Wang Shuo

Wang Shuo a Chinese novelist and screenwriter born in 1958, the spokesman of the urban youth culture that emerged after the Cultural Revolution and one of the most commercially successful and controversial writers of the reform era. His slangy, ironic fiction about drifting young men and the new wealth of the cities defined a style that came to be called hooligan literature.

Early Life and Formation

Wang Shuo was born in 1958 in Nanjing and grew up in Beijing, in a family connected to the military establishment. He spent part of his childhood in a residential compound for military families, and the atmosphere of privilege and discipline shaped his attitude both to authority and to the ordinary life of the city. The Cultural Revolution interrupted his education while he was still a boy.

As a young man he served in the navy, an experience that he later drew on and that ended with his discharge in the late 1970s. He drifted through a series of jobs, working in a pharmaceutical firm and in other miscellaneous posts, before turning to writing. He had little formal literary training and came to authorship from the margins of the urban world.

The years after the Cultural Revolution, with their loosening of controls and their sudden opening to commerce and foreign influence, formed his subject and his audience. His generation had been educated in slogans and then released into a society that no longer offered the certainties it had preached, and the mixture of cynicism, longing and irreverence in his work spoke directly to that experience.

Fiction and the Hooligan Style

Wang Shuo began publishing fiction in the early 1980s and made his name with a series of novellas and novels about idle young men in Beijing. The most famous, including the stories later collected as The Troubleshooters, portray a world of petty crime, casual sex, drinking and aimless talk, in which the heroes mock the values of their elders while pursuing their own pleasures.

His style was as important as his subject. He wrote in a racy, colloquial Beijing speech, thick with slang and irony, and he turned the language of official slogans against itself. His narrators are flippant and knowing, and their refusal to take anything seriously became the hallmark of a whole literary manner, much imitated and much debated.

He was associated with a group of writers who gathered in Beijing in the late 1980s and whose loose, urban, anti-idealistic fiction was given the name hooligan literature. The label was part insult and part advertising, and Wang Shuo accepted it with irony. His work was enormously popular and put him at the centre of the cultural conversation.

Screenwriting and Television

Wang Shuo was also one of the most successful screenwriters and television dramatists of his time. His scripts and the adaptations of his fiction shaped a large number of films and television series, and he worked closely with directors of the emerging popular cinema. The television series based on his work became national events and made him a household name.

His screenwriting extended his reach far beyond the readers of fiction, and the phrases and attitudes of his characters entered the common speech of the cities. The commercial success of his television work made him a wealthy man and a symbol of the new alliance between literature and entertainment in the reform era.

He founded and ran a publishing and media enterprise of his own, seeking to control the production and marketing of his work. His ambition was not only literary but entrepreneurial, and he thought of himself as a professional writer who understood the market and was not ashamed to make money from it. He courted, and often enjoyed, the notoriety that followed.

Controversy and the Public Arena

Wang Shuo's irreverence made him a target for critics who saw in his work a celebration of selfishness and a corrosion of public values. He was accused of cynicism, of treating women as objects and of lowering the tone of the culture. He answered his detractors with characteristic mockery, and the argument about his work became one of the defining debates of the 1990s.

He was also drawn into public controversy beyond literature. He made remarks about major modern writers that were widely condemned, and he engaged in polemics with critics and academics. The confrontation between the popular writer and the guardians of high culture was itself a symptom of the changing place of literature in a commercial society.

For a period his work was subject to official criticism and some of his productions were restricted, and he complained that his satirical purposes were misunderstood. He withdrew at times from the public eye and spent intervals abroad, particularly in the United States, before returning to Beijing. His relations with authority remained wary and unpredictable.

Later Years and Legacy

In his later career Wang Shuo wrote less fiction and turned more to essays, memoirs and cultural commentary. His books about his own life and his reflections on the changes of the decades were widely read, and he remained a recognisable and sometimes provocative voice in the public discussion of Chinese society. He continued to divide opinion.

He is regarded as the most influential popular writer of the reform era and as the chief inventor of a distinctively urban, ironic and street-smart Chinese prose. His style entered the language, and his characters and attitudes shaped the imagination of a generation that had grown up amid rapid change and uncertain values. Many younger writers acknowledged his example.

His reputation is contested. Some readers see him as a corrosive cynic, others as the honest voice of a disillusioned age, and still others as a gifted comic writer who captured the speech of the city as no one else had. Whatever the verdict, his fiction and his screenplays are indispensable documents of the cultural transformation of China in the last decades of the twentieth century.

See also

• Hooligan literature
• Post-Cultural Revolution fiction
• Beijing dialect literature
• Chinese television drama