Chinese literature has played a key role in communicating Chinese values and cultural traditions to the Western world, and needs to be promoted more aggressively, a British academic says.
Michel Hockx, professor of Chinese at the University of London's School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), believes China's rapid growth will spur increased interest in its literature.
Great literary works are valuable tools with which China can boost its soft power internationally, says Hockx.
"Introducing Western people to Chinese classics and cultural traditions, including Confucianism, Taoism and Buddhism, is typically what a soft power initiative would do," Hockx says.
Initiatives, such as the SOAS China Institute, are encouraging scholarly research on China and will play a key role in promoting China, he says.
The appreciation for Chinese literature and culture has been growing steadily, thanks partly to the spread of Confucius institutes in Europe, where Chinese languages are taught. These places are drawing large crowds of students.
More Chinese books are now being translated into Western languages, and the country's rising profile in literary circles can be gauged by events such as the London Book Fair, where China was the focus country in 2012. That year, Chinese writer Mo Yan also won the Nobel Prize for Literature.
Hockx appreciates Mo's writings that are usually woven with magical realism and depictions of rural China, where the author spent most of his childhood.
"I think the greatest quality of his works is that they completely shatter the notion of realism, especially when one measures it with the old Chinese belief that fiction needs to be more realistic," Hockx says. "In his works, there's such detail about reality from different perspectives that at some point you realize that the techniques cannot be real."
The ambiguity between what is real and what isn't, is particularly interesting, even more so coming from a Chinese writer, Hockx says. Most of Mo's peers have lived through big cultural and economic changes.
The picture of communities that the 59-year-old author has painted through his books offers a perspective on rural China that was less familiar to both Chinese and Western readers in earlier times. An example is Mo's 1987 novel Red Sorghum. In the book, he describes a village in northeastern China under Japanese occupation, as being full of barbarous warlords and lusty peasants.
"None of the characters are typical heroes. They are all bandits and cowards. He (Mo) looks at individuals and their strengths. He enlarges and puts them under the microscope, and adds things that make them almost grotesque and absurd, but makes you think about how history is told."
This style of writing gives Mo's characters more depth and even caught the attention of the Nobel prize committee, Hockx says. The top award, however, hasn't been able to generate worldwide interest in Chinese literature to the level that was expected mainly because more needs to be done to promote Chinese literature abroad.
Hockx feels a greater number of Chinese books need to be translated into foreign languages and more Chinese authors need to participate in Western literary festivals.
The Chinese government, according to him, is likely to fund new translations of Chinese classics, as some of the previous translations were done by the 19th century Westerners who may have interpreted them in a slightly different light.
In order to promote its soft power effectively, China would have to persuade the West to look at it in a way that is closer to its own views of itself, Hockx says. The attempt would be to break stereotypes about China and the simplification of narratives that the Western media often builds.
But it is important for China not to push its message too hard. "As China becomes more powerful, so will its culture. That will happen. The more you push it, the more you come across as lacking in confidence," Hockx says.
He says one key difference between China and the West lies in society's approach to literature. There's been a surge in book and author clubs in China owing to frequent public exchanges. This is in contrast to Western post-modern literature, often exclusive and hard to understand.
"In China, people tend to be more communicative about literature, especially what you read and what you write, and it's done in groups."
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