In recent years, Chinese netizens have shown they possess boundless creativity and ingenuity in finding ways to express themselves despite government restrictions on online speech. To Chinese Internet users, those terms often resonate deeply by expressing feelings about shared experiences that millions of people can immediately relate to. Does New Language Lead to New Thought? Will new political discourse give birth to a new political identity? Are new forms of networked communication enhancing opportunities for social change and helping to move China toward a “threshold” for political transformation? This study is attempting to shed lights on those questions.

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Until about thirty years ago, the field of modem Chinese literature scarcely existed in the American academy. A few scholars of MingQing fiction did occasionally consider modem writers, but only secondarily. Language teachers used stories by Lu Xun, Zhu Ziqing, and others as teaching materials. But beyond that, only some historians and social scientists did anything with twentieth-century Chinese literature.In the 1960s, modem China studies were dominated by the interdisciplinary &dquo;area studies&dquo; approach that was exemplified in about five major university centers supported by the Ford Foundation and National Defense Foreign Languages funding from the United States government. These funding efforts, which were indirect results of the shock of Sputnik and the vision of an expanding Communist bloc, were primarily rooted in the precept &dquo;know thine enemy.&dquo; Many of the scholars who became the foot soldiers in this early march had broader aims-including more complexly humanistic approaches to China, as well as, in many cases, outright sympathy with the putative enemy. But still, in intellectual terms, the area studies approach remained dominant. When it came to literature, it seemed natural to use literary texts, especially realist fiction, as a means to understand Chinese social life. The suitability of this approach seemed to be confirmed by modem Chinese writers themselves, who, almost unanimously, seemed to be focused on China's social crises and eager to portray them in literary form.

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