WU QI: Over the past ten years, we at One-way Street Journal have worked closely with Paper Republic, translating and publishing the short stories and essays of a number of young Chinese writers, helping them to find more opportunities in both the Chinese- and English-speaking worlds. At the moment, this ‘opening up’ process has come to a temporary halt: the situation in China and the world has changed drastically, with repercussions, of course, in the literary world. It is against this background that I was interviewed by Granta and attempted to describe the changes I have seen. To my surprise, I realised that no changes are purely external; for those of us involved, the internal changes we perceive – the sayable and the unsayable – are completely different from what they were ten years ago, and that every person, every choice, every gesture needs to be examined in a completely new way.

Granta Interviews Wu Qi

Born in the city of Lengshuijiang in Hunan Province in 1986, Wu Qi is one of the leading literary figures of his generation. He has worked as a journalist at Southern People Weekly and Across, and as the translator of James Baldwin. He currently works at One-Way Space (Danxiang Kongjian 单向空间), an independent bookstore in Beijing, where he serves as the chief editor of One-Way Street Journal (Dandu 单读) and as a board member of the One-Way Street Foundation. The journal specializes in cultivating avant-garde literature as well as the new worker writing in China. Its title is an homage to Walter Benjamin’s 1928 essay. In 2022, Wu Qi published a book-length conversation, Self as Method, with the anthropologist Xiang Biao, which probed contemporary Chinese subjectivity and literary expression. A second volume, translated by David Ownby, will appear next year.

Among Wu Qi’s talents, his skill at interviewing is widely recognized by his peers. Instead of asking Wu to interview someone for this issue, Granta decided to interview the interviewer.

Editor:

One hears often of the ‘Dongbei Renaissance’ (东北文艺复兴) from Chinese writers. Many of its authors appear in this issue of Granta. What do you think accounts for the special quality of their writing? What do they capture about the country?

Wu Qi:

For me, the most fascinating thing about their writing is how they accurately capture the lost but resigned emotional structure that pervades contemporary society, whether it be for an individual, a family, or a nation – the kind of weightlessness that one can only experience in a highly functioning social machine. There is a disease of weightlessness, especially serious, in today’s China.

The reason why the northeastern, Dongbei region of China has become so representative of this literary phenomenon has to do with the fact that the region as a whole closely followed the main course of socialist development – from the rise of industry to the decline of the economy, from the highest point of collectivist ideals to the lowest point of the market economy – this violent and dramatic movement of the times was centrally staged there. In addition, the landscape and scenery of the northeast, the folk narrative tradition, and the natural sense of humor in the dialect provide rich material for literary expression.

Editor:

Is there anything comparable in the south?

Wu Qi:

It is difficult to replicate this kind of regional literary grouping elsewhere. In the past few years, there have been different organizations or individuals trying to artificially generate a new wave in the south – in places like Hangzhou and Guangzhou – but most of them have not succeeded, whether in the realm of literature or film and television.

Work of real originality will naturally refuse to be included in a collective concept, which is part of the socialist tradition. I suspect that in the south, where the market economy is relatively more prosperous, creators are more willing to preserve their individuality, even if it means marginalizing themselves.

This is much more in line with the way I perceive literature as functioning. I don’t agree with terms like the ‘Dongbei Renaissance’, which is too general and optimistic – do we have a real renaissance? But professors, and the literary class, need new material so that they can continue on with their professional lives.

Editor:

When you pick up a story by Shuang Xuetao or Ban Yu, can you tell it’s been done by a Dongbei writer?

Wu Qi:

Their work is easily recognizable because of the language. The climate stands out, and the setting – factories, heavy industry. People seem rougher in their fiction. Rough in the way they speak and the way they act. More authentic and outspoken. But they also make fun of themselves. They make fun of what we’re all facing.
In the south, we’re not that direct. If you think of people in Shanghai, their language is much more polished, and they always try to describe and trace and criticize in a more obscure way.

It is easy to feel lost in the history of socialist development, but you still need to try to find hope in life – in literature for instance. The Dongbei writers keep that aim at the heart of their stories.

I think the most important thing about them, probably, is that they write about the real social environment. And people now are desperate for stories that feel like their own. We need stories that describe what the feeling of actually living here in China in the twenty-first century is like.

Editor:

How did you first become aware of the Dongbei writers?

Wu Qi:

I remember it was around 2015, during the period when traditional media was experiencing a crisis and content-control policies were being tightened. Novels from the northeast began to circulate among a small group of professional readers, literary editors, and media people, at a time when their work had not yet been seen by the marketplace, and it almost seemed like it was circulating underground.

Through word of mouth and media publicity, famous publishers and even movie stars began to notice these books, and publicly recommended them long before they reached a mass audience. Finally, literary critics began to notice them, and to study and name them.

The next stage for some of these authors was film and television adaptations, where they are now directly involved in writing the scripts, or are responsible for teaching the screenwriters how to write – becoming ‘literary gurus’ in another industry.

Reprinted by kind permission of Granta magazine, 2025. To read more of this interview, and the rest of Granta issue 169 China, click here: https://granta.com/products/granta-169-china/