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Megan Walsh, "The Subplot: What China Is Reading and Why It Matters" (Columbia Global Reports, 2022)
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Welcome to the New Books Network.
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A
Hello and welcome to another episode on the New Books Network. I'm one of your hosts, Dr. Miranda Melcher, and I'm very pleased today to be speaking with Megan Walsh about her book titled the Subplot what China Is Reading and why It Matters. Published by Columbia Global reports in 2022, this book takes us to so many different parts of the reading and publishing landscape in Chinese fict. We're going to be talking about some sort of big name books, but also some areas of the publishing world that are probably a lot less familiar to readers outside of China and helping us make sense of the complexity of the nuance and why this is such an interesting thing to investigate. So obviously we have a lot to talk about. Megan, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast.
- [02:20]
B
Thanks so much for having me.
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A
Miranda, could you please start us off by introducing yourself a little bit and tell us why you decided to write this book?
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B
So I'm a writer and journalist. I'm currently based in London, but I guess I've been writing about Chinese culture, mainly literature and film, since I moved back to Beijing in about 2013. I then lived in Taipei a little bit after that, but I'd spent a bit of time before I Lived in Beijing in my early 20s and writing a little bit about it while I was at the Times of London. But it was really sort of when I moved back there that I was able to reflect properly on how I had looked at China before I'd lived there properly and start writing about it more consistently. And that's also, I guess, what sort of led into the idea for the book.
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A
Yeah, there's definitely a clear investment of time and thought to make sense of all of this, because you've managed to cover so many aspects of writing and publishing in China, and yet the book is not like 800 pages. Right. Very condensed. So that obviously takes a huge amount of work and I think probably gives us a good starting point to begin to get into some of the things that you've written about. So, first off, the kind of obvious thing I think that people from the outside are going to come into this sort of conversation expecting is a discussion about censorship, because China does have a lot of restrictions about what can be written by whom, how, that kind of thing. So can we get into that with a bit of detail? What are some of the main challenges that writers face and how do they manage to get things published anyway?
- [03:59]
B
Yeah, so you're absolutely right. Censorship is something that is an ongoing consideration for writers in China. And it's also the main prism through which I think we tend to think about literature in China, whether somebody is a dissident writer or whether they are in some ways a sort of collaborator or they've submitted to the requests of the state at the time. I guess what's really interesting about it is that it really varies at various points in history. And even in the last 10 to 20 years, the weather, as it's often called, changes a huge amount. And writers in China tend to be very innovative and reactive according to what they can sense is possible at the time. And so you tend to sort of get a bigger kind of, I guess, degree of, like, churn or sort of different ideas or genres sprouting up that sort of happen in response to the sort of leniency or sort of strictures on what people can say at the moment. I think things are pretty tricky, but certainly I was focusing on books of the last 10 to 20 years, and it's really, really sort of changed over the course of two decades.
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A
That's really interesting to understand, change over time. What about change in genre? Does it, for example, make it easier to publish something if it's fiction versus nonfiction?
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B
Oh, definitely. I think it's one of the main reasons I really wanted to write about fiction in particular, because I think it's always offered a safer space for people to explore very difficult ideas without drawing too much fire. Obviously that still has its difficulties, but I think, and I mentioned in my book, there's a writer called Yin Yanke who wanted to write about an AIDS crisis in rural villages in his home province. And he realized very quickly that he just couldn't write a non fiction piece about it. It just wouldn't be published to get him in trouble. So he decided to turn it into a novel which became Dream of Ding Village, which is an incredible book. And it was written in a very, I guess, in a style that he calls mythorealism. It's very sort of strange. It's dreamlike, but it really. It's brilliant. And it was banned. But he's still able to kind of write and work there in a way that had he just an out and out, I guess, sort of piece about a non fiction piece, he could have been in a lot more trouble. So nonfiction has always been, I guess, representative of real bravery when people do it. It happens a lot during COVID but it also is what gets people in more trouble.
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A
Despite these challenges, though, there are a lot of books that get published that perhaps outsiders, as you say, mainly come to this sort of topic with these assumptions of dissidents and censorship books that those with those sorts of stories people might be surprised to find in Chinese bookstores, for example, in that particular instance, yes, it's a fictionalized version of instead of a sort of non fiction expose. But it's not necessarily that fictionalized in those sorts of cases. So that might be a surprise. What other sorts of books might outsiders be surprised to encounter being sold in a Chinese bookshop?
- [07:33]
B
Again, it sort of depends on the time at which they're being published. I mean, I think the main division seems to be whether something is published in Chinese or not. So you can find all sorts of things in English which are published in English, and then they're sold in Chinese bookshops, which as a sort of side note, are so beautiful these days. They have built in all these different cities just exquisite bookshops. And you can route around them and there will be many English translations of things like, well, in terms of foreign texts, Aldous Huxley and George Orwell. But I have found books by Yanlianke and this very controversial writer called Chen Xihuo, who wrote about sort of incest between a mother and son as sort of symptomatic of corruption in China. All of that was available in English and you would never find it in Chinese. So the battleground for a lot of writers really is sort of whether they're able to sort of write their novels in their own language or whether they need to find publishers outside to print their works either in other languages or, I guess, up until recently, Hong Kong and Taiwan, they could actually publish in Chinese.
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A
That's definitely interesting. Are there any types of books that would be in Chinese that people might be surprised by?
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B
Again, it sort of depends. So someone like Mo Yan, who I think in the west we're familiar with, he won the Nobel Prize in 2012. A lot of his books are published. Some of them aren't. Same with Yen Lian Kuo. Some are banned, some aren't. Sometimes it just takes a little while for things to make it through the system. So Yuhua's book To Live was banned for years. It was about the Cultural Revolution and some upheavals of, you know, I guess, of communism the last 40 years or so. And then he just sort of was enfolded into the Beijing Olympics in 2008 to, you know, help organize the opening ceremony. And then To Live was made available. So it just. It really depends on sort of, I guess, temperature at the time and.
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A
Yeah, yeah. I mean, the change over time. We're not just necessarily talking about kind of one decade to the next. It can be even sort of shorter periods of time than that.
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Completely, yeah.
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A
Thinking then about some of the themes that come up in some of the books you discuss in your book. It was really interesting to read about a number of different novels you examine that have really strong themes of sort of confusion or, like, disorientation about the state of the world. Sometimes kind of a character, like, wondering, what has the world come to? Sometimes, like, more dystopian than that of, you know, opening the door and going, whoa, everything is different. Is there a way in which we might understand these themes as not just being about, like, the last few decades? Everywhere in the world has changed a lot, but even more in terms of political criticism, of generational divides in China itself?
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B
Yeah, it's a really good question, because I think. I think the particular chapter you're referring to is many writers who are in quite a sort of unique position where they lived through the Cultural Revolution or were very young at the time and then continue to write in the reform and opening up years. So they're sort of aware of the before and the after versions of China, in a way. And, of course, we have a sort of tendency to look for a degree of political dissidence wherever we can, including in sort of metaphors. So a lot of these books are about protagonists who are in suspended states and states of limbo. They're sleepwalkers, they're zombies who don't know how to connect the past with the present. And generational divides are really, really rich themes for all literature, really. The, as you say, how things sort of change and how people adapt to the surpassing of these different sort of eras. But I guess within China, because so much history is not allowed to be touched, a big part of that sense that the past doesn't feel like it's connected to the present is also to do with a kind of metanarrative that prevents certain historical events from being explored. So in one sense, you're right, it's not just about sort of political criticism, and it is about exploring just a feeling of complete loss of an agrarian socialist society that's suddenly become an urban capitalist society and wondering how on earth to adapt to it. But that sort of magical radical transformation is also tied up with the politics of a government that's been in power throughout. It's the sort of main linking thing between those two eras. And it's still, I guess, speaking about the same policies, but the world in which people live in is completely different. So I think the answer to your very long winded answer to your question is sort of both.
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A
Yeah, and of course, that particular generation is representative of a large generation in Chinese society. Right. These aren't sort of fringe experiences of the last people who remember World War I, for example. Like, this is a generation that is still very present in Chinese society. This is a type of experience that a lot of people would have had or relate to. And then of course, you've got the younger generations that don't really relate to this at all. So we've got lots of different kinds of readers going on. And of course, some of them are reading books. They go into a bookshop and buy them. But I think if we just talk about bookshops and kind of older readers, maybe we would end up ignoring a huge aspect of Chinese fiction, which is the universe of Chinese fiction online. So this is pretty big. Can you give us a sense of how big?
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B
Yeah, it's. I mean, this is, I think looking back, this is the chapter that most people have wanted to talk about. Just, I think because of the sort of staggering numbers involved and the money involved, people have been very interested in it. So China has the largest online fiction platform or sort of industry in the world. When I was writing, I think there were 24 million titles available, 430 million active readers, and I think that's doubled since writing it. There's now something like 42 million titles and 638 million users. It's an inconceivably large industry. It's mostly read by people who are under 25. And the kind of, the whole sort of. It's a business model essentially, is that people log in to read a chapter every single day. A sort of cliffhanger after cliffhanger after cliffhanger on a sort of pay per view scheme. So it's essentially huge amounts of fantasy and romance that's being churned out by people in the hope that they can eventually sell it for some kind of IP to be turned into TV or micro dramas. But yeah, it's staggeringly huge and it's a very strange world as well.
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A
It almost reminds me of how some of Dickens novels were originally published as serialized columns in Victorian newsprint. Yeah, there's like a sort of cliffhanger, chapter by chapter type thing going on. But the fact that it's such a big industry obviously means that the sort of traditional publishing industry would be paying a lot of attention to it, obviously. Political leaders too. Is this something they like or is it seen as sort of a potentially problematic challenge?
- [15:58]
B
Yeah, so I think when, I guess in the sort of frontier days of the Internet, there were a lot of writers who did see it as a way to, you know, bypass the gatekeepers of traditional sort of pure literature, which they're sort of known as the China's Writers association, which, you know, looks after what should be written, I guess. But as you know, is the case with the Internet, it was also quite easy to then remove them or, you know, control it in some ways. Then what happened after that sort of early frontier era was people just started writing escapist fiction. And that didn't really seem to bother the government or sort of state in the same way because it just seemed to be. It was non political, it was escapist in nature and people sort of trying to make money out of it. And I think there are a lot of young people who just wanted to sort of read about being young in the sort of new landscape. So it just sort of, it filled a bit of a vacuum. The problem was it just then exploded mainly as a kind of business model. It just, it became the incarnation of sort of free market fiction. It was sort of fantasies about survival of the fittest at all cost. Whether it was sort of, you Know, kind of ruthless businessmen or sort of superheroes cultivating to be the most powerful person in the universe or girls trying to attract the attention of sort of wealthy sort of businessmen or industry leaders. And that was I think in 2004. Even then, Xi Jinping said how worried he was about it. He called it a plateau without peaks and that there was something sort of inherently empty about the content and it was kind of hard to disagree with him in many ways. It wasn't producing stuff which you would really sort of encourage or you'd want to be reading. But I think it's worth mentioning in a way that it did sort of happen on the CCP's watch, that there was just a sort of a vacuum that had to be filled which came from political and cultural strictures. And I think young people just sort of saw an opportunity and went for it. So it's only now that they're really cracking down on content which has become increasingly racy and taboo in terms of sex and violence. I guess they're encouraging people to readers to censor it or sort of flag up anything that they think is not adhering to core socialist values. A lot of things are getting closed down. A lot of novels are being locked and people can't read them. But it is kind of, you know, bolting the, the stable after the horses. Yeah. You know what I mean? Yeah, yeah. So yeah, it's really not loved by the, by the government, but it sort of. It, it is what it is.
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B
Yeah, I think they were. I mean it was almost sort of self selecting in that people just weren't writing politically controversial stuff. So there wasn't sort of stuff to censor. It's only as people were trying to attract more eyeballs which became, you know, the most important metric, it wasn't sort of whether the government was happy with it, it was whether people were reading it or not that people started introducing more problematic themes like sex and. And violence that attracted the. The attention of the censors or the government anyway. And so you're right. Now there is a kind of modern rating system whereby everything sort of has to conform or be healthy in quotation marks or adhere to certain sort of socialist credentials before it can make it through.
- [20:56]
A
Okay, that definitely is interesting to see how that's changing. And to the point about kind of. There weren't things necessarily to censor. One could assume that Japanese manga would also fit into that category, that this would be a big thing. It's popular in many countries and yet you talk about how it is seen as something to be censored. So why. And how does it manage to be a big industry despite that?
- [21:21]
B
Yeah, I think. I mean, I guess it's worth saying that there are huge overlaps between sort of Japanese and Chinese sort of culture in terms of Daoism, Buddhism and the characters that they share together. And I. So something like Journey to the west became the Monkey King who becomes the sort of main character in Dragon Ball, which is one of the most popular anime shows ever. But the most important thing was, I think in the 80s during form and opening up, because there was just nothing. Everything had been removed. Only socialist realism pretty much written by Mao had been allowed to be read. And then suddenly there was this opening up and Japanese manga just. And just an anime flooded Chinese culture. People just read everything they could get their hands on. And I think there's in that respect a real degree of nostalgia for that time and all the things they were reading about. But also it therefore sort of set the tone and the sort of standards for what people were interested in and wanted to read about. Also, I guess it's worth mentioning that, you know, Japan is a democratic society. It's sort of free of like ideology in terms of what people should and shouldn't be writing about. So it also was a place that people could read about quite racy things which they couldn't get at home. It's a kind of. It's a genre that just cannot. That people just love it. And now it's so spread into gaming as well as, you know, Japanese gaming and things. I actually just read a book by Huan Yen, who is a delivery driver, and he was just talking about how Japanese anime and manga completely changed his life. Gave him an insight into universal values of good and evil. And truth and falsehood, beauty and obviously ugliness. But he was aware even then of the kind of ideological struggle that the government had to prevent young people from growing up on foreign works or tv. And I guess that's just ongoing and it's not really working. But people seem to get around it either by reading comics or using VPNs and. And it still very much influences the kind of anime that's being produced in China as well.
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A
Thinking a bit more about who is creating all of this. One interesting thing you talk about in the book is that the majority of authors of Danmei fiction are in fact young women. Why is that?
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B
Yeah, I think so. Danmei is a really interesting Japanese import as well. For anyone who doesn't know, it's generally romance written by girls who identify as straight, but they write about two lovers who are men. In Chinese, it means addicted to beauty or aestheticism. And there are various theories. I mean, it's the most. I should go back and say it's the most popular type of romance in China. So people are very interested in why girls are writing themselves out of their own romances, essentially. And I think the sort of theories are it's to avoid judgment about sexual transgression. Issues of pregnancy don't have to worry them anymore. They don't have to make a decision about career or family in these fictional universes anyway. Nor is there any pressure to marry or shame about not being married. It's just not part of the male relationship. And if there is sex, which obviously makes it more risky to publish anyway, there is a sense that the girls like that the violence isn't directed towards women, it's directed towards a man. And I guess what sort of makes it back to your question in a way that this is a quite strict sense about it being female readership and female writers. So the girls want to be writing about it and reading it, but they want to remove the girls from the sort of role of protagonist in the stories that they're reading. And it has. It's created a really sort of interesting dynamic in China, one in which these sort of male relationships are often turned into really, really successful TV shows in which the kind of comradeship between the two men is respun as socialist brotherly love. And another in which girls who are writing about sort of more sexually explicit or pseudomasochistic relationships have been put in prison, much more so than male writers who write about equally kind of violent things. Yeah, a girl called Mr. She went by the name of Mr. Deepsey, went to prison for 10 years for. For her book. So it's a sort of strange, I guess, arena in which girls are sort of experimenting with all sorts of boundaries and transgressions.
- [26:39]
A
But it's not the only genre that has sort of some specific challenges in being published in China. So I wonder if we can move from talking about da me fiction to crime fiction or murder mysteries. Right. Again, these seem like really common, you know, very popular types of things. Why are these tricky to write in China? And to what extent do authors sort of try anyway?
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B
Yeah, I guess it's tricky because law and order are, you know, law and order is the pillar of the CCP's or one of the pillars of the CCP's legit sense of legitimacy, you know, that they have a degree of control over how people behave. And it's not great to have crime fiction that acknowledges in the way.
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A
A.
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B
Culture that has a lot of crime. So many crime writers sail quite close to the wind by, I guess, sort of presenting crime in China, but also showing the police at being really good at cracking down on it. I think there was a professor in Hong Kong University who identified in 2012 that the government had declared that there were no unsolved murders in China, which he says is statistically impossible. But for the crime writer, there just has to be that sense that that kind of idea is reflected in what they're writing. There was a really, really fascinating TV show which was based on an online novel called in the Name of the People, which was the first time that corruption had been allowed to be shown on TV for decades. And it was, I guess, seen as being aligned with Xi Jinping's anti corruption crackdown. And I think what it offered a lot of viewers and readers was a feeling of catharsis, this sense that there had been corruption that was not being acknowledged for years. But it also gave the government a chance to sort of demonstrate the ways in which they are cracking down on it. It's what Geoffrey Kinkley, who's an academic around all this stuff, calls the law as literature rather than the law in literature. So sort of using fiction to support certain ideals and policies. But, you know, it was still kind of risky for them, but it paid off, I think.
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A
Yeah, that's really interesting to see where those risks are. Another trend I wanted to ask about was cottagecore, again, big in the West. Why is this popular in China? To what extent is it for the same reasons it is outside of China?
- [29:38]
B
I mean, I think there are, of course, overlaps that we're all Kind of, sort of wondering what the sort of flood of technology into our lives has taken from it, taken from our sense of reality even. I think in particular in China, the sort of agrarian or like pastoral is a very, very powerful part of the cultural imagination and the literary imagination, whether it's the Tang dynasty poets, but also even with the communist origin story, it all begins with agrarian peasants and that they are the heart of the revolution. And I also think there is something about longing for one's ancestral home that is so deep in the Chinese psyche and poetry and literature. So it hasn't taken a lot for people to become very captivated by the idea of returning, returning to these sort of idyls. There is a really popular influencer who has moved back to the countryside and makes videos about, you know, painting her lips red with rose petals and making silk from, you know, silkworms and things. And they're really beautiful videos. And I think people sit and watch them and just sort of swoon. And it's sort of. I think people thought that it might just be a sort of COVID era thing, but it's really gaining traction. I think there's something called the rural reconstruction movement, where people are kind of thinking about setting up libraries in the countryside and moving back there to sort of talk about things and work the land. And it also feeds into this. There's a sort of movement called lying down or Tang Ping, which I think is sort of caught up with young people feeling like urban living. The rat race, has left a huge sort of hole in their heart. They need a sort of meaning in their lives that they can't get from urban living. So while it's similar, I think, to our longing for a simpler life, there are kind of just powerful forces in the sort of cultural imagination as well that make it so beguiling.
- [32:08]
A
Yeah, that definitely combination makes sense, especially for something that is so popular. Turning perhaps to the opposite type of questions, I've been asking you. I've been asking you about kind of, why is this genre tricky? Why is that one tricky? I wonder if we could talk about a genre that's perhaps actually easier to maybe get published in China than in other places, which is sci fi, sometimes considered really niche in other countries, but there's a lot of it in China. Why?
- [32:35]
B
I think it's been much easier for people to write about the future where it's not sort of constrained by history or the present day in terms of what can and can't be touched. I also think there's. I'd just like to add that so much of Chinese sci fi is really, really exciting. And there's a lot of writers who are actually. It's one of the few areas where they're choosing to, you know, not stick with lucrative careers and actually just writing sci fi to try and make that their career because they're so sort of inspired by all of the ideas that are sort of coming up being in China at this time. But I also think it's accompanied by unlike in the West, I think, and this also goes against what I was saying about Cottagecore, a real excitement about what technology can do. And people talk about living on the moon in a way that doesn't sort of feel tinged with worry. Or they could, you know, might write about sort of the. The benefits of AI or kind of symbiotically pairing with a robot. That doesn't. It just comes with a degree of openness and excitement and interest. It's freighted neither way in terms of like pro or con, but there's just excitement in it. And I think the government aren't too worried about it because it's not about the past or the present. And I think it's also a sense that people in China feel like they are part of the future. They are where technology is being embraced more readily and being put in place more comprehensively. And that doesn't feel completely terrifying, perhaps because it was sort of linked with. This period of bringing essentially a billion people out of poverty is also linked with an explosion in. In technology. So it is kind of thrilling to read science fiction that comes the degree of optimism and excitement as well as innovation in the way that we're sort of much more black mirror here, I think, and worried about it all.
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A
Can be nice to have something optimistic to take from any book, really. And speaking of taking things from books, is there anything further you want to make sure that readers outside of China understand from this?
- [35:05]
B
I mean, I think I just really hoped or my aim with writing the book was to give people other lenses to, I guess, engage with China. That was sort of beyond economics and politics and sort of human rights questions. Of course, all of these things are sort of tied up with that. But it felt like a kind of inside out way of trying to better understand the contradictions that exist within China at the moment. But also it would hopefully offer an opportunity for us to kind of look again at our own cultural landscape and look for some kind of overlaps that we have as well as ways in which we can maybe learn from what's happening there. But to certainly not be quite so resistant to finding out more about what Chinese people are writing within the particular climate that they live.
- [36:10]
A
Lots to think about there. Can I ask as a final question what you might be working on now or anything you're looking to work on? Anything you want to give us a sneak preview of?
- [36:21]
B
I've just finished a piece about delivery drivers in China and the way that they are, I guess, prioritizing the humanities rather than making money these days. And I have also become quite interested in the role that memoirs are playing in terms of bringing generations together. But that's sort of early days at the moment.
- [36:44]
A
Well, sounds intriguing, so best of luck pursuing that.
- [36:48]
B
Thank you.
- [36:49]
A
Any listeners who want to learn more about what we've been discussing can read the book titled the what China Is Reading and why It Matters, published by Columbia Global reports in 2022. Megan, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast.
- [37:02]
B
Thanks so much for having.