In the Red, the largest book to date on contemporary Chinese culture, offers a formidable range of information, with very few errors, mostly of translation or romanization. Barmé, an Australian reporter and researcher with long experience of watching the PRC from Hong Kong, has looked closely at his subject, and his attempt to understand its reconfiguration deserves our admiration and respect. He sensibly takes the crushing of the revolt in Tiananmen in 1989 as a watershed that has marked a decisive turn in Chinese cultural life. The book starts with a discussion of the political purge that followed Tiananmen, and returns to current political developments in its last chapter and long Postscript. Its somewhat delphic title can at a guess be taken two ways—certainly as a reference to the context of cultural production under the greatest remaining Communist regime; but perhaps also to its upshot. Barmé stresses at the outset the sheer volume of print now pouring off the presses in China—at least according to UNESCO statistics, the PRC was one of only two states to publish more than 100,000 titles in 1994, though given the size of its population this is not that impressive a figure. He dubs this ‘publishing furore and writing fever’ a new ‘graphomania’ and ‘logorrhea’. But what of its quality? The title could be read as hinting at an ultimate superfluity of all this sound and fury—a deficit in meaning that no amount of hyperactive output can hide.
Barmé’s focus, as this initial emphasis suggests, is highly selective. For all its larger claims, In the Red is essentially devoted to the fate of Chinese literature and ‘literary politics’, rather than culture in general. Readers expecting coverage of cinema, music, or architecture, for example, will be disappointed. Apart from one, rather outsize chapter on t-shirts—whose legends lend themselves to his treatment—he confines himself to literary topics, with only side-glances at other fields of culture. In this respect In The Red is narrower than Jean Zha’s lively, shorter study China Pop, which deals with television, town planning and films as well as novels. There is, however, one sense in which a concentration on literature may offer a privileged angle of vision on recent Chinese culture. Most observers agree that modern Chinese culture can be roughly divided into three sectors: that of the dictatorial state, that of the intelligentsia, and that of mass consumption. This triangle is older and more visible in literature, where from the early 20th century onwards constant shifts of power forced them into a complicated set of alliances and oppositions, than in any other field.
It might appear that Barmé does not subscribe to this tripartite division, since he repeatedly argues that any distinction between high and low art is merely ‘academic’, and that ‘mutual cannibalisation’ undermines even the distinction between party propaganda and opposition to the regime in matters of culture. Were this really the case, contemporary Chinese culture could more or less be treated as a single undifferentiated bloc. In practice, however, Barmé does not really contest the triangular division, since he devotes separate parts of the book to the three sides, and offers very different evaluations of each. He precedes his discussion of them, however, with a theoretical sketch taken from an essay by the Hungarian writer Miklos Haraszti, who in the eighties described the cultural scene in his country as a ‘velvet prison’, trapping intellectuals into unwary collusion with the regime, from which there was no escape. The contradiction between this scheme and the tripartite lay-out of the book is evident, since it is clear that the highly commercialized scene on display in China today is a prison-house neither for popular nor for official culture. It looks more like an unprecedented carnival for both.
Barmé begins by depicting State controls over current Chinese cultural production. His portrait of the official grip on the mental life of the nation is not entirely unflattering. He tells us many stories of the remarkable adaptability of the PRC propaganda machine to commercial styles of presentation, however clumsy or grotesque the result might at first seem to be. In a chapter with the cute title ‘CCPTM & Adcult PRC’ he suggests that the Chinese Communist Party has been impressively successful in turning agitprop into advertising, as a less intrusive and more effective means of domesticating the Chinese masses. ‘Party adcult’, he writes, ‘de-sensitizes the public’ to the power wielded over it. A certain ambivalence of tone is detectable in his account of this updating of ideological manipulation. The reason why Barmé should be less than scathing about it becomes clear when he turns to popular culture.
This is where his main interest lies. About two-thirds of the text are devoted to the stunning growth of Chinese popular culture. Barmé dwells with relish on the power of the new commercial tide of distraction and entertainment. Official propaganda has had to adopt its strategems and its vocabulary. Intellectuals fall into aphasia before the ingenuity of its forms. Barmé reserves his most enthusiastic treatment for market-oriented popular fiction, whose supreme practitioner is the Wunderkind Wang Shuo, and foremost champion the former Minister of Culture Wang Meng. Each enjoys a special chapter of detailed discussion and hundreds of mentions throughout the book. There is, however, a difference in his portrait of the two. Wang Meng’s self-assumed role as enlightened advocate of popular culture left him open to objection from other critics, and Barmé shows us how he was embarrassingly attacked by—well, some young intellectuals. Wang Shuo, on the other hand, emerges unambiguously as the central hero of ‘contemporary Chinese culture’.
In point of fact, there is no doubt that Wang Shuo could have become an excellent writer—had he not been spoilt by market hype (which he came to manipulate without scruple) and foreign acclaim of the kind we find here. His early works were biting satires with real moral force; Playing with Thrills remains one of the best Chinese novels of the past fifteen years. Gradually, however, Wang Shuo started to strike the pose of a complacent school bully, flaunting his brutishness with the proud declaration, via one of his stock characters: ‘I’m a hooligan (liumang). I’m not scared of anyone’. Barmé renders liumang with the euphemistic ‘lout’, lending the term a jovially populist note it does not have in Chinese, where its meaning is closer to the sociological notion of lumpen, with a strong undertow not just of bad manners, but of criminal violence. It is no surprise that Wang Shuo should have reaped such rewards from this stance in today’s China, where uncontrolled corruption and rampant abuse of power for monetary gain have been spreading like a prairie fire. Wang Shuo’s glorification of the liumang simply feeds—and is fed by—this demoralized culture at large.
Barmé himself notes that ‘at times it was difficult to distinguish between Wang’s fictional creation and his circle of writer-business partners’. The wider issue, of course, is whether—as his admirers would have it—the effect of Wang Shuo’s work is to debunk the hypocrisies of official culture, or to reinforce them. More generally, has the growth of commercial popular culture in the PRC strengthened or weakened the regime’s dictatorial control of cultural life? To this crucial question, Barmé returns no consistent answer. On more than one occasion, suggesting that the state has actually benefited from the new commodification of culture, as ‘its sign system has been enriched and enhanced’, he seems to sense that popular—like any other—culture in China needs some criticism. Yet after pages of excited coverage, he offers virtually none.