Murong Xuecun: From Internet Novelist to "Public Intellectual" | 20 Years of Internet Literature ③

Or, more precisely: a critic by conscious choice.

So-called internet literature began as writing simply put up online; then it meant writers the internet dug up; then content made specifically for online readers; and then it turned around and changed literature offline.

Like any part of the real economy the internet has remade, literature met the same fate.

We are visiting the important figures of these 20 years one by one, hoping to put this history on the record.

Recently the media came to Murong Xuecun again, asking him to talk about the Li Wenxing case. Nearly two months earlier, Li Wenxing, a 23-year-old college graduate looking for work, had been found drowned in a water-filled pit beside a national highway in Tianjin. Investigators found that he had stumbled into a pyramid-scheme organization, and that his death was closely tied to it.

Eight years before, Murong Xuecun had written a book about pyramid schemes. Back then he had a friend get him into a pyramid-selling operation; 23 days later he got out. Out of that came China Is Missing an Ingredient (《中国，少了一味药》).

In the book's preface, Murong Xuecun wrote: "In the end I had to admit that this is land well suited to pyramid schemes. Everyone in them shares the same traits: no common sense, not even a basic power of discernment; greedy for quick gains, caring about nothing but money; ignorant, credulous, fanatical, stubborn, fixed on unreal goals and blind to the facts right under their noses. That is a portrait of the pyramid-scheme member, and it is a portrait of most of us. Pyramid schemes are a disease of society, but the lesion is buried deep in our culture, in the air, in the soil; wherever the conditions suit, it will quietly grow."

Murong Xuecun had already written the prescription for curing this social disease at the root: "common sense." Before the American War of Independence, Thomas Paine set out a whole set of common-sense principles about how society and government work in a book called Common Sense, which is credited with awakening the American public and shaping the American national spirit.

China Is Missing an Ingredient carries nothing like that much theory, but Murong Xuecun's attention had already moved from his own predicament to the country's. That 2009 book can probably also be read as the marker of his turn from internet literature writer into public intellectual — a critic by conscious choice.

I

In 2002, Hao Qun, 28, graduated from the China University of Political Science and Law and took his first job in Chengdu, in sales. In his free time he knocked around online — you could call him an "internet literature youth," or, in the language of the day, just a "netizen." Writing things online was mostly a pastime then, and Hao Qun gave himself a string of handles for it: The Little Matchstick Who Sells Girls, Gousheng and the like, showing off the early internet's brand of cleverness.

One of those names was "Murong Xuecun." It caught fire.

First came Tang Seng's Love Story (《唐僧情史》), posted on the Wuwen Nongmo literature board of Tianya, the hottest BBS of the day — not long, just over 6,000 characters. Writing in the voice of Tang Seng, Murong Xuecun had him say: "Many years later, I would miss that spirit in the peach blossom grove beyond all measure. I know that for a 'Buddha' this is not as it should be. I should forget it all — all the love and hate, the sorrow and joy, the achievements and the ideals."

Tang Seng's Love Story was plainly an imitation of The Legend of Wukong (《悟空传》), Jin Hezai's internet literature hit from the year before. It belonged to the era's online enthusiasm for rewriting classic characters. The very first comment under it read: "Pretty good, but too many people have written this theme already."

Since he was writing online anyway, he tried a different tack. Like many novelists, he started from the life he knew best, and in April Chengdu, Please Forget Me Tonight (《成都，今夜请将我遗忘》) began appearing on Tianya.

"Describing real life, content with experience behind it — I could pretty much write it out of what I'd lived through myself." The novel follows a group of young people born in the 1970s, freshly out into the world and adrift in their careers, their love lives and their marriages. "I was in a foul mood that day. Head office had made Fatty Dong general manager. The guy started the same day I did, has a face like a pig's head, not an ounce of real ability, and knows nothing but how to flatter the boss. To think I now had to work under a jerk like that — my chest tightened just thinking about it." From the opening page, passages like this set the whole book's gray tone. And at the end, the protagonist, Chen Zhong, gets nothing he wanted either: his marriage and his friendships both collapse, his career goes nowhere, and he finally leaves Chengdu for Guangzhou.

The thread's click count quickly passed 200,000, and once it was reposted to other sites the total eventually topped one billion, making it the most watched internet novel of the year. Four months later, Chengdu, Please Forget Me Tonight finished serializing, and on the momentum of its online run the novel was published that November.

Looking back, Murong Xuecun put it down to readability — how the plot was laid out, how the story moved, how the characters were built. That, he thought, made Chengdu a decent read.

The larger reason behind it probably lay in the nostalgia then rising among young people, the post-70s generation of the day. Going from campus into society, anyone runs into a considerable drop, even setbacks. "It's a feeling young people share: you don't fit into society, but in the end you drift with the current and join in its filth anyway."

The book became the turning point of Murong Xuecun's life. In December 2002 he quit his job and became a professional writer.

"I'm a fairly slow person. I can only do one thing well at a time."

II

Just as literature on the internet was exploding, Murong Xuecun began to move away from it.

After 2004, apart from the occasional online Q&A, he was rarely active on Tianya any more — no more padding out threads or commenting on other people's posts the way he used to. His third book, Eden's Cherries (《伊甸樱桃》), went up on Tianya chapter by chapter only two months after it was formally published, and in the comments underneath plenty of readers wrote that they had already bought the book in a shop and had come to Tianya just to show support.

The economics can't be ignored. The internet brought Murong Xuecun fame and attention, but the BBS forums paid him nothing extra for it. In print, by contrast, Chengdu sold about a million copies, and the royalties were a sizeable income.

His relationship with internet literature was turning awkward. In 2008, when Murong Xuecun signed with Shanda Literature, a report quoted him saying: "I'll certainly bring out the print edition first — that income is at least steady. The e-book comes a month or two later; there'll be a gap in between." By then, calling Murong Xuecun an "internet writer" already looked out of date.

At the same time, the internet was pushing him away. In 2011, Murong Xuecun disclosed that after licensing Forgive Me for Turning This World Upside Down (《原谅我红尘颠倒》) to Shanda Literature, his cut of the revenue over three years came to just over 300 yuan. On Weibo he wrote: "More than 200,000 characters, the only fully authorized edition on the entire internet, close to three years, and the whole take was 300-odd yuan. Hearing that, I went cold all over."

By then Qidian Chinese Net, Shanda Literature's own site, was already turning out online authors who made a million yuan a year. What happened to Murong Xuecun showed that internet literature's readers no longer chased early internet writers like him, and so the internet itself could no longer support a writer like him economically.

He was not the only one.

In 2002, just as Murong Xuecun's name was taking off, the early internet writer Li Xunhuan announced his exit from the internet with a book called Exiting the Stage in Full Makeup (《粉墨谢场》). "What I wanted then was to say goodbye to 'Li Xunhuan' — the pen name, or online ID — and go back to my real name, Lu Jinbo," Li Xunhuan told Xinmin Weekly in 2006. He became a publisher instead, founding Guomai Culture, which has put out a great deal of literary work — including, of course, work that began online.

Anni Baobei left Rongshuxia around 2000. She has not published any work online since. In an interview with Beijing Youth Weekly, she said: "I define myself as an independent writer. And I write seriously, always. I don't let my writing be confined to any school or category, and I don't let anything else influence it."

Two things pushed internet writers to do this. "On the road of literature I really am still outside the door, looking in. So I wanted the Li Xunhuan who belonged to mass culture and popular culture to disappear. If I went on writing, I'd do it with a new identity, from a new starting point," Lu Jinbo once said.

This retreat from online back to offline moved Chen Cun — a champion of internet literature and then artistic director of Rongshuxia — to post The Best Period of Internet Literature Has Already Passed (《网络文学最好的时期已经过去了》). He rebuked internet writers: "If everyone treats going offline to publish a traditional book as internet literature's highest achievement, as a writer's credential and license to boast, then what is left of internet literature?"

The question, asked in 2002, was soon buried under internet literature's unchecked growth.

Between 2002 and 2011 the taste of internet literature's readers changed beyond recognition. Shanda Literature's most profitable titles were now fantasy and xuanhuan novels — books that ran past a million characters as a matter of course, usually built around a hero who keeps getting stronger and beating his enemies. They produced authors like Tangjia Sanshao and Tiancan Tudou, whose annual incomes could reach 10 million yuan, or even 100 million.

The individual writing of Anni Baobei, Li Xunhuan and Murong Xuecun, with its flavor of traditional literature, lost outright: it was not entertaining enough.

Brutal youth, realist subjects… Murong Xuecun, too, could only find a place of his own through traditional publishing.

III

Murong Xuecun the writer had in effect finished his work in internet literature, but the internet's marks had become part of the character of what he wrote.

As internet literature grew more and more entertainment-driven, he tried to give the real-life subjects he wrote about deeper thought — a sense of social responsibility, if you like. "What I write is more or less a shadow of real life," Murong Xuecun said.

Eden's Cherries: Hangzhou. A young man is given a Montblanc pen worth tens of thousands of yuan, falls under the spell of the material world and finally destroys himself. "The way I see it, this world has only one faith. Of the 6 billion people on Earth, every one is a devout believer in money."

Heaven to the Left, Shenzhen to the Right (《天堂向左，深圳向右》): Shenzhen and Chengdu. A company employee uses a loophole in a contract to make off with more than a million yuan and blows it all within two years. Stranger still, the two state-owned enterprises tangled up in the contract both refused to take responsibility for the missing money, so neither of them went to the police. "When I was writing the novel, his story came to mind naturally. At the start his story was part of my novel; as the novel went deeper it drifted further and further from his story."

Forgive Me for Turning This World Upside Down: an unnamed big city. The protagonist comes from a poor village and works his way up to be a lawyer in the city with both money and a name, only to be caught up in a murder case. Along the way, a great deal of fact about judicial corruption comes to light.

In almost every one of his novels, Murong Xuecun's anger runs beyond control.

In Eden's Cherries he named every chapter after a luxury brand, closed each chapter with a short account of where that brand came from, and added commentary like this: "An Armani T-shirt of 43 percent cotton and 57 percent blended fabric sells for 7,900 yuan, the equivalent of a year's wages for a blue-collar worker on the Chinese mainland. Spent instead on pencils for children who have dropped out of school, it would buy 40,000 of them; at 40 a year, that would keep one child supplied for a thousand years."

On the Douban page for Chengdu, Please Forget Me Tonight, a user called Moxi summed up Murong Xuecun's style: "Society is dark, you find life hopeless, having money doesn't work and having none doesn't either, being kind doesn't work and being sly and vicious doesn't either, and dying is the only good way to carry on; it's all scheming and backstabbing, bribes taken and paid, eating, drinking, whoring and gambling, that sort of thing."

Lu Jinbo, who published Murong Xuecun's books, once took him to task: "In the whole book (Forgive Me for Turning This World Upside Down) you will not find a single good person. Not a trace of kindness, of feeling, of integrity, of courage. This really is a novel so dark it drives you to despair. A writer doesn't have to be clever, but surely he can't be without humanity?"

Murong Xuecun defended himself: "If you say what I write is dark, it would be closer to say our lives are like this. When I write about eating human flesh, that comes out of the Chinese tonic culture where anything can be turned into a nourishing supplement — and in fact all of it really happened."

Online, voices are loud and many; for one of them to be noticed and heard, it has to be turned up on purpose. When people today call Weibo a place where rational exchange is impossible, Murong Xuecun will say: "The mood on Weibo isn't necessarily worse than the mood on the forums back then. People's language then was bloody; they'd stop at nothing."

"Living in this society, all of us carry some sense of humiliation. As a writer I'm bound to be more sensitive to it," Murong Xuecun said. With a writer's sharpness he caught that pervasive mood and let it out.

IV

"I have a certain amount of a voice too, so I have to use it," Murong Xuecun said.

By 2010, this writer known for depicting bewildered young people hustling and drifting through the city, this successful literary youth who had found his worth online, had taken on a new duty online.

China Is Missing an Ingredient won a prize from People's Literature at the time, and Murong Xuecun wrote a speech to give on accepting it. "A writer should not be a parrot," he wrote, "should not be a loudspeaker wrapped in human skin, and still less one of a pack of pets that can only bark. Writers should make their own sound — and when it is called for, that sound should be clear-headed and upright."

The speech, which could have stood as his literary manifesto, was never delivered at the ceremony. But he found a new space instead.

Murong Xuecun made his own turn deliberately. It was also after China Is Missing an Ingredient that his writing moved toward public space, coming out as commentary and columns rather than the novels of before. As Weibo gradually became his main platform for speaking, people gradually began calling him a "public intellectual."

For that he had Weibo's rise at that moment to thank. Just as Murong Xuecun the internet writer had found a place of his own on Tianya, Weibo at first also gave him room enough to speak. Around 2010, public intellectuals — educated people with academic backgrounds and professional expertise who took part in debate about public affairs — were the most active class on Weibo, and Murong Xuecun was one of them.

Speaking out on Weibo about one public event after another, his account at one point had more than 4 million followers. "Weibo's public intellectual and preacher" — that was the title Southern People Weekly pinned on Murong Xuecun in a report about him.

What came next is well known. In the purge of public intellectuals and of Weibo as a public forum, the preacher's Weibo account was canceled in 2012.

After it was canceled, Murong Xuecun told the BBC that he felt afraid: "A group of people were probably going to be punished very severely, and you don't know whether it will be you, and you don't know whether that punishment is coming, or when."

From then on, Murong Xuecun all but vanished from public life in China. For a while he moved to WeChat official accounts, setting one up called "Seven Writers" with Jiang Fangzhou, Fei Yong, Li Haipeng, Ran Yunfei, Tujia Yefu and Wang Xiaoshan. But like Serious Gossip and Poison-Tongued Movies, Seven Writers was shut down in February 2017. A replacement, "New Seven Writers," ran for a while and was shut down too.

All the while, internet literature went on thriving. Only the internet was no longer the internet it had been, and literature, of course, had long since stopped being Murong Xuecun's literature.

Cover image: Unsplash