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In the fall of 2010, Fudan University in Shanghai announced that its Chinese department was about to revitalize the country’s literature. Creative writing was getting “a new face.” But rather than announcing a new faculty member or the winner of a literary prize, Fudan was planning the establishment of mainland China’s first MFA program in creative writing.

One might wonder what took them so long. The graduate creative writing program—and its attendant phenomena, from the undergraduate workshop to the small-press book deal to the degree-carrying poet who lives off untenured teaching jobs—has become a central feature of a contemporary American literary education. The idea of a degree in creative writing is less than a century old; the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, which is the oldest and most prestigious MFA program in the country, began in 1936. To reverse the national seal’s dictum: from one, many. Today it’s nearly impossible to find a major U.S. research university that doesn’t teach creative writing. 

Chinese universities have been openly emulating American universities at least since the Reform and Opening in the late 1970s. Coinciding with Deng Xiaoping’s promulgation of a more liberal national political ideology, so-called “Socialism with Chinese Characteristics,” this series of policies increased China’s economic and political openness to the outside world. Law schools, business schools, courses teaching leadership skills—the Chinese academy now has it all. But an MFA degree in creative writing is something different. Certainly, Fudan sees it that way: the program’s detailed and somewhat extravagant syllabus describes the university’s ambitions as nothing less than transforming contemporary Chinese literature into a thoroughly “international and scientific” practice.

But all is not quite as it seems. The syllabus, even with its vague goals like “expanding students’ artistic consciousness,” mirrors in almost every way what one might see at Iowa or another American MFA program. Novel writing, the art of the essay, rediscovering the classics, interdisciplinary film studies—it’s all there, with one glaring exception. Fudan has completely omitted poetry from its scheme to revolutionize contemporary Chinese literature.

Of course, the Chinese are writing poems, and have been for thousands of years. Tradition credits Confucius with compiling hundreds of Chinese folk songs and poems into the Shijing or Classic of Poetry. This text forms the core of a canon—parts of which are memorized by every elementary school student—that also includes Tang poets like Li Bai and Du Fu, as well as latter-day literati like the founding father of the People’s Republic of China, Mao Zedong. Mao, a prolific writer in the classical style, is perhaps the bestselling poet-politician in world history—and certainly the only poet whose image watches over his nation’s capital, as Mao’s portrait hangs above Tiananmen Square.

In many ways, Mao the Poet can coexist with Mao the Chairman because of a long Chinese tradition of the scholar-official (the shi class). Many canonical poets, like Qu Yuan, Wang Wei, and Su Shi, served in government. The imperial examination, a requirement from the Sui to the Qing dynasties for those who wished to join the national bureaucracy, focused on literary skills. Academic, poetic, and political success often intertwined.

But the tumult of twentieth century Chinese history created deep discontinuities between present and past. Poetry in China today is no longer a province of the ministry or the academy. China has not taken the path of the West, where the poète maudit, outside of society or outcast from it, dominates our cultural image of the literary artist. Instead, as poetry has dissociated itself from its historic affiliations, it has found a new territory to colonize: the Internet.

In a way that may be difficult for Americans to imagine, for young Chinese writers the poetry world now largely centers on decentralized online communities of non-professional, often anonymous writers. Forums like bbs.chinapoesy.com and poem100.cn allow poets to publish themselves, reaching large virtual audiences. There is no one authoritative site, no sole locus for this activity. Xiaofei Tian, a Harvard professor and scholar of Chinese poetry, calls these websites the “real world” in contemporary Chinese literature, in contrast to traditional venues like the universities and the publishing houses. Of course, as in any democratic literary model, quality varies widely. But, Tian argues, “Many of these online communities are actually very good.”