Rewriting Beijing: a spectacular city in Qiu Huadong's urban fiction

The rise of urban fiction in Chinese literary writings of the 1990s is certainly an important phenomenon, closely related to rapid urbanization as well as changes in the literary zeitgeist. However, what distinguishes the urban fiction of the 1990s is the foregrounding of the city itself, in that the city has come to the central place to become the chief object of representation. This paper examines, through a reading of Qiu Huadong's novel, The City Chariot, the specific ways in which urban fiction and the modern city have come to interact, how the city has created exclusively urban experiences, and how these urban experiences, in their turn, complicate our understanding and representing of the city, and demand a new structure of representation as well as a new relationship to the city. Set against a new metropolitan backdrop, Qiu's novel concentrates on the anxiety and richness of contemporary urban experiences. However, what these new experiences have created are senses of randomness, of terrifying disconnectedness, and of a loss of history. In this perceptive vertigo, the city resists any neat representation; and its images are fragmented to become ‘an untotalizing totality’.