China has the largest online publishing platform in the world and among the most striking genres of fiction. There is a flourishing area of works by migrant workers toiling in China’s rapidly growing cities and lamenting their distance from “left behind children” in rural villages. It is, says author Megan Walsh, the most comprehensive migrant worker poetry movement in the world.
Megan Walsh author of The Subplot on modern Chinese writing Photo: Supplied
Then there is the sub-genre of online homoerotic fiction written for the internet by mainly female writers, calling themselves “rotten girls”. Walsh, a journalist and critic, argues it is a way for Chinese women writers to absent themselves from the story and yet tackle stories of society expectations, taboos and attraction.
There is much more; literary superstars; authors churning out e-sagas the longer the better for pay; underground comics playing on Chinese characters - all tackled by Walsh in her tiny but exuberant book, The Subplot: what China is reading and why it matters. A former editor on London Newspaper The Times' book section, she studied Chinese films and literature after falling in love with the culture living in Beijing. She sets out to dispel the impression in the West that Chinese writing is all about dissidents or conformists. First, the sheer scale and colourful diversity of writing is far bigger than that, says Walsh. Moreover, she says, every writer is trying to find ways to tell their stories despite censorship, which is “intentionally hazy”.
What is China reading? Photo: Supplied
Walsh is good in her opening chapters at teasing out the generational differences and, occasional misunderstandings, between China’s best known writers. There’s the “lost” or “perplexed” generation born in the 1950s whose formative years in a poor agrarian China were upended by the Cultural Revolution. The problem is their past is very much a different country for readers in modern urban China. They are writers like the Nobel Prize-winning Mo Yan, Yan Lianke or Can Xue, as well as exiled dissident author Ma Jian
Those who came after, the “post-80s” writers, were the first generation to grow up in modern, urban cities, often writing about the flash cash-obsessed young thrusters. The model was Han Han, the handsome, massively popular author and blogger who has given up writing novels to drive fast cars and write screenplays about it. Zhang Wei (pen name Tang Jia San Shao) is a multimillionaire superstar online, reportedly earning more than $28 million in one year. To the lost writers, the newcomers seemed vapid. To the newcomers, the lost were out of touch.
Where Walsh really excels is capturing the volcanic churn of online publishing - many of the e-writers working on the China Literature platform, owned by tech giant Tencent. China is in the midst of a boom of sci-fi writing, with authors taking their stories into the future and away from present-day China. At the opposite end, e-writers are churning out endless fantasy sagas, many in the wuxia tradition of mythical worlds of martial arts heroes. The numbers are staggering.
"Today, online reading platforms are crammed with more than 24 million fiction titles by writers who, depending on their stamina, hammer our between 300 and 30,000 words every day, hoping to catch and keep the eyeballs of 430 million currently active readers," writes Walsh.
Readers pay-per-view or take out monthly subscriptions to unlock chapters; it is, says Walsh, Dickens-style serialisation for the TikTok era. The niggling problem for the Chinese Communist Party, Walsh points out, is that despite years of stories emphasising core socialist values, most of the online sagas involve individual heroes and all published on a capitalist-style market for stories.
You don’t have to have read many Chinese authors to enjoy this book. The big names are here and Walsh sketches them well. What makes this concise book so readable is its snapshot of the contradictory ways China is finding to tell its stories.
The Subplot: What China is Reading and Why It Matters
by Megan Walsh
Columbia Global Reports US$16
