ABSTRACT
In the 1980s, during the campaign against spiritual pollution, Gao Xingjian and Ma Jian, alongside many other intellectuals and artists, had to leave their urban homes, trying to escape political persecution. The two authors fled from Beijing into China's vast hinterland, where they each spent long periods, constantly on the move, unable to fully leave behind the politics of the centre and the history connected to it.
They each processed their journeys in an autofictional novel – Soul Mountain (Gao, 1989) and Red Dust (Ma, 2001) – in which they not only engage with questions of individual identity, but also describe in detail their encounters and experiences. Through a closer analysis of these works, this chapter focuses on their literary discovery and simultaneous (re)construction of the Chinese hinterland. Three general types of socio-spatial construction can be distinguished: firstly, through a foregrounding of natural sights, secondly through politicized human relations, and thirdly through a return to local histories and traditions, which is reminiscent of root-searching literature and sometimes borders on what David Der-Wei Wang calls “imaginary nostalgia”, implying the literary construction of an ideal, not an actual space.
