New Growth From China’s Roots : SPRING BAMBOO A Collection of Contemporary Chinese Short Stories <i> compiled and translatedby Jeanne Tai with a foreword by Betty Bao Lord and an introduction by Leo Ou-Fan Lee (Random House: $18.95; 275 pp.)</i>

“Woe to the nation whose literature is disturbed by the intervention of power,” Alexander Solzhenitsyn once warned. It was not, he explained in his 1970 Nobel Prize acceptance speech, merely a violation of freedom of the press but a “closing down of the heart of the nation, a slashing to pieces of its memory.”

The heart of China came perilously close to “closing down” in the Maoist decades, as Chinese writers, heirs to the dazzling cultural record of ancient China, suffocated under political restraints imposed by party leaders who saw writers not as creators but as transmitters, “cultural workers”--propagandists in service to the revolution.

A rigid doctrine governing all cultural and intellectual expression was set forth in 1942 when Chairman Mao delivered two lectures to a forum on art and literature at the Yan’an party headquarters. “Art for art’s sake” was condemned as a bourgeois notion. Artists, poets, novelists, dramatists and musicians were all enjoined to seek inspiration from the “rich sea of the people” and learn how to communicate with the masses through the medium of “socialist realism.” The demands of socialist realism produced the exact opposite of realism, a kind of revolutionary romanticism in which stereotyped class virtue always triumphed over feudalistic “poisonous weeds.” And in the process, Chinese literature lost its humaneness and its power to move.

Mao’s death and the rise to power of a pragmatic leadership committed to reform has resulted in a gradual expansion of the permissible. The dramatic changes that have taken place in the marketplace are less apparent in the cultural world, however, where the chairman’s Yan’an Forum dogmas, though not always enforced, are still invoked. Thus, the fine literary weather of one season can give way to the chilly winds of the next, as Beijing authorities alternately relax and tighten the reins on the nation’s cultural workers. The metaphor of openness, “a hundred flowers blooming,” is sure to be followed by talk of the need for uprooting “stubborn weeds” from China’s literary gardens.

The title “Spring Bamboo” suggests a fresh beginning, a new opportunity for literary creativity to sprout. The name is apt and the opportunity welcome. The 11 short stories in this anthology, compiled by Hong Kong-born New York City attorney Jeanne Tai, have appeared in recent years in literary journals in the People’s Republic of China. The young authors--most of them are younger than 40--are gaining recognition in China as leading exponents of the xungen (“searching for roots”) school that is trying to re-establish connections with an authentic Chinese civilization that has been obscured by the relentless ideological campaigns that have only recently subsided.

Refreshingly, “Spring Bamboo” is the least polemic literature to appear in China in decades. As Leo Ou-fan Lee notes in his helpful introduction, the authors of this volume are distinguished by their “refusal to embrace . . . the moralizing, exhortatory tone so characteristic of the older generations of writers.” The assault on the “sacrosanct view that artistic creativity must be used in the service of some overarching political purpose” is just getting under way in China, Lee writes, and the “Spring Bamboo” authors are in the vanguard of the assault.

The effort to recover China’s true cultural identity is seen in the appreciation in these stories on the folksy ways of the most ordinary people. Chen Jiangong’s “Looking for Fun” is a celebration of the idle gossip and pleasures of the porters, ragpickers, con artists and pedicab drivers who frequent a teahouse on Winch Handle Alley in a humble section of Beijing. They are all well on in their years--”camels on the wagon”--but manage to gain some local fame for their splendidly amateur renditions of the old Peking opera in spite of run-ins with party authorities who accuse them of organizing a decadent capitalist club. As part of the ethnographic lore that Chen sprinkles throughout the story, we are told that the “camels on the wagon” expression dates to the time when there really were camels in Beijing. When an old camel died and was carted away to the slaughterhouse to be recycled into soup bones, Beijing folk noted with sympathy that the wagon ride was probably the only “fun” the poor camel ever had.

Almost half of the stories are set in distant frontier regions peopled by ethnic minorities whose exotic ways endlessly fascinate and disturb the majority Han Chinese. The Mongolian, Tibetan and Silk Road borderlands became less remote to many educated Chinese, including some of the “Spring Bamboo” writers, when they were exiled there during the upheavals of the Cultural Revolution. Li Tuo, member of a small Mongolian minority, describes the frustrations of a grumpy “Grandmother Qi” in coping with modern gadgetry like pressure cookers and propane heaters. Zhaxi Dawa’s contribution, “Souls Tied to the Knots on a Leather Cord,” is a grim tale of a mysterious couple’s wanderings in the author’s native Tibet. The Moslem Zhang Changzhi’s “Nine Palaces” is set in the barren wind-swept deserts of western China where the lives of a modern archeologist and local natives intersect in their search for a legendary oasis kingdom. And “Dry River” written by Mo Yan, the co-author of the recent award-winning movie, “Red Sorghum,” draws us into an eerie rural landscape where violence and cruelty erupts in the wake of the harmless prank of innocent youngsters.

The “Spring Bamboo” authors are fond of using myth and legend in their quest for roots. As in the novels of Gabriel Garcia Marquez--and the celebrated Colombian writer is regarded as arch-exemplar by the “roots” school--the mythical and the real, the ethereal and the mundane are interwoven in ways that alternately enchant and baffle the reader. The heightened powers of observation and the fresh angles on ordinary experience that suffuse these stories probably also owe much to Garcia Marquez.

The “Spring Bamboo” tales cannot be called masterpieces. Many of the fantasy episodes are too derivative and too consciously elaborated to be convincingly dreamlike, as when the narrator in the Tibetan story is propelled into the past as he sees his solar-powered Seiko watch turn counterclockwise at five times the normal speed. Shades of “Lost Horizon.” And, while the debt to Garcia Marquez is evident in the bold experimenting with new idioms and plot, the “Spring Bamboo” writers can’t match their master’s talent for combining the grand, poetic and comic into memorable images. But then, after all, who can?

Still, Chinese literature may be moving into a new era of creativity. If the authorities in Beijing will curb their penchant for “guiding” culture, there is a good chance, as Leo Ou-fan Lee predicts, that “some of these early shoots may yet mature into magnificent stands of literary works.”