china

Since the 1990s, Chinese literary enthusiasts have explored new spaces for creative expression online, giving rise to a modern genre that has transformed Chinese culture and society. Ranging from the self-consciously avant-garde to the pornographic, web-based writing has introduced innovative forms, themes, and practices into Chinese literature and its aesthetic traditions. Conducting the first comprehensive survey in English of this phenomenon, Michel Hockx describes in detail the types of Chinese literature taking shape right now online and their novel aesthetic, political, and ideological challenges. Offering a unique portal into postsocialist Chinese culture, he presents a complex portrait of internet culture and control in China that avoids one-dimensional representations of oppression. The Chinese government still strictly regulates the publishing world, yet it is growing increasingly tolerant of internet literature and its publishing practices while still drawing a clear yet ever-shifting ideological bottom line. Hockx interviews online authors, publishers, and censors, capturing the convergence of mass media, creativity, censorship, and free speech that is upending traditional hierarchies and conventions within China—and across Asia.

Research on culture and literature from the perspective of the media has been a hot topic among Chinese scholars in recent years. In this special issue, the relevant authors organize and analyze major issues in online literature, including understanding media culture, cyber technology and the characteristics of literature, defining online literature, online writing and online text. We hope to provide, to the best of our capacity, cultural interpretation and theoretical reference for the healthy growth and sustainable development of online literature and to serve as a modest stimulus for academic inheritance and innovation with regard to the theory and criticism of online literature.

(Source: last paragraph of introduction to special issue.)

"Twenty Years of Chinese Network Literature" is an excellent book with important academic value and practical significance. It can enable readers to fully understand the basic development of Chinese Network literature in the past 20 years, and understand what online writers and online literature are like. People and what kind of works are written; it can also enable researchers to have a correct understanding and evaluation of the achievements, existing problems and historical status of the development of Chinese online literature in the past two decades, and become an important basis for future research; It can also provide a basic reference and basis for the decision-making of network literature management departments, and provide basic judgments for grasping the future development of network literature.

(Source: Amazon.com description, Google translated from Chinese.)

In her article "Electronic Literature in China" Jinghua Guo discusses how the reception and the critical contexts of production of online literature are different in China from those in the West despite similar developments in digital technology. Guo traces the development of Chinese digital literature, its history, and the particular characteristics and unique cultural significance in the context of Chinese culture where communality is an aspect of society. Guo posits that Chinese electronic literature is larger than such in the West despite technical drawbacks and suggests that digitality represents a positive force in contemporary Chinese culture and literature.

Over the past decade, Internet literature has indeed accomplished remarkable achievements. Internet literature has garnered a readership of 202.67 million, amounting to 39.5 percent of all netizens in mainland China now. That 55.5 percent of these netizens are between the ages of twenty and forty indicates that Internet literature is clearly very popular with young people, which is surprising nowadays considering that there are so many forms of entertainment available to them. Although Internet literature has developed rapidly, it is not only accepted as a part of mainstream contemporary literature but also plays an increasingly important role in literary creation, theory, and criticism in mainland China

During the past 10 years, the success of Internet literature has become the most attractive phenomenon in contemporary Chinese literature. Internet literature has not only attracted millions of readers, it has also gained commercial success. How can we understand the combination of computer and Internet as a kind of global technology, and the literature, as the local and the national representation, in China? In order to answer this important question, my paper will begin with a discussion of the rising young and famous Internet literature writers. The Internet not only provides a new world of cyberspace to young people to express their feelings and lives in a new age, it has also created new possibilities for the refashioning of literature in contemporary China. By following the successful stories of Internet literature writers, we will find that Internet literature, as a kind of new folk disourse, creates a new discursive space and constructs a kind of virtual identity. Such an attempt, generally called "the spirit of new folk literature" in the cyberspace, counters the elite discourse of Chinese traditional literature. Meanwhile, with the acquiescence of official ideology and the promotion of commercial power, Internet literature moves towards the mainstream from margin to the centre and bring forth a literary revolution in post-socialist China.