“What happens when a US cultural institution is imported to China, the purported chief rival of the United States in the twenty-first century?” asks Jin Feng in The Transpacific Flow, a short 100-page study of MFA programs in China.
What indeed? The framing implies some relation between creative writing programs and not just literature but also geopolitics. Whether there really is, it’s clear that at least some of the powers-that-be believe there to be. Feng writes:
The expansion of US creative writing programs benefited from Cold War initiatives such as the GI Bill and the National Defense Education Act, issued by the US federal government to subsidize the expansion of American universities to compete with the Soviet Union. Moreover, their pedagogy was formulated against the purportedly collectivist and “propagandist” Soviet ideology by emphasizing the individual over the collective and the concrete over the abstract.
Feng’s points of reference here are the well-known Iowa Writers’ Workshop and International Writing Program, both at the University of Iowa. Chinese writers started attending almost as soon as this was possible: Wang Anyi attended more than forty years ago in 1983.
An internationally acclaimed program that provided one of the rare and earliest opportunities for Chinese writers to reengage with the West after thirty years of isolation, it also roused attention from the two national governments and put them on high alert, as both viewed the program as a form of soft power.
Feng ascribes the subsequent development of similar programs in China also to a political impetus:
Half a century later, Chinese writing programs multiplied, thanks to a “rising” China’s initiative to mass-produce high-quality cultural workers and hence give the nation a boost in its bid for cultural as well as economic prominence, and its drive to realize its ambitious goal of “Made in China 2025” in both economic and cultural arenas …
although the two don’t seem quite parallel.

The question how American and Chinese institutions of higher learning are related and interact was asked more broadly in William C Kirby’s Empires of Ideas: Creating the Modern University from Germany to America to China. The most illuminating aspects of The Transpacific Flow are perhaps not so much these broader issues, but some of the details, of which the linkage between American MFA programs and Cold War politics is just one. Another is that China has imported some of the peculiar hierarchies of America academia long with the programs:
Today, Chinese universities typically require a PhD degree as a minimum qualification when hiring faculty members, and they do not accept an MFA in creative writing as a terminal degree that fulfills that requirement.
The efficacy of such programs is questioned in China as it is elsewhere: Jeng’s sources
are not unanimously confident that writing programs can produce writers. Some successes have emerged in the decade and a half since the first MFA in creative writing was established in China, yet, as some facetiously put it, only eggs can be hatched, and no stones can be turned into chickens no matter how good the incubator is.
One particularly interesting thread involves the baleful effects of the centrality of the English-language:
Today, English still dominates as the language of global communication and translation, while certain Western-centric “universal” criteria of good writing continue to inform the definition of literature worthy of global recognition. Meanwhile, Chinese writers and intellectuals are enthusiastically pursuing the project of building creative writing programs at Chinese universities based on their experiences with the American-style writing programs. At the same time, they have consciously or unconsciously changed their writing styles, arguably to make their works more translatable and thereby more accessible to Western audiences
That final comment has been made by or about writers in other languages from Japanese to Italian. The side effects are not limited to writing:
It appears that those who have been exposed to Western education and literature in systematic or immersive ways also tend to believe that contemporary Chinese authors compare unfavorably to Chinese authors from the 1920s and 1930s in terms of their educational background, cultural knowledge, and global perspective. These “pessimists” also advocate that Chinese authors read Western works widely since “the tradition of fiction came from Europe.”
Feng covers a lot of ground, from Paul Engle and Hualing Nieh Engle’s role in building the programs in Iowa and opening them to foreign writers, to translation, teaching, careers, institutional structure and dynamics, the rise of “popular web literature in a market-oriented economy” and the angst about where Chinese writing fits into “world literature”, or whether it does it all (without really questioning whether “world literature” is a sensible concept).
Some unfortunate phrasing has been allowed to creep in. In her long sidebar on Hong Kong and the programs there, she writes:
Moreover, in their mind, their program would integrate Hong Kong’s colonial heritages, such as the British educational model … and local strengths in English learning with the new reality of life under CCP rule ….
Hong Kong is not “under CCP rule”. Elsewhere she mentions “the state initiative to focus on ‘cultural and creative industry’ in Hong Kong”; but Hong Kong, not being a country, doesn’t itself have anything with the gravitas of “state” initiatives. One can deduce what she means, but neither terminology is as rigorously accurate as one might expect from an academic monograph. And “Hong Kong’s well-heeled Horse Racing Society” is presumably the Hong Kong Jockey Club.
But at the end, Feng takes a step back from the politics to note that
You must be logged in to post a comment.