At the same time, a small but influential group of Chinese intellectuals in the United States and, to a lesser extent, in Europe was having an increasing impact on China. People who had lived abroad for many years were being welcomed with open arms by China’s students and intelligentsia in general. The huge, chaotic, and uncontrollable network of cultural communication, which embraced the whole gamut of opinion voiced by Chinese intellectuals in exile, colored and in some instances shaped the picture of China in the 1990s.

As a primary frame of reference for the quickening pace of cultural reconfiguration, literature appeared to have taken on new functions and facets, but also to have forfeited some of the influence it once had, according to the poet Yang Lien (b. 1954) and the playwright-painter Kao Hsing-chien (b. 1940), who addressed their readers from Paris. Alternative and dissident artists created untraditional forms of expression in their paintings and other works that were parallel to those presented by writers. During the 1990s New Chinese Film, which in many respects had its roots in literature, and its regional variants in Taiwan and Hong Kong, became even more influential than the literature of the 1980s, both nationally and internationally. During the 1980s, furthermore, the Chinese public was inundated with mass culture products. Popular culture evolved, from film to television, from journals to the products of innumerable publishing houses, which tended to dominate the new realities of cultural consumption.