A Survey of Contemporary Literature of China’s West

T he notion of the contemporary West China literature originated in the 1980s when in 1982, the literary magazine Yang Guan proposed to start Dunhuang Arts as a particular school of literary and artistic works. In 1983, poets and critics in Gansu and Xinjiang were engaged in discussions of the emergent New Frontier Poetry. In 1984, critics such as Sun Keheng and Tang Qi pointed out that the newly emerging “West poetry” is a “new-type literature of locality.”1 After the screening of Wu Tianming’s feature film Life, adapted from the novel by Lu Yao, critics discerned convergences of the movie and the American Western films, and proposed the concepts of the Chinese Western films2. Such an overflow of keenness on the West China’s literary landscape was almost like a sandstorm overwhelming the West China, or in fact the whole country. Writers and critics responded with a passion that was close to a frenzy. The influential literary journal Contemporary Art Thoughts published in 1985 a special issue entitled A Forum on West China’s Literature. In the same year in July the Literature Associations of the 5 provinces in the North-west, in conjunction with relevant film studios and local literature associations convened the First Conference on the Arts in West China in the frontier city, Yining of Xinjiang. Since then, the notion of West China literature was officially established, incurring active writing and criticism nationwide.