From “Crawling Grids” to “Processing Words”: “Stylus” Transition and Computer Writing in the 1990s Chinese Cultural Marketization

Abstract This essay examines the understudied role of personal computers in China’s literary transformation, focusing on the shift from handwriting to computer writing led by established literary elites circa the 1990s. It first contextualizes writers’ switch to computer writing within early-reform China’s information craze, exposing the purported efficiency of computer writing that allured writers and engineers alike as a constructed technophilic myth. It then contends that the adoption of personal computers has reconfigured literary composition into “processing words,” which manifests in three aspects: compartmentalized and human-machine entangled workflows, reinterpretation of the Chinese language stimulated by input methods, and writers’ negotiation with their new “processor” roles within the burgeoning and diversifying Chinese cultural market. Particularly, this essay closely analyzes Chen Cun 陈村 and his computer-written novel Fresh Flowers And 鲜花和 (1997) as an epitome of established writers’ shared navigation of the computerized creative environment. Writers grapple with the paradoxical effect of literary creation becoming “processing,” which unleashes new textual and paratextual expressive possibilities for literary experimentation but simultaneously desanctifies literary elites in the increasingly streamlined cultural production mechanism. This essay thus also identifies the nation’s pursuit of information modernity as a crucial catalyst of the cultural commodification witnessed in 1990s China.