Echoes from the Opposite Shore: Chinese Ecocritical Studies as a Transpacific Dialogue Delayed

When the first Chinese book to systematically introduce ecocriticism, Ecoliterature in Europe and America, was published in 2003, it was seven years after the publication of The Ecocriticism Reader in the United States. Ecocriticism in China has developed dramatically since then. In his comprehensive review essay, “Environmental Dimensions in Contemporary Chinese Literature and Criticism” (2013), Yang Jincai has identified four paths for the development of Chinese ecocriticism: 1) reiteration of Western theory; 2) comparative, cross-cultural theorization; 3) the study of environmental themes in Chinese literature; and 4) the study of Western literature.1 This paper does not intend to look backward, repeating Yang's rigorous examination, but tries to look ahead to diagnose some urgent obstacles hindering Chinese studies in the fields of ecocriticism and environmental literature, such as undeveloped ecocritical branches in China and delays in translating Western ecocriticism into Chinese. Using American ecocriticism as a reference, I first seek to illustrate my concerns about Chinese ecocriticism by analyzing publication data and epistemological differences between American and Chinese ecocriticism. Translation delays in the case of both theoretical and primary texts may generally account for many of the gaps in Chinese ecocriticism and the differences between Chinese and international varieties of ecocriticism. Nonetheless, other vital impediments for Chinese ecocriticism still lie in the tensions between professors of English and Chinese, visual and textual departments, the science and the humanities, and, more importantly, in the conservative attitudes of Chinese scholars who represent an urban middle-class Han Chinese bias. I conclude my paper by anticipating that fulfilling the potential for transnational dialogues and interdisciplinarity inherent in Chinese academia will greatly contribute to Chinese and international ecocriticism in the coming years.