The Subplot

 
The Subplot
What China is Reading and Why It Matters
by Megan Walsh

Columbia Global Reports
2022
 

 

The Subplot is a very recent review of fiction written by mainland Chinese authors and read primarily by Chinese audiences. This is a short work, a little over 100 pages, and each chapter covers a different popular genre. Regardless of genre, authors who publish in China are required to treat certain topics as off-limits, and cannot openly disagree with the government's official position on others. Part of the creativity of Chinese literature is trying to write around what's not allowed to be said.

 
Walsh explains her project by noting that Western audiences are usually most interested in books that have been banned outright by the CCP, often by authors living in exile. Meanwhile, in China, fiction accounts for a much smaller proportion of book sales than in the West, and fiction writers have come under renewed scrutiny and censorship after a period of relative openness in the 2000s and 2010s, in the time of Covid and President Xi's increasing authoritarianism.

 
Books by authors who grew up during the Cultural Revolution, and have experienced the rapid change of capitalism, tend to be the most overtly political, and the best known to Western audiences. Authors like Mo Yan and Lan Yianke write historical fiction that incorporates as much criticism of past governments as the censors will allow.

 
Authors who grew up in the first generation to be raised under capitalism (people my age) write about urban life and its amenities, and the pursuit of love and sex, unimaginable under Mao. These writers are often criticized for being vapid, or not sufficiently critical or political. Rural migrants in this age group, who moved to the cities for work, but lack the rights of people born in the city, have a thriving poetry scene that describes the harsh conditions of their lives.

 
Online fiction, roughly equivalent to American fanfic, is extremely popular. The two most common plots are about young men who repeatedly 'level up' in business, defeating foe after foe, until they attain super powers, and eventually godhood, and about young women competing to become the love interest of someone like that. These stories tend to be very, VERY long, some the equivalent of millions of printed pages. Online writers on platforms like Chinese Literature hope to gain enough readers to quit their low-paying day jobs, and dream of maybe scoring an anime adaptation. This genre has been the subject of a recent crackdown, directed by Xi, that's left many writers locked out of their own stories.

 
China also has a print-only underground comics scene that remains offline to try to avoid censorship. Books by non-Han ethnic minorities are subject to much more intense government scrutiny, because authors identifying themselves with their own ethnic group is treated as akin to protest or terrorism. Women are the most common readers of the 'boy's love' genre, whose homosexuality is often among the least transgressive elements, written by self-proclaimed 'rotten girls,' some of whom have been jailed for their writing. Ironically, despite the government's displeasure with these stories, they're a popular source for tv and movie adaptations, as long as the two central men can be officially recast as just friends or just coworkers.

 
Crime fiction was banned under Mao, and Western-style mysteries involving criminals who outsmart the police are still not really allowed. (In both cases because they're seen as implicitly criticizing the government.) Crime writing usually takes the form of police procedurals. During Xi's anti-corruption campaign in the 2000s, crime writers were allowed to depict corrupt officials as the criminals being caught.

 
There's a rich tradition of Chinese science fiction, which can sometimes use imaginary future societies as a basis for political critique. Cixin Liu and Chen Qiufan are currently the best known scifi authors. Pastoral 'cottagecore' style rural utopias have also recently become a popular topic, possibly as a reaction against Covid lockdowns.