Xu Yong indicates in the Nanjing Journal of Social Sciences (1st issue of 2022) that seen from the process of literary activities, the three stages of contemporary literary criticism, i.e. the seventeen years after the founding of the People’s Republic of China, 1980s and 1990s, in a way represent a transition from the author-oriented criticism, works-oriented criticism to the critic-oriented criticism. Such an evolution shows that literary criticism is not the production of knowledge, but the embodiment of the relations between the author, the works, the reader and the world. There exists all the time the phenomenon of "criticism surplus" in the practice of contemporary literary criticism, which on the contrary indicates an absence of literary criticism. But from the point of view of the dual nature of modernity, the existence of "criticism surplus" is of necessity. To some extent, the validity of literary criticism is shown in the balance between them.