The Xinhua News Agency, as it is wont to do, brings us fresh cause to despair: the hot new literay trend is here, and it is 'writing groups' or 'bands' (写作组合), cabals of scribblers analogous to the boy-bands or girl-bands that dominate the pop music world. These writing groups are mostly in the under-twenty age-range, mostly writing in imitation of 'older' celebrity writers like Han Han. Apparently it all started in 2006, when Li Ze (李锋) at the World Knowledge Press (世界知识出版社) published Water Town (水城), a novel by a pair of girls then aged 18 and 19, who called themselves Jumping Orange Writing. They were followed by the three members of Girls' Studio (女生作坊) (the youngest of whom is 16), Lollipop (棒棒糖) (middle school students), and Unknown Quantity (未知数) (elementary school students). As the article cheerfully notes, many of these groups only ever publish one book, or break up without having published anything at all.

Is this curtains for serious Chinese literature? I've done plenty of hand-wringing myself in the past few years, but at a certain point, when pop culture has got its claws deep enough into literature, it seems likely that literature will pull a Trojan Horse, and start to transform pop culture from the inside out. Among all these scribbling teens there must be a few who, fifteen years from now, at the age of 29 or 30, will start to feel the itch of dissatisfaction and wonder if they shouldn't be trying for something a little deeper. From the melodramatic, sentimental mush that's being produced today, it's only a few short steps to a Chinese Dickens, and once you've got a Chinese Dickens, well… there's nowhere you can't go.

Wishful thinking, perhaps, but if these trends keep up I'm going to renounce all snooty puritanism, and whole-heartedly embrace this new era of sloppy literary love. Not actually read the books, mind you, just 'embrace the era'.