Contenu du sommaire : Gao Xingjian and the Role of Chinese Literature Today

Gao Xingjian won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2000 for his works begun in China in the early 1980s. After moving to France in 1987, he has also written theoretical texts proposing not a major principle or ism, but the opposite, the absence of ism and a “cold” literature, free of all political or ideological influence. He has since had to confront the inherent contradictions between being famous as well as weak and isolated, the latter condition being conducive to producing literature and art in line with his convictions. This article looks at his work through the prism of the absence of ism.

With reference to Erving Goffman's notion of “frame analysis” and Colin Counsell's “framing signifiers,” this article explores how Gao Xingjian, the first Chinese-language Nobel laureate for literature, has represented the reality of contemporary China in his dramatic works. Focusing on two scenes in one of Gao's early plays, The Other Shore, it aims to illustrate the way Gao uses the narrative technique of framing to inversely (un/re)frame the notions of China and Chineseness.

From Soul Mountain to One Man's Bible, Gao Xingjian's fiction is committed to a labour of transgressive remembering: excavating minority heritages eclipsed by the dominant culture, protecting individual memory from established historiography, and sounding the dark areas of personal memory, less to indulge in “repentance” than to examine identity. The writing of memory, thanks to fictionalisation, thus comes to resemble an exorcism that makes it possible to defy prohibitions by casting out external and internal demons and by imposing the existential prescription against normative judgement.

Gao Xingjian and Ōe Kenzaburō share an interest in margins that was the basis for a conversation between them in 2006. A closer comparison of Gao Xingjian's Soul Mountain ( Lingshan, 1982-1989) and Ōe Kenzaburō's The Silent Cry ( Man'en gannen no futtobōru, 1967) also reveals a shared distrust of modernity, and a more precise preference for the margins of local culture. This cultural critique of modernity can be documented in their essays. However, although their respective doubts about modernity and central culture translate into similar formulations of an individual ethics, Ōe does not share Gao's vision of a detached writer of “cold literature,” but rather continues to explore the political implications of his ethical stance. It is argued that their respective definitions of literature can be viewed as explorations of an alternative form of modernity.

Assessment of the implications of experiments with village committee elections since 1987 has changed. In 2006, direct town elections were categorically forbidden, but in 2008 public nomination and public selection were resumed in Guiyang City for district and deputy municipal leaders. The paper explores the rationale behind the decisions and concludes that a strategic choice is pending within the central leadership.

Through a retrospective summary of the history of the re-education through labour (RTL) system, the author concludes that the emergence and development of the RTL system can be divided into two stages: its use as a tool of political struggle, and its use as a means of social governance. Although the RTL system has undergone a number of reforms in the wake of social developments, leading to significant changes in its functions and targets, this can be considered adaptation to the varying social requirements of different time periods and changes to its specific tasking, while the intrinsic violation of individual rights by the authorities that underlies this system has never changed. For this reason, although the RTL system remains an effective anomaly, it has lost all legitimate grounds for continued existence.