About Xingxing Poetry

Xingxing Poetry

Xingxing Poetry (Xingxing Shikan, titled simply Xingxing, “Stars”) is a poetry journal published in Chengdu, Sichuan, founded on 1 January 1957. It is described as China's earliest poetry magazine, and together with the Beijing-based Shikan (Poetry Journal) it was one of only two poetry journals in mainland China between 1949 and 1966. Its history is dramatic even by the standards of Chinese literary periodicals: founded by the poets Bai Hang, Shi Tianhe, Liushahe (Liu Shahe) and Bai Xia, it was shut down in October 1960 in the wake of the “Xingxing poetry case”, and it was revived in October 1979, after which it resumed its place as one of the principal homes of Chinese poetry. It is published by the Sichuan Writers Association from Hongxing Road in Chengdu's Jinjiang District, and since 2007 it has run the Xingxing Annual Poetry Award with Chengdu University of Arts and Sciences.

Founding on 1 January 1957

The journal was founded on 1 January 1957 by four poets: Bai Hang, Shi Tianhe, Liushahe and Bai Xia. Its name, Xingxing, means “stars”, and it comes from the saying that a single spark can start a prairie fire — an image of small beginnings with vast consequences that the journal's subsequent history, in both its glory and its troubles, would bear out. Bai Hang, whose real name was Liu Xinmin and who was born in 1925 in Gaoyang County, Hebei, had entered Sichuan with the army after the Battle of Taiyuan; he became the journal's founder and long-serving editor-in-chief, and the person most closely identified with it for the rest of his life. The founding date matters: a specialist poetry journal launched at the start of 1957 entered a literary landscape in which poetry held a central public place in China, and in which a dedicated poetry magazine was still a novelty.

One of two poetry journals, 1949–1966

Between 1949 and 1966, mainland China had only two poetry journals: Xingxing in Chengdu and Shikan, the Poetry Journal, in Beijing. That duopoly gives Xingxing its historical weight. Shikan, the premier poetry magazine of the period, represented the official centre in the capital; Xingxing, edited from Sichuan, represented a second, provincial pole in the southwest. For poets of that generation, publication in one of the two journals was effectively publication in Chinese poetry itself. Xingxing's description as China's earliest poetry magazine rests on this founding moment: launched at the very start of 1957, it belongs to the first handful of specialist literary periodicals of the People's Republic, and its survival — interrupted but not ended — makes it a living link to that founding generation of journals.

The Xingxing poetry case and closure in 1960

The journal's first life was short. It was shut down in October 1960 in the wake of the “Xingxing poetry case”, the controversy that attached itself to the young magazine and its circle in the harsh political climate that followed the Anti-Rightist Campaign of 1957. Bai Hang himself was mistakenly classified as a “rightist” in that period, a label that ended his editorship and shadowed him for two decades; he was rehabilitated only in 1978. The closure of Xingxing in 1960 is therefore not a routine publishing failure but part of the political history of Chinese literature: a three-year-old poetry journal, one of only two in the country, silenced, its founding editor condemned, and its title extinguished for nineteen years. Any account of the journal that skipped the case would miss the event by which it is most widely known in Chinese literary history.

Revival in October 1979

Xingxing was revived in October 1979, in the first wave of journal restorations that followed the end of the Cultural Revolution and the rehabilitation of writers condemned in earlier campaigns. Bai Hang, rehabilitated in 1978, returned to edit the journal he had founded, and continued editing it for a further ten years after its revival — an almost unique continuity of founder-editorship across a nineteen-year enforced silence. The revival restored the pre-1966 duopoly in a new form: Shikan in Beijing had been revived in 1976, and with Xingxing back in Chengdu from 1979, Chinese poetry again had its two historic journals. The revived journal entered a transformed poetry scene, in which a new generation of poets was emerging and unofficial poetry journals were beginning to circulate, but it carried the authority of a title that predated them all.

Bai Hang and the journal's identity

No account of Xingxing separates the journal from Bai Hang. Founder in 1957, editor-in-chief, condemned as a rightist, rehabilitated in 1978, editor again for a decade after the 1979 revival: his biography is the journal's biography in miniature. He was himself a poet, author of the Selected Poems of Bai Hang, Blue Humor and A Brief Discussion on Li Bai and Du Fu, among other works. When he died in Chengdu on 20 September 2021, Chinese coverage remembered him precisely as the founder and former editor-in-chief of the “Stars” poetry magazine. That a provincial poetry journal should be identified for over sixty years with a single founding editor is unusual, and it gave Xingxing a personal continuity that institutions alone rarely provide.

Publisher and Chengdu base

The journal is published by the Sichuan Writers Association, the provincial professional body for writers, from Hongxing Road in Chengdu's Jinjiang District. Chengdu has long been one of the capitals of Chinese poetry, with a dense population of poets, poetry societies and, from the 1980s onward, unofficial poetry journals; Xingxing, as the official Sichuan poetry journal edited in the city since 1957, is the institutional anchor of that scene. Its contributors recorded in poets' biographies span generations of Chinese poets who list publication in Xingxing Poetry Journal among their credits, alongside Shikan and the other national poetry titles — evidence that the Chengdu journal functions, as it did before 1966, as one of the small number of poetry journals whose pages define a poet's public standing.

The Xingxing Annual Poetry Award

Since 2007 the journal has also acted as an award-giver: the Xingxing Annual Poetry Award, established in that year together with Chengdu University of Arts and Sciences, is run by the magazine as an annual judgement on the year's poetry. The award extends the journal's historic role. A magazine that began by selecting which poems China would read now also formally honours the poetry of the year, in partnership with a Chengdu arts university — a combination of editorial and academic authority rooted, again, in the journal's own city. For a title founded in 1957, the creation of a named annual award in the 2000s is a sign of institutional vitality rather than mere survival.

Standing in Chinese poetry

Xingxing Poetry's standing rests on three facts that no other Chinese poetry journal combines: it is described as China's earliest poetry magazine; it was, with Shikan, one of only two poetry journals in mainland China from 1949 to 1966; and its suppression in the Xingxing poetry case and revival nineteen years later make its run a compact history of Chinese poetry publishing itself — founding optimism in 1957, political closure in 1960, and restoration in 1979. Published by the Sichuan Writers Association from Hongxing Road in Chengdu, edited for its first decades by its founder Bai Hang, and active today with its own annual poetry award, Xingxing remains what its name promised: a small spark, lit in Chengdu in 1957, that Chinese poetry has never entirely let go out.