This week, AAS Publications celebrates the release of the newest title in our Asia Shorts series, The Transpacific Flow: Creative Writing Programs in China, by Jin Feng (Grinnell College). Feng recounts the story of how, since 2009, Chinese academics and authors have taken inspiration from workshop-based creative writing programs in the United States and developed similar courses of study at institutions in China. Often still fighting for security and position within their universities, these programs prepare their students to navigate both the market of cultural production and a publishing industry in which the Party-state always has final say.
In the excerpt below, taken from the introduction to The Transpacific Flow, Jin Feng provides readers with an overview of how creative writing programs have come to be, first in the United States amid Cold War concerns and more recently in China.
Order The Transpacific Flow from our distribution partner, Columbia University Press, and register now to join us at a virtual book launch with Jin Feng and journalist Megan Walsh on Wednesday, May 22 at 8:30am Eastern Time.
“I am sick of teaching. I am sick of teaching. I am sick of teaching,” bemoaned Vladimir Nabokov to his friend, the literary critic Edmund Wilson. Although he was teaching Russian literature at Cornell University in the 1950s, Nabokov yearned to focus on writing Lolita, a novel that would earn him monetary rewards, fame (or notoriety), and the freedom from ever having to teach a college course again. Yet it is precisely the systematic coupling of the profession of authorship with institutions of higher education that makes creative writing programs “as American as baseball, apple pie, and homicide,” according to Mark McGurl. This uneasy alliance reveals a tension between the desire to engage in creative endeavors and the systematization of literary study both in the United States and in China, where founders of writing programs have purportedly emulated US models to teach creative writing in Chinese academic institutions.
From the beginning, the American-style writing program was “a national institution with international aspirations and attitudes,” and it was formed under the tremendous urgency of the postwar imperatives for the humanities. During and after the Second World War, a group of influential US intellectuals asserted that creative writing, as no other medium could, enshrined human values that were crucial to civilization. The Iowa Writers’ Workshop (IWW), which was founded at the University of Iowa (UI) in 1936 and which established the basic protocols of writing pedagogy, had been conceived as an ideological bulwark against the specter of the Soviet Union. In the words of its longtime director, the American poet and “creative writing Cold Warrior” Paul Engle, to practicing writers, Iowa City felt like “Paris for Hemingway in the 1920s,” not least because the IWW taught empathy and spread the gospel of democracy across the globe. Since then, the programmatic mechanisms modeled by this revered writing program have proliferated not only in the United States but also all over the world. Ranging from English-speaking Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom to countries as diverse as Israel, Mexico, South Korea, and the Philippines, many nations have by now established their own MFA programs in creative writing, emulating the IWW.
In 2009, China launched its first MFA in creative writing at Fudan University. It then saw the entry of professional writers into the faculties of multiplying Chinese writing programs over the next decade and a half. Founders of Chinese writing programs unanimously credit the models of both the IWW and the International Writing Program (IWP), which was cofounded by Engle and his wife, the Sinophone novelist Hua-ling Nieh, at UI in 1967. The IWP invited a total of fifty-seven writers from mainland China between 1979 and 2019, adding to the sixty-four from Taiwan and the twenty-nine from Hong Kong, since its establishment. Some of the IWP’s Chinese alumni spearheaded writing programs at Chinese universities, inspired by the US models to establish their own workshop-based teaching. Wang Anyi 王安忆, a 1983 IWP alumna and one of the most influential contemporary Chinese writers, cofounded the MFA in creative writing at Fudan. Several former visiting Chinese scholars to the IWP helped build the Center for Creative Writing at Beijing Normal University (BNU); Mo Yan 莫言, Nobel laureate in literature in 2012 and a 2004 IWP alumnus, has become its director.
What does it mean to import a particular US model of cultural production to China, the purported chief economic and ideological rival of the United States in the twenty-first century? Can the broader political project embraced by such writing programs be divorced from their day-to-day pedagogy? Can this transpacific cultural flow map out a new path for Chinese intellectuals as they navigate the turbulent waters of postsocialist China? And will the flourishing of Chinese writing programs herald a comparable moment of cultural transformation for both China and the world, similar to the way that the inauguration of American creative writing programs signaled a postwar transfer of politico-cultural power from Europe to the United States?
I have investigated these and other crucial questions to produce the first book-length account of the development of Chinese creative writing programs, which has been characterized by the formalization of creative writing instruction and the entrance of professional writers as instructors into universities. Chinese universities had no established creative writing curriculum between 1949 and 2009, except for some short-term training programs for published authors. College-level writing courses aiming to produce good academic writers were typically viewed by the students as necessary evils to fulfill graduation requirements. They had been taught by equally unenthusiastic faculty members who had not published creative work and who were usually marginalized within a Chinese literature department that only rewarded scholarship on literary history and theory. In contrast, adopting a US model seems not only to have revitalized the teaching of writing and elevated its status in Chinese academia but also to have provided individual faculty members with opportunities to produce exciting new scholarship.
Tracing the complex process of the birth and evolution of Chinese creative writing programs, I draw particular attention to the ways that intellectuals have adapted their experiences with the IWW and the IWP after their initial encounters with the “other.” Chinese intellectuals sometimes replicate structural biases inherent in their US model, such as the modernist disdain for storytelling and the privileging of psychological delineations, when judging Chinese literary works, even while pursuing literary innovation and program growth. At other times, however, they have used program building to hone writerly craft and to fortify identities. They have demonstrated individual agency and individualist ambitions despite volatile sociopolitical headwinds, and they have eventually changed American creative writing pedagogy both to satisfy the state imperative of mass-producing competent cultural workers and to advance personal career goals. Furthermore, the writers and intellectuals who have contributed to building creative writing programs in mainland China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan deploy specific local resources to craft their founding narratives, even while facing marginalization within the humanistic fields and voicing existentialist concerns over individual and professional relevance, as do their counterparts in the United States. They each emphasize the “added value” of creative writing to enhance the global influence of Chinese national culture, to build up the innovation industry, or to boost students’ mental health and personal growth. Sharing a collectivist and utilitarian-oriented view of the function of creative writing, the writing programs at these three East Asian sites also depend more on government patronage and are subjected to more state control than their US models, though the latter do not exist in an autonomous vacuum and also form complex relationships with state sponsorship.
Although the scholarship on the impact of writers’ workshops on Western, particularly English-language, literatures has been growing, the influence of this model on the literatures of non-Western nations has been underexplored. Rather than painting it only as a one-way flow of influence and reception, I excavate the multi-sited and multidimensional engagements, appropriations, and competitions that happen between various individual and institutional actors based in the United States, mainland China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong. Putting Sinophone intellectuals at the center of the development of their writing programs and examining their efforts, I untangle their founding narrative from the official discourse of the pursuit for global prominence endorsed by the Chinese state—which is currently engaged in a new Cold War rhetoric with the United States—while dissecting the aesthetic standards set by Western cultural institutions, such as the Nobel Prize in Literature, that have a hold on their mind. This is vital to our imagining of the future of the humanities when the world is at a crossroads between globalization and the rise of totalitarianism.
My book, above all, produces a bird’s-eye view of contemporary Chinese literary production, shining a light on institutions as well as individuals. It illuminates how the rise of creative writing programs explains broader issues of Chinese literary and cultural production in the context of an increasingly authoritarian regime’s tightening of ideological control; of the demise of state-sponsored mechanisms for nurturing the writing profession and the literature of “socialist realism”; and of the flourishing of popular web literature in a market-oriented economy. Furthermore, it reveals how Chinese intellectuals negotiate political obligations and economic incentives while also seeking academic freedom and recognition from abroad. Chinese intellectuals’ apparent embrace of the American-style writing program and its underpinning aesthetic criteria signals a collective anxiety about the role of literature in society as they wrestle with the threat to their livelihood and the decline of traditional cultural prestige.
My book also scrutinizes the complex dynamics of Sino-West cultural exchanges through the unique example of Chinese intellectuals’ interactions with an influential American cultural institution. Answering Taiwan scholar Kuan-hsing Chen’s call for “Asia as a method,” I seek to break free of the simplistic West-versus-East, developed-versus-backward binary through a deeper consideration of multiple perspectives within Asia and of Asia’s engagements with the West. I study creative writing within a larger framework that entails multi-sited research, mindful both of the IWW’s and the IWP’s reach in Taiwan and Hong Kong as well as in mainland China, and of the rich and fluctuating interactions between intellectuals inhabiting these three East Asian sites. By integrating findings from Hong Kong and Taiwan into my investigation of creative writing programs in mainland China, my book reveals how varied cultural and geopolitical priorities can rewrite the story of the global influence of the United States. In so doing, my book also offers scholars of literature an understanding of their own field from a comparative perspective: the roles that people-to-people contact, transnational movement, and Cold War politics have played in the formation of a modern literary canon in light of, and in spite of, Western evaluations of the merits (or lack thereof) of modern Chinese literature.