About Youth

Youth

Youth (Chinese: 青春; pinyin: Qīngchūn) is a Chinese literary journal published in Nanjing, Jiangsu province. Founded in 1979, it is known as one of the "four small stars" of Chinese literary journals — the quartet of relatively young, comparatively daring literary magazines that distinguished themselves in the crowded field of Chinese literary publishing in the reform era. In the account of the Nanjing City of Literature programme, which documents the journal as part of the literary heritage of China's UNESCO-designated City of Literature, Youth's record of discovery is remarkable for a journal of its size: Su Tong's first book appeared in its pages; Liang Xiaosheng's celebrated work "Storm Tonight" was published there; and Zhang Ping's first award-winning short story appeared there as well. The journal has won the Jiangsu Province Award for Outstanding Journals and the Zhuang Wenwen Youth Literature Journal Award sponsored by the China Writers Association, honours given, in the programme's words, because of its great deeds in promoting valuable literature.

Youth was born in the first year of China's literary reopening. Literary journals had been among the glories of Chinese publishing before the Cultural Revolution silenced most of them; in 1978–79 the surviving journals revived and new ones were founded to meet an enormous pent-up demand for fiction and poetry. A journal founded in Nanjing in 1979, named simply Youth, and committed from the start to new writing and new writers, was perfectly placed for that moment — and its subsequent reputation rests on how consistently, across four decades, it kept finding the writers who mattered.

Founding in 1979: a journal of the reopening

The year 1979 stands at the hinge of modern Chinese literature. The Cultural Revolution had ended in 1976; the policies of reform and opening were proclaimed in December 1978; and literature — scar literature first, then the broader flood of new fiction and poetry — was returning to print at extraordinary speed. Journals founded or revived in those years became the arena of the new literature, because book publishing lagged behind the periodical press in speed and courage. Youth, founded in Nanjing in 1979, belonged to the new foundations: a journal created not by inheritance but by the moment, in a provincial capital with a literary tradition two millennia deep.

Nanjing mattered. The capital of Jiangsu, a city of universities and publishing houses — home to Phoenix Publishing & Media Group and Yilin Press among China's largest publishers, and designated a UNESCO City of Literature in 2019 — Nanjing sustained a literary ecosystem in which a young journal could draw on deep reserves of writers, editors and readers. The Nanjing City of Literature programme presents Youth within that ecosystem, alongside its elder stablemate Yuhua (founded 1957), as one of the journals through which Nanjing's contemporary literature was made.

The "four small stars" of Chinese literary journals

Youth's best-known distinction is its membership in the group Chinese critics call the "four small stars" (si xiao mingxing) of literary journals. The label identifies four journals that, though smaller and younger than the great national literary monthlies — People's Literature, Harvest, Contemporary and their peers — achieved national reputations in the reform era for the quality and adventurousness of their selections, and above all for discovering writers. To be named among the four was to be certified as a journal that mattered beyond its province and beyond its size.

The economics behind the label are those of Chinese literary publishing generally. Provincial and municipal journals — sponsored by writers' associations and federations of literary and art circles, supported by subscriptions in a vast country — vastly outnumbered the national titles, and writers' careers were typically made locally first: a story placed in a good provincial journal was noticed by critics, reprinted by the national selection journals, and carried its author toward book publication and prizes. The "small stars" were the provincial journals that performed this function at national standard. Youth's documented discoveries show it doing exactly that work, repeatedly, across the 1980s and after.

Su Tong's first book

The journal's most famous discovery is Su Tong. Born Tong Zhonggui in Suzhou, Jiangsu, in 1963, Su Tong entered the Chinese department of Beijing Normal University in 1980 and began publishing fiction in 1983, before his graduation in 1984; he settled in Nanjing, where he became an editor (eventually editor-in-chief of the literary magazine Zhongshan) and vice-president of the Jiangsu Writers Association. In the Nanjing City of Literature's account of Youth, Su Tong's first book was published in the journal — the debut that began one of the most acclaimed careers in contemporary Chinese literature.

The writer Youth launched went on to write the novella Wives and Concubines (1990), adapted by Zhang Yimou as the film Raise the Red Lantern (1991); the novels Rice, My Life as Emperor and The Boat to Redemption; and Shadow of the Hunter, which won the 9th Mao Dun Literature Prize in 2015 — the highest honour in Chinese fiction. His work, translated into English, German, Italian and French, made the avant-garde fiction of the 1980s known worldwide. That his first book appeared in Youth is the clearest single exhibit of the journal's editorial function: a small Nanjing journal identifying, at the very start, a writer of world stature from its own province.

Liang Xiaosheng, Zhang Ping and the journal's discoveries

Su Tong was not an isolated case. The City of Literature's record of Youth names two further landmarks. Liang Xiaosheng's "Storm Tonight" (Jinye You Baofengxue) — the celebrated story of the sent-down youth generation, among the best-known Chinese works of its period — was published in Youth; the programme calls it Liang's masterpiece. And Zhang Ping's first award-winning short story likewise appeared in the journal, preceding a career that would make Zhang one of China's most prominent novelists of officialdom and society. Three writers of three different kinds — the avant-gardist, the chronicler of the educated-youth generation, the social novelist — all passed through the same small Nanjing journal at the decisive early moments of their careers.

This pattern is what the "four small stars" reputation means in practice. A discovery journal's editors read manuscripts without the protection of famous names; their skill is judgement under uncertainty, and their record is testable in retrospect, as Youth's is. The works named above are canonical reference points of post-1979 Chinese fiction, and each is attached, in the documented record, to this journal's pages.

Awards and official recognition

Youth's honours match its reputation. It won the Jiangsu Province Award for Outstanding Journals — the provincial system's recognition of editorial quality — and the Zhuang Wenwen Youth Literature Journal Award sponsored by the China Writers Association, the national writers' body's award for journals serving youth literature. The City of Literature's summary ties the awards explicitly to the journal's service: they were won "because of its great deeds in promoting valuable literature." In the Chinese journal system, where titles are ranked continually by their associations, their provinces and their peers, such awards are the formal counterpart of the informal "small star" label — the institutions certifying what readers and writers already knew.

Youth among China's literary journals

China's literary journals form one of the world's great periodical systems: hundreds of titles, sponsored at every level from the national writers' association to the prefectures, which together published the overwhelming majority of serious Chinese fiction and poetry throughout the print era. Within that system the hierarchy was real but porous. The national journals in Beijing and Shanghai conferred the greatest prestige; yet the system's vitality depended on the provincial journals — Yuhua in Nanjing (1957), Youth in Nanjing (1979), and their counterparts in every province — where most writers first appeared and where regional literatures were formed.

Youth's career shows the system at its best. Founded in a provincial capital in the year of reopening, it used local knowledge — Jiangsu's writers, Nanjing's universities, the province's literary associations — to perform a national function, discovering authors whom the whole country, and in Su Tong's case the world, would read. Its survival across the system's later transformations — the collapse of subscription economics in the 1990s, the migration of young readers to the internet, the re-founding of literary prestige in prizes and film adaptations — testifies to the durability of the function it was created to serve.

Nanjing, City of Literature

The journal's modern frame is Nanjing's designation as a UNESCO City of Literature, the first Chinese city so honoured. The City of Literature programme's documentation of Nanjing's journals presents Youth — with its founding date, its "four small stars" standing, its discoveries and its awards — as part of the city's living literary infrastructure: the journals, prizes, salons, bookshops and publishing houses through which a city of 8 million sustains a two-thousand-year literary tradition. In that company Youth figures not as a relic of 1979 but as a continuing institution of the city's literary life.

Legacy

Youth's legacy is measurable in other writers' bibliographies: a first book by Su Tong, a masterpiece by Liang Xiaosheng, a first prize-winning story by Zhang Ping, and the countless less famous careers that a discovery journal launches without leaving names in the reference books. Founded in Nanjing in 1979, counted among the four small stars of Chinese literary journals, honoured by its province and by the China Writers Association for promoting valuable literature, Youth exemplifies the reform-era literary journal at its most useful — small, alert, and early to the writers who would define its age. Its name has proved accurate in a sense its founders may not have intended: it is a journal that has spent more than four decades in the company of literary youth, printing it first.