Poets Go Online: What Kind of Jianghu Lay Behind the “Seven Days and Seven Nights” Flame War 17 Years Ago? | 20 Years of Internet Literature, Part 4

The uproar that shook the entire poetry world — where did it come from, and how did it vanish?

So-called internet literature began simply as writing published online, then became writers the internet dug up, then content made for online readers, and finally turned around and changed literature offline.

Literature met the same fate as any bricks-and-mortar business the internet has changed.

We are visiting, one by one, the people who mattered over these 20 years, in the hope of getting this history down.

Poets went online, and they were thrilled.

In 2000, not long after the internet arrived, someone threw together a site called Shijianghu, “the poetry jianghu,” and poets felt they had a world of their own again.

A decade or so earlier, poets had been a towering presence. Literary youth were idols. Poets all over China made friends through poetry, kept up a constant back-and-forth, lived unrestrained lives, and walked at the front of the era.

Then came the shock of 1989, and after 1992 the wave of commercialization. The poets' standing collapsed overnight, and they sank out of sight. The people with pagers on their belts, trading stocks, became the new elite on campus.

One flame war on Shijianghu blasted them all back into view — poets who had once written, and poets who were still writing in secret.

Shen Haobo was the central figure in that “Seven Days and Seven Nights” battle. “I counted — 49 named, well-known poets and writers took part in that fight.” More than 16 years on, Shen still has the same excitement in his voice, breaking into “ha ha ha ha” laughter as he talks.

I

On New Year's Day 2001, an argument about what actually counts as “avant-garde” poetry moved online.

Arguments like it had always gone on in poetry's pre-internet boom years; they just moved slowly. At the “Forum on Chinese-Language Poetry of the 1990s,” held on Mount Heng in 2000, Shen Haobo argued that poets who billed themselves as avant-garde ought to do some self-criticism too, and gave a talk attacking another poet, Han Dong. When Han Dong heard about it, he wrote a reply and published it in the January 2001 issue of Writer (《作家》). One exchange, and nearly half a year had gone by.

Shen Haobo read it. By then he had turf of his own — Shijianghu. He posted a piece there, and the tone was anything but polite. “I've only just found out about your snide attack on me in Writer. My counterattack starts now.” And: “Han Dong, you really have gotten old — maybe someone should have said so long ago.”

“The moment I realized you were cursing me out, I went on Shijianghu — he wasn't online yet back then — and I said, somebody pass the word to Han Dong, and then I fired right back.” Shen Haobo got worked up telling it, and let a curse word slip. “Then old Han found out. He didn't have a computer either, so he went to an internet café with two young guys and opened fire on me from there. Middle of the night, out of nowhere, he just opened fire.”

“So I had to fight back. Next thing you know, both camps were pulling in more and more people — some backing me, some backing him. Ha ha ha ha! Right, both sides started getting reinforcements, tons of people piled in. All his old buddies piled in, all those famous writers and poets from his day — all of them!”

Poets later called the seven-day, seven-night quarrel the “Shen-Han dispute.” At the time, many of them tried to read it as a matter of poetic aesthetics. Yang Li saw a fight between the “folk” and the “fake folk”; Afei called it a clash of interests behind rival schools; and on its face, the Shen-Han dispute was simply an argument over what kind of poetry deserves to be called avant-garde.

Looking back on it, Shen Haobo said: “Calling them essays is a stretch — a lot of it was just forum posts… Back then I think the main goal was to curse him into submission. Not much scholarly weight, if I'm honest. The Shen-Han dispute was really a fight, a fight… we were all poets, and everyone's mouth was vicious…”

“Summing up this online argument by conventional logic would leave you thoroughly disappointed: its nature unclear, its meaning nil.” That was how Yi Sha, the poet who stood on Shen Haobo's side of the “fight,” put it in his book On Modern Chinese Poetry (《中国现代诗论》). But he went straight on to write: “So let's understand it another way: all those named, well-known poets baring their true selves online, showing their full colors, running wild with words — isn't that more interesting than that crap about ‘nature’ and ‘meaning’?”

II

The poets had a rowdy, happy time of it — rowdy enough that Shen Haobo still can't stop bringing up those 49 people, and that Yi Sha not only put it in a book but found in it something “more interesting than meaning.”

The internet gave these old comrades back their lost, blazing years.

The pent-up feeling of the 1980s had found an outlet. Poems by Shizhi, Bei Dao and others, passed around underground during the Cultural Revolution, swept away the rigid, clanging tone of revolutionary literature and turned to human nature and the inner life. Under the murky banner of the so-called “Misty School,” poetry was forced into pop culture, and poets were treated like rock stars — rebellious, beautiful, young and unruly, and burdened with worry for the nation, all at once. And back then Haizi had not yet reached Shanhaiguan, and Gu Cheng had not yet picked up his axe… everything looked as though it truly did face the sea, spring warm and flowers blooming.

The aesthetician Li Zehou considered this poetry the most important aesthetic text of the 1980s. Ten years of destroying culture and destroying beauty, he once argued, had left so much ugliness, and so much ugliness passed off as beauty, that working out what beauty was became a need everyone shared. Poetry, in turn, became a wave that was exalted and popular at the same time, right across society.

Good times never last. Poetry's tide went out fast. In the spring of 1989, Haizi lay down on the railway tracks and killed himself. That summer, Bei Dao was forced into exile. Young poets lost their bearings — no sea, no flowers, their black eyes still seeing only the night, and no idea where to look for the light.

The generation of readers who had seemed so in tune with the poets, close but not too close, said goodbye faster than the poets did, and more decisively.

Nothing shows the rift between poetry and the public better than what happened to Yi Sha's poem Starve the Poets to Death (《饿死诗人》). The poem was Yi Sha's own thinking about poetic aesthetics, an argument against writing that was simplistic, vulgar or commercialized. But in the public's eyes, those four words turned into mockery of poets themselves — penniless poets, serves them right to starve.

“Because poetry fell silent as a group for a time after 1989, there was, relatively speaking, a vacuum in poetry from 1989 into the early 1990s,” Zhou Hang, a professor at the School of Literature at Yangtze Normal University, wrote in the paper “The Evolution of Poetic Ideas Since the 1990s” (《1990 年代以来诗歌观念的流变》).

Over holidays and skipped classes, campus poets still made friends through poetry, but the glory of holding everyone's attention was gone. Pop songs, real rock stars, KTV, television and everything on it… the poets went back to their slow, awkward little living rooms.

III

The internet was like an angel. Wonderful.

Poets felt it was simply a better vehicle for a form like poetry than traditional literary journals such as Poetry (《诗刊》), run by the China Writers Association.

“BBS forums had just taken off, and the text that best fit the size of a single post was poetry — you could read one in a few minutes, comment on it right away, and the interaction was intense,” Nan Ren said of Shijianghu's early energy. Nan Ren founded the site.

Shen Haobo agreed: “The size of a poem, the rhythm of the line breaks, the length — usually it's all pretty short. You can read it fast, get into it fast, get straight into the poet's inner world. I think poetry really suits the way the internet grows.”

The internet also sped up how poetry circulated. Before, you finished a poem and mailed it to a magazine like Poetry or People's Literature (《人民文学》), where it went through editing and typesetting before it finally ran. “The whole exchange took forever — a poem written in 1988 might not get discussed until 1990,” Shen Haobo said. On Shijianghu, “because people wrote fast, they could publish the moment they finished.”

And perhaps more important than any of that: the power to define poetry, long held by the traditional academy, was seized back through the internet.

“In the print era, one kind of poem always had the advantage — the kind written by people with a good education, excellent at language, good at building sentences. There was a threshold, a sentence-building threshold, because the journals used it to screen submissions,” Shen Haobo said. “But in the internet environment it can hide almost no one. As long as you have talent, everyone sees it, and your name spreads fast. That's what directly produced a kind of populism in Chinese poetry.”

In 2014, Yu Xiuhua became a sensation. A poet with cerebral palsy caused by oxygen deprivation at birth, living at home in Hubei with no regular job, she suddenly had a poem — Crossing Half of China to Sleep With You (《穿过大半个中国去睡你》) — running across the whole internet. The route it took is worth dwelling on: posted on a blog, spotted by an editor at Poetry, then fed back online again, this time through WeChat and Weibo.

Shen Haobo now runs the Motie Poetry Reading Society. Among the 100 good Chinese poems it picked for 2016 were works by Yuan Qi, a retired rural middle-school teacher; Yi Xiaoqian, a French-language student; Zhang Mingyu, a high-school teacher in Shanxi; and Tan Kexiu, an architect.

Shen Haobo was of course a beneficiary of the internet himself: the Lower Body movement, the label permanently attached to his name, also burst onto the scene by riding it. “A Lower Body group formed by a bunch of hotshot young poets — Shen Haobo, Yin Lichuan, Duo Yu, Wu Ang, Sheng Xing, Xuanyuan Shike, Li Shijiang, Ma Fei, Zhu Jian, Li Hongqi and others — came out of nowhere. The Lower Body crew were forever stirring up trouble; there was no way they wouldn't draw a crowd,” is how Nan Ren described the relationship between Shen Haobo's “Lower Body writing” and Shijianghu.

Shen Haobo entered the Chinese department at Beijing Normal University in 1995. As he saw it, poetry teaching in Chinese departments had gone down a blind alley, stressing polished, tidy language, stressing sentence-building and word-crafting. “However twisted and contorted you could make a sentence, that's how you made it — anything but talk like a human being.”

To break what he saw as the limits of traditional poetry, Shen Haobo published the essay Who's Mocking the Nineties (《谁在对九十年代开涮》) in 1998, an attack on the poetry scene of the day. Criticizing Xiao Kaiyu's poem Muttering (《嘀咕》), he wrote: “Truly baffling muttering, manufactured posturing — beyond playing tricks with mystery, what does Xiao Kaiyu know about this world? Does he know how to face life and writing honestly?”

None of it was enough. Traditional poetry writing “was getting more and more of the say, at least in newspapers and magazines, the mainstream press, the official publishing system.” Shen Haobo said: “Back then it was an era controlled by the elite, and every magazine editor's power kept growing. That puts you in a tough spot, right? Your poem could be a hundred times better than his, but if he just doesn't like you, what do you do? You get cut.”

IV

The internet let poets hold their heads up, full of spirit.

Chinese poetry, which had looked orderly and even lukewarm in the early 1990s, began to show new life once the internet put it into high gear. “Your exchanges got much faster, and so did the collisions between different schools and different ideas. You collided every day, you distilled something every day, it could happen at any moment — so the aesthetic impact was fiercer, the arguments were fiercer, the collisions were fiercer.”

By 2000, the two most important poetry websites had appeared: Shishenghuo, or “Poem Life,” and Shijianghu.

Shishenghuo was founded by four poets: Lai Er, Xiao Xi, Baiyu Kugua and Sang Ke. Reportedly, Sang Ke had no particular vision for “internet poetry” at the start — “I just wanted readers to see truly high-quality poems.” That explains why Shishenghuo looked more like a portal, collecting poetry news and curating poems to publish.

Shijianghu, built on the Lequyuan forum system of the day, was more of an open forum. Its founder, Nan Ren — real name Yu Xi — was a poet himself, and like Shen Haobo he had studied in the Chinese department at Beijing Normal University.

The different formats produced very different places. If Shishenghuo was buttoned up, Shijianghu was chaotic and alive. In Nan Ren's words: “Setting up Shijianghu only meant providing a pitch. We'd often invite a bunch of big names in poetry to come cheer things on, and people charged around the pitch showing off.”

“Judging by the creative momentum and influence of the time, the Shijianghu forum could be called the front line of contemporary Chinese poetry — noisy, clamorous, a jumble of voices all at once. You could say it showed the sharpest, most solid, most vital side of Chinese poetry,” is how the poet Xiao Yin, born Wang Zhaohui, put it.

“There had never been a platform for exchange like this, and you could feel how different this way of talking was. It was all so exciting.” That is how Shen Haobo explains why Shijianghu became the gathering place for Chinese poets overnight. “Suddenly everyone is talking nonstop, having real discussions — none of that existed before, right? And over time, more and more poets kept showing up. Some came in 2006, some in 2008, whenever — they just kept coming.”

A fellow alumnus of Nan Ren's, Shen Haobo had been posting on Shijianghu from its first day. The Lower Body school he founded also used the site as its publishing base. “I was even a moderator,” he said, though he didn't like managing anything. “Mostly I just joined in the cursing. I like cursing people out too.”

Fast, showing off, charging in, trading ideas, cursing people out… was this poetry, or was it jianghu?

In June 2001, the poet Xiao Chen published the essay Down With Jianghu-ified Poetry (《打倒江湖化诗歌》), which blamed the internet for a flood of crude poetic garbage and argued that the Lower Body writing Shen Haobo had started had coarsened poetry as a whole. Out of that came an argument involving the poets Xiao Chen, Xu Jiang, Yang Li and Han Dong, later called the “Xu-Han-Xiao-Yang dispute.”

“A debate, especially an online one, doesn't have to solve every problem. As long as a genuine question of poetics gets raised, it has been worth the fight. I think the greatest value of this argument among the four poets Yang, Xiao, Xu and Han lies in how it touched on the idea of ‘chitchat verse.’” Looking back, Yi Sha wrote: “In these three years, Chinese poetry seems to have already passed ‘ten thousand mountains in a light boat.’”

Ten thousand mountains in a light boat. Poetry or jianghu, getting past ten thousand mountains didn't necessarily mean getting off the narrow path. That 49-person brawl nobody can forget, the one that shook the whole poetry world, produced manifesto-like posts that drew, on average, only one or two thousand clicks each.

V

The road literary people travel looking for allies is always full of thorns and setbacks, and internet poetry was no exception.

In 2010, Lequyuan shut down, and Shijianghu, which sat on top of it, closed with it.

Blogs and Weibo replaced forums, and the poets moved over. Blogs and Weibo were still open to the whole internet, but the way people reached them made them feel more like a half-private space. Then WeChat Moments and official accounts replaced blogs, and the poets' work grew more closed off still. From BBS to blogs to WeChat official accounts, poetry seemed to back away, step by step, from the middle of the public square into the poet's bedroom.

“These days people just finish writing and publish it on WeChat. As long as someone can see it, that's fine; or it runs in one of the poetry journals on WeChat. A few thousand people see it, ten thousand people see it, that's enough — the poet feels he's written it, published it, talked it over with people, and he's satisfied,” Shen Haobo said. Poets were still writing and still trading ideas; everything about poetry now played out in this half-closed space.

Read a Poem Before Bed (《读首诗再睡觉》), founded in 2013, may be the biggest of them: its nightly push averages more than 30,000 reads, and it occasionally sells facial cleansing soap on the side. A single poem on the WeChat account of Poetry magazine also gets a few thousand reads. Shen Haobo runs an account called the Motie Poetry Reading Society, where a poem passing a thousand reads already counts as a good day.

Shen Haobo and his publishing company, Motie, put together a set of poetry collections by poets born in the 1950s. The first printing was 4,500 copies, and every one sold. For the publishing industry, a first printing of 4,500 is barely a test of the market. By the standards of poetry, Shen Haobo thinks it is an extraordinary number.

“Poetry has always belonged to the elite; there's no need to make everyone read it,” he said. In turn, he refuses to let the public judge poetry. Poetry and the public have split again into two separate worlds with completely different values.

Shen Haobo still writes poems, and posts them on Weibo or in his WeChat Moments. But in the public eye, Shen Haobo the poet doesn't matter.

Outside poetry, Shen Haobo's day job is Motie Publishing. After years of putting out books, new investors decided its model was too simple all the same. Motie is now one of the largest private publishing companies in China, and thanks to the IP it holds it is valued at 4.5 billion yuan. The internet literature he talks about in public is “genre-based, industrialized, commercialized, IP-driven.”

Which is why, before our interview, he made a point of saying we could not talk about poetry and publishing at the same time. “They're two completely different things. You can't mix them up.”

Like that 49-person brawl, the excitement was in the end the family's own. Liu Ma, editor-in-chief of Read a Poem Before Bed, described it as many voices clamoring inside poetry's own circle. The internet let them turn up the volume all at once and gave poets a taste of a crowd. Smart poets really were ahead of the curve on internet culture — remember, this was New Year's Day, 2001. What is worth remembering more is that even the poets' moment of noise turned out to be close to a swan song.

Outside, the world surged on, magnificent and indifferent, with nothing to do with the poets at all.

Cover image: Unsplash