The Fundamental Difference Between Real Writers and Fake Writers

Yin Qian: (5, 2025)

"Jia Pingwa's decadence and pedantry, Chi Li's vulgarity and shallowness, Liu Zhenyun's tedious verbosity and sluggishness, Yu Hua's coldness and affectation; also Mo Yan's wantonness and exaggeration, cruelty and violence; Can Xue's psychological abnormality and bizarre experiences."

After I published what I considered essays or commentaries on my blog, several writers sent me blog messages and left comments. One comment asked me what the difference is between real writers and fake writers. Another message "suspiciously" said: Yin Qian keeps talking about the sublime, about faith, about morality—who knows what his novels will be like. Let me address the latter question first. When I question whether there are any real writers in China today, I have no motive to tar everyone with the same brush—at least this is my personal doubt. This includes some views in my writing that have attracted countless "flying bricks"—all of these are my personal views. If there's anything inappropriate, I hope all you "masters," "famous writers," "well-known writers," "post-80s writers," "online writers," "famous authors," and other such "writers" will be understanding. I'm honored that the online world still has such a good place where I can review and publish my own work, because all the critical writing on my blog, except for some that newspapers have reprinted after "selecting the essential and deleting the superfluous," consists of rejected pieces. With nowhere else to publish them, I can only post them here for myself to read.

As for the novels I've written, apart from Secret Chronicles of the Heavenly Court and Love Is the Lie Loneliness Tells (the original title was Death of a Chinese Petty Official, but I only discovered after receiving the advance copy that the publisher had changed the name—beyond speechlessness, I can only express helplessness)—these two novels I personally consider literary works—the dozen or so other novels published in recent years are just storytelling, not really literature. Of course, I'm not accustomed to viewing the literary world as an arena, nor do I advocate placing literary works by writer A and writer B side by side to compare superiority and inferiority. If even literature must compete for "first under heaven," it inevitably falls into cliché, and once "first place" is contested, it quickly degenerates into an appendage of the market and a tool of merchants. But unlike "competing in the arena" with other writers, literary works need not compete for superiority, though this doesn't mean one cannot point out the deficiencies and problems in literary works. Like a martial artist—I don't advocate that he compete with others, but I very much want to point out the shortcomings and inadequacies in each of his moves. When I say I'm not a writer, especially not a real writer now, these are words from the heart. I never easily abandon my own views to accept views others impose or offer, so I'm even less likely to comply with some people's "good idea" that I withdraw from the Chinese Writers Association. After all, it's just a pale symbol—removing it or not has no practical significance, just as Zhao Benshan is still Zhao Benshan whether or not he wears that hat. What's important is a person's inner quality and temperament, as well as their vitality and spirit.

Why do I say there are no real writers in China today? I must emphasize again that I'm talking about "today." Although some real writers are still alive, very regrettably they don't seem prepared to raise their voices anymore. So what we see today in the works of some so-called "famous writers" is desire-driven writing and spiritually dwarfed literature. Literature was originally a sublime enterprise, but they disregard the sublime, even damage the sublime. This is the tragic situation and living circumstances of the "sublime" in contemporary literature. Especially in today's shallow, chaotic, and crude literary landscape, I see fabrications of wild invention and slick, boring irony; weak and powerless clamor and irrelevant showing off; meticulous carving of copied phrases and self-satisfied intoxication; self-abandoning indulgence and self-pitying sentimentality; trivial trifles and shameless licentiousness... Many of today's so-called famous writers—their poverty of narrative ability and structural capacity, as well as the chaos of their linguistic ability and basic values, is truly astonishing.

Apart from works by writers like Lu Yao, Deng Gang, Zhang Yigong, and Zhang Chengzhi in the early 1980s, which could still convey moral passion and heroic temperament approaching the sublime, by the late 1980s, Chinese contemporary literature began to reveal a spiritual state and literary mood of bewilderment, decadence, and confusion: Jia Pingwa's decadence and pedantry, Chi Li's vulgarity and shallowness, Liu Zhenyun's tedious verbosity and sluggishness, Yu Hua's coldness and affectation; also Mo Yan's wantonness and exaggeration, cruelty and violence; Can Xue's psychological abnormality and bizarre experiences... After the 1990s, commercial materialism's money-worship tendency and materialism's hedonistic tendency gave unprecedented and malignant development to the negative momentum that already existed. The originally fragile spiritual principles of the 1980s—such as subject reconstruction, equal dialogue, ideological liberation, creative freedom, humanism, engagement with reality—almost instantly tended toward disintegration and collapse.

The ultimate chronic illness of our era is the loss of values. The supra-utilitarian principle of values has been easily replaced by the commercial principle of interest. Thus, physical pathology and cynicism, hopelessness and immorality, abnormality and sense of failure have become a universal, internal spiritual landscape in China today. The value system and life philosophy we need—like calcium and zinc, sunlight and love—can no longer be seen. Instead, we see indiscriminate and unscrupulous mockery of inherent values. Great and sublime things are topped with philistine slickness. In life scenes dominated by the hedonistic principle and commercial principle, literature's spiritual banner has dropped to an unprecedentedly low point. Many "famous writers" active in literary circles today hold an attitude of doubting everything, of nihilism. Under these circumstances, what real writers does China still have today?

I deeply feel the enormous magical power of those so-called "famous writers" in our era. To deny their works requires courage, because when an unknown person casually questions a famous writer's work, it inevitably makes some people doubt your motives and purposes, and you're often given the bad reputation of "a bald man trying to borrow the moon's light." Quite a few people in our era regard these astonishingly famous writers as divine and place them on altars. Because they're famous and rolling in money, they're successful, and in their view, someone who's not yet successful or not yet famous cannot question their "divinities." Since they're successful, what grounds do you have to question their success? I must certainly question, and must question, because in literary matters, great fame often falls short of reality. To evaluate the literary value of a "famous" writer, one must first have a standard different from worldly perspective, requires a gradual settling process, as well as a supra-utilitarian tranquil atmosphere, in order to evaluate whether the writer's fame and the work's value are equivalent, whether they truly live up to their name.

In today's China, I think it's very necessary to establish a concept completely different from "fame"—what I previously proposed in my essays as "literary prestige"—to distinguish between writers who are famous for a time and those who are truly real writers: Famous writers don't necessarily have prestige, writers with prestige aren't necessarily famous. Of course, both can be combined in some truly great masters. In fact, very often those famous writers completely obtain their fame by sacrificing their own "prestige," while writers with prestige are exactly the opposite—they win others' respect and defend their own dignity precisely because they can maintain a certain distance from their era's vanity and shallow tendencies. Writers with prestige receive true honor—whenever their readers talk about their works or mention their names, their hearts fill with gratitude and warmth. But famous writers are different—what they obtain is mostly others' drooling envy, cheap flattery and compliments from media reporters, commercial critics, and their blind worshippers.

"Fame writers" display their superior cleverness and extraordinary talent in various ways, singing their own praises, forgetting there are others; while "prestige writers" are modest yet radiant, restrained in their conduct, understanding that all "immortality" and "greatness" are but "a bit of floating cloud." "Fame writers" are satisfied with "making noise," indulge in low taste, and can only provide ephemeral entertainment reading; while "prestige writers," through literature's sacred spiritual creative activity, extend for their readers a path of mind leading to the realm of truth and goodness, allowing their readers to obtain life's wisdom and courage through beautiful yet heavy experiences, becoming aware of human dignity and value—this is the fundamental difference between "prestige writers" and "fame writers."

Therefore, I must give everyone a suggestion: henceforth when we meet those astonishingly famous writers and their works that have been blown sky-high, we must examine the name to verify the reality. No matter how much money they've made or how many prizes they've won, no matter how many words they've written or how many volumes they've printed, whether they've triggered "earthquakes" or created "miracles," whether they're "geniuses" or "wizards," we must see what their inner "goods" are really like. We absolutely cannot get excited just hearing a celebrity's name, or have our knees go weak seeing a celebrity, becoming prisoners of "profit" and servants of "fame" before even figuring out their inner "goods," kneeling at their fee