"Chinese Reportage" details for the first time in English the
creation and evolution of a distinctive literary genre in
twentieth-century China. Reportage literature, while sharing
traditional journalism's commitment to the accurate, nonfictional
portrayal of experience, was largely produced by authors outside
the official news media. In identifying the literary merit of this
genre and establishing its significance in China's leftist cultural
legacy, Charles A. Laughlin reveals important biases that impede
Western understanding of China and, at the same time, supplies an
essential chapter in Chinese cultural history.
Laughlin traces the roots of reportage (or "baogao wenxue") to the
travel literature of the Qing Dynasty but shows that its
flourishing was part of the growth of Chinese communism in the
twentieth century. In a modern Asian context critical of capitalism
and imperialism, reportage offered the promise of radicalizing
writers through a new method of literary practice and the hope that
this kind of writing could in turn contribute to social revolution
and China's national self-realization. "Chinese Reportage" explores
the wide range of social engagement depicted in this literature:
witnessing historic events unfolding on city streets; experiencing
brutal working conditions in 1930s Shanghai factories; struggling
in the battlefields and trenches of the war of resistance against
Japan, the civil war, and the Korean war; and participating in
revolutionary rural, social, and economic transformation.
Laughlin's close readings emphasize the literary construction of
social space over that of character and narrative structure, a
method that brings out the critique of individualism and humanism
underlying the genre's aesthetics.
"Chinese Reportage "recaptures a critical aspect of leftist
culture in China with far-reaching implications for historians and
sociologists as well as literary scholars.
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