On june 30, 1989, at around one-thirty in the afternoon, a young woman made an emotional descent from the uneven steps of a Soviet passenger airliner towards a crowd of well-wishers who had gathered together to welcome her to Pyŏngyang, North Korea. Rising just above them, in bold neon letters, an anachronistic sign, which served as a reception banner of sorts, read:

Let the world's youth and students unite firmly under the banner of anti-imperialist solidarity, peace and friendship.

As Coale notes, over the long run human societies have been successful at maintaining a balance between population growth rates and economic resources. This has not been easy: some societies became extinct through overwhelming mortality or by failing to reproduce themselves, while others have burgeoned and outstripped their territories. Even at the end of the twentieth century, a hundred years after the onset of the demographic transition in Europe which transformed human birth and death rates forever, achieving the balance which creates homeostasis remains problematic. In east Asia alone, while the People's Republic of China is trying to bring the expected number of births per woman below 2.0, Japan is attempting the opposite, to raise the total fertility rate above its current level of 1.6. The same contests are being played out in developing and developed societies throughout the world. Thus creating a balance between birth and death rates and linking it to economic conditions so that a society neither outruns its economic resources nor fails to exploit them is a perduring human problem.

A renaissance in literature and art took place in the People's Republic of China from the late 1970s through the 1980s. In poetry, the outburst of vitality first showed itself in 1978–80 in the underground Today (Jintian) group, which included cofounders and editors Bei Dao (b. 1949) and Mang Ke (b. 1951), and such contributors as Jiang He (b. 1949), Shu Ting (b. 1952), Gu Cheng (1956–93), and Yang Lian (b. 1955), to name only a few of the best-known in the West. Today lent momentum to the flourish of Menglongshi, commonly translated as “Obscure Poetry” or “Misty Poetry,” in the early 1980s and became the major source of inspiration—no less than the target of criticism and revolt—to post-Menglong poetry in the second half of the decade. Like Menglongsbi, post-Menglong poetry is a term of inevitable, even misleading, simplification, since it refers to a wide range of varying styles and modes of writing. Rather than being unified by a set of formal and stylistic characteristics, it is marked by a radical openness to experimentation. The multiplicity of experiments in poetry since the mid-1980s may be more broadly and appropriately referred to as avant-garde poetry or experimental poetry (Yeh 1992). This paper will focus on an interesting—and unique in today's world—phenomenon that I call the “cult of poetry.” I will first examine the “cult” by defining its salient features and then present a critical analysis of the diverse historical and psychological forces that contribute to such a literary phenomenon.

In general, readers, commentators, translators, and reviewers are bound to see shadows of themselves or of their own concerns in a poem. A poem is, in fact, a “patch” between desire and reality. Like a dream, a poem can be viewed as “reality encoded” (Skura 1981, 126). The issue is not what is actually on the page, what critic Harold Bloom calls the “manifest text” (Bloom 1987, 3). The poem is really what exists in that misty place between “writing” and “reading,” the “latent text,” the poem that lives in symbol or emblem. Though a poem certainly has a static life on a page, the actual events of reading, interpretation, and commentary are what give a poem a vital historical life. We are fortunate that over a millennium and a half of Sanskrit scholarship has yielded up to us actual records of historical moments of reading. And, since these recorded “moments” have become traditionally attached to various types of printed text, many of these commentaries have become as vital as the text itself. In some instances they have even superseded the text, as is true, I believe, in the case of Abhinavagupta's commentary on Ānandavardhana's Dhvanyāloka.

The rural credit system in traditional agrarian societies has long been associated with “usury,” and therefore often considered a hindrance to rural development. Three aspects of the traditional rural credit system are used to substantiate this assertion. First, traditional rural credit often entailed interest rates above the ceiling set by law. As early as 1790 b.c., the Laws of Hammurabi established annual interest ceilings of 33.3 percent for grain loans and 20 percent for cash loans. Any loan charging interest beyond the ceiling was illegal (Sowards 1983, 5). To many contemporary scholars, even a ceiling of 20 to 30 percent seems exorbitant: given the low return of traditional farming, peasants could hardly afford to borrow at such high interest rates. Second, from a socioeconomic perspective, high interest rates suggest unequal relations between debtors and creditors. According to Rao, the origin of this unequal relationship lies in market imperfection, or so-called “connectedness”—the link between wealth inequality and the failure-of-markets mechanism (1986). A fragmented and noncompetitive market, this view maintains, facilitates personalized credit transactions which not only extract surplus but also perpetuate peasants' credit dependency on the landlord. This credit dependency, in turn, creates a situation in which compulsive indebtedness gradually deprives the peasantry of the means of production (Bhaduri 1983, chaps. 4, 5). Finally, it is asserted, traditional rural credit had little to do with production. Most peasants used rural credit for consumption purposes, which had destructive effects on agricultural production. Rural credit, in these views, is a siphon that draws resources out of the rural sector, locks peasants into a vicious cycle of debt, creates rural inequality, and hinders production. Scholars who have studied the Chinese peasant economy agree, by and large, that that was the nature of Chinese rural credit system.