From microblogs and avant-garde literature to serialized autobiographies and online poetry forums, Michel Hockx's Internet Literature in China provides a wide-ranging and carefully choreographed survey of literary productions that exist outside of postsocialist China's print culture system from the 1990s to the present day. The book positions itself against the more conventional way of looking at the Chinese Internet through the lens of the “Great Firewall” or state censorship, and provocatively redirects its research focus toward the abundance of Web activities and communications originating from an active generation of Chinese netizens. The greatest contribution the book makes to an audience interested in media culture in China is its eloquent demonstration that the Chinese Internet is not just about repression, but also features an erraticism and unpredictability not legible in the framework of censorship. Focused on problematizing a singular understanding of postsocialism, Hockx thoughtfully concludes that postsocialism cannot be properly understood without engaging seriously with Chinese Internet studies. The book thus provides an initial glance at a new, interdisciplinary, and fast-developing field in modern Chinese studies.
The question of what Internet literature is cannot be answered without reconsidering what “literature” means in an era when state censorship coexists with the commercializing forces of a competitive market. While literary activities on the Internet push the boundaries of the state-regulated publishing system, such activities are nonetheless subject to the market interests of international multimedia groups seeking control of China's media outlets. Internet Literature in China documents not only emerging literary practices on the Internet, but also the shifting definitions of “literature,” whose transformed meanings provide a rare archive of the changing relationship between aesthetics and politics.
The biggest challenge of writing about Internet literature is its ephemerality. Websites not only undergo constant updates but may also disappear entirely. Based on Hockx's research archive and written in the style of a virtual travel journal, the book contains four chapters organized by different online literary practices that are considered by Hockx to be representative of Chinese Internet literature.
Chapter 1 presents an overview of the online literary landscape from the early 1990s to the 2010s, with an emphasis on the creation and transformation of China's first successful literary website Under the Banyan Tree. This chapter foregrounds the analytical approach that Hockx uses throughout the book. In addition to comprehensive descriptions of the Web interface(s) used in a particular literary practice, Hockx selects a few popular literary works and unpacks their significance. Hockx provides a detailed analysis of the Web diarists Lu Youqing and Li Jiaming. Both wrote diary-style chronicles describing their experiences battling terminal diseases. Hockx's discussion captures not only the emergence of a new literary practice but also its immense popular appeal.
Chapter 2 investigates the “online chronicle” as a literary practice by examining the works of three distinct online chroniclers. These include Chinese avant-garde writer Chen Cun, the first microblog novelist Wen Huajian, and celebrity blogger Han Han. In their unique ways, each of these online writers is engaged in creating a social space for independent literature in China.
Chapter 3 deals most directly with the changing relationship between aesthetics and politics on the Internet. Through the examination of erotic fiction, Hockx shows Chinese Internet writers' creative and playful circumvention of state censorship as well as the state's shifting definitions of “healthy” literature. The chapter ends with a brief discussion of the website Black and Blue, where Hockx underscores the site's avant-garde ideals and high literary standards as an example of independent online literature.
The last chapter of the book is devoted entirely to the study of online poetry published both inside and outside of China. The most methodologically rigorous chapter, this section examines a wide-ranging selection of works. Hockx asserts that the abundance and diversity of online poetry—encompassing classical-poetry forums, erotic poetry, and programmable computer software that generates textual morphs, among others—call for a redefinition of what we consider to be poetry and, more broadly, literature.
Internet Literature in China depicts an exciting new chapter in postsocialist Chinese culture. A pioneering work that paves the way for new literary and media studies, the book is an early experiment on bringing legibility to a variety of Internet writings. In many ways, the book alludes to a much larger and unfinished project. In the attempt to introduce Chinese Internet literature to Western readers, Hockx's emphasis on evaluating the aesthetic value of online writings reveals certain underlying assumptions about literature as an aesthetic institution. Relying on a set of Western, modernist, and aesthetic categories such as the avant-garde and the experimental, Hockx leaves out discussions of immensely popular works that do not fit easily into existing literary categories, such as the same-sex erotic fiction genre Boys Love and fan fiction as a genre, which Hockx mentions but does not discuss in detail. This absence may be especially important for queer, women, and other marginalized writers who are at a clear disadvantage in the traditional publishing system. Hockx sets out to investigate how online writings redefine the meaning of literature, paying special attention to literary productions that circumvent the traditional print culture system. Yet the book's focus on aesthetic evaluation serves to highlight the similarities between print and Internet literature, rather than explore the unique traits of the latter. Although this may well be the purpose of Internet Literature in China, where Hockx characterizes the Internet as an additional venue for familiar forms of intellectual exchange, further elaboration on what makes Internet literature unique may be a potential direction for future research. Overall, Hockx's meticulous documentation of China's Internet culture is an invaluable contribution for anyone interested in this largely overlooked and essential aspect of postsocialist Chinese society, and constitutes an indispensable resource to the study of globalizing Chinese media culture.
