FILE PHOTO: A poster of the TV series “To the Wonder,” adapted from Li Juan’s prose collection My Altay

In recent years, New Southern Writing, New Northeastern Literature, frontier narratives, and county-level local writing have continued to gain prominence, making place-based narrative a major focus of modern and contemporary literary creation and scholarship. Rooted in local spaces and drawing on situated experiences, these writings have broadened the scope of realist representation, further enriched the diverse yet unified narrative landscape of Chinese literature, and provided vivid literary perspectives for presenting China’s story in all its complexity.

Refining vivid local experiences

The upsurge in place-based narrative is not a short-term trend, but the product of both the contemporary context and literature’s own internal development. Meng Fanhua, vice president of the Chinese Association of Contemporary Literature and director of the Institute of Chinese Culture and Literature at Shenyang Normal University, said that the concentrated emergence of regional creative clusters such as New Northeastern, New Southern, and New Beijing writing reflects an underlying desire within literary circles to “decenter” and reshape the literary landscape. “Concepts such as ‘New Southern Writing,’ ‘New Northeastern Writers Group,’ ‘New Northwestern Writers Group,’ as well as earlier formulations like ‘Fujian School Criticism’ and ‘Cantonese School Criticism,’ are not only tied to the creative ecologies of different regions but also implicitly call for literary diversity, representing an effort to ‘restructure’ the overall landscape of contemporary literature,” he noted.

Modern and contemporary literary narratives, Meng argued, have long been centered on the Central Plains and first-tier metropolises, leaving regional literature marginalized. The emergence of various regional writing concepts reflects a shared effort by writers and scholars to move beyond a single narrative center and pursue greater diversity in literary expression.

Meng proposed that “examining local knowledge from the perspective of cultural anthropology can provide useful reference for literary studies in their engagement with local knowledge.” However, he also cautioned against overemphasizing regional characteristics: “While investigating local knowledge has positive value, overstating regional traits can distort the way writers perceive life and understand the world, creating the risk of homogenized and stereotyped literary production.”

He Zhongming, vice president of the Modern Chinese Literature Research Association and professor of the Department of Chinese Language and Literature at Jinan University, said that outstanding place-based narratives capture a region’s cultural history, local customs, and natural landscapes. “In this rapidly changing era, such writing can undoubtedly be seen as a kind of solidification of history and a certain suspension of time, gathering people’s memories and emotions. Literary works of this kind are emotionally resonant and also represent a negation of and resistance to the highly uniform life brought about by high technology,” he added.

Looking back at literary history, the Xiangxi region in Shen Congwen’s Border Town, Beiping in Lao She’s Rickshaw Boy, and Chengdu in Li Jieren’s Ripple on Stagnant Water all developed distinctive aesthetics through vivid portrayals of local landscapes. Contemporary works continue this lineage: Li Juan’s My Altay records the nomadic life of the northern Xinjiang grasslands; Ge Liang’s Food is Heaven uses Cantonese cuisine to weave together stories of migration, enriching Lingnan’s maritime narrative; Yang Benfen’s Qiuyuan portrays the fate of ordinary women in Hunan, adding to grassroots narratives of county-level life; Shuang Xuetao’s Moses on the Plain, set amid the old factory districts of Shenyang, draws on the transformation of state-owned enterprises in the 1990s to explore the complexities of Chinese modernization through the lives of ordinary local people.

“All great literature ultimately focuses on people, yet people’s fates and characters are always anchored in specific geographical spaces,” He Zhongming observed. The unique historical textures, natural landscapes, and community ethics of a place can give rise to distinctive literary styles and enrich the ways in which China’s story is told.

Hidden concerns behind the craze

Beneath the surface of this boom, problems such as spectacle-making, labeling, and homogenization have prompted reflection among scholars. Niu Xuezhi, director of the Institute of Cultural Studies at the Ningxia Academy of Social Sciences, observed that modernity has eroded the spatial distinctiveness of different regions—chain commercial districts and standardized housing developments have diminished local character, while people have increasingly lost a stable sense of belonging to place. Place-based writing originally emerged as a literary response to this spiritual predicament, yet many writers have taken shortcuts, reducing living localities to static, reproducible symbols.

Northeastern narratives have become locked into a melancholic register of industrial decline; Southern writing piles up dialect, folklore, and encyclopedic descriptions of local customs; while frontier writing slips into exoticized spectacle. Niu described this as “museumified writing”—a mode of writing that severs places from their deep connections with everyday life and turns them into consumable cultural bonsai. “It appears to enhance regional distinctiveness, but in reality, it neither truly reconstructs the flesh-and-blood bond between people and place, nor can it effectively respond to modern people’s genuine longing for belonging in a ‘placeless’ context.” Driven by the logic of internet dissemination and IP adaptation, standardized narrative labels are rapidly reproduced and circulated, pushing regional writing that should be distinctive into a new form of homogenization.

Some critics have argued that certain contemporary place-based narratives suffer from an overemphasis on regional form at the expense of humanistic spirit, and on nostalgic lyricism at the expense of engagement with contemporary life. In response, He Zhongming said that truly mature regional writing must delve into the cultural core of a place and create characters whose inner lives could only have emerged from that particular environment; local customs and material culture are narrative vehicles, not ends in themselves. Some young writers possess only basic narrative techniques, but lack sustained immersion in local life and the depth of independent thought needed to move beyond superficial local color and produce work with lasting literary vitality.

A narrowing of creative vision is another prominent concern. Many writers are adept at looking back to the past, yet struggle to capture the new and ongoing transformations of contemporary life. While creative practice itself is not constrained by time or space, He Zhongming acknowledged, it would be a regrettable loss for the literature of any era if writers failed to engage deeply with the life of their own time. Prolonged formulaic writing, he told CSST, can also erode creative potential—many writers produce a distinctive first work centered on a particular region, only for subsequent works to lapse into self-repetition and lose the unique spirit that once distinguished their regional writing.

Meng, however, argued that the broader trend of place-based narrative should not be dismissed simply because it has attracted large numbers of inferior imitations. Discussion, he said, should focus on mature, representative works rather than allowing weaker examples to discredit the trend as a whole. In his view, the positive value behind this boom—namely, the reconstruction of indigenous literary experience and efforts to move beyond the singular constraints of Western theory—still deserves recognition. The key, he argued, lies in striking a balance between regional distinctiveness and the universal values of literature.

Building dynamic and open place-based narrative

On how to break free from rigid narrative templates and achieve an aesthetic breakthrough that is both rooted in the local and able to transcend it, scholars offered a range of suggestions.

In Niu’s view, writers need not retreat into nostalgic, idealized visions of place, obsessively salvaging vanishing customs or recreating an idealized rural past. Instead, they should focus on the lived realities of modernization, immerse themselves in ordinary people’s daily lives, depict how people actively shape new forms of place-based identity, and uncover vivid local meanings within the fabric of everyday life. At the same time, they should avoid fetishizing material culture or reducing locality to an accumulation of regional products. Rather, they should adopt a broader historical perspective on individual existence, anchoring their writing in the texture of local life while engaging with shared contemporary concerns such as modernity and identity. Food is Heaven offers a useful example: using Lingnan cuisine as a local vehicle, the work weaves together stories of north–south migration and cultural transmission, using regional experience to explore universal human themes such as displacement and civilizational intermingling, and ultimately uniting local experience with humanistic reflection.

He Zhongming, meanwhile, emphasized the broader qualities required of writers, arguing that the key to breaking through homogenization lies in sustained immersion in local life and the capacity for independent thought. “The deep perception of local culture, the accumulation of long-term life experience, and independent thinking are indispensable qualities for an individual writer; mere narrative technique cannot produce a regionally grounded text with lasting vitality.” Regionally grounded writing cannot be achieved through short-term field trips or secondhand materials. Only by taking root in a place over an extended period and observing changes in human relationships and the course of social life can writers capture a region’s unique spiritual core.