Content area
Full Text
(Tr. from the Chinese by Chantal Chen Andro and from the French by Esther Allen)
Late 1978; Beijing under a blanket of snow. In a room of about six square yards located on the border between the city and the country the first issue of the magazine Today (Jintian) is printed. The only equipment is an old manual roneograph machine, completely primitive. Under the dim light of a single lamp, seven young people are busy for three days and three nights. They are far from thinking that this magazine will change the history of contemporary Chinese literature. On December 23, 1978, the magazine Today is posted around the universities of Beijing, on the administrative buildings, the walls of publishing houses and in public spaces. Until 1980, when it would be banned by the police, nine issues and four special editions would appear, reaching a public throughout all of China.
To examine the history of the magazine, one must go back to the appearance of an unofficial literature in Beijing at the end of the '60s and the beginning of the 70s. At that time, most high school students had been sent off into the distant countryside, where they had settled. During the long and inactive winter months they returned to the capital and exchanged books and points of view. Thus, little by little, all sorts of "literary salons" were formed. Works by anonymous authors, especially poems, began to circulate in these salons, usually in manuscript form. In 1973-1974 most of these salons were located and investigated by the police and had to shut down; arrests were made and people were interrogated. But certain writers...