Exploring the politics of reading in the People’s Republic of China
Politics and literature have always been closely linked, as they can have profound effects on each other and the societies in which they meet. Researchers in the READCHINA(opens in new window) project, which was funded by the European Research Council(opens in new window), explored this link through an investigation of the social conditions under which texts were read in the People’s Republic of China (PRC) from the 1950s to the present day, and the impacts of various policies. “Some texts seem to go past us without a trace, while some readings prove life-transforming for the individual,” explains Lena Henningsen(opens in new window), lecturer in Chinese literature at Heidelberg University(opens in new window) in Germany. “When numerous such everyday persons experience these transformations, this in turn can have an impact not only on the individual, but on a society as a whole,” she adds. READCHINA took an innovative, ‘grassroots approach’ to investigating literature, looking at the social conditions under which things were read to truly gain an understanding of how politics and literary policy affected an ‘everyday person’ in the PRC. This was particularly interesting for the READCHINA team to study in China, where reading was not only in high esteem, but also – during the Maoist years – highly steered.
A widespread literature review
To investigate the literary history and cultural policy of the PRC, the team applied a number of methods, depending on the case study. This included: participant observation and interviews; distant reading of various online information on blogs; and analysis of autobiographical texts from the 1970s to create a database with information on who read what, when and how. The team also studied collective reading using a combination of archival research; and how reading is depicted in literary texts at different points in time, to gain an idea of the imagined ideal readers at the time texts were consumed. In all these cases, it can be intricately difficult to get access to ‘actual’ readers, notes Henningsen, as they mostly do not leave a trace of their readings or the impact of readings on their lives. “Therefore, the mass of silent readers – silent in the sense that they do not talk or write about themselves as readers – always needs to be brought into the analysis,” she adds.
Unintended consequences of literature policies
The project found that reading certainly had an impact on China, on individuals as much as on society as a whole. This was not always the impact the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) wished to achieve. “Readers may read what they are told to, yet they come up with their own thoughts and resolutions,” says Henningsen. As for today, with the movement of reading into the digital sphere and with the amount of surveillance that the CCP has put in place, the CCP may be able to exert media control more easily than in the past. “If we extrapolate our findings, however, we can safely assume that quite some Chinese readers may come up with their own ways of reading,” Henningsen notes.
Publications and translations of Chinese literature
The project(opens in new window) published a range of publications(opens in new window) available(opens in new window) on the READCHINA web page. The team also developed three digital resources to be used by the research community, including: a database(opens in new window) that collects reading acts; a platform for translations(opens in new window) of Chinese comics, and a critical digital edition of a handwritten manuscript from the Cultural Revolution.