Snapshot of an Icon: Database evidence

The "China Academic Journals Full-text Database" provides convenient snapshots of major topics covered not only in specialized journals like Journal of the Second Northwest University for Nationalities (Philosophy and Social Science Edition) 西北第二民族学院学报(哲学社会科学版) but also more mainstream literary journals like Reading magazine 读书. This database provides some evidence that Yang Jiang has become a major topic of discourse since 2003 -- a significant and unusual achievement for an author who is over 90 years old!

Between 1980 and 1994, Yang Jiang is a topic of discussion in just 15 articles, mostly praising her autobiographical collection Six Chapters of a Cadre School (1980). However, between 1994 and the present, there are over 200 articles that focus on Yang Jiang in a wide variety of journals (including the two mentioned above). In general, this tremendous rise in popularity as a topic of journal articles is in keeping with other intellectual figures of this generation. Yang Jiang's husband Qian Zhongshu, for example, is the subject of nearly 100 articles between 1980 and 1994, but some 400 articles discuss his life and work since 1994. And perhaps most influential of all the Chinese elder writers, Ba Jin, was the subject of 400 articles between 1980 and 1994, but nearly 1,200 articles since 1994.

The remarkable difference I'd like to point out, however, is Yang Jiang's amazing rise in popularity since 2003. Of the 200-some articles about Yang Jiang's life and work since 1994, some 60 percent were written after 2003, with 37 articles on Yang Jiang in 2008 alone and three more already in 2009. Writing about Qian Zhongshu, by contrast has declined slightly since 2003, and the rate of writing about Ba Jin has stayed the same.

Yang Jiang can be said have been an established Chinese writer at least from 1981, when Six Chapters received a warm welcome (it has stayed in print ever since). But she has only been a "hot topic" in academic and literary journals in the last 5 years. This popularity seems to have been spurred by her 2003 memoir, We Three, a surprise bestseller that dominated the paperback markets in mainland China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan through-out the second half of 2003. One of the goals of my dissertation is to examine in detail the factors that have led to this very recent rise in fame, and to link Yang Jiang's fame to the social and political situation of China since 2003, as well as the literary market.