ideas,” but a “front line of struggle” with a clear stance.

Although the Zhongliu Series published only four issues before it was ordered to close, and Liu Jiming received a second Party disciplinary sanction for it, the journal meant a great deal to him. It was with the Zhongliu Series that his influence broke out of the literary world in which it had been confined, and he became a left-wing public intellectual with a clear political stance, no longer merely a writer inside the system; in his own words, he became a Marxist-Leninist-Maoist.

4. From Position to “Lifeblood”: Writing Workshops and the Training of Red Writers

A position needs people to hold it; ideas need people to pass them on. If the Zhongliu Series was the cultural “fortress” Liu Jiming built, the writing workshops were the cultural “military academy” he founded.

Almost at the very moment Liu Jiming’s enemies were congratulating one another on his second sanction, Black and White was published, by a non-mainstream route. Soon afterward Liu Jiming founded and led a writing workshop, with the explicit aim of training “red writers.” At the opening of the third workshop, he set out his idea: “The students in our workshop should first of all be believers in Marxism, willing to use their writing to serve the proletariat and serve socialism, and not to make a name for themselves.”

He put forward his well-known “three passes of writing,” the pass of feeling, the pass of standpoint, and the pass of language, and asked his students “to unite these ‘three passes’ organically on the Marxist standpoint, and become true red writers who stand up for the proletariat and speak for the working people.” This systematic training stands in sharp contrast to conventional literary education: it no longer pursues professional standards such as “literariness” or “artistry,” but defines writing clearly as a form of “struggle”: “every writer worthy of the name of red writer is a fighter.” This means that Liu Jiming is not only fighting with his own pen to rebuild faith, but consciously training successors, turning his personal left-wing practice into an organized and sustainable cultural movement.

At the same time, he has been actively exploring new forms of writing and new channels of communication. His Random Thoughts series of Weibo-style essays, “short and pithy, in plain and stirring language, turns complex left-wing theory into texts readable in everyday life,” and has had considerable influence among young people. One commentator has argued that this writing, “through fragmentary, popular, and highly interactive forms, has markedly reshaped the paths and effects by which left-wing ideas spread.” In Liu Jiming’s own words, it is “writing in an entirely new sense,” in which “the manner of writing and the medium of communication” have “changed substantially” from traditional literary production.

5. Breaking Out and Its Predicaments: The Fate of Left-Wing Cultural Positions Today

From Tianxia to the Zhongliu Series, and on to the writing workshops and the cluster of self-run media, Liu Jiming’s building of left-wing cultural positions has gone through a clear process of “breaking out of the circle”:

In its carriers, it has moved from an elite magazine (Tianxia) to a popular journal (the Zhongliu Series), and on to online essays and social media; the threshold has kept falling and the audience has kept widening, a clear pattern of breaking out.

In its intellectual stance, it has moved from the liberal left of “going beyond left and right” to “Marxism-Leninism-Maoism,” the stance ever clearer and ever more combative.

In its form of practice, it has moved from individual editorial work to organized writing workshops; left-wing cultural production is evolving from “guerrilla bands” into a “regular army.”

Yet whether in breaking his personal influence out of its circle or breaking his cultural positions out of theirs, Liu Jiming has had to face new predicaments. First is suppression by the system. The new work into which he poured enormous effort is banned at home and can circulate only “in electronic form and the like.” In April 2025, Black and White was published in the United States (a foreign outlet called it “a literary expedition of testimony to time”), and it began to enter the international field of vision. As Liu Jiming wrote in his afterword to the English edition: “Its circulation in the English-speaking world not only releases a literary work from a formatted space, but also means that a steadfast commitment to a plain class justice and humanist spirit can still win respect.” Even so, the novel’s reach remains essentially cut off from the mainstream domestic cultural market; it can only be passed “quietly from hand to hand” among ordinary people, through reading groups and other forms of private reading. But as Kong Qingdong has said, the novel is not only a major achievement of contemporary Chinese literature but “far surpasses most Nobel Prize-winning works in its excavation of history,” and the history of its publication, its reading, and its circulation forms a unique history of its own: a history of resistance, of breaking out through the cracks in mainstream culture.

Second is the “echo chamber” effect among its audience. Most readers of left-wing cultural positions are “our own people”; the ideas circulate mostly within the same bubble and find it hard to reach the wider public. Liu Jiming admits frankly in “To You” that his supporters may be “a tiny ‘handful of people,’” or may be “a huge group of astonishing size.” This uncertainty reflects the awkward position of left-wing culture in Chinese society today.

Last is the continuing high pressure from the system. Faced with suppression in the form of closed accounts, silencing, and Party disciplinary sanctions, Liu Jiming wrote in Random Thoughts: “Nothing but death can break me.” “For a writer who believes in communism, the right to express his thoughts is above everything; holding fast to one’s faith matters more than life itself.” This tragic, heroic declaration is at once a reply to power and a hint at how harsh the conditions of his existence are.

Conclusion: The Meaning and the Limits of a Position

From Tianxia to the Zhongliu Series and on to the program for training “red writers,” Liu Jiming’s persistent building of left-wing cultural positions makes up a distinctive and important chapter in the landscape of contemporary Chinese left-wing culture. It shows how, in an age of “farewell to revolution,” an intellectual has carried on the literary tradition of the League of Left-Wing Writers of the 1930s, led by Lu Xun,[8] and, by building cultural positions through magazines and books, has passed on the torch of progressive thought along a winding and even tragic road.

In a sense, Liu Jiming has taken a road much like Zhang Chengzhi’s. In his essay “The Seventy-Year-Old Sent-Down Youth, or the Rhetoric of the People,” he wrote that Zhang Chengzhi “gave up his post and salary and parted ways with the mainstream literary world at the very height of his reputation as a writer,” while his own choice “came too late, and had something of being ‘driven to join the rebels on Mount Liang.’”[9] Compared with Zhang Chengzhi’s lone-ranger “personal spiritual pilgrimage,” Liu Jiming lays more stress on building organized positions. From magazines to writing workshops, he has tried to turn left-wing cultural production from “individual action” into a “collective cause.”

Yet the meaning of a position and its limits are equally plain. It can give shelter to talent from the bottom and the margins; it can keep the left-wing intellectual tradition unbroken; it can open an alternative space outside the “mainstream.” But whether it can truly change the structure of power and reach the broader public remains a hard question. And all the while he must be ready to face the dirty water and the open spears and hidden arrows that power and his enemies keep hurling at him.

At the end of “To You,” Liu Jiming wrote: “I have spoken, I have acted, I have saved my own soul.”[10] These words reveal the deeper motive of his writing and of his building of cultural positions: what matters is not victory, but the very act of rowing on “on a rising sea.” As he says in his long 2021 essay “A Brief History of Ideas: The Metamorphosis of an Era (2001–2021)”: “The goals the left is striving for remain far out of reach, but their meaning lies in existence itself. Struggle may not change reality in the short term, but it can keep society from being captured entirely by capitalist groups and driven to extremes, and so win more time and space for the proletariat to grow and gather strength.”

In this sense, the very process of building left-wing cultural positions is itself a form of resistance: resistance to forgetting, resistance to assimilation, resistance to the narrative of the end of history and to a unipolar social order.

Notes

[1] Dushu (Reading), published in Beijing since 1979, and Tianya (Frontiers), published in Haikou, Hainan, were the two most influential journals of ideas in China in the 1990s and 2000s.

[2] Wang Hui, the historian Huang Jisu, and Kong Qingdong are prominent figures of the Chinese left; the political scientist Xiao Gongqin and the historians Qin Hui and Xu Jilin are leading liberal or conservative-liberal voices.

[3] Li Tuo (b. 1939), writer and critic, long resident in the United States. Wang Hui (b. 1959), intellectual historian at Tsinghua University, is widely regarded as the leading figure of China’s “New Left.”

[4] Fang Fang, novelist and former chair of the Hubei Writers Association, later known worldwide for her Wuhan Diary (2020). Chen Yingsong is a Hubei novelist.

[5] Zhang Chengzhi (b. 1948), novelist and essayist, coined the term “Red Guards” in 1966 and later broke with the literary establishment to write as an independent.

[6] Wei Wei (1920–2008), author of the Korean War reportage “Who Are the Most Beloved People?” Zhongliu (1990–2001) was the leading journal of the old Maoist left in the 1990s.

[7] Samir Amin (1931–2018), the Egyptian-French Marxist economist and theorist of world-systems and “delinking.” Cao Zhenglu (b. 1949) is a novelist known for his fiction about laid-off state-enterprise workers.

[8] The League of Left-Wing Writers was founded in Shanghai in 1930 with Lu Xun as its leading figure.

[9] “Driven to join the rebels on Mount Liang” (逼上梁山), from the classic novel Water Margin: to be forced into rebellion by persecution.

[10] An echo of Marx’s closing words in the Critique of the Gotha Programme (1875): Dixi et salvavi animam meam, “I have spoken and saved my soul.”