The "linguistic turn" in 1990s China and globalization

It is impossible to review how the use of language changed in 1990s China, a subject worthy of several books. China had made herself a new grand narrative of change in that decade; it seems that any aspect of the change is describable, except the change of narrative that had described itself. Rather than a full survey, however, this essay features some texts, authors, moments, and discourses in the fields of the humanities linked to the printing sphere; whether about the issue of ordinary language, classical language, or poetic language, they all inevitably engage the yuyan zhuanxiang (linguistic turn) which originated in the May Fourth period, interplayed with the polemic of the "living" and the "dead" language in the past and present. From diverse voices in debates arises a new language consciousness critical of the "standard language," or putonghua, legitimized by official language reform in the twentieth century. Ultimately, it is about how a new myth of hanyu (Han language) has been created, and its significance in the contemporary global context. In this essay, the "linguistic turn" refers to verbal texts in publication, aside from cultural products in any other language that might be more spectacular, such as visual arts, pop music, or fashion. In twentieth-century China, the linguistic turn has been repeated, as we trace to the first turn created by the May Fourth Movement, only against which can we understand the second in the 1990s. As a metaphor borrowed from the philosophical realm, it strikes an elevated note, though this essay does not deal only with the elite; nevertheless, it carries with it Marx's famous comment: "all facts and personages of great importance in world history occur [...] twice, [...] the first time as tragedy, the second as farce."1 In this case, however, it is comedy rather than farce. The year 1993 was crucial for a new cultural paradigm. Print culture bloomed in all directions. Amid waves of the Post-New Literature, the Post-isms, mass production, and the debate over the renwen jingshen (humanist spirit), a linguistic revolution silently swept the humanist fields in which the term hanyu was commonly used. If in the early 1990s an intellectual consensus had been formed that language is the most essential element in culture,2 now the use of hanyu implied a shift of its role from parole to langue in the Saussurian sense, characteristic of the rise of a new racial and national consciousness. By naming it with the character Han, the Chinese language was being identified as a system of ideograms; charged with autonomous critical drive, it was like a double-edged sword: internally it subverted the orthodox tenets of language reform since the early twentieth century, yet at the same time it reaffirmed national unification under the name of Han that was more historically hallowed than the term yuyan (language) or guoyu (national language); externally it symbolized the national cultural essence in answer to the cultural pressures of globalization. If the intellectual discourses in the 1980s were heroic, idealistic, and hyperbolic, what prevailed in the 1990s was individualistic, quotidian, and realistic. The mainstream of literature and art, even the avant-garde "1990s poetry" and sixth-generation cinema, was dominated by a kind of new realism. "My camera d o e s n ' t lie," claimed the sixth-generation directors, trying to distinguish themselves from the fifth-generation directors. In daily and speedy changes, the reality itself was so miraculous and spectacular that it challenged capacities of expressing, performing, and imagining; material fortunes were so close and fertile that they washed away big and empty promises. From the generation born in the 1960s arose a new collective anxiety for contemporaneity; around the question of how to grasp the reality and how to represent it a new paradigm of poetic creation came into being. Sun Wenbo, a m e m b e r of the zhishifenzi xiezuo (intellectual writing) says, "all poets who were influential in the 1990s ... took the relationship between writing and reality as the factor they must consider, and in this consideration they found themselves a starting point and a totally new understanding of poetry and its writing techniques."3 He wrote: Thus, unlike the 1980s when the holiness of poetry conferred an absolute superhuman value, now the purity of language and its unshakable authority were more or less thrown away. If it departs from the concrete facts of human life, what significance does poetry have? Since language was born in a world complicatedly intertwined with good and evil, it has never been pure. Therefore, from another point of view, the poetry of the 1990s is, we may say, an earthy (shisu de) poetry. Although the "earthy" does not sound lyrical, it is real. Which one - politics, economics, or science - is not real? The reality of human life is earthy; poetry tells about human life and the spiritual understanding of the history of human life. So it is a process of return rather than separation.4 Such a strong sense of history in the poetic field does not mean that the Chinese poets are short of romantic imagination; rather, their creative practices are historically conditioned by two factors. Indeed, they no longer pursue the Romantic self or an ontological poetics, under the influence of post-structuralism, which materialistically treats language as a se miotic culture. Meanwhile, they join the Chinese intellectuals in the search for a new sense of history and a new collective identity. I will return to this "sense of history" in the conclusion of this essay.