This book represents the first full-length study in English of the poet Haizi (Zha Haisheng, 1964–89). While his suicide on 26 March 1989 has been mythologized against the background of the Tiananmen democracy movement (during which Haizi's close friend Luo Yihe died of a brain haemorrhage after falling into a coma on Tiananmen square in May), Rui Kunze's main contention is that, from the 2000s, Haizi has been reintegrated in the canon of contemporary literature and hence acknowledged by the state. The first complete edition of Haizi's works was compiled by Xichuan in 1997; just four years later, Haizi was posthumously awarded the National Poetry Prize by People's Literature (together with the poet Shizhi) and began to be included in school textbooks from 2003. He was anthologized by Hong Zicheng as one of the four important post-Menglong poets with Han Dong, Yu Jian and Zhai Yongming.
In the first two chapters, Rui Kunze offers a comprehensive overview of the literary and intellectual scene during the 1980s, highlighting the convergence between state modernization and intellectuals' embrace of enlightenment. Her study is at its best when she discusses the intellectual debates that took place around Haizi and more generally the intellectual legacy of the 1980s. She pinpoints Cui Weiping's 1999 edited collection Haizi Who never Dies (Bu si de Haizi) as the source of the Haizi myth, the content of which is encapsulated in the summary of another article published by Cui in 2006: “Thus the poet is described as a cultural hero with prescience and courage, who fights against an increasingly commercialized society and represents the spirit of idealism of the 1980s” (p. 63). Haizi in this sense embodies the quintessence of the avant-garde of the 1980s, imbued with the conviction that their own heroic stance was in resonance with the march of history towards a more liberal and enlightened future, not seeing the contradiction between this elitist heroism and the democratic ideals they (mostly) supported (the author might have pointed out that this is a typical Romantic contradiction, Victor Hugo is perhaps its ideal-type). At the same time, it opened the way for a possible absorption by the state under the shared banner of a Western-inspired “modernization” discourse.
The study revolves around three core chapters, devoted to the notion of minjian (the popular or folkloric, chapter three), Haizi's experiment with “modern epic” (chapter four) and his appropriation of Christian vocabulary and symbolism (chapter five). Retracing the history of minjian throughout the 20th century, and in particular its subversive or subaltern potential highlighted in two seminal articles published by Chen Sihe in 1994, Kunze seems to conclude that Haizi eschewed its counter-hegemonic dimension: “minjian in Haizi's poetry not only fails to retrieve the collective memory concealed by official historiography, but serves conveniently the Party's need to construct a mythical community of the Chinese nation” (p. 32). In Kunze's view, Haizi's endorsement of “folklore” as set out in the preface to his poem “Legends” (Chuanshuo; 1984) and in “But Water, Water” (Danshi shui, shui; 1985), which are discussed at length, ends up returning to a form of alternative – but equally hegemonic – narrative of populistic nationalism: “With the desire to seek alternative historical and cultural traditions, Haizi's ‘folklore themes’ promise to inscribe the lived experience of common people in the collective memory of Chinese through ‘epic writing’” (p. 174).
Chapter four highlights the parallel between Haizi's use of epic to rebuild a mythical cultural China and the Party's post-Tiananmen turn to cultural nationalism to rebuild legitimacy, sponsoring new areas like “national studies” (guoxue). After compiling a long history of the epic form in China, Kunze analyses Haizi's unfinished 400-page collection The Sun, an attempt to write a “national epic” encompassing all Chinese culture, juxtaposing it with the poet's proclamation in “Decapitation”: “In a time of decline and utilitarianism, I will bear witness to heroism” (p. 205). This endorsement of heroism, in Kunze's view, opens the door to politically questionable interpretations of Haizi's writing.
Finally, in chapter five, Rui Kunze puts Haizi's search for the divine in the context of several seminal essays published in the 1980s, in particular Li Tuo's two well-known pieces on Mao-style, Li Zehou's Marxist theory of the sublime and Liu Xiaofeng's book Zhengjiu yu Xiaoyao (Deliverance and Dallying). Drawing on Michelle Yeh's 1996 study of “The Cult of Poetry” (Journal of Asian Studies 55.1), Kunze draws a parallel between the absolutist, utopian frames of mind in Haizi's vision of the poet-prophet, and the figure of Mao as poet-ruler. Kunze concludes: “the religious symbols and motifs turned into their inversions when Haizi became disillusioned with his identity of poet founded on the idea of the (socialist) poet hero” (p. 294).
Overall, this is a very solid study, which contains a wealth of material that is not directly related to Haizi but puts the intellectual history of the 1980s back into perspective. The bibliography and footnotes are extremely rich and provide much further reading. Although Kunze extensively quotes Haizi's poems, they perhaps are sometimes discussed less convincingly than Haizi's and other thinkers' essays about poetry and literature. The core of the argument (the potentially totalitarian affinities of what is essentially the aesthetics of Romanticism) remains – in this reviewer's eyes, at least – less interesting than the rich texture of literary debates the book retraces. The structure of the book comes across as somewhat spiralling: there are repetitions and themes are revisited several times with only incremental progress of the argument. There are also whole chunks of text (on the epic, on Christian imagery) which seem lifted from the dissertation this book originated in – a more streamlined study, focused on Haizi and (as the emblem of) the generation of the 1980s would probably be more effective. The book is also marred by countless typos, especially in proper nouns. However, all in all, it opens up new lines of thinking about the 1980s: the relationship between the “roots”-based cultural nationalism that emerged in the pre-Tiananmen decade and the reversion of the “new left” to state-led nationalism in the post-Olympic one stands out clearly. The richness of the material discussed gives this book the potential to become the new standard intellectual history of the 1980s, although the author might want to save this project for a new and entirely restructured essay.
