Actually, I believe him. It's just that his sympathetic attitude took a different form from, say, Ai Weiwei's efforts to compile a list of school children killed in the quake.
Yu is not a government spokesman. He is not aligned with any organization, or danwei in the Chinese parlance. He does not hold any title or draw a salary, which is something he is proud of. His gravitas comes not from any official position, but from the words flowing from his pen or mouth.
The last "official position" he held was president of Shanghai Drama Academy. In 1992, he quit the job and became a freelance writer. Before that, he published a series of scholarly tomes on literature.
While in graduate school, I read his first book, a history of drama theories, and it was amazing. He was able to clarify the most arcane stuff and his prose is rarified. To my mind, he is China's Samuel Johnson.
The reading public did not get to know him until the 1992 publication of A Bitter Journey of Culture, his first collection of essays. It was the fruit of his travels across China "in search of the soul of Chinese civilization".
It's not an exaggeration to say Yu revolutionized the Chinese essay. Before that, the genres of fiction, essay and academic writing were clear cut and rarely ran into one another. Essays (sanwen) in Chinese literature are for recording your moods while sipping tea. When Yu wrote about a landscape, he combined the present and the past in a style so grand it swept readers off their feet. It was a travelogue with history; it was a history lesson with personal insight.
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