Between Animalizing Nature and Dehumanizing Culture

Abstract

Arenowned writer who has won several top-level national awards in China since 2002, Yingsong Chen writes about the poverty-stricken people struggling in the great mountains of Shennongjia and about the people who leave these mountains and end up in neighboring cities such as Wuhan and Yichang.¹ His Shennongjia stories often strike readers with images of the desperate dehumanization facing characters who find themselves cornered into destitution in the country and anonymity in the city. Critics of his works tend to focus on human characters fighting for survival or on animal characters functioning as metaphors of human survival. This chapter attempts to show the close link between the fates of humans and animals in Chen’s Shennongjia stories. Close readings of the texts produce the following observations: first, in the face of extreme material poverty, whether in the country or in the city, there is no ground for human superiority over animals; second, the most dehumanizing power is not poverty itself, but the pervasive industrial power that is fundamentally damaging to humanity as well as destructive to nonhuman animals. The chapter argues, therefore, that by denouncing human arrogance in a specific situation in contemporary China, the writer actually shows a post-humanist attitude. It goes on to argue that this attitude is also an ecological attitude, for it directly confronts the anthropocentric view that sees value only in humans and their activities.