Who Liu jiming is

A Comparative Analysis of Liu Jiming’s 2010 Hubei University Lecture and His Positions Today

By Tumen
Bohuozhe, Debate Forum, October 22, 2026

Liu Jiming’s 2010 lecture at Hubei University’s Sirui Forum, “‘De-Lu Xun-ization’ and China’s Intellectual and Cultural Crisis” (https://bohuozhe.pages.dev/a/forum-90011), is the text through which many people first became aware of his “turn to the left.”[1] Many assume that the Liu Jiming of today is “still the same Liu Jiming,” only “bolder in speaking out.” But a careful comparison of his essays, interviews, and practical work over the past decade and more tells a different story. His spiritual core shows real continuity, yet his theoretical coordinates, his vision of struggle, and his understanding of the intellectual’s place have all gone through a crucial “iteration.” This was not a simple about-face. It was a long road of steady digging, one that kept pushing his questions to deeper ground.

A note on method: what follows is a comparative reading of his published texts. It is an analysis at the level of ideas and literature, not a final verdict on matters of fact. In 2010 he was a “New Left writer.” Today he has become a “people’s writer” and a “proletarian intellectual” who holds firmly to a Marxist-Leninist-Maoist position. This change follows a clearly traceable path.

I. The Constant Ground: A Line of Inquiry That Never Wavered

Let us begin with what has stayed the same, so as not to overstate any “rupture”:

• He has always been alert to the infiltration of neoliberalism into culture, education, and literature.

• He has always taken Lu Xun as his most important spiritual reference point, defending Lu Xun’s fighting spirit: sympathy for the insulted and the injured, and criticism that never stops.

• He has always opposed the deification of market logic, and has remained wary of the way capital has devoured spiritual life since the 1990s.

• He has always insisted that literature must not retreat into the sealed ivory tower of “pure literature,” but must answer to the suffering of its time.

None of these starting points from the 2010 lecture has been overturned by Liu himself. What has been completely renewed is the “toolbox” he uses to diagnose the disease and point to a way out.

II. Five Major Changes (2010 → Today)

Change 1: Theoretical resources. From a Western Marxism centered on Gramsci to a framework built on Mao Zedong’s thought on literature and art.

The 2010 Hubei University lecture: His central analytical tool was Gramsci’s concept of “cultural hegemony.” He read “de-Lu Xun-ization” as a battle in which neoliberal elites were fighting for cultural leadership. His Marxism was largely of the academic New Left variety, with cultural critique coming first: he spoke of ideology, of discursive struggle, of the hidden taming at work in education. But he seldom drew systematically on the Talks at the Yan’an Forum on Literature and Art,[2] and rarely made class struggle, the people as historical subject, or continuing revolution his overall framework. He did read Mao at the time, but treated him mainly as a great historical symbol of the twentieth century, not as a complete method for dissecting the present.

In short: back then, he was “looking at Lu Xun through Gramsci’s eyes.”

Liu Jiming today: He still mentions Gramsci, but Gramsci has moved to the background. At center stage now are Mao Zedong’s view of history, the Yan’an path in literature and art, the mass line in historiography, and the concern with combating and preventing revisionism. He repeatedly stresses the remolding of intellectuals, and insists that working people are the subjects of history, not “material” to be gazed at. He has re-evaluated Liu Qing and his novel The Builders, as well as Chen Yingzhen,[3] and has explained again and again “why Lu Xun cannot be treated merely as a great man of letters, but must be placed within the lineage of the people’s revolution.” He states clearly that “cultural critique” alone is far from enough. If the left avoids the economic base, the relations of production, and the reproduction of class, it easily turns into “sophisticated griping.”

Now it is: “rereading Lu Xun from the ground of the people’s revolutionary tradition.”

Change 2: His view of the system. From “there is still room to maneuver inside” to “no longer expecting the literary establishment to reform itself.”

The 2010 lecture: He criticized cultural trends and many mainstream intellectual elites, but still assumed that the existing literary and cultural institutions contained room for struggle. When the lecture mentioned the Wang Hui affair,[4] his reasoning ran: “There are still upright scholars, there are still positions to hold. We must keep debating and keep contending for discursive power.” As a vice-chairman of the provincial Writers’ Association at the time, he still believed it was possible, from within this establishment, to halt the further spread of “de-Lu Xun-ization” through essays, lectures, and dialogue. His stance was that of a “critic and voice of warning within the system,” hoping the system would “return to a better version of itself.” At that point, he had not yet imagined “deliberately cutting off every institutional channel.”

Liu Jiming today: After the storm of 2018[5] and a string of hard experiences, his judgment has changed completely. He believes the mainstream literary world has been thoroughly tamed by neoliberal logic, and can hardly be turned around by internal reform. So he chose to open up independent ground of his own: the internet as his trench, writing workshops, the Human Realm platform, and the Midstream journal series.[6] This is a line of “building people’s literature outside the system,” devoted to uniting young people and rebuilding a grassroots ecology of people’s literature and art. He has given up the reformist illusion that “I can slowly win it back from the inside.” He has gone from “loyal critic within” to “builder at the margins.”

Change 3: The intellectual’s place. From “critical conscience” to “the necessity of remolding one’s own standpoint.”

The 2010 lecture: It was deeply moving, yet it still carried a limitation common to that generation of “critical intellectuals.” It cast the intellectual chiefly as “the conscience of society, the clear-eyed sentinel,” one who stands up to expose “de-Lu Xun-ization” and tells everyone that danger is coming. The logic was: if only more intellectuals dared to tell the truth, the cultural crisis could be checked. This was an “elite leftism,” in which intellectuals are the main movers and the people are objects to be “awakened and informed.”

Liu Jiming today: He has repeatedly examined and criticized this stance. In many essays and workshop lectures he argues that being merely a “witness of conscience” is far from enough. Intellectuals must transform their standpoint: not “speaking for the lower classes” from on high, but placing themselves within the ranks of working people. He sharply criticizes the “academic left,” whose papers are elegant and whose slogans are textbook-correct, but whose way of life and structure of feeling remain cut off from workers and peasants. He emphasizes that the greatness of the later Lu Xun lay precisely in having “moved from evolutionism to class theory, breaking out of his old self.”[7] He also settles accounts with his own past, admitting that the self of the 1980s and of his avant-garde period carried heavy elitist baggage too. His writing today is an ongoing struggle against that old self.

Change 4: Historical vision. From “criticizing what came after the 1990s” to “a full revisiting of the twentieth-century revolutionary legacy.”

The 2010 lecture: His critique was aimed mainly at the expansion of neoliberalism after the 1990s. As for the first thirty years of the People’s Republic and the Chinese revolution as a whole, he largely “took its justice for granted,” without actively and systematically revisiting it. His narrative was closer to: “things were fine, and then after the nineties they were ruined.”

Liu Jiming today: His line of inquiry has pushed much further back and much deeper. He argues that the revolution cannot be treated as “a finished matter, a job accomplished and done with.” One must see that the revolution had victories, but also setbacks, interruptions, and struggles that came round again and again. He writes about and discusses land reform, agricultural collectivization, and the Yan’an path at length, refusing the popular narrative that reduces the twentieth-century revolution to a series of “disasters to repent of.” At the same time, he makes clear that revisiting is not nostalgia, nor an attempt to copy historical practices wholesale. It is about recovering the resources of popular subjectivity that have been forcibly “soft-buried,”[8] in order to understand the capitalist reality of today. It is precisely this dimension that has opened a decisive gap between him and the path represented by Fang Fang, which takes the Enlightenment of the 1980s as its final horizon.[9]

Change 5: The logic of action. From “a critic working mainly through publications and lectures” to “an organizer who also builds positions.”

2010: His mode of struggle was entirely typical: writing essays, giving public lectures, publishing commentary in established media. He believed that the force of ideas alone could change public opinion. He had not yet formed a plan of practice involving “running a platform, running workshops, and sustaining a community of young people.”

Today: He still writes fiction and essays, but has added a very deliberate main line: building positions and training red writers. He says again and again that a few brilliant essays written by a lone gunman are not enough. Neoliberalism infiltrates in an organized, long-term way, and people’s literature must likewise rebuild its own ecology bit by bit. The Human Realm website, the writing workshops, and the Midstream series are all products of this thinking. He calls himself “a guerrilla fighter,” with the internet as his trench. This vision of action is entirely absent from the 2010 lecture.

III. A Necessary Distinction: Intellectual Evolution, Not a Sudden Swerve Forced by Events

Two oversimplifications popular online should be avoided here:

• The first: “In 2010 he was still normal; only after being provoked in 2018 did he turn left.” This is wrong. As we have argued more than once, the turn was organic and gradual. The 2010 lecture was itself an important milestone in his departure from pure literature toward the left, and his sustained rereading of the classics and the writing of The Human Realm between 2012 and 2017 were key intermediate stages. The 2018 storm was an accelerant, not a starting point.

• The second: “He never changed; he was always like this.” This is not accurate either. If you set the full text of the 2010 lecture beside his recent Random Thoughts and the lectures he has given at Tsinghua University, Nanjing University, Shanghai University, and other institutions, you find real and significant advances in his theoretical framework, his judgment of the system, his self-reflection as an intellectual, and his attitude toward the revolutionary legacy.

The writer who rose at Hubei University in 2010 to defend Lu Xun, and the writer who today declares that he “writes for the proletariat,” are one and the same spiritual life in its “growth and fulfillment,” not two unrelated people.

A line of his own may serve as a footnote to this road:

“It took me a long time to truly understand Lu Xun. Not to understand his literary brilliance, but to understand why he ultimately chose to stand on the side of the worker-peasant revolution.”

Translator’s notes

[1] “De-Lu Xun-ization” (去鲁迅化): refers to the removal or reduction of Lu Xun’s essays in Chinese school textbooks, which was widely debated around 2009–2010 and seen by critics as a retreat from his critical, left-wing legacy.

[2] Talks at the Yan’an Forum on Literature and Art (《在延安文艺座谈会上的讲话》, 1942): Mao’s foundational statement that literature and art should serve the workers, peasants, and soldiers, and that writers must remold themselves by joining the masses.

[3] Liu Qing (柳青) and Chen Yingzhen (陈映真): Liu Qing’s The Builders (《创业史》) is the classic novel of agricultural collectivization in Shaanxi; Liu Qing famously lived among peasants for fourteen years to write it. Chen Yingzhen (1937–2016) was Taiwan’s most prominent leftist writer and was imprisoned for his political views.

[4] The Wang Hui affair (汪晖事件): in 2010, Wang Hui, a leading New Left scholar at Tsinghua University, was accused of plagiarism in his early work, setting off a fierce public debate largely divided along ideological lines.

[5] The storm of 2018 (2018风波): refers to the controversy surrounding Liu’s public support that year for young people detained in connection with a labor dispute (see his essay “A Remembrance That Must Not Be Forgotten,” mentioned in I Cannot Remain Silent).

[6] Midstream (《中流丛刊》): the title 中流 echoes Mao’s 1925 poem “Changsha,” with its image of striking the water in midstream, a byword for youthful daring against the current.

[7] “From evolutionism to class theory” (从进化论走到阶级论): echoes Lu Xun’s own account, in his 1932 preface to Three Leisures (《三闲集》), of how his thinking moved from a faith in evolutionary progress to class analysis.

[8] “Soft-buried” (软埋): a pointed allusion to Fang Fang’s 2016 novel Soft Burial (《软埋》), which depicts the violence of land reform. The term originally means burial without a coffin. Here the author turns it back on its source: what has been “buried” is not the trauma of the revolution but the people’s agency within it.

[9] Fang Fang (方方): Wuhan novelist, former chair of the Hubei Writers’ Association, internationally known for Wuhan Diary (2020). She and Liu Jiming, both Hubei writers, represent opposing camps in Chinese literary debate.

A few choices you may want to adjust:

• 高级吐槽 → “sophisticated griping.” Alternatives: “high-minded venting” or “highbrow complaining.”

• 内部诤友 / 边缘建设者 → “loyal critic within” / “builder at the margins.” 诤友 has no exact English equivalent; “a friend who remonstrates” is more literal but stiffer.

By Zhou Ziheng

On the landscape of contemporary Chinese left-wing culture, Liu Jiming stands out as a unique figure. He is a writer as well as an editor; an intellectual as well as an organizer. From his avant-garde writing in the 1990s, to his subaltern narratives in the new century, and finally to his recent shift toward Marxism-Leninism-Maoism, his intellectual trajectory reveals a clear, unwavering path of "moving leftward." A crucial thread running through this path is his persistent effort to build a left-wing cultural front. From self-funding the launch of Tianxia (The World) magazine, to founding and chief-editing Zhongliu Congkan (Mainstream Miscellany), to hosting writing workshops and operating independent media accounts, Liu Jiming has used "guerrilla warfare" tactics to carve out survival space for marginalized left-wing voices. This process represents both a breakthrough practice of left-wing culture in the "post-revolutionary" era and an identity transformation for an intellectual evolving from a "writer" into a "warrior."

I. The Tianxia Era: An Idealistic Experiment to "Transcend Left and Right"

In 2011, Liu Jiming self-funded the launch of Tianxia magazine. According to media reports at the time, the publication was hailed as part of a cultural triad: "Dushu (Reading) in the North, Tianya (The Ends of the Earth) in the South, and Tianxia in the Center." This positioning alone revealed Liu’s ambition: he hoped to forge an opinion platform capable of standing as a third power alongside the two major intellectual hubs of Beijing and Shanghai.

The editorial board of Tianxia was uniquely composed. Featured authors included leftists like Wang Hui, Huang Jisu, and Kong Qingdong, alongside rightists like Xiao Gongqin, Qin Hui, and Xu Jilin. This pattern of "co-governance between left and right" reflected Liu Jiming’s philosophy at the time: "transcend left and right, and rebuild consensus." In an era of an increasingly fractured intellectual sphere, he attempted to build a platform for pluralistic dialogue.

This philosophy aligned perfectly with his creative stage back then. Before publishing Renjing (The Human Realm), Liu was in a transitional phase moving from "cultural concern" to "subaltern narrative." Although he had already turned leftward, he maintained an open attitude toward "diverse perspectives." The attempt to found Tianxia resembled a left-wing intellectual practicing his ideal of a "public forum"—hoping to accommodate dialogues between different stances on a left-led platform.

However, this idealistic experiment folded in less than two years. The reasons for its closure involved external factors like funding, but also mirrored the inherent dilemma of trying to "transcend left and right." As the left and right camps grew increasingly polarized, the survival space for the "middle ground" was drastically squeezed. An episode in 2012 illustrates this: when Tianxia was on the brink of closure due to a capital shortage, Li Tuo—a scholar based in the United States—brokered a meeting. Liu Jiming traveled to Beijing to discuss a joint publication venture with Wang Hui, a professor at Tsinghua University, Director of the Institute for Advanced Study in Humanities and Social Sciences, and a recognized leader of the New Left. Although they reached a consensus on cooperation, the opportunity—which could have brought Tianxia back to life—fell through at the last minute because a partner magazine in Guangxi reclaimed its publication license number (gankhao).

The closure of Tianxia served as an important disillusioning experience for Liu Jiming. He realized that when the literary world degenerates into a cynical arena for fame and wealth—or even becomes part of an institutional "iron triangle"—it is futile to try to build "bridges" within or on the fringes of the establishment. This realization laid the groundwork for his subsequent, more radical "guerrilla warfare."

II. The Period of Rupture: From Writer to "Guerrilla"

The year 2017 marked a critical turning point in Liu Jiming’s ideological shift. That year, he publicly reported Chen Yingsong, Vice Chairman of the Hubei Writers Association and Dean of its Literary Academy, for alleged disciplinary violations. This triggered a high-profile defamation lawsuit involving himself, the writer Fang Fang, and Chen Yingsong. The lawsuit ultimately ended in Liu's defeat. However, for him, the significance of this event far transcended the legal verdict. As he later wrote in his article To All of You:

"When the literary world degenerates into a cynical arena for fame and wealth, or even becomes part of an institutional 'iron triangle,' I resolutely hurl the spear in my hand. From that moment on, I am no longer just a writer; I have become a warrior or a guerrilla."

The metaphor of the "guerrilla"—originally derived from an article by Zhang Chengzhi about Che Guevara—implies abandoning the illusion of fighting for discourse power within the establishment, turning instead to flexible, marginalized, and non-institutionalized forms of struggle. This shift manifested on multiple levels:

• In communication channels: He no longer placed his hopes on "print magazines within the system." Instead, he treated the internet "as the primary platform to publish works and related information—not just as a platform, but as a front, or a trench." He opened accounts on Weibo and WeChat, disseminating ideas through his Thoughts (Suixianglu) microblog essay series, using a "fragmented, popularized, and highly interactive format" to lower the barrier to entry for left-wing thought.

• In organizational form: He openly broke with the mainstream literary establishment. In 2019, after receiving an internal Party warning for "inappropriate methods of exercising reporting rights," he left Wuhan for the United Kingdom. There, he secluded himself to write Black and White, entering a period of "intellectual self-exile and reconstruction." During this time, he was no longer acting as the Vice Chairman of the Hubei Writers Association. Although he retained his status as a top-tier professional writer (zhenggao erji), his writing stance had fully transformed into that of an independent intellectual detached from the establishment.

• In spiritual identity: He completed his metamorphosis from a "left-wing writer" into a "Marxist-Leninist-Maoist." The Russia-Ukraine War acted as a "critical catalyst," prompting him to "thoroughly shed the influence of 'pure literature' and explicitly create works from a proletarian standpoint." He began systematically critiquing the "nationalist left" (minzu zhuyi zuopai), arguing that they "obscure the essence of class," while he actively "rebuilt his communist faith."

This series of transformations formed a "transitional zone" between Tianxia and Zhongliu Congkan. During the Tianxia period, he was still seeking dialogue with the system and liberals. After the rupture, however, he stood ready to "face the tearing jaws of the wolfpack alone." But how far could an isolated "guerrilla" go?

III. Zhongliu Congkan: Connecting with Tradition, Rebuilding the Front

In August 2020, Zhongliu Congkan (Mainstream Miscellany), a large-scale intellectual and humanistic journal, was founded. The timing was provocative. Due to the pandemic, Liu Jiming was stranded in the UK, claiming externally that he was "secluded and writing on an island far from Wuhan." His lawsuit with Fang Fang and Chen Yingsong had just settled, and he had just finished the first volume of Black and White. It was the absolute critical peak of his leftward ideological turn.

The naming of Zhongliu Congkan was a manifesto in itself. Zhongliu (Mainstream or Midstream) was originally the name of a magazine founded by the veteran writer Wei Wei in the 1980s. On his deathbed, Wei Wei left behind the famous words: "Continue the revolution, never surrender." By adopting this name, Liu Jiming clearly intended to reconnect with the "Old Left" tradition represented by Wei Wei—a tradition that steadfastly held onto the belief of "continuous revolution" even after the revolutionary tide had receded.

Unlike Tianxia’s goal to "transcend left and right," Zhongliu Congkan hoisted a clear banner: it took "Marxism-Leninism-Maoism as its fundamental purpose." The inaugural editorial listed an inclusive spectrum for its target audience, including "traditional Marxism, young Marxism, the Maoist left, liberal left, statism, nationalism, democratic socialism, and Trotskyism." This vision of a "left-wing united front" differed fundamentally from Tianxia’s "left-right dialogue." It no longer sought connection with liberals; instead, it tried to construct a platform for pluralistic dialogue within the left itself.

The inaugural issue featured two special dossiers—"In Memory of Wei Wei" and "Return to Marx"—which explicitly marked the publication's spiritual coordinates. "In Memory of Wei Wei" paid homage to and reconnected with the left-wing tradition, while "Return to Marx" reaffirmed its theoretical foundation. The lineup of contributors for the first issue was stellar, featuring posthumous works by Wei Wei, alongside pieces by Samir Amin, Wang Hui, Zhang Chengzhi, Li Tuo, Cao Zhenglu, and Liu Jiming himself. Zhang Chengzhi’s evaluation was concise and powerful: "One more front has been gained. Wonderful!"

The word "front" (zhandi) appeared once again. From Tianxia to Zhongliu Congkan, from a "platform" to a "front," this shift in discourse reflected Liu Jiming’s redefined understanding of left-wing cultural practice: it was no longer a neutral "marketplace of ideas," but a clear-cut "frontline of struggle."

Although Zhongliu Congkan was ordered to shut down after only four issues—and Liu Jiming received a second internal Party disciplinary sanction because of it—the venture held immense significance for him. It was precisely through Zhongliu Congkan that Liu’s influence broke out of the literary world into the broader public square. He emerged as a left-wing public intellectual with a distinct political stance, rather than just an establishment writer. In his own words, he had become a Marxist-Leninist-Maoist.

IV. From Front to "Blood Generation": Writing Workshops and Training Red Writers

A front needs people to guard it, and ideas need people to propagate them. If Zhongliu Congkan was a cultural "fortress" built by Liu Jiming, then his writing workshops became his cultural "military academy."

Almost exactly when Liu’s adversaries were celebrating his second disciplinary sanction, Black and White was published—albeit via non-mainstream channels. Shortly thereafter, Liu spearheaded the creation of a creative writing workshop, explicitly stating the goal of training "Red writers." At the opening ceremony of the third workshop, he explained his philosophy:

"Students joining our workshop must first be believers in Marxism, willing to use their writing to serve the proletariat and socialism, rather than seeking personal fame and fortune."

He put forward his famous "Three Passes of Writing"—the pass of emotion, the pass of standpoint, and the pass of language. He demanded that students "organically unify these 'three passes' with a Marxist standpoint, becoming true Red writers who stand up for the proletariat and speak for the working people." This systematic training mechanism stood in stark contrast to conventional literary education. It discarded professionalist criteria like "literariness" or "aestheticism," explicitly defining writing as a mode of "struggle"—"Every writer worthy of being called a Red writer is a warrior." This meant that Liu Jiming was not only fighting with his own pen to rebuild faith, but was also consciously training successors, transforming individual left-wing practice into an organized, sustainable cultural movement.

Simultaneously, he actively explored new writing formats and paths of dissemination. His microblog essay series, Thoughts, "adopted a concise, colloquial, and infectious style to translate complex left-wing theories into everyday, readable texts," producing a significant impact among young people. Some critics noted that this style of writing "significantly reshaped the path and efficacy of left-wing ideological dissemination through its fragmented, popularized, and highly interactive form." In Liu Jiming's own words, this represents "writing in an entirely new sense," where the "modes of writing and mediums of transmission" have "undergone substantive changes" away from traditional literary production.

V. Breaking the Circle and Facing Dilemmas: The Contemporary Fate of Left-Wing Cultural Fronts

From Tianxia to Zhongliu Congkan, and onward to the writing workshops and his self-media matrix, Liu Jiming’s construction of a left-wing cultural front has undergone a noticeable process of "breaking the circle" (poquan, meaning reaching beyond a niche audience):

• In communication mediums: It moved from an elite journal (Tianxia) to a mass-oriented journal (Zhongliu Congkan), and finally to online essays and social media. The barrier to dissemination lowered continuously while the audience expanded, showing a clear trend of breaking into the mainstream public.

• In ideological stance: Shifting from a liberal-left stance of "transcending left and right" to a "Marxist-Leninist-Maoist" position, his stance became sharper and increasingly combative.

• In practical form: Moving from individualized editorial work to an organized writing workshop, left-wing cultural production began evolving from a "guerrilla band" into a "regular army."

However, whether in terms of personal influence or the cultural front itself, breaking out of the circle forced Liu Jiming to confront new dilemmas.

First is institutional suppression. His new major work, which took immense effort to complete, was banned domestically and could only be "disseminated via digital editions and alternative formats." In April 2025, Black and White was published in the United States—hailed by foreign media as "a literary expedition of temporal testimony"—allowing it to enter the international spotlight. As Liu Jiming wrote in the epilogue to the English edition: "Its dissemination in the English-speaking world not only releases a literary work from a formatted space, but also signifies that holding onto a primitive sense of class justice and humanistic spirit is still respected." Despite this international reach, the book's domestic dissemination remains largely cut off from the mainstream cultural market, leaving it to "circulate quietly" among the public via private reading circles and underground book clubs. Yet, as Kong Qingdong observed, this work is not only a major achievement for contemporary Chinese literature, but "in its excavation of history, it far surpasses most Nobel Prize-winning works." Its history of publication, reading, and dissemination constitutes a unique history of its own—a history of resistance, breaking out through the cracks of mainstream culture.

Second is the "echo chamber" effect among the audience. Most readers of left-wing cultural fronts are "one of our own." The ideas circulate primarily within a thermal layer of like-minded people, making it difficult to truly enter the wider public consciousness. In To All of You, Liu Jiming admitted frankly that his supporters might be a "very small 'handful of people,'" or they might be a "group so vast it is startling"—an uncertainty that reflects the awkward predicament of left-wing culture in contemporary Chinese society.

Finally, there is the continuous high pressure from the system. Facing account bans, censorship, and Party disciplinary actions, Liu Jiming wrote in his Thoughts: "Except for death, no force can crush me." He added, "For a writer who believes in communism, the right to express thought is higher than everything; holding onto faith is more important than life itself." This tragic, heroic declaration serves as both a defiance against power and an acknowledgment of his harsh survival environment.

Conclusion: The Significance and Limits of the Front

From Tianxia to Zhongliu Congkan, and then to the "Red writer" training program, Liu Jiming’s continuous construction of a left-wing cultural front forms a unique and vital chapter in the landscape of contemporary Chinese left-wing culture. It illustrates the tortuous, even tragic journey of an intellectual in an era that has "bid farewell to revolution." It shows how he inherited the Left-League (Zuolian) literary tradition of the 1930s represented by Lu Xun, keeping the sparks of progressive thought alive by building cultural fronts like magazines and books.

In a sense, Liu Jiming walks a path similar to that of Zhang Chengzhi. Liu once wrote in his article Seventy-Year-Old Educated Youth, or the Rhetoric of the People that Zhang Chengzhi "resigned and stopped his salary, parting ways with the mainstream literary world precisely when his reputation as a writer was at its zenith," whereas his own choice came "too late, carrying a flavor of being 'forced to rebel at Mount Liang' (bi shang liang shan)." Yet compared to Zhang Chengzhi’s lone-wolf style of "individual spiritual pilgrimage," Liu Jiming emphasizes organized front-building. From magazines to writing workshops, he attempts to transform left-wing cultural production from an "individual act" into a "collective enterprise."

Nevertheless, the significance and limits of such a front are equally apparent. It can provide a sanctuary for subaltern and marginalized talents; it can maintain the continuity of the left-wing intellectual tradition; and it can open up an alternative space outside the "mainstream." Yet, whether it can truly alter the power structure and affect the wider public remains a grim question. Moreover, he must constantly stay prepared to handle the mud thrown at him and the hidden arrows shot by authorities and enemies alike.

At the end of To All of You, Liu Jiming wrote: "I have spoken, I have acted, I have saved my own soul." This sentence reveals the deep-seated motivation behind his writing and his creation of cultural fronts: what matters is not victory, but the act of continuing to row on a "rising sea." As he stated in his 2021 long essay, A Brief History of Thought: The Metamorphosis of an Era (2001–2021):

"The goals of the Left remain far out of reach, but their meaning lies in existence itself. The struggle might not change reality in the short term, but it prevents society from being completely captured by capital conglomerates and drifting toward extremes. In doing so, it buys more time and space for the growth and strengthening of the proletariat."

In this sense, his process of building left-wing cultural fronts is a form of resistance in itself—a resistance against forgetting, a resistance against assimilation, and a resistance against the narrative of the end of history and a monopolar social structure.