New Wine in Old Bottles: Contemporary Chinese Online Allegorical Ghost Stories as Political Commentary

Abstract

The phenomenal popularity of the Internet literature in China and the potential for freedom of speech in China’s cyberspace have long fascinated scholars of contemporary China. This article examines the interaction between Chinese Internet literature and the ever-increasing online censorship by focusing on one type of Internet literature in China: the allegorical ghost stories. While observers of censorship in China have expressed worries about the tightening censorship in China’s cyberspace and self-censorship’s damaging effect on literature, this article follows the conceptualization of censorship as co-existing with literary production and seeks to explore how censorship shapes literature. Specifically, it analyses how the contemporary online allegorical ghost stories re-appropriate an old Chinese fictional genre zhiguai (i.e. records of the strange) – a genre that has maintained a paradoxical dissenting and conforming relationship with the state orthodoxy – and use a coded, “Aesopian language” to satirize contemporary Chinese politics and revisit historical atrocities. I argue that these negotiations with censorship (or selfcensorship) resurrect the premodern zhiguai, turning it into a historical documentation of the contemporary and constitute a form of resistance that smuggles into the public discourse a usually hidden transcript.