About Shijie Wenxue

Shijie Wenxue

Overview

Shijie Wenxue, published in English as World Literature, is a bimonthly literary magazine published in Beijing, China, and is the country's flagship journal for translated literature and world-literary scholarship. Founded in 1953 — beginning life as a journal of translation, the predecessor title from which World Literature developed, and renamed World Literature in 1959 — it is published under the Institute of Foreign Literature of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. For seven decades its editors and translators have introduced generations of Chinese readers and scholars to foreign classics and contemporary writing. Its history contains one of the most famous episodes in modern Chinese literary culture: shut down for thirteen years during and after the Cultural Revolution, the magazine resumed publication in 1979 with Li Wenjun's translation of Franz Kafka's The Metamorphosis, a text that helped ignite China's modernist literary awakening. At its peak in the 1980s, the bimonthly's circulation reached roughly 400,000 copies, each copy, as one account puts it, circulated among dozens of readers. No other Chinese periodical has played quite the same role as a bridge between Chinese readers and the literature of the rest of the world.

Origins, 1953–1959

The journal began in 1953 as Yiwen (Translation), a magazine devoted to translated foreign literature in the young People's Republic. Li Wenjun, who would become its defining editor, joined the editorial board in 1953 and was among the journal's earliest editors and translators; he remained there for forty years, eventually serving as editor-in-chief. In 1959 the journal was renamed Shijie Wenxue — World Literature — the name it has carried ever since, supervised by what is now the Institute of Foreign Literature of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in Beijing. The institutional home is significant: this is a scholars' journal as much as a readers' magazine, attached to the national research institute charged with studying foreign literatures. Its pages have therefore always combined two things — translations of fiction and poetry, and the scholarship, reviewing and literary intelligence that help readers place those works. In the 1950s the foreign literature available to Chinese readers leaned heavily toward Soviet and socialist writing, reflecting the alliances of the day; the journal's later fame rests on how dramatically that diet broadened after 1978.

Translators at the Centre

World Literature is, to an unusual degree, a magazine run by translators, and its history is best told through them. Li Wenjun is the central figure: a translator of Faulkner, Hemingway, Salinger, McCullers and Alice Munro, he is credited with introducing Franz Kafka to China. His working method illuminates the journal's privileges and purposes. Attached to the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences' foreign-literature institute, the editorial board could subscribe to the latest foreign publications even when ordinary readers could not; reading English-language journals, Li saw how highly Kafka was evaluated abroad, translated The Metamorphosis from English himself, and had his wife Zhang Peifen, a German translator, proofread it. Around him worked a generation of scholar-translators — among the names associated with that era of Chinese translation are Liu Mingjiu and Zhou Kexi — who, following reform and opening-up in 1978, introduced Western classics at, in one account's phrase, lightning speed for hungry readers. The magazine was their instrument: it could put a newly translated modernist masterpiece in front of hundreds of thousands of readers within months, without waiting for book publication.

Closure and the Kafka Revival of 1979

The magazine shut down for thirteen years in the fallout of the Cultural Revolution (1966–76), the decade in which literary publishing in China was subordinated to a narrow revolutionary culture. When World Literature was officially revived in 1979, its return issue featured Li Wenjun's translation of Kafka's The Metamorphosis. The choice was programmatic. Kafka was already celebrated in the West as a literary prophet, but Chinese readers were encountering the name for the first time in the journal's pages; apart from Soviet literature, The Metamorphosis became the one twentieth-century foreign work that made university reading lists, even if initially for critical purposes. Scholarship on Kafka in China dates the field from that 1979 publication: a first stage runs from the World Literature translation to the 1996 complete Kafka in Chinese, and Chinese academic databases now hold thousands of Kafka articles and hundreds of theses that trace back, ultimately, to the journal's return issue. A single magazine translation also had a creative consequence that scholars and journalists consistently emphasise — it showed Chinese fiction writers a new way to write. The generation that turned to modernism in the 1980s had read its Kafka, among other revelations, in World Literature.

The Golden Age of the 1980s

In the 1980s, World Literature played a significant role in ushering in what accounts of the period call a golden age of literature and arts in China. At its peak the bimonthly journal boasted a circulation of roughly 400,000, and because copies were shared — passed around dormitories, workplaces and reading rooms — each copy reached dozens of readers, putting the magazine's real audience in the millions. For the young writers of the period, it was a university in print: through its translations they met the Latin American magical realists, the European modernists and the American storytellers whose techniques they would absorb into the root-seeking and avant-garde fiction that remade Chinese literature in that decade. The magazine's influence is thus double. It served general readers hungry for the world after decades of restriction, and it served the writers who were simultaneously creating a new Chinese literature — a readership within the readership whose debt to the journal is recorded in memoir and criticism alike. When NewsChina profiled the elderly Li Wenjun decades later, it framed the story exactly so: in the 1980s, a single magazine run by translators gave millions of Chinese readers their first glimpses of world literature and led a generation of writers to embrace modernism.

What the Magazine Publishes

World Literature is published bimonthly under the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences' foreign-literature research institute, and its contents reflect that scholarly home. It publishes translated foreign fiction and poetry — novels in extract, short stories, poems — alongside essays, reviews and research on world literature, making it simultaneously a literary magazine and an academic-adjacent journal of record for its field. That dual character distinguishes it from purely commercial translation magazines: its editors are researchers at the national institute for foreign literature, and its selections carry scholarly weight, signalling which foreign authors Chinese academia considers important. In recent years it has also responded to world events with themed columns; one account notes a column titled The Epidemic Site, featuring stories, essays and poems concerning the Covid-19 pandemic by writers around the globe. A bimonthly rhythm suits the model: frequent enough to track contemporary world writing, substantial enough to carry long translations and serious criticism in a single issue.

Institution and Continuity

The magazine's survival across seven decades — through the journal's founding as Translation in 1953, the renaming to World Literature in 1959, a thirteen-year closure, and the transformation of Chinese publishing after the 1990s — rests on its institutional base. Journals attached to national research institutes are insulated from some market pressures and anchored to a continuing mission: the Institute of Foreign Literature studies the world's literatures, and its journal presents them. Editors of Li Wenjun's generation gave the title extraordinary continuity — one editor-translator serving from 1953 for forty years, rising to editor-in-chief — and that continuity of personnel is visible in the magazine's identity, which has remained recognisably itself even as its 1980s mass circulation gave way to the smaller, more specialised audiences of contemporary literary journals. The title's name is itself a mission statement, and Chinese literary culture has had no reason to retire it: Shijie Wenxue is routinely described, as in the reference summary behind this profile, as China's flagship journal for translated literature and world-literary scholarship.

Why the Magazine Matters

Assessments of World Literature's importance converge on three points, all documented. First, priority: founded in 1953 and renamed in 1959, it is among the oldest continuously identified channels through which foreign literature has entered Chinese, and its editors were translating major world authors when few others could. Second, the 1979 moment: its revival issue's publication of The Metamorphosis is a fixed point in Chinese literary history, credited with introducing Kafka to millions of mainland readers and with helping to trigger both Kafka studies in China — thousands of articles strong — and the modernist turn of 1980s fiction. Third, scale at its peak: a bimonthly circulation of roughly 400,000, multiplied by pass-along readership, made it one of the most influential literary periodicals of the reform era. Translation is the invisible infrastructure of literary culture; readers rarely know the names of the journals that first carried the books that changed them. World Literature is the exception that proves the rule — a translators' magazine from Beijing whose name is permanently attached to the moment modern world literature arrived, in full force, in China.