About Flower City

Flower City

Flower City, known in Chinese as Huacheng, is a bimonthly literary magazine published in Guangzhou, Guangdong Province. Founded in April 1979, it is one of China's most influential large literary periodicals and the only large-scale pure literature journal in Guangdong Province. It mainly publishes medium-length and long-length novels, together with novellas, short fiction, long reviews and works of other genres. Flower City has been listed as one of the "Four Famous Dan" of Chinese literary journals, alongside Harvest, Shiyue (October) and Dangdai (Contemporary), and it is hailed as the "cradle of avant-garde literature" in China.

A Name Taken from Guangzhou and Qin Mu's Book

The magazine takes its name from Guangzhou itself. Guangzhou, in China's subtropics, has long summers and warm winters, and flowers bloom there all year round; the city has enjoyed the reputation of a "flower city" since ancient times. In 1961 the famous writer Qin Mu published a collection of essays whose title piece began as an account of Guangzhou's New Year flower market, "Nianxiao Flower Market," which, at his wife Zifeng's suggestion, he retitled "Flower City" and used as the title of the book. After that book appeared, Guangzhou's elegant name became famous nationwide. When the new literary magazine was founded in Guangzhou in 1979, its title was taken from Qin Mu's book — a name that tied the journal from the outset to the city, its southern culture and its literary tradition.

Founding in 1979 and a First Printing of 200,000

Flower City was founded in Guangzhou in April 1979, though its first issue is also dated July 1979 in reference listings — the magazine emerged, in other words, in the first spring of China's reform and opening up. The response was immediate: the first printing reached 200,000 copies, a striking figure for a new journal of serious literature. At the beginning of publication, Flower City mainly focused on the literature of Guangdong, South China and overseas Chinese communities. The first issue, for example, carried Zeng Minzhi's article "A Glimpse of Chinese Literature in Hong Kong, Macao and Southeast Asia," signalling the outward-looking, southern orientation that its location in China's great southern port city made natural. In January 1981 the Flower City Publishing House was established in Guangzhou, and the publishing house began to publish the bimonthly literary magazine regularly; the house, the only professional literary and artistic publishing house in Guangdong, was itself named after Qin Mu's work and after the magazine founded two years earlier.

One of the Four Famous Dan

Flower City's national standing was recognized remarkably early. At the end of 1980, the editors-in-chief of 27 literary magazines from across the country met at Jinshan Temple in Zhenjiang, Jiangsu Province. At that meeting, participants proposed the collective title of the "Four Famous Dan" — using the term for a leading female role in Chinese opera — for the country's outstanding large literary journals, and Flower City was counted among them together with Harvest of Shanghai, Shiyue (October) of Beijing and Dangdai (Contemporary) of Beijing. Contemporary foreign observers reached the same conclusion: a 1985 survey of Chinese fiction in the American journal Partisan Review named The Contemporary, October, Harvest and Flower City as the famous "big four" thick literary magazines enjoying nationwide circulation, at a moment when medium-length fiction — novellas of between 20,000 and 80,000 Chinese characters — was the genre in vogue and these journals were its principal home.

The Pioneering Year of 1984 and the Novella

The year 1984 is regarded as the first year in which Flower City made pioneering explorations in literature. That year the magazine concentrated on novellas, publishing a total of 33 of them. Among them, Zhang Jie's "Emerald," Zhang Xiaotian's "The Man Who Missed the Sun and the Stars," Liu Xinwu's "The Daily Schedule" and Liu Xihong's "The Moon, Shaking Forward" all caused a strong response among readers and brought Flower City to the attention of the Chinese literary community. The openness and inclusiveness of Guangdong culture, and the trend in the south of the early reform era toward freedom and liberation of thought, allowed the magazine to incorporate experimental and diverse elements into its style. In the late 1980s Flower City also published documentary and reportage works that reflected reality and boldly exposed social problems, including Lu Yao's "Ordinary World," Li Shifei's "Hot-blooded Man" and "After the Redemption," and Zhao Yu's "The Fracture of Taihang Mountain."

Cradle of Avant-Garde Literature

Flower City's best-known epithet is the "cradle of avant-garde literature" in China. The avant-garde or experimental fiction that transformed Chinese writing in the mid-to-late 1980s — associated with writers such as Ma Yuan, Hong Feng, Su Tong, Yu Hua and Bei Cun, and with a "language revolution" in the Chinese novel between about 1984 and 1989 — found in southern journals such as Flower City a receptive home. The magazine has published important works by famous writers including Wang Meng, Mo Yan, Yu Hua and Can Xue. It has also discovered and introduced a group of influential writers, among them Lu Yao, Wang Xiaobo, Zhou Meisen, Bi Feiyu and Lin Bai. That double role — publishing established masters while bringing new, formally adventurous voices before a national readership — is the core of Flower City's reputation in literary history.

Reform, the Market Era and the 1990s

Like every Chinese literary magazine, Flower City had to navigate the 1990s, when, under the tide of the commodity economy, literature was gradually marginalized and the market for literary magazines deteriorated. Compared with the 1980s, when the magazine had proposed "text reform," it now paid more attention to personalized literature and to literary exploration carried on under a spirit of freedom and innovation. The magazine survived the contraction of the literary-journal market that closed or shrank many of its contemporaries, retaining its bimonthly schedule, its focus on medium-length and long fiction, and its position as Guangdong's flagship journal of pure literature.

The Flower City Literature Award

The magazine's name is also carried by the Flower City Literature Award, established in the 1980s and presented periodically to honour outstanding work. At the sixth award ceremony, held on 10 August 2017 during the South China Book Festival in Guangzhou, 25 writers, including Wang Meng, Bi Feiyu and Chen Cang, received accolades. In August 2024 the magazine combined two milestones: its 45th anniversary celebrations and the eighth Flower City Literature Award ceremony were held together in Guangzhou, with an accompanying national exchange meeting of famous journal editors on the theme of "Reshaping the Communication and Leadership of Literary Journals." The award, like the magazine, functions to promote the literature of Guangdong while addressing a national community of writers, critics and editors.

Flower City Publishing House and the Academy of Literature

Flower City does not stand alone: it sits within a small literary institution in Guangzhou. Its publisher, Huacheng (Flower City) Publishing House, was established in January 1981 and has published a wide range of fiction and non-fiction, poetry, prose and translations; the magazines Huacheng and Suibi (Essays and Sketches), sponsored by the publishing house, have become cultural landmarks in Guangdong. In 2023 the Flower City Academy of Literature was established, integrating the resources of the publishing house; its purpose is to encourage and guide writers and critics to create and promote literary works with Guangdong characteristics and a southern China style, especially the style of the Guangdong–Hong Kong–Macao Greater Bay Area. The academy celebrated its first anniversary in 2024, the same year as the magazine's 45th anniversary.

Guangdong's Journal of Pure Literature

Within China's literary geography, Flower City represents the south. It is the only large-scale pure literature journal in Guangdong Province, and from its beginnings it attended to Guangdong, South China and overseas Chinese writing alongside the national literature it published. Reviewers and scholars have treated it as one of the essential venues in which the new literature of the reform era was made: it appears in scholarly bibliographies of avant-garde poetry and criticism, and its 1980s novella programme is a standard reference point in accounts of the decade's fiction. An interview with its editor-in-chief Zhu Yanling was tellingly titled "Quietly Guarding a City" — a description of the magazine's steady stewardship of Guangzhou's literary culture.

Reading Flower City Today

Flower City continues to appear bimonthly from Guangzhou, publishing medium-length and long-length novels and other literary genres, more than four decades after its first printing of 200,000 copies announced its arrival. Its history compresses much of the story of contemporary Chinese literature: the hunger for serious fiction in 1979, the novella boom and the avant-garde experiments of the 1980s, the market pressures of the 1990s, and the effort in the 2020s — through the Flower City Literature Award and the Flower City Academy of Literature — to sustain a regional literary culture with national reach, rooted in the city whose name it bears.