“ to Revolution” and “Revisiting Revolution”: 

Black and White and Ordinary World

Qiu Ling (Northeastern University)

Abstract. Liu Jiming’s Black and White and Lu Yao’s Ordinary World are two of the most influential realist novels in contemporary Chinese literature.[1] They share the grand ambition of “panoramic writing” and a deep concern for the fate of ordinary people, yet they diverge profoundly on core questions of historical understanding, class narrative, and the shaping of the ideal personality. Through a systematic comparison of the two works, this essay reveals their inner differences. Within the mainstream narrative framework of the reform era, Ordinary World centers on “the dignity of labor” and “rural ethics,” lending moral legitimacy to the path of “letting some get rich first.”[2] Black and White, by contrast, seeks to salvage the revolutionary legacy suppressed at the fault line of history, using “class consciousness” to rebuild a critical understanding of contemporary Chinese society. This difference marks not only the divergent intellectual positions of two generations of writers, but also the deep tension in Chinese literature as it grapples with the twin historical legacies of revolution and reform. Reading the two works side by side, the essay argues, offers a unique vantage point on the many faces of contemporary Chinese literature.

Keywords: Black and White; Ordinary World; historical narrative; class consciousness; idealism; realism

1. Introduction

1.1 The Question

On the map of contemporary Chinese literature, Lu Yao’s Ordinary World holds a place all its own. Born in the early years of reform and once coldly received by the mainstream literary establishment, the novel has drawn a passionate response from readers for decades, and has at last been acknowledged, after the fact, as a “literary classic.” In 2023, Liu Jiming’s Black and White was published by China Culture Communication Press (its English edition, Black and White, was published in the United States by Vero Publishing in 2025). This 1.2-million-character epic likewise aims at “panoramic writing that joins revolutionary history to present-day reality,” likewise centers on the rise and fall of ordinary people in a great age, and has likewise provoked wide discussion.

Set the two works side by side, and a thought-provoking question emerges. If Ordinary World is the reform era’s “manifesto of idealism,” celebrating the spirit of changing one’s fate through personal struggle in a time of change, then Black and White is more like a “re-examination” of the same historical process: it questions the costs concealed by the narrative of reform and asks what the revolutionary legacy means today. As one critic has keenly observed, “the age that produced Ordinary World was busy bidding farewell to the age of revolution, busy turning revolution into history,” whereas Black and White “closely joins the reshaping of revolutionary history with reflection on present reality.”

What is the value of this difference? This essay argues that the divergence between the two works is not a simple matter of political labels, “left” against “right,” but represents two cognitive paradigms with which contemporary Chinese literature faces the twin historical legacies of revolution and reform. Their confrontation and dialogue reveal the deep tension in Chinese intellectual life over the fundamental question of “where we have come from, and where we are going.” A systematic comparison of the two works not only helps us understand the intellectual landscape of contemporary literary creation, but also offers a distinctive way into the transformations of contemporary Chinese literature.

1.2 The State of Research and the Approach of This Essay

Scholarship on Ordinary World is already extensive, covering its narratives of city and countryside, its youthful coming of age, its realist tradition, and its dialogue with Liu Qing’s The Builders. Existing commentary on Black and White has mostly focused on its theme of “the descendants of revolutionaries and the revolutionary legacy,” and on its intellectual progression from Liu Jiming’s earlier novel The Human Realm. The Human Realm has been described as “carrying on the realist tradition since Lu Yao.” Yet when Liu Jiming has spoken of the relationship between Black and White and Ordinary World, he has shown a cautious reserve, saying that a simple comparison between the two “is not entirely appropriate,” because Ordinary World “conforms to the mainstream values since the reform and opening.” This ambivalence itself shows that between the two there is inheritance, and still more, rupture.

This essay compares the two works along four dimensions (historical narrative, class discourse, the ideal personality, and the function of literature), analyzes the intellectual logic behind their differences, and considers what this tension teaches us about contemporary Chinese literature.

2. Historical Narrative: Rupture or Continuity

2.1 Ordinary World: “Legitimate Succession” within the Narrative of Reform

The historical narrative of Ordinary World turns on the axis of “reform.” The novel runs from 1975 to 1985, precisely the crucial decade in which contemporary China moved from the last years of the Cultural Revolution to the full advance of reform and opening. Lu Yao’s narrative focus is on a kind of “continuity within rupture”: the old collective system is discarded and the new responsibility system brings new life,[3] but the legitimacy of change comes not from a total repudiation of history, but from answering the simple wish that “the people should live good lives.”

An important character in the novel, Hei Bai, an old writer, is regarded by many scholars as modeled on Liu Qing.[4] His lifelong work, the novel The Sun at High Noon, passionately celebrates the people’s commune movement, but in the tide of reform he discovers that “the things he poured his whole life’s heart into praising have suddenly been repudiated completely.” Lu Yao has Tian Fujun console Hei Bai: his writing was a sincere song of praise, but it had, after all, the limitations of its time. This narrative strategy is worth pondering. It acknowledges the sincerity of the idealism of the revolutionary years while affirming that the arrival of reform was a historical necessity.

The historical outlook of Ordinary World thus has the character of “succession”: it does not stand on the ruins of revolution and mock it, but places revolution in “the past,” completing a dignified farewell to history in the name of “the limitations of the time.” This treatment gives the work a gentle historical wisdom: it does not repudiate the previous age, but embraces the new one more warmly. One scholar has pointed out that in his narrative of reform Lu Yao “revives traditional value norms,” such as Sun Shao’an’s “sense of fellow-villagers” and “ethics of human feeling,” which “to a certain extent carry on the basic demand of the revolutionary years for common prosperity, starting from collective forms.” This means that Lu Yao does not truly abandon the ideal of “common prosperity,” but changes the path to it from “collectivization” to the reform logic of “the first to get rich bringing the rest along.”

2.2 Black and White: “Revisiting Revolution” in the Shadow of Reform

Unlike the narrative of continuity in Ordinary World, the historical vision of Black and White is sensitive to “rupture” from the start. The novel’s span of time far exceeds that of Ordinary World, stretching from the years of revolutionary war into the early twenty-first century, and its narrative drive is not “succession” but “re-examination.” Have the values that the narrative of reform declared obsolete as a matter of course (the collective, class, revolutionary ideals) really lost their meaning? Has the new order that rose in reform (capital, power, consumerism) really brought about “the end of history”?

The critic Zhang Yongfeng has pointed out that Black and White is “a panoramic writing that joins revolutionary history to present-day reality,” and that its distinctiveness lies precisely in the fact that it “cannot, like Ordinary World, devote itself to creating a rupture between revolutionary history and present reality.” This judgment goes to the heart of the matter. If Ordinary World embraces reform in the posture of “farewell to revolution,” then Black and White questions the unfinished business of reform in the posture of “revisiting revolution.”

The novel’s design of a group portrait of “the descendants of revolutionaries” is itself a strategy of historical narrative. Five kinds of revolutionary descendants, from Hong Taihang, “the representative of crony capitalism” who betrays the revolutionary legacy, to Chen Yimeng, who carries on the revolutionary family tradition, to Wang Sheng, who comes to identify anew with the revolutionary tradition in the face of present reality, together form a complex picture of how the revolutionary legacy is divided, contested, betrayed, or reborn. This is no longer a linear, progressive view of history, but one full of fissures, conflicts, and incompleteness.

2.3 “Farewell to Revolution” and “Revisiting Revolution”: A Dialogue between Two Historical Attitudes

In the end, the divergence between the two views of history comes down to different understandings of the relationship between reform and revolution. Ordinary World sees reform as a correction of the “leftist errors” of the revolutionary age, a process of “setting things right.” Black and White asks: who bears the costs of reform? Who gains from it? In what sense has the “liberation” promised by the revolution been fulfilled, and in what sense betrayed?

This also explains why Black and White, though regarded as “carrying on Lu Yao’s realist tradition,” parts ways with Ordinary World in its fundamental attitude toward history: it is not content to be the “witness” of its age, but means to be its “judge.”

3. Class Discourse: Implicit Ethics and Explicit Politics

3.1 Ordinary World: The Ethicization of Class

The treatment of class in Ordinary World embodies a typical feature of literary narrative in the early reform period: the transformation of class discourse from a “category of political analysis” into a “category of ethics and morality.”

In the novel, the tragic love between Sun Shao’an and Tian Runye is the classic scene in which the question of class is handled. Runye’s father, Tian Futang, opposes his daughter’s union with Shao’an, a “mud-legged” peasant, and this certainly involves a “class gulf,” the difference between a cadre’s family and a peasant’s. But Lu Yao’s narrative focus is not on revealing the structural causes of this gulf. It is on presenting Shao’an’s “voluntary withdrawal”: with an almost self-sacrificing ethical gesture, he chooses to give up Runye and accept Xiulian, thereby avoiding a greater conflict between the two families. In this narrative, the question of class is transformed into a question of personal moral choice: not “how society ought to be,” but “how I ought to conduct myself.”

The same logic appears in Sun Shaoping’s coming of age. Between Shaoping’s “black” in the coal mine and Xiaoxia’s “white” there arises a spiritual dialogue that transcends class. One reader has summed up the relationship in the images of “white dust” and “black dust”: “She is the ‘white dust’ standing in the sunlight; he is the ‘black dust’ sunk into the heart of the earth. Yet their souls meet as equals under the dome of the spirit.” This “equality of souls” is premised precisely on stripping class of its political meaning: it appeals to universal human nature, spiritual aspiration, and the power of love, not to changing the structures of inequality.

Scholars have noted that Lu Yao explains Sun Shao’an’s expansion of his brickworks and his leading of fellow villagers to prosperity in terms of “human feeling” and “a sense of fellow-villagers,” not “class consciousness.” This gives Ordinary World an ethical appeal that transcends ideology, but it also makes “class,” as an analytical concept, recede from the work.

3.2 Black and White: The Return of Class Politics

In contrast to the ethicizing path of Ordinary World, Black and White restores “class” as the principal tool for analyzing contemporary Chinese society. The novel’s political critique springs precisely from this return: it is no longer content to ask “how an individual can become a good person,” but asks “what kind of social structure produces injustice.”

In the novel, Hong Taihang, who joins Bai Wen, the son of a Nationalist secret-service chief, in pursuit of profit, “symbolizes the betrayal and destruction of the revolutionary legacy.” This setup is itself a piece of class analysis: what it reveals is not an individual’s moral corruption, but the structural phenomenon of an alliance between power and capital. From the “Trojan Horse Plan” to the “New Marshall Plan,” the novel uncovers, in historical depth, a disturbing continuity: the victory of the revolution did not eliminate the class enemy; the enemy lies hidden, in new forms, within the revolutionaries’ own ranks.

This narrative logic stands in sharp contrast to Ordinary World. In Lu Yao’s hands, reform is the drama of “dividing the land among households and growing rich through hard work”; in Liu Jiming’s, reform may at the same time be the tragedy of “capital infiltration and the rent-seeking of power.” Both narratives rest on observation of reality, but the first attributes what it observes to individual struggle and choice, the second to deeper structural forces.

3.3 The Literary Fates of Two Class Discourses

The retreat of class discourse in Ordinary World and its return in Black and White trace an intellectual thread running through forty years of Chinese literature. In the 1980s, with the rise of the discourse of “humanism,” class discourse came to be seen as “mechanistic” and “dogmatic,” and was set aside. In the twenty-first century, as the gap between rich and poor has widened and social contradictions have sharpened, class discourse has re-entered the literary field of vision in new forms.

The distinctiveness of Black and White is that it does not simply return to the class discourse of the years before the 1980s, but tries to rebuild the validity of class analysis. The attempt is full of risk: it may be criticized as “radical” or “nostalgic,” or fall into “glorifying” the revolutionary age. But precisely this risk constitutes an intellectual stance: a refusal to keep silent before the consensus of “farewell to revolution.”

4. The Ideal Personality: Laborer, Revolutionary, and “New Man”

4.1 Sun Shaoping and Sun Shao’an: The “Labor Heroes” of Reform

Ordinary World shapes two models of the ideal personality. Sun Shao’an is a “doer” rooted in the soil: from a poor peasant he grows into the owner of a brickworks, changing his own and his family’s fate through personal struggle, while never forgetting to lead his fellow villagers toward common prosperity. He represents an idealism rooted in “rural ethics”: hardworking, dutiful, responsible, grateful. One scholar has pointed out that Lu Yao “abruptly turns” Sun Shao’an’s expanded reproduction “for profit” back into “pooling funds to build an enterprise ‘for common prosperity,’” and that the driving force of this turn is not “collectivism” or “class consciousness,” but “a simple sense of fellow-villagers.”

Sun Shaoping represents the “spiritual laborer.” He toils in the mine, yet always looks up at the stars; he is buried by the “black dust” of fate, yet guards the “white dust” of the spirit. His love for Tian Xiaoxia is a symbol of spiritual equality: two people of very different standing meet at the height of the soul. Readers have described his relationship with Xiaoxia as “idealism’s most magnificent charge against the walls of reality.”

Different in form, the two personalities share one core quality: guarding one’s dignity in an imperfect world. They do not try to change the world fundamentally, but fulfill themselves within the given conditions. This idealism turns “inward”: it points toward personal cultivation, spiritual elevation, and moral integrity, not toward social change.

4.2 Wang Sheng: “Son of the People” and “Heir to the Revolution”

The ideal personality of Black and White presents an entirely different face. Critics have described Liu Jiming’s ideal characters as “sons of the people”: though intellectuals or the descendants of revolutionaries, they consciously bind their own fate to that of the masses at the bottom of society.

Of the novel’s five kinds of revolutionary descendants, two carry its ideals: first, “Chen Yimeng, the child of a senior cadre, who carries on the fine revolutionary family tradition and follows the mass line”; second, “Wang Sheng, the son of a war hero, who comes to identify anew with the revolutionary tradition.” Wang Sheng’s figure is especially symbolic. He is no born revolutionary; it is only after “going through hardship and a transformation of thought” that he rediscovers, in present-day reality, the contemporary value of the revolutionary tradition. This “transformation” is in essence an “awakening of class consciousness”: breaking free of the individualist logic of survival to identify with a collective, historical cause.

Unlike Sun Shaoping and his like, the ideal personalities of Black and White are not content with “perfecting oneself in private”; their compass points toward “benefiting all under heaven,” not through charity, but through changing the structure itself. This idealism turns “outward”: it demands intervening in the world and changing it, not merely guarding one’s inner self.

4.3 Two Idealisms in Dialogue and Tension

Setting Sun Shaoping beside Wang Sheng shows clearly the division between two idealisms. Sun Shaoping’s idealism is individual and spiritual: he keeps up his habit of reading amid suffering and stays sensitive to beauty down in the mine, and this “holding fast” is itself the whole of his meaning. Wang Sheng’s idealism is historical and political: his meaning lies not in personal cultivation, but in carrying on the revolutionary tradition and criticizing present injustice.

Critics have noted that Ordinary World voices, through Hei Bai, the pain of a revolutionary cause repudiated, but that this pain is in the end soothed by the reform narrative of “the progress of the times.” In Black and White, this pain is pushed deeper: it is no longer merely a personal regret, but a questioning of historical justice itself.

Ordinary World asks: in an age of change, how can the individual keep dignity and goodness? Black and White asks: in an age of change, who will seek justice for the ideals and the people that were sacrificed?

5. The Function of Literature: Testimony, Consolation, and Historical Judgment

5.1 Ordinary World: Literature as “Consolation”

Ordinary World has gone on moving readers in large part because it offers a distinctive “literary consolation.” In Sun Shaoping and Sun Shao’an, readers see themselves: the struggle in adversity, the defense of dignity, the longing for a better life. The novel tells its readers: even stuck in the mire, one can look up at the stars; even if ordinary, one need not be mediocre.

This function of consolation rests on a premise: it accepts the basic framework of the real world, and does not ask “whether this world is just,” but teaches the individual “how to live decently in the world as it is.” This is exactly why it struck such a wide chord in the reform era: in a humane and warm way, it provided an emotional outlet for the pains of reform.

In an interview, Liu Jiming has expressed dissatisfaction with literature’s tendency to “write downward,” saying that “showing the good and the beautiful in human nature, honoring the sublime, and continuing Lu Yao’s path remain literature’s most important mission.” This shows that he identifies with the moral idealism of Ordinary World, but selectively: he inherits Lu Yao’s pursuit of “the sublime,” while rejecting Lu Yao’s wholesale acceptance of the narrative of reform.

5.2 Black and White: Literature as “Testimony”

In his afterword to Black and White, Liu Jiming proposes that the novel is “testimony to its time.” This judgment reveals the fundamental difference between Black and White and Ordinary World in their views of literature’s function.

“Testimony” means witnessing, bearing witness, even passing judgment. It demands that literature not only record its age, but pass judgment on it; not only present the joys and sorrows of individuals, but ask what structural causes lie behind them. This makes the literary stance of Black and White “heavier”: it offers no easy consolation, but keeps exposing fissures and asking about justice. One critic has pointed out that the way Black and White is written “is new and distinctive,” because it “gathers typical figures from every stratum of society, from the halls of power at the center down to the grassroots,” an ambition far exceeding Ordinary World’s focus on rural youth.

Of course, “testimony” implies a literary self-awareness: the author is not only the teller of the story but a witness to history. In this sense, Black and White carries on the tradition of nineteenth-century critical realism, while keeping its distance from the “humanist warmth” that has been the mainstream of Chinese literature since the 1980s.

5.3 The Merits and Limits of Two Views of Literature

Each view of literature has its merits and its limits. The “consolation” model of Ordinary World answers ordinary readers’ longing for “the meaning of life”: in an age of plural values and rapid change, it provides a stable ethical coordinate. Its limit is that when consolation replaces critique, literature may become a whitewash of reality.

The “testimony” model of Black and White keeps literature’s critical edge, but faces difficulties of its own: when the critical stance is too pronounced, the shaping of characters may seem driven by ideas, and their complexity may be simplified by political position. Critics have noted that the novel’s division of revolutionary descendants into five types itself has a strongly typological cast, in contrast to the exploration of moral complexity in characters such as Sun Shaoping and Sun Shao’an in Ordinary World.

The coexistence and confrontation of these two views of literature is precisely a source of vitality in contemporary Chinese literature. Each answers one side of its age, one the hunger for meaning, the other the demand for justice; and true wisdom may lie in listening to both voices at once.

6. Conclusion

Through a systematic comparison of Black and White and Ordinary World, this essay has revealed the deep differences between the two works in four dimensions: historical narrative, class discourse, the ideal personality, and the function of literature. Ordinary World, framed by the “narrative of reform,” with “the dignity of labor” and “rural ethics” as its core values, offered warm spiritual consolation to an age of change. Black and White, in the posture of “revisiting revolution” and with “class consciousness” as its analytical tool, puts sharp questions to reform.

The division between the two works is not merely a difference of individual style, but two ways in which contemporary Chinese literature responds to the twin historical legacies of revolution and reform. If Ordinary World represents the 1980s’ mainstream narrative of “farewell to revolution” (it does not repudiate the revolutionary years, but embraces the “progress” of reform more warmly), then Black and White represents the twenty-first century’s reflection on that “farewell”: can revolution really be bidden farewell, once and for all? Do the values declared “obsolete” truly no longer have any present meaning?

This tension is itself a true portrait of the spiritual life of contemporary China. In an age of ever more plural values, when consensus is hard to reach, the value of literature may lie not in offering a single answer, but in allowing different voices to be heard and different questions to be asked. In this sense, the dialogue between Black and White and Ordinary World is not only a literary dialogue but a dialogue of the age, and it is far from over, nor should it ever be.

Translator’s notes

[1] Lu Yao (1949–1992) wrote Ordinary World (平凡的世界, 3 vols., 1986–1988), which won the Mao Dun Literature Prize in 1991 and remains one of the most widely read novels in China. It follows the brothers Sun Shao’an and Sun Shaoping in a village in northern Shaanxi from 1975 to 1985.

[2] “Let some people get rich first” was one of Deng Xiaoping’s signature slogans of the reform era.

[3] The “household responsibility system” (家庭联产承包责任制), introduced from 1978 onward, replaced collective farming with the contracting of land to individual households.

[4] Hei Bai (黑白), the old writer in Ordinary World, is not to be confused with Liu Jiming’s novel Black and White (黑与白), though the characters of the name are the same. The scholar sees him as modeled on Liu Qing, author of The Builders (创业史).