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Literature fest sparks rural reboot
2019-06-03 
Winners of Ma Feng Literature Prize and Lyuliang Literature Prize hold an academic dialogue during the first Lyuliang Literature Festival. [Photo provided to China Daily]

An event set up by film director Jia Zhangke featuring leading proponents of a school of writing from Shanxi aims to place the province on China's literary map.

Jiajiazhuang village in Fenyang, Shanxi province, sits around 600 kilometers southwest of Beijing.

Once known for its collective economy that helped draw its population out of poverty, it has now gained another label thanks to film director Jia Zhangke, who was born in downtown Fenyang in 1970, just a short distance from the village.

Jia has devoted much of his time to regenerating the area's cultural legacy, not only through movies, but also through literature.

To do that, Jia set up the first Lyuliang Literature Festival, which was held from May 9 to 16.

Nobel laureate Mo Yan and a dozen winners of the prestigious Luxun and Maodun literature prizes, including Ge Fei, A Lai and Su Tong, together with a group of renowned Shanxi writers and poets gathered that week to discuss literary depictions of the countryside.

The village has a literary tradition which dates back to the mid-20th century, when a new Chinese modern literary genre shanyaodan, a nickname for a potato that's popular in North China, emerged.

Authors who follow the shanyaodan school of writing such as Zhao Shuli, Ma Feng and Xi Rong were all living in the Shanxi countryside, where their work centered around rural life there.

Many of Ma's works in particular were written in Jiajiazhuang, where he witnessed the changes to the village brought about by the agricultural cooperatives during the 1950s after moving to work in Fenyang.

Nobel laureate Mo Yan (center) and film director Jia Zhangke (right) arrive at the Fenyang Middle School, Jia's alma mater, to attend a seminar on Mo's recent works during the first Lyuliang Literature Festival in Fenyang, Shanxi province. [Photo provided to China Daily]

So by holding lectures, conducting dialogues and screening movies related to the countryside and contributed by guest authors, the region's local literary legacy can both be re-examined and extended.

Many modern and contemporary works of Chinese literature touch on common rural issues - childhood upbringing, family inheritance and people's experience of being stuck on the bottom rung of society - that have been rooted in Chinese farming culture for thousands of years.

China's urbanization has been rapidly progressing to the extent that rural life has become something unfamiliar to the majority of the population, which is very different from what it was like just three decades ago, according to Ge Fei, author and a Chinese literature professor at Tsinghua University in Beijing.

He was delivering a speech on the first day of the festival, interpreting what it means to us when rural societies fade away.

"It's important we have both of the visions. One is the vision to look into the future amid urban life, and the other is to look back on rural history - it's our past," he says, adding that this contradiction - resisting urbanization while at the same time embracing progress - has driven the emergence of modern thought and discourse, which has become the internal motivation for change in art, literature and philosophy.

Ethnic Tibetan writer A Lai, famous for his novel Settling Dust, which was also published under the title Red Poppies, says many of the writers today still depict rural life as they imagine it, rather than observing and reflecting on it by honestly facing the challenges posed by globalization.

"We should be aware that many of the problems facing Chinese farmers and villagers today are universal," he says.

While many people doubt whether Mo could top the success of winning the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2012, Zhang Qinghua, professor at Beijing Normal University, believes that Mo's way of dealing with this has been to make a return to his hometown, a village in Gaomi, Shandong province, both in reality and spiritually.

Mo didn't publish any new work in the five years following the award, when in 2017 he released several short stories, poems and theater works, mainly reminiscing about his hometown.

Unlike Mo's former novels, Peking University professor Chen Xiaoming notes that his new works are more reserved, realistic stylistically and employ more simple language. Literary critic Li Jingze is impressed that Mo has remained acutely sensitive to the realities of urban and rural life.

Ge Fei, writer. [Photo provided to China Daily]

Architectural experts who have gained a hands-on understanding of the pros and cons of rural reconstruction through their work were also invited to hold a dialogue with the writers, which resonated so strongly with the villagers that some of them surrounded the speakers afterward hoping to expand their discussions.

He Wei, assistant professor at the school of architecture at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing, who has been leading several projects in the countryside, thinks a major problem is the conflicting demands between the elite class of city dwellers, who tend to seek spiritual comfort in village life, and the villagers themselves who naturally want to improve their quality of life. However, many of the rural traditions have been lost during the process.

"Once they leave the countryside, it's hard for people to come back and settle, both in person and spiritually," he says.

One aim of the literature festival is to improve the cultural appeal of the countryside so as to attract people back, Jia says. The organizers are also working to promote communication between the authors and the villagers, and encourage more reading activities.

Rural resident Ren Chunhua, 63, who now works as a narrator at a local history gallery, was listening to Ge Fei's lecture in her gallery neighboring the festival venue and wanted to buy his work and got the writer's signature. She thought Ma's work inspired by village life in the 1950s was well-written and accurately reflected the reality there.

Literature aficionado Cao Liang drove for two hours from Taigu county to attend the lectures. Having collected all of Su's books and being familiar with many of the guest authors' works, he is currently writing his own novel.

Villagers took turns to attend the festival, a move which Ren believes will invigorate the local cultural environment and raise Jiajiazhuang's profile.

The festival was held in an open square at a cultural zone redeveloped from a local cement plant, a former symbol of its economic boom. And the locals are working together to turn the venue into a cultural landmark that will eventually include a cinema, a creative writing residence and a cultural center named after Jia.

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