About Contemporary

Contemporary

Contemporary, known in Chinese as Dangdai — "The Present Age" — is a bimonthly literary magazine published in Beijing. Established in June 1979, it publishes long-form fiction, novellas and long literary reviews, with issues of roughly 250,000 Chinese characters. It is counted among China's most influential literary periodicals, and it belongs to the celebrated group of large literary journals known as the "Four Famous Dan," together with Harvest of Shanghai, Shiyue (October) of Beijing and Flower City (Huacheng) of Guangzhou. The magazine is closely associated with the People's Literature Publishing House, with which it co-hosts the Dangdai Novel Forum and the Dangdai Literary Rally, a fixture of the contemporary Chinese literary calendar.

Founded in Beijing in June 1979

Dangdai appeared in June 1979, in the first year of China's reform and opening up, when literary magazines from before the Cultural Revolution were being revived and new ones founded to satisfy what contemporary accounts describe as the seemingly insatiable appetite of the reading public. Beijing in 1978–79 was the centre of that revival: older writers and younger writers alike took up their pens again after 1976, and a wave of new fiction demanded thick, serious journals able to carry it. Dangdai was created for exactly that role. As a bimonthly, appearing six times a year, it could offer writers the space that monthly short-fiction journals could not, and it defined itself from the start by length and weight of content rather than by speed or topicality.

A Bimonthly of 250,000 Characters

The magazine's defining physical characteristic is its size. Each issue of Dangdai runs to roughly 250,000 Chinese characters of text — the equivalent of a substantial book — devoted to long-form fiction, novellas and long literary reviews. That format made the journal a natural home for the novella, the medium-length form of between roughly 20,000 and 80,000 characters that became the genre in vogue in Chinese fiction in the first half of the 1980s. A contemporary foreign survey of Chinese writing, published in the American journal Partisan Review in 1985, explained the vogue for medium-length fiction and named The Contemporary, October, Harvest and Flower City as the famous "big four" thick, large-sized literary magazines that enjoyed nationwide circulation. Dangdai's bulk was thus not incidental: it was the material basis of its influence, allowing complete substantial works to reach a national readership in a single issue.

One of the Four Famous Dan

Dangdai's standing was formalized early. At the end of 1980, the editors-in-chief of 27 literary magazines from across China met at Jinshan Temple in Zhenjiang, Jiangsu Province, and there the collective title of the "Four Famous Dan" — borrowing the name of the leading female role in Chinese opera — was proposed for the country's outstanding large literary journals: Harvest, Shiyue, Flower City and Dangdai. The grouping has stuck in Chinese literary history, and Dangdai is consistently listed among the four. To be named in that company within eighteen months of its founding, alongside journals with much longer histories such as Harvest (founded in 1957), marked Dangdai as one of the defining periodicals of the new era almost from its birth.

Long-Form Fiction and the Novella

Dangdai's editorial identity rests on long-form fiction and the novella, supplemented by long literary reviews that treat new writing at corresponding length. In the literary system of 1980s China, the large journals were where reputations were made: a substantial novella or a serialized long work in a nationally circulated bimonthly reached critics, publishers and readers simultaneously, and book publication typically followed journal success. Dangdai's commitment to complete, lengthy works — rather than excerpts or short pieces — placed it at the centre of that system. Its review pages performed the complementary function, giving extended critical attention to the fiction it and its sister journals published, and helping to form the critical consensus around new writers and new tendencies.

The People's Literature Publishing House Connection

Dangdai is institutionally linked to the People's Literature Publishing House in Beijing, the country's flagship literary publisher, founded on 28 March 1951 and described as the "national team" of Chinese literary publishing, with nearly 20,000 titles and a total circulation of some 1.3 billion volumes across its first seventy-one years. The connection is visible in the magazine's public life: the Dangdai Novel Forum is co-hosted by the China Publishing Group, the People's Literature Publishing House and Dangdai Magazine itself. The same publishing house also stands behind People's Literature (Renmin Wenxue), the oldest continuously published literary magazine in China, founded in October 1949 — making Dangdai the younger, fiction-focused companion within a family of periodicals that has anchored official Chinese literary publishing since the founding of the People's Republic.

The Dangdai Literary Rally and Novel Forum

The magazine gives its name to one of China's most closely watched literary prize processes. The Dangdai Novel Forum, co-hosted by the China Publishing Group, the People's Literature Publishing House and Dangdai Magazine, announces the winners of the Dangdai Literary Rally. The forum is known for its awarding principles of "zero prize and full transparency": there is no cash prize, and the selection is conducted openly. In the process described for the 19th rally, seven critics were invited to comment on 21 candidate works, and the results were then selected through an open ballot. That combination — no money, public voting, named critics — was designed to distinguish the Dangdai awards from the many Chinese literary prizes whose secretive procedures have drawn scepticism from media and readers.

The 19th Rally and the Realism Debate of 2017

The 19th Dangdai Literary Rally, discussed at the Dangdai Bimonthly Magazine Novel Forum in Beijing in early 2018, took realism as its keyword, carrying forward the emphasis on "realistic themes" raised at the 19th Congress of the Chinese Communist Party. The top five works of 2017 were A Single Swallow by Zhang Ling, You Touched Me by Yan Geling, Plainsman by Li Peifu, The Light of Liang Guangzheng by Liang Hong and The Eye of Chongqing by Fan Wen; with the highest vote count, Zhang Ling's A Single Swallow won the Best Work of 2017 award. Liang Hong's The Light of Liang Guangzheng won the Novel of the Year award, Zhu Yong's On Art at the Imperial Palace won Prose of the Year, and Liu Qingbang's Cattle won Short Story of the Year. Presenting an award at the forum, Wu Yiqin, an official of the China Writers Association, observed that Dangdai Magazine stood out from major domestic literary periodicals for its persistence with realistic themes — a characterization of the magazine's editorial line offered by the literary establishment itself.

Dangdai and the Shape of the Literary Journal System

Dangdai's career illustrates how literary influence worked in reform-era China. Authority flowed through a small number of large, nationally distributed journals, edited in Beijing and a few other publishing centres, whose choices decided which long works were read, reviewed and republished as books. Within that system Dangdai held a specific niche: the big Beijing bimonthly of long fiction and long reviews, named among the Four Famous Dan and recognized abroad by 1985 as one of the "big four." Its roughly 250,000-character issues were, in effect, anthologies of the newest serious Chinese fiction, and its archive from 1979 onward constitutes a shelf of record for the literature of the new period.

The Magazine in the Market Era

The world that made Dangdai changed profoundly from the 1990s onward, as commercial publishing, and later internet literature, eroded the gatekeeping role of the big literary journals, and as the number of novels published annually in China climbed past ten thousand, according to figures cited at the magazine's own 2017 forum. Dangdai's response, visible in its public activities, has been to lean on curation and judgement: the Novel Forum and Literary Rally position the magazine as an arbiter that reads across the year's flood of fiction and identifies, transparently and without prize money, the works it judges best. Its stated persistence with realistic themes, noted by the China Writers Association, has remained its distinguishing editorial commitment through this transition.

Reading Contemporary Today

Contemporary — Dangdai — continues to be published bimonthly in Beijing, carrying long-form fiction, novellas and long literary reviews in issues of roughly 250,000 characters, as it has since June 1979. For students of modern Chinese literature it remains one of the essential periodicals of the reform era: one of the Four Famous Dan, one of the big four thick journals of the 1980s novella boom, and, through the Dangdai Literary Rally and its principles of "zero prize and full transparency," an continuing participant in the debate about what contemporary Chinese fiction should be. Few magazines have so literally embodied their title: for more than four decades, Dangdai has presented its readers with the present age, written at full length.