Sex, libel and literature

A FRANK NOVEL about sex is at the centre of a court case in Beijing being billed as China's version of the famous obscenity trial in England over publication of D. H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover.

In a Chinese-language novel called simply K, London-based writer Hong Ying has written a graphic description of the erotic goings-on among China's close-knit literary community during the 1930s.

The banning of D. H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover and the subsequent acquittal of the book's publishers in 1960 helped usher in the post-World War II era of permissiveness in Britain. Hong predicts dire repercussions for literary freedom in China if she loses her case.

'It would put an end to a growing freedom and restore literature to the control of conservative and totalitarian forces,' said Hong, a lively, outspoken woman who has been based in London for more than a decade. The author of best-selling autobiographical works, such as Daughter of the River, the story of growing up in a poor family in Chongqing, and an earlier work describing the Tiananmen protests, she has now turned her attention to sex.

Hong has written an imaginary account of a real-life event, the love affair between Julian Bell, a nephew of English novelist Virginia Woolf, and Ling Shuhua, one of China's most highly regarded short-story writers during the 1930s.

Like so many of the disputes tearing apart China's literary circles, the controversy has its roots in the golden age of modern Chinese literature, when writers enjoyed a rare period of personal and professional freedom before they submitted themselves to the dictates of the Communist Party, which took power in 1949.

A Cantonese who came to Beijing in the 1920s to study English literature at the National Peking University, Ling began publishing her short stories under the tutelage of her professor Chen Yuan, whom she married. Chen fell into a bitter dispute with writer and social critic Lu Xun and later worked for the Nationalists. The couple worked in Wuhan, where Chen was head of the literary department.