Xuemo Beyond Labels: Jianxin Yang on Redrawing the Map of Western Chinese Literature | “Xuemo in Dialogue with International Scholars” (Episode 12)

Xuemo Beyond Labels: Jianxin Yang on Redrawing the Map of Western Chinese Literature | “Xuemo in Dialogue with International Scholars” (Episode 12)

The twelfth session of “Xuemo in Dialogue with International Scholars” took place online at 8 p.m. Beijing time on June 7, 2026. Organized by the World Literature Union and the Xuemo Foundation, the forum considered a question that has followed Xuemo throughout much of his career: Does the label “western Chinese writer” still describe the work he is producing?

The principal speaker was Jianxin Yang, Professor and Deputy Dean of the School of Foreign Languages at Hexi University. He also directs the university’s Research Center for the Translation and International Circulation of Gansu Literature and Art. Under the title “Xuemo Beyond Labels and the Redefinition of Western Chinese Literature,” Yang discussed the subject with Xuemo, a contemporary Chinese writer and cultural scholar.

More than ten sinologists, translators, scholars, and young writers from China, Italy, Canada, the United Kingdom, Mexico, the United States, and elsewhere attended. Yanjin Chen, author of The Xuemo Code, served as academic moderator.

Xuemo in the History of Western Chinese Literature

Chen opened by reviewing Xuemo’s place in a literary tradition with a long history and a character of its own.

She referred to A History of New Literature in Western China, edited by Professor Ding Fan and published by People’s Literature Publishing House in August 2019. Chen was the commissioning editor of the volume.

The book discusses Xuemo at length in two sections. The first is “Singers of Living Beings: The Spiritual Dimensions of the New Fiction,” in Chapter Six, “The Flourishing Landscape of New Literature in Western China, 1992–2000,” on pages 336–338. The second is “A Plurality in Bloom: Fiction in the New Century,” in Chapter Seven, “The Development of Western Chinese Literature in the New Century, 2000–2017,” on pages 419–424.

Among the works examined are Desert Rites, Curses of the Kingdom of Xixia, Legendary Wolf of Xixia, The Undying Diamond Heart, and Wild Fox Ridge.

When the West Becomes More Than a Place

Yang began with the conventions commonly associated with literature from western China. Critics have often treated it as writing from both a geographical and cultural frontier. Its familiar elements include desolate landscapes, hardship, local customs, and stories of male heroism. Lu Yao, Chen Zhongshi, Jia Pingwa, and Hong Ke are among the writers most often associated with this tradition.

Xuemo began within that literary world, but Yang argued that he did not remain inside its established boundaries.

The Desert Trilogy, comprising Desert Rites, Desert Hunters, and White Tiger Pass, records rural life in Liangzhou in a largely realist mode. The Soul Trilogy, consisting of Curses of the Kingdom of Xixia, Legendary Wolf of Xixia, and The Undying Diamond Heart, moves into religious experience and realities that lie beyond ordinary perception. With the epic Suosalang, a particular region gives way to questions about life that are not limited by geography.

For Yang, the category “writer from western China” no longer accounts for the full range of Xuemo’s work.

“Xuemo’s importance lies in turning the West from a geographical idea into a spiritual terrain,” he said.

The deserts, sandstorms, and camel caravans in these books do more than establish a setting. They create a place where hardship must be borne, character is tested, and awakening may occur.

Although suffering runs through Xuemo’s fiction, Yang said, the writing does not end in complaint. It asks what suffering does to a person and whether adversity can become a form of inner tempering.

Xuemo also departs from the male-dominated wilderness narrative long associated with western Chinese literature. Women’s lives, the survival of the poor, and the relationship between people and the natural world are not secondary concerns in his fiction. They stand at its center.

His books have now appeared in English, German, Arabic, and other languages and are held by libraries in dozens of countries. Their circulation abroad, Yang argued, has allowed literature from western China to carry Chinese ideas about moral life and Eastern traditions of thought to readers far from the region itself.

The Limits of Familiar Labels

Yang questioned two descriptions often applied to Xuemo’s work: “suffering narrative” and “magical realism.”

The Desert Trilogy presents hardship, he said, but does not trade on misery. What readers take from the books is not the spectacle of another person’s pain but the strength required to face a difficult life.

Nor should every extraordinary event in Xuemo’s fiction be treated simply as “magic.” Such events belong to the surface of the narrative. Beneath them is a sustained inquiry into the workings of the mind.

Yang traced that inquiry from the early story “Old Man Xinjiang,” with its insistence on “settling life’s affairs while one is still alive,” to the later books’ search for the original mind. Across these very different works, Xuemo returns to the same concern: how people can find the inward strength to live with uncertainty and impermanence.

Western China made Xuemo possible, Yang said, but Xuemo has also changed how the region can be imagined in literature. Liangzhou’s cultural inheritance helped shape what he called “Xuemo’s Xin-xing Philosophy,” a body of thought grounded in xin-xing (心性), the cultivation of the heart-mind and human nature. Xuemo’s fiction, in turn, loosened the region’s association with a fixed group of subjects and images. His West became a place of inward questioning, where people measure their choices against conscience rather than convention.

Where New Readers Might Begin

For readers approaching Xuemo for the first time, Yang proposed a sequence.

He recommended beginning with Selected Stories by Xuemo and then moving to the Desert Trilogy. The autobiographical One Man’s West could follow, before the reader proceeds to the Soul Trilogy and finally to Suosalang. Xuemo’s cultural writings, Yang added, help explain the body of thought that runs beneath the fiction.

The forum’s discussion will inform two books Yang plans to publish between September and October 2026: The Representation and Reconstruction of Rural Language in English Translations of Xuemo’s Works: A Cognitive Stylistic Study and The Translation and International Circulation of Contemporary Gansu Literature.

Both studies will examine how literature from Gansu and western China changes as it passes into other languages and reaches readers abroad.

Writing What the Moment Demands

In his response, Xuemo explained how he understands the different stages of his career.

Each, he said, arose from a problem he could not ignore. The Desert Trilogy and the Soul Trilogy were books he felt compelled to write. More recent works, including Mama’s Star, Eternal Love, and Koala Wants to Be Happy, grew from encounters with autistic people, seriously ill patients, and young people facing psychological distress.

He compared inspiration to a stream of uninvited visitors.

“Countless pieces of material come knocking at the door,” he said. “If I cannot write them all, I worry that they will die inside me.”

His writing draws on several traditions. One is the shamanic culture of western China, with its belief that spirit inhabits the natural world. This is why, he said, the land and animals in his fiction appear to breathe and possess lives of their own. Confucian, Buddhist, and Daoist ideas provide another source.

Xuemo also referred to the observer effect in quantum mechanics. He saw a resemblance between the idea that observation can affect a quantum system and the older belief that mind and world cannot be wholly separated. He offered the comparison as a philosophical analogy, not as scientific proof of the traditional view.

Xuemo’s Xin-xing Philosophy

Xuemo said he is now trying to give a clearer form to what he calls “Xuemo’s Xin-xing Philosophy.”

Human civilizations, in his view, have often been measured by their material achievements. China’s tradition of xin-xing (心性), the cultivation of the heart-mind and human nature, offers a different measure. Xuemo described this inheritance as a possible “gene of longevity,” one that has endured through five thousand years of Chinese history.

He hopes to express these ideas through literature and cultural writing in language that can be understood outside China. His metaphor is a “spiritual code”: something compact enough to travel across languages yet substantial enough to help readers think about meaning and the inner life in the age of artificial intelligence.

A Writer Who Does Not Repeat Himself

Two other scholars took part in the exchange.

John Edward Stowe of Toronto Metropolitan University said he was struck by Xuemo’s description of himself as “a writer who cannot be defined.”

Stowe compared three periods of Xuemo’s career: the early fiction represented by Desert Rites, the middle period represented by The Undying Diamond Heart, and the books written in recent years. Each adopts a different position and a different angle of vision.

This means that readers encounter more than stylistic change. They meet a writer whose understanding of life has altered over time. For Stowe, Xuemo’s refusal to repeat an earlier version of himself is one of the strongest features of his work.

Chan, Vajrayana, and the Original Mind

Huan Xia, Assistant Professor at the Macau University of Science and Technology, is preparing a review of Curses of the Kingdom of Xixia. She noted that Xuemo’s fiction bears traces of both Chan and Vajrayana Buddhism.

The Vajrayana elements include the suggestion that extreme good and evil may arise from a common source, along with the effort to overcome attachment to the self and to doctrine. The Chan elements include seeing one’s true nature and setting aside social identities in order to confront the question, “Who am I?”

Xia asked whether Xuemo’s work pointed toward a nondual understanding of Chan and Vajrayana. Had the two traditions blended naturally in his thinking, or had he brought them together by design?

Xuemo said the combination was not deliberate.

Both traditions, as he understands them, seek to reveal the original mind, end affliction, and move beyond binary thought. They differ chiefly in method.

Chan emphasizes breaking attachment and conceptual division. Once grasping ceases and affliction falls away, there is nothing further to build.

Vajrayana also begins by breaking attachment, but it then turns toward construction. Having recognized the nature of mind, practitioners use visualization to reshape the inner world through such images as the meditational deity and the mandala. From there may come the aspiration to attain Buddhahood in this lifetime and to act more fully for the sake of others.

Making Wine from Many Traditions

Xuemo compared his writing to winemaking. Confucianism, Buddhism, and Daoism provide the base. Western Chinese shamanism contributes its sense that all things are alive, while Western philosophy supplies another set of ideas and questions.

Once absorbed into a life, he said, these influences no longer remain separate ingredients. The resulting work belongs to no single school.

“Literary exchange is like making wine,” Xuemo said at the end of the forum. “The grains supplied by many civilizations may eventually become a new wine that nourishes humanity.”

The metaphor also described the course of the discussion. Western Chinese literature began with a particular landscape, history, and body of experience. In Xuemo’s work, Yang argued, that inheritance has opened onto questions of suffering, consciousness, moral choice, and the future of civilization. The writing remains rooted in western China, but it no longer ends there.