UNIVERSITY OF EDINBURGH

ASIAN STUDIES
Essay Coversheet
*Proof of extensions should be appended to this coversheet*

Name and Matric No: Meghan Ghent

0910044
Course (for which this essay is due): Chinese Literature 3

Essay Title:

Discuss the ways in which Wang Xiaobo's The Golden Age

deconstructs and subverts the "spirit" of the Cultural Revolution and the Sent-Down
Youth Movement.
Word Count: 2800
Declaration of own work
I have read and understood the Plagiarism rules and regulations available
to me in course materials and at http://tinyurl.com/plagiarism-uoe.
I confirm that all this work is my own, except where indicated.
I understand that an electronic copy of my work may be submitted
to plagiarism-detection software.

Meghan Ghent
Signed: .
14th September 2012
Date: ..

Discuss the ways in which Wang Xiaobo's The Golden Age deconstructs and
subverts the "spirit" of the Cultural Revolution and the Sent-Down Youth
Movement.

The Cultural Revolution of 1966 to 1976 and the Sent-Down Youth Movement that it
brought about were characterised by high revolutionary ideals of collectivism,
passionate emotions and the omnipresent influence of politics in all spheres of life.
Wang Xiaobos novella The Golden Age, itself written by a former sent-down youth,
playfully deconstructs and subverts these fantastic ideals while underscoring their
absurdity by means of an anti-emotional approach, a cool disengagement with politics
in favour of prioritizing natural human instincts, and frequent use of satirical humour.
The Sent-Down Youth project had its roots in the Hundred Flowers Movement of
1957.1 By the time of the Cultural Revolution it became expected that young junior
high-school graduates would answer Chairman Maos directive to go up to the
mountains and down to the villages for re-education from the poor and
lower-middle peasants.2 Mao Zedong had determined that intellectual youths, or
zhiqing, had been imbued with bourgeois liberalism and, according to the important
principle of class struggle, needed thought reform. He also hoped that the intellectuals
would further disseminate Marxist-Leninist ideology to the rural residents who were
still conservative and traditional in their thinking.3
The zhiqing generation shared many ideals with the Cultural Revolution itself. It
prioritised class struggle and collectivism being a never-rusty revolutionary
screw, a part of a greater whole to the point where nearly any individual concern
was seen as individualist, that is, self-seeking and selfish, and therefore bourgeois
and to be struggled against.4 This evolved into an atmosphere of ascetism, especially
surrounding issues of romantic love and sex, which were individualistic pleasures.
The ultimate ideal was to transcend the human,5 and so these desires would have to
be denied:
1

This was a period in which the Chinese Communist Party government encouraged citizens to express

their views of the regime. This gave rise to a large volume of strongly critical statements made by
intellectuals, and caused Mao Zedong to realise the influence they could have on public opinion. For
this reason, an anti-rightist crackdown began where dissidents were purged and criticised.
2

King, Richard. Introduction: Writings on the Urban Youth Generation. Renditions, no. 50 (1998), p.

4.
3

Pan Yihong. Tempered in the Revolutionary Furnace: Chinas Youth in the Rustication Movement.

Maryland: Lexington Books, 2003, pp 36-37.

4

Ibid., p. 109.

Qin, Liyan. The Sublime and the Profane: a Comparative Analysis of Two Fictional Narratives

about Sent-Down Youth. The Chinese Cultural Revolution as History. Eds. Joseph W. Esherick, Paul
G. Pickowicz and Andrew G. Walder. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006., p. 242.

"The Cultural Revolution advocated an almost Islamic

prohibition on desire; the 'erotic' and 'sexual' became the
greatest taboo in language and speech. It was a time when
everyone was singing songs based on Mao's quotations,
studying the Little Red Book, bowing to the image of
Chairman Mao every day where they would 'ask for
instructions in the morning and report back in the evening',
and continually wiping out any private thoughts." 6

The zhiqing generations most defining characteristics, however, are its sense of
heroism, and its emotional intensity. Works appearing in print presented energetic
and idealistic young people boldly going along a path pointed out to them by the
Great Leader.7 In the late 1980s and 1990s, a wave of zhiqing nostalgia surfaced,
and accounts of life in the countryside, in addition to sentimental zhiqing literature,
were published, in which authors seemed to seek justification for their hardships by
emphasising their generations heroism and shared sense of historical purpose,8 and
romanticising the experiences of youth in the countryside. Wendy Larson proposes
that revolutionary passion was based in the emotions, and that this integrated
emotion into a chain of loyalty that extended up to the highest levels of the state.9
By trying to cultivate an atmosphere of revolutionary passion amongst the masses, the
Communist Party sought to politicise the emotions.
Wang Xiaobo, born in 1952, the son of a well-known logician, was himself sent down
to Yunnan for re-education at the age of just sixteen. His experiences left him with a
profound sense of the absurdity and futility of the Cultural Revolutions utopian ideals
and the nave enthusiasm of the sent-down youth project.10 He typically approached
these topics with a tone of irony and humour. In his essay The Silent Majority, he
describes his opinion of the spirit of the times:
Since I was old enough to understand, Ive heard people
saying, How fortunate our generation is to be born in this
sacred age, to take upon ourselves the sacred task of
liberating the suffering people of the world, and so on. My
contemporaries were all very inspired by this kind of talk and
loved to listen to it, but I always doubted a bit. How did all
these wonderful things manage to happen to me? I
6

Berry, Michael. A History of Pain: Trauma in Modern Chinese Literature and Film. New York:

Columbia University Press, 2008, p. 264.

7

King, op. cit., p. 5.

Qin, op. cit., pp 243-244.

Larson, Wendy. From Ah Q to Lei Feng: Freud and Revolutionary Spirit in 20th Century China.

Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009, p. 137.

10

Berry, op. cit., p. 268.

wondered.11

His most well-known novella, The Golden Age (1994) is written in an

emotionally-distant tone. Matters of sex, humiliation and political punishment, usually
topics that are approached with emotional gravitas, are narrated drily and levelly.12
His protagonists are not presented as tragic heroes13 or revolutionary martyrs as in
other works of zhiqing literature.14 Instead, they are simply intelligent people who
have managed to retain their humanity15 in the face of an absurdly anti-human
situation. Rather than giving into narcissistic nostalgia 16 and romanticizing the
sufferings of the past, Wang Xiaobo iconoclastically deconstructs the sacred 17
ideological passions of the Cultural Revolution to highlight their absurdity.
The protagonist Wang Er is a youth sent down from Beijing to a farm in the southern
province of Yunnan. There, he encounters a young, married female doctor named Chen
Qingyang, who has been accused groundlessly of being a broken shoe that is, an
adulteress and comes to enlist his help in proving her innocence. Instead, however,
he convinces her that proving her innocence is impossible, and that she should instead
prove her guilt. They begin an illicit sexual affair, and eventually escape the farm and
run off into the mountains to live off the land. After some time, they return to the farm
and are apprehended and forced to write a series of confessions for the farm cadres,
and attend struggle meetings. Twenty years later in the 1990s, Wang Er and Chen
Qingyang meet again and reminisce about their shared past while having sex.
It is tempting to view The Golden Age as a narrative about sexual love overcoming all
obstacles in a time of adversity, and the sexual act as an instrument of rebellion
against the totalitarian state. Zuoya Cao equates sex to a weapon with which the
heroes do battle against spiritual oppression.18 Hongling Zhang and Jason Sommer
in their introduction to Wang in Love and Bondage go even further, stating that sex
becomes an expression of rebellion against oppressive authority19 and explicitly
comparing it to the overtly politicized sex as seen in George Orwells 1984. This,
however, is ignoring the strong undercurrent of apathy and disengagement with

11

Wang Xiaobo. Chenmo de daduoshu. Baidu., n. pag. Translation is my own.

12

Larson, op. cit., p. 151.

13

Zhang, Hongling and Jason Sommer. Wang in Love and Bondage: Three Novellas by Wang Xiaobo.

Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007, p. xi.

14

For an example of an acclaimed work of zhiqing literature exhibiting heroic emotionalism and desire

to transcend the human, see Liang Xiaoshengs Snowstorm Tonight.

15

Wang. Chenmo de daduoshu. N. pag.

16

Qin, op. cit., p. 262.

17

Ibid., p. 263.

18

Cao, Zuoya. Out of the Crucible: Literary Works About the Rusticated Youth. Maryland: Lexington

Books, 2003, p. 165.

19

Zhang, and Sommer, op. cit., p. x.

politics throughout the narrative.

Wang Ers desire for sex is a product of his human nature, intrinsic to his being, and
as important as [his] existence itself.20 This is simply a sexually-inexperienced
youth in the golden age of [his] life, confronting so many desires of a deeply
individual and bodily nature. His sexual desire for Chen Qingyang is not motivated by
resistance to state control, as in Orwells 1984. Instead, Wang Er wants to seduce her
because she was my friend; and she had a full bosom, a slender waist, and shapely
buttocks.21 His pursuit of individual gratification flies in the face of the collectivist
rhetoric of the Cultural Revolution. In his own words, Craving good food and
aversion to hard work, together with lust for beauty and sex, make up a human beings
basic nature.22 However, this is a period in which individual thought and desire
have been denied, while political power is omnipotent.23 This concept is made into
an important metaphor in the passage where Wang Er describes the docility of
castrated bulls, and then explains:
Our team leader, the one who always wielded the hammer,
had no doubts that surgery of this kind would also work on
humans. He would shout at us all the time: You young bulls!
You need a good hammering to make you behave. In his way
of thinking, this red, stiff, foot-long thing on my body was
the incarnation of evil.24

The conflict here, then, is not between opposing political forces or ideologies; rather,
in a time when individual concerns and desires were seen as a diversion of vital
energy away from the greater cause of class struggle and revolution,25 it is a conflict
between human nature, and the anti-human circumstances 26 of the Cultural
Revolution.
This primeval, natural state of the human being is given room to flourish in the setting
of rural Yunnan. On one occasion, Wang Er awakens naked at the riverside and
contemplates: My little Buddha pointed to the sky like an arrow, bigger than ever
The sun glared down on me from a frighteningly blue sky [] Id experienced
numerous erections in my life, but none as vigorous and magnificent as that time.
Perhaps it was because of the location, so isolated from the villages that not even a

20

Ibid., p. 66.

21

Ibid., p. 68.

22

Ibid., p. 67.

23

Cao, op. cit., p. 169.

24

Zhang and Sommer, op. cit., p. 66.

25

Lin Qingxin. Brushing History Against the Grain: Reading the Chinese New Historical Fiction

(1986-1999). Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2005., p. 176.

26

Cao, op. cit., p. 168.

soul could be seen. 27 This sensual description of natural scenery and sexual
excitement points to what Sebastian Veg calls a Golden Age of sexual liberation in
the lap of nature.28 Great importance is attached to descriptions of the world of
nature; scenes of sexual interaction between Wang Er and Chen Qingyang often take
place in idyllic and wild natural surroundings, amid the stirrings of animals.
Historically, Yunnan was not considered a province of great strategic importance, and
its distance from the nucleus of political control, as well as the ruggedness of the
terrain and presence of multiple ethnic minority populations, meant that life on the
production teams was not as rigidly militarized or politicised as it was in other
provinces.29 As such, the characters in the novella have a degree of personal freedom;
and a more direct connection to the natural environment virtually replaces any
connection to the revolutionary cause.
Wang Er is a man only mildly perturbed by political events, 30 as he consistently
prioritises his own experiences and sensations over political consciousness. In the
third chapter, he gets into a fight with a local youth and a denouncing meeting, later
amended to a helping meeting, is organised. During this chaotic meeting, Wang Er
is intended to perform a self-criticism,31 but he does not even try. Instead, he stands
in front of the crowd and calls people names. Evidently, for Wang Er this conflict is
simply personal, and the politics and ideals of the Cultural Revolution are simply
background noise to him. Another example of personal-not-political conflict with
representatives of power is Wang Ers altercation with the military deputy. Instead of
corruption or other overtly politicised accusations, Wang Ers quarrel with the deputy
is simply that he finds the man very disgusting.32
The deputy is also presented as a ridiculous figure: Wang Er first encounters him as
the deputy is in the middle of brushing his teeth and speaking to him with a mouth
full of froth. When the deputy demands a confession of Wang Ers affair with Chen
Qingyang and begins to threaten him with political consequences such as
classification as one of the bad elements33 and punishment by the proletarian
dictatorship a speech reported by the narrator in a dry and unembellished
manner Wang Er responds simply by staring apathetically and wordlessly at the
deputy until the deputy gives up and leaves.
Wang Xiaobos frequent use of satire and humour is an important avenue through

27

Zhang and Sommer, op. cit., p. 66.

28

Veg, Sebastian. Utopian Fiction and Critical Examination: the Cultural Revolution in Wang

Xiaobos The Golden Age. China Perspectives, no. 72 (2007) p. 76.

29

Qin, op. cit., p. 258.

30

Larson, op. cit., p. 152.

31

Zhang and Sommer, op. cit., p. 73.

32

Ibid., p. 81.

33

Ibid., p. 82.

which the absurdities of the Cultural Revolution and the rustication project are
brought to light, and made light of. When Chen Qingyang approaches Wang Er to ask
him to prove that they are not having an affair, Wang Er replies that in order to do that,
they would have to prove either:
1.

Chen Qingyang was a virgin.

2.

Castrated at birth, I was unable to have sex. 34

Since neither of these can be proven, he says, proving their innocence is impossible.
Here the language of logical reasoning is used humorously, parodying the absurd
logic of the revolutionary period.35 Wang Er seems to be keenly aware of the
illogicality rampant in his surroundings, yet accepts that it is beyond his control, and
approaches it with a sense of humour rather than struggle,36 appropriating the absurd
revolutionary logic to further his own individual purposes. He also appropriates
revolutionary rhetoric, such as his often-repeated concept of the great friendship37
which he offers Chen Qingyang in order to seduce her. This is a play on the
revolutionary sentimentality in which the great love between a man and a
woman more a sort of comradeship is a metaphor for love of the party and its
Chairman.38
Later on the protagonists are taken into custody, and made to write confessions and
attend denunciation meetings. This whole process is written as a circus-like farce in
which the actions of writing confessions and standing on stage being struggled against
become like professional writing and theatre respectively, both acts being performed
repeatedly for a frenzied and insatiable audience. As he continues to write confessions,
Wang Er becomes quite proud of them, referring to his literary talent,39 and even
showing the duplicates to a friend years later, who said they were all very good, with
the charm of Victorian underground novels.40 Chen Qingyang is described as an
expert at getting denounced,41 even bringing her own pair of shoes to dangle around
her neck while playing the broken shoe, and feeling proud because when she was
denounced, people came to see her from several production teams nearby.42
At these denunciation meetings, Chen Qingyang is tied up with rope and put on show
in a manner that accentuates her sexuality, putting the curves of her body

34

Ibid., p. 65.

35

Cao, op. cit., p. 166.

36

Qin, op. cit., p. 245.

37

Zhang and Sommer, op. cit., p. 68.

38

Veg, op. cit., p. 82.

39

Zhang and Sommer, op. cit., p. 103.

40

Ibid., p. 104.

41

Ibid., p. 107

42

Ibid., p. 108.

completely on display.43 In the midst of the denunciation, she notices that the men at
the meeting all have erections from looking at her. Once again, the denouncers and
those with political power are made into figures of fun, as the narrator shows them to
be unable to fully deny their human nature as required by the party. Similarly, when
Wang Er writes his initial confession, Chen Qingyang and I have an indecent
relationship,44 the leaders say that it is too simple. Wang Er then writes another
confession, but the leaders keep requesting more and more sexual details. Unable to
embrace their basic human desires, the cadres and the denouncers have become
voyeuristic sexual perverts.45
Wang Xiaobos The Golden Age is exceptional in that although its historical setting is
the Cultural Revolution, and its author a former zhiqing, it is not characterised by
emotional nostalgia, political idealism and transcendence or erasure of human nature.
Instead it uses emotional distance, irreverent satire, and a foregrounding of the
individual and the human over the collective and political.

43

Ibid., p. 109.

44

Ibid., p. 82.

45

Lin, op. cit., pp 176-177.

Bibliography

Berry, Michael. A History of Pain: Trauma in Modern Chinese Literature and Film.
New York: Columbia University Press, 2008.

Cao, Zuoya. Out of the Crucible: Literary Works About the Rusticated Youth.
Maryland: Lexington Books, 2003.

Huang, Yibing. Contemporary Chinese Literature: From the Cultural Revolution to

the Future. Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007.

King, Richard. Introduction: Writings on the Urban Youth Generation. Renditions,

no. 50 (1998).

Larson, Wendy. From Ah Q to Lei Feng: Freud and Revolutionary Spirit in 20th
Century China. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009.

Lin Qingxin. Brushing History Against the Grain: Reading the Chinese New
Historical Fiction (1986-1999). Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2005.

Pan Yihong. Tempered in the Revolutionary Furnace: Chinas Youth in the Rustication
Movement. Maryland: Lexington Books, 2003.

Qin, Liyan. The Sublime and the Profane: a Comparative Analysis of Two Fictional
Narratives about Sent-Down Youth. The Chinese Cultural Revolution as History. Eds.
Joseph W. Esherick, Paul G. Pickowicz and Andrew G. Walder. Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 2006.

Veg, Sebastian. Utopian Fiction and Critical Examination: the Cultural Revolution in
Wang Xiaobos The Golden Age. China Perspectives, no. 72 (2007) pp. 75-87.
Wang Xiaobo. Chenmo de daduoshu. Baidu. Retrieved from
<http://baike.baidu.com/view/851619.htm> on 07/09/2012.

Wang Xiaobo. Huangjin Shidai. Wang Xiaobo Zuopin: pp 1 39. Retrieved from
<http://code.google.com/p/wangxiaobo/downloads/detail?name=wangxb_xeCJK_201
20501.pdf> on 07/06/2012. PDF file.
Yang, Guobin. Chinas Zhiqing Generation: Nostalgia, Identity and Cultural
Resistance in the 1990s. Modern China, Vol. 29, No. 3 (2003), pp. 267-296.

Zhang, Hongling and Jason Sommer. Wang in Love and Bondage: Three Novellas by
Wang Xiaobo. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007.