The Sichuan earthquake of 12 May 2008 has been widely cited as a catalyst for the growth of Chinese civil society, as well as for an upsurge in patriotism and national unity centred around traditional Chinese virtues.Footnote ¹ The role played by new media in reporting and documenting the earthquake has also been noted.Footnote ² Reactions among the Chinese public included a wave of poetry composition that swept across the country in the days and weeks after the earthquake hit. “Quake Poetry” (dizhen shi 地震诗), also named “Quake Resistance Poetry” (kang zhen shi 抗震诗) or “Wenchuan Poetry” (Wenchuan shige 汶川诗歌) after the town at the epicentre of the quake, refers to any poem written in reaction to the earthquake, as well as to the phenomenon of Chinese people turning to poetry as an emotional outlet. This is a tradition that finds modern precedent in China in the Multimillion Poem Movement of the Great Leap Forward (1958–61) and the Tiananmen Poetry of 1976. Beginning the day after the quake, linear text poems were posted in their hundreds and thousands on internet forums and blogs, and sent around by email and text message.Footnote ³ They were soon reproduced nationwide in newspaper columns, published in print anthologies, recited on radio and television, and performed at poetry recitals and charity events.Footnote ⁴ Multimedia versions were posted online, featuring music, voice, photographs and video footage. Although well-known poets also composed works in response to the earthquake, the most widely-circulated Quake Poems were produced by so-called “ordinary netizens” (putong wangmin 普通网民), who were reported to have barely written a poem in their lives.Footnote ⁵ In China, Quake Poetry was to become one of the most talked-about cultural phenomena of 2008, an event which spoke not just to the enduring popular appeal of this literary genre, but also to the evolving relationship between culture, politics and media in the contemporary PRC.

This article examines the uses of different media in the production, circulation and consumption of Quake Poetry, and the discourses invoked in media coverage and online discussions of these poems. It will show how Quake Poetry emerged through a convergence of digital, print and live media, enabling it to spread rapidly throughout mainland China and beyond, in the process satisfying the various narratives of the individuals and institutions involved in its production, circulation and consumption. I begin by looking at the explicit and implicit connections made by commentators between Quake Poetry and other mass poetry movements of China's past. After a brief overview of typical Quake Poems, the main analysis focuses on a poem initially posted and circulated anonymously online, entitled “Child, quickly grab hold of Mama's hand” (Haizi, kuai zhuajin mama de shou 孩子, 快抓紧妈妈的手), as well as multimedia adaptations of the poem. Despite certain variations between these adaptations, all feature similar visual, oral and textual tropes that point to a convergence of interests among the poem's producer(s), the mass media and the central Chinese government.

My discussion borrows from the work of media studies scholar Henry Jenkins to propose that Quake Poetry can be seen as part of an emerging convergence culture that is being born from a combination of technological development and socio-political transformation in contemporary China. Examining the production, circulation and adaptation of these poems reveals how convergence took place on multiple levels: between media technologies, among producers and consumers (or what some call “prosumers”Footnote ⁶), and between different interest groups. Ultimately, Quake Poetry aided not only in what Jeffrey Alexander terms the trauma process,Footnote ⁷ that is to say an imaginative representation of trauma that allowed the Chinese people to grieve en masse, and to experience through poetry a form of cathartic release within politically approved limits. It also promoted a politically expedient image of national unity in the face of adversity, which extended beyond the borders of the PRC and gained favour in international media discourse on the Sichuan earthquake.

Quake Poetry: Chinese Media Discourse and Archetypal Examples

News articles written on the Quake Poetry phenomenon focused on the diversity and numbers of people writing poems in response to the earthquake, the large volume of Quake Poetry anthologies published in May 2008, and the emotional effects of these poems, “consoling those who lost relatives in the disaster, inspiring those helping in rescue efforts, and eulogizing the fortitude shown by Chinese people in times of great calamity.”Footnote ⁸ Some exclaimed “the entire population writes poetry” (quanmin xie shi 全民写诗), a phrase used in 2006–07 in reference to the online spoofing of the poet Zhao Lihua 赵丽华Footnote ⁹; others used the designation “earthquake poetry transcriptions” (dizhen shichao 地震诗抄).

Whereas the phrase “Quake Resistance Poems” implies a narrative of national unity with the Chinese people coming together to “resist” the disaster as if resisting a common wartime enemy, “transcriptions” (chao 抄) resonates rather with mass literary movements like the Tiananmen Poetry (Tiananmen shichao 天安门诗抄) of April 1976. Following Zhou Enlai's death on 8 January that year, thousands of poems were composed by ordinary Chinese people, displayed in locations in and around Tiananmen Square, copied down and circulated by hand, and recited aloud and turned into songs, before being published in print anthologies in 1977–79.Footnote ¹⁰ Although ostensibly written to mourn the passing of Zhou, the contents of Tiananmen Poetry touched upon a widespread discontent with the Chinese leadership of the time.Footnote ¹¹ Several Chinese news articles published in May 2008 directly compared Quake Poetry to Tiananmen Poetry. This comparison not only emphasized the continued hold of poetry over the Chinese national consciousness,Footnote ¹² but also hinted at an analogy between both events regarding the power of the masses to forge their own emotional and cultural responses to major events.

Commentators drew a further historical parallel between Quake Poetry and the Multimillion Poem Movement (baiwan shige yundong 百万诗歌运动, also known as the New Folksong Movement xin min'ge yundong 新民歌运动) of the Great Leap Forward.Footnote ¹³ News reports on the volume of Quake Poems circulated online recall government orders issued in 1958 to work units across China to produce poetry in support of the communist revolution, and the subsequent hyperbole used by the CCP to publicize the numbers of poems being written.Footnote ¹⁴ Great Leap Forward poems were so numerous that they were counted using basketfuls (lü 篓) or carloads (che 车) instead of the usual pieces (shou 首).Footnote ¹⁵ Similarly, it is the volume of poetry produced in response to the Sichuan earthquake rather than the quality of individual pieces that has impressed commentators.Footnote ¹⁶ The Quake Poem discussed below does not stand out as unusual, or unusually well written. It has been taken, rather, as an example of the “direct mass appeal”Footnote ¹⁷ of such poetry. It is, furthermore, evidence of the facilitating power of new media technologies to send an individual cultural text on a fast track to the national psyche, blurring boundaries between producers and consumers, and institutional and vernacular interests.Footnote ¹⁸

Before looking at the poem “Child, quickly grab hold of Mama's hand,” it is worth examining some different examples of Quake Poetry. The following is typical of works that were circulated anonymously online by netizens. It is called “China! Don't cry” (Zhongguo! Bu ku 中国! 不哭), and the author's name appears to have been lost – some websites carry the IP address used to post the poem in place of the author's name or web ID.Footnote ¹⁹ Here is the first section:

This poem is first and foremost a paean to the spirit of the Chinese people, and their ability to unite in overcoming perilous circumstances; it refers to other 2008 disasters that preceded the Sichuan earthquake, including the Olympic torch protests, the January snowstorms and the fatal train crash in Shandong province in April. It employs end rhyme throughout based on the word “cry” (ku 哭), and contains an abundance of exclamation marks and patriotic images like the sun, the red flag and the hands of the masses, making the poem reminiscent of Great Leap Forward or Cultural Revolution era literature. Other similar poems include “Together in life and death” (Shengsi bu li 生死不离) written by Beijing Olympics committee member Wang Jiuping 王久平 (not technically a “netizen” because of his official affiliations), “Passionately love life” (Re'ai shengming 热爱生命), and “Ode to peace” (Ping'an song 平安颂).Footnote ²¹

Early responses to the earthquake among mainland China's unofficial (fei guanfang 非官方) or avant-garde (xianfeng 先锋) poetry scene are also worth a brief overview here. The avant-garde poetry scene, which has its roots in underground literature of the Cultural Revolution, is distinguished by its ideological, institutional and aesthetic separation from mainstream literary production.Footnote ²² This involves a rejection of – and often by – both orthodox literary channels, which are the most subject to the Chinese central government's ideological agenda and censorship mechanisms, and commercial publication, which is motivated primarily by profit and thus rarely interested in the works of China's experimental and independent-minded poets. This dual separation has led to depictions of the avant-garde poetry scene as highly marginalized (bianyuanhua 边缘化). It has also resulted since the early 1990s in the formation of a crisis discourse among Chinese poets and critics, who make regular doom-laden predictions of poetry's declining position within contemporary culture, or even imminent “death.”Footnote ²³ Scholars including Maghiel van Crevel have pointed out that such depictions are little more than “socio-economic reductionism,” which ignore the broader socio-cultural relevance and artistic achievements of contemporary poetry beyond the size of its readership and financial revenue.Footnote ²⁴ In short, although the avant-garde poetry scene may be described as a fairly typical case of “production for producers”Footnote ²⁵ that only rarely attracts the attention of people outside the scene, it nevertheless constitutes a lively, active and highly networked field of literary production.

Unlike the largely anonymous netizen authors of Quake Poems, avant-garde poets wrote nonymously as poets of varying levels of renown. Some poems penned by self-professed members of the avant-garde demonstrated marked differences from those examined thus far. The following work was posted on 24 May 2008 on the online poetry forum Poetry Vagabonds (Shi jianghu 诗江湖), the home of poets aesthetically aligned with the now-defunct Lower Body (xia ban shen 下半身) poetry group.Footnote ²⁶ It is written by the poet Gu He 古河 and is entitled “After the earthquake was over, I admit” (Dizhen guo hou, wo chengren 地震过后, 我承认).Footnote ²⁷ The final section reads as follows:

The poem requires little in the way of interpretation: the narrator makes the guilty admission of having put quotidian concerns before grief or philanthropy, yet refuses to believe this behaviour makes him less of a human being. In general, avant-garde poetry forums witnessed a wider range of emotional, intellectual and verbal responses than the netizen-penned Quake Poems discussed so far, including anger, provocation, profanity and black humour. Some poets objected outright to the existence of Quake Poetry, arguing that a more natural reaction to the tragedy would be creative silence. The poet, critic and scholar Zhou Zan 周瓒 pointed out that most Quake Poetry had unconsciously adopted a Scar Literature (shanghen wenxue 伤痕文学) style, implying it had placed knee-jerk emotional catharsis before literary sophistication,Footnote ²⁸ and expressed disagreement with claims that the earthquake had given rise to “poetry fever” (shige re 诗歌热).Footnote ²⁹ The literary critic and scholar Xie Youshun 谢有顺 remarked that as time passes and the earthquake is forgotten, poetry too will probably “return to its original [marginalized] state,” and thus Quake Poetry cannot be considered evidence of a widespread poetic renaissance.Footnote ³⁰

Despite such voices of caution, the majority response to the earthquake amongst the contemporary poetry scene can be summarized as one of support, and poets expressed hope that their work could aid in fundraising movements and console the people of China.Footnote ³¹ Numerous critics wrote favourably of the phenomenon, equating it with trends in poetry production referred to as “grassroots poetry” (caogen shige 草根诗歌),Footnote ³² and seeing it as evidence of a newly liberal atmosphere in mainland China regarding poets' freedom to respond to events of national significance.Footnote ³³ Quake Poetry confirmed the significance of poetry as an art form in modern China, provided publishing opportunities, and invigorated discussions within the poetry scene about contemporary poetics. Although there was a high level of disagreement amongst poets and critics regarding its long-term impact on the development of contemporary Chinese poetry, most observers were able to describe the phenomenon in a way that met their own pre-existing narratives concerning the position and ideal role of modern poetry in Chinese society, and how necessary it is that poets respond creatively to contemporary public events.Footnote ³⁴

Child, Quickly Grab Hold of Mama's Hand

The title of “Child, quickly grab hold of Mama's hand” is usually followed by the clause “composed for the children who died in the Wenchuan earthquake” and the date of composition, 13 May 2008. Linear text versions of the poem read more or less as follows:

In its original form as a linear poem written in short lines with a rhyme scheme based around the word “hand” (shou 手), it is not difficult to see why this poem was a hit. Its simple, rhythmic style makes it conducive to memorization and recitation, as does the use of two voices to express the perspectives of mother and child. The tone is sad, a little sentimental, but reassuring, with the promise of reunification in the next life. In a shift of usual roles it is the child who comforts the mother, urging her to save her love for children whose lives were spared. The poem's popularity can be gauged by its publication in nearly 100 newspapers and magazines,Footnote ³⁶ its reproduction on thousands of blogs, forums and other websites, its inclusion in most officially published anthologies of Quake Poetry, and its subsequent metamorphosis into multimedia poems.Footnote ³⁷ Certain lines of the poem sound familiar to the point of cliché. An online search revealed, in fact, that the exact words of the final line, “in the next life we'll be together again,” had previously featured in the lyrics to a pop song released in 1993 by the Taiwanese singer Su Rui 苏芮, entitled “Holding hands” (Qianshou 牵手).Footnote ³⁸

The widespread circulation of “Child …” spurred a communal effort among netizens to discover the poem's original author, a process known in web slang as a “human flesh search” (renrou sousuo 人肉搜索).Footnote ³⁹ Since first being posted on the Earthquake Bar (dizhen ba 地震吧) forum of baidu.com, at least six people stepped forward to claim authorship.Footnote ⁴⁰ Most media outlets and poetry critics concluded that the original author was a 24-year-old from Shandong province called Su Shansheng 苏善生, who was revealed to have not completed his high school education and who claimed to have only written three poems in his entire life.Footnote ⁴¹

Several netizens suspected Su Shansheng was not the real author, expressing disgust that anyone should use “fake sentiment” to exploit the tragedy and become a celebrity.Footnote ⁴² Such resentment may have been fuelled by Su's revelation that the poem was based on an earlier poem he had written for a deceased girlfriend, entitled “Darling, quickly grab hold of my hand” (Qin'ai de, kuai zhuajin wo de shou 亲爱的, 快抓紧我的手), which he had posted on his blog in December 2005.Footnote ⁴³ Regardless of these controversies, Su appeared well-suited to post-2000 narratives of online literary success: he is a “post-1980” (baling hou 80 后) youth with an unconventional educational background for whom blogging is second nature, much like well-known novelists Han Han 韩寒, Zhang Yueran 张悦然 and Guo Jingming 郭敬明.

The public's desire to know not just the name, but also the background, interests and personality of the author of “Child …” contrasts with media portrayals of Quake Poetry authors as anonymous masses of “net friends” (wangyou 网友), participating in a collective cultural movement with scant thought to individual fame. It is also at odds with theories of online literary authorship, and digital cultural production more generally. As Siân Bayne suggests, a Foucauldian understanding of authorship as a socially constructed function of discourse rather than a fixed concept impervious to historical change might be most helpful to conceptualizing the creation of texts in a digital environment like the internet.Footnote ⁴⁴ As participatory modes of online cultural production become increasingly dominant in the 21st century, scholars are acknowledging a shift from individual to collective understandings of authorship, and from known identities towards “ambiguous gender, geographical location and social status.”Footnote ⁴⁵ In this case, the deployment of a human flesh search (usually reserved for cases involving “social shaming, monitoring and revenge”)Footnote ⁴⁶ suggests that a significant number of Chinese netizens were invested in the issue of individual creativity, even though Su Shansheng himself claimed this to be of little importance.Footnote ⁴⁷ An emphasis on individual agency could help counteract the lack of control experienced by netizens when poems like “Child …” went viral and, as demonstrated below, were adopted by the state-controlled mass media as a symbol of the unity of Chinese people in reacting to the earthquake.

Multimedia Adaptations

By multimedia adaptations, I mean any version of “Child, quickly grab hold of Mama's hand” that includes more than just text: usually some combination of words, music, sound and images. In a three-day period of searching online, I was able to locate 20 distinct multimedia adaptations of the poem. Some are referred to as poems (shi 诗), some as songs (gequ 歌曲), some as videos (shipin 视频) and some as music videos. Although it is not always clear where these multimedia adaptations were first broadcast, published or circulated, all the versions to be discussed were uploaded online in mp4 or flash video (.flv) format on to video sharing websites including YouTube, Youku 优酷, Sina (Xinlang 新浪), Sohu (Souhu 搜狐) and others. I shall describe several examples of multimedia adaptations that differ in their use of media and attitudes towards authorship, but which demonstrate clear similarities in their deployment of certain visual, audio and textual tropes. It will be shown how, from a piece of linear text posted online, the poem quickly developed into multiple multimedia works, gaining cultural capital as it was circulated on television, recorded as pop songs, and performed at live, government-sponsored events.

The most common type of adaptation is centred upon a spoken recital of the poem. These adaptations feature some combination of journalistic photographs of the destruction caused by the earthquake, background music and subtitles carrying the text of the poem. One version features the voice of a female narrator, whose name is not disclosed.Footnote ⁴⁸ It is accompanied by sombre-sounding orchestral music that eventually swells into the pop song “[We don't] only love by halves” (Cai ai dao yiban 才爱到一半) by a Taiwanese girl group. The photographs are graphic, including images of corpses and parental grief. Such images, seen countless times in newspapers, on television and online in the weeks after the quake, can be argued to contribute towards what psychologists term flash-bulb memories: vivid, commonly shared memories resulting from a “high level of surprise, a high level of consequentiality, or perhaps emotional arousal”Footnote ⁴⁹ that create over time a powerful sense of having been present at an event of historical significance.Footnote ⁵⁰ They appear in all the multimedia adaptations of “Child, quickly grab hold of Mama's hand,” thus constituting a powerful visual theme. This video finishes with a written message on the screen dedicating the poem to the PLA troops, police, medical personnel and “patriotic people” who helped with earthquake rescue efforts, and to Premier Wen Jiabao, who “persisted on the frontline of the disaster despite his advanced years.” We also find out who produced it (“blue jingyu 鲸鱼” – blue whale – and a “Mr Dabao 大包” or Mr Bale) and are given a contact email address. We are not told who wrote the poem itself.

A second type of adaptation is almost the same as the first, except the poem is sung rather than recited. I have identified two pop songs and the score for one other musical adaptation.Footnote ⁵¹ One was written and performed by a singer-songwriter from Fujian province called Jiang Zhou 蒋舟. It appears online in at least two versions with the same audio recording but different visuals. One of these two versions is visually similar to the adaptation described above, featuring almost identical photos of the immediate aftermath of the quake. Interestingly, Jiang Zhou is listed as the author of the words as well as the music. The text is, in fact, more or less the same as the poem by Su Shansheng, with a few minor changes, such as use of repetition to make the lyrics scan better, the addition or deletion of the odd character like “no” (bu 不) or “also” (ye 也), and the exchange of “incomplete exam papers” in place of “Papa's fists” as something the child will no longer have to suffer. The video ends with cartoon images of children, and a request to the audience to light candles to “comfort injured hearts.”Footnote ⁵²

A second musical version of the song appears in many different versions online. The music is said to be composed by a songwriter called Wu Mengqi 吴梦奇 and has been recorded by the singer Zhou Yu 周渔. A year after being posted online, the version sung by Zhou had been played over one-and-a-half million times on one website alone, attracting around 12,000 comments, including an exclamation that it is “the most moving song I have ever heard!”.Footnote ⁵³ Like Jiang Zhou's adaptation, it features a typical Chinese pop melody with a slow, uneven tempo, long phrases, and a gentle piano and string accompaniment. The music grows in volume and instrumentation a third of the way through with the introduction of drums, bass and backing vocals. The final section drops back down to piano and vocals, before the video finishes with a photo of a child holding its mother's hand, and the names of the song's composers and performer. The author of the lyrics is stated to be a “web friend.”

A third type of adaptation can be found in videos recorded from television broadcasts of recited and sung versions of the poem, copied from television to computer (sometimes via a handheld video recorder pointed at the screen),Footnote ⁵⁴ and then uploaded on to the internet. One example is a recital of the poem on a Dragon TV (Dongfang weishi 东方卫视) news programme, presented by Yu Dan 于丹 and Luo Xin 骆新. It begins with an emotional Yu discussing the aftermath of the earthquake and her personal reaction to the tragedy. A minute in, Luo mentions that he and Yu recently received a text message containing the poem “Child, quickly grab hold of Mama's hand.” He proceeds to take out his phone, search for the poem and recite it live on air. The camera zooms in for a close-up of Yu Dan's face, with tears rolling down her cheeks. By the end both presenters are crying, and the rest of the video shows them discussing their inability to contribute towards earthquake relief efforts beyond the sum of money they have already donated. Some viewers have remarked that the real reason Yu Dan is crying is because she donated so little (100,000 yuan) compared to her huge annual earnings as a best-selling author and media celebrity, but others have cited such video clips as their first exposure to the poem, and claimed that the sight of Yu and Luo's tears was immensely moving.Footnote ⁵⁵ Worth noting here are the multiple stages of technological mediation on display: the poem has travelled from internet forum via email, blogs and text message to a mobile phone, recited in a television recording studio, broadcast on television, then recorded on to a computer and posted back to the internet, all in the space of less than a week.

Other televised recitals of the poem were more staged, employing professional actors, stage lighting and musical accompaniment. One example, shown on Dragon TV as part of a fundraising programme, was recited by the actress Xi Meijuan 奚美娟 and an eight-year-old girl called Li Jiayi 李嘉仪. The names of the actors and of the poem are given, but the author of the poem is not. This recital takes its cues from poems found in the first category in its choice of musical accompaniment, use of an adult and child narrator, and in the vocal cadences towards the poem's denouement, slowing and rising in volume. Other features are more medium-specific: that it was recorded in front of a live studio audience might explain why Xi Meijuan appears to improvise upon the words in places, slightly changing the text of the poem, and why it incorporates theatrical moments, such as when the actors walk across the stage and hold hands to recite the final section of the poem in unison.

A fourth type of adaptation can be identified in commercially produced music videos of the poem. In June 2008 a group of 50 Hong Kong pop singers recorded a Band Aid-style music video for the song version composed by Wu Mengqi. It begins like many other multimedia adaptations with a photograph of strong visual impact: a clock with its hands permanently pointing to 2.28pm, the precise time the quake hit. Smoke rises from the bottom of the screen as the picture fades out and then in again to moving video footage of the singers in a recording studio, hands over headphones, singing into their microphones as the lyrics scroll across the bottom of the screen. Photographs of the earthquake are interspersed with video recorded in the studio. Backing vocals riff on individual lines, and the poem is stretched into a song that lasts nearly five minutes. Opening credits list the lyricist as anonymous (yiming 佚名), even though Su Shansheng had long been identified as the poem's author by most media outlets. The closing credits, on the other hand, are exhaustive, listing the names of the songwriter, singers, producers, recording studio, vocal coach, sound mixers, vocal producer, design company, record company and so on. This commercial musical adaptation is clearly the furthest removed from its origins as a linear text poem composed as an impromptu response to the earthquake by a Chinese netizen. At the same time, the anonymity of the song's lyricist suggests an attempt on the part of the video's producers to emphasize the authenticity of its emotional message.

A pared-down celebrity performance of this arrangement was sung live at the eleventh anniversary celebrations of Hong Kong's handover to the PRC on 30 June 2008, broadcast on TVB Jade.Footnote ⁵⁶ This anniversary is usually marked with a combination of celebrations and protests, the latter organized by campaigners for democracy and economic and media freedoms.Footnote ⁵⁷ The Sichuan earthquake imbued the anniversary with extra significance, allowing the organizers of the televised celebrations to promote an image of solidarity during a period of mourning that was observed by Chinese people regardless of location or nationality.Footnote ⁵⁸ This was arguably the most striking example of how the Chinese government and the mass media were able to appropriate “Child, quickly grab hold of Mama's hand” in order to fulfil certain key narratives regarding the nature of the Chinese people's collective response to a national catastrophe like the Sichuan earthquake. Once again, by emphasizing the anonymity or ordinariness of the poem's author, the media implicitly underlined the phenomenon of spontaneous popular grief that in China finds expression through the historically important and culturally refined medium of poetry. The inclusion of a sung version of the poem at the handover anniversary concert might be said to reflect the Chinese government's desire to highlight and encourage an emergent sense of Pan-Chineseness or “Cultural China,” in which events that affect the well-being of the Chinese people are felt as keenly in China's Special Administrative Regions, would-be provinces and overseas communities as they are within the mainland itself.Footnote ⁵⁹