marketization is a prime feature of arts and culture in contemporary china. strikingly, while avant-garde poetry is hardly involved in this trend, and some of its commentators feel a sense of crisis as a result, it continues to flourish as a small but stable, high-cultural niche area that boasts increasing textual richness and a well-positioned constituency. an explanation of this phenomenon must take into account multiple re-inventions of traditional chinese notions of poetry and poethood, amid rapidly changing circumstances throughout the contemporary era. less culturally specific but no less essential, another factor is the very nature of the genre of avant-garde poetry in its social context and of artistic experiment per se, creating a problem for cultural analysis that makes numbers the measure of all things.