Signposts of Self-Realization : Evolution, Ethics and Sociality in Modern Chinese Literature and Film [1 ed.] 9789004265356, 9789004196094

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Signposts of Self-Realization

Ideas, History, and Modern China Edited by Ban Wang, Stanford University Wang Hui, Tsinghua University

VOLUME 8

The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/ihmc

Signposts of Self-Realization Evolution, Ethics and Sociality in Modern Chinese Literature and Film

By

Xinmin Liu

LEIDEN | BOSTON

Brill has made all reasonable efforts to trace all rights holders to any copyrighted material used in this work. In cases where these efforts have not been successful the publisher welcomes communications from copyright holders, so that the appropriate acknowledgements can be made in future editions, and to settle other permission matters. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Xinmin, Liu. Signposts of Self-Realization : Evolution, Ethics and Sociality in Modern Chinese Literature and Film / by Xinmin Liu.  pages cm. — (Ideas, History, and Modern China ; 8) Includes index. ISBN 978-90-04-19609-4 (hardback : acid-free paper) — ISBN 978-90-04-26535-6 (e-book) 1. Chinese literature—20th century—History and criticism. 2. Chinese literature—21st century—History and criticism. 3. Self (Philosophy) in literature. 4. Self-realization in literature. 5. Self-perception in motion pictures. 6. Ethics in motion pictures. 7. Ethics in literature. I. Title. PL2303.X5594 2014 895.109’353—dc232013046907

This publication has been typeset in the multilingual ‘Brill’ typeface. With over 5,100 characters covering Latin, ipa, Greek, and Cyrillic, this typeface is especially suitable for use in the humanities. For more information, please see brill.com/brill-typeface. issn 1875-9394 isbn 978 90 04 19609 4 (hardback) isbn 978 90 04 26535 6 (e-book) Copyright 2014 by Koninklijke Brill nv, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill nv incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Nijhoff, Global Oriental and Hotei Publishing. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill nv provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, ma 01923, usa. Fees are subject to change. Brill has made all reasonable efforts to trace all rights holders to any copyrighted material used in this work. In cases where these efforts have not been successful the publisher welcomes communications from copyright holders, so that the appropriate acknowledgements can be made in future editions, and to settle other permission matters. This book is printed on acid-free paper.

To Snowflake (Vivienne), Willow (Yiyi) and Jane (Qian)

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Contents Acknowledgments  viii

Part 1 An Introduction to Self-Realization in Modern China  1 1 Sociality in Early Modern China: An Ontological Appraisal  3 2 Historicizing Social Development and Self-Realization  29

Part 2 Ethical Imperative and Social Progress  47 3 Fountainheads of Change: Yan Fu’s Tussle with Evolution  49 4 Empathetic Vision in Yu Dafu’s Fiction  85 5 An Exile of Self-Disinheritance: Revisiting Qu Qiubai  116 6 Non-Epiphany in Ye Shaojun’s Lyrical Vision  157

Part 3 Post-Revolutionary Self-Remaking and Global Development  195 7 How Steel Is Tempered: The Making of a Revolutionary Hero  197 8 Retributive Memories: Self-Realization in the Post-Mao Era  224 9 Zhang Chengzhi’s Reinvention of Ethnic Identity  262 Glossary  302 Works Cited  317 Index  329

Acknowledgments My thoughts on writing this book first took shape in the seminar room of an east-coast Ivy League campus over a decade ago, and it is with mixed feelings that I acknowledge the fact that I can now see them through print—not because this is in anyway a lesser accomplishment than I have longed to cherish, but because the changes of time and place which my mid-life has absorbed and endured have at last borne fruit out of a strenuous growth, but not without being tempered by spells of anxiety, skepticism and predilection I have been tussling with up to this point of my personal journey. Over the years, the writing of this book progressed, digressed and at times stalled as my life of being an “academician” in the US followed a long, strenuous and occasionally disorienting course. I stuck to it thus far owing more to my resolve to reach my avowed goal of proving the worth of my life-long avocation of teaching than to the necessity to obtain hard-copy proof to climb the heights of academic ascent. In a way I feel I have been vindicated by the resilience and fortitude I was able to display in having undying faith in and keeping tirelessly at the issue of self-realization, both virtual and actual. While it is true that many of the character-building, mettle-tempering encounters through my thrice-displaced career always came with heavy tolls to suffer on my part if measured with real-life yardsticks, I never took my eyes off the goal of my pursuit, nor did I miss a turn in moving towards its object. For this reason, I would not hesitate to count the completion of this book one of those hard-earned “moments of truth” that brighten the mind of a seasoned but well-worn academic journeyer like me. Likewise, the choice of the title for this book is emblematic of many such agonizing encounters in the book as well as in my writing of it, but none are more strikingly so than those instances in which I felt disoriented and frustrated about self-realization until I came upon “the signposts”—the guideposts (in their human form of course) for my progress towards the completion of this book. They have been the long-awaited harbingers of hope and meaning; they have pointed me timely to the correct direction for the journey’s end; they have convinced me time and again of the value of following such a path for my pursuit of meaning and values of life as they themselves have previously sought counsel when menaced by similar hazards of vacillation, perplexity and bewilderment. It is therefore to these signposts that I express my indebtedness, gratitude and (for those deceased) heartfelt homage for delivering me the roadmap to a successful end of the journey, for leading me out of the perplexing mazes and unnerving traps, and occasionally for rescuing me from the verge of a premature forfeiture or termination. I would like first and foremost to express my thanks to those of my mentoring generation: Professors Michael Holquist, Kang-I Sun Chang, and Leo Ou-fan Lee whose academic expertise, life wisdom and personal generosity enabled me to overcome the

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trauma of a disrupted career and unnerving departure from China in the summer of 1989; they refueled my career development and launched me on a renewed academic quest in the US. In the same breath, I want to pay a tribute in memoriam to the late Marston Anderson whose tenure as my first mentor left indelible marks on the project of self-realization I was to undertake; despite the fact that his tenure was abruptly abbreviated by his passing away, his impact on my subsequent research and writing remained enduringly insightful and profound (as can be attested to by my references to his work in the ensuing pages). I want to express my heartfelt gratitude to Ban Wang, Jie Lu, Xiaomei Chen, Thomas Moran, Guobin Yang and many others of my generation, who have been the most trusted source of inspiration, support, and assistance during the entire length of getting this book done. Infinitely more direct, constant and rewarding as my peer counsel, their guidance has been illuminating, timely and energizing as their criticism has been candid, persuasive and constructive. The enumerable exchanges, discussions and even arguments I have had with them at major conferences, seminars and panels over the years have vastly broadened my vision, sharpened my critical wisdom and often times compelled me to further enrich and improve as a scholar and as a person. I owe an unforgettable debt to the graduate and undergraduate students I have worked with at Yale, Trinity College, Wesleyan University, and the University of Pittsburgh where in classes and other teach-in venues they willingly turned themselves into sounding boards or “test tubes” for the ideas I have written on the issue of self-realization before I could blend them into the pages of this book. I would also extend my profound gratitude to the East Asian librarians and cataloguers at the college campuses where I have taught, who, in one way or another, assisted me in book search and bibliographical verification at various stages of my writing. Of these unsung heroes two names, Haihui Zhang and Yulian (Lotus) Liu, deserve a special mention for providing me a service so selfless, diligent and flawless no matter what my inquiry happened to be. While coping with the enormity and complexity of the Glossary, Works Cited, Index and other typographical supplements, I have been ably assisted by Wang Haixia, Lee Yun-ju and Shi Qianqian whose tireless and meticulous labor and care between the lines and across the pages of the manuscript have left me deeply impressed and thankful. Since the moment I first sat myself down to the key board to work on this book, I have had the fortune to be the recipient of ample institutional funds; I am forever indebted to the Yale School of Graduate Studies for a Dissertation Fellowship in 1996– 1997, which enabled me to get the early versions of this project off the ground. I am deeply grateful to the Asian Studies Center at the University of Pittsburgh for awarding me a sizeable subvention in 2011 that boosted the printing process of this book. I remain thankful to Wesleyan University and the University of Pittsburgh for granting me a one-term sabbatical leave so that I could have the much-needed time to be

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away from teaching and service and concentrate on my writing. I am extremely indebted to Brill for accepting my manuscript and being amiably patient and accommodating in dealing with the queries and requests I fielded while preparing and revising the manuscript. I feel especially thankful to the reviewers whose comments, suggestions and questions have aided me in clearing up ambiguities, averting possible pitfalls and embellishing the articulation of my ideas, to the series editors who generously adopted this book to their Ideas, History and Modern China series and, above all, to Thomas Begley and Qin Higley for the excellent editorship they have exhibited in making it possible for the manuscript to see the light of its day. Last but not the least, while I do not disclaim all the hard work that went into the success of this book, I would like to emphatically state that I will be solely responsible for all the errors, oversights and inadequacies which may have found their way into its pages.

Part One An Introduction to Self-Realization in Modern China

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chapter 1

Sociality in Early Modern China: An Ontological Approach The many-faceted evolution of Chinese modernity can perhaps be best grasped by observing how the subject of the self weathered its bumpy passage through social upheavals and cultural dislocations on its way to maturity and realization in the modern age. One of the most telling rites of its passage is how the subject of a principally Confucian self repeatedly sought to recover and refigure its identity on the cusp of total despair or collapse. Disabled by inner strife and foreign invasions at the turn of the last century, the traditional values of Confucian China had been largely shaken, diffused and undermined by Western notions and values, such as science and democracy, and the social changes resulting from these disconcerting ideas and practices had given rise to the emergence of other social classes and political forces. The increasing presence of these other beings in public began to challenge the Chinese intellectuals’ age-old beliefs in the unitary and homogeneous nature of the Confucian selfhood. How to encounter the other(s) and integrate with them was no longer a choice made out of conscience; it is utterly necessary as a condition of existence for the Confucian intellectuals known as the literati class. Ready or not, they were compelled to reckon, grapple and intermingle with the other beings; to do that, it required them, first and foremost, to conceive of what or who stand for the social, how the self is perceived in relation to the social and how to interact with them in the course of forming one’s selfidentity. In his informative gloss of “the problematic literati self,” Martin Huang dwells on the Confucian literati’s course of self-realization as one steadfast estrangement from the central role of shi (the elite class of literati) to the somewhat marginal position of Wenren (men of culture).1 Speaking chiefly, but not exclusively, of eighteenth-century China, Huang argues that the literati’s selfalienation parallels a process of “depoliticization” and “professionalization” of their legitimate domains, which resulted in a slow but steady downward spiral of their social importance—they had once been ranked among the ruling elites, but were now reduced to a social status not much better than min 1 Shi 士大夫; Wenren 文人. Martin W. Huang, Literati and Self-Re/Presentation: Autobiographical Sensibility in the Eighteenth-Century Chinese Novel (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), “Introduction” 1–14.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���4 | doi 10.1163/9789004265356_002

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(the commoner subject). The literati tried to find viable means other than court service to justify their raison d’être, but had to be content with earning their living as private secretaries or clerks for officials or merchants. The conversion of their identity of literati to the non-elitist and non-privileged, i.e. the Other, according to Huang, is due largely to social and economic changes.2 Huang’s focus on a sociological interpretation of the literati’s problematic growth has manifold implications: (1) despite his presumed “heavenly mandate” of being the moral arbiter, the literatus had been forced to come to terms with the nature of his position as a social/cultural construct whose attributes needed to adapt in order to keep abreast with the ever-changing societal contexts; (2) the literatus self induced by means of this socially determined role makes it necessary to recognize his shared existence with other selves without whom the identity of the self can never be sufficient or meaningful; (3) sliding between the ruling and the ruled, the literati’s identity had thus been rendered ambiguous, insecure and fragmentary. The literatus would therefore find himself in constant disorientation and need to anchor and orient himself by negotiating between himself and other social classes, ideologies and identities. But the ontological dimension of their identity formation seems to be treated in passing in Huang’s critique; one could ask: for instance, how did the problematic literatus self react against and adapt to the changing social parameters in relation to the Other? Why were literati still defining themselves in terms of the dysfunctional sagehood rather than that of other emerging classes? Why did they tend eventually to fall back on Neisheng (being a sage within), or variations of it, as the only form of self-achievement? It is evident that these questions direct us to an ontological dimension of the literatus identity, which, I think, gains pressing relevance. For, as Huang himself indicates, the Confucian model of cultivation had been gradually stripped of its corollary—Waiwang (being a king without) and literatus self as such was, as a result, on the verge of losing its social and political legitimacy. Huang does point out that the discrepancy between self-cultivation and public service led many members of the literati to question the feasibility of sagehood, mock the inadequacy of moral ideals and even display a degree of eccentricity or deviation from the prescribed moral and social norms as a gesture of protest.3 But it is also the case that they usually ended up redefining their newly assumed roles in terms of the centralizing identity of the literati. In other words, while often adapting themselves to a range of social roles at variance with the literatus identity, seldom would they attempt to break away from this elite status in the 2 Min 民; Shi 士. Huang, Literati and Self-Re/Presentation, 1–14. 3 Neisheng 内圣; Waiwang 外王. Ibid., 12–14.

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face of the socially determined other(s). This failure in embracing the other seems to erect an insurmountable hurdle for the literati before any real social metamorphosis would occur and an autonomous identity of their own be established. Thus, it is my view that the Confucian inner self is apt to possess certain ontological means that holds its central position, keeps its homogeneous identity and renders the literatus individual coercive to its ideal of sagehood. Granting that such a means existed, what needs be pursued then is: how did it react and behave when coming into contact with the socially emerging other(s)? Did the Confucian sagehood, while reckoning with the other, mediate a cognitive continuum that would be apt to align the real-life literatus with the ideal of sagehood? Questions like these have been brewing at the heart of my inquiry into the process of the Confucian self turning modern. This book delineates the key signposts that map out the trajectory of its faltering, laborious but ultimately fulfilling growth.

Endeavors in Reciprocity

In his critique of modern selfhood of Western liberalism, Michael J. Sandel writes: “The relevant moral question is not ‘Who am I?’ . . . but rather ‘What ends shall I choose?’ ”4 Sandel’s criticism is directed at ethicist John Rawls, whose famed affirmation of the enlightened individual is predicated on a transcendental state of being atomistic, disinterested and unsituated prior to the individual’s social experience. In a move to counter this de-ontological, noncontextual selfhood, Sandel emphatically valorizes one’s chosen ethical ends as what basically constitute an individual self, thereby positing contextually oriented and historically motivated goals as essential to the self-realization of a moral subject. In a sense, Sandel’s emphasis best illustrates how the subject is reconfigured in cross-cultural translation. The issue of one’s situatedness with the emerging self has always been disputed by Western philosophers in their dispute over the primacy of the absolute subject. Classic European philosophy privileged at the outset an individual that was self-referential and unitary; Goethe and Schiller undertook to renovate the subject with the aesthetics of inner sublimation against the entrenched authority of neoclassic vulgarity; Hegel furnished the subject with a global vision that encompassed all else as its partial immanence. Their twentieth century disciple, Lukács, resonated in his turn with “Aufhebung” while decrying the diminishing epic qualities of the 4 Michael J. Sandel, Liberalism and the Limits of Justice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 59.

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modern world. Lukács first deployed irony to hold in balance the bifurcated subject and object: the subject was now brought to rest in the individual’s inner world where he could reckon with the empirical world by seeing its limitations as necessary conditions of human existence; yet at the same time the subject glimpsed at an inner world that rose above their externality to unite them as a whole.5 By creating an interior subjectivity as the pivot, Lukács next sought to link up subjectivity and objective existence in an organic continuum: the disparate, autonomous facts of the subject’s life became integral parts that could form a whole only in his inner world; likewise, his fragmented exterior of existence could all be aligned towards his interior world as the goal of coherence and meaning. With such a continuum, Lukács’ aim became evident: the surrounding world of the individual was the “substratum” (the means) buttressing for the individual aspiring after the ideals in his/her interior self (the end). And a télos of self-realization was thus posited in a linear progression from parts to the whole, from exterior to interior. Moreover, both the whole and interior resided in one’s inner world, the epitome of ultimate essence, where the chasm between the subject and object was finally bridged. Lukács did not hesitate to declare such a privilege he was granting to the inner self as the consummate subject: Individuality then becomes an aim unto itself because it finds within itself everything that is essential to it and that makes its life autonomous—even if what it finds can never be a firm possession or the basis of its life, but is an object of search.6 The journeying towards himself, according to Lukács, turned the individual into a repository of ideals, which “irradiates the individual’s life as its immanent meaning; . . .7 If so, what the individual attained now was not what Lukács vaguely called “individuality,” rather it was the individual abstracted into an 5 Georg Lukács, The Theory of the Novel, trans. Anna Bostock (Cambridge: The M.I.T. Press, 1971), 74–5. It is to be note that Lukács published this book in its original German as early as in 1920. 6 Lukács, The Theory of the Novel, 78. Lukács’s assertion makes enormous sense in the context of the Chinese modernity because the kind of trajectory, from the external constraints facing the individual self to the unified consciousness of the inner self he proposes here projects a striking parallel to the continuum between the lesser “I” to the greater “I” that leads the individual in his/her search for modern identity. This journeying route (or pattern) will be dealt with in Chapters 3 & 4. 7 Ibid., 80.

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image of idealism and withdrawn into a solitary inner world. Lukács himself admitted that the individual wanted to identify with the ideal because he/she had found his/her actual existence in reality to be meaningless and his/her self-activity futile. Furthermore, he pointed out that the success of such a model depended on the “negativity of the ideals” in the real world; in other words, it was true of social surroundings where the individual found him/herself alienated or isolated for the sake of the ideals he/she upheld, because “the ideal becomes apparent only by the absence of the ideal, in the immanent selfcriticism of mere reality caused by that absence, . . .”8 Ironically, what Lukács desired to leave behind—the situatedness of the individual in his real-life world—was what had conditioned him to undertake such a mental escape for his ostracized individual. He was repulsed by the social ills of the industrialized Western civilization and alarmed by the feeble, useless state of the individual being in the face of the chaos and ruin that WWI wrought on them. He deplored the loss of an epic kind of spiritual linkage that could relate the individual with absolute values and yearned for a way to empower him under adverse conditions. Such dangers were aptly foretold by the Russian social thinker Mikhail Bakhtin when he explicated the notion of non-alibi in Being.9 In a work of his formative years, Toward a Philosophy of the Act, Bakhtin rejects the validity of an absolute consciousness (as found with the subject of the Western ontology) in cognition and stresses the importance of “a non-fused yet undivided affirmation of myself in Being.” He writes: In all of Being I experience only myself—my unique self—as an I. All other Is (theoretical ones) are not I for me, whereas my own unique (nontheoretical) I participates in once-occurrent Being: I exist [ego sum] in it.10 In this tersely knit argument, Bakhtin informs us that the being of “I” is poised between being situated as an individual in Being (a passive given) and actualizing this individual existence (a goal to be achieved); this not only constitutes 8 9

Ibid., 79. Mikhail Bakhtin, Toward a Philosophy of the Act, trans. Vadim Liapunov & Michael Holquist (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1993), 40. Holquist, the co-editor, has also provided a shorthand explication of what the phrase means in a footnote. Consult Note 111, 95 of the same book. Note also that Bakhtin’s work came out between 1920–24, at about the same time as Lukács’ The Theory of the Novel, a little later than the discussion of individualism that took place in China mainly in 1910s and 1920s. 10 Bakhtin, Toward a Philosophy of the Act, 41.

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the uniqueness of one’s being but embeds a télos of a personal development to be unfolded and reached. One’s being is undivided from his historical and cultural placement and it demands to be fulfilled with self-activity. Fulfilling it, on the other hand, does not mean it can be fused with other being or idea purporting to engulf or transcend his own so that his being is in consequence elevated or subsumed as if he were not there, but somewhere else. Whatever this twofold process promises to the subject, as Bakhtin warns us, cannot be accomplished through the act of cognition by the unitary “I” with its innate need to globalize. To clarify the point, he explains: “the rest of the world as an object not only of my cognition and my outer senses, but also my desiring and feeling.”11 The inner self is thus valorized as the be-all and end-all in this cognitive act, while the other and the entire world are summoned into existence insofar as they can all fit into its act of objectification. It is such absolute coincidence that brings into being either an I-for-myself or the other-for-me, eclipsing or erasing the living historicity of the “I”; it cannot but expose the universalizing impulse of the subject who is attempting to objectify every other being exclusively from within itself. This brings us to the fundamental flaw in the cognitive act: cognition surmounts the concrete situatedness of the “I”; it begins at the outset with an inner consciousness that contemplates being in a disembodied and extrahistorical manner and it never truly occupies an actual, individual site in being. Yet once projected onto this universally valid plateau, the cognizant “I” is able to convert him/herself freely into this or that individual, inasmuch as they are all inhabitants of the same cognitive universe. It is this unlimited convertibility that makes empathetic seeing and thinking possible. What Bakhtin has revealed here, i.e. the slippage of the inner self from the actual self, is therefore discernible enough to unsettle the hierarchical continuum we mentioned earlier. It will undo the logic of that continuum by demystifying its teleological linkage: since the universal subject is shown to be biased from its birth by a larger-than-life subjectivity, it will be blindfolded by its inability to perceive fully the embodied self in its subsequent objectification of the other. What made Bakhtin wary of such a slippage was his suspicion of the blithe synthesis of mind and world in Kant’s dualism, and he strove to anchor it with more immediacy of historicity and individuality.12 His efforts to engage the 11

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Mikhail Bakhtin, “Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity,” Art and Answerability: Early Philosophical Works by M. M. Bakhtin, ed. Michael Holquist and Vadim Liapunov (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990), 38. For details of Bakhtin’s life of this period, read chapters 2–4 in Mikhail Bakhtin by Katerina Clark and Michael Holquist (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984). Correlating to

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self/other relationship dialogically proved crucial yet futile to an age which privileged typicality over difference and diversity, lending itself to the rising cult of “positive heroes” fostered by the literature of utopian socialism. As univocality takes the center stage to showcase exclusive heroic “types,” Bakhtin had to rediscover in the novels of Dostoevsky live individual beings with their splintered conscience and multiple inner voices. In their wake followed the eventual jelling of his monumental theory on heteroglossia. However, the critical thrust in Bakhtin’s dialogic approach is not confined to the voice of narration; it has proved equally effective in visuality. If the above-mentioned continuum entails a transfiguration of the self, it is due to the fact that the subject is no longer delimited by his/her situatedness and could readily morph into an all-inclusive subjectivity. “Seeing,” then, plays a pivotal role in such a transforming act. How the inner self is shaped hinges largely on the way the individual subject deploys the mental mechanics of human sight. Thus, in the case of the inner self, the engulfing “I” is called into being either through voyeurism—an act of seeing in which the self emerges by mounting itself on a disembodied and all-inclusive vision possessed by a universal subject, or through empathetic seeing—a process in which the self projects an image of the other whose presence compels him to come to grips with self-awareness and recovers a sense of identity by embodying the other. But such perceptual empathy leaves us somewhat in the dark as to how the same subject would experience and articulate his/her psychologized mind and body. These are ironically the mortal boundaries of his/her actual being, whereas his/her ubiquitous inner self knows no such limits. So a paradox arises, according to Bakhtin, in human cognition that makes a distinction between empathetic seeing and embodied vision. The former is capable of encompassing the beginnings and ends of others, but not of his own; the latter supplements such knowledge provided by other human beings. Here cognition shows its ultimate handicap: with its oceanic embrace, it cannot perceive the outward boundaries of its actual self. To be able to do that, however, requires it to descend to the world of irreducible particularity and determinacy where its abstract thinking must be mediated through the actual experience of seeing. What, for instance, I am liable to miss in cognition is how my situated being connects with the contour of my actual living conditions, but all this is completely visible and accessible to you when you observe me from your point of view. Thus that part of my existence unavailable to myself lies within your uniquely angled sight, just as yours within mine. So you and I complete each his life experience was the phase of his theoretical formation on the dialogic nature of one’s social being.

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other’s being architectonically. This architectonic of seeing—what Bakhtin calls “the excess of seeing”—makes it inevitable that the observing “I” must depend on an “outsideness”—the vision of the other(s) being observed—to attain a full view of himself, and vice versa.13 The same principle operates for our cognitive perception; it is in alterity that lays the completedness of one’s ontological meaning. Accepting such a cognitive premise means, we are reminded, that the unfinished nature of the self is a limit to be overcome, and that self-fulfillment must be sought in the shared existence with the other. This resonates well with my understanding of the term sociality. Let us dwell briefly on the term of sociality: by sociality, I refer to the intricate variety of encounters of social immersion that channels the individual’s progress towards his/ her final destiny; no matter what motivates the individual, sociality is the ineluctable nodal point that orients and drives him/her toward an end that concurs with the ethical wellbeing of a society and the state.

Subjective Vision and Situated Body

Liang Qichao once remarked, on the eventful decade of 1910s, “I will stop at nothing in getting the “I” of today to confront the “I” of the past.”14 Liang’s words reveal less about his own penchant to constantly shift positions than about his need to grapple with the plight of a self being constantly challenged by other(s) and interacted with them to the best of his ability. Nurtured by his steep classical upbringing, Liang kept a lasting interest in the human affect and the role of vitalism in Western modernism. Incidentally, it was logical that he and other Chinese thinkers of the early decades found an inspirational and mentoring figure of European vitalism in Henri Bergson whom Liang met in person during his trip to Western Europe in 1919. Liang later drew on Bergson’s vitalist philosophy to outfit his mind with adroit insight for interchange and negotiation. By virtue of intuitive perception, Bergson’s life-long scuffle with positivist thinking is to thaw out the stiff tundra of abstract intellect and release human consciousness back to vital and fluid history. Bergson believes 13 Bakhtin, Art and Answerability, 22. Consult also the chapter “The Architectonics of Answerability,” in Mikhail Bakhtin. How Bakhtin’s visual dynamic translates into empathetic cognition will have significant impact on my readings of Yu Dafu and Qu Qiubai in their literary delineation of the “I” in quest of self-realization (Chapters 4 & 5). 14 Liang, Qichao 梁启超, Qingdai xueshu gailun 清代学术概论 (The Intellectual Trends in the Qing Dynasties), (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 1963). Also quoted in editor’s preface to On New Citizen ed. Song Ziming 宋子闵 (Shengyang: Liaoning renmin chubanshe, 1994), 5.

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that human psychic experience endures time without ceasing: its present state builds, like musical notes, on the preceding ones, weaving their individual differences in a fluid succession while remaining open to embrace new and different ones. Mobility, continuity and indivisibility spell out the nature of mental life in action. The subject “I,” Bergson informs us, is capable of achieving coherence and succession when he deals with other(s) in the human and material world, but has to mobilize this capability via Durée (duration). In Time and Free Will, Bergson defines durée this way: We can thus conceive of succession without distinction, and think of it as a mutual penetration, an interconnexion [sic] and organization of elements, each one of which represents the whole, and cannot be distinguished or isolated from it except by abstract thought.15 According to Bergson, the subject, which he terms the “Conventional Me,” begins with his emotive and subjective responses, which are premised on his direct and rough-and-ready contact with others. As he deduces other beings through his self-centered vision, his viewpoint tends to be egocentric, subjective and self-serving; it follows that his status as the sovereign subject renders him powerful and authoritative towards others, but he remains oblivious of his own condition of being situated in concrete historical conditions. Thus, in dealing with mental states of perceived qualities and entities, such as desire and freedom, the spiritual and the worldly, the subject and the object, he sees them as abstract and detached. This, as seen by Bergson, is precisely how the conventional self acquires his mastery of universal laws and a totalizing vision of those subordinate to him. With the intuitive idea of duration, Bergson sets up the “Fundamental Me” as an antidote. Intuition, according to him, stems from human instinct that possesses a natural affinity with other(s) which endows the mind in intimate and full knowledge of them, an asset which intuition never employs for speculative or instrumental ends. Unlike pure intelligence, he insists, human intuition, rather than deducing concepts in the disembodied mind, offers consciousness full access to the continuous flux of living reality. The “fundamental me,” declares Bergson, grows by virtue of an intuitive synthesis derived from one’s biological and physiological being, and exists, not by way of p ­ ositivist 15

Henri Bergson, Time and Free Will: an Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness, trans. F. L. Pogson (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1910), 101. Bergson is often cited as a key thinker in “psychologizing” human consciousness; for the very reason, it is important to bear in mind that Bergson himself was under the influence of key Buddhist schools of thought of the East during his formative years.

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deduction, rather by mobility, succession and qualitative divergence. We now see the individual inhabiting real space—a corporeal self enveloped in real time—that interacts between his sensory impressions and involuntary reflexes of his body.16 Bergson states: “Just in proportion as we dig below the surface and get down to the real self, do its states of consciousness cease to stand in juxtaposition and begin to permeate and melt into one another, and each to be tinged with the coloring of the other(s).”17 It is apparent that Bergson ascribes this empathetic act to the I-subject’s introspective vision, which enables him to at once partake of the others’ being and animate his own psychic abilities, thus laying cognitive grounds for his “fundamental self.” And it is precisely via this empathetic “inner sight” that the subject can construe a fluid yet tangible selfhood through ceaseless otherness “[as] if I were able for an instant to identify myself with the person of the hero himself.”18 All this surely had enormous appeal to those Chinese intellectuals who had been groomed in the Ming thinker Wang Yangming’s idealist and introspective construal of human consciousness. Thus far these disciples of Bergson’s had not missed a single note relishing his vitalist teachings.19 In the late 1910’s, the new Chinese state had been beset with tumultuous unrest at home and would presently be humiliated at the Versailles Convention in Paris in spite of her status as a victor nation of WWI. Despite being a social and intellectual trendsetter, Europe had just let the Chinese down by revealing to them what ugly and disastrous ends that material progress and industrial strengths could lead human societies to with the outbreak of the First World War. Bergson’s all-out assault on the vile and hollow base of modern materialism was exactly what the Chinese yearned to be enlightened with, thus winning him instant and extensive respect among many of the Chinese intellectual elite. At the heart of Bergson’s vitalist skepticism lies the question whether it is possible to valorize 16 Bergson, Time and Free Will, 164. It is significant to note that Bergson here lays down a corner stone for the later resurgence of the human affect in critiquing the dichotomous Western subject. 17 Ibid. 18 Henri Bergson, An Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. T. E. Hulme (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1912), 3. 19 These Chinese disciples include Zhang Dongsun 张东升, Zhang Junmai 张君劢 (Carson Chang) and Xiong Shili 熊十力. Incidentally, one public reference to Bergson was made in the middle of the well-known debate between Ding Wenjiang 丁文江 and Zhang Junmai; the debate which took place around 1923 was widely known as Kexue yu xuanxue zhi zheng 科学与玄学之争 (the debate between Science and Metaphysics). Wang Yangming 王阳明 (1472–1529) was the eminent thinker of Mentalism (School of the Mind 心学) in the Ming Dynasty.

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otherness beyond the aesthetic reaction of the interiorized self. His vitalist idea of duration was orienting his Chinese followers towards an ontological difference that they could not miss: a self that embodies the perceived vitalist values could be geared to the dynamic life and concrete reality of China in crisis. Yet it had to pass through otherness that was ethically sanctioned as much as was aesthetically evoked; once that goal was achieved, it would lead to the realization of a renovated citizen, providing a link between the sociopolitical and the socio-cultural that Liang Qichao avidly propagated.20 One might question at this juncture if such empathetic acts work to displace or even bring peril to the integral nature of the I-subject. The skeptical point is well taken because those moment-to-moment, inter-subjective changes Bergson proposes are indeed full of ambiguous potential: it is plausible for the sovereign subject’s transcendental power to be only momentarily displaced before it absorbs the variation and addition of others’ psychic consciousness, and be at the mercy of being brought back into its hegemonic orbit. It is therefore crucial to establish the fact that empathy triggers difference in nature, not in degree. While it is hasty and misleading to say that Bergson banishes finality of human endeavor altogether, his envisioned outsideness does stand to challenge “. . . the dialectic, as much Plato’s dialectic of alterity as Hegel’s dialectic of contradiction,” for dialectics always aims at the resolution of the binary in a single unity of opposites.21 This, ironically, is where the Chinese thinkers like Zhang Taiyan and his pupil Lu Xun parted their way with regards to Bergson’s vitalist subject.

Interlocuting the Vitalist Modern

In view of what vitalism typically stood for in Bergson’s time, we need to ask: how did the focus on intuitive empathy particularly impact the overall epistemological reorganization since the crisis of Western modernism? And what did it bring to bear on the Chinese writers’ configuration of the subject of the self through literary imagination? What makes it almost insuperable a difficulty for the writers of the early Republican era was not so much the need to tell what ideas were patently Chinese and what not as how both Western and 20

21

Read a more detailed account of this later in this chapter. On a larger scale, the cognative trajectory for self-realization replicates the complexity and profundity of the debates on the social evolution prevalent in China during the early stages of her modernization. Chapters 3 & 4 of this book will be devoted in part to Yan Fu’s translation and Liang Qichao’s articulation of these issues. Gille Deleuze, The New Bergson (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999), 49.

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Chinese ideas were thrown together in a hasty and jumbled fashion, and in what ways differences in the two cognitive traditions contended and intermingled in the endeavor of writing. As it occurred, a widely shared sense of anxiety and futility began to broach a mindset that would in time segment in a paradoxical position: they would rather see the human body become vigorous and productive with an inner perception even as its physical being is parceled and divided into separate and specific functions at the hands of modern science. This makes it intriguing and valuable for us to remain committed to studies of ontological issues that tend to be ambiguous, fluid and indeterminate. The revival of Confucian vitalism in modern China shed some light on the lingering impact of the inner centrality and primacy of the Confucian self, but clouded our vision as to which venues are truly conducive to interacting and mediating with otherness. Yan Fu, whose career changed drastically from naval expedition to cross-cultural translation, was among the earliest to draw genuine inspiration from Western ideas of evolution from the deeply rooted stand of literati Confucian. Even though he did relatively little to espouse and circulate his own brand of social theories as a signature of being modern, his unique way of adapting ideas of disparate evolutionist thinkers such as Thomas Huxley and Herbert Spencer led the way across the threshold of modern thinking. He intermixed, molded and reshaped their divergent approaches to social evolution on his own terms, i.e., by way of paraphrasing their shared views and intersecting their differences. Andrew Jones has succinctly captured Yan’s patently “evolutionist” inclination in that Yan, . . . reframed national history in terms of natural history, casting China as an actor in the unfolding of a vast and tumultuous world-historical drama, one in which species, races, and nations alike were caught up in a relentless struggle for survival.22 Yan’s evolutionist inclination is clearly honed during his sojourn in England, where the intellectual climate had been full and ripe in evolutionary notions and terminology. Abridged as his study in the Greenwich Naval Academy was, Yan’s mind was thoroughly absorbent and immersed with ideas of social development and historical transformation. Yet, the most potent impulse of his interaction with evolutionary ideas is, as Jones reveals to us, his “organicist” 22

Yan Fu 严复. Andrew Jones, Developmental Fairy Tales: Evolutionary Thinking and Modern Chinese Culture (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011), 7. Equally important is Note 10, in which Jones traces out the linguistic lineage of the evolutionary perspective of Herbert Spencer.

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bent as Yan now believed that human society could only make progress by evolving “from the homogenous to the heterogenous.”23 He tried to embrace and interact with the heterogeneous other(s), converting their ideas into literary Chinese by way of coining neologisms and experimenting new narrative modes. Yet it is his steadfast heed to China’s historical contingency that eventually prevailed over his trial run of discursive insemination; it cost him his chance to further pursue his organicist line of thinking and ended up returning to his royalist former self. It is no coincidence that Liang Qichao’s modernist thinking thrived along a parallel path but with a different outcome. Liang Qichao was a more eager, articulate and prominent spokesman for the late Qing reformists who had at one time been Yan’s senior political ally and social mentor. Hence it broaches no wonder that critical scholarship on Liang has yielded countless volumes, teeming with most revealing insights contributed by eminent China scholars such as Joseph Levenson, Hao Chang, Charlotte Furth, Philip Huang and lately Xiaobin Tang.24 To a greater or lesser degree, these scholars have all dwelled on the integrative process through which Liang helped convey to the educated public a basic knowledge of liberalist individualism and its influence on the reformist agenda of Chinese nationalism. Attuned more to a political-historical stance, their views shed ample light on how social and political forces and events explicitly impacted Liang’s ability to adapt and encompass diverse views and positions in his attempt to rise to meet the twin challenges of individual freedom and national identity. Charlotte Furth’s view of attributing it to the desire for renewing national integrity surely hits a note of consensus: “. . . the external crisis made Chinese nationalism a universally shared sentiment which flavored every point of view . . . ”25 In a manner of speaking, these historians, like Furth, have inadvertently traced out a predictable, though tenuous, course of social stimuli and individual responses that not only reflects 23

Jones has also singled out this aspect as his critical assessment of Yan Fu. Read Jones, Developmental Fairy Tales, 7. 24 Their works include: Joseph Levenson, Liang Ch’I-chao and the Mind of Modern China (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1959); Hao Chang 张灏, Liang Ch’i-ch’ao and Intellectual Transition in China, 1890–1907 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971); Charlotte Furth, ed. The Limits of Change: Essays on Conservative Alternatives in Republican China (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1975); Philip C. Huang 黄宗智, Liang Ch’ich’ao and Modern Chinese Liberalism (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1972); Xiaobing Tang 唐晓兵, Global Space and the Nationalist Discourse of Modernity: The Historical Thinking of Liang Qichao (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996). 25 Furth, Limits of Change, 39.

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Liang’s belief in the power of social evolution, but bespeaks an indebtedness on their own part to a linear, positivist approach to the modernist teleology. The flip-side of their socio-political critique is their oversight on the implicit depths of the ontological process that seemed to prompt many of Liang’s mental comings and goings. A case in point is the host of assertions made over Liang’s abrupt scurry, after his return in 1902 from his exile years in Japan, to take an all-out stand for nationalism instead of reformism. Their deliberation over his shift in thinking seems to echo Andrew Nathan’s pointed query: . . . Liang repeatedly performs an act of philosophical legerdemain that is bound to baffle Western readers. Into the hat go individual rights, freedoms and autonomy, and out of the hat come group rights, freedoms, and autonomy. Even after following this trick several times, one cannot easily analyze how it is done.”26 In actuality scholars of Liang have long undertaken a cautious probe into the blurred arena of Liang’s mental juggling. Hao Chang, for one, is able to discern a striking degree of affinity between the individual and the citizenry (which Liang later equated with nation-state) and he thus regards Liang’s term as the bearer of organic and independent attributes that are strikingly similar to those of the classic Western individual.27 Chang explains, “By citizenry, he [Liang] meant a group of people who were not only a legal body but had also an organic and corporate personality capable of expressing its own will and formulating its own rights.”28 How does Chang arrive at this conclusion? I believe that Chang is insightful in perceiving how Liang would venture to “renovate people”: what starts off as a Confucian self would now come through Liang’s citizenry, which would fuel and prep him as a way-station before sending him off to pursue his final goal—a collectivist one embodied in the nationstate.29 The brilliance of Chang’s view, to be noted, lies in the analogy of evolution aligning Liang’s thought formation with his life in progress. 26 27

Andrew Nathan, Chinese Democracy (New York: Knopf, 1985), 57. Liang himself had no qualms about being a disciple of Social Darwinism, but the same cannot be said of his treating of citizenry as equivalent of a modern nation-state. See Liang, Hsin-min ts’ung-pao 新民丛报 (The New citizen journal), (Yokohama: nos. 1–13, February-August, 1902), 56. Also see Chang, Liang Ch’i-ch’ao, 194–195. 28 Chang, Liang Ch’i-ch’ao, 260. 29 The word xin 新 (new) in Xinmin 新民 (new citizen) can be both a noun and a verb. In the case here the emphasis is on xin as a verb (to make anew), i.e., to make a person a new citizen. This is knowledge commonly shared among scholars of Liang’s generation.

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Like Yan Fu, Liang professed to be a disciple of Darwin and Spencer.30 We know, through Chang, that Liang believes that, as a sociopolitical organism, the nation state is but the ripened fruit borne naturally out of the amalgamation of such free and assertive citizens. Whether that same evolutionary force allows Liang to traverse the course of ethical progress (as defined by Thomas Huxley) is, however, a different issue. When Chang comments on Liang’s distinction between private morality (Si de) and public morality (Gong de), he seizes on its coherent and extensive potential as an illustrative instance of the organist evolution, and envisions a synthetic merge of the private into the public. The reason is, as Liang remarks, “. . . private morality was by no means only of individual concern; its primary value still lay in its serviceability to the collective interest of the group.”31 Chang’s emphasis on “value” and “serviceability” is prompted by his view that “these Western ideals were accepted not as intrinsic values but as secondary values instrumental to the attainment of the collective power of the state.”32 In other words, Chang thinks that ideas like individualism, private interest were adopted by Liang to complement the Chinese concept of private/public continuum. Chang’s focus on these terms, moreover, also rings a bell; we are reminded of the views of two champions of English liberalism: Jeremy Bentham who advocated a pursuit of greatest liberty and happiness for the greater public as the core of utilitarian ethic, and John Stuart Mill who distinguished between “self-regarding” and “otherregarding” elements of the self in defense of individual liberty.33 Both Bentham and Mill undoubtedly derived their views from a human relationship aptly characterized, not by the part/whole, but by the one-many interrelationship that Chad Hansen evokes.34 The reason is that the one-many relationship always already implicates a self-versus-the other dualism; the individual self does not partake of a whole larger than himself; he IS the whole writ large. This explains why these apologists of English liberalism were able to oblige a serviceable wedlock among ethical value and historical contingency. Chang’s 30

31 32 33 34

Liang himself had some doubts about being a pupil of Social Darwinism, but same cannot be said of his treating Citizenry as equivalent of a modern nation-state. See Liang, The New Citizen 新国民 (Taipei: Taiwan Zhonghua shuju, 1959), 56. Gong de 公德; Si de 私德. Chang, Liang Ch’i-ch’ao, 151. Ibid., 197. John Stuart Mill, On Liberty, ed. Currin Shields (New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, Inc. 1997), 3–19, passim. Chad Hansen, “Individualism in Chinese Thought,” in Donald Munro, ed. Individualism and Holism: Studies in Confucian and Taoist Values (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1985), 36–37.

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comments in turn pinpoint where a lacuna, possibly at the level of consciousness, lay in Liang’s transit stage. So how can a collective télos, as Nathan earlier implores, evolve out of the stage of Liang’s citizenry? This brings us to face the perennial dilemma that China historians face: is citizen-renovation holistic or individualistic? It seems, for this renovation to work, Liang has to allow the two rivaling systems of selfconstitution co-inhabit the same space—at the domain of consciousness blending historical heritage with social progress. In all likelihood, he has to ensure that a politically engaged individual (e.g. the new citizen) be concurrently sanctioned by Confucian morality as well as liberalist values from the West. The dilemma has been further defined (by Levenson) as a polarity between “value” and “history,” wedging between universal laws (of the West) and historical particularity (of China). Resolving this dilemma makes it one of the toughest thresholds of modernity to cross while mediating between the traditional and the modern. The individual—such as Liang’s new citizen— finds it almost impossible to escape being targeted from both stances when stranded in between: he is either accused of falling back on ahistorical and disembodied criteria of the Tianxia empire (extolled as “value”), or denounced as a carpe diem realist going mindlessly after some imported vogue—modernism, Statism, individualism, etc., (labeled as “history”). The historian likewise is hard pressed (by the insuperable chasm) to avert such a divide, but more often than not he ends up taking side on the either/or stand between tradition and modernity.35 Just as Liang was fated to meet his impasse in his theory of Statism as a “terminal community,” Chang, like others who have perused Liang’s mental journey, gained little headway in untying this intractable knot hampering Liang during his mental transition. It seems that bridging the gaps in ontological tumults proves too far a stretch from their fields of focus. The private self groomed on literati virtues had by now been cast off its habitual mooring—the Imperial civic system. Its social role remained baseless, stagnant and inorganic. At the other end of the continuum, the nation-state, as the public self, had barely survived its infancy, attempting to wrest life out of the jaws of feuding warlords and pillaging foreign powers. Liang’s proverbial new citizenry was thus no better than a fragile, unsettled and often bewildering illusion. All this cannot but raise the specter for Liang’s drive to renovate the people, which oscillated between the stagnant creeds of a dysfunctional universalism 35

Tianxia 天下. Hao Chang’s critical review features well-presented and insightful explications for Liang’s evolving thinking on the complex relationship linking citizenry to nation-state. I am thankful to him for the rich suggestiveness one can draw from his views.

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and the tangible prospects of a dynamic but fickle and menacing modernism. Liang was tentative and unsettled as to where the center of gravity was—having hovered back and forth across the two value systems. So I believe that one aspect of the dilemma to be dissected more effectively is how the onset of modernist values threatened to displace the subject from its undisturbed mastery of authority in universal values such as those of classical Confucianism. Any new consciousness would have to militate against the abstract, formal terms of ethical reasoning—rigid precepts in isolation from the reality of historical changes—and voluntarily resisted his presumed affinity with the authority of knowledge and reason.

Self-Nature and Buddhist Nonself

A selfhood constituted of the Buddhist notion of nonself appears oxymoronic. But it happens to be a corner stone laid into the intellectual base of Zhang Taiyan’s thought, which positions itself right opposite to Liang Qichao’s citizen and consequently challenges the nation-state as an end-point community. It therefore prompts us to inquire: why does such a self stand in the way of realizing the individual-state continuum? Since Zhang Taiyan declared: “the individuated is the real; the collective is the illusory,” it seems so logical to rank Zhang among those who completely bought into the selfhood of Western liberalism.36 But we must be wary that his whole notion of the self/other and individual/state dichotomy was quarried out of Buddhist bedrock which would displace the ontological base of the Western selfhood. Whereas the Western self typically presumes a lopsided relationship of subject over object (Hegel’s master-slave bondage is the extreme example of it), Yogācāra Buddhism depends on sedimentation and the momentariness of the flow of life force to explain how the world of life evolves—much like Bergson’s notion of “durée” described earlier in this chapter. According to the Yogācāric thought, the self of ālaya-vijñāna, known as “storehouse consciousness,” feeds off the energy of the “seed”—dubbed “perfuming” in Buddhist terms. The act of perfuming stands for the function of particularizing and discriminating impressions for the individuated being. The seed is itself straddled and shared across the active human senses and a will sedimented via lived history and its role is animating, spiritual and subjective but not disembodied. As Kenneth Ch’en puts it across 36

Quoted in Wang Hui 汪辉, “Zhang Taiyan’s Concept of the Individual,” in Wen-Hsin Yeh 叶文心 ed., Becoming Chinese: Passages to Modernity and Beyond (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 251.

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vividly, “it [the storehouse consciousness] may be said to be in a state of continual flux, with its seeds constantly influencing external manifestations, and these manifestations in turn adding new seeds or impressions to it.”37 It is no surprise that such a process should be fluid and not linear, reciprocal and not subordinating, thereby making it imperative for the self to partake of the interactive process of seeding rather than being barricaded in an atom-like closure. It is abundantly clear from the above that the self-consciousness of the individual comes into being only through cross-fertilization between sedimented knowledge and momentary association—as in the manner of Bergson’s durée. Accepting such a premise renders pointless the need for a metaphysical and permanent formula of the self such as espoused in the Cartesian subject of the Western philosophies.38 The process of seeding also spurs the sprouting of a non-self in the fertile mind of Zhang Taiyan. Pursuing the genuine form of the self, Zhang now laid stress on the self’s dependence on its participatory role for access to the true self-nature of things, which Wang Hui compares to Kant’s Ding-an-sich.39 In Wang’s reading, Zhang deemed only individuated beings in possession of Zixing (self-nature), and that aggregate entities (such as groups, villages and states) formed out of the individuals were “artificial” and therefore should not be constrictive or binding to the individuals. He does however grant the individual a sort of shared subjectivity beyond the immediate self in order that he could negate the unequal subject/object relationship by eliminating the object’s subordinate half from the ontological equation. We realize that Zhang had further refined the individual self by positing it in a “provisional” role where the individual self is neither identical with nor possessive of self-nature, but is privy to it in order to be perfumed by it in its attempt at self-realization.40 Zhang’s insightful view of the Dao-like subjectivity of self-nature was the chief 37 38

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Kenneth Ch’en, Buddhism in China: a Historical Survey (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1964), 332. Yogācāra is commonly known as the “Storehouse-consciousness” School of Buddhism; it sees self-awareness as a result of sedimented and momentary karma rather than via a perceptual interaction between the subject and the object. More detail will follow. For further reading on Yogācāra, refer to Dan Lusthaus, Buddhist Phenomenology: A Philosophical Investigation of Yogācāra Buddhism and the Ch’eng Wei-shih lun (London: RoutledgeCurson, 2002), 183–194. Zhang Taiyan 章太炎. Wang Hui, “The Rise of Individualism and Identity Politics in Modern China” in Wang Hui, Wang Hui zixuan ji 汪辉自选集 (Wang Hui: Collection of Self-selected Works), (Nanning: Guangxi Normal University Press, 1997), 159–175. Zi xing 自性. Wang Hui glosses the Buddhist notion of ālāya in “Zhang Taiyan’s Concept of the Individual and Modern Chinese Identity” in Yeh, ed., Becoming Chinese, 236–238.

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reason behind his favoring the Buddhist non-self as expounded by Yogācāra and it enabled him to steer clear of both the metaphysical and the determinist obstacles in the ontological formation of the non-self. Given the fact that even the individual being does not outright own selfnature, what social impact does this notion of self-nature have on Zhang’s critique of the Western modern self? And how is the social to be understood and valorized in his scheme despite his disregard of the teleological course harnessing the individual to the nation state? I believe that answers to the above can be found in the following: (1) since the self is now void of substantive attributes and remains only “provisional” in true nature, the individual no longer figures integrally within the subject/object dichotomy, which in turn annuls the modern state with its supremacy over the individual as its object. (2) it follows that the self cannot function as the sole anchoring site from which all social relationships evolve—social and cultural status, private ownerships, wealth-related entitlements, rights and interests. Hence, the need for reclaiming the social that feeds off a collective consciousness. Following Zhang’s Yogācāric approach to the provisional self, we see significant results emerging from what the provisional self could contribute to the reconstruction of the social. For one thing, it clarifies the nature of non-being and sheds ample light on Zhang’s envisioned role of religiosity. Zhang’s resort to Yogācāric non-self is not a passive or pessimistic evasion in the face of the overriding power of the modern State, still less was it a hopeless withdrawal from the world of reality by dint of solipsistic faith in the etherized being of a divine authority such as God. On the contrary, the plight of “being provisional” recharges and re-orients the self socially, because in the company of the multitudes like it, the self remains responsive and susceptible to social interaction. It is now through the unimpeded and spontaneous interaction among them that prompts more solid and truthful responses for individuals to “unseat” the presumptive “supremacy” granted to the State, the local governments and social establishments such as the clan lineage. On the other hand, being provisional valorizes the self by proximity, which forestalls the trend of setting itself up as the gravitational center of ontological and moral primacy.41 It is pivotal

41

My reading has benefited from his original thought of the self being only “provisional” in Zhang Taiyan’s use of the Buddhist non-self. I here draw on Wang Hui’s view that Wuwo (Non-self) cannot function as the source of morality, but disagree with him as to which, the publicness or the self, should have ontological primacy. See Wang, Rise of Modern Chinese Thought: General Principle and Anti-General Principle, Volume 1, Book 2, 1041. My view is that any claim to ultimate publicness as the overarching goal for individual self-realization foreshadows a healthy, openended and non-determinist discussion of social and individual progress; the primary

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to see that the non-self not only abstains from but also defends against any abusive power wielded by the State in the guise of an individualist I. This brings us back to the issue of sociality in the light of the Buddhist nonself. It is vital to positively assess Zhang Taiyan’s indictment of the collective in his critique of modern teleology; yet it would be a grave misunderstanding to regard his anti-collective stance as one that rejects all social relationships— one would be misguided to disregard the real thrust of Zhang’s non-self and ignore its liberating and transformative power. As early as in 1894, Zhang issued an astonishing maxim of a paradoxical nature: “Da du bi qun; qun bi yi du cheng” (A supreme individual is bound to be the social; the social must be realized by an individual).42 In the ensuing decades, Zhang further honed his insight as to how the non-self correlates the social in a paradoxical and unconditional manner. In the light of its paradoxical nature, on the one hand he targets the nation-state for setting the be-all and end-all goal for the individual whose imminent subjectivity refused to be yoked onto the State’s exclusive orbit, thus releasing the self’s realization from a stifling bondage under the modern state. On the other, as its correlating half, he posits for the self a principally affirmative and constitutive role in an “absolute” bind with the social in toto. Scholars like Wang have dubbed it “absolute” to lay heavy stress on a radically different sociality.43 Taking cue from these readings, we find it compelling that the former unfalteringly signifies the freedom of refusal, while the latter seems to figure as an affirmative testament to a certain interdependence that underlies the relationship between the true self and the supreme publicness.44 c­ ounterpoint I raise here is to be continually mediated between the publicness and the self. I try to unpack the anticipated pitfalls of disinheriting one’s situated and embodied identity in Chapter 5 and through the characterization of Wang Leshan in Chapter 6. 42 Da du bi qun; qun bi yi du cheng 大独必群; 群必依独成. Zhang Taiyan, “Illumination of Du” in Complete Works by Zhang Taiyan, vol. 3 (Shanghai: Shanghai People’s Publishing House, 1984), 53–55. Also quoted by Wang in Rise of Modern Chinese Thought, 1022. The translation and emphases are by the author. 43 Ibid. In the case of Wang’s English translation of da as the absolute, I have a word of caution: this absolute I is fundamentally different from the Hegelian supreme consciousness accessible exclusively to the egotistic self by way of spiritual transcendence; on the contrary, it is closely akin to the utmost actualized individual “I” firmly rooted in historical reality. 44 I am here resonating with the notion of “negative liberty” espoused by Isaiah Berlin. Wang Hui also relates his interpretation to Berlin’s idea. Consult Isaiah Berlin, “Two Concepts of Liberty” in Isaiah Berlin, Four Essays on Liberty (London: Oxford University Press, 2002). Wang, Becoming Chinese, 236. Wang uses this phrase “supreme publicness” to denote the kind of social that Zhang Taiyan stood for. Emphasis is mine.

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Admittedly, for all the studious reviews that Zhang scholars have conducted, it is not so clear how the non-self can derive its constructive role from an otherwise heavy-handed critique of the State-led society. I contend that it is precisely the significance of the emotive, psychological and ethical impact as integral to the human affect that forms the intersected grounds for an alternative sociality—the supreme publicness. If Chinese anarchism can still be evoked as a motivational source, what we can distill from it is its unequivocal stress on the human sentience. Spontaneous calling from what is good, just and cohesive never fails to prove its potency in overcoming dynastic crises and re-igniting cultural innovations by way of recurring peasant revolts of China’s Imperial past. But moral spontaneity is a less-than-certain means for Zhang and his followers to reclaim primacy in guiding China beyond the threshold of the modern state since they could only be evasive and indefinite about any organized social movements that would ascertain supreme publicness in China at the time. It is precisely this lack of clarity and commitment that depletes their critical momentum and clouds their prophetic vision in the end. The demise the Chinese anarchists met in early Republican politics—distrust and aversion of organized social movements—reveals a latent drawback of the Chinese anarchists in that that they failed to further the cause of mass movements beyond the status of being “provisional.” Their movement sadly faltered at the vital juncture of ethical orientation and mobilization for the socially engaged forces before letting go of them when confronted by “organized” politics. None, I feel, could offer a clearer illustration of such a short-lived run than the so-called mishaps that catapulted and then unraveled the tragic but touching life of Qu Qiubai.

From Here to a Teleological Where?

Thus far we have focused intensely on the correlativity posited between the new individual (the citizen) and the modern State (nation state)—the continuum that moves the lesser self progressively to the great self as its fulfilling endpoint. What has emerged from these discussions is a key form of sociality that extends personal growth and drives the questing individual; what still remains to be articulated is the plurality of télos that orient the growth of the individuals and ethically chart their development. Whether it is the enlightened I-subject empathetically identifying with the socially inferior, or the disenchanted youth aspiring to a modern China built with wealth or power, there are the latent but multiple téloses that inform the underlying design and motor the evolving growths. What, we need to ask, constitutes the multiple téloses for

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the fledgling modern individuals? How is self-realization politically and historically delineated under diverse social conditions? Or is it morally determined and ethically inspired relative to indigenous and/or transnational cultural values? Our assumption here is that a fully realized growth travels by more than a single path, and its destined goals are set through a negotiated process. What this means at the ontological level is again navigation that intersects multiple subjects’ horizons of constitutive values. It is almost ineluctable that when we study the reciprocal mediation at the ontological level we must begin by tackling received stereotypes: the stereotypes that foreshadow our study of modern development: the egotistic West contra holistic Chinese. These are fixated ideas of cultural, cosmological and cognitive differences that have long impacted the way we conceptualize the trajectory of evolution. Chad Hansen draws a line between a part-whole grid for China and a one-many grid for the West. He defines the contrast between the two as follows: The difference is that in one-many structures, the units are treated as interchangeable, fixed in “size,” and only externally related. . . . Parts, by contrast, are of variable size. Some parts may be parts of other parts. One can refer to more and less inclusive parts of the same whole.45 To flesh out this contrast, Hansen further explains that “. . . human agency is fundamentally autonomous,” thus laying the grounds for an atomistic model of taking self-constitution as the bare-bones paradigm.46 Observed through this one-many grid, this atomic human ego is the headspring from which flow all human motives, desires and towards which all human goals, realization and finality gravitate. Once stripped of the communal and contextual bonds and duties, the individual self turns interior, unitary and solipsistic, and poses its substantive rights, such as freedom, equality and pursuit of happiness as the linear, edifying and unitary endpoint for human progress. By contrast, Hansen reminds us, the part-whole dynamic makes it axiomatic that the individual is always oriented toward the whole; the self’s destiny is thus configured, not via self-acclaimed ends, but through duties and loyalties to the public good. This bounded destiny thus makes it an ethical priority of all the individuals to be compliant, receptive and accountable towards collective goals and standards. What inspires the individual in his/her quest must be aligned with collectively 45 46

Chad Hansen, “Individualism in Chinese Thought” in Donald J. Munro, ed. Individualism and Holism, (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1985), 36–37. Ibid., 51.

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shared ideals; any progress or development of the individual must likewise be mapped out along the trajectory leading from the inner to the outer, from the individual to the social, and from the citizen to the State. David L. Hall and Roger T. Ames have likewise proposed regarding the Chinese self-realization as “process ontology” in which the individual strives to act upon ethically appropriate choices and principles to actualize a life-long commitment to the greater good. As a way to distinguish a potentially instantiated goal of the individual of the West, they state: . . . [I]n China the goal of personality development involves the achievement of interdependence through the actualization of integrative emotions held in common among individuals.47 Even though laid out in broad strokes, these comparative studies have explored the inner workings of the interactive dynamics in teleological designs, and have begun to shift their critical attention away from reified dichotomy of Chinese holism vis-à-vis Western individualism. We can now observe how mediating these polar opposites served to engage in and reflect on the integrative process of teleological thinking that has fed on the potent, alternative modes of self-fulfillment. These emergent modes were duly animated by the discursive enthusiasm of many May Fourth activists who had advocated a two-way reciprocity between the Western Bildung and the Confucian cultivation. It is two-way in the sense that the activists could either incorporate thinking and action of the past in the guise of change for the new, or claim to “reinvent” the tradition by masking novelty and discontinuity as present-day incarnates of the past. Between these two, one could seek teleological paths of self-realization based on different and contingent historicity. The key to this reciprocal process was simultaneity—an on-going process of mutual contestation and negotiation among disparate teleological designs without each ascending to a romantic or lyrical epiphany above historical contingency to assume supremacy over the other(s). A process typically unfolded when the self “is” embarked on an intercourse with the self “ought to be”; yet instead of letting the latter circumvent the historical subject from an idealistic pose, the realist, lyrical or romantic author—the self “is”—deployed the self “ought to be” as an outer mirror to reflect a newly unveiled version of him/ herself in transformed contexts.

47

Ibid., 23.

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Dewey’s China Legacy

In the modern Chinese context, the closest that any process of self-realization imported from overseas comes to is John Dewey’s theory of “interaction.”48 It may be pertinent then to examine how Dewey’s ideas on education impinge the process of inter-subject interaction and self-realization. Dewey believes that interaction between the student and the environment is of supreme pedagogical worth; yet his interactive dynamic is premised chiefly on the function and operation of ongoing changes, i.e. how the individuals enter into and rely on a reciprocal order so that an interactive effect incurs and change unfolds. All this is derived from his unique theory of experience. Experience, according to Dewey, is “a series of disorientations and re-integrations with the environment, resulting in restored equilibrium, satisfaction, consummation, fulfillment.”49 Hence, his preoccupation with the ontological process as such rather than its participants. Intriguingly, this raises a question: does Dewey’s process affirm a simultaneous interaction between different selves? After all, there are other subjects who form parts of one particular subject’s environment. What do we make of these individual beings, each of whom embodies an “organic self” that radically differs from any other because of the “environing” of values and biases relative to his/her own class, society and culture? How can one interact with them in body and spirit appropriate to each? In the realm of education, the answer will have to come from the problematic of Dewey’s idea of interaction. And there is surely to be discovered sufficient ambiguity and complexity in his theories that reveal his inner clashes with his obsession with Hegel’s dependence on the totality of the historical subject emerging out the evolving spirit. First, duplicity in Dewey’s experience. Dewey is primarily an evolutionary thinker who, echoing Hegel, Spencer and Bergson, subscribes to the view that human progress is capable of achieving an enduring unity as a whole in which integral parts or phases of it diversify but cohere. What this means, in terms of Dewey’s experience, is to underscore at once variation in change and prevalence of integrity. This truly resembles the synthesis uniting a dialectical pair of opposites in a materialist dialectics. But Dewey stamps his distinct mark on 48

49

Many Chinese scholars have traced China’s educational reforms to John Dewey’s philosophical and pedagogical influence in modern China, which reached its zenith when Dewey came to China for a lecture tour in early nineteen twenties. See Pan Fanyuan 潘凡 远, “Reading Ni Huanzhi from the Perspective of the History of Modern Chinese Education,” in An Anthology of Ye Shengtao Scholarship, ed. Liu Zhengren 刘真茹 & Feng Guanglian 冯光联 (Beijing: Shiyue Art and Literature Press, 1988), 498–526. John Dewey, Art as Experience (New York: Milton, Balch & Company, 1934), 14.

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it by highlighting the emotional and intuitive qualities of each concrete moment of experience. He thus argues: Emotion is the moving and cementing force. It selects what is congruous and dyes what is selected with its color, thereby giving qualitative unity to materials externally disparate and dissimilar. It thus provides unity in and through the varied parts of an experience.50 By the same token, experience “possesses internal integration and fulfillment.” Dewey defines the act of experience as involving “doing” and “undergoing” aspects of the subject’s emotive participation. In his view, “undergoing,” akin to the act of “seeing,” is executed mainly with the subject as the central pivot. To “undergo” objects or events in reality immediately implies, as he explains, that there is intense passion on the part of the subject to recognize, to identify with the object. Thus “it involves surrender,” that is, it entails that the subject yield itself in an empathetic embrace of the object. The act is thus more reciprocal and interactive than it appears.51 Dewey then quickly imposes subject-­ oriented qualifications for the act: (1) the subject is in a position to frame the entire act of empathetic recognition by selecting aspects of it that contribute to the “estheticness” of the experience; (2) to anticipate the subject’s inner desire for an aesthetically gratifying goal by swaying the experiential act with its consequences.52 This is done through what Dewey calls exercising “out-going” energies in order for the subject to envelope the object in a pervading mood. Thus, the act is now cast in a more subjective impression in order to ensure the likelihood of its desired end. It is duplicity like this that turns Dewey’s “esthetic quality” into the suspect: for it gestures, not toward a true interaction between subjects, but toward a subjectively consumable end for the subject. Second, ontological ambiguity in Dewey’s evolving self. Dewey does speak of development of the subject’s selfhood as constituted by a trajectory of various “disorientations and re-integrations,” which refuses to be ever arrested in a static equilibrium. Further, he argues that the equilibrium attained after a spell of disintegration should be a “temporary, moving equilibrium” because “there is no such thing as a fixed, ready-made, finished self.”53 So it seems to be Dewey’s firm belief that the self thus formulated is amorphous and ­becoming, 50 Dewey, Art as Experience, 42. 51 Ibid., 53. 52 Ibid., 48–49. 53 John Dewey, Experience and Nature (New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1958), 245. John Dewey, Ethics, 2nd ed. (New York: Rinehart & Winston, Inc., 1932), 430.

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and it attests to his conviction in ongoing change. But elsewhere, when ­elaborating the esthetic experience, for instance, Dewey declares that the individual self is only valorized insofar as it partakes of “intuited enveloping quality”—what one might call a unity among a motley of experiences.54 And this betrays Dewey’s centrifugal inclinations. Dewey also writes: “there is the individual that belongs in a continuous system of connected events which reinforces its activities and which forms a world in which it is at home, consistently at one with its own preferences, satisfying its requirements.”55 That Dewey here gives credence to the whole over the part, to universalism over individualism is evident. What is self-conflicting is his slippage to the homogeneous and self-centered of the whole so as to justify the subject while depriving its individuality. But how can there be a single, harmonious entity out of the incomplete and ongoing realization of an individual self? Conversely, what true individuality is expected of a self that develops and unfolds only to eventually become part of a latent yet engulfing whole? The truth is that Dewey cannot escape the overdetermined subject of totality. With it the self is orbited on a determined course, ascends the lock-step path to a self-effacing transcendental union with the absolute spirit. This points right at where Dewey’s interaction might run aground in social praxis. Rejecting initially the conceptual split of dualism, Dewey attaches great values to an integrated development of the self. Similar to the inner ascent of the lyrical self, this enables the subject to infuse his/her experience with self-centered affective sway. While doing so, however, he would unwittingly cancel off the object as an indispensable partner in the dynamic interaction, and in turn terminate any necessity of tension, negotiation and creativity there can be in the “process” between his and other selves. On the other hand, desiring the process of self-realization to be “ongoing,” Dewey also has to be wary that the developing self must stay in step with the contingent and amorphous world and therefore cannot but be undecided, open-ended and un-teleological. This means, in terms of progress, no less than a denial of his own equally popular idea that human beings’ ability to interact, with nature and among one another, can shape or direct subsequent effects, aligning present acts with future ends. If his outlook appears somewhat teleological, his “process” could signify, by contrast, a final end menaced by indeterminacy and unpredictability.

54 Dewey, Art as Experience, 192. 55 Dewey, Experience and Nature, 245.

chapter 2

Historicizing Social Development and Self-Realization It was with his study of Yan Fu and Zhang Taiyan, both renowned scholars of late Qing, that Wang Hui first embarked on his wide-ranging and thorough investigation of social thought in the early Republican era. The upshot of his monumental oeuvre on the rise of modern Chinese thought is a voluminous and insightful critique that contests the dominion of the Western-inspired modern télos and raises the stakes of alternative modern selfhoods in the Chinese context. Taking cue from Arnold J. Toynbee’s Orientalist reading of the Russian intelligentsia, Wang applies the British historian’s analysis of those Russian intellectuals to such Chinese reform-minded scholars as Zhang Taiyan and Lu Xun, but with a twist.1 In Toynbee’s reading, we note, the class of “liaison officers” pushed for “Westernization” in mid-nineteenth century Russia while being prompted by a key intellectual quandary—they were caught between “being in” (as in “intelligentsia living in the Russian society) and “being of” (as in “intelligentsia belonging to the Russian society). When Wang draws parallels between the Russian intellectuals and the Chinese reformists, we see fundamental differences emerge: Toynbee’s diagnosis of those liaison officers’ hybridity discloses their intent as a reformist leverage to sustain their privileged access to ruling power. This disclosure incidentally reveals the fact that the parallel would be more fitting for what the reformists of the Yangwu (Western Affairs) school tried to accomplish in late-Qing China. By comparison, Wang Hui’s take on Zhang Taiyan and Lu Xun is decidedly focused on their social criticism: the members of this class are typically more assertive in their ability to critique both the traditional Confucian selfhood and modern individualism from the West. In other words, Wang’s approach departs from the path Toynbee’s liaison class took by way of emphasizing the reformists’ readiness, not to “[learn] the tricks of the intrusive civilization’s trade so far as may be necessary to enable their own community, . . .” but to foster a vigilant 1 Yangwu School 洋务派. Arnold Joseph Toynbee, A Study of History, Vol. I (New York: Oxford University Press, 1946). We here encounter the phrase “in” but “not of” in the English original. Wang’s quotation of the phrase “being present” but “not belonging to” was taken from a Chinese translation of Toynbee’s work done in 1986. The intellectual position seems emblematic of Wang’s own critical stand underlying his prolific enterprise of studying the rise of modern Chinese thought.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���4 | doi 10.1163/9789004265356_003

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and iconoclastic sensibility of the individual that confronts and combats the potential pitfalls of intellectual misguidance and failings regardless of their ideological or cultural bearings.2 It is precisely this vigilant insight that has prompted Wang to turn to Yan Fu’s exceptional translation of evolution by Huxley and Spencer and Zhang Taiyan’s revival of Buddhist and Daoist ontologies when he tackles the hidden agenda embedded in Toynbee’s critique of the Russian intelligentsia’s modern teleology. Prompted by this critique within a critique of the modern teleology, Wang Hui brings into play his critical study of Yan Fu, the translator of European theories of evolutionism and the precursor of the Chinese modern, in the aftermath of China’s devastating defeat and ruin as a result of global expansion and exploitation at the hands of the Western imperial powers at the turn of the twentieth century. Wang’s exploration of the genealogy of early Chinese renderings of individualism, selfhood and freedom aims to unpack how and why ethical impulses Yan Fu harbored impinged fatefully his less than accurate translations of major English works on evolution, sociology and economics.3 In a study that both dissects and sustains Yan’s cross-cultural thinking, Wang helps bring to light what lay at the heart of Yan’s position on (1) the importance of a modern selfhood which Yan conceived in close affinity with the society/ state (Yan was apt to collapse society and state); the distinct role of qun (social grouping) which Yan envisaged to chart a pathway for an individual’s selfrealization as a cohesive part of the overall ethical wellbeing of the society and the state.4 In concrete, Wang centers on evolution as the principal motor for propelling the individual in his search for individual freedom and autonomy, but all goes through the mediation of qun, i.e., the social institutions. Even though Wang examines Yan Fu along a rather different perspective, there is no doubt that his approach ensures that the individual’s self fulfillment be accomplished, less in subordination to than in line with, the goal of social and ethical progress, and that it resonates with what is epitomized in the Confucian mantra of Xiusheng (cultivation of the self), Qijia (rule the clan/family in harmony), Zhiguo (bring 2 Toynbee’s words are quoted from Toynbee, A Study of History, 393. 3 Wang, The Rise of Modern Chinese Thought, 857–881, in passim. 4 I totally agree with Wang Hui’s insightful reading on this point, but I have reservations over what he does next: launching a constructive effort to delineate a self-sufficient system of empirical knowledge for Yan Fu’s teleological learning. My point of departure from Wang’s insight would be to look into the notion of qun more closely and clarify its pivotal role in Yan’s translation of the Western idea of evolution. See Wang, The Rise of Modern Chinese Thought, 882–923.

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order to the nation) and Ping Tianxia (make peace under heaven).5 He does so firstly by foregrounding Yan’s perception of the modern self through the prism of ethical orientations, and then by regarding Yan’s position on the relationship between the self and the society as interlocked and reciprocal; in other words, Wang’s approach construes the modern individual’s endeavor of selfarticulation and self-constitution as one immersed in a realization which is coterminous and interactive with the society and state while questing for a modern identity. To me this progress via the route of the social sphere lays out a course that correlates China’s transition to the modern through societal transformation and nation-building. As is shown in the ensuing chapters, what is distinct with this socially mediated evolution is “correlativity”—Western notions of evolution must first be correlated to indigenous conditions and historical needs of China. Wang Hui explicates this correlation between the imported idea and its recipient thinker as one of extension rather than subordination. His stress on the extended meaning of evolution from the West not only allows received notions to depart from the original intent, but empowers the recipient to contest in return the inadequacies and pitfalls latent in the Western original design. One aspect that stands out in Wang’s reflections on Yan Fu is the latter’s utmost ethical concern with the shaping and upkeep of the social wellbeing. It should come as no surprise that Yan’s translating the English term “society” into “qun”—“sociology” becomes the “study of qun”—immediately lit up Wang’s critical imagination. The discussion of qun gained almost fervent currency amongst the late Qing thinkers who all owed Yan an intellectual debt because Yan was among the earliest to incorporate this concept from the ancient philosopher Xun Zi. Wang, on his part, eagerly brings a cultural specific, i.e., the multifaceted problem of Chinese identity on the eve of the modern era, to bear on Yan’s translation of the term; he does so by urging us to heed the fact that the Chinese notion of qun—a common designation for any social grouping—includes both the society and the State, and for that reason, the rivalry between the society and the State that is crucial in the typical Western binary is thus decisively insignificant. We can now appreciate that the critical thrust of Wang’s study is not to polarize opposites, such as tradition vs. modernity, individualism vs. collectivity, but to engage them in a recurring and reciprocal dialectic. His approach therefore does posit (if only cautiously) a self-society/nation continuum which differs critically from a teleological trajectory typical of a Hegelian fruition of “inner-purpose.” His view on modern self-realization 5 The Confucian mantra of Xiushen 修身, Qijia 齐家, Zhiguo 治国 and Ping Tianxia 平天下.

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makes it plausible not to assume an irreversible linear path of progress subsuming the individual to the State, nor does it, as in Frederic Jameson’s “national allegory,” envisage a relationship of instantiation between the two that turns the individual self into a mere exemplified instance of the national spirit.6 In the same vein, Wang Hui approaches Zhang Taiyan’s Buddhist non-self in a manner that takes to task the received ideas and perceptions held by the May Fourth believers in individualism, social evolution and the nation-state. Of these modern notions, social evolution with its all-embracing télos bears the foremost brunt of Zhang’s critical scrutiny. Inspired by the spirit of Zhuangzi’s Qi wu, i.e., taking the uneven as even, Zhang responded to the sound and fury of modernist evolution with his “equalization as difference”—a solitary but resonant voice asserting a non-evolutionary and anti-teleological path of progress.7 Wang notes that Zhang’s critique was not so much against evolutionism as against social evolutionism as espoused by Hegel and Spencer; he reminds us that at the time many perceived China’s transition from the traditional to the modern as an inevitable parallel to Western historical progress from being under the feudal court to becoming the modern state, implying the historical necessity of following a single-track, lock-step and edifying ascent that fits all human races. Hence, any country must pass through the era of the nation state en route to the summit of a social ascent in pursuit of the télos of human progress. However, in Wang’s view, it remains vital for a modern state to distinguish alternative ideological forms and choose different ethical standards so that it is optimally enabled to envision its own future and lead its people to its promised destination. As Wang explains, Zhang was able to trace back to this evolutionary holy grail as an overarching goal posited by capitalistic modernity that the West had accomplished by means of its supremacy. On a more balanced note, Wang points out, Zhang did not reject evolutionism categorically, but called for a multifaceted perception of the term Gongli (general principle) that would contest and mediate the Western brand of evo6 My reference to Jameson’s critical term “national allegory” draws on its multiple-layered meanings arising out of the discussion of Jameson’s first use of this term which delineates a general path of national salvation intertwined with individual enlightenment. See Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981). 7 Zhuang Zi’s Qi wu is summed up by Zhang Taiyan as “taking the uneven as even.” My point here is derivative of Wang Hui’s comments on Daoist influence on Zhang Taiyan as in Wang, “Zhang Taiyan’s Concept of the Individual and Modern Chinese Identity” in Yeh, Becoming Chinese, 235.

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lution by way of the Confucian vision of Tianli (natural principle).8 The aim of such a mediation, as was expected, was not only to earn China’s “presence” in, but a real sense of “belonging to,” the global system of modernity. But Wang points out that Zhang’s reluctance to belong to the global system is triggered by the fundamental disparity as to whether they construe Gongli as a one-sizefits-all universality. Insofar as the word “gong” in Gongli denotes “publicness” or “collectivity,” Zhang chose to fault the general principle, as was embodied in nation-state, because of its proximity to the key political form of capitalist modernity. Unlike other reformist literati, Zhang resisted the capitalist law of subordinating individuals to a form of social domination under the egis of private interest, entitlement and ownership despite its professed emphasis on individual autonomy. A case in point is, when blaming China’s weakness on the lack of a collective identity, Liang Qichao attributed the cause to the fact that “ . . . within everyone’s mind and eye there is only the I of his own self and not the I of the collective.”9 The reason behind Liang’s chastisement is his indelible faith in and support for a linear, positivist continuum between the I of the self and that of the collective undergirded by the modernist télos. At odds with collective domination of any stripes, Zhang opposed Liang’s stance of regarding the nation-state as a “terminal community” in China’s becoming modern—as stridently as he abhorred a total takeover by individualism. Along that line, Wang Hui displays at length Zhang’s thorough exposition of ancient Daoist and Buddhist thoughts, and endorses Zhang’s robust stand on how to appropriate ideals of moral governance, e.g. pre-Qin fengjian (the feudal system), in the present, yet be able to steer off or delink from the overarching frame of the modernist teleology. All this enabled Wang to question the ­rationale and legitimacy underpinning the cause of modern progress. What adds to the historical complexity of the issue is, Wang reminds us, that Westernstyle individualism has habitually concealed the fact that the fruition of the 8 Gongli 公理; Tianli 天理. Viren Murthy has written on a more worthy effort by Kang Youwei to implement such an integration, though it is to be noted that Zhang Taiyan departs from Kang’s approach significantly in terms of the function of social critique. See Viren Murthy, “Modernity against Modernity: Wang Hui’s Critical History of Chinese Thought” in Modern Intellectual History, volume 3. 1, 2006 (London: Cambridge University Press), 153–158. For further detail, refer to the relevant passages in the fourth chapter “Empathetic Vision in Yu Dafu’s Fiction” of this book. 9 Liang Qichao, “Zhongguo jiruo suyuan lun” 中国极弱溯源论 (On Tracing the Origins of China’s Extreme Weakness) in Yinbingshi heji (Combined Collection from the Ice-drinking Studio), vol. 5, 15–16. The same words were also quoted by Wang Hui in “Zhang Taiyan’s Concept of the Individual,” 241.

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nation-state could be a full-blown version of the self-centered individual by way of instantiation.10 By the same token, Wang points out that Zhang Taiyan would be in sharp disagreement with the May Fourth continuum between “the lesser self” and “the greater self,” and he surely remained vigilant against the corrosive power of the nation-state by way of its invasive influence through the “public sphere” e.g., local governments, civilian societies, professional organizations and other such collective entities.11 Invoking the Daoist spirit of Qi wu, Wang states, Zhang’s critique of the modern was engaged chiefly with a negation of the nation state as a modernist télos. Backed up by his own study of theories of micro-organisms in forming societies and communities both animate and inanimate, Zhang boldly claimed that all beings, whether good or evil, possess equal potential and chance to evolve (or simply to change) and they remain fundamentally unaltered in their moral worth; it follows that such claims would make it possible for myriad forms of life to evolve along varied paths to suit their internal needs and external conditions. Hence, Zhang argued that virtue and evil, poverty and wealth, knowledge and ignorance all advanced together, thereby challenging the authority of the Western claims to human progress by way of a single-course teleological realization.12 He proudly named his own evolution theory as Ju fen jinhua—evolutionary paths that are diverse, nonlinear but concurrent, thus dislodging the questing self from the binary, contractual relationship that tends to dominate the individual selves in a subject vs. object bondage. For all his profound talent and fierce verbiage, Zhang’s 10 Pre-Qin fengjian is often referred to as Gongyang sanshi 公羊三世; This is believed to be a three-step evolutionary social development invented by the philosophers of the Xianqin 先秦 of Antiquarian China. The three-step phases stand for three evolving stages of social progress: (1) Juluan shi 据乱世 (chaotic disunity); shengping shi 升平世 (emergent stability); Taiping shi 太平世 (flourishing peace). This resonates with similar points I will express in Chapters 3 & 4. For a critique from the Western perspective, consult the comments made by Hannah Arendt in The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), 66–67. 11 Readers interested in this critical approach are urged to read Presenjit Duara, “Bifurcating History: Nation and Histories in China and India” Positions 1, no. 3 (1993), 779–804. 12 Ju fen jin hua 倶分进化 (All beings, though differentiated, evolve together). My comments draw on views expressed by a few scholars: Wang Hui, “The Rise of Individualism and Identity Politics in Modern China” in Wang, Self-selected Works, 43–66; Jiang Yihua 姜义华, Zhang Taiyan Pingzhuan 张太炎评传 (Annotated Biography of Zhang Taiyan), Nanchang: Jiangxi Xinhua Press, 169–179; Viren Murthy, “Modernity against Modernity: Wang Hui’s Critical History of Chinese Thought” in Modern Intellectual History, volume 3. 1, 2006 (London: Cambridge University Press), 137–165.

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single-handed battle seemed much like an oriental Quixotic assault at the juggernaut of the global spread of modernity; but in the eyes of Wang Hui, Zhang’s ill-fated fight lit a far-away beacon which beamed its rays of historical truth across ages and over lands.

Alternative Memories and Social Evolution

How is the personal past represented in an evolving and teleological narrative that has clearly met its demise—the failure to deliver its faithful followers to its promised end of dénouement? What are the ways for the growing individuals to present their coming-of-age testaments amidst failed political experience to reflect in a manner that does not cloud their critical vision about their social relatedness vs. state authority? There is little doubt that when the vast public arena was pervaded with CCP’s stifling ideological discourse, the narrative closure of a self-realization chronicle tended to signify a Maoist-style of hobo-to-hero—a CCP version of Horatio Alger—rite of passage to success. But does it always result in a total disconnect of the individual from any social or ethical fields of force or source of orientation in Post-Mao China to sustain his/ her future growth? In other words, does the individual, especially when betrayed and isolated by the politicized public, invariably have to be woken up to the “liberating” values of Western individualism? Needless to say, tale after tale have been narrated since the end of the Maoist era, to acquaint us with an “unfamiliar” kind of rites of passage, which would depict the individual in a daring revolt against or a risky escape from the demons of the authoritarian rule, and then turn him/her into an automatic convert to the ideology of bourgeois liberalism. Ironically, even in the land of exceptional capitalistic liberalism, namely the US, there are media outlets, college forums and community interest groups where informed Americans find themselves engaged in debating whether there has existed a singular, unconditional and non-negotiable types of individualism in the West, which can function with no regards whatsoever for their families, communities or social networks! In fact, recent voting trends and election results in American politics have driven a point home convincingly: the ever-pluralizing American society is again witnessing a new upsurge of the relational, the communal and the local; hence, the tattering myth of an essential and reductive core of individualism has outlived its values in reality. Before addressing these issues, we need first to draw a line between what is the social and what is the collective; then we need to discredit the false notion that individualism is necessarily to be constituted to the exclusion of sociality.

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It is gravely mistaken to equate “collectivity” with “sociality.” Whereas collectivity avails itself of the disposal of ideologically and organizationally hegemonic powers such as the CCP-led modern state, sociality refers to a deeper, vaster and thus murkier nexus of relationships shaping the social spheres of the family, the public and other groupings. When one speaks of “rites of passage” as a metaphor for growing up through social rituals and acculturation, it is beyond any doubt that the maturing individual is tested and proven through primarily social, long before coming into contact with collective, experiences, even though his/her entire growth may in part entail some collective form. With respect to the manner in which human memory functions, therefore, it must be initiated with and concluded in the social realm with the potential of some delimited role for the collective in between. The realm of sociality thus comprises a wide swath of social involvement that intertwines different ideological or belief systems.13 In a similar manner, our memory intersects the past and the present. When Richard Terdiman famously says: “Memory is the present past,” he is referring to memory’s role as “the modality of our relation to the past,” which he further defines as “the engagement we have taken in (and with) our history to mortgage the approaching present that at one time was our future to a past . . . .”14 Terdiman, following Bakhtin, tries to discern why and how forms of human relatedness have impinged on our capacity of remembering the past, which he intensely scrutinizes while exploring the causal relationships that drive humans’ concrete actions and general development. The key to unpack how the pasts invest in our present, as Terdiman explains, is to “read the memory relation . . . through its constant rehearsal and reproduction in individual and social memory.”15 Taking Bakhtin’s dialogism as a memory model, he envisions 13

I refer the reader to theoretical writings on linguistics, memory and society in Chapters 2 & 3 of Jürgen Habermas, Communication and the Evolution of Society, trans. Thomas McCarthy (Boston: Beacon Press, 1979), 69–94, 95–129. See also Note 7, Chapter 4 of this book. 14 Richard Terdiman, Present Past: Modernity and the Memory Crisis (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993), 17. I was enthusiastically drawn to Terdiman’s theory on postFrench Revolution memory because of his theoretical lineage from Mikhail Bakhtin. Read his chapter “Theorizing Recollection” in which he traces his theoretical genealogy to Bakhtin’s dialogism. Terdiman, Present Past, 42–48. 15 Terdiman, Present Past, 27. The chapter, “Historicizing Memory” of Terdiman’s book addresses a period of French history—between post-French Revolution and proto-Industrialization—in which similar issues occurred. Interested readers are also urged to read Max Weber, The Nature of Social Action, ed. W. G. Runciman. “Weber: Selections in Translation” (London: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 7.

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an interlocking of meanings between Gemeinschaft (a relational community) and Gesellschaft (an instrumental society), and delves into the contradistinction between the varieties of memories derived from them. He treats the memory of Gemeinschaft as a nurturing accumulation of natural associations embedding the evolving life of an individual as part of a whole. In contrast, he regards the memory of Gesellschaft as a sort of “archival consciousness” that isolates a person’s experience in “lifeless” fragments in service to an institutional agenda.16 I take these potent relations as a point of departure, focusing on the differentiated memories in order to detect and uncover what makes these relationships tick—what constitutes the kind of teleological linkage conjoining the past remembered (of the Maoist times) to the recollecting present (during the post-Maoist era). I recognize how the personal histories can be vital in challenging and unseating the hidden télos of CCP’s institutional memory and derailing the grand finale of its “official” history; but I also contend that, as these “individuated” stories are studied out of historical context, the critical edge has mostly been absorbed in its fragmenting and de-centering acts, and that private lives are glamourized to offset a one-sided claim to truth by the dominant center towards historical memory. In doing so, however, such storied pasts seem to have quietly vindicated their horrific pasts by dint of the universal code of humanist values—freedom, autonomy and happiness for the individual as epitomized in Western liberalism. Or have they? There is no denying the fact that these individualized tales are also exposed to the paradoxical side: one tends to overlook the medium which is itself governed by a built-in “scopic regime,” i.e. a viewing or perceptual center whose ideological locus is latent but efficacious.17 It is precisely the veneer of filmic instrumentality that conceals the hand of the modern state shifting the teleological gears between the free individual and the authority of the Western liberalist values, causing the relation to be quietly locked in but not easily found out. To see how the télos kicks in, Martin Jay writes: “the scopic regime of modernity may best be understood as a contested terrain, rather than a harmoniously integrated complex of visual theories and practices.”18 After linking the mode of perspectivalism with the epistemology of its represented subject, Jay finds its visuality to be withdrawn, static and arresting; he then identifies the viewing subject as someone who is inclined to be 16 Terdiman, Present Past, 38–42. 17 The term is from Christian Metz, but is elaborated by Martin Jay in his article “Scopic Regimes of Modernity” in Vision and Visuality, ed. Hal Foster (Seattle: Bay Press, 1988), 3–27. 18 Jay, Vision and Visuality, 4.

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“ahistorical, disembodied and disinterested,” who “ignores the materiality of our embeddedness” in the bone and flesh of human existence. Jay thereby reveals that while this process of self-constitution as a response to the Western liberalist subject can be complicitous with repressive political practices, he also posits critical potentials to turn to “alternative scopic regimes,” such as his unpacking the levels of “distantiation” that exist as a result of “internal tensions” and “relativistic contestations” prevalent amidst the liberalist tradition.19 The example, distantiation, according to Jay, refers to the social-scientific models in which the distanced and totalized bourgeois subject is constructed for neutral and disinterested claims to truths in social sciences.20 Owing to Jay’s insightful reading, we are in a position to explore the nuanced differences in subject formation within the liberalist teleology, and discern the hidden pitfalls of Then vs. Now as it is applied to the context of non-Western societies, in this case, the post-Mao China. One way to observe how the role of teleological memory gets contested and mediated is by sorting out the entangled social and political relationships between the individual’s recollected past and the present state of his/her self-realization. This brings us right back to “social relatedness” by which sociality can ably impact on historical memory, and urges us to study its extended impact across temporal and cultural boundaries. Instead of either holding or folding a rigid binary of the “relational” and the “instrumental,” social relatedness, as is reflected via historical memory, opens up diverse and animating dimensions of the everyday that point toward divergent and elevating paths of growth for the aspiring youngster. Thus, by affirming social relatedness, it pays off, both hermeneutically and politically, to observe that the memoirs based on Then vs. Now have a penchant to assert values of bourgeois liberalism only with diluted and opaque notions of its implications amidst different social roles. We are therefore looking into “distantiation” more closely now to see at once its antithetical and interdependent sides—its vigilance against ideological complicity vis-à-vis its proclivity for social relatedness.21 19

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Ibid., 10, 24–25. Jay is fully aware of the reductive excess in critiquing Western perspectivalism, a critical stand with which he accords in principle; he therefore follows up with comments on the issue of “internal tensions” and “alternative perspectivalism” within the Western epistemology counterposing to perspectivalism. Ibid. Jay feels impelled, when asked by discussants during the Discussion section, to explain why he regards the case of “distantiation” illustrates his view that political implications can be disentangled from the embeddedness of the liberalist epistemology; he argues that there are different sub-variations of the Cartesian perspectivalism that create internal tension and can potentially subvert one another in their ontological functions. This issue relates to what I state in my comments in Chapters 8 & 9 below.

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In filmic and literary arts, distantiation usually means to be distanced on purpose from the mainstream ideology or culture by way of estranging the viewing subject through formal or political means. A case in point is the “defamiliarizing” or “alienating” effect achieved via fragmented narrative forms or upsetting visual effects in filmic and literary arts. Enlightened by Terdiman’s critical distinction, we can now explore how the relational and the instrumental can reinforce and/or destabilize one another in our remembered past. A central issue we face when judging memories of political pasts is inescapably with the individual’s ability to recapture the past very much by “brushing against the grains,” i.e., by undoing the ideological encodings that are enmeshed both in his/her nativist upbringing (the relational) as well as universal adoption (the instrumental). So how shall films recapture our political pasts while undoing the Then vs. Now directionality? In what ways can Chinese filmmakers contest and dispel the false teleology of a culminating present when reconnecting their political pasts? First and foremost, critiquing the teleological present entails refocusing the contrived visages of memoir away from the “collapsed space” in the guise of global capitalism. It needs to be vigilant against the act of “blanketing” the pasts as though they were processed en masse with a “nostalgia” mode digitally modulated in a disembodied and ahistorical present. It needs to remind itself that no such rear-view mirror exists to offer a historical past in an objectified and unconditioned manner; certainly not when one can see through the dominant’s semblance of transparency. The way the transparency of a triumphant ideology works is to deprive the everyday of its everydayness, turning it into an uncontested option of “complicit survival.” Terdiman puts it this way: “The dominant is the discourse . . . [which is] granted the structural privilege of appearing to be unaware of the very question of its own legitimacy.”22 In other words, the domination is papered over by a totalizing transparency, which induces the dominee to subsume its discursive authority in a taking-for-granted fashion. Engulfed by this blinding totality, the dominee is impelled to internalize it while believing that millions of others must have reacted equally submissively. As a resistance strategy for the dominee, therefore, Terdiman commends the act to unveil this blinding transparency: “Memory is inherently contestatory.” He further states: “it also subverts it [the hegemony of the dominant] through its capacity to recollect and to restore the alternative discourses the dominant would simply bleach out and forget.”23 22 Terdiman, Present Past, 19. 23 Ibid., 20. It shall become self-evident that, in Chapter 9 below, that is what Zhang Chengzhi attempts to recapture in his History of the Soul—an alternative history for the Muslim Chinese based largely on their clandestine oral histories.

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Aided by such contestatory memories, we shall be “estranged” but enlightened as to how the budding individual overcomes the rigidity of ideological divides and negotiates his/her way out of crises of growth to reach their aspired goals. The key to countervailing the discourse of the state domination lies in the extent to which the author/filmmaker remains vigilant against it, consciously resist it, and diligently dissects its veneer to uncover the ideological télos latent in it. Conversely, the same also holds true for the social relatedness of the liberalist self, when reinvented by way of such universalist essence as those of bourgeois liberalism, is surely assembled out of the liberally nurtured attributes of the usual suspect—the atomized self, so we must be wary that such a selfhood is hardly an integral and autonomous subject; nor is he/she ever free of any social and ideological encodings characteristic of the historically emergent bourgeois class in the West. The self under question can therefore hardly claim any objective or transcendental status, and is indeed inescapably enmeshed in different causal links that shape up the related yet contested social realm of the modern West. It follows that one effective strategy to recuperate the obscured everydayness is to restore the relational (that has been exiled) to the everyday by way of the instrumental (that has been taken for granted). While staging the alternative resistance, we need to undo our instrumental immersion in the everyday context through which we once internalized the authoritative center while being schooled by the ruling ideology. On the other hand, this internalized gravity must be negotiated, assertively, with historical memories that perceive the present to be evolving and altering in its own historical milieu. In other words, remembrance should be undertaken, not from a jaded and unsuspecting “now,” but in a manner that interacts and intersects with a fluid and progressing historical present. In the light of such a historical present, we encounter the favored self-­ realization narrative that customarily seeks to identify with children growing through politically eventful years, whose wide-eye innocence quietly prizes open the implosive breakup of domestic harmony; going agonizingly against the grains, the child weaves in and out of the domestic space of the everyday shared with grownups, thereby reliving the traumatic “coming-of-age” that once disfigured his/her childhood as his/her now awakened mind smarting over it in the present. Alternatively, as in the case of Zhang Chengzhi, we are let in the self’s emotional ordeal of self-awakening to a new ethnic identity as he treks across the loess highlands, lodges at the meager abodes of the Chinese Muslims and records their oral history of fearless resistance and tenacious livelihood powered by their own social relatedness.

Historicizing Social Development and Self-Realization



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A Coda

As the new millennium dawned, we found ourselves confronted by a resurging bestial giant—the globalized market that grinds down the fauna and flora of planet earth and gnaws away at the heart of human decency. For the multitudes of youths who set out again in search of self-realization, new signposts will have to be in place and on display, and there will always be sobering truthseekers like Yan Fu, Zhang Taiyan, and Wang Hui who, tracing their footsteps, take pains and risks in spotting out pitfalls, dangers zones and dead-ends ahead of the marching crowds. Across the long and daunting treks of human progress, they and the opportune truths they share with us become the most enduring human signposts. The journey leading the questing self to eventual socialization can be unnerving, disorienting at times, but it turns out to be energizing and gratifying in the end. While critiquing the individual/state continuum of a modernist teleology, I am equally aware of the need for textual signposts of a kind for the readers of this book. These ensuing remarks are provided to that end. Chapter 3: In studying how the idea “evolution” figured critically in China’s modernity, I observe that Yan Fu adroitly (mis)translated contentious ideas about social evolution by Huxley and Spencer by way of paraphrase and interlocution. Yan’s reading and its subsequent broadened meanings of social evolution lent themselves to a major departure from the tension and difference embedded in the original Western dispute. Key to Yan’s interlocution is the ethical orientation of individualism in pursuit of self-realization that ends in public good, which “deviates” from the core tenet of Western liberalism—individualism as the transcending value in and of itself for all social development. While juggling his understanding of evolution amidst those of Huxley, Spencer and Mill, Yan also drew heavily on his learning of the Chinese antiquity and brought the importance of Xun Zi’s qun (social groupings) to bear upon individualism and social evolution from the West. What his discursive interlocution succeeded in achieving was to bring to the fore the manifold potentials invested in the Western notions other than the “absolute, autonomous and non-utilitarian” values of individualism (advocated by Benjamin Schwartz), and the tenable service it could perform for China’s search for power and wealth (chastised by Schwartz). Yan’s contribution to the modern by way of his paraphrastic writings is on the level of ontology—his inclusion of the “immanental” télos of the Confucian selfhood in his vision of a fulfilled modern self. Chapter 4: Yu Dafu’s (auto)biographic narratives told in the first person often present us with the most candid and complex tales of the protagonists’ coming-of-age in early literary modernism. Yet a closer look at his literary

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theories reveals much more about its ontological intricacy than its social impact. My focus in examining Yu’s “I” narratives on the theme of social initiation is on the integrative process of self-articulation. I take my cue from the concept of “citizenry as mediation” by Liang Qichao and engage in a two-way strategy of adapting and negotiating to meet the dual challenges of individual freedom and national identity. Like Liang, Yu was also enlightened by Henri Bergson’s vitalist insight, but he relied as well on classical Chinese poetics to embrace otherness through aesthetic reaction of an interiorized self. The critical challenge facing Yu’s aesthetic interaction with others (from other social classes or cultures) is in forming an empathetic vision to encompass otherness without devouring their historicity. In his “Sinking,” the character “I” evokes an all-embracing vision, takes hegemonic control of the other in consciousness, and results in a voyeuristic narrative stance. Even as he tells a confessional tale, Yu tends to be unitary and ahistorical towards other characters in his stories who share inter-subjectivity with him, turning them into deserving personae of kindred spirit across historical gaps. In his later works, Yu’s cognitive challenge remains as to whether his affective intuition could forge a broader basis for genuine empathy for others in conjunction with their social and educational status. This abolition-infusion dilemma is fully illustrated in how the “I” subject’s ego is nurtured and renewed with Ermei, the female alter in the story “Intoxicating Spring Nights.” But it is in his later wrings such as “Late Blooming Cassias” that Yu confronts the final hurdle of ethico-aesthetic fusion: what makes the integrative emotions truly “social” and how the self is brought forth through a process of discovering the interdependence between the two situated individuals as two “soul mates.” Chapter 5: As an exile of self-disinheritance, Qu Qiubai stood out from those Left-wing intellectuals whose alliance with Western liberalism was fraught with ambiguity and skepticism; Qu truly felt he was “in” (present) but never “of” (belonging to) those sharing the radical mindset of Left-wing politics. In his youth, Qu had been drawn to Bergson’s vitalist thought by way of Buddhist notions and became enlightened by the anarchist agenda of mass psychology and social movements. It was the thrilling forces displayed by the Bolsheviks in Soviet Russia that inspired him to endure the harsh trans-Siberian train journey and conducted journalistic duties while in Moscow in early 1920s. When Zhang Taiyan revived the Buddhist notion of non-self to target Western individualism, Qu shared Zhang’s assertive claims of Yogācāric store consciousness which propagated the non-self as a provisional status for the individual in resisting organized forms of social coercion. Concurrently, Qu had also embraced elements of the idealist drive of socialism for fundamental social changes—through spontaneous and unreserved interaction with fellow

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humans in multitudes. All this had an enormous impact on Qu as he had reached maturity intellectually as well as socially. In 1921, Qu wrote A Journey to the Land of Hunger and History of the Heart in the Soviet Capital; both works alternate between journalistic showing and philosophical musing; both focus on the human affect to valorize otherness while pursuing a self-affirming cause. But what is central to Qu’s ideological initiation in Soviet Russia was to disinherit a key measure of his integral and substantive selfhood and eventually embrace the fluid, agitating and renewing energy of the Bolshevik revolutionists. Coinciding with his gradually dysfunctional physique, his agitated mind was apt to rehearse the Yogācāric “perfuming” of a non-self embodied in the events of the Soviet revolution. The near religious experience enabled Qu to take a stand from which he could mediate between the religious and the cultural, draw on the intuitive and the personal, and at once interact with the transcendental and the resistant. Qu’s stint in the Chinese Communist leadership in the 1930s proved onerous and unraveling with his arrest and execution by the Nationalist. Thanks to its inspiring yet intriguing nature, however, Qu’s non-self was able to map a critical trajectory of self-realization as a parallel, if not alternative, to the failed idealistic model projected by communism. Chapter 6: Can there be any intrinsic correlation between lived experience (as in a lyrical story) and lived history (as in a hero’s life story)? As a master of modern short fiction, Ye Shaojun deftly crafted short stories whose lyrical endings provide transcendent closures to modern sensibilities of empathy, justice and love. What would happen to such sensibilities when they were set adrift in the fluid and volatile currents of historical reality of 1920s’ China? Ye’s novel Ni Huanzhi, the Schoolmaster (1929) interlaces a web of lyrical stories (of early short fiction) into a full-length personal saga (of the subsequent novel). We can easily detect the resemblance between Ni’s earlier short stories and many of the characters and events in the later novel. But intriguing parallels reveal more: Ye experiments with the form of the novelistic narrative in much the same way that his protagonist Ni Huanzhi grapples with liberal humanist notions in search of a fulfilling life and a proven identity. My reading of the authorial penchant for “objective correlative” in Ye’s fiction seeks to explore, in a dialogic way, how a unitary and self-conscious vision of the lyrical subject is in turn displaced and recouped by the compelling needs of social exigencies and mediations. Conversely, I investigate how the liberally motivated protagonist resorts to desire, inclination and affinities to free him/herself from ontological stalemates caused by social and cultural complexities. This kind of interactive continuity between the emotive and the teleological sheds fresh light on understanding Hegel’s dichotomy of Life and Consciousness. I also examine the impact of a renewed “expressivist freedom” (through John Dewey

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and Charles Taylor) and tease out the flawed notion and aberrant praxis of “progress” as a key mover of modern Chinese history. Chapter 7: Since ancient times, the Chinese have used the trope of tempering steel as a metaphor for the making of a hero—the fostering of virtues through trial and error, through setbacks and against all odds and even sacrifice—all aimed at ridding the hero of impurities and defects in his growth. As China entered the modern eras, the quest to become a model person began to shift focus from a self-edifying escapism as exemplified in the literati’s Being an Inner Sage towards a socially oriented realization as shown by an activist intellectual. As Western values like democracy and science began to figure centrally for the modern world view, the metallic trope fittingly returned with a key role for the seekers of exemplary life: along with empirical methodologies and utilitarian thinking, social praxis was extolled as one major scientific law, boosting social movements to gain equity and justice for the society at large. The left-wingers of these new forces expanded into the Chinese Communist Party who oversaw the transformation of literary revolution into revolutionary literature. There was no lack of social engagement on their part, but their ideas about the social allowed no room for free and spontaneous interaction in public without the CCP giving the nod. Trumpeting a Marxist approach to literature, leftwing theorists took over the “tempering” function of hero-making and turned it into a mind-bending device: calling on the educated class to cleanse one’s mind and body of upper class upbringing in the interests of the underclass. Revolutionary literature undertook to serve that end not only as a jingzi (mirror) reflecting the polarized social classes, but as a fuzi (battleaxe) combating the exploitative culture of the bourgeoisie and landed gentry. It also served the CCP’s agenda of gaining ethical legitimacy for a vanguard party such as the CCP. Ironically, it is through the misuse of the instrumental role of tempering steel that had finally brought the social to critical attention. One popular theme is the “severance act” written by revolutionary writers (Ba Jin, Jiang Guangci, Yang Hansheng, etc.) who churned out heroic protagonists, based often times on their own lives, disowning their vile family origins, joining the CCP-led political campaigns, and later returning home to deal a death blow to their own class. But nothing illustrates the abuse of the sword-forging metaphor better than their volition to channel their pursuit of self-realization into the overarching orbit of the CCP ideology; its unyielding decrees coerced them into devoting their individual talent, energy and desire but often at their own expense or peril. This kind of misguided pursuit re-asserted Liang Qichao’s notion of the continuum between the lesser self and the greater self and took it to unparalleled heights, collapsing any spaces for individual autonomy and contention in public discourse and setting the stage for Mao’s

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“thought rectification” agenda aimed at stamping out all impurities in CCP ideology from the 1940s onward. In the post-1949 years, what scarcely remained with the hero’s role of inspiration and emulation was overrun by pervasive feelings of fear and trepidations among the ordinary Chinese as collective surveillance and self-censure now consumed what was originally a realm of the social. Chapter 8: In this chapter, I study one aspect of the traumatic memory vs. adolescent growth that intersects global concerns and local contestations in the Post-Mao reform era: how youth’s rites of passage to adulthood were materialized in trivial, “mock-heroic” day-to-day humdrum while traumatic pasts were redressed and recuperated in national historical narratives. One of the redemptive roles is undertaken by filmic and fictional narratives which stress the day-to-day growth of adolescents via their play and being playful with and against parental guidance. Like other recuperative sites of the social, to reminisce parent-child bonding restores individuals to the integrating grid of social habitat by way of interaction, tension and harmony to offset the stifling collapse of the public sphere under the CCP. It is also a site where the ties with the non-coercive Confucian family values were renewed across the ages so that the public could regain some societal space. I focus on a cast of redemptionseeking youths in recent Chinese films on growth amidst political trauma, such as The Blue Kite (Tian Zhuangzhuang), In the Heat of the Sun (Jiang Wen), and Growing with Pains (Lu Xuechang). My critical attention stresses diegetic memoires of mock-heroic or “anti-heroic” youthful pasts to locate and invest the potentials for alternative routes of recovering and reconstructing modes of historical trajectories. But I also uncover the blanketing and monological télos of the capitalistic modern through a critical review of the Then vs. Now trope that misconstrues Western liberalism to be an error-proof model to dispel our inner demon of “developmental anxiety” and reach the goal of self-realization. I explore how, with a sleight of hand, the State ideology appropriates the global market as the sweeping endpoint of development, bracketing out local assertions and practices that once informed and sustained China’s own evolving historicity. Instead the State lets loose a great many unjust and polarizing social ills that infect and deplete the moral fibers of social progress. A case in point is the hedonistic virus that has since sapped social conscience and specifically sunk her disillusioned youth to the depths of nihilistic materialism even as the nation has steadily thrived and expanded to be one of world’s leading powers. To go beyond this “developmental dilemma,” it is necessary to stake out different historical topographies in which a study of the interactive social formations can be engaged between the homogenizing global era and China’s convoluted specificities, between History conceived along a single linear

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trajectory and histories as a concurrent commitment to different modes of historical unfolding. Chapter 9: Since Edward Said’s study of Orientalism, otherness has been chiefly studied and debated in the Asian context with the either/or mode: either one trumps up China and Asia as alterity to destabilize and subvert the established order of the Western logos from within, or one lays exclusionary claim to the ethnic/historical “specificities” by virtue of the rhetoric of cultural exceptionalism. As dire opposites, they remain as far apart as ever. To me the answer may be found in duality and simultaneity which we discover in the tension and discord among the ethnic others and ethical otherness; I enter the foray on the critically constructive role of internal otherness via Zhang Chengzhi’s ethnic self-invention. In pursuit of his Muslim Chinese identity, Zhang has been brutally candid, provocative and problematic: he has recovered the oral history of one sophist sect of Islam as the most scathing and unyielding detractor of the Chinese penchants to abandon spirituality, stifle religious dissent and obliterate ethnic differences. Zhang’s History of the Soul (1991) features a scathing critique of Chinese intellectuals’ lack of spiritual faith, their surrender to global consumerism and postmodernity. Driven by a populist zeal, Zhang extols Chinese Muslims’ devotion to their faith while being acculturated by Han Chinese, their defiance of material affluence and close bond to their unyielding yet unsullied terrestrial habitats. Zhang’s journeys to the wild and unforgiving Northwest highlands in Ningxia and Gansu regions enabled him to revert to a long-lost ethnic stand from which he could simultaneously mediate between religion and ethnicity, tap into the intuitive and the personal, and interact between the transcendental and the resistant in his critique of the global spread of market-driven values. Within his “recollected” tales of the Jahriyya sect’s valiant but futile uprisings against the Qing court, the empathetic narrator makes “symbolic identification” an inspiring yet intriguing model for the questing self. His populist approach to ethnic transcendence in opposition to what he perceives as today’s intellectual disenchantment is ambiguous yet insightful and rewarding. It intersects global subaltern politics and indigenous radical religiosity by way of sanctifying the identity of a suppressed internal other. In the end, Zhang is able to map out trajectories of his identity formation as parallels to the idealistic model of preserving ethnic identity and religious truth projected by unwritten histories of the ethnic others. These together pursue the ennobling goal they share: building a free and interactive public sphere where difference of ideas and faiths can be contested and mediated. It looks forward to future prospects of creating an ethnic pluralism that protects cultural differences without yielding to positions that claim unique access to truth.

Part Two Ethical Imperative and Social Progress

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Fountainheads of Change: Yan Fu’s Tussle with Evolution For all her millennially recorded histories and grandiose cultural heritage, China’s arduous leap over the threshold of the modern era around late Nineteenth Century has, rightly or wrongly, been compared to the coming-ofage of an adolescent weakling. There is ample print evidence to attest to the nation’s rejuvenated spirit in such proverbial terms as “adolescence,” “youthfulness” and “new citizens.” The most inspirational instances are found in Liang Qichao’s Shao nian zhongguo (Youthful China)—one of his landmark editorials calling for social reform—in which Liang made repeated reference to youth while extolling the prospects of a rejuvenated China. Chen Duxiu’s use of Xin Qing nian (New Youth) christened a journal so widely known that it presently became synonymous with the May Fourth Movement of 1919.1 Yet these were overly exerted mantras of rejuvenation because they often times turned out to be symptoms of ongoing tremors of disquiet, insecurity and even menacing vacillation. Ironically, they had stemmed from spasms of anxiety, disorientation and lassitude typical of a brisk growth spurt. Reform-minded intellectuals who had been classically trained, akin to Liang Qichao, Yan Fu and Chen Duxiu, oscillated between an aspiring urge to reach the modern and a lingering faith in Confucian tenets; their psychological qualms could bear witness to the insufferable intervals of experiencing such “growing pains.” Hence, their desire to posit this moment of “threshold” growth as a rejuvenation trope. A typical poignant angst of such political “adolescence” is their initial embrace of Western modernity as a superior universal law and their ensuing conviction to discard the Confucian heritage as feeble, outmoded and dismissible in contrast to the Western modern values. But they avidly applied it to the particulars of late Imperial China only to discover not long after that the underlying premise of the Western universal law showed semblance of or even resonated with 1 Shaonianzhongguo 少年中国 was the title of one of Liang’s editorials. Liang Qichao 梁启超 (1873–1929) was one of the most erudite scholars of his era. Working as a scholar, journalist, politician and philosopher concurrently, Liang embraced key Western ideas and co-led the reform movement with Kang Youwei 康有为 his mentor, in the late Qing Era. Xin qin nian 新青年 is the name of the journal of which Chen was the chief founder and editor. Chen Duxiu 陈独秀 (1879–1942) was an eminent scholar and educator in the early Republican era (1911–1927). Chen co-founded the Chinese Communist Party with Li Dazhao 李大钊 in 1921.

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key precepts of classic Confucianism and Daoism. As much as they had been drawn to the gravitational pull of the heavenly principle before, they were now ready to appropriate and mediate such Western notions as “evolution,” “wealth” and “power” as the truly universal—in the sense that they could positively replicate them in the Chinese context to spark off new energy and authority while still tending the grounds of the Confucian heritage. This ironically proved to be where their reformist endeavors often ran aground. The impasse these enunciators of national rejuvenation faced were manifold, but none proved as daunting and elusive as how China could adopt foreign ideas of “modernity” and “progress” without compromising her own ethical integrity, or conversely, how Confucian ideas of moral growth could be evoked to renew the cultural dynamic needed to drive China’s march towards the modern. These late-Qing thinkers, whether they were for the Yangwu ideology or for the Kang-Liang constitutionalists, all seemed to have embraced the universal/particular binary with Western know-how taking precedence over Chinese principles in terms of coping with contingency. But I believe that it is vital to identify, following Theodore Huters, the fact that “. . . there has always been an equally steady undercurrent insisting on reciprocity—that there must be some sort of equality between the intellectual traditions of China and the West if Western ideas are to be able to flourish [in China].” Taking cue from Huters, I want to tackle how “the thorny accommodation between China and the incoming rush of Western ideas and practices was actually effected.”2 As coming-of-age offers a pertinent point of departure, to the late-Qing intellectuals as well as to me, I approach the issue of reciprocity between Western and Chinese thinking by way of Yan Fu’s translation of key ideas of European notions of modernity. I shall explore Yan’s translations as a cultural dynamic of “transvaluation,” in a manner inspired by Lydia Liu’s “translingual practice.”3 I choose to focus on exploring the ontological and ethical aspects of Yan’s endeavors of reciprocity, and the emphasis of my investigation will be on what goes into the constitution of the self and how the process of self-realization unfolds in response to historical conditions. What can ontological reflections bring to bear on self-realization as the Chinese intellectuals were mulling over the imminent arrival of the modern? 2 Theodore Huters, Bringing the World Home: Appropriating the West in late Qing and Early Republican China (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2005), 6. I’m indebted to Ted Huters’ chapter on “Yan Fu and Western Ideas” in this book. 3 Lydia H. Liu, Translingual Practice (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996). I benefit from Lydia Liu’s analysis on the varied discourses of May Fourth individualism and follow the general bent of her point of views mostly expressed in the chapter entitled “The Discourse of Individualism.”

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How did ethical concerns in late-Qing era define and delimit modern identity for the aspiring individuals? Exploring these questions makes it imperative that we revisit the cultural realms that have been hitherto understudied or overlooked: one such realm is the ethical orientation and the teleological mode affecting most late-Qing reformers’ thought. Lydia Liu’s book, Translingual Practice: Literature, National Culture and Translated Modernity—China 1900– 1937 undertakes a trailblazing search to this end. In a chapter entitled “The Discourse of Individualism,” she offers us a most methodical, insightful evaluation of the kind of individualisms circulating feverishly in print media and literature leading up to the apogee of the May Fourth Movement in 1919. What illuminate us most lucidly are not so much the conflicting claims of individualism as proposed by diverse New Culturalists at the time, but Liu’s conclusion that “Even as Chinese tradition came under attack, nationalism and social collectivism were never abandoned. On the contrary, collectivism now inhabited the same homogeneous space of modernity as individualism.”4 Lydia Liu’s chosen antithetical notions, such as Xiaoji (the individual) vs. Daji (the Greater Self), Gongwo (the public self) vs. Siwo (the private self), have not only borne out a dialectical existence of opposites, but shed light upon the complex interconnection between these binary opposites, as, for instance, being incongruous, contentious and hierarchical.5 As she focuses on the linguistic and social dynamics of these neologisms, Liu discerns a kind of “organic logic” underlying the Western modern state that resembles the law of evolution.6 Yet she seems to be more preoccupied with the rhetorical impact of such linguistic renovations than that of the evolutionary trope, which explains why she makes but a nodding acquaintance with the famously tenuous notion of the “Xiaoji-Daji continuum” in the whole chapter. Although she does mention “extension” or “multiplication” of the individual versus the state and society, a clear and direct revelation of the underlying correlation between the two remains as yet elusive. It is Wang Hui who pinpoints the direct link. Wang’s exhaustive study of the origin of modern Chinese identity in connection to the May Fourth discourses of “science” and “democracy” enables him to zoom in on the enlightenment idea of evolution as the lynch pin to interlock the genesis of modern individualism with the political and social contexts of China.7 Wang insists that the 4 Liu, Translingual Practice, 95. 5 Xiaoji 小己, Daji 大己, Gongwo 公我, Siwo 私我. I have used here the English translations by Lydia Liu herself. See Liu, Translingual Practice, passim. 6 Liu, Translingual Practice, 95. 7 Wang Hui 汪晖, Wang Huizixuanji 汪晖自选集 (Self-selected collection of Wang Hui), (Guilin: Guangxi shi fan da xue chu ban she, 1997), 36–45.

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study of modern Chinese individualism must be anchored in the context of confronting the imported idea of evolution whose impact on the late-Qing intellectual milieu was decisive and thorough. On the strength of his extensive in-depth study of the sources of modern Chinese identity, Wang is convinced that theories of social evolution, such as developed by Huxley and Spencer in the West, not only prompted the Yangwu policy makers to adopt a strategy of Westernization for its instrumental value, but inspired classicists like Liang Qichao and Yan Fu to rethink and invigorate the native classical tradition in ways that proved rather revealing and least anticipated. By virtue of being erudite and resourceful, Wang argues, they not only appropriated evolutionary theories as a renewed social organic for the cause of ethnic survival and national salvation, but reckoned with the fundamental conflicts and demise concealed in such Western concepts, and attempted to ethically orient the fashioning of a modern identity of the Chinese individual to render it historically contextualized, socially adhesive and intellectually unitary. In discerning this relationship of interdependence between the self and the society, which is characteristic of an extensive, rather than a subordinate, correlation, Wang Hui’s appraisal of Yan’s thoughts gestures towards a Westerninspired teleology underscoring a self-society continuum, but remains attentive and receptive for alternate routes to self-realization. Viewed against the backdrop of Yan Fu’s intellectual endeavor as well as his life experience, this raises issues about Yan’s “dualistic” attitude towards the continuum at the time: was it merely reflective of his fence-sitting attitude out of pressing contingency, or did it reveal rather than conceal his discernment of an underlying télos by the Westerners in their discourse of liberalism in general and laissezfaire individualism in particular? Wang has evidently endorsed the latter, but he cannot arrive at this position without the benefit of glancing through the lens of Benjamin Schwartz, a famed Harvard historian who dedicated years of research to Yan Fu and the latter’s role in promoting modernity in China. In fact, Wang is as indebted to Schwartz’s critical insights on Yan Fu’s vacillations in appropriating Western ideas as he is to Schwartz’s positive appraisal of Yan Fu’s contributions to China’s understanding of the West. While commenting on the impact of evolutionary thinking of Huxley and Spencer on Yan Fu, Schwartz writes, “Yan Fu is no longer committed to anything in the tradition which lies in the way of the search for power, yet he is no doctrinaire ‘antitraditionalist.’”8 Somehow we detect from his words a faint note of disapproval. What Schwartz refers to here appears to be his quandary in trying to get 8 Benjamin Schwartz, In Search of Wealth and Power: Yen Fu and the West (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1964), 52.

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a balanced appraisal of Yan, but it may well be his not-so-guarded bafflement over the shift in Yan Fu’s life-long intellectual pursuits. In his search for answers as to why and how China lagged behind the West in terms of evolution, ­according to Schwartz, Yan Fu oscillated between positing drastic differences separating traditional China from modern Europe and valorizing deep and vital similitude underlying both cultural heritages.9

The Educator Estranged

Perhaps this is an opportune moment to reminisce how Yan Fu interacted with the political and intellectual events during the period of 1895–1898 while he was preoccupied with a variety of translations. 1895 was the year when Yan embarked on the translation of Spencer’s The Study of Evolution. That year, amidst China’s devastating defeat at the hands of Japan, elite intellectuals like Yan Fu found themselves deeply ensnared in a “struggle for existence” at both the national and the individual levels (Figure 1). Yan’s own plight was particularly upsetting and frustrating because he was the Superintendent of the North Sea Fleet Academy whose naval cadets had just been crushed by Japan. As a minor supporter of the Yangwu school of thought, he bore the direct brunt of the devastating naval defeat by Japan, and felt extremely stirred not just by his gravely undermined nationalistic pride, but also by his feeble ability to curb the “all-out Xixue (Western learning)” advocates, such as those led by Li Hongzhang, the chief architect of the Yangwu platform. In the public eye, Yan had hitherto been acclaimed as a key enunciator of taking Yangwu as China’s top-priority strategy in getting China back on her feet. Besides being the naval academy’s superintendent, he set up a Russian language school in Tianjin, lectured in Western Studies in Beijing, and in 1897, he founded a pro-Yangwu Chinese daily named Guo wen Bao (National News Daily) and a weekly journal Guo wen hui bian (National News Weekly Digest) in Tianjin. The year 1898 even saw him summoned by Emperor Guangxu with a “Ten-Thousand-Word Memorandum” in which Yan proposed (but was unable to submit) his ideas for a court-led reform. In fact, Yan had once been viewed by both the antiquarian conservatives and the moderate reformers as a mediator best suited for 9 For details in Yan Fu’s oscillation in his understanding of Herbert Spencer, see Theodore Huters, Chapter 2. “Appropriations: Another Look at Yan Fu and Western Ideas,” in Bring the World Home, 43–73 and Wang Hui, “Reconstructing the Cosmic Order and Universal Laws of Nature” in The Rise of Modern Chinese Thought, Part II, Vol. I, 833–836. I owe my views expressed here to these writings.

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Yan Fu, taken in 1878 when he visited the St. Cyr Military Academy near Paris. Courtesy of Haihui Zhang.

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averting showdowns and seek out compromises between the two embattled camps, and in general between Chinese and Western ideas. However, it turned out not to be the case. As Schwartz rightly comments, “. . . in many ways Yen Fu remained the outsider.”10 And I hasten to add: Yan was estranged from both camps. The conservatives didn’t need much to warrant their dislike of him: he had never belabored with cannons of Chinese antiquity and stayed guiltily away from the track of official examinations. Nor did the Yangwu advocates, who occasionally dragged him into their ranks when expertise on foreign cultures was needed for an audience with the court or negotiations with foreign emissaries. A case in point is his inadvertent falling-out with Zhang Zhidong, himself a lukewarm backer of the Yangwu policies. It is one of those personal mishaps that historical records never failed to relish: Zhang was offended by what Yan asserted in his essay “Pi Han” (In Refutation of Han Yu) published in Shi wu bao (Current Affairs Daily) back in 1895, and persuaded Emperor Guangxu to indict Yan. Fortunately, Yan was let off the hook thanks to his high-profile friends who intervened on his behalf. Tempered by near escapes like this one, Yan came to realize that politics was not to be his way to make a dent on the conservative agenda for reform, as he remained a stunted novice to the intricate backstabbing and maneuvers which Li Hongzhang and his rivals tirelessly performed at the court. In the ensuing decades, as the authority of Yangwu thinkers faded alongside their dwindling political control amidst one defeat after another, Yan had occasionally been offered token official titles in naval affairs, which he customarily declined. In retrospect, his estrangement from the Yangwu clique might well have been a blessing in disguise. For he had personally observed how Li’s alleged “self-strengthening” policy proved nothing more than an attempt to theorize a face-saving pretext for importing wholesale technologies from the West, and detected one underlying flaw in such a policy: without the climate of modern social and political infrastructure, the building of a modern navy, like a tree without its favorable turf, would never grow, let alone bear fruit.11 On balance, the reformers’ camp headed by Kang and Liang offered Yan more leeway in exchanging ideas in writing and lent an ear to his odd-style exposition of the basic divergence between China and the West. Of the two, Liang was apparently more amenable to Yan when they traded views on the 10 Schwartz, Yen Fu and the West, 82. 11 This is based on my reading of the facts collected in the chapter “The Early Years” in Schwartz’ book, Yan Fu and the West, 29–33. For details of Yan Fu’s reminiscence, refer to Chi Zhonghu, “Haijun da shi ji” 海军大事记 (A Record of Major Events of the Navy) in Zuo Shunsheng, Zhongguo jin bai nian shi ziliao xubian 中国近百年史资料续编 (A Supplement to Materials on Chinese History in the Last 100 Years), Shanghai, 323–363.

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pros and cons in adopting Western worldviews.12 For instance, when Liang published his Gu yi yuan kao (An Investigation of China’s Antiquarian Parliaments) in 1896, Yan was impelled by “a choke-up” urge while reading it, and expressed his critical views candidly in a letter to Liang. He disagreed with Liang’s dubious explication of China’s ancient prototype “parliaments” and reproved it as a reformist ploy to introduce top-down changes within the imperial system. And according to one editor of Liang’s correspondence at this time, Yan also spoke frankly about Liang’s ill-fated equation of ancient Chinese despots’ tactics of bolstering zhongmin (the commoners) with the Western concept of the individual as the root of all political systems (Minben, the commoner as the root).13 Letters similar to this, needless to say, were never sufficient to persuade Liang who was at this time deeply in awe of his master Kang’s vision of reviving a Datong utopia modeled on ancient China’s gong yang san shi (Three Dynasties).14 But in a typical interlocutory manner, they not only opened up an unconventional viewpoint, but prompted Yan to explore the viability of antiquarian wisdom in order to seek out common identity between the philosophical legacies of China and the West—precisely what kept Yan preoccupied as he toiled over the translations of Huxley and Spencer. As it turned out, the short-lived 1898 reform hurled their fate onto two divergent courses of life, never to cross their paths again. Liang escaped the Empress Dowager’s coup and left for Japan in exile, while Yan was nudged to the sidelines of the 1898 reform and its aftermath, and would soon depart from Beijing, through Tianjin, Shanghai, Anhui and eventually back to Fujian—his home province—in a self-imposed retreat from the center stage of politics.

12

My comments here are based on my reading of a few works newly published on the subject of Yan Fu and Liang Qichao by Chinese scholars. Two deserve mention here: Zhang Zhijian, Yan Fu xue shu si xiang yan jiu 严复学术思想研究 (A Study of Yan Fu’s Academic Thought), Shangwu yin shu guan chu ban (Beijing: Commercial Press, 1995). Jiang Guangxue, Liang Qichao he zhongguo gu dai xue shu de zhong jie 梁启超和中国古代学 术的终结 (Liang Qichao and the Termination of Chinese Antiquarian Scholarship), Jiangsu Jiaoyü chu ban she (Jiangsu Education Press, 1998). 13 Guyiyuankao 古议院考. Minben 民本. Li, Quojun, Liang Qichao zhu shu nian pu 梁启超 著述年谱 (A Chronicle of Works by Liang Qichao), Shanghai: Fudan University Press, 1986. 14 Datong 大同. For a more focused definition of Gong yang san shi 公羊三世, refer to Hao Chang, Liang Ch’i-ch’ao and Intellectual Transition in China, 1890–1907 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971), 50–52 and passim. See also Note 10 in Chapter 2 of this book.

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Interlocution as Self-Aporia

Yan’s gradual estrangement from the reform maelstrom of the late Qing has all along been a historian’s enigma due to the lack of archival evidence reflecting tenable political or psychological causes behind it; pursuing it in that direction would call for far larger and deeper scope of research. As it turned out, how to come to terms with Yan’s major shift has resulted, over past decades, in a compelling need for engaging in an interlocking of interpretive voices in Schwartz’s reading of the overall drift of Yan’s thought. Here is one of those interlocutions in which, in retrospect, we can discern how a great scholar treads the line adroitly between two opposite views on human evolution: in a China vs. the West comparison, Schwartz is cautioned to steer away from the vested binary opposites: as the West is dynamic and aggressive while China is pacifistic and conservative, so the West embraces progress whereas China clings to inertia and stagnation. But we need as well to understand that Schwartz’s deep intellectual root in Western liberalism makes it logical for him not to anticipate a surprising retreat in Yan’s otherwise illustrious intellectual career. Hence, the disquieting undertone in his appraisal of Yan Fu. What has drawn me to this is the likelihood that the push and pull of Yan’s educational and publicist energies in fact kept molding his mind into a distinct setting for translation—his paraphrastic translation. In a sense, this turns out to be a more intriguing reversal than we all expected. Schwartz, for one, queries later in his book—with the voice of an impersonated Yan—Yan’s motive in returning to the Dao: “Why does the Chinese apostle of social Darwinism feel this strong need for the sense of some ultimate, unchanging, higher reality lying behind the evolutionary stream?”15 As if drawn by the allure of his Yan Fu impersonation, Schwartz himself replies: “Buddhism and philosophic Taoism both point to an ineffable, inconceivable, ultimate ground of reality which transcends and relativizes all determinate orders and structures of reality.”16 This brings us back to the most revealing aspect of Schwartz’s interlocution with Yan Fu: why the latter, even while embracing Spencer’s social Darwinism, was unconsciously “homing in” on the core values of ancient Chinese thought. Through round after round of inquiry, barter and further inquiry, most of which have been raised and rejoined by the author himself, Schwartz in the end concludes thus:

15 Schwartz, Yen Fu and the West, 209. 16 Ibid., 210.

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For him the ten thousand things evolve out of the womb of the Tao in strict obedience to the laws of physics and the mechanisms of evolution as lay down by Darwin and Spencer. . . . Yet there can be no doubt that the inexhaustible void is more hospitable to the possibility of an evolution of the ten thousand things to ever higher levels of heterogeneity, complexity, and organization than is a Confucianism which attempts to absolutize and freeze a given social and political order.17 Curiously, Schwartz now feels impelled to disclose a touch of uneasy relief because of Yan’s unexpected homecoming to a worldview characteristic of “the inexhaustible void.” Thus, only when coming around to appreciate Yan’s eventual recapitulation of the Chinese tradition in its essence does Schwartz openly voices his approval: From the very outset, however, Yen Fu escapes some of the more rigid dogmatic antitheses of nineteenth-century European liberalism. Precisely because his gaze is ultimately focused not on the individual per se but on the presumed results of individualism, the sharp antitheses between the individual and society, individual initiative and social organization, and so on, do not penetrate to the heart of his perception.18 The ironical wording here informs us of the following: what eventually ­convinces Schwartz is the fact that Yan Fu’s failure to grasp the rift between the individual and the society embedded in Western liberalism is due to what Yan has intuited about the ethical end of such ideas, and that probably enables Yan to short-­ circuit the typical antithesis in Western thought and circle back to the safe haven of Chinese antiquity in which he had always cherished a deep faith. It may be true that nothing interlocutes like interlocution. We discover that this interlocution of Schwartz’s is shortly to become in its turn a nodal point for further rounds of interlocution on the complex role of Yan Fu’s appropriation of European liberalism, especially its evolutionary thinking. Over temporal and national boundaries, scholars have revisited Schwartz’ appraisal of Yan Fu in the context of Western ideas and Chinese praxis. In a way these were first initiated by Louis Hartz who prefaced Schwartz’ book in 1963. In his preface, Hartz makes a mildly provocative claim that: “It may be, after we have absorbed his (Yan Fu’s) elucidation of energy and community strength, that we will come to a larger appreciation of the moral formulas of individualism which 17 Ibid. 18 Ibid., 239–240.

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contained them, and actually hid them, in modern thought.”19 Hartz is here alluding to the aspect of Western individualism that now finds its energy being “harnessed” to collective ends, which, according to Schwartz, has been misinterpreted by Yan Fu owing to his later “utilitarian” approach to Western liberalism.20 To put it plainly, Schwartz deems it misleading for Yan Fu to use values of Western individualism to fuel China’s desperate drive to salvage the Qing court in the 1890s. Thus Schwartz has this to say: In the final analysis one may assert that what has not come through in Yen Fu’s perception is precisely that which is often considered to be the ultimate spiritual core of liberalism—the concept of the worth of persons within society as an end in itself, joined to the determination to shape social and political institutions to promote this value.21 Granted that the end Schwartz refers to here is ambiguous—is the individual in essence, or the social context on which the individual depends, to be regarded as the bedrock of society?—it doesn’t make it that hard to pin down where Hartz challenges Schwartz, albeit so subtly: whether the norm of Western liberalism lies with what classical economists like Adam Smith once defined as the core tenets of capitalism: private rights of an atomized individual. Instead of answering “where does it lie?” Hartz articulates a cogent case about how Yan Fu lets his perceiving of the ultimate though “hidden” end of Western liberalism get in the way of his “paraphrastic translation” of Western thought: He [Yen Fu] thrusts forward the energy concept in its own right, and after having made individualism an instrument of it, he places public spirit at the very center of liberal thought. The result is that writers who in Western terms are ordinarily viewed as atomists subscribing to the notion of a natural harmony emerge as theorists of a titanic cultural drive leading to collective strength . . .”22 Hartz’s compelling comment comes through eventually with the term “collective strength”: it is arguably the well-hidden quality of Western liberalism 19 20

Ibid., xix. See Huters, Bring the World Home, 65. I hereby express my indebtedness to Ted Huters whose insight has inspired my opinions that follow. 21 Schwartz, Yen Fu and the West, 240. 22 Ibid., xii.

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which Western intellectuals have failed to fathom because it had largely receded into oblivion as the modern West ascended to world dominance in triumph. In what ways this occurred would be open to countless rounds of debate; what is certain at the moment, as Hartz rightly states, is the instrumental role Yan grants to individualism in his construal of China’s plan of cultural renewal by virtue of social means and collective strengths. It is very likely this insight that prompts Yan to perceive Western liberalism with singular foresight: values of Western liberalism, such as the spiritual essence of individualism, might have a universal appeal, but it is by the end of revitalizing China against the odds of foreign invasion and exploitation in the late Qing era that the choice of appropriating the liberalist values such as individualism is justified. Beyond the utilitarian role, Hartz further suggests, Yan has brought the value of public good to bear upon the fundamental tenets of liberalism as he attempts to graft them onto the context of late-Qing China. Whether his point proved convincing to Schwartz at the time we can only speculate. But Hartz conveys a pivotal message about the viable intellectual linkage between Western-inspired individualism and the budding reformist movement over the fate of the Chinese nation that sheds crucial light on what follows. The issue of ethical orientation becomes pivotal in gaining vital legitimacy for social transformation. As Wang Hui has eloquently argued in his espousal of the identity of the individual self in modern China, it is the vital role of legitimating one’s proposed solutions through “orientation.”23 In Wang Hui’s view, “Orientation . . . emerges only within a specific context, because we can express our attitude toward and evaluation of matters only within a range of concrete choices.”24 This is precisely where the ensuing debate picks up new interlocutors and gathers fresh momentum of late. And it is on the grounds of “orientation” of the individual self that Theodore Huters and Wang Hui have both entered the fray. For Huters, his exchange with Schwartz first begins by taking a cue from Hartz’ idea about Yan Fu’s implication of a viable bond between a newly minted individual and the revival of a much needed collective identity. And next he explores what Schwartz could have heeded as one key aspect of the social context of Yan’s translation of Huxley, Spencer and J.  S. Mill: the need for Yan to join those who favor adopting West-imported knowledge and skills in opposition to those anti-Western conservatives while distancing himself from the Yangwu (Foreign Affairs) thinkers in pushing an 23

Wang Hui, “Zhang Taiyan’s Concept of the Individual and Modern Chinese Identity,” in Wen-hsin Yeh, ed. Becoming Chinese, 232. I am indebted to Wang Hui’s ideas which first drew me to the issue of “orientation” in the research on modern self-identity in China. 24 Ibid.

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incremental reform.25 Given such urgent and precarious conditions, Huters argues, Yan’s alleged reversal of course to valorize Chinese antiquity as the original wellspring of all human dynamism and collective strengths, including those of the modern West, can be perceived in a more approving light. It is chiefly a tactful way for Yan to stake the boundary of the proven and refined, if slightly utilitarian, cultural faith in the antiquity of both China and the West, thereby separating himself from the Yangwu thinkers. It will also attest, as Huters has shown us, to the fact that Yan’s ideas consciously averted any association with China’s more recent eras, such as the Song and Ming dynasties; for he truly believed the most enduring and unitary forces of Chinese culture lay with pre-Qin China, and openly accused post-Qin dynasties of deviating from and betraying the original heritage.26 Huters makes a more insightful contribution when he faults Schwartz on his reluctance to embrace the feasibility of a “legitimate competing value system” in which Yan could have placed his fidelity and done service to by way of acknowledging the shared roots of Western and Chinese ideas to enrich and strengthen each other. As Yan himself put it, “The four books and five classics are a rich mine. We must, however, use new tools to dig out and refine the ore.”27 Huters’ challenge seems to be triggered by Schwartz’ presumption that Western-style liberalism can “transcend all other values in the end . . .”28 In that case, is he tactfully faulting Schwartz for being an apologist for Westerncentered world of human intellect? On this point, Huters’ stand becomes intriguing, because he next turns to Wang Hui and quotes the latter as saying this: In the atmosphere of the cold war, Schwartz, by means of Yan Fu’s observation that the ‘Western spirit’ was suffused with nationalism and the worship of power, sought to emphasize the absolute, autonomous, and nonutilitarian value position of liberalism, in order to overcome the excess of the notion of collective strength in the ‘Western spirit.’29 25 Huters, Bring the World Home, 43–47. 26 This aspect has also been noted with detail by Zhou Zhenfu 周振复, Yan Fu’s biographer in the 1940s, in his Yan Fu Si xiang shu ping 严复思想述评 (A Critical Account of Yan Fu’s Thought). It is also referred to by Huters in Bringing the World Home, 72. 27 “Yan Jidao yü Chunru shu zha jie chao” (Collected Letters of Yan Fu to Xiong Chunru) in Xuehen: Wenlu (The Critical Review: Literary Section), No. 13 (January 1923), letter 39. 28 Huters, Bringing the World Home, 66. 29 Ibid. In his remarks, Huters also uses a phrase “Wang Hui, . . . turned the table” to load up the weight of his reference to Wang Hui while critiquing Schwartz; however, the outcome of this rhetorical gesture is nowhere to be ascertained.

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Given his critical retrospect on the cold war from the angle of post-socialist China, it is evident that Wang has a unique grasp of Schwartz’ inner anxiety in his chastising Yan Fu’s half-way adaptation of Western liberalism. Huters, by quoting Wang, seems to hint, a broad hint at that, that Schwartz did not think that the menacing domination of the Western world order on the rest of the nations necessarily grew out of the “absolute, autonomous, and nonutilitarian value” of classical liberalism. Instead Schwartz seems to be of the view that the true worth of such liberalism, if made known to all, would urge its Western practitioners, and non-Western followers, to look past and beyond the violent assertion of wealth and power at the expense of other nations. This can also be inferred from the remark we earlier quoted—“the concept of the worth of persons within society as an end in itself, conjoined to the determination to shape social and political institutions to promote this value”—that Schwartz might have posited a télos for his idea of uplifting liberalist individualism beyond the current state of being and eventually reaching that ideal.

Orientation as Legitimacy

Yet this already begs more than one question: Were values such as the absolute, autonomous and nonutilitarian to be viewed as the teleological ends of a future society in the West based on a fully developed liberalism as Schwartz envisioned? What kind of social institutions need be in place if they were built entirely on these values? How then is the realization of this view of liberalist teleology related to the rise of the capitalistic state, in full swing at the time, which played such a vital role in the making of the modern West? Wang Hui’s take on Schwartz’ core value of Western liberalism reveals a more assertive reading characteristic of a non-Western cultural strategy which is unlimited to a single-tracked, linear growth of the liberalist teleology. Wang believes that many of Yan’s “oddities” in translating Huxley and Spencer are the outgrowths of a penetrating insight that impels him to perceive the vital energies of early European liberalism, such as the synergy shared by individualism and collectivism, which had earlier been thrust into the center of struggle at the time of the Renaissance in Europe. Thanks to its triumph over the challenge of Europe’s defeated medieval age, the issue of collective strengths and its corresponding state apparatus has now been laid to rest and buried deep in the Western modern ethos. Given the analogous quandary China was confronted with at the time, Wang finds it reasonable to conclude, by way of echoing Hartz, that Yan is asking questions which “[the West] have ceased to ask, not because they

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have been answered but because the medieval contrasts which make them vivid have receded into the distant background.”30 And it is not so hard to note that Wang’s analysis above lays much weight on the circumstantial urgencies and demands under which Yan Fu engaged in his transformative readings. By the same token, it surely occurs to Wang in his review of Schwartz’ politically motivated reading of Yan: In the climate of cold war, through the prism of Yan Fu, Schwartz has come to discern such intrinsic features as the absolute state and the worship of rights deeply hidden in the “spirit of the West.” He [Schwartz] is attempting to reiterate the absolute, autonomous rather than instrumental, values of liberalism in the hope of overcoming the notion of excessive preoccupation with use of power as the ultimate origin inherent in the Western spirit.31 在冷战的氛围中, 史华兹通过严复看到了 “西方精神” 中深藏着的 国家主义和崇尚权力的内蕴, 他试图重申自由的绝对的, 自主的 而非工具的价值地位, 以克服 “西方精神” 中过度的力本论观念。 One of the oft-cited cases shows Yan caught “red-handed” in the act of his paraphrastic translation of a passage in Spencer’s writings on guarding against governmental meddling and protecting the individual’s welfare. In his criticism, rather than reproving it as a distortion, Schwartz uses Yan’s Chinese rendering of Spencer’s passage to illustrate how the translator let his perception of Spencer be “intruded” by his single-minded preoccupation of the power of the state.32 Wang Hui leaves his finger prints on this case as well, disagreeing with Schwartz’ criticism of Yan and arguing, though in a different context, that Schwartz seems to be guilty of collapsing Yan’s complex mindset to the essentialized Western binary of the individual vs. the state.33 A hard and close look at Spencer’s English original passage side by side with Yan Fu’s Chinese version reveals to us something intriguing and illumining. For the sake of comparison,

30 Schwartz, Yen Fu and the West, xiv. I have here quoted from Hartz’s words in his preface rather than translating Wang’s directly so as to emphasize how these critics are interrelated by way of interlocution. 31 Wang, Rise of Modern Chinese Thought, Part II, Vol. I, 837. 32 Schwartz, Yen Fu and the West, 97–98. 33 Wang, Rise of the Modern Chinese Thought, Part II, Vol. I, 873.

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here are the two passages in the order of first the English original and then the Chinese version translated back into English: . . . so the ordinary political schemer is convinced that out of a legislative apparatus, properly devised and worked with due dexterity, may be had beneficial State-action without any detrimental reaction. He expects to get out of a stupid people the effects of intelligence, and to evolve from inferior citizens superior conduct.34 They say that the rise or fall of the society depends wholly on the legislative system (Fazhi), on our system of laws, and that weak people can be used to create a strong state, a poor people can be made to create a rich state, a stupid people can be made to make wise state. This is like dreaming of food and hoping to be satisfied!35 Reading Yan Fu’s passage, one can hardly miss two main points: 1) the fusion of the society with the state; 2) the merged state as a whole induces more power, wisdom and wealth than does the sum total of its individual members. And one would be tempted to ask why Yan Fu inadvertently coined this patently liberal and misleading rendering of Spencer’s passage. To gain a fuller idea of the context, we may need to be acquainted with the passage, and its related context, prior to the one quoted above. In that passage, Spencer has been delving into the allegedly superstitious beliefs still popular among the rather “­civilized” citizens of England whose minds are, in Spencer’s view, misguided by “omens and charm” and therefore are not receptive to “subtle and more complex” ideas. Then quite abruptly, Spencer draws an equation between such people and those who earnestly voice their support for state legislatures such as heavy taxes. For the latter, i.e., the socially conscious people, Spencer offers this scathing sketch:  . . . there is a tacit supposition that a government moulded by themselves, has some efficiency beyond that naturally possessed by a certain group of citizens subsidized by the rest of the citizens. . . . They are compelled to admit, when cross-examined, that the energies moving a governmental 34 35

Herbert Spencer, The Study of Sociology (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1961), 5. Yan Fu, Yan Fu Juan: Zhongguo xian dai xue shu jing dian 严复卷: 中国现代学术经典 (Modern Chinese Academic Classics: Yan Fu Volume), ed. Ouyang zhe sheng, Hebei Education Publishing House, 1996), 123. The back-to-English translation is by Schwartz.

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machine are energies which would cease were citizens to cease working and furnishing the supplies. But, nevertheless, their projects imply an unexpressed belief in some store of force that is not measured by taxes.36 Spencer then shoves such people aside with the unflattering analogy: “Just as the perpetual-motion schemer hopes, by a cunning arrangement of parts, to get from one end of his machine more energy than he puts in at the other, . . .”37 The rest of the passage is, of note, the one Schwartz has quoted above. What kind of clues can we garner from the foregoing passage to tap into the mindset of Spencer who had authored the adage “the survival of the fittest” in sociology long before Charles Darwin did in biology? A few things come to our attention right away. First off, we are reminded that Spencer, following Hegel’s quest for the inner self, places his utmost confidence in the perfectibility of an aspiring individual being; thus he opposes any form of collective polity unless it proffers a rigid correspondence to the culmination of this individual’s progress. He believes, in other words, that guaranteeing the fullest attainment of the individual’s goal is the modern state’s sole raison d’être. Secondly, in a linear and corresponding fashion, Spencer believes that the way to create and improve a state legislature should be mostly focused on the representation of what the individual desires in his self-advancing pursuits. Third and above all, by the same token, Spencer does not trust in social institutions which aim at any form of public good above and beyond the individual’s self-interest. To that end, he advocates a one-sided economist view that there is no force in any state legislatures other than the power its taxation begets. In a manner of speaking, what Spencer here peddles as cures for unwanted social incumbencies see eye to eye with what Yan desires in order for China to embark on its march to the modern era. Taking advantage of analogies between social processes and living organisms that Darwin hinted at, Spence applies the biological trope of organism to the social realm with more implications than just a self-asserting “struggle for existence” and a reckless rivalry with other individuals and the collective in general. “Evolutionary change” in the natural world paves the way for Spencer to promote social selection through competition, an idea that not only undermines the validity of the divine creation as the origin of humanity, but more vitally negates the residual English aristocratic inheritance by birth. Yet, this promising aspect of liberalism is immediately overshadowed by Spencer’s fear 36 Spencer, The Study of Sociology, 5. 37 Ibid.

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of the Malthusian notion of human growth which forecasts an eruption of oversized populations of the lowly and uneducated in disproportion to food supplies, social and cultural resources to be made available. Out of this fear arose Spencer’s dualistic worldview of preserving the “type” of a human species and eliminating the impure and the weak of his kin. Evidently Spencer’s view of social selection sows the seeds of an inherent paradox: his liberalist stand obliges him to posit equalitarian footing for individuals in the struggle for survival on the one hand, it is also apt to reinsert discriminatory divisions in terms of social relationships on the other. These notions of the Nineteenthcentury English liberalism are beginning to provoke Yan to at first consider favorably the basic tenets of Western individualism and the liberalist philosophy, and then set Yan navigating a China-bound course, politically and then metaphysically, in search of solutions to China’s survival crisis. In the light of the above, I believe that the impact of Spencer on Yan Fu is decisive and unforeseen: it is decisive in the sense that they tip the scales in Yan’s mind towards the idea behind his paraphrasing Spencer’s passage as we know it today. It is unforeseen because the orientation in which Yan Fu charts his reflection of the individual vs. the state issue turns out to be a downright departure from Spencer’s purported end of individualism. His impulse to blend rather than divide the two strands of evolutionary change conceivably owes it to his undaunted desire to fill a mental vacuum with his educator’s energies after being sidelined from the heated action. This apparently psychological motive does apply, but it takes more than some presumed human behavior to fathom the depths of Yan’s misgivings over the travails of translation. Akin to the oddities often attending the career of eccentric but brilliant thinkers, murky musings churned mightily in Yan’s mind while he toiled over his cross-cultural translations. The Russian philologist Sergi Karcevskij once said: “True differentiation presupposes a simultaneous resemblance and difference.”38 The quandary Yan wrestled with while trying to bridge across antiquarian China and modern West is precisely what forced him to resort to a kind of “interlocuting background,” in which he could simultaneously question and articulate the jumbled fusions and hybrid offshoots he perceived in the dilemma he and other reformers were confronted.39 An ensuing polyphony of awareness and voices must have impinged on Yan’s obsessed 38

39

Sergi Karcevskij, “The asymmetric dualism of the linguistic sign,” in Peter Steiner, ed., The Prague School: Selected Writings 1929–1946 (Austin: The University of Texas Press, 1982), 50. For my comments below, I am indebted to Michael Holquist’s “Introduction” to M. M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), xv–xxxiii.

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mind over the possible final ends to the much needed evolution. Granting this to be the case, the interlocution Yan Fu voluntarily experienced much resembles M. M. Bakhtin’s condition of transgredience in which Yan, consciously or otherwise, empathizes with his interlocutors’ arguments and counterarguments. He clearly used the interlocution to test out and shape up his own faith in what ought to be the ethical finality of China’s epochal changes. It is therefore of critical relevance to approach Yan Fu’s metaphysical nebula via the prism of Michael Holquist’s dialogic imagination.40 That said, it is nonetheless intriguing to consider the fact that what initially brings Huxley and Spencer to Yan in his contemplation of evolution and social grouping are very different, even antithetical, ideas about the individual self and the social aggregate, but at the end of his paraphrastic endeavor the essential thrust in each line of thinking has come through, if only through Yan’s own interlocution with ancient Chinese sages like Xunzi, Confucius and more profoundly, Laozi and Zhuangzi. This, we may recall, is exactly what Karcevskij defines as a true kind of differentiation—relying on a simultaneous interplay, in this case, a subtle intertextual reading of the presumed difference and resemblance embodied in the two Western thinkers. It also relates, by way of transgredience, to the Russian novelist Dostoevsky’s choice of contending voices in the hope of clarifying and affirming his own faith. Given such “outside” illuminations, who can be better candidates for Yan’s choice of human partners as inner voices of consciousness than Huxley and Spencer, with Xunzi and Daoism to boot? For all four focus on issues of releasing energies of individual beings in relation to building effective and self-supporting social entities—precisely with what Yan was at the time fervently preoccupied. Interlocuting qun Let us, then, return to the case of Yan’s creative rendering of “society” into “qun.” Reading between Yan’s liminal interlocutors, Huxley and Spencer, questions like the ones below have preoccupied me and, presumably, they must have been constantly beaming their presence onto Yan’s mind over a century ago. These are: 1) Legitimacy of the individual self. What are the salient features of the individual self as espoused by Huxley and Spencer, and that of 40

In alluding to Holquist’s work, I envision another interlocuting trio emerging: Yan Fu, Bahktin and Holquist, all of whom eminent translators whose travails included at one time pains of detours, setbacks and dead-ends across barriers of languages, cultures and ideologies. Needless to say, I hereby acknowledge a deep intellectual debt to Michael Holquist for his guidance in my scholarship and life.

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Yan’s? How are they interrelated to the state or the social grouping? 2) Nature of the social institution (the state in Spencer’s case or the social grouping in Yan’s). What motivates individual members to group themselves? To what ends is the function of the social institution directed? And to what ends should the social institution harness the energies of its members in service of? 3) Causal connections embedded. What viable relationship can we assign between the individual and the social institution? That is, what kind of relationship can there be between the individual and the collective, of which he/ she partakes? I assume that these questions must have bombarded Yan Fu’s mind madly and relentlessly as he was reading and translating those passages from Huxley and Spencer—so much so that it is certain that Yan involuntarily allowed their impact to leach into his effort to fathom the intention of Huxley and Spencer. There is plenty of textual evidence to prove how this leaching takes place, and it is essential, we are reminded once again, to remain engaged in an interlocutory setting consisting of Yan Fu’s paraphrastic translations of Evolution and Ethics by Huxley and The Study of Sociology by Spencer. There exists, as Schwartz must have assumed decades ago, a nexus of intertextual links among the surface meanings and their resonant subtexts, overt cross-references and covert cultural foregroundings.41 Yet they function more like a polyphony played out by a string quartet, evincing a chorale of variations on the intertwined themes of evolutionary change and social organization. A case in point is how Yan tests out the fate of the individual self between Huxley’s emphasis on the “ethical process” and Spencer’s focus on the “cosmic process,” by means of a triad of relationships: the individual, the social grouping and the relationship in between. Coinciding with Bakhtin’s transgredience, the role of this relationship between the two entities is reciprocal and negotiable insofar as it at once elucidates and interrogates one another in the name of evolution. To ensure ethical progress, therefore, views held by Huxley and Spencer are on the one hand sharply contrasted, but on the other, implicated in each other’s premise; thus they enable Yan to feed off each other’s insight while shoring up his own viewpoint by dint of the interchange. For example, Huxley refutes the belief that human evolution is motored solely by cosmic forces as he distrusts a natural world ruled over by sheer organismic laws.42 Humans survive by relying on their instinctual sympathy 41 42

There is plenty of commentary made by Schwartz over what he was doing, which fits the term “intertextuality” even though he did not use such terminology then. T. H. Huxley and Julian Huxley, Evolution and Ethics: 1893–1943 (London: The Pilot Press Ltd., 1947), 81. My points in this passage are based on close readings of “Prolegomena” of Huxleys’ book.

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for one another and organizing into groups, which help them out of harm’s way in the brutal natural world. Huxley went so far as to dubiously use a hypothesis of “horticultural process”—a sort of gardening colonization, admittedly at the expense of local aboriginals. And through this unnaturally founded “earthly paradise,” humans can form a close-knit human society where all are gardeners on constant watch to restrain selfish assertion of energy and encourage a “conscience” derived from acquired fellow-feelings. Expectedly, Huxley defines evolution in unmistakably ethical terms: Social progress means a checking of the cosmic process at every step and the substitution for it of another, which may be called the ethical process; the end of which is not the survival of those who may happen to be the fittest, in respect of the whole of the conditions which obtain, but of those who are ethically the best.43 Granting that harmony and prosperity await these ethically fittest at the social level, we probe at what kind of individual self is thus legitimated by such ethical progress. First, this selfhood must include what Huxley calls “personified sympathy”: the self-urge to restrain or check self-assertion for the sake of his/ her fellow beings and the collective good. By the same token, secondly, selfawareness grows in step with the individual’s persisted willingness to reject the cosmic impulse to seek pleasure and satisfaction at the expense of fellow beings. Thirdly, the individual must strive to become, or be led by, the watchful “Gardener” figure, whose role is to guard against the encroachment of the cosmic drive to compete and conquer. In sum, true to his hostility to the cosmic world, Huxley declares: “. . . the practice of that which is ethically best—what we call goodness or virtue—involves a course of conduct which, in all respects, is opposed to that which leads to success in the cosmic struggle for existence.”44 The immediate difficulty Yan Fu encounters in translating these views is the embedded paradox between Huxley’s ethical belief in social progress and his abhorrence of cosmic changes resulting in his rejecting a Darwinian natural selection. This outwardly insoluble conflict stands right in the way of Yan’s fundamental faith in the cosmic license of evolution, as is shown in his Chinese title: Tian yan lun (On Cosmic Evolution). Yan is decidedly convinced that the natural and human worlds are one, and that what gives luxuriant life to plants and animals also fuels human beings’ ascending development from them. What makes it possible for men to move higher and further on the evolutionary ladder is, as Yan argues, their unsurpassed ability to form collective polities 43 44

Huxley and Huxley, Evolution and Ethics, 81. Ibid., 81–82.

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that ensure peace and security be shared by all. On the other hand, however, Yan indeed gives credence to Huxley’s view that individual humans possess distinct awareness to restrain their self-assertion in favor of common interests such as security and well-being, but Yan insists that their ethical consciousness grew out of none other than the cosmic process instead of protected isolation from it as in Huxley’s “horticultural process.” He explains it in these words: The process of evolution determines that those who can form social groups survive and those who cannot shall perish. . . . What makes them effective? The ability to develop a sense of mutual sympathy. This ability to feel sympathy is, however, an effect of the process of natural selection and not something which was there from the outset. Those groups which do not effectively develop this fellow-feeling are eliminated in the struggle for existence.45 Evidently, what Yan regards highly—the sense of mutual sympathy as delineated above—is part and parcel of the cosmic process which Huxley detests, but to Yan, it must have appeared so baffling that Huxley refuses to accept it as evidence for humans’ ability to endure and triumph in the cosmic process. What, one may ask with Yan, could be more convincing proof for the evolutionary progress made by the individual human than his ethical consciousness borne out of the very process?! Yan blames this oversight on Huxley’s professed antagonism between natural evolution and human development; in his postscript comments following the translated passages, Yan explains why: His [Huxley’s] attempt to derive social ethics (ch’üntao) from the feeling of sympathy inverts cause and effect. What causes men to enter society and leave their state of dispersion is the interest in security. . . . It is not his fellow-feeling which leads to the formation of society, but his interest in security.46 It should be evident from the above that Huxley also errs in missing the tenable causality between the individual self and his/her collective identity, which unfolds in this order: first comes his dependency on the social group for his survival, and then comes his feelings of sympathy and belonging. And, to Yan’s mind, never the other way round. This constitutes precisely what Yan perceives 45 46

Tian yan lun 天演论. Yan, Yan Fu Juan, 39. English translation is by Schwartz. Ibid., p. 39. Chun dao, qundao 群道. English translation is by Schwartz.

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to be the evolutionary progress for the humans riding the tides of the cosmic evolution. Conversely, the ethical outcomes—collective cohesion and wellbeing—of this progress validate this route for the humans in cosmic evolution, the only one tried and true, by virtue of being where they now stand. It is beyond doubt that this must be the original motive for Yan Fu to choose Huxley’s theory of evolution for his translation project. Ironically, Yan’s paraphrastic note also reveals a possible clue as to why he had decided on translating into Chinese only the first half of Huxley’s book title: Evolution and Ethics. For, as Yan has now come to realize, individuals’ ethical progress is by design what Chinese individuals can hope to achieve through his envisioned social evolution, albeit one filtered through a Chinese lens. The success of their struggle for building a powerful and wealthy China depends, not just on releasing their individual energies to wrest a life out of the jaws of naturalistic cruelty and terror alone, but on banding together in the face of national crises and rise in unison by virtue of fellow-feelings. Thus, insofar as Yan can envisage, the self-assertions of individuals of which Huxley is deeply critical should and can be harnessed to a collective drive to help China stand up to the odds of a historical decline. To the extent that social Darwinism could deliver to him that ruse of morale mobilization, he was ready to embrace that Western concept. As it happened, while Yan was translating Evolution and Ethics during the years 1896–1898, he was literally preparing textual notes for translating other Western works such as Qun ji quan jie lun (On Liberty by J. S. Mill) and Qun xue yi yan (The Study of Sociology by Herbert Spencer).47 This can be induced from the fact that Yan Fu inadvertently made a reference to Spencer’s principles of sociology in one of his postscript comments. Having pointed out that Huxley blunders on splitting social grouping from cosmic evolution, Yan writes that Spencer’s grasp of the Qundao, i.e., social ethics, is more thorough than Huxley’s.48 Yan’s involuntary comparison of Huxley to Spencer brings us right into the mix with Spencer’s social Darwinism, whose principles, needless to say, have been contrasted and blended in Yan’s fermenting mind all along. 47

Qun ji quan jie lun 群己权界论. Qun xue yi yan 群学议言. I have searched more than a few biographies of Yan for the specific date on which Yan officially started his translation of Spencer’s work, but failed so far. There is a reference to the incompletion of Yan’s translation of it in 1898, when he had previously promised to submit parts to Guo wen bao 国 文报 for publication. This could be used to infer that the translation had been underway before 1898 the year which saw the publication of his translation of Evolution and Ethics. 48 Yan, Yan Fu Juan, 39.

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Whereas Huxley’s views orient Yan towards the overall goal of ethical progress, Spencer’s ideas enable Yan to foresee, at least initially, how the individual human is apt to aggressively release his potentials by means of self-assertion. Apparently opposed to Huxley’s self-restraint and fellow-feelings, Spencer’s cosmic progress is predicated on a model of biological organism that conceptualizes Nature as capable of limitless potential of power and inexhaustible prospects for change. Drawing on the great discoveries of the new biological sciences in nineteenth-century Europe, Spencer configures a model of human development that is completely analogous to the laws of natural growth and reproduction. Known as “unfettered individualism,” Spencer’s idea of the individual is characterized by his tirelessly seeking personal happiness and his fearlessly pursuing self-interest. As for his natural instincts for fellow men, Spencer is far less clear and sincere, as can be attested in this statement of his: “My aim is the liberty of each, limited alone by the like liberty of all. . . . Every man has freedom to do all that he wills, provided he infringes not on the equal freedom of any other man.”49 The two italicized phrases are most vividly indicative of his fuzzy formulation that plays on rhetorical wit. Once pressed hard, however, his rhetorical cleverness fades to disclose its logical absurdity: if every man enjoys equal freedom to everything he wills, how can he help not to infringe on others’ freedom. To be fair, Spencer seems content with a kind of “innate discreetness” possessed by the individual that prompts him to hold back when his assertions intrude into other individuals’ interests. But we are bound to encounter the absence of any higher court of appeal if and when the individual fails to do so. And what kind of social grouping can be formed out of such self-assertive individuals? This brings to our attention another aspect of Spencer’s evolution: there is a direct correspondence linking the assertive individual to the state which seemingly fits the trope of physiological organism; the particles (the individuals) assemble to form an entire whole which functions much like the head and limbs of a body. Curiously, we cannot but notice that Spencer shrewdly inverts the order of legitimacy by first positing the self-governing individuals and then creating a social aggregate out of such individuals as its constituents. The upshot of such an inversion is concurrently inverted: qualities of the individual shall determine what the state ought to be as his collaborative counterpart, rather than the other way around or reciprocally. In doing so, Spencer not only gives priority to the individual over the social group, but 49

Herbert Spencer, The Man versus The State (Caldwell: The Caxton Printers, Ltd., 1940), 76. These words were also quoted in Robert Nisbet, History of the Idea of Progress (New York: Basic Books, Inc., Publisher, 1980), 230.

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lays down a causal connection between the individuals who assemble to form a social group. Many have pointed out that such a connection coincides with the evolutionary trajectory Spencer has outlined for his espousal of the cosmic process. To Yan Fu, the instant appeal of Spencer’s choice of biological organism are twofold: 1) Spencer’s reliance on the cosmic forces concurs with Yan’s belief that humans evolved together with his/her natural environ, thus, his refutation of Huxley’s splitting men from nature has been tested out in positive terms; 2) Spencer’s stress on mobilizing the individual into self-assertion and pursuit of happiness has rousing repercussions on Yan in his search for paths to national salvation. Yan is thrilled by its unequivocal efficacy in awakening China’s multitude from their lethargic limbo since he now sees how liberated individuals can wield direct impact on the formation of a new political entity. He hastens to concentrate on what he presumes “a straight and thorough continuum” linking the individuals to their viable state as Nisbet has best articulated: Knowing the principles of sustaining the life of my own person, I also know the principles of the survival of the social group. Knowing what makes for long life in the individual, I know what maintains the strong pulse of the nation. In the individual, body and spirit depend on each other. Within the society, physical strength and virtue are mutually dependent. In the individual, liberty is esteemed. In the nation, independence.50 Compelled by the dire fate China faced at this time, Yan cannot wait to see it bring about a massive rallying of individuals and get organized in a rigorous drive to rebuild the Chinese state. Spencer’s assertive individualism has shed blinding light on the possibility that individuals can be unfettered from the prohibitive Confucian orthodoxy and can be recruited for China’s struggle against foreign domination or internal strife. Schwartz pinpoints the appeal of Spencer’s organismic energies to Yan this way: Yen Fu derives from him [Spencer] the profound conviction that the energies which ultimately account for the wealth and power of the social organisms of the West are energies latent in the individual; that these energies are powered, as it were, by the drive of enlightened self-interest; and that liberty, equality, and democracy provide the environment within 50 Nisbet, The Idea of Progress, 542.

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which this enlightened self-interest manifests itself—within which human physical, intellectual, and moral potentialities are realized.51 For now, as indicated in his remarks earlier, it has become increasingly clear to Yan that the survival of the state is as necessarily dependent on the energies and worth of the individual as a body upon an organ or a limb. For his part, Yan is more inclined to envision a harmonious blend of strength and virtue to be embodied in the state than being concerned about the drift of Spencer’s notion of a social aggregate composed of self-promoting individuals—an overview that is bound to lead Yan away from his Western mentors and back to the ancient sages of antiquarian China by way of Huxley. Latent discords indeed exist in Spencer’s analogous nexus that can break down to threaten the viability of Yan’s anticipated blend of power and virtue for the social group. And seeds of disunity were sown at the outset in Spencer’s implied evolutionary law extending from the individual to the aggregate state by virtue of an organismic force. Notably, we recall that Spencer considers the enterprising individual to be the embodiment of evolutionary dynamism and fulfillment, and declares: “From the earliest traceable cosmical changes down to the latest results of civilization, we shall find that the transformation of the homogeneous into the heterogeneous is that in which progress essentially consists.”52 Yet when Spencer sets forth the same law for social orientation, a metaphysical chasm appears in the form of irreconcilable disparity between the atomistic individual and any plausible form of a social group. The very law of cosmic process is denied by Spencer to a social aggregate of any ability to initiate or embody progress. The cause he lays out here is nothing more than a crude either/or solution, i.e., either a laissez faire government or no government at all. He thus defines the distinction of the two societies as below: “. . . that in which the individual is left to do the best he can by his spontaneous efforts and get success or failure according to his own efficiency, and that in which he has appointed place, works under coercive rule, and has his appointed share of food, clothing, and shelter.”53 The former is apparently a rewording of his professed adage “the survival of the fittest,” while the latter betrays his bias against the state since all he could see in it is a coercive and pigeon-holed society which regiments and strangles the individual’s desire of freedom. Thus, 51 Schwartz, Yen and the West, p. 57. 52 Herbert Spencer, Progress: Its Law and Cause: with other disquisitions, viz (New York: Humboldt Publishing Company, 1881), 235–236. 53 Herbert Spencer, Essays: Scientific, Political, and Speculative (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1899, vol. III), 450.

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Spencer’s choice of the latter is illogical, unlikely and, needless to say, against his own principle. Given the affinities of his assertive individualism with the classical model of economic organization, it comes as no surprise that many have associated Spencer’s self-promoting individualism with the underside of social Darwinism.54 In a typical tirade against the state, for instance, Spencer lashes out at “state officialism” in unmistakably economic terms: “As we once heard said by a State-official of twenty-five years’ standing—‘Wherever there is government there is villainy.’ It is the inevitable result of destroying the direct connexion between the profit obtained and the work performed.”55 With little rhetorical disguise in this instance, Spencer has thus laid bare the essential causal link between economic self-interest of his individualism and the kind of state he wishes to set up, and revealed the reason behind his effort to collapse the realm of society at large—the public sphere—lying between the two. We are thus referred back to where his real intention seems to be originally anchored: his apology of economic individualism is indisputably conducive to giving license to the rich and powerful individuals whose wealth and authority far outsize their number, and foreclosing the capacity of any social polity to use collective ethical measures as a safety net against such polarized classes and intensified social conflicts between them. As his first Chinese translator, Yan Fu is indubitably Spencer’s first Chinese critic, and again his critique comes through his paraphrastic translation and comments. Always lurking in his paraphrastic frame of mind is his interlocuting partner, Huxley. Huxley’s group morality, we recall, never fails to be the positive notes sung in praise of the ethical superiority of the group to counter Spencer’s abrasive keys for the political state. We are reminded by him that “social progress means a checking of the cosmic process, still less in running away from it, but in combating it.”56 Even though Huxley’s “horticultural process” in isolation from cosmic evolution is not found to Yan’s liking, the sociological bent of it reminds him of the invaluable teachings of Confucius, Mencius and Xun Zi on the ethical imperative of early human polities. This is probably the single most crucial aspect of Huxley that has clung to Yan Fu’s mind as he was laboring with the translation of Spencer. What follows is my close reading of one of Yan’s postscripts, in which we observe how Yan shows

54

My views are based on my reading of William Sumner, Social Darwinism: Selected Essays of William Graham Sumner (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1963). 55 Spencer, Essays, 251. 56 Schwartz, Yen Fu and the West, 101.

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traces of a shift toward China’s antiquarian sages in his search for a higher ethical court of appeal. In one of the postscripts named Yi yü zhui yü (Superfluous words upon completing my translation), Yan commences his own stream of philosophical thinking at variance with the subject under study. Like an afterthought, he reveals his reflections on the individual vs. state binary by way of Spencer. He does so by dint of a plain antithesis: the total vis-à-vis the unit.57 As a way to explain its cohesive antithesis, Yan lists out a few examples of opposites that form interrelated wholes, of which the following warrant our special attention: a paint brush and threads of hair, cooked rice and rice grains, and a nation and its people. These are choice specimens that best illustrate the well-known maxim: the unity of parts is larger than their sum total. For when threads of hair are bound, they turn into a paint brush that can be used to write and paint. Likewise, grains of rice can feed humans once cooked, and people who form a state can surely have more power than the multiplied number.58 Hence, there is no denying the fact, I believe, that social groupings do create a transformative power or force, whether for a positive or a negative end, which individual beings cannot if left by themselves. The use of these well-illustrated instances, therefore, disproves Spencer’s doubts expressed in his remark that no real efficiency or force can ever exist or function in a collective polity. What is more instructive is how Yan discounts Spencer’s dire, regimented kind of individual vs. society relationship by putting the other half of the equation under scrutiny—the role of the individual. In his critique of Rousseau’s The Social Contract, Yan questions the French thinker’s presumed attributes of freedom and equality of the individual, revealing its limitations for application to the Chinese case, given that it appears derivative of the Kantian a priori.59 Evoking presently his faith in the Confucian legacy, Yan keenly senses the disparity separating Rousseau’s individual self from the Confucian exposition of it, stating that “The freedom and equality [the Roman citizenry] enjoyed are based on the law and its implementation. They were never regarded as the individual’s naturally endowed rights from the outset.”60 To Yan Fu scholars this 1914 statement marked a sort of watershed in his political allegiance which sealed his vacillating stand on the side of those opposed to the new-born Republic. But to thus belittle all his views in the wake of Qing government’s downfall as “conservative and regressive” is partial and unwarranted. In my 57 58 59 60

Yi yü zhui yü 译余缀语. Yan, Yan Fu Juan, 119. Ibid. Translations of following quotations are mine unless indicated otherwise. Yan Fu, “Critical Comments on The Social Contract” in Yan, Yan Fu Juan, 607–615. Ibid., 611.

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view, ironically, his belated disapproval of iconic figures of Western thought like Rousseau, Hobbes, Adam Smith and, to a lesser extent, Spencer coincides with his reconnection with the Confucian tenets, and, as most intellectual rejuvenations do, it did a great service to his times and ours in reflecting on modernity in China. Foremost among the critical issues is the disparity between individualisms of the West and China in ontological terms. As we might recall, Hall and Ames shed ample light on why the two are at odds on fundamental grounds despite their semblance. The Chinese self is largely constituted as “immanental” which sets the aspiring individual amidst a nexus of external conditions, e.g., social events and praxes, in his/her journey to seek a fulfilled life.61 By the same token, what drives the individual to his/her final fulfillment is the incessant need to interact with the ever-evolving milieu of historical times; the questing individual remains committed to the knowledge that self identities are inexorably contextual, always determined by social conditions which in turn determine them. The Western self, in contrast, is primarily endowed with pre-requisite substances, such as freedom, equality and other rights, which tend to be essential and ahistorical. In essence, self-realization for the Confucian must be measured through the prism of social and historical action and experience; it is forever mutually implicated with and reinforced by the society. In the end, therefore, the progress of a Confucian self would never entail his rising from and above the world of reality, into the transcendental realm where the individual turns incarnate of substantive rights and unaffected by history. More important, Yan’s retooled notion of individualism reveals an underlying télos: rather than obeying Spencer’ idea about the state being a mere aggregate of individual selves, Yan is committed to thinking out personal growth along the lines of organic interdependence between the total and its parts. This gives him a flexible cohesion that undercuts Spencer’s notion of the modern state as a mere replica of its citizenry writ large, and it discloses the weakness of the evolutionary thinker’s partial use of the biological model: the whole body never fails to take precedence over the body parts in its physiological function. On the other hand, Yan’s recourse to organism does echo Spencer’s point that the worth of each individual citizen is indispensable as the basis of the state’s legislative power. Yan cites a cross-cultural stereotype, widely held by Japanese scholarship at the time, of the Chinese governing the state at the expense of the well-being of its individuals, only to immediately balance it with a notable saying quoted from Sima Qian, the Grand Historian of the Han 61

I have made references to these co-authors’ book Thinking through Confucius earlier in the Introduction chapters.

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Dynasty. It is widely known that Sima Qian declares “. . . that Xiaoya mocks the lesser being’s assertions about his gain or loss, and that this has everything to do with the superior whole.”62 Yan then concludes: Changes at the societal level are legion, but each and every one of them is traced back to the worth of Xiaoji (the lesser self). For that reason, the study of social grouping usually takes precedence with its classification as the lesser beings. This explains why only when classified as such can they be considered.63 Notably, Xiaoji first appeared in a Chinese text as early as Shiji (Records of the Grand Historian), and judging from the context, it came into being insofar as it was implicated in defining qun, the social collective; therein lies the embryo of Daji (the greater self) which witnessed a rapid growth spurt in Yan’s time. Soon a host of “I”s or “selves” were baptized in editorials of new journals like New Youth and Eastern Miscellany, which all shared this implicated public identity as their birthmark. When Gao Yihan published his “The Republican State and the Self-Awareness of the Youth” for New Youth in 1915, he openly expresses what Yan ponders in thought earlier; he writes: We youth should seek our private good in the same way as we would our public good; likewise, we should seek our public good in the same way as we would our private good. . . . The two must benefit each other and keep each other going; they must hold onto their own realms; they must keep their interest in balance.64 则吾辈青年。即应以谋社会之公益者。谋一己之私益。亦即以 谋一己之私益者。谋社会之公益。。。。必二者交益交利。互 相维持。各得其域。各衡其平者。 Min Zhi wrote “Wo” (I) for Eastern Miscellany in which he distinguishes between siwo and gongwo and suggests a connection linking the two; but he also dubiously implies that the pursuit of the former’s individual rights cannot outweigh the latter’s.65 Guang Sheng probably came closest in his comments in New Youth (1916) to eclipse the validity of the Western self’s substantive 62 Xiaoya 小雅. Yan, Yan Fu Juan, 119. 63 See Note 45 above. Ibid. 64 Shiji 史记. Gao Yihan 高一函, New Youth, Vol. 1, Issue number 2, 129. 65 Min Zi 民子, Eastern Miscellany quoted by Lydia Liu in Translingual Practice, 89.

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rights when he grants equal status to obligations the individual holds as a citizen to the state. He perceives the individual being as composed of two sides of the human identity: “One side of the individual is under the authority of the State; the other is of his/her autonomous character. What exists between the state and the citizenry is therefore a relationship based on substantive laws just like that between the individual’s whole being.”66 Granting that this genealogy is valid, we are instantly reminded that the idea of an individual self existed then, not as the embodiment of substantive rights per se like that of the Western counterpart, but as an integral part of the social existence as a whole. Hence, its inalienable social bond. Many have justly traced out a lineage between Yan’s take on the notion of qun and the original concept as espoused by Xun Zi. Indeed, in the same postscript, Yan quotes directly from Xunzi as saying: “Because he [the individual] is able to organize himself in society . . .”67 The rest of Xun Zi’s passage is provided below to give a fuller idea of Xun Zi’s entire argument: Why is he able to organize himself in society? Because he sets up hierarchical divisions. And how is he able to set up hierarchical division? Because he has a sense of duty. If he employs this sense of duty to set up hierarchical divisions, then there will be harmony. Where there is harmony there will be unity; where there is unity there will be strength; and where there is strength there will be the power to conquer all things.68 The passage, incidentally, is from Section 9 “The Regulation of a King” of Xun Zi’s Basic Writings. Xun Zi’s use of the third-person pronoun “he” is, on the surface, indicative of a King or a Sage, but on a closer look, we discover that Xun Zi does not limit the Kingship to men of noble descent. As he explains: “Although a man may be the descendant of commoners, if he has acquired learning, is upright in conduct, and can adhere to ritual principles, he should be promoted to the post of prime minister or high court official.”69 Leaving the door open for commoners, Xun Zi’s idea of a sage ruler convincingly includes men of ordinary birth but have proved himself worthy of Kingship through his exemplary conduct of Li (Rites) and Yi (Sense of Duty); and the notion evinces a strong resonance with the Confucian precept of “a sage inward; a king 66 67 68 69

Guang Sheng, “The Chinese National Character and Its Weaknesses” in New Youth, Vol. 2, Issue number 6, 1917. Xun Zi 荀子. Yan, Yan Fu Juan, 119. Translation is by Burton Watson. Xun Zi, Hsun Tzu: Basic Writings (New York: Columbia University Press, 1963), 45–46. Ibid., 33.

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outward.”70 As Xun Zi also believes that the qun leader can domesticate ox and horse as part of his ethical process, it instantly reminds us of someone who declares: “The intelligence which has converted the brother of the wolf into the faithful guardian of the sheep flocks ought to be able to do something towards curbing the instincts of savagery in civilized men.”71 This someone is of course Thomas Huxley whose notion of gardeners tending to the “horticultural process” resembles Xun Zi’s sage ruler so surprisingly, yet so compellingly as well. Therein lies the interlocutory tie that connects Yan Fu to Xun Zi through Huxley; their views span across centuries to jointly deliver one central message: individual humans are born into differentiated social ranks and status as conditioned by their clanal and ethnic lineages; likewise they are each endowed with greater or lesser physical and intellectual gifts. These “encumbered” attributes would likely result in a harsh and unyielding world of hierarchical divisions riddled with inequality, despotism and exploitation. Yet this world is not without its potential for rewarding a worthy effort in the struggle for existence. Despite the fate of being bound by such inescapable contextual limits, Xun Zi’s teachings also urge a shared obligation of duty and accountability, especially on the part of its leaders. If the leaders see to it that this is truly acted upon, they would lay the grounds for unity and harmony for the entire community. The primacy of collective welfare and security also make it a moral imperative to ensure open and fair opportunities of education for all, and to implement meritocracy and upward mobility based on public goodness. All of these reflect the efficacy of ethical progress and in turn affirm the feasibility of achieving teleological progress from a lesser “I” to a greater “I.” They also help Yan steer a home-bound journey to China, especially to its ancient repository of wisdom, to complete his final act of transvaluation by way of an interdependence that infuses rather than diffuses the correlative dynamic between the individual and the state.

Revisiting the “Continuum”

It is opportune for us now to delve into what constitutes the teleological progress as Yan envisioned it then and how a correlative, in lieu of a linear, course of growth informed Yan’s eventual elucidation of the Confucian notion of selfrealization. It is noted from the above that Yan’s sense of the antithesis, consist70 71

Li 理; Yi 义. Thomas Huxley & Julian Huxley, Evolution and Ethics 1893–1943 (London: The Pilot Press Ltd., 1947), 84.

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ing of such opposites as the individual vs. the state, complement each other to create an organic relationship that can tie the individuals to social groupings in cohesion and order. We thus find it compelling to see as well why and how this complementary relationship is interwoven with ethical progress in a teleological course such as implied in an evolutionary scheme. Schwartz repeatedly concedes that what fascinated Yan was his discovery of the link between the empowerment of the social group and dynamism of the liberated individual, but he seems to disallow that Yan, thanks to his perception of China’s urgent and pragmatic needs, was able to reach and depart from the core of English liberalism and thereby uplift his paraphrastic translations of Western individualism beyond that of a mere utilitarian cause. What is unfair with Schwartz’s judgment, therefore, is that, while reiterating a teleological path for the liberalist individual to reach its goal of self-realization in the Western context, he remains indifferent to the fact that Yan could have also been motivated by a teleological cause, one that is different, yet effective and equally legitimate, linking the individual with the society. And when applied to the Chinese context, Yan’s tenable course of ethical progress readily gained validity due to its social immediacy and reality. Of the myriad assertions of Darwinian evolution found in the writings of the pro-Qing reformers and the soon-to-be New Culturalists, none indeed proved more mesmeric yet puzzling than the motivational cause guiding the individual’s journey of self-realization towards the society and the state. It is antithetical yet correlative: the individual self was often depicted as being liberating and regressive in tandem, as being at once self-centered and socially oriented, and as playing a role both detrimental to and constitutive of social organizations, such as the nation-state.72 These claims contest as well comprise this surging neologism and shall reveal those vital clues to the distinct and contingent nature of the indigenous claims made to it while being adapted from its Western origin. Copious evidence and commentary from available scholarship have delved into them and revealed slippages and twists in what constitute the local assertions of social evolution and in how they correlate, rather than instantiate, the building of a modern nation-state. Yet, the heart of the issue—the continuum—remains elusive and intangible. What merits a closer scrutiny is how the seeming opposites together delineate a trajectory of growth and fulfillment for the individual that rehearses as well as displaces the essential teleology underwritten by Western thought. Yan Fu’s tussle with 72

I am fully aware that the distinction between the society and the state is extremely crucial and will dwell on it in the following chapter “Ethical Vision in Yu Dafu’s Fiction.” For now they are being lumped together as the same collective body in a loose sense.

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social evolution is undoubtedly an erudite illustration of this dynamic process. Beyond the ontological intricacy already dwelled on, we should now explore how evolution, by virtue of a biological model, shaped and swayed Yan’s envisaged path of progress. We need to ask, for an example, if ethical legitimacy, as the locus of Spencer’s social Darwinism, maps out different routes of progress for Yan’s guide to self-realization. The prompt answer to the above is: yes, routes are vastly different for Yan just because the ontological disparity entails how certain inescapable guideposts arise over the horizon that orient and urge the individual to journey ahead in the pointed direction. While it is true that Yan seldom touches on the continuum issue in particular, his view on the essence of qun (qun xing) addresses it forcefully: “Our most urgent task today is not (individual) freedom, but each of us contain and trim down freedom, so as to assume the obligation of doing service to the state and spreading good for the society.”73 Wang Hui pinpoints Yan’s view on qun as “[signifying] both social groupings with the parallel infrastructure and the fundamental morality that gives rise to them.”74 We may ask: what good(s) can come out of such a moral aspiration? How can the Chinese individuals seek to attain a collectivist ideal that can intrinsically accommodate their own? A further look at such guiding framework for Confucian progress as propounded by Hall and Ames is in order if only to throw light on why and how they impinge strongly on the ethical conduct of the aspiring individual in pursuit of a fulfilled life. Hall and Ames argue that “. . . Confucian order is realized, not instantiated.”75 As the human cosmos is immanental, they believe, the individual’s desire for a full life is infinitely intertwined with the social circumstances he/she encounters at various stages of his/her life. They further state: what the individual can eventually bring to fruition remains locked in a correlative bond with the everchanging contexts; any progress made is always the result of a two-way involvement of impacting and being impacted by the historical contexts and the individual’s decisions and actions. Unlike the Western individual whose ideals consisted of substantive rights as pre-requisites of his being, it is hardly pertinent for the Confucian to seek ideals of an exemplary life at the outset as Confucian ideals are certain to arise accordingly from disparate contextual ethics and changes during his ethical progress. Nor would it be expected of the Confucian self to reach full realization in isolation from specific events and 73 Qunxing 群性. Quoted in Wang, The Rise of Modern Chinese Thought, 611. 74 Ibid., 866. 75 Hall & Ames, Thinking through Confucius, 16. The following comments are indebted to the views expressed by Hall and Ames in their writing. The emphases are mine.

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acts of a social nature. His success would always require the articulation of the social aspects which have reinforced or delimited it. This is in keen contrast to the Western self whose eventual triumph is but a rational outcome of the individual’s pursuit of substantive rights detached from and unaltered by circumstantial reality. In other words, what he has gained in the end is an embodiment of the substantive spirit, an illustrated case of the originary self-conceived ex nihilo. The atomist self is indeed its own cause and consequence. What this boils down to for the questing Confucian is the interdependence between self-realization and social progress. This orientation of his progress is inescapably social, not by rational will, but by cultural heritage as well as existential necessity. It is clearly conferred as one embedding the individual self in a web of societal interlockings, through which the individual self is seamlessly situated in social institutions and rituals. This distinctive feature of sociality lies at the root of the social dormancy and political tumult that many reformminded Confucians found themselves in as the new century dawned. Their intuited knowledge of the correlative essence enables them to discern the underlying differences setting the Confucian self apart from Western individualism, but it does not necessarily deny them the ability to absorb the dynamic forces of the Darwinian evolution on their own terms. Indeed high amidst their own terms was the readiness to release the free, creative energy from each individual and simultaneously harness it to drive reforms within a defunct political system. What they desire is, as one advocate remarked, “individual development that is in keeping with the social development as a whole.”76 It is more than a coincidence that their knowledge about correlativity helped them garner an intellectual vantage. By way of remedying a dualistic conception of polarities, for instance, they were able to reconcile opposites such as tradition vs. modernity, collectivity vs. individuality, evolution vs. solidarity, and make it possible and beneficial to complement each polar with the other; only then could they reach the end of building a non-contentious world uninfected by self-serving gains. Despite all the oscillation and ambiguity suspected of his paraphrastic thinking, Yan led the way in bringing into play the complementary role enmeshed in ancient Confucian thought while riding the thrusting forces of social evolution initiated in the modern West. He took his cue from his English liberalist mentors by way of their use of social organism and followed its logical course as far as he saw fit. What caused his departure from their path in the end is not so much his “inability” to reach the core of Western liberalism as his ability to detect, albeit in a reconciled way, its “dead-end” outcomes if they were ever installed as a goal for a Chinese modernity. That 76

This remark is made by Min Zi. See note 65 above.

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is largely what prompted Yan to switch to pursuing, as Huxley did, a sociallyoriented goal of ethical development. Then again it is not so much Huxley’s assertions of ethical evolution that lured Yan away from Spencer as his own yearning for a more fair, cohesive way to channel the new and assertive energies released from the individuals in the strife for China’s existence in the modern age. Like many of his contemporaries, Yan relied on his home-bred wisdom of the correlative dynamic to ensure the moral and altruistic faculties of the individual, posit ethical legitimacy for individualistic ambition and ingenuity within the compass of social stability and welfare, and reinforce mutual sympathy while seeking to expand and perfect one’s interest as an integral part of enhancing human dignity and solidarity.

chapter 4

Empathetic Vision in Yu Dafu’s Fiction Yan Fu’s paraphrastic tussle with the liberalist notion of evolution shaped a pivotal facet of modern Chinese individualism, yet we must be immediately reminded that there are bound to be other facets of the Chinese self that arose from vastly different sources. If Yan’s effort to assay the evolution theories of Spencer and Huxley offers any clues, we might expect having to navigate familiar but extraneous terrains, such as ideas of Confucianism, Daoism and Buddhism, for alternate paths for the Chinese self en route to the modern. Charles Taylor’s idea of “inescapable frameworks” for fostering an individual self dwells on certain “transcendental conditions.” They include: intuition, memory, linguistic imagination and other elements of self-articulation, which have little apparent link with the immediate social and historical contexts. Taylor further states: “The self is partly constituted by its self-­interpretations; . . .”1 What makes articulating such a self dubious and difficult is, as Taylor suggests, that it is not “a contingent matter,” and the praxis involved might be social or contextual, not in the existential sense, but in the ontological sense. This intellectual realm should not be lost sight of because “[w]e are not selves in the way that we are organisms, or we don’t have selves in the way we have hearts and livers.”2 The physiological metaphors are used here to make us wary of the raging social impact of the prevalent biological evolution at the time. Yet what Taylor refers to are those “transcendental conditions” which are vitally integral to self-constitution even though they relate apparently more to the cosmic and metaphysical aspects of human experience. So we must ask: does this make the process of self-articulation and self-interpretation in any way anti-­ evolutionary, anti-social, or even anti-modern? Or is it an appropriation by the New Culture activists in seeking a Chinese modern enlightenment on their own terms?3 Before we attempt an answer to this question, let us be clear that self-­ articulation against the social backdrop of the late-Qing and early Republic 1 Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: the Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989), 34. 2 Ibid. 3 The term on their own terms has gained rapid currency among China scholars of late thanks to Benjamin Elman who used the phrase in the title of his eminent work On Their Own Terms: Science in China 1550–1900 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005). More on the ensuing impact of Elman’s concept later in the chapter.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2014 | doi 10.1163/9789004265356_005

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eras was never a one-way travel between the individual and the nation-state, and that its complex and multilayered tapestry has since been combed and detangled by scholars both Chinese and Western. Of more recent findings, one deserves our closer scrutiny. In her critique of the discourse of individualism, Lydia Liu alerts us to the fact that “the intellectual tradition of the European Enlightenment is itself fraught with heterogeneous elements and counter discourses,” and she pointedly argues that “the dynamic history of Chinese enlightenment is in every sense capable of generating its own meanings and terms of interpretation.”4 Her own critical reading of the binary opposites of selfhood versus nationalism offers us a most insightful case in point. She seizes on a view widely shared among the New Culturalists who believed that the individual served as the ignition to start the motored vehicle on the tracks of the individual-state continuum whose endpoint totally consumes the lesser individual. She then points out that such advocacy of the free individual was able to release him/her from the shackles of the traditional society only to place him/her under the fetters of the new nation-state. She thus warns us against being fixated with either the “authentic root” of a Western self or a singular teleological path to modernity leading from the individual self to the nation-state. Instead, she urges us, in the spirit that Lu Xun once exhibited, to look beneath the trappings of Western individualism and explore its ambivalent relationship to the master narrative of the nation state.5 All this grants convincing validity to the vast body of sociopolitical perusals of the early Republic era. Yet it remains to be seen as to how these loaded, entwined and often conflictual claims to the individual-state continuum would be sorted out if we approach them in an ethical and ontological ­investigation. And I believe inquiries put forth in the realm of the human consciousness deserve their share of legitimacy: firstly, because they help bring to light the submerged ontological and epistemological depths of human mind in coping with drastic social changes; secondly, because they reveal how human motives are conditioned by their sociality while their minds grapple with how to comply with what is just and proper. It is therefore their ability to intuit in moral terms that dictates their love or hate, attachment or rejection, ­responsibility or disregard towards other members of the society. If, for instance, self-identity was all about personal cultivation, what made Fu Sinian think that he could proclaim “free development of the individual for the com-

4 Liu, Translingual Practice, Note 19, 403. 5 Ibid., 86.

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mon welfare”?6 It is because Fu discerned underneath their polarized exterior a common bond of mutual empathy and solidarity as the moral basis for human endeavors. If, in the case of Lu Xun, individualism is taken to be selfcentered or downright egotistic, how could he still mobilize the very concept to go up against materialism? It is because his sharp critical sensibility pierced the seeming consistency of the two to disclose the subversive potential of a non-self (i.e. a Buddhist variation of the self) latent in the individualism that we know. Conversely, in view of the State, if the changes were called for in the name of social utility—of seeking wealth and power to help China stand up to Western imperial powers—how could the public be morally enlightened when individualism was first dubbed as a liberating and progressive “subject” to emulate and then as an irresponsible and nihilistic “object” fit only to be denounced and effaced? It was explicable that the public was confused and dissonant because disparate views of Western individualism were merely asserted—often in the ­manner of namedropping of Western thinkers—without their respective sources and traditions being delved into. Much less had been made known as to how the fundamental differences in their views and approaches had been analyzed, debated, and validated or rejected in public. In retrospect, we find the late-Qing reformists like Liang and Yan guilty of such lamentable lack ­initially—a tendency that was sadly to recur within the May Fourth discourse. What matters in importing modern thoughts from the West is not so much how the above questions can be answered to the full as how they are meant to compel us to seek beyond what is external, apparent and instant, and observe the underlying tensions, slippages and pitfalls which broached, swayed and shaped the differences of opinion. We thus need first and foremost focus on the process through which diverse brands of individualism were conveyed, contested and approved in the West before applying them to the Chinese context. Equally crucial is the need for us to explain where we stand in relation to our traditional heritage, if only to be wary of what Habermas cautions as “[t]he custom to face different points of view from a familiar one coerced by the quotidian world of our own political and social reality.”7 It thus directs us to engage what is known as the process of “dialogical” mediation so that the Chinese public could perceive, directly and plainly, how the inner workings of a mind were mediated and refocused when challenged by “alien” ideas and ­worldviews, 6 Fu Sinian 傅斯年 (1896–1950), “Ren sheng wen ti fa duan” 人生问题发端 (Introduction to the Problem of Human Iife), Xinchao 新潮 (New Tide), Vol. 1, Issue 1, 1919, 5–17. Also quoted by Lydia Liu in her chapter “The Discourse on Individualism.” 7 Jügen Habermas, Communication and the Evolution of Society, trans. Thomas McCarthy (Boston: Beacon Press, 1979), 82–90, 109–116.

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and that we can come to better terms with modern notions like evolution and the individual-state continuum. However one approaches the inner workings of cross-cultural mediation, the crux of the process lies in how to reckon and blend with Otherness, and how one can situate the historicity of the other in one’s own historical consciousness? Geoffrey Harpham delivers us a pointed answer: “Ethics is the arena in which the claims of otherness—the moral law, the human other, cultural norms, the Good-in-itself, etc.—are articulated and negotiated.”8 In the context of China’s grappling with the modern, otherness presents the thorniest issue: can traditional ethical reasoning absorb the pounding impact of social evolution to regain its footing? If it can, how does it square with the assertive and progressive forces of social progress that Liang and his contemporaries extolled and implemented? And what intrinsic Chinese ethical values can be reclaimed to ensure social wellbeing for the Chinese modern and what not?

Yu Dafu and Empathetic Seeing

How this kind of ethical negotiation occurs can be best illustrated through the ontological unfolding reflected in the life-stories by Yu Dafu. Yu is a chief exponent of the May Fourth literature and a key articulator of romanticism during the Republican Era.9 He published perhaps the most intimate and candid confession of the entire May Fourth literary oeuvre: a self-exposure of how he endured a traumatic coming-of-age while studying in Japan in the 1910s. In his “Chenlun” (Sinking, 1921), Yu gives sensational accounts of how the protagonist “I” lusts after Japanese girls in vain, masturbates compulsively in frustration and contemplates suicide in despair. Here we encounter a passionate search for self-identity sadly gone warped. At the outset we find this adolescent Chinese tangled up in a web of tormenting sentiments: loneliness, melancholy and self-pity. All these sentiments blend into a confused state of inner being for the protagonist who feels increasingly “walled in” from the human world. Yet he is not yet disembodied by the onslaught of pure emotion and volition 8 Geoffrey Harpham, “Ethics” in Frank Lentricchia & Thomas McLaughlin, eds. Critical Terms for Literary Studies (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1995), 395. 9 Yu Dafu 郁达夫 (1896–1945) Yu Dafu was one of the best known fiction writers in China in the early twentieth century because of his romantic and confessional style. During most of the May Fourth era, Romanticism was a powerful ally of the anti-Imperial revolutionary cause because the literary movement entwined individualist love of nature with public awareness of the downtrodden. For details, see Leo Ou-fan Lee, The Romantic Generation of Modern Chinese Writers (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1973).

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from within; he endures what a youth in exile has to undergo: he is ostracized by his Japanese classmates whom he tries to befriend, and he is snubbed by Japanese girls at geisha bars for whom he harbors sensual love. He is able to recall how his family struggled to survive the tumultuous warlords’ rule and Republican revolution; how his early schooling was wrecked by his rebellious inclinations, and how he came to Japan still cherishing “dreams of the romantic age.”10 Despite his solitary wanderings, the protagonist is at this point still situated in intelligible, personal history. However, the protagonist’s situated being begins to get blurred and distracted by his inner consciousness by way of the lines of Western romantic poetry he frequently quotes; our sense of his bodily existence becomes fuzzy with the milieu of remorse engulfing his presence created by the author; the sentiment in fact deepens the I-subject’s romantic dream of timeless love and poetic genius, inflating his narcissistic ego like a freely sprawling mist; finally the maturing subject finds himself transported—by interlocuting with a host of poetic personae —into a gala of romantic writers from all ages and all over the world: Wordsworth, Heine, Gogol and the Chinese poet Huang Zhongze.11 Eventually we are overwhelmed by the impression that the protagonist has become blended into a permeating chant of poetic conscience. Thus, we come to realize that it is this intertextual link forged within his inner consciousness that gains him the ability to freely converse among poetic subjects, overcoming spatial and temporal limits and projecting himself at will into the disparate beings carved out of their respective life-stories. Nonetheless Yu’s global poetic subject fails in the end to emerge in the daylight world of peace and happiness to meet our idealistic projection of an aspiring individual on the hobo-to-hero journey to reach his destined goal. Rather it is the ghostly alter ego of the narrator’s actual, embodied being that keeps returning to haunt him in his flight from his guilt and agony of lust, voyeurism and masturbation. His carnal desire is again kindled by the sight of a geisha girl’s half-exposed thigh and by her lewd laughter in the company of other male clients. And what follows is a shocking revelation of his now aggrandized self: his mixed feelings of jealousy and vengeance drive him to the verge of hysteria, and at this very moment he invokes his faith in national identity: 10

11

This phrase appears in English in the original text of Yu Dafu’s “Chenlun,” in Yu Dafu Xuanji 郁达夫选集 (Collected Works of Yu Dafu), Vol. 1 (Hong Kong: San lian Shu dian and Hua cheng chu ban she, 1982), 1: 28. Huang Zhongze 黄仲泽 (1749–1783) was a highly talented Chinese poet from the Qing Dynasty, who, much like Yu himself, was a drifting loner and suffered from self-effacing melancholy till the end of his life. Yu later dramatized the poet’s life in a short story entitled “Caishi ji” as a vision of his alter ego.

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“China, China! Why haven’t you grown strong?”12 Immediately in his next thought, the hero confesses that he now loves China as his new lover. His appeal is so abrupt that we can hardly be certain if it has the climactic effect of an intellectual awakening; still less are we convinced that this is the “greater self” he has been pursuing all along as the destined end. Rather it is to the contrary that we are led to feel: his failure in elevating and ennobling his carnal desires and his inability of aesthetic transcendence as the goal of his maturity. There is no image more devastating than the dismal scene of “I” about to drown himself in the sea at the end of the story; it portrays a lifeless specter hovering on the cusp of death. The scene seems to empty out whatever purpose or meaning in the hero’s westward glance across the sea at his distant native land. Hence, we conclude that the kind of national identity he evokes is but an exorcising spirit whose help he seeks to free his psychologized self from the haunted abode.13 With a mentally evoked other at the self’s beck and call, empathy from the “I-subject” cannot but result in a hegemonic perception of the other. This usually happens when the self subscribes to certain universal discourses (e.g. romanticism, Enlightenment, nation-state, etc.) and in turn feels inclined to induct the other nominally into a unitary and unhistoricized subject. And precisely because the hegemonic perception takes effect within consciousness, the self commands the view of the “ideal spectator,” i.e. seeing everything in a circumscribed world in telescopic mode without those enclosed inside knowing that they are being observed.14 Such acts of seeing used to be deployed by the unsuspected authority of the omnipresent narrator in nineteenth-century European fiction when positivism reigned supreme. For a different yet also essentially positivist aim, pre-modern Chinese ethics had also posited such power in the literati class who basked in the authority of the princely court and could voice a universal conscience on behalf of it. But due exactly to its allembracing vision, the self’s authority and rationality were taken for granted, and, when imposed by the I-subject on the other, such a relationship would always spawn injustice in terms of desire, knowledge and power. This is most evident in the act of voyeurism. Even if the spectator views the other in an empathetic way, what he sees in it is spurious: he sees mostly what he would like to see to confirm his own mental prediction; he sees what he himself has projected into an abstract and hypothetical other who warrants his empathy. 12 Yu Dafu, Yu Dafu Wenji 郁达夫文集 (Collected Works of Yu Dafu), 1: 48. 13 Lee, The Romantic Generation, 122–23. 14 The term is from Anthony Cascardi, The Subject of Modernity (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 60.

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In the light of voyeurism, Yu Dafu’s “Sinking” deserves further scrutiny not only because the text contains literal voyeuristic acts by the protagonist, but voyeurism seems to be embedded as its perceptive grid that determines the kind of intersubjectivity to be tenable between the self and the other. As the story progresses, the I-persona chances upon the view of the Japanese innowner’s daughter bathing. This happens at a point in his fugitive flight from his guilt when sexual craving and melancholy are about to erupt and banish him in solitude forever. The actual view he has is no bigger than a peephole which only allows him to feed his eyes on the bathing girl’s “snow-white” breasts and thighs; yet it is, by token of the voyeuristic act, large enough for him to project through it the entirety of his inner consciousness. He becomes so enraptured by the sheer corporeal presence of the female body that he is almost ready to plunge himself into it and be gratified through it. The self he envisages here is most ambiguous—between an Oedipal yearning for a return to maternal hedonism and a male instinct to possess a body other than his own. The ambiguity seems to act out belatedly when the protagonist enters an adolescent-like plea to Heaven in his diary: “If only you could give me an Eve from the Garden of Eden, so that I could possess her in flesh and spirit altogether, how contented I would then be!”15 Here we see how the I-voyeur brings into sharp relief the unitary effect of pure empathetic seeing: the subjective self sees exclusively what he desires; in the meantime he desires what he sees. Throughout the story the I-narrator remains susceptible to female bodily presence and his bodily yearning to take possession of it. The seductive urge is so overpowering that he begins to envision everything from which he feels alienated the same way as he feels about the female body. Elsewhere in his fiction, Yu remains riveted to the image of “the voluptuous white female body” as the estranged object of desire. His insistent voyeur bears witness to the fact that his persona would habitually feminize the other(s) in vision and crave to become one with them. Sexual attraction was admittedly a driving force here, but he also casts an allegorical spell on our national identity—whenever he feels rejected by Japanese girls, he wishes China could be strong and wealthy. Hence Yu is seen to equate masculinity with national identity in a quest for femininity. His poetic talent comes gushing out whenever he is aroused by female bodily presence, so much so that it even fills in for the void when female bodies happen to be absent. What is amazing is that the same holds for Yu’s view of European literary modernism, eyeing it as an alienated lover whom he in turn desires, pursues, deserts and then rejoins. The manner in which Yu utilizes Western literature in 15 Yu, Wenji, 1: 25. The English translation is by Joseph Lau and C. T. Hsia.

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this story bears striking resemblance to his voyeuristic acts. Mimicking the real poetic-waxing self whenever he is moody or amorous, the protagonist would produce a Wordsworth or a Heine volume and elicit quotable fragments from it as if he were gazing illicitly at some hot spots of female nudity to make up for the missing sensuality. A case in point is how he trifles with Wordsworth’s poem “The Solitary Reaper.” First, his gaze homes in on the poem’s first stanza, and then for no obvious reason, it strays to the third stanza. After reading the other two stanzas out loud, he suddenly hits upon the idea of translating the poem into Chinese (It is a very appropriate thought, after all, because translation is a kind of possession). Having done it, he is immediately filled with regret and dullness and reproaches himself with self-mockery about the stupidity of coupling English poetry with Chinese poetry through a ­translation.16 The subject’s dilly-dallying even starts to dictate his reading taste. Every time he opens a book, he is instantly infatuated at first sight—by the opening four or five lines or the opening page; then he experiences that ambivalent halt that a seasoned lover is prone to: he wants to postpone the reading so as to prolong his fantasy and thoroughly savor the details of the whole affair. On the other hand, he feels in his heart the yawning tedium of having to court another just-so lover and abruptly drops the book. But before long, he moves on to yet another book with seemingly fresh ardor, and so on and so forth. All this meandering, we cannot but notice, occurs early in the story and anticipates similar drama performed time and again by the protagonist’s amorous routine. It would of course be an oversimplification to regard the protagonist as an unmediated self of Yu Dafu himself, and we must be appreciative of the use of irony, as suggested by Michael Egan, which Yu deploys in “Sinking” to accentuate “a clear contrast between the situation revealed by our ‘hero’s thoughts and what is more or less wryly hinted at by the narrative text.”17 If irony is taken to mean, as Egan here suggests, the embedded existence of an implied author who explores the gap between the surface meaning and deeper reality, it proves the near impossibility of not being a reflective self when writing about it; further it offers alibi to the presence of an omnipresent authorial “I” in a constant act of voyeurism in Yu’s works. This resonates with another critic’s point on Yu’s narrative of “univocality.” Huters, glossing Bakhtin via Yu and other May Fourth writers, discerns in their narrative stances a strong tendency to be unitary and ahistorical. The vast ego of Yu’s narrative persona, insists 16 17

Ibid., 1: 18–20. Michael Egan, “Yu Dafu and the Transition to Modern Chinese Literature,” in Merle Goldman, Modern Chinese Literature in the May Fourth Era, 309–26.

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Huters, gets the last laugh at the errors of the split selves by alternating the narrative angle between empathy and irony, and creates in readers’ awareness a remedial subject for the protagonist. But his remedy is operable, cautions Huters, only by way of “flattening out or bending to [his] will any alternative voices that it sets up in [his] own text.”18 Such a role played by ironic consciousness allows the narrator to stay within the orbit of a unitary subject; the subject can hardly claim to be historically authentic because what it alternates— between the alienating irony and the cohesive empathy—depends on the eventual return to the contemplating self. The subject thus revamps itself as the absolute consciousness that finally rescues the splintered half of the self; the alienated hero in “Sinking” is one such example. Here irony might even serve Yu Dafu in good stead: autobiographical or otherwise, the narratorial stance of the story creates the hero as a divided self, parades its ailments through the lens of irony, and then recuperates it via empathetic seeing. So the questions still remain: could the subject of the May Fourth Culture descend from his pedestal of modern enlightenment and become a particular, situated being in ordinary life while cherishing the same rightness and authority? Or is it ever possible for the subject to identify with the multitudes without wrenching them away from their lowly but sentient contexts? Pursuing the same line of thinking, other critics have brought us closer home: in his group portrait of Yu’s romantic generation, Leo Ou-fan Lee focuses on the central dilemma menacing their personal commitment to social conscience: on the one hand, they preen on their inflated postures of literary genius and glamour, and extol their intellectual alienation from the mundane multitudes. By doing so they in fact turn literature into a field of force to cure their political impotence. On the other, they cannot but respond to the Leftists’ call to harness their elitist impulses, be the voice of moral conscience, and align themselves with the vanguard role of the Proletariat with whom they are out of touch.19 The intellectuals fashion a narcissistic image of the peculiar and spontaneous self. They begin, according to Lee, with a vengeful intent of pitting the individual against the state and the society; but end up by adopting this magnified persona in literature, and yielding their individuality to the empowering voice of the vanguard and the prophet of a radical ideology. Thus, under the aegis of political forces, they allow their conscience to be completely seized by a 18

19

Theodore Huters, “Lives in Profile: On the Authorial Voice in Modern and Contemporary Chinese Literature,” From May Fourth to June Fourth: Fiction and Film in Twentieth-Century China, eds. Ellen Widmer and David Der-wei Wang (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 271. Leo Ou-fan Lee, The Romantic Generation of Modern Chinese Writers (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1973), Chapter 13, passim.

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c­ ollective mandate and accept a denial of their historicized identity. This lack of genuine individuality is seized on by another critic Mau-sang Ng. Ng has also laid emphasis on the social responsibility of the romantic writers, and he too suggests that Yu was made to feel acutely his humiliated dignity, morbid nostalgia and despair precisely because his wisdom, energy and talent were incapacitated by the castrated image of a weak China. In sum, both critics have pinpointed the enigmatic states of mind that caused Yu to abstain from what could become a correct diagnosis of his personal crises or an affirmation of his personal strengths. It is precisely such mental enigma, we agree, that captivates Yu in exploring subject/object relationship in the rest of his literary endeavor. The story of “Sinking” pinpoints Yu in a ripe moment of gearing up for multiple crises. First of all, the inward turn of his consciousness enables him to lift himself out of his immediate historical context and locates him in the ­community of noumenal subjects with whom he now shares the pleasure of fulfilling his subject (for subjectivity acknowledged by him and the like-minded romantic poets has become their own ends). But his sense of fulfillment lies not in completing the “continuum” between the polarized selves (lesser vs. greater) but in arching over the “split” between the real and ideal worlds and entering into an intersubjectivity of free and equal spirits in abstraction from his depressing reality. Here we witness a typical Kantian shift from ontological concerns to aesthetic judgments, which is an intellectual magnet too strong for Yu to resist. With a sleight of hand, his inner angst of failing to find reason to legitimate his existence (e.g. his feeling of being a futile Zarathustra) sends him scurrying for empathy and assurance amidst romantic poets.20 Yet in making such a shift, we also notice, Yu not only pursues a Kantian move to accentuate aesthetics as a way to mediate between domains of pure metaphysics and practical reason, but resonates with Chinese literati’s penchant to seek the company of kindred spirits when falling out of political fortunes with the Imperial court. Well-schooled in Chinese literary classics, especially classic poetry, Yu’s bond with the kind of poetic conscience upheld by traditional Chinese poets remains vibrant and strong. His adaptation of biographical fragments of Huang Zhongze in a short story entitled “Caishiji” (The Cliff of Colored Rocks) proves the point. Presenting autobiography via biography, Yu posited so much of his own feelings and life experience that the protagonist’s life reads like another version of “Sinking.” Being also pale and fragile in built, Huang Zhongze resembles Yu mostly in literary talent and personal eccentricity. So deeply assured of his own 20 Yu, Wenji, 1: 21.

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poetic genius, his romantic temperament and his impeccable moral nature, Huang feels repulsed by the banality of other poets, alienated from his patron and subjected to unending mood-swings, distress and hypochondria. He is constantly driven to the verge of despair and grief that he once seeks his spir­ itual companion of the great Tang poet Li Po over the latter’s grave-mound, or frequently resorts to confiding to his literati friend Hong Zhicun over excessive wine-drinking through long, sleepless nights. It is only in the company of these like-minded individuals that Huang can enjoy moments of warmth, peace and relief for his much tormented heart and feels genuine empathy and understanding for his fragmented self-identity. Yu’s portrayal of such characters affords crucial testimony to his own intense yearning for empathy of kindred spirits. His identifying with Huang creates an aestheticized version of his self while Huang’s pursuit of true self-identity is extended via him over temporal gap and historical change. This awareness of being an equal among imaginative, creative and insightful individuals has provided the Chinese literati with a most enduring hold on a collective identity—a kind of trans-historical ­subjectivity—against the ephemeral dynastic reigns. Furthermore, Chinese poetics, best illustrated by the tradition of lyrical sentiments, lends itself to the making of common quasi-laws of taste and feelings and the rallying of generations of practitioners into an affective community (Gemeinschaft) on the strength of intersubjectivity. This communal bond is what spurs Huang to seek out the dead as his soul mates or to blend his identity into that of his confidant.21 It has also prompted Yu to ignore temporal gaps and cultural differences in search of identity based on reciprocity of sentiments, tastes and interests. The aesthetic as a mediated form of cognition does not quite amount to a universal claim; nevertheless, it has instituted a cognitive structure analogous to that of reification on the basis of a pure subject/object relationship—what Charles Taylor calls the “transcendental” condition.22 Taylor recognizes the plausible condition of being transcendental mainly because it can be a form of immersing one’s identity in a given community, albeit an ahistorical one. But that is not all. In Taylor’s view this must stand in close relation to a “primitive” form of immersion with a particular historical community, for his (Taylor’s) ultimate concern rests with concrete human existence as the “inescapable frameworks.”23 This turns out to be an untenable relationship for the New Culture intellectuals. They were faced with a social environment deeply fractured by class 21 Ibid., 1: 209. 22 Taylor, Sources of the Self, Part 1, 1. 23 Ibid.

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d­ ivisions resulting from social, educational and economic inequality. Though in accord with their own social standings, the elitist standard of their transcendental immersion is decidedly at odds with an immersion in the historical ­particulars of other classes. But what challenged them is precisely that: besides themselves, they were also granting mostly “subjective” rights, i.e. equality, freedom and happiness, to the unlettered class who had been victimized by an exploitative and suppressive social system. To achieve cognitive intersubjectivity with these individuals is out of the question; even in the diluted form of poetic aesthetics they (the educated elite and the commoners) shared little, if any, common ground in terms of taste, sensibility and interest. To a large extent, I believe, these intellectuals like Yu Dafu were aware of such incompatibility. However, one aspect of the aesthetic still seemed, to them at least, to hold out promise of shared understanding regardless of social difference: their common emotive capacity that is exercised, not according to cognitive reasoning, but on a more intuitive, affective level. It was in intuitive empathy that these intellectuals thought they had found the link of shared humanity in its most elemental form. Thus, empathetic expressions of the I-subject toward someone (usually from the illiterate underclass) became the order of the day for most May Fourth realists struggling to close the cognitive gap. If we now pause to relate the two versions of the subject as shown in the two stories (they are perfectly comparable because both reveal an autobiographical slant), we are apt to detect an intriguing back-and-forth movement in the author’s focus on the relationship between the authorial subject and his object: he is initially preoccupied with disentangling the protagonists’ inner chaos but soon turns them outward for objects (e.g. poets, geisha girls and nature) to alleviate their internal burden. Yet in the end we find him guiding the narrative gaze to the subjects themselves and then turn further inward as he concludes their self-motivated search in vain.24 The return to the subjective “I” and to his inner world raises unsettling questions about the efficacy of the Kantian shift to aesthetics. What does the subject rely on in his empathetic intuition? How does he convince himself that this rather emotive way of knowing the other is sure to arouse compassion and harmony in one another? And if we push it further, is intuitive empathy really a better solution than the abstract and conceptual approach?

24

With this comment, I am referring to the hero’s urge to drown himself in the sea in “Sinking” as well as his yearning to become one with his confidant in “The Cliff of Colored Rock” Cai shiji 彩石矶 is a short story about the Qing poet Huang Zhongze’s life as a selfexiled drifter.

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The Aesthetic as Ethical Fashioning?

Kant’s use of the aesthetic to negotiate between the absolute impersonal “­subject” and the subject of particular, embodied individuality seems to be legitimated by his belief that aesthetic judgments are “impersonally personal.”25 When facing the beautiful, Kant explains, every subject becomes the bearer of an absolute, total feeling while at the same time it remains immersed in its specific and varied existence. The subject is thus straddled across the abstract cognitive realm and his individual reality by letting his sensory faculties respond to some feeling triggered off within rather than identify with some such property in others or in the external world. In a way, this is the same as saying that the beautiful is “an absolute impersonal rightness” from one standpoint and that it is beautiful simply because the subject “happens to feel” that way about it from another standpoint.26 But to Kant that “happens to feel” does not just happen; it in fact is inescapable that the subject feel so as, according to Eagleton, the intuitive responses arise from those physical conditions in which we are embedded as individuals—the cognitive structure formed out of our sense organs. Eagleton seizes on Kant’s latent logic that since we possess them in common, our feeling capacities should be identical and immutable, impinging directly on our ability to confer on universality of a sort. He further elaborates: Part of what we enjoy in the aesthetic, . . . is the knowledge that our very structural constitution as human subjects predisposes us to mutual harmony. It is as though prior to any determinate dialogue or debate, we are always already in agreement, fashioned to concur; and the aesthetic is this experience of pure contentless consensus where we find ourselves spontaneously at one without necessarily even knowing what . . . we are agreeing over.27 What Eagleton captures in this passage is the key phrase “as though”—it is as though our intuitive feelings are invariably fashioned by our sensory and intuitive powers, and as though such fashioning never fails to induce our intrinsic 25

Ted Cohen and Paul Guyer, “Introduction,” in Cohen and Guyer eds., Essays in Kant’s Aesthetics (Chicago: 1982), 12. 26 For the following points, I am indebted to Terry Eagleton whose chapter “The Kantian Imaginary” in The Ideology of the Aesthetic (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990) puts my critique on the right track. But I have also found some of his comments, such as the analysis of the class-society, sidestepping the main issues he deals with. 27 Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic, 96. The emphasis is the author’s own.

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willingness to reach out and identify with each other. It thus implies that aesthetic properties do not lie so much in the object as in the emotive capacities of the subject. We now need to take a more rigorous look at how “as though” function. If we trace its metaphoric lineage to semantics, we find that semantics offers a modality for the metaphor surprisingly analogous to a cognitive scheme. Metaphoric usage usually begins with the abolishing of the subject’s literal reference and, by means of infusing the subject with the object, it then raises the signifying process to a higher mode of imaginary reference.28 What gives the “as-though” metaphor its evocative power is, according to Paul Ricoeur, its ability to orient itself “toward a dimension of reality that does not coincide with what ordinary language envisages under the name of natural reality.”29 In other words, it is crucial for the user of a metaphor to yield the vehicle (the literal meaning) to the tenor (the imaginary meaning). It is this abolition-­ infusion process that enables Ricoeur to perceive an underlying link between the act of “being-as” or “seeing-as” and the reality to be and to be seen. More importantly he declares that such a semantic fusion hinges on an “intuitive relationship” which the user of metaphor innately masters.30 In sum, Ricoeur metaphorizes the whole mode of being through the dynamic of “as though”: as we judge by the way we feel, our being-in-the-world can be intermingled with the “as though” world of aesthetic experience. In light of the “as though” modality, we might view Yu Dafu’s earlier deployment of the narrative focus as his way to implement this “as though” ­conversion. In Yu’s masochistic loathing of the I-subject’s body and its plight, we could detect a candid intent to call into question the relevance of a Chinese intellectual’s literal context vis-à-vis his faith in a morally elevated mode of existence. But Yu’s real aim, if viewed by way of Eagleton’s critique of Kant, lies in directing aesthetic fulfillment back to the intellectual himself—to his role in ­reflecting the socially divided world through the subject’s own inner fragmentation. Thus, Yu’s thematic concern with self-exposure and inner conflicts can be seen as an unsparing diagnosis of the intellectuals’ dissociated sensibilities, and a deliberation of what means there are to help them reflect the social disintegration through their own bodies and their sensibilities. Thanks to Eagleton’s interpretation, we realize that the narrator of Yu’s two short stories has indiscernibly led us away from a quest for conceptual truth and finality to an exercise of intuitively empathetic responses, trying to turn our fallible 28

Read Paul Ricoeur’s explication on the edifying function of the metaphoric meaning in Chapter III “Study 7,” of The Rule of Metaphor: Multi-disciplinary Studies of the Creation of Language, trans. Robert Czerny (Toronto: The University of Toronto Press, 1977), 216–56. 29 Ricoeur, The Rule of Metaphor, 211. 30 Ibid., 212.

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c­ ognitive grid into a harmonizing and ameliorating agent. In “Sinking” Yu is more inclined to involve his protagonist in a quest for the conceptual meaning of the modern subject, and his portrayal of him reifies such objects as body, gender, and nationalism. In “The Cliff of Colored Rocks,” by contrast, the hero withdraws into himself to be guided solely by poetic outpourings, emotional ­torments and sympathetic company. But if that were the outcome, we would be merely half way through with the search for a way out of the matrix of inner consciousness. Eagleton has indeed given us the benefit of looking at ways of observing others and the surrounding world in an embodied yet non-coercive and spontaneous manner. But we are none the wiser as to how the embodied self identifies with the other, that is to say, whether by virtue of intuitive empathy it still runs the risk of intimating a quasi-conceptual scheme of harmony, order and centrality. This is where even Eagleton’s critique falls short: we discover that he has not examined the autoletic nature of the self’s infusion with others (even though he is now equipped with an embodied, perspectival knowledge). He has rightly taken note of the importance of “reciprocity of affective and intuitive reactions” among the feeling subjects without specifically spelling out the workings of this reciprocal relationship. While he has vaguely hinted that the subject can “put himself into the place of other subjects,” the next logical step for Eagleton to take is to judge “from the standpoint of a universal subjectivity.” What goes on between the one and the other is bypassed by a leap of faith. So what he seems to reject at first—the plausibility of an inner self working to objectify all phenomenal reality—not only remains intact but is somewhat fortified by way of his own criticism. What Eagleton fails to unpack is Kant’s presumption that the key function of aesthetic experience is for the reunited subject to willingly bracket out his personal aversions, bias and eccentricity, so that when aroused by beauty or pity, he is left only with a “non-coercive” urge to put himself in the place of all other human beings. For despite this “contentless consensus,” we are, however, still faced with an old paradox—the same paradox Friedrich Schiller foresaw centuries ago: the inner cosmos of the individual subject is still segmented by the strife between his intellect and affect. Schiller then could not but lamely arbitrate: “The interest he [the subject] takes in it is quite simply either a moral or a material interest; but what precisely it ought to be, namely aesthetic, that it certainly is not.”31 Schiller’s grappling with the paradox anticipates that of Yu Dafu in his own theoretical venture.

31

Friedreich Schiller, Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Men, trans. Elizabeth Wilkinson & L. A. Willoughby (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967), 158–59.

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In a critical essay entitled “Wen yi Shang jian shang zhi Pian’ai Jia zhi,” (‘The Affektionswert in Literary Appreciation,’ 1923), Yu finds himself mulling over whether one should be subsumed by beauty with the self “clean forgotten” or one should be self-directed in experiencing beautiful objects.32 He falters because he has as yet to sort out his theoretical lineage with Lipps or with Schopenhauer. He first agrees with Schopenhauer that one attains aesthetic joy when truly free of one’s intellectual will or his/her subjective desire, and that his/her sense of selfhood must be entirely absolved and transposed by the object of beauty. Yet when he elaborates Lipps’ notion of Einfuhlung, he seems increasingly convinced that objects cannot be aesthetically alive unless they provide one with an “objective correlative,” and that all such interactions are the active projection by the subject’s self onto the objects. Yu further explicates: The appreciation of art objects requires that we project our subjective will into the objects proper. It is not to let the subjective will be annihilated, but to enable it to live and act within the objects, only by doing that can the proper function of aesthetic appreciation be completed.33 艺术品的赏鉴，要把我们的主观，参入于对象之中，不使我们 的主观消灭，而使我们的主观在对象内生活着，活动着，方能 完成赏鉴的本职。 The philosophical jargons notwithstanding, what Yu tries to convey here is apparently the self’s ability to establish certain rapport with the object by fusing itself with it. But doing so does not automatically incite the subject to let whatever aesthetic effects out there surface within, still less actively reflect on them; if anything, it would as soon cause the subject to immerse the object in its own subjective will. Yu is hereby toeing a precarious line: he must resist the temptation to allow the absolute will to subsume the subject’s self from one side; he must on the other side watch for possibility of the self-oriented subject take possession of other objects. Being perhaps aware of this, Yu attempts later in the essay to relate his Affektion to popular and practical sentiments or opinions, realizing 32 Yu, Wenji, 5: 159. Even without him giving the reference, it is highly probable that Yu Dafu is under the influence of Wang Guowei who defines the perception of the beautiful as illustrated by primarily two mental states: the one within the aestheticized subject (the self) and the other without. See Ban Wang’s insightful comments in The Sublime Figure of History, 17–54. 33 “Wen yi Shang jian shang zhi Pian’ai Jia zhi” 文艺赏鉴上之偏爱价值. Ibid., 5: 160.

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that it is not sufficient that the subject be situated in its affective corpus while the object remains an empty vessel awaiting anyone’s occupancy. The object must be on a par with the subject so that there will be genuine reciprocity of feelings among one another. The subject’s abolition-infusion with the other is precisely the gist of his “Chun feng chen zui de wan shang” (Intoxicating Spring Nights), another tale of Yu’s intricate metamorphosis of the self and the other.34 The protagonist in this short yet captivating tale is cast in the first person. The I-subject is by all accounts a far more matured person than his previous protagonists: he writes and translates but leads a life no better than those hack writers he despises: he is down and out in the slums of Shanghai. He has lately moved to share lodging with a woman who fits a perfect portrait of the other: Ermei (Second Sister) was born poor and has no education; she works in the sweatshops of a tobacco factory all day, earns pitifully little and barely makes ends meet; yet she is good-natured, wary of evil designs and sympathetic to the distressed. Above all, she has the most down-to-earth sense of uprightness, sensitivity and justice to prevail against heavy societal odds. All these qualities are what Taylor has characterized as “constitutive concerns” that will mirror the protagonist’s own lack of them and countervail the selfenclosed and introspective nature of his identity. As the plot unfolds, the subject “I” finds himself holed up in a den of despair, idling days away without facing his problems of unemployment, poor health and fading artistic inspiration. He meets Ermei, the woman tenant who cares for him, feeding him and warming his downcast soul, and gradually uplifts him out of that den of despair. He regains his appetite, sleep and, more importantly, the lost sense of his self while listening to her life story of misery and struggle. His weakened body replenishes with vigor during his nightly strolls out in the streets and his insulated heart thaws out in the warmth of her wifely care and advice. In the end, he gets his translation work published and earns enough to pay for his rent, food and clothing. To crown it all, he is rewarded with the most sincere and nurturing companionship from Ermei. The upshot of the story is self-evident: the hero is released from an imprisonment of self-isolation, redeems his abandoned manhood and faces the dehumanizing world of reality with more poise and sensibility. All this the I-subject has accomplished through the edifying agency of Ermei. She plays in turn the roles of his Doppelgänger and the feminine other whose fate it is to diagnose the pathological state of his psyche and physique, release his quelled sense of a wholesome and integral self and get him back on the track of recovery. Once done with it, she exhausts 34

Chun feng chen zui de wan shang 春风沉醉的晚上. Ibid., 1: 237–51.

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the usefulness of her roles and becomes virtually non-existent in the mind of the protagonist. What is even more revealing is how the story stages his den-like lodging as a site where the I-subject’s immersion in a different, even hostile social milieu unfolds. His narratorial authority, predisposed at the outset, begins to abate much like the dispossession of the literal reference at the outset of a semantic transfer. It turns to embrace Ermei as a splintered self as well as an imminent other. When they meet for the first time, the “I” character hears ascending footsteps and what he sees (vaguely because he incidentally suffers from failing sight) is his own shadow looming large from where the sound comes from. Only after he gazes into the shadow intensely for a while does he perceive the figure of Ermei: “a pale round face and half of a slender female form finally came into view.”35 This is a scene saturated with perceptual transference and cognitive displacement. Ermei’s muted entrance is displayed in such a slowmotion sequence as if she is beckoned forth in her being by the protagonist from his own shadow. Further, she does not and will not speak a single word with him during and after the brief encounter, and all this prompts him to probe at her from outward features to inner thoughts: From this brief meeting with her, I felt—I could not say why—that she was a girl very much to be pitied. The high-bridged nose, the pale oval face, the short slender body—all seemed to call in a special way for sympathy.36 The subjective authorship of this portrait is apparent: it is he who “feels” struck by her need of compassion and such a state of his mind gives rise to her outward figure that answers faithfully to it. Thus far, the immersion of the “I” in the estranged other has been merely his subjective projection. What follows is centered around Ermei as the threshold to cross in the subject’s conversion from the intellect to the affect, from the solipsistic to the social and communal. Ermei as an independent being begins with her verbal ability to express her feelings and retell her own past. Yet apart from the scattered few words she actually utters, her life experience is mostly narrated by the “I” through a blending of both the speaker and the listener. Interestingly enough, it is the linguistic exchange between them that initiates and completes the “as though” function: it brings sense back to the effaced identity and 35 36

Ibid., 1: 239. The translation is by George A. Kennedy quoted here from Straw Sandals, ed. Harold R. Isaacs (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1974), 70. Ibid., 1: 70–71.

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atrophied body of the I-narrator dislodged earlier from his immediate existence. It is as if he has been exiled to some lifeless void via self-inflicted dislocation, and only now does he return to breathe the life-giving air of his live being: . . . I had been growing more lifeless day by day until I had almost completely lost track of such thoughts as “Who am I”? “What are my present circumstances”? “Do I feel happiness or sorrow”? Her question brought vividly to mind the various stages in my half year of misery, . . . 37 The catalyst to this sudden outburst of self-awareness is of course Ermei’s questions: “Where is your home, and why are you not with your family?” In a sense, her role is intimated by what these questions purport to investigate. “At the sight of me,” the narrator would soon tell us, “she came to think of me also as a homeless vagrant. Almost at once an expression of loneliness surges up her face. With a faint sigh, she said: ‘Oh, you are just like me, aren’t you?’ ”38 The conversation reminds us of Taylor’s stress on language’s ability to weave “webs of interlocution” that enmeshes its speakers in inescapable, shared frameworks of basic concerns. Thus, it marks not only the protagonist’s admission to the alien environment of his other, but his acceptance that Ermei is now at one with him on equal footing. More significantly, if his world now resonates with Ermei’s embodiment of social divisions and fragmentation, it ought also to reciprocate with a comparable act of problematizing his inner world in a similar fashion. He now entrusts it to Ermei to perform this one crucial function: she is, in their de facto husband-wife cohabitation, to assume the self-styled tutor of moral conscience who guards against any remotely possible signs of doing injustice to the moral integrity of their common selfhood. As it happens, she discovers his habit of roaming about the streets at night and suspects him of joining the street gangs in burglary and other felonies. Ermei embodies their shared sense of decency and beckons him to act upon his innocent instinct and confess his wrong­ doing. Although this turns out to be a false alarm, it does, when the fog is lifted, reflect upon his virtuous nature, which in turn confirms and brightens the hero’s own being: “When, sobered by reason, I reopened [my eyes]; I found everything about me suddenly brighter than before.”39 And, having brought out the very best in him under the circumstances, and once the “I” reclaims, if only gingerly, a new entry into the daylight world, Ermei in turn is shown to be 37 38 39

Ibid., 1: 74. Ibid., 1: 242. Ibid., 1: 82.

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judgmental and fallible and finally disappears into a mere flash amid his nebulous thoughts all directed to his own survival. Nonetheless, the I-subject’s perception of his concrete existence has changed; with a new sense of immediacy, he notices, for instance, evidence of social polarity in slums juxtaposed with foreign mansions, in itinerant Russian prostitutes singing in brightly-lit, music-drenched rich houses. What used to be the contrasting ways and values of life Ermei personally brought into his existence he now can intuitively discern. Indeed, he has assimilated as part of his affective constitution Ermei’s alienated world of the illiterate underclass, which adduces, to evoke Eagleton’s term, a “fashioning” predisposing him to moral rightness and harmony. Reflecting Yu’s own state of mind, the I-subject has proved that intuitive empathy has borne the brunt of inimical social relationships on the strength of emotive capacities. In addition, he has made a significant move from the aesthetic to the ethical, affecting the authority of some kind of “the ethic of the aesthetic.”40 In retrospect, Yu Dafu’s self-problematized narrator has indeed crossed the threshold of psychic adolescence when compared with his oedipal innuendoes in “Sinking.” With his free sprawling inner consciousness, the protagonist in that story is spurred on by his possessive instinct to relegate his emotive powers to the single function of devouring or being devoured by the female body. It does not, however, embolden him enough to have a face-to-face encounter with the live person. We may recall in his voyeuristic act earlier how a mere sneak-peek view of female nudity would instantly fill him with breathless bliss while the thought of facing the bathing Japanese girl would baffle and paralyze him. The description of the scene is all about his guilt, fear and other confused thoughts of self-incrimination instead of his possibly aroused sexuality. That perhaps argues forcefully that his voyeuristic act is initiated by a ­curious conceptual embodiment and he craves to objectify nudity as a graspable object. For this reason, therefore, his possessive drive relates equivocally to that of the pre-mirror-stage child who projects his desire on anything other than his own unconscious. The narrator “I” resembles the child psychically but does so for a different reason: the child behaves so simply because he is barely aware where his physical being ends and bodies of other beings begin; whereas the mature “I” tries to disown his body—one heavily fettered by cultural limits and 40

I have here used a concept invented and elaborated by Ian Hunter whose ideas about “the practice of the self,” “the use of ethic techniques,” etc., have enlightened me. For more details, see Ian Hunter, “Aesthetics and Cultural Studies” in Cultural Studies, ed. Lawrence Grossberg, et al. (London: Routledge, 1992), 347–367.

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curbs—by dealing to it such masochistic penalties as masturbation, feverish drinking and delirious sex (it is not by accident that he seldom feels so intensely and expresses so openly his ribald encounters with middle-aged women). In other words, his yearning to blend into the bodily existence of the female other, especially maiden nudity, is instigated not so much by sexual possession as by his vehement desire to undo a regimentalized body. Ironically, the lack, or at least the illusion of a lack, created out of such self-denial of the body spurs his mind to repeatedly create the painful need of finding a bodily residence. And in such incessant unmaking and making of the need for body his yearning for satisfaction is never but occasionally quenched. By letting his self be bodied forth through the empathized other, as in the case of his intuitive fusion with Ermei, he has toddled away from the cradling lap of inner consciousness, revived his own affective abilities, immersed himself in social “inferiors” who would have otherwise been kept out of his way, and in so doing he becomes capable of forging ties with others and his need to depend on them. Nevertheless, empathetic intuition still induces him to desire being one with Ermei and it is now certain that his upswing impulse to embrace Ermei is sexually motivated. He confesses that he is, but is cautioned by reason to stop in time before committing the crime of periling a virgin’s innocence.41 His being rather forthright signifies a different kind of possessive instinct: he has accepted his bodily being and can better understand his desires and impulses within its limits; so it would be more cogent to think of his sexual urge as his penchant to see Ermei as an extended, varied or edified adjunct of his self. Yet what he does to fend off his hormonal spur is to abruptly recoil into his enclosed self and reopen the chasm between social decorum and intuitive empathy. If the concluding portrait of our hero at the end of the story is edified, it is again enframed by solipsistic, conceptual thoughts that begin to drift away from the squalid slums where numerous Ermeis remain toiling in poverty and misery.

Formulating the Affective

But we need go beyond this. If we look more closely at the intuitive empathy of Yu’s I-subject, we might detect traces of what impacts the interior of his emotive world and gain access to the causes behind the withdrawal of his self from the integrated persona. And one way to do this is to further dissect Yu’s immersion of his self in objectified selves like Ermei, especially to see whether the 41 Yu, Wenji, 1: 250.

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way they comport with each other’s existence lends itself to a concession to the conceptual hold on the hegemonic subject. We know from his literati upbringing that his lyrical bent has all along been live and potent. It therefore remains to be seen if and how his lyrical sensitivity affixes a télos of self-­ realization in the company of the objectified other. For that purpose no better clue has been provided than what Yu himself states on this issue. In a literary essay entitled Jie shao yi ge wen xue de gong shi (Introducing a literary formula, 1924), Yu surprised his Creationist colleagues with a tenet for literary creation: “No literature in the world can escape being governed by the following formula: F + f.”42 The formula seems rather far-fetched of his known assertions on individuality unless and until one scrutinizes its full meaning. Yu does not hesitate to flesh it out for us: he tells us that F stands for the conceptual aspect of literature whereas f its emotional aspect. In the former he posits the central concept, a kind of extrinsic, impersonal ideas and laws which precondition the writer’s mental state of being before and during writing. By the latter he designates simply the unmediated flow of private, spontaneous feelings out of the writer’s creative mind when aroused by images and situations. The contrast between these two apparently suggests a third, which merges the two ­components into a harmonious whole and, according to Yu, offers us inspired ­literature par excellence. To us, however, there is more to it than that: is “F” simply taken to be the precept ontologically prior to and externally imposed on the individual writer? A great many Chinese critics apparently think it is and regard it as Yu Dafu’s unique feat—his reconciliation of zhi (intellect) and qing (affection)—in ­revolutionary romanticism.43 Such being the case, the companion notion of “affection” is naturally reduced to a secondary, supporting partnership and is left with all but the duty to affix compatible emotions to the prefixed idea. While it is true that this chiefly extrinsic, extra-personal source of judgment has as yet remained an idealistic goal for Yu’s rebellious heroes, his center of gravity may well have rested elsewhere: with the more inwardly motivated nature of his self. This can be seen in Yu’s earlier theoretical writings on the nature of poetry. In a piece that might pass for a master piece in close reading, “Shi Lun” (On Poetry), Yu undertakes to enumerate the various kinds of affections that poetry comes to depend on. He defines the nature of poetry as composed primarily of 42 “Jie shao yi ge wen xue de gong shi” 介绍一个文学的公式. Ibid., 5: 223. 43 Zhi 智; qing 情. Wang Zhaowen, for one, comes to such a conclusion in his essay on Yu’s short story “Chi Guihua,” collected in Yu Dafu yan jiu zi liao 郁达夫研究资料 (Collected Research Writings on Yu Dafu) eds. Chen Zishan and Wang Zili (Hong Kong: San lian shu dian in collaboration with Hua cheng chu ban she, 1986). Ibid., 5: 428–446.

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“affections,” which he divides into two major types: Emotion and Sentiment.44 While the former designates all those feelings, desires and inclinations, he explains, the latter signifies exclusively those aroused by one’s intellect (i.e. cognitive and conceptual knowledge). When he lists out their specifics, ­however, his categories begin to get fuzzy: we witness a blurring of semantic boundaries between intellect and affection (as in the case of “sentiment”) due rather to Yu’s singularly personal understanding of poetic feelings. For instance, when he elaborates “social emotions” Yu seems to respond to Lord Shaftsbury’s emphasis that the subject is able to emanate sympathy inwardly thanks to some external objects, scenes or events which are not in and of themselves emotionally colored. This casts a shade of redundancy on Yu’s explication of “Egoistic emotions” (read self-pity) as feelings chiefly emanated for self-serving purposes. As a result, he fails to clarify what makes social emotions social. The answer probably lies, as Aristotle stated ages ago, in the fact that taking pity on one’s self (because what is true of one object may be true of a great many others like him) leads the subject to regard himself as one of a group, a community of subjects onto whom he projects pity and concern. Hence, the socially interrelated nature of emotions. In addition, Yu is unable to articulate that the act of associating feelings on a unified basis presumes certain conceptual judgment. The neglect of such connections, subtle yet effective, is what causes him to generalize about “taste”—what he calls “aesthetic sentiment”—without ­indicating its nature of being a quasi-conceptual knowledge (involving both cognitive and affective reactions) that not only helps to blend the aesthetic with the ethical in terms of “sentiment,” but in general integrates intellect with affection. As we shall see later, his neglect to focus on the overlapping of certain affections with elements of intellect will pose problems for him in defining literature as a whole: it posits unexpected flexibility as well as ambiguity. True to his temperament, Yu has sought to valorize the affective faculties in order to turn them into the breeding ground for human judgment of ethical weight. But he is also compelled to resolve how the self can freely discharge his emotions with a desirable purposiveness: a kind of heuristic sentiment—in part emotional, in part conceptual—that coerces spontaneous emotions and aesthetic sentiments in unison to bear on a narrow voluntarism. We find him trying to implant aim, order and wholeness into the strictly voluntarist in pure lyric poetry (such as those of Shelley and Li Qingzhao cited by Yu) which is presumably composed of free, impromptu feelings as they literally come 44

Shi lun 诗论. The English terms actually appearing in the text are Yu’s choice of words. Ibid., 5: 206–207.

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r­ ushing through the pen. Despite the poets’ lack of evident cause or motivation (i.e. lacking a conceptual underpinning), Yu argues, the affections they display with valor and candor can be appreciated and immortalized by (1) readers who happen to have tasted exactly the same feelings; (2) sensitive readers who will on their own strive to recapitulate the specific social and historical circumstances facing the poets that triggered off such emotive ruptures; (3) interpretive-minded readers who simply conjure up a new yet apt conceptual premise and tailor these feelings to fit alien meanings. It is not hard for us to conclude that Yu has perceptibly granted the origin of pitiful and caring feelings to the sensitive will of the subject (e.g. the reader). This he made possible by stressing the fact that feelings are never devoid of either experiential relevance or personal psychic coloring. It is indeed true, it follows, that either the writer or the reader, when engulfed in feelings, is anchored in a given historical context. Nevertheless their feelings and sentiments are more aptly generated from an internalization of external, unfeeling circumstances. More significantly, the writer or the reader can enact such affections by ascribing them to similar objects, images and events by way of conveying states of their internal being. When, for instance, reading Li Qingzhao, a ci poem giving vent to her unceasing melancholy, Yu was perceptive enough to decipher the woman poet’s soul-wrenching anguish for the departed husband and a scarcely requited wedlock.45 To him Li’s feelings, far from being the mere Wu bing shen yin (Groaning while not being sick) are the direct and palpable expressions of her unique internal being: the poetic ­persona voicing these sentiments brings into life a self that is actualized and gratified through an evocation (reminiscent of T. S. Eliot’s objective correlative) of the kindred spirit permeating the autumnal scenes of decay and loss—the south-bound flying geese, the fallen yellow flowers and the dripping from the rain-soaked leaves—she witnesses. With the poetic “I” interlocked with the implied author, the image of these evoked scenes attests to a direct communion between the motivated viewer and the observed spectacle of nature, ­forging a tenable relationship between them. It also suggests a constructive way for the author to be empathized into a kindred spirit—an othered “I”— without necessarily being harnessed to a conceptually enclosed subject. Such a reading reminds us of Yu’s juvenile angst early in the story of “Sinking,” and affords further testimony to Yu’s early focus on the individual mind or psyche 45

Li Qingzhao 李清照 (1081–c. 1141) was a woman poet of extraordinary talent in the Song dynasty. She has been especially renowned for her ci 词 poems on life and sentiments of the boudoir setting; for the very reason, she is sometimes faulted for writing poems with little real angst or joy. See the phrase “Wu bing shen yin” 无病呻吟 in the following sentence.

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as the fountainhead of concrete and personal affections. And the built-in télos of the lyrical self—it is concurrently the agent of manifested and transposed ­feelings—is compatible to a determinate and personally accountable environment, projecting for him a tangible and realizable course of self-realization. It is thus to the self’s inner endowments that certain feasible finality and totality are entrusted. So in reflecting his reality, the individual embarks on a teleological cause of self-improvement that is compatible to the télos of ­reason. Not only does this goal dwell inwardly, but so it should be capable of self-­ articulation; the self is now in charge of orienting its own affective faculties to bring about fairness, order and totality before it can ascribe them to the external world. In a manner of speaking, self-realization for an alienated and ­frustrated subject makes it imperative for the self to engage inner reconciliation of conflicting desires, impulses and biases—the internalized forms of an adverse external world. In contrast, in the case of a cognitive subject, secluded by a concept or idea from its inception, the subject is urged to transcend his affections toward an imminent goal sanctified by reason conceptually. He is goal-oriented but detached from any concrete human praxis. He stands little chance of fulfilling it without sacrificing his embodied and historicized being. Despite all this the lure of télos holds out the dream of a higher end in meaning than any other he has ever known. Expectedly, this appeals strongly to Yu Dafu whose mission it is to mediate between the affective and the intellect, but his endeavor can be justified only with some hints at finality and wholeness. This is where ambiguity sets in. What makes it so ambiguous is that Yu’s tentative coupling of the cognitive and emotional “genes,” as seen in his F + f formula, is meant to conceive the subject’s potent intuitive embryo so as to foster the best literary progeny. He now sets out to assuage his divided emotions or unruly inclinations, trying to coerce and refine them by aligning them according an ethical telos. He argues in his literary formula, F + f, that in order to attain a telescopic view of doing good or making sense of one’s life, one must organize his mixed inner affections under the aegis of a jiaodian (rallying sentiment).46 In light of this, F is at once the inner motivation and the ultimate telos while f stands for affections internalized and regulated. Yu further explains: All good and genuine literature is by and large the author’s merging of a great many key affections and forming of another general key sentiment 46 Jiaodian 焦点 is a rather vague term coined by Yu himself. But it is exceptionally useful in this particular context, i.e. affections unleashed in a wave-like process now cresting, now ebbing, result in forward motion after all.

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by means of his own ideal. He should then do all he can to put across this new goal.47 好的真的文学，大抵是集合许多的焦点，用自己的理想，去另 外组织一个总合焦点, 然后将这个新的目标，尽力地描写出来。 Needless to say, in this naïve literary eugenics, Yu lays most hope on the author’s capacity to first internalize and then outgrow one outbreak of emotions after another. The external contexts—they may well include objectified other ­individuals—are like the scene-by-scene drama of life to continuously impregnate the author’s intuitive faculties and deliver consummate emotions. Whereas for the overarching concept (Lixiang), Yu seems to imply, one is obliged to mediate between his voluntarism and the Zeitgeist of historical eras. So on the one hand, one can rely on his intuitive bent to pursue the good, the just and the whole; on the other, one must allow himself to be swayed and shaped in accordance with one’s inescapable milieu. But because the individual (more specifically, the New Cultural activist), as we have indicated earlier, is compelled to abolish his literal references in the form of a denial of his own body, he has to transpose his ostensibly untainted body onto an other—ideally, a kindred soul with an innately endowed body in tune with his/her natural world. For Yu the pattern growing out of this—i.e. incessantly wavering between effecting a denial of his own bodily desires, reconciling with one’s own internal dislocations and projecting its subsequent harmony onto the external world— dissipates what teleological values he originally hoped to attain from a chiefly projectionist view of fulfilling one’s being on the basis of free, spontaneous affections. Indeed, the crisis now lies with the exigency to splinter the innate self and the outer body, forcing them to settle in their respective habitats. Hence, ironically, Yu has to unsettle the “naturally endowed” self from the projectionist Gestalt that merges the world of objects with his experience of it, and begins to insulate it, shape and color it in isolation from his personally accountable locale in being. As a result, Yu’s stories written around this time seem to slip back and forth between the lure of impressionism—the purely subjective and capricious as in “Qing yan” (Pale Smoke)—and the decree of realism— the bluntly sociological reportage as in “Bo dian” (Modest Offerings).48 Imperceptibly but surely, he lets the self of internalized ethical coercion and social teleology proceed side by side with the self of emotionally active 47 Yu, Wenji, 5: 227. 48 Qian yan 青烟; Bo dian 薄奠. These are two short stories written by Yu around this period.

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and wholesome body transfixed in an equally alive and robust world. And the portraits he has configured for the protagonists of these works are restless, introspective, psychically depressing self-portraits juxtaposed with still-lives of idyllic innocence and purity. Likewise, the relationship between the protagonist’s confessional self and the other (including the splintered half of the self) is cast in the pattern of self problematization and self-discipline leading to a positivist coming of age. The narrator—an “I” or a “He”—is now endowed from the outset with moral empathy and openness which ensures him the outcome of an edified or redeemed self before the story ends; or else he proves he is inherently superior and spreads his aura of radiance around so that others are invariably being awakened from their uncouth naїveté and become sophisticated with his counsel; or, if they are innocent by nature, he sees to it that their innocence is preserved while he reaps the benefit of a handy source of intellectual refreshment. In all cases, the protagonist is certain to have his patronizing sense of the self/other relationship confirmed and gratified.

Late-Blooming Selfhood

I will now illustrate Yu’s ethical quandary with the story “Chi Guihua” (Late Blooming Cassias, 1934) in which the protagonist “I” first acquires a mentally framed portrait of an angel-like young female and then seeks to “identify,” albeit in a condescending manner, with her, but he is purified in his courtship with her and her innocence is preserved while offsetting his lewd urges in one way and refining his mind in another. Yu wrote the story in 1932, shortly after he broke up with the Creationists and the Literary Left-wingers at large, at a time when he came close to a drastic turnaround in his career of futile r­ omantic relationships. His writings betrayed simmering thoughts of remorse, penitence and self-immolation; his yearnings verged on those of the idyllic and the recluse. The story of “Late Blooming Cassias” reveals precisely these moods of his. It begins with a letter that immediately relates the protagonist, an I-narrator by the name of Yi Ren, with an other that could easily have been an estranged self. A friend named Weng Zesheng who studied with the narrator in Japan long ago has since returned to his home village near the scenic West Lake in Hangzhou and led a hermit life of quiet and simplicity. Yet what really fascinates us is the fact that Zesheng claims to be the sickly youth in a story entitled “Nanqian” (Moving South, 1923) the I-narrator had earlier written.49 Here Yu’s autobiographical impulse proves too strong to mask the intertextual lineage. 49

“Chi guihua” 迟桂花 was written almost eleven years later than “Nian qian” 南迁; thematically it is usually considered the sequel to the latter.

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It instantly gives away the character of this former fellow student as the incarnate of Yu’s earlier romantic protagonists who idle away and drift in their ­elusive chase of lovers and dreams. Far from being accidental, the resemblance between them in fact cues up the backdrop for the I-narrator’s long journey south (from Beijing) to be reunited with a rogue-turned-hermit self in the former’s spiritual recuperation. The letter reveals something else as well, something far more significant than the reunion of two parted selves. For this quest for individual autonomy and fulfillment cannot get under way without the hero first knowing what end is in sight and how the new self will attain it; in other words, the protagonist has to be motivated, as Yu’s formula demands, by rallying sentiment as the underlying motive of his quest. Yet such a sentiment is only achievable via one’s affective faculties, so he must intuit about a final goal by token of a body with a natural bent to love the good and the just. While his body is deprived of it, he can be immersed in these innately endowed conditions to have access to a sense of a sound body. It is in such a context that the angelic nature of the heroine Weng Lian comes into play. Her child-like innocence and purity of heart, vividly sketched by her brother in the letter, are not merely rustic qualities that the city-slickers may find refreshing and enviable. Such a contrast with city-born and city-bred misses and mistresses is striking, but still falls short because Weng Lian is simply nature herself: everything that a civic education strives to be she already is without having to acquire it. “Her adorable and cute qualities are the true expression of a natural given,” remarks her brother, “but with those modern damsels they are tagged-on fashions.”50 Weng Lian’s mind seems innately disposed to be honest, empathetic and receptive to perceptive range and agility—her memory of fauna and flora, we are told, surpasses an entire volume of natural history the protagonist has read. Her physical being boasts of the best specimen—to the admiring eye of the hero—of health, beauty and vitality that femininity could ever exhibit. Above all, she appears to be blithe and other-worldly, displaying a carefree sense to cruelty, selfish design and indecency that her individual presence seems intrinsically encapsulated in the form of a female saint. In her, to put it succinctly, the idyllic has reached its apogee and through it myriad affections, desires and concepts can be crystallized in her plain and decent daily existence. Likewise her character, once idealized, will be immune to any erosion or diminution that changes in the world might incur. To Zesheng, who instantly identifies with Yi Ren, the hero of “Moving South,” it must have occurred to him what brought sorrow and pain to Yi Ren’s futile courtships with Miss O and Mrs. M 50

Ibid., 5: 334.

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during his wanderings in Japan—they cannot but remind us of the protagonist of “Sinking.” It is between Yi Ren’s thirst for carnal pleasure, his castrated ­dignity and his female companions’ rejection or disloyalty that his search for compassion and harmony has reduced him to nothing but a broken heart. So what Zesheng introduces by way of his sister’s character is not so much the idyllic as a personal trait, but as a frame of mind and a state of being the I-hero can identify and in time internalize. Therefore, Yi Ren’s visit will be infused with emotional urgency and the much needed ethical regeneration. To him, moreover, it is the beckoning of a nascent, collective ethos to an estranged mind. For him to meet Weng Lian is like looking ahead to the destination of his long-awaited return. Thus, even before the parted selves actually reunite, a shared goal gets set thus laying the télos of the hero’s self-education and selfrejuvenation. It is therefore no accident that the hero’s bucolic excursion must enact, as a rite of passage, the purgation of carnal desire and refinement of love between the sexes. The “I” (Yi-ren) at the start of his return journey appears to retain much of his earlier self: he cannot withstand his erotic impulses—the mere fragrance of cassias arouses his possessive sexual instincts. Even when listening attentively to Wen Lian’s folk tales of flora and fauna, he is captivated by her physical appeal and cannot help feeding his eyes hungrily on the girl’s curvaceous ­figure. Once smitten by her “beauty of health and rusticity,” he is inwardly seized by wave upon wave of obscene instincts: “at the sight of her racy thoughts come gushing in my mind,” or “one more look will make me crave for the lewd.”51 What enables him to stifle and reject these carnal impulses is, astonishingly, the girl’s hand touch followed by her calm and reposing gaze that reveals so much of her natural self. If her unruffled appearance reflects her chaste nature, her act to “misread” Yi-ren’s flirtatious reply that “all I am thinking here and now is you!” asserts more emphatically her own way of being; her manner of quietly admitting an other into her confidence without losing her own dignity and tranquility is a sharp reminder of his own brash and amorous tendencies. And this passive aggressive state of mind has finally dawned on Yi-ren and the force of her selfless simplicity and grace has indiscernibly assisted him in purging his bodily yearnings and possessive urges. With tears swelling his eyes, the hero declares that “my heart opens up wide and my sexual impulses are cleansed.”52 In his confession to Weng Lian afterwards, Yi Ren chastises himself for almost committing the hateful crime of soiling her soul as clean and innocent as virgin snow, and expresses his 51 52

Ibid., 5: 340. Ibid., 5: 341.

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g­ ratitude to her for delivering him from his sinful heart, which he rebukes as so unforgivable that deserves a death. He also declares to her his resolve to bring to an end that flawed being he has been so far and beseeches her to disregard his aberrant behavior. All this goes on intimately between them as if they were sharing the occupancy of one mind and one body: he the emotional misfit and the outlaw while she the conciliator and self-regulator; he desiring order and harmony like a sickened body yearning for health whereas she emanating order and harmony by being just herself. This ongoing tussle between the two characters sets the stage for him to propose to her that they will be, not lovers, but sworn brother and sister so as to forge the most loving yet most chaste relationship between the sexes on earth. With this the narrator brings to a close what the name of the flower (as the story is entitled) signifies: “Late Blooming Cassias,” besides being a popular local girl’s name. The belated blossoms, according to folk wisdom, make them superior in fragrance because of their ability to weather more hazards and changes than the seasonal ones. Such a symbolism has more than one meaning: it refers directly to the host Zesheng’s belated marriage; it also stands for Weng Lian’s belated reward of a “true” human love after her years of suffering from injustice. Above all, it suggests that Yi-ren has at last succeeded in merging with an other drastically different from himself in terms of social and ideological makeup. Here is this other who embodies the natural measure of what he ought be ethically and has beckoned to him through a calling from the ­ethical—not unlike Weber’s Protestant sense of being hailed by a higher order of being. When he first set out in search of it he was more or less seized by a personal aesthetic sentiment, viewing her as a childlike beauty defying worldly etiquette and social prejudice while giving vent to his male-centered possessive lust after her. But the ethos of amelioration surging in his effort to deepen the meaning of affective intuition helps diffuse his projectionist fusion with her physiological self and incites him instead to emulate her in all her natural ­attributes. Meanwhile Yi-ren remains committed to the intellectual cause of social advancement, but expands beyond the conceptual limits of his personhood and persists in his self-realization. What seems to be achieved in his immersion with the chaste Wen Lian remains yet to be tested and preserved. But it does lead to Yu Dafu’s success in “intuitive merge” with the ethical rightness via the act of fiction writing, i.e., the shaping of a general sentiment by way of self-revelation and a blending with a common ethical cause. In doing so, meanwhile, it also testifies to the fact that Otherness can be known and valorized, and that the psychic depths of intersubjectivity can be fathomed without having recourse to a hegemonic gaze of an essentialist subject. This

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sheds abundant light on the emblematic moment of the ontological impasse facing Bergson and Chinese writers alike: every time they accord to the human body, especially the human senses, the dubious status as the lone producer of ontological reflections, they need to conflate human physiological capacities with their fluid, heterogeneous psyches so that they can reciprocate and mediate with the phenomenal and dynamic existences of other humans and ­mutually attain an open-ended and fluid interdependence for humanity as a whole.

chapter 5

An Exile of Self-Disinheritance: Revisiting Qu Qiubai In his last words before his execution by the Chinese nationalist troops, Qu Qiubai (1889–1935) confessed that for him to have crossed the threshold of Marxism from his earlier life as an aspiring literati is Li shi de wu hui (A historical mishap). By “mishap” he probably referred to the twists and turns inflicted upon his personal growth which he was neither prepared for before nor tempted to disavow afterwards. These remarks appeared in Qu’s Duoyu de hua (My superfluous words) which capped his lifelong avocation of writing—an extraordinary literary output arguably paralleling that of Lu Xun.1 Although offering few traces of his being “confessional” or “remorseful,” Qu’s essay indexes the ups and downs en route his personal journey for three decades prior to his fatal capture by GMD (the Nationalist) troops in Fujian in 1935. Replete with self-mocking sarcasm, it sheds ample light on aspects of Qu’s writings where his political thinking, philosophical probing and literary impulses would diverge as well as intersect. As a result, his soul-searching narrative was peppered with latent cues and clues, and we are left with the benefits for connecting the dots and detecting a trajectory of Qu’s intellectual growth, which features meandering rites of passage through the terrains of his journalistic stints, political enterprising, labor activism and ideological upstarts and downfall. In a heavily politicized society such as China where personal confessions (especially when made to one’s ideological foes) come automatically under a hurtful and debasing curse; that Qu’s “Confession” can still be publicized as a Leftist, honorable literary work is no mere accident. It bespeaks not so much the CCP’s occasional effort to relax its censor of “dishonorable literature” as the touching appeal of the author’s untainted honesty on the eve of his execution. Perhaps it is for that reason that Qu’s essay, after its ban during the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976), has rekindled the interests of critics, publishers as well as scholars in China since the 1980s. The subsequent decades saw surging tides of more pointed and insightful reflections and critique on Qu’s writing and Qu scholarship, and they have helped us reclaim fresh grounds to make a still stronger case about the vitalist 1 Qu Qiubai, “Duo yu de hua” 多余的话 (My superfluous words) in Zhou Hongxin, Qu Qiubai shi ge qian shi 瞿秋白诗歌浅释 (A Preliminary Interpretation of Qu Qiubai’s Poetry), Guangxi People’s Press, 1981.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2014 | doi 10.1163/9789004265356_006

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thinking as an alternative mode of modernism as well as Qu’s singular ­contribution to it. At the heart of this renewed inquiry is, I believe, the need to decide whether Qu’s misshaped life can be seen as a character anomaly—to be solely attributed to the peculiar traits of his own disposition, psyche and even personality at large—or whether his tenuous growth and premature demise is a reflection of certain intellectual traits emblematic of a paradoxical stand taken by many progressive intellectuals at the time. In his suggestive reading of Zhang Taiyan’s appropriation of the Buddhist non-self for his critique of the modern nation-state, Wang Hui tries to fathom the enigmatic depths of Lu Xun (once a student of Zhang Taiyan) and reveals that the vigor of Lu Xun’s critical sensibility stems largely from a psyche typically fractured between Zai (being present at) and Bu shu yu (not belonging to) the rise of modernist selfhood.2 What makes Lu Xun’s views so enigmatic yet so penetrating is, according to Wang, his ability to embed his critique within a critique, i.e., his uncanny discernment of the pitfalls of modern individualism even while he was promoting it in opposition to the Confucian ethics. It is to that end that Wang drew particular attention to the fact that there existed this so-called “liaison class”— those educated elites whose mind was straddled across both forms of social consciousness, i.e., the traditional and the modern—proved equally ambiguous and combative in their pursuit of modernity. And their lives professed a doubly complex measure that can only be best delineated by the paradoxical plight of Lu Xun and the like-minded characters featured in his short stories. In revealing their paradoxical stand, Wang notes, Even more unfortunate is the fact that even though Lu Xun “does not belong to any of the civilizations or societies, be it traditional Chinese or modern Western, he cannot shake off the inherent ties with either of the two. He therefore is both anti-tradition and remains rooted in the traditional; he promotes the values of the West, but remains vigilant against her menacing intent.3 而更其不幸的是，鲁迅虽然“不属于”其中任何一种文明或社 会，无论是传统中国还是现代西方，但他恰恰又无法摆脱与这 两者之间的内在关联。因此，他既反传统，又在传统之中；他 既倡导西方的价值，又对西方的野心保持警惕。 2 “Zai” 在; “Bu shu yu” 不属于. I refer here to the sections of writing on Lu Xun in Wang Hui’s “The Rise of Individualism and Identity Politics in Modern China” in Wang Hui, Collection of Self-selected Works (Nanning: Guangxi Normal University Press, 1997), 159–175. 3 Wang, Self-selected Works, 160. Translation is by me.

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It should be immediately clear from the above that these vacillating traits are embodied in many of Lu Xun’s protagonists; a case in point is the autobiographical “I” of “A Madman’s Diary.” But their character flaw of wavering and instability has often been regarded as a mere throwback in social trend or a reversal of personal belief; it therefore remains to be seen as to how Wang asserts his view that Lu Xun is anti-modern as well, and that Lu Xun is critically aware of and vocal about the potential pitfalls and detriments of such modern values as individualism, democracy and freedom.

Cosmic Mind: An Ontological Bond Solitary is this life of mine on earth, Happily does my body disinherit any owner. Once the flux of worldly events witnesses my last, Therein I find myself frolicking in oblivion.4 寂寞此人间，且喜身无主。 眼底云烟过尽时，正我逍遥处。

This poem, written in 1935 by Qu Qiubai while in GMD prison, stands in testimony to a retreat in spirit from his ill-advised association with his once-­ brilliant political career as well as his ever futile struggle with partisan politics in China. Its lamenting yet sober tone rings reminiscent of the early poems of Lu Xun with whom Qu enjoyed a most comradely friendship among the Leftwing social commentators in the 1920s. In view of all his innately elitist intellect and literary talent, we are compelled to ask: did Qu embark on the wrong path when he joined the ranks of CCP by way of the Soviet-led Comintern? Was he increasingly mired on the slippery slope of self-delusion as he rose up to the pedestals of the CCP leadership? And unlike Lu Xun who never genuinely wetted his feet in the muddy waters of partisan politics, did Qu stay the course of revolutionary politics till the end thanks to and/or in spite of his sensitive and fragile upbringing? To get to the bottom of these concerns, we are presently reminded of what induced some of the May Fourth intellectuals of Qu’s time to disinherit their professed “I” and surrender it to the hegemonic, unitary subject that purports to realize its ultimate end—the modern state as the prevailing embodiment of the general principle. And a disappointing parallel in self-realization is found in the slippage from a self-mastery of personal 4 Zhou, A Preliminary Interpretation, 239.

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a­ ffections to self-enslavement by a higher mode of power and authority. As we see in the previous chapter, Yu Dafu’s superfluous hero is led to self-mastery by an allegorized body other than his own; by the same token, the I-subject can be emptied of his distinct individuality and empathized into the “master figure” of historical progression. Qu’s elegiac testimony mentioned above should, of course, be read with a grain of salt granting the extreme circumstances: he could after all be reevaluating his own past life for an expedient purpose—merely to make a final plea for life. Even so, we cannot but notice, especially when reading between the lines, traces that reveal a latent trajectory of Qu’s strenuous growth as a Marxist. When May Fourth iconoclasm dawned on Qu in his teens, he had seemed to be more impressed by the chance it held out to him to form a “new world view.”5 He had by then been well-nurtured by his mother to have a precocious knowledge of classical Chinese poetry, but now the onslaught of new ideas jolted him out of the sedate world of poetic transcendence. He admitted: My thoughts were in turmoil then. I had started reading the canons of Laozi and Zhuangzi, to be followed by readings of great saying by the Song Confucians, and then by the Buddhist canons, the Qixing Commentary of the Greater Vehicle. . . . I might have read a few works such as those by August Bebel, The Communist Manifesto, but I could hardly speak of any real understanding of Marxism.6 我那时的思想是很紊乱的: 十六七岁时开始读了些老庄之类的子 书，随后是宋儒语录，随后是佛经、《大乘起信论》。。。。 我固然已经读过倍倍尔的著作，共产党宣言之类，极少几本马 克思主义的书籍，然而对马克思主义的认识是根本说不上的。 It had never occurred to him that he would one day be preoccupied with all kinds of isms in the hope of “bringing order to the state and peace to the whole of mankind.”7 In a less guarded moment, he still avowed that he was by nature an anarchist like his most favorite Russian author Tolstoy, cherishing a kind of “intellectualized” solipsism. However, there was something else he did admit that immediately casts a shadow on his innocent avowal. He declared that he “was rather drawn to the 5 Qu, “My Superfluous Words,” Ibid., 242. 6 Da cheng qi xin jing lun 大乘起信论 (the Qixing Commentary of the Greater Vehicle). Ibid., 254. 7 Zhi guo ping tian xia 治国平天下. Ibid., 255. See also Note 5 in Chapter 2 above.

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ultimate ideal of socialism or communism.” He had always committed himself to an anarchist utopia of a future “classless and stateless society.”8 Now he could see Communism propagated by Marxism promise the same ultimate goal, only to be reached by a different means. What that means entailed—a Marxian dialectic that prophesied eliminating class, state and government with one last “grave-digging” class, i.e. the proletariat—he was at the time barely able to figure out. He was nevertheless quite impressed by the potential of the underprivileged mass to buttress a teleology propagated by Marxism. The individual being, however conditioned by his finite world, was thereby (so he thought) endowed with a liberating force and extended his own being infinitely into a “classless and stateless” future. It was on account of such a vague yet appealing end that, as Qu admitted, he had persuaded himself to forsake the philosophy of Yan shi guan (“misanthropic philosophy”) he had been studying up till the May Fourth Movement in 1919.9 Even without his specifying it, we know for certain that he is here referring to Buddhist philosophy. But how did he get to know that the Marxist dialect could work to close the gap between his solipsistic self and an amplified self of the multitude? What Buddhist thoughts did he believe at first that later persuaded him to see it as incapable of fulfilling such a mission? And was his move from Buddhist faith to Marxist teleology a thorough conversion or a hasty leap of faith? The truth is that it was never clear what concrete notions of Buddhism Qu renounced, just as it was never certain how in particular he was drawn to the prophetic agenda of Marxism. And a quick look at the texts here plunges us into more, not less, confusion. When recalling his most unforgettable three years’ solitary life in Beijing (1916–1919), Qu had this to say: “Taking Pusa xing (Bodhisattvahood) as my outlook of life and the great flux as my sociological perspective has gradually led me onto a bright path.”10 This has pointedly summarized those three years he spent struggling to find himself: on the one hand, he roamed halfway across China so as to quench his thirst for knowledge, especially, Buddhist wisdom on human existence, while on the other, he simply had to wrestle with the sheer need of staying alive—making sure that he got his next meal. His prideful memory of a novice’s gulping down of such Buddhist notions as Bodhisattva’s Ren sheng guan (dharmas, selflessness), Wuchang (sûnyatâ, emptiness) is constantly punctuated by his most mundane anxiety

8 9 10

Ibid., 255. Yanshi guan 厌世观. Qu Qiubai, Qu Qiubai Wenji (Complete Works of Qu Qiubai), 1: 23. 菩萨行的人生观, 无常的社会观渐渐指导我一光明路。Qu, Wenji, 1: 25. All translations are by the author unless stated otherwise.

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Qu Qiubai and Yang Baihua in Huo Jianqi’s recent film An Eternal Love (2011). Courtesy of Beijing Hua Xia International Film Producer.

of Wei chi fan de (securing my meals) and Ji sheng sheng ya (The needs of my parasitic life). As he puts it himself: I allotted a part of my time to discharge my Shi jian de (worldly) duties— preparation for a career which would enable me to make a living. I used another part of my time to prepare myself diligently for the Chu shi jian (unworldly) service of saving China by cultural means.11 On account of all this, Qu confessed, he was resigned to “a dualistic outlook of life.” Although words like “worldly” and “unworldly” seem to have a familiar 11

Ren sheng guan 人生观; Wuchang 无常; Wei chi fan de 为吃饭的; Ji sheng sheng ya 寄生 生涯; Shi jian de 世间的; Chu shi jian 出世间. Ibid., 1: 22. The translation of these terms is done by Paul Pickowicz.

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ring to them, the tone of his remarks betrays his willingness rather to adapt to a Western-style dualism than to revive the age-old Chinese dispute between Confucian and Taoist alternatives. (Fig. 2) Nothing can testify more forcefully than this about Qu’s being at once intrigued and impaired by this dualism/monism discrepancy. Thus it becomes our primary concern as to whether, for Qu at the time, Bodhisattva’s spiritual pursuit could reconcile with and even enlighten his practical, uncharted social life. It does not take an erudite Buddhist scholar to know that the saintly ­pursuits of a Bodhisattva runs counter to a lay enthusiast’s down-to-earth empirical concerns, and Qu was indeed aware of these not-so-hidden conflicts between them. But he seemed to suggest nevertheless that Buddhist spirituality lay at the heart of his desire of “humanizing Buddhism” as a way to grapple with the problems of life here and now.12 So it is not at all clear whether his belief in Bodhisattva is what illuminated his inner world and propelled him in his participation in the May Fourth movement in the late 1910s. Or his exposure to the pressing problems of the experiential world instilled a sense of practicality and action into his pedantic belief in Buddhist ideals. The ambiguity therefore seems to have stemmed from Qu’s undecided state of mind over the controversial divide—then prevalent amongst May Fourth iconoclasts— between the awaking self and the dormant reality, between spiritual enlightenment and impoverished society. We can now see what makes Qu typically vulnerable to such a divide: he was toiling to free himself from the dilemma of isms. This dilemma was to remain in the center stage of Qu’s life-long tussle with an indismissible fate of political flows and ebbs. In place of a worldly vs. unworldly feud, he would find himself caught in the crossfire of a “deterministic” and a “voluntaristic” view of social revolution and progress among the iconoclastic Left. Upon his return from Soviet Russia in 1923, he plunged headlong into the already heated dispute on the positive heroes of May Fourth realism: he repositioned the battle line to one between the “realists” and the “voluntarists.” He defined the “realists,” rather disparagingly, as those writers who are “merely” capable of reflecting or mimicking the reality of their own times so that history would be led through a rationalized course aimed at its final end stage by stage. The “voluntarists,” he explained in favorable contrast, 12 Qu, Wenji, 1: 25. This has also drawn the attention of two well-known Qu Qiubai scholars, Tsi-an Hsia and Paul Pickowicz, though they go on to arrive at very different conclusions, as will be shown shortly in my argument. See Tsi-an Hsia, The Gate of Darkness: Studies on the Leftist Literary Movement in China (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1968). See also Pickowicz, Marxist Literary Thought and China: a Conceptual Framework (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980).

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are those capable of intuiting an ultimate vision and mobilizing subjective forces who consciously stage reforms in ideas to edify the imperfect condition of the present toward an idealist goal in the future. This voluntaristic vision he first stood for betrays the fact that Qu still remained captive to his earlier faith in Buddhism’s demiurgic power to transfigure the despondent world and envisage a redemptive future. It also explains why he was so susceptible to Russian populist thinkers, such as Belinsky and Chernyshevsky, whose ideas he eagerly absorbed into his own intellectual apprenticeship in the Soviet Union.13 But his pro-idealism stance had left him dodging theoretical crossfire from both the deterministic and voluntaristic schools of Leftist thought, which added unwanted fuel to the heated in-fights among the literary theorists. They were themselves victimized by incessant disputes over priority in what is and what ought to be, i.e. the significance of an individual revolutionist’s concrete life vis-à-vis his strife to achieve the ultimate goal prophesied by the ideology he believes in. And from the time when Qu first introduced Marxist ideas (à la Russian Bolshevism) into Chinese literary theories in the early twenties, these disputes would constantly threaten to cast a shadow over literary portrayals of personal growths being turned out then in considerable numbers. They were like intermittent waves of cold fronts to nip the early buds of May Fourth Bildungsroman, rendering them crippled and unfruitful.14 Qu’s effort to do so turned out to be rather simplistic and costly for himself, too, for he had shortly after abandoned his own voluntaristic belief and sided with the realists. He became alarmed to the excess to which the “bourgeois” voluntarists could go so that individuals could be free and creative in their subjective world while cutting off their ties with the suffering masses. He stressed the need for the Leftist writers to be socially oriented and even went out of his way to reproach a prominent Leftist writer (Yang Hansheng) in his preface to the latter’s novel for being incapable of “understanding this world,” and still less of “transform[ing] the affairs of this world.”15 He now disdained the intuitive and the individualistic in romantic literature and advocated 13

My take on Qu Qiubai’s part in importing Marxist ideas is based largely on Paul G. Pickowicz, Marxist Literary Thought and China: The Influence of Ch’ü Ch’ü-pai (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981), especially chapters 2, 4 & 5. More will be discussed later in this chapter. 14 Qu, Wenji, 3: 1304. See also Pickowicz, Marxist Literary Thought and China, 29. 15 Qu Qiubai, “Geming de langmandike—Hua Han Changpian xiaoshuo Tijuan xu” (Revolutionary romantic—an introduction to Hua Han’s novel Spring) in Qu Qiubai, Luantan (Random Shots), Shanghai: Xia She, 1949. Qu’s term of “romantic” is often used with voluntaristic interchangeably in the context of revolutionary literature of the 1920s–1930s. Also quoted in Pickowicz, Marxist Literary Thought, 118.

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instead the literary function to mirror social life, primarily in social and economic realms, in order to keep in step with a more orderly and teleological revolution conceived by the Comintern.16 But historical events soon took an unexpected turn, causing severe setbacks to the predicted bourgeois-­ democratic stage of revolution, for which Qu was made the scapegoat and was banished from the Comintern.17 Ironically, the only lesson he drew from this, instead of arousing his doubts in a more deterministic télos, made him an even firmer believer in a deterministic teleology as the only way to leap next to a Proletariat-led socialist revolution, and with the same newly energized belief he started assaulting the conservative trends of the May Fourth Movement which he had earlier stood for, blaming them for failing to orient it towards a Communist future in China. From all this twist and turn in Qu’s own “growth” as a Marxist literary critic a disquieting nexus of three factors has emerged: (1) the split between the deterministic and voluntaristic views of historical progression that eventually stifled his affective grasp of social revolution and restored him to a pedestrian Marxist concept of history; (2) the gradual lessening of the more creative and intimate elements of his own thinking—a penchant to personalize—in the service of impersonal ideological goals, and (3) the futility he absorbed rather nobly in predicting the course of historical happenings that gave the lie to the theories he tried to formulate on their behalf.18 Here we touch right on the heart of the matter: what makes Qu’s life so underachieving and fruitless is not only his personal existence being brutally diminished by the drastic, often willful shifts and reversals in Communist politics, but the fact that this nexus wrought to reduce his life-long quest for truth and meaning to a mere cautionary testimony for the formulaic process of an ideological télos. What could have been fulfilled as a Marxist Bildungsroman par excellence went awry precisely because he allowed his self to be pruned and trimmed according to the ever-changing demands of the socialist revolution, but was time and again thrown off track by the flux of events. The true lesson to be drawn from it is 16

17 18

Qu was admitted to the Comintern through Chen Duxiu, the then first Secretary General of CCP and remained thereafter in close contact with the Comintern, acting upon its global, often disastrous policies for China. For further details, see Pickowicz, Marxist Literary Thought, 56–80. Qu gives a candid and self-chastizing account of what happened while he was the CCP leader from 1927–1930 in “My Superfluous Words,” 331–335. All this frustration endured by Qu was to lead to his final confession “My Superfluous Words” in which he revoked his ability as a Marxist thinker and castigated his own personality as a “superfluous man” in a masochistic manner. See also Pickowicz, Marxist Literary Thought, Chapter 12.

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this: an individual’s progress is useful, in terms of partisan politics, only insofar as it can serve as a living parable of Marxist laws of historical progress; but while such exemplars are upheld to be emulated, it follows that a person’s “rough edges,” especially his/her critical thinking, be rounded off to fit this tailor-made type. As it turned out, Qu was indeed squirming and groping under the exemplar type to little avail. According to Communist ideology, the exemplary life of an individual, when inspired by the télos of historical progress, should be allegorical in the sense that it is to embody a working-through of history’s lock-step march towards its ultimate realization. The shadowy figure of Hegel never lurks too far behind such teleology. This teleological path became the stock measure for the ensuing lore of revolutionary biographies at the hands of the Marxist literary critics.19 Since it joined hands with the agenda of Chinese modernist literature, the deterministic télos had gradually taken on enormous ideological weight and turned itself into what for once was widely acclaimed as the “objective laws” of historical progress. It would set, as its ultimate aim, to bring about a classless, utopian human society through successive stages characterized by ideological purity and uniformity, and it would become, in keeping with its role of ideological persuasion, the embedded télos for the education of the individuals subscribed to this system of belief. In a highly monologic manner, it would oversee their nurturing and growth to ensure that they be strictly tailored to fit and illustrate this underlying agenda of individual growth and social transformation. In hindsight, we are able to see Qu’s mishap fostered amidst this a robust and untrimmed blooming out of a shared root: Qu’s encounter with Yogācāra Buddhism. It prompts us to take a second look as to why he first resorted to and then gave up on Yogācāric tenets on the provisional self which had for a time appealed to him as China’s much needed intellectual shot in the arm for history making. Like the late-Qing reformers who had turned to Daoism and Buddhism for intellectual stimuli to invigorate their reformist drive, Qu was now gravitating towards Buddhist ideas when disgusted by the medley of conflicting isms as Zhang Taiyan had earlier been. One common challenge facing Qu and Zhang and other reformists was what would become of the pursuit of modernist evolution were it carried out to its end. To them it clearly projected a linear pattern of social advancement to the nation-state (which was an adaptation of the Hegelian Aufhebung) but propelled by top-down agenda of social progress implemented through the necessary ideological coercion. Qu could 19

For more examples of this literary working out of the Communist télos, refer to Chapter 7 “Steel Is Tempered through Persistent Tempering” of this book.

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have discerned the teleological bent of modernist evolution which had in time triggered his skepticism; an individual was and would at best be, he had come to realize, as his position in economic and social relationships dictated by the wedlock of dominant political entities running the state apparatuses. Unless and until the individual found the wisdom and will to uncover and resist this imposing agenda, his/her wisdom and talent would have been totally siphoned off by the swelling squalls of political tempest. He could have yearned for the ultimate doxa of human strife to be revealed and inspiring him to stand up to it. He would hope that only when the truth of such a vision was set firmly in mind, could the individual relate to the ultimate meaning for human existence whose strength he/she could rely on to transform the imperfect and individualistic condition—the here and now—and move it in the direction of its ­eventual destiny. Admittedly, we see these tangential views revealed amidst the lurking pathos that had motivated Qu while still groping his way out of the elusive quandary between “determinism” and “voluntarism.” But he was perhaps aware, by dint of his Russian studies, that these boundaries implied a presupposed dualism characteristic of Western philosophical thinking. ­ Kantian dualism, for instance, emphasizes an ontological gap between empirical reality and intelligible entity that appears, according to Mou Zhongsan, to comply with Chinese Buddhist ontology.20 But Mou goes on to dissect the seeming resemblance on the basis of a dual function of Buddhist ontology that integrates empirical perception (of phenomena) and metaphysical intuition (of noumena).21 In spite of this dual function, Mou states, Buddhist ontology evolves out of one single “mind” of cosmic potentiality, which immediately encompasses all ontological activities in its subjective aura. As a result, there is no room for any determinist or reflectionist standpoint on human existence. It is precisely over these unchartered waters that Qu first lost and then regained his bearings. Qu’s momentary quandary has to do with his patent conviction (more than he himself knew) of a Western-inspired epistemology that presents a sharp contrast to the Buddhist metaphysics on the self’s grasp of reality. According to notions that underlie Western thinking, “determinism” seems to favor the process through which the hero’s growth is shaped by the transpersonal material forces that govern the social environment in which he lives. It follows that 20

Zongsan Mou 牟宗三, Zhong xi zhe xue zhi hui tong shi si jiang 中西哲学之汇通十四讲 (Fourteen Lectures on Comparative Studies in Chinese and Western philosophies) (Taiwan: Students’ Press, 1990), 95–110. 21 Mou, Fourteen Lectures, 103.

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‘­voluntarism’ leans towards the way an intuited goal beckons the hero, enlightening his mind and guiding his deeds in the present with the aim to ignite social and economic changes. Translated into an individual/history dialectics, this means that often times history makes the hero, i.e., changes of social, economic forces are the primary motor of history-making while a hero’s ­exemplary life is merely the function of one of its numerous cogwheels (this is Lenin’s favorite metaphor) that must be limited in itself yet contiguous with the entire operation. Only rarely does the hero make history in the sense that what “propels history ahead” is the individual person embodying or emanating the spirit of his age (an extreme case is the personal cult of Mao Zedong).22 When cast in such mythological stature, the maturing hero’s life must be identical with the shaping patterns of the historical teleology, not just an ephemeral phase in it. Within the dualistic tradition of Western philosophy, this see-saw wrestle perpetuates itself through divided views of social evolution. If determinism holds sway, it dictates an overriding need to register, in a realistic mode, the rise and fall of Qu’s journey in strict parallel to the political tidings of the day in Russia and China. On the other hand, if voluntarism gets the upper hand, it reflects, chiefly through his allegorical quest, how the ideas and actions of the inspired individual sway the entire course of political maturity. The chasm in between is almost insuperable for Western thinkers because, as Mou argues, they have no access to any “cognitive faculty” that can transform empirical knowledge into intellectual intuition; thus, they are rendered perplexed as to how to close the gap between the deterministic and voluntaristic models of progress.23

A Field Trip in Mass Psychology

We may begin with how Qu’s scholars judge the symptoms of his quandary. Correlating Qu’s inconsistency is a dividing line between our critics’ views on Qu’s mindset during these formative years. Writing in 1968 in a well-known essay on “The Tenderhearted Communist,” T. A. Hsia graciously calls Qu’s much tangled position “an eclecticism.” Prompted by his modest but cogent insight, Hsia deems Qu’s character “a cross of idealism and materialism” and he proceeds to tilt the scale towards the latter’s spiritual side. He is quite convinced that Qu, the scholar-turned-Communist, accepted the socialist revolution more as “a stage in spiritual evolution than a necessity conditioned by e­ conomic

22 See Note 37 in Chapter 7 below. 23 Mou, Fourteen Lectures, 92.

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factors.”24 He thus concludes that Qu’s knowledge of historical materialism was at best cultivated within the framework of Buddhism plus Bergsonism, a once powerful school of thought which culminated in a unitary scheme of evolution not unlike Oriental mysticism.25 Pickowicz, on the other hand, presents his reasoning to the contrary. Focusing on what he terms “the Buddhist phase” of Qu’s early intellectual development, Pickowicz shifts his emphasis to the tension caused by Qu’s spiritual enlightenment as a stoical sojourn to his destination of social engagement. For example, he insists that Qu’s social concerns are not the mere products of pure consciousness; he stresses the fact that Qu’s Buddhist inputs can be pertinent when it deals with crises in the finite world, i.e. “it did not ignore the sufferings of people in the material world,” because “it was the duty of the Bodhisattva to renounce a life of bliss and return to free the world from suffering.”26 It is intriguing to note that both critics, equally captivated as they are by the role of Buddhist influence on Qu’s early growth, have chosen to bypass the ontological rift that separates the determinist being from the voluntarist’s non-self for his growth of the Buddhist phase. To shed light on that, we must reexamine closely Qu’s grappling with the quandary in relation to his understanding of Buddhist precepts like “mind,” “life” and “the self.”27 To begin with, we might ask: what do his writings of the journey tell us of the underlying scheme of his thoughts, Buddhist or modernist? If and when that turns out to be self-conflicting and fragmented, how does he negotiate through conflicts between his immersion with the “great flux” and his reflection of his economic being, between a free-floating subject and a mindless messenger dispatched on ideological missions, between his inert Buddhist beliefs and the rapid inroads on his mind made by Soviet socialism? Above all, how do these conflicts impinge on his conception of selfhood as his autobiographical writing actually unfolds? All must begin, inevitably, with the ambiguous nature of Qu’s trip to Soviet Union as a journalist: it is both a pilgrimage and an exile; but in another sense, it could be neither. Judged by his 24 Hsia, The Gate of Darkness, 22–23. 25 Henri Bergson, L’Evolution créatrice (Paris: Librairie Félix Aloan, 1924). See also Frederick Burwick and Paul Douglass, eds., The Crisis in Modernism: Bergson and the Vitalist Controversy (London: Cambridge University Press, 1992). Hsia makes a brief association of Bergson with Buddha and Marx in Hsia, The Gate of Darkness, 39. 26 Paul Pickowicz, The Influence of Ch’ü Ch’iu-pai, 16. 27 Without intending to criticize, I do think, however, that Marian Gálik’s essay “Studies in Modern Chinese Intellectual History, II: Young Ch’ü Ch’iu-pai (1915–1922)” sheds some light on connections between the Buddhist influence and his struggle to outgrow it while leaving others in the dark. See for details in Asian and African Studies, Vol. 12 (Bratislava: The Slovak Academy of Sciences, 1976).

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vehemently averred purpose for the trip, Qu differed sharply from his senior May Fourth colleagues (such like Lu Xun, Chen Duxiu and Hu Shi) in not being fascinated by “a wholesale transformation” of basic ideas qua ideas for a new China. Instead he believed in one’s direct, total immersion in the Sheng ming da liu (great flux of life) in order to stay in sync with laws of social evolution.28 But to obey such laws, in Qu’s view, was to obey his Shi ji nei li (inner drive of reality) in us human beings, who had to break it loose from the fettering systems or schools of abstract thinking on society.29 Only by reviving the affective capacities of the human heart, Qu suggested, could the Chinese find the key to amassing a new collective human consciousness and dispelling old China’s ­values and beliefs. In E xiang ji cheng (A Journey to the Land of Hunger, 1921), Qu deplores at the failure of systems of social thought (such as la démocratie, science, socialism, national capitalism and others that were in vogue then) to strike firm roots and foster steady growth in Chinese soil.30 He blames in particular the fact on their practitioners’ inability to come to grips with Xian shi sheng huo (the reality of social life), which is to remain his self-styled critique of the New Culture and the May Fourth Movements throughout his trip.31 He accuses them of a blind trust in the notion that ideals and beliefs alone, even when transplanted from alien soils, can give birth to reform and progress in the native setting. But the gravest consequence, he charges, is that they have neglected China’s vital need to know “social reality.” He argues in a rather opinionated way: “China has never had ‘social life,’ and has likewise never acquired any modern social sciences. China has always been indifferent to social phenomena, . . .” Those are his words uttered in a section called “New Reality” in his Chi du xin shi (History of the Heart in the Red Capital, 1923), the second book he wrote about Soviet Russia shortly before he returned to China.32 His almost haughty tone strikes a fitting end-note for his astounding discovery of what 28

29 30 31 32

Sheng ming da liu 生命大流. In his reply poem to those seeing him off on the train journey, Qu writes: “. . . we are doing nothing but following ‘nature’ resolutely in its march ahead.” “Spurring me is ‘the will of the universe.’ Beckoning me is ‘harmony of nature.’ ” All these terms betray, besides his Buddhist influence, his conviction in the existence of natural laws of social evolution. Shi ji nei li 实际内力. Qu, Wenji, 1: 44. E xiang jicheng 饿乡记程. Ibid., 1: 30. Ibid., 1: 194. Ibid., 1: 193. I translated Shi ji sheng huo as “social life” for lack of a better rendered version; but it should prove to be better than a word-for-word equivalent “realistic”. Translations of Qu’s remarks are provided by the current author from here on unless noted otherwise. Chidu xinshi 赤都心史.

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enabled Soviet Russia to spring ahead in social evolution and unmercifully passed China by. How “social life” functions to Qu is, therefore, nothing short of a touch stone for telling true social thinking from the false. First of all, his priority in terms of theory vs. praxis is iron-clad: “only reality of social life can give birth to sociological ideas,” not the other way around.33 Social ideals and ideologies, he argues on the basis of his first-hand observations of Russian socialism, have never been the life-giving formulae that people commonly thought they were, nor are social revolutions the “test tube babies” conceived according to theories of socialism. As his direct proof, he cites the case of Russian socialism: Social revolution, Russian social revolution is not crest riding torrential waves of social thought, but a fata morgana that ensues from a union and reflection (Shen lou, Mirage) of social psychology—one aspect of the “mind” of the real life, plus the economic life—one aspect of the materiality of the real life.34 As a novice Marxist, Qu here sets up a classic example of the dialectic of opposites: consciousness vis-á-vis being. But the boundary quickly turns fuzzy as to what actually occurs in the act of “union” and “reflection.” The answer, within the reach of orthodox Marxism, is indeed tempting: one’s “material” being determines his/her spiritual life. But for Qu this would immediately bring him face to face with a sharp clash between opposing claims of spirituality: because he has resorted to the Buddhist concept of xin (mind), can he feel comfortable as well with a Marxist consciousness which is only a product of material existence?35 Somehow this has to be negotiated. The term “social psychology” perhaps gives us the clue. If we gloss the above passage in the light of his long-held belief in the Store-Consciousness as espoused by Yogācāric Buddhism, we promptly notice two things: for one thing, Qu has used xin (mind) not so much in opposition to wu (matter) as in relation to xin li (psychology); for the other, Qu has most frequently referred, in the context of Mind, to qun zhong xin li (mass psychology) which he uses 33 34

35

Ibid., 1: 79. Ibid., 1: 79. Translation is by Marián Gálik, although I have made slight stylistic changes to it. His rendering of the term “shen lou” 蜃楼 as fata morgana is better than other translators’ versions (such as “interplay” or “combination”), but he regrettably does not elaborate why his term is preferred to others’. A better translation of xin 心 is really “mind of the Universe” with a lower case ‘x’, as Pickowicz puts it in his book. Mind with a capital M is used, nevertheless, for the remainder of the text as its short form.

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i­ nterchangeably with “social psychology.”36 So this subtly affirms, as Gálik does, the fact that Qu regards fata morgana as a “positive and wholly real phenomena, not as an imagined reflection.” If this is the case, then his purpose seems only justifiable as a way to underscore his censure of “social ideology and social teachings” as the catalyst to social transformation. In other words, Qu substitutes fata morgana between one’s psychology and one’s material being for the conventional Marxist material/spiritual dichotomy; yet he falls short of saying that it is now social or mass psychology rather than economic conditions per se that sways the individual being. It is almost certain that we are nearing where and how, in Qu’s mind, the ontological opposites should be negotiated.37 The key lies, as Feng Youlan tells us, in treading the middle way between opposing options, i.e., between overturning the priority of idea over material being on the one hand and on the other, consistently “downgrading” the Sixth or sense-center consciousness.38 In Qu’s own words, the Sixth sense functions “to discriminate and judge according to reason.” For reasons now obvious to us, Qu has dismissed the Sixth sense from Buddhism’s claim to legitimacy chiefly due to its principal role in cognitive determinism. At the outset of his Moscowbound trip, he calls it “a consciousness motivated by Xu wei miu wu (­hypocritical and mistaken) superficiality; when operating on the social scale, it is apt to leave one stranded in a Wei zao huan xiang cuo jue (miscreant illusion).”39 Halfway through his Moscow-bound journey, his self-styled indictment becomes more elaborate: in his mind, an understanding based on the Sixth consciousness does not bring one in contact with the world of “reality” because it is hindered by its dependence on use of language composed of rhetoric and conception: 36

37

38

39

There might be minor variations between the Yogācāra texts that Zhang Taiyan and the young Qu Qiubai studied, but the main tenets they reflected and discussed far outweigh the likely differences. It is known in Chinese as Weishizong 唯识宗, which will be referred to as Yogācāra school for the rest of the text. Thanks to Gálik, there is a complete account of how Qu Qiubai tends to signify a variety of things by the Buddhist term “mind of the Universe.” Consult his article “Young Qu Qiubai” referred to in Note 27 above. Feng Youlan (Fung Yu-lan) 冯友兰 devotes an entire chapter, Chapter VII, to explicating how Cheng wei-shih lun (namely, Yogācāra Buddhism) denotes neither pure mind nor downright matter, but straddles in between the two so as to engender “an evolving consciousness.” See Feng, A History of Chinese Philosophy, Vol. 2 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1953), 237–284. The Sixth consciousness 第六识, as defined by the Yogācāra school, has been subject to a host of interpretations and rendered into different translations. Mine is based on Feng’s erudite version. See Feng, A History of Chinese Philosophy, 299. Xu wei miu wu 虚伪、谬误; Wei zao huan xiang cuojue 围遭幻想错觉 Qu, Wenji, 1: 50.

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When human beings express their thoughts and convey facts of events and objects, the language they use can only correspond to “reality” by means of extracting a concept within a given confine. Thus the nature of their thinking is in turn affected by the influence of this “inertia,” and they are likewise inclined to think and judge “realistic life” by token of subjective concepts.40 人类表示思想，传达事物的言语文字本来只能在某一限度内抽 出一相对合于“现实”的概念，因此思想的本身也受这“惰性 化”的影响，只凭主观概念中的理解去思索论断现实生活。 Words like Chou chu (extracting), Xian du (confine) and Duo xing hua (inertia) are not randomly picked by Qu. Rather they give a broad hint to the fixated, abstract concepts and the intellectual stasis that, in his view, had prevailed in China’s vogue of sociological theories. Spurred on by his conviction in the fluid and vitalist force in life, Qu harbors a keen, outgoing intent against trite, sweeping and impersonal ideas and notions of social reforms prevalent at the time. He accuses them of having plagued the social fabric of Chinese culture, benumbed the thinking of generations of the Chinese literati class (of which his father is an estranged and irresponsible member) who attempted in vain to jolt China out of her lethargic, doomed cycle of history, but always fell prey to the pitfalls of their own ideologies. Embittered by such a ruinous historical fate, Qu argues, the mind of the Universe has so determined that the social fabric has lost its basis and naturally begun to totter; by means of the monstrous Shehui shenglang (the wailing torrents of the society), it is giving vent to its inner protest. So there has occurred the motion from “not knowing” to “knowing.” . . . The whole universe is none other than this entire process of Qiu an er dong (motion in pursuit of gratified desires.)41 社会组织失了根据地，自然就动摇，借着怪物的 “社会声浪”， 鳴他心意的不平。自“不知” 动而至“知”。。。。全宇宙不过 只这一“求安而动”的过程。

40 41

Chou chu 抽出; Xian du 限度; Duo xing hua 惰性化. Ibid., 1: 70. She hui sheng lang 社会声浪; Qiu an er dong 求安而动. Ibid., 1: 50.

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With this perpetual motion of the universe, we have finally reached the cosmic wellspring of Qu’s Buddhist ontology, selfhood, social evolution and mass psychology. In Yogācāra Buddhism, it might be said that every road leads from and back to ãlaya consciousness. Known also as Chang shi (storehouse consciousness), ãlaya deposits, in the form of Zhong zi (seeds), the most fundamental fount of motion, energy and meaning for the universe. Worldly beings and happenings linger on here after they are over, and are segmented much like memory in the mind’s cosmic potential, a process known as Xun xi (perfuming). Once ­perfumed, the seeds of ãlaya remain ever ready to sprout into external manifestations, which in return add new seeds or segmentation to ãlaya.42 All this forms a constant flux of actions and reactions whose cause and effect occur at one and the same time.43 It also serves as a crucial reminder of the inescapable framework of Chinese ontological monism residing in sinicized Buddhism. How young Qu Qiubai came to identify social phenomena with ãlaya remains yet to be scrutinized in full. But it is quite obvious that he has envisaged a life-world that emanates from the cosmic mind as the mirror-image of ãlaya: Social phenomena have engulfed all individualities, it is like a colossal foundry that melts and molds hundreds and thousands of gold and zinc. It is also like torrential rivers that roll fearlessly downstream, amassing estuaries and accumulating sand and mud. Whatever form you are ­transformed into, whether a fish or a dragon, you can never escape its tumultuous territories.44 社会现象吞没了个性，好一似烘炉大冶，熔化锻炼千万钧的金 锡，又好像长江大河，滚滚而下，旁流齐汇，泥沙毕集，任你 鱼龙变化，也逃不出这河流域以外。 Quite a few factors have emerged here to form the grounds of Qu’s formulation of social psychology: (1) Characterized by this ceaseless flow of energy and impact, the great flux of social life refuses to be arrested or contained by any precepts or principles that tend to be general, rigid and intractable. Qu does not therefore believe that social phenomena can be cut up into slices or 42

Cang shi 藏识; Zhong zi 种子; Xunxi 薰习. For further details on the function of “store consciousness,” see Feng, A History of Chinese Philosophy, 304–312. 43 Ibid., 305. For a less formidable reading of álaya’s nature, see Kenneth Ch’en, Buddhism in China: a Historical Survey (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1964), 321–22. 44 Qu, Wenji, 1: 11.

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sections, because they are “causally related, overlapping one another.” Likewise, all individual lives “are right in its midst, submerged by its entirety . . . they are not capable of knowing its whole entity.”45 He nevertheless does acknowledge the impact the individual lives receive from such omniscience, but because they are part and parcel of the cosmic mass, their total immersion makes it almost impossible to reflect upon it from a detached stance external to it. He believes instead they could blend into its invisible yet ubiquitous whole by becoming its mirror-like image and resonating with its palpitating rhythm. In a manner of speaking, this resembles the all-embracing inner consciousness we dwelt on in previous chapters, but with a tell-tale difference: the individual who resorts to his/her bond with the cosmic mind is not atomistic, not bound up by clear-cut boundaries of an individuated consciousness. Rather he/she is infinitely infused in a stream-like sentient existence with multitudes of fellow humans.46 (2) Analogous to the reciprocal and continuous existence is the simulta­ neity of interplay as a form of reflecting social phenomena and the latter’s ­resistance to be objectified from a detached viewpoint. Qu has stressed from the outset that the great flux of the life world Bu zuo xiang er zuo xiang (feigning not to reflect with tangible and accurate images, but actually does).47 It is, for that reason, impossible for a detached individual subject to snatch up “a slice of life,” tailor it to the framework of logical reasoning and still call it “cognizable and real.” What has been revealed as its “hidden motion,” Qu observes, can only be felt and acted upon in a fluid, interactive setting; hence, the mirage-like manifestation out of a concomitant “union and reflection.” To that end, Shen lou (mirage) appears more than once in Qu’s texts; as does Yin ying (shadow). Both refer to fata morgana—a mirror-like presentation of social reality that requires the simultaneous presence of the observer and the observed. As Qu states, “a human life is the trace left on social phenomena whereas social phenomena is the fata morgana of a human life.”48 But it is 45 46 47 48

Ibid., 1: 12. For a more detailed account, refer to the previous Chapter 4. Bu zuo xiang er zuo xiang 不作像而作像。 This is most likely a Buddhist term whose source is to be confirmed. Yin ying 阴影. Qu, Wenji, 1: 13. Feng gives us a more elaborate account of how the individual human interacts with the cosmic mind in the manner of mirror-image (in which case the subject has to be in front of the mirror for the latter to reflect image, i.e., both need to be present). More importantly, the effect of perfuming performed by the cosmic mind, where the knowledge of all past mirror-images is stored up and processed, ready to function to illuminate the next mirror encounter. Feng, A History of Chinese Philosophy, 320–332 passim.

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beyond doubt that neither prevails without the other, nor elevates itself to a dominant position over the other; a subject vs. object dichotomy cannot apply here, still less does a materialist-determinist outlook, because the whole dynamic relationship hinges on mutual and largely interactive and affective attachment. More will be discussed later with regard to its connection to the unconscious. Suffice it to say presently that the reciprocal involvement of the individual being with one another results in an evolving continuum, not one that unfolds in a linear and graduated teleological path to a final end, but one that moves in a radius, animating and multitudinous fashion. (3) With ãlaya orchestrating this panoramic drama of ceaseless motion and change, Qu is only a step away from equating it with mass psychology. Pickowicz is right to underscore the Bodhisattva’s return to this world to release the multitudes of their suffering souls. One central image of Buddhism has always been the salvation of multitudes of poor souls who toil in the sea of misery and bitterness, awaiting Bodhisattva’s deliverance. To Qu, who witnessed his mother taking her own life, his father becoming estranged, and the family being driven to the verge of poverty, the trope of xin hai (mind’s sea) and xin bo (mind’s waves) becomes very relevant and handy. He willingly adjoins himself with the trend of sea changes, of psychological palpitations and fluctuations of the working class in the face of social revolutions. To him, therefore, the ties between the omnipresent ãlaya consciousness and the boundless sea mean more than a metaphorical similitude; they are forged out of the crucial link of the human unconscious, a subject that was raging popular in Qu’s time alongside the debut of the translation of Freud in China. Gálik’s comprehensive study bears this out. Referring to Qu’s association of the ãlaya consciousness with the unconscious via mind, he remarks: When reflecting on hsin (Mind), Ch’ü Ch’iu-pai has very often in mind precisely this component of human beings (demiurgic component of sentient beings), . . . sometimes even those strata of the mind become involved that are hidden under the seventh or the sixth consciousness, or even under heart . . . i.e. as the seat of emotional life.49 If the unconscious lies potent under sea longing to have its energy discharged, the sea waves are precisely the very shape and force the sea explodes into when it is compressed under external impact of social reality. These are none other than the mind’s waves: they are stirred and whipped into powerful waves upon waves to pound on the shore of social reality. In the case of the newborn Soviet 49 Gálik, Young Qü Qiubai, 94. The following translations are all by Marian Gálik.

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Republics, the waves seem to rise in the form of the psychological states of millions of poor laborers that fermented under centuries of Czarist rules, harsh climate and especially the economic subsistence to eventually break out in furious waves of protests and revolutions. As Qu describes on the night he arrived in Moscow: “it (the scene of Moscow) is gushing forth the hot blood from the heart of Russian workers.” He sees the Red Capital taken by the storm of Bolshevik revolution as She hui xin ling de jie jing (crystallization of social psychology) and hails the surging mass movement heartily as “Sheng huo­ tu xian ” (the “epiphany of the living reality”) that has materialized itself in this “modernized Moscow.”50 And he concludes: “The rising and falling waves of their mind (hsin-p’o) are the facts from the history of the new Russian social evolution, and the hidden strength (han-liang) of their Mind’s sea is the manner of organization of the new Russian society.”51 This is the very reason why Qu, half way through his trans-Siberian travel, was so astounded by his own discovery that Russian Bolsheviks are not “chemists experimenting in accordance with ‘formulas of a socialist theory’ with the ‘elements of the Russian nation,’ transforming them in the ‘test tubes of the Soviets’ and thus achieving ‘socialist compounds.’ ”52 The discovery deepened his yearning to see young “Red Russia” with the belief that “the Russian Communists—have definitely mastered a concrete methodology geared to the reality of life.” He is now fully convinced by their success that “the history of social evolution is a record of psychological changes of society, and ‘a shady image’ revealing fluid passions and feelings.”53 So much so that he is prepared to abbreviate the whole cause of social progress as “the wave-like movement made by social psychology.”54

Disinheriting the Ego

In a piece entitled Ba (Epilogue) for his first book, Qu writes, as if he were seized by a hypnotic deity of lyricism, about his discovery of the sea and the waves of the cosmic mind. The passages seem to mimic a rhythmic swelling of its own with expressions for waves, confluences, mirages and dreams. 50 51 52 53 54

She hui xin ling de jie jing 社会心灵的结晶; Sheng huo tu xian 生活凸显. See Qu, Wenji, 1: 99, 1: 84. Hsin-p’o, Xin bo 心波; Han-liang, Han liang 含量. Ibid., 1: 100. Ibid., 1: 79. Ibid., 1: 85. Ibid., 1: 86.

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We ­cannot but feel Qu is himself experiencing then and there the virtual effects of what he saw and heard in Russia. As he confesses: I, the young child from the East, am boating right into a whirlpool, bearing the full brunt of it. So it is imperative that I hold the rudder steady. In addition, the whole of my personal psychological experience serves as the floating lilies cushioning its bow waves before I set the oar ready, and that becomes an impact within an impact; . . .55 This is Qu at his psychological and lyrical best! Yet what makes this passage even more striking is the presence, I think, of two “I”s: the I who is more accustomed to logical judgment (“he” cautions himself with the control of the ­rudder) and rational thinking (he deftly sizes up his plight and perceives the ambient reality), and the I who is more prone to fluidity, agitation and spontaneity of the bow-waves, who abandons himself to the tide of social evolution. Between the lines, we understand that Qu’s attention is focused more on the “personal psychological experience” that acts simultaneously as a cushion and conduit between the surrounding reality and the “conscious” mind. Thus we need to examine the most crucial link in Qu’s mediation between a Buddhist and a psychological approach to the reflection of the life world—the ego—that has been missing in our analysis so far. In the Buddhist cosmos, the ego has no real nature of its own and is ultimately a nonbeing. But in the scheme of Yogācāra Buddhism, the ego is assigned a decisive role in the ontological process; it is the seventh consciousness located between ãlaya (the eighth consciousness) and the first six ­consciousnesses (including the much disdained sixth). That is to say, what goes on between the cosmic mind and the psychological reality, with all its complex interplay and perfuming, must revolve around this pivot of the self.56 The ego consciousness, alias manas, mona, is straddled across the empirical and the intellectual worlds, relaying to and fro all impressions and intuitions between the eighth and the first six consciousnesses. On the one hand, according to Kenneth Ch’en, it is “the self-conscious mind that thinks, wills and reasons on a self-centered basis” in relation to all the sensory data.57 On the other, it is the agent that directly disturbs the sea-like ãlaya, stirring up the seeds from their unconscious state to become particular, live beings or objects 55 56

Ibid., 1: 91. Read the pertinent chapters on the seventh consciousness 第七识 in Feng Youlan, A History; Chan Wing-tsit, A Source Book; Ch’en, Buddhism in China. 57 Ch’en, Buddhism in China, 321.

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(­relative to the appropriateness of the waves). As much as it discriminates and particularizes, the ego also contributes to the amorphous flux by relying in turn on its affective faculties of the sense organs and bodies and on its intuitive capacity of the intellect endowed by the cosmic mind. Qu Qiubai had first been instinctively drawn to the ego before he became resolved to yield to a rapport between the Yogācāric store consciousness and the collective human unconscious (as implicated by mass psychology). Early in his Moscow-bound trip he declared that insofar as the forward thrust of the Will of the Universe could be felt, it was the ego and the five sense consciousnesses that were proficient in stimulating the human into affective reaction and keeping one in pace with it. He even goes so far as to say: [T]he whole of the flux can only be realized by the function of the ego’s self- conscious judgment Wozhi, i.e. intellection on basis of the self—the seventh or mona consciousness—through feeling and intuiting about “the reality” at pointblank range. What matters throughout my Russian trip is only the involuntary responses of my intuition.58 If taken at its face value, his admittance implies that during his trip so far what he has accomplished is little more than the recording of his personal instincts and spontaneous reactions. But this might not amount much towards justifying his steady trust in the ego, which demands to reveal its ontological root. In other words, he might be asked: what constitutes his own individual approach to feeling or intuiting, as he does, the reality of the life world? If his ego stems from its root in ãlaya consciousness, what impact does that exert on his handling of the perception of the empirical world? The answer to these queries, I suggest, must have been at the heart of what Qu sets out to find in writing History of the Heart in the Red Capital. Though obvious to readers of his twin travelogues, few critics have actually commented on the substantial differences between them in terms of thematic as well as stylistics. One such difference, for example, is evident in their narrative stances: the first book is, true to its title, “a journey” which Qu employs as an overall trope for his probing at the nature of social (mass) psychology. He does so by observing and monologuing how the Russian society is transformed as the changes unfold scene after scene, image after image. Thus pure, matter-of-fact passages of reporting are few and far between; it is more often than not Qu’s interior monologue that we read at regular intervals which underpins the fleeting scenes of reality captured and snatches of conversations overheard 58

Wo zhi 我执. Qu, Wenji, 1: 50.

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throughout the entire journey. With the second book, the point of view seems to be placed closer to the factual details of the Russian society, as if we can now view it with the benefit of a magnifying glass. The Russian mosaic becomes enlarged and animated with visits to historical sites, meetings with revolutionary celebrities, on-site reportage of festivals and celebrations and even ­scholarly translations of eminent Russian writers. The point of departure is the withdrawal of the first-person narrator to let in a measured impersonal scrutiny of the real people, events and locales. So is this due to the author’s slippage towards a more disinterested position now that he has gained more knowledge and confidence as a believer of Soviet socialism? Or could it be that Qu has felt the urge to depart from his previous stance on the substantive ego, once it is contested by his growing awareness of its inadequate ontological moorings? The answer proves hard to pin down, but let us first see what orientation Qu sets up at the outset. In a preface to the book, he begins by philosophizing, in a Rousseau-like manner, about how Shi jian de bu ping deng xing (inequality in the mundane world) is an assertive and indispensable component of reality. He attributes its existence to the fact that the cosmic mind must manifest itself through multitudes of concrete life forms which help bring forth what we know as social phenomena and social history. Not surprisingly, this chiefly Buddhist concept is accompanied by its worthy metaphor, Ming jing (the Shining Mirror) and Sheng zhong (the Sacred Bell) of the mind.59 In Buddhist ontology, these usually remain latent until stimulated, at which time they energize the sensory perception and the ensuing cognition by each individual’s ego consciousness. Because of its derivative nature, each ego enacts a given phenomenal form of the cosmic root such as “the mirror face and the bell frame.” This is where Qu’s views on the inequality of the worldly beings kick in: to him all differences incur within the empirical world and here alone lies the essence of human existence. He says: If the historical facts of the life world are yin xian (reflective images) of some substantive discrepancies, they are bound to be imprinted on concrete “mirror faces and bell frames.” For that reason the issue has shifted from being one of abstraction and reduction to being that of specificity and individuation. . . . The mirror can be big or small, the bell frame can be thick or thin, these are the cause of their subsequent differences.60

59 60

Shi jian de bu ping deng xing 世间的不平等性; Ming jing 明镜; Sheng zhong 圣钟. Ibid., 1: 95. Yin xian 印现. Ibid.

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Thus far Qu has offered a lucid exegesis of the diversified phenomenal world; because they differ in their physical forms, they present varying images and impressions in accordance with differences in person, time and place. Inequality is born out of matter, and the self as a uniquely constructed material entity commands a distinct outlook of reality. In sum, material differences forge at least in part the empirical being of “I.” However, this being does not automatically ensure the substantive being, i.e. the self-nature of the subject “I.” As is taught by the Yogācāric precept, the ego is, in the final analysis, composed of other substances, and none is the work of the self. Zhou Shujia, an erudite Buddhist scholar of the last century, elaborated the specialty of the ego to be self-centered shi (intellection) without bian (innate knowing) and declared that all ego knows is through the intellection of the self. Ambiguous by its name, this “intellection” is an exclusive operative in the empirical context and therefore is more accurately termed “sensible knowledge” as against “intellectual intuition” out of Western ­metaphysics.61 Another way of putting it is to go by that age-old dichotomy between the universal and the particular, i.e. ego’s sensible knowledge is always confined to self-serving or individual venues, thus failing to reach intuitive knowing that instantly immerses the ego’s being in cosmic commonality. This binary analogy carries only this far, however, because what separates the Buddhist notion from Western dualism is the Buddhist insistence on the bonded embodiedness of the individual ego; the empirical world cannot make sense to the ego until and unless its intuitive knowing interacts with the preserved forms such as uniformity vs. difference, stasis vs. motion, time vs. space and so on. Hence, all this stored knowledge of the mind’s belongings can be obtained only through ego’s intuition of them.62 Simply put, the cosmic mind is responsible for the abilities of the self to reflect upon the raw data received by the five sense consciousnesses, which would otherwise remain an embryonic mass. In light of this, let us glance at a few of the metaphors that, according to Zhou Shujia, elucidate the illusory nature of ego’s functions. There exist six kinds of metaphors denoting the vulnerability of sense consciousnesses to illusion; three of them directly involve hearing and sight: First, Xiang (sounding off) stands for the echoing of sounds from a deep valley which does not give forth sound of its own making. Zhou points out: “. . . the echoing of the valley does not itself carry any meaning, but the human listener seems to c­ omprehend 61 62

Shi 识; Bian 辨. See Mou, Fourteen Lectures, 95–110. This is a very general statement of these intuitional forms made here in anticipation to a more elaborate explication later in the chapter.

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what the sound may mean.” Second, Ying (mirror-imaging) indicates that peculiar function of the mirror which reflects an instant image of the object, when it is present before the mirror, although its mirrored image is not real. Third, Yang yan (mirage, fata morgana) is the optical illusion of seeing an oasis in the desert which is never reachable for the fatigued traveler because it forever recedes in sight.63 As we have seen earlier, this is what Qu believes to be going on between the human psychological atmosphere and the economic conditions. All these metaphorical meanings boil down to the Buddhist constriction of the ego whose function would otherwise be in limbo had it not been embedded in the ãlaya consciousness. This puts us in a position to better evaluate Qu’s mindset during his moments of quandary. When Qu deploys the metaphorical mirror and the bell as his ontological premise, he is not only ready to embrace their sensitivity to imagery and sound, but prepared to accept the full implication of its ambiance. On the same page of his “Preface” to the book, he inadvertently lets his line of thinking zigzag over the self-nature of the ego. On the one hand, he is enough of an empiricist to anatomize the constant flux, cutting up each of its most basic elements as a diversely formed entity in a fixed material form. In doing so, he reminds us of what Bergson accuses the empiricists of doing, i.e. mistaking snapshots of an essentially fluid world for their cognizable substance. Hence, he remarks: “. . . what we see in movies—the unending flow of images, successive and overlapping—consists in essence of single and independent snapshots.”64 On the other hand, he is so perceptive as to detect the impasse of conceiving reality as such in wanton disregard of the human capacity of innately knowing the cosmic mind. Qu also deplores the fact that “to induce sound and imagery” in one’s world outlook causes one to leave no room whatsoever for the human intellect to exist, and he forcibly states that once “we scrutinize them in their extremity” we are bound to be at a loss for any “real existence” for all the motion and change, the complexity and diversity we see. What this implies in a way anticipates, to the contrary, what he says later about the empirical nature of inequality: despite their given plurality, the only way to bring the concrete “mirrors and bells” alive in the great flux of life is to turn to their ultimate source, i.e. the cosmic mind that imparts life to their sounds and images.

63

Xiang 响; Ying 影; Yang yan 阳焰. See Zhou Shujia, Weishi Yan jiu (A Study of Consciousness-Only School of Buddhism) (Taipei: Hua zang Buddhism Library, 1995), 11. Zhou Shujia 周叔伽 (1927–1970) was a prominent scholar and practitioner of Buddhism. 64 Qu, Wenji, 1: 95.

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That has landed Qu’s ego consciousness in a collision course. He is torn between the constant push-and-pull of the role of the self as an active reflector of the palpable mass movement and as the self-effacing agent of sedate enlightenment by the all-embracing mind. The rivalry intensifies, as Qu himself describes it in a sketch called “The Chinese” as the “social self” who clearly represents Qu’s increasing preoccupation with the socially underprivileged, sneers at the “private self” characterized by other-worldly and self-immolating anxieties.65 Chafing at his fluctuating moods, he purposefully casts aside his political journalism (although he did write a series of commentaries on Soviet Russia’s social and economic systems) in favor of a personal psychological log which registers, in his own words, “real social life, visits and interviews, reading notes, impressions and meditations.”66 With the help of these, he is resolved to “highlight my distinct personality” and “etch out wave upon wave of my own thinking.” Some sketches of his Moscow days offer instances that bear the striking stamp of his inner musings. His visit to Trityakovskay gallereya engages him in a magic rapport with nature’s vibrating motion that transforms from “sedate content” to “vibrating motion”—all of which trigger his “fresh, bright, fluid and revealing sensations.”67 With the same frame of mind, he promptly grasps the futuristic spirit of Mayakovsky’s poetry “by supplying the natural association of the human psychology” as the missing verbs in poetic lines packed with only epithets and appellations.68 But the more he is absorbed in the mosaic of Red Russia, the less he feels enthralled by the pulsations of this “inner drive”; the more he feels relieved of his “private self,” the less he palliates the infringement by the social self, which was steadily gaining an upper hand. His present book in fact unveils the course of this subtle make-over. It does so to the accompaniment of a kind of chastisement of and aversion to his sickening body and sickly personal upbringing. In a piece named with perhaps Qu’s best hallmark phrase “The Heart’s Feelings,” Qu recounts the rugged life-story of a Russian WWI veteran in the voice of a detached narrator. In a rare moment of epiphany, it is recalled, as the Head of the Village Soviet, the veteran finds himself surrounded by armed peasants 65 Qu, Wenji, 1: 160–162. 66 This other book, projected as “Russia in Modern Times,” is said to consist of Qu’s writings from the perspective of a social scientist. Unfortunately the manuscripts were destroyed in the “December the 8th Incident” before they had chance to be printed and published. Only one of those articles survived as it first appeared in the first issue of New Youth. See the note in Qu, Wenji, 1: 92. 67 The Museum of Trityakovskaya is a Moscow art museum that hosts collections of art and sculpture works of the ancient and early modern Russia. 68 Qu, Wenji, 1: 99.

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who had risen in mutiny against the local Soviets’ harsh policy of draft. Ironically, as the veteran stands face to face with the menacing power of the agitated arm-bearing crowds, he panics and abruptly passes out: “the chaos and the uproar deprived me of any ability to think, only triggered my immediate reflex, . . . the hub . . . bub . . .”69 The veteran’s total paralysis in the face of such threatening crowds is painfully real, as are the raging muzhiki (peasants) who were driven to violence by despair as a result of the exacting Soviet draft. But what impact would this shocking example of “being at one with mass psychology” have on the listener, who happens to be a Chinese youth like Qu ­himself? Or should it be intended only as a mockery of a self-centered reproach of mass psychology? Qu surely knows, but does not tell. Since his own voice is more implied than apparent throughout the retelling, it gives him the leeway to suspend charting pros or cons as to what the incident validates in the hope of abiding a more discrete opportunity down the stretch. As it happens, the personal recollection ends with an openly moralistic scene of the veteran offering unselfish service to an old woman, making it possible to forget the “me” in the very act of giving selfless help to others. The veteran says this as his apology: “ ‘Serve the other people,’ forget this ‘me,’ then peace of mind returns; think every thought in connection to ‘me,’ one tends rather to be miserable.”70 Thus, on a more ambiguous note than expected Qu marks the disinheriting of his self we have come to know. Qu’s disinheritance of the ego entails distancing himself from his Confucian roots and their moribund remnants. It compels him to embark on a self-­ negation that is strenuous and often unrewarding. In hardly more than six months after his arrival in Moscow, his health deteriorated because of a worsening tubercular condition. He was suffering from insomnia and sometimes coughed blood, adding physical torments to his already agonized mind. In one of those sleepless nights, Qu had a delirious dream in which a white old cat gibes and rails at him for being “an unabashedly despicable” human being. Drawing perhaps on the horse story by Gogol in particular and the Russian tradition of parabolic satire in general, Qu seems competent and intrigued enough to try his hand at the Russian modernist trope of ventriloquism by way of human impersonation. Appropriately named Sheng cun (To stay alive), the short tale is narrated by an “I” who is sleepless, moody and distraught. What hypnotizes him into the dream is a particular line from his Russian copy-book with French, English and Chinese notes, which says: mentir, lie, e yan (false

69 70

Ibid., 1: 135. Ibid., 1: 136.

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words).71 An involuntary smile (of his own in his dream) gives rise to a voice that could only be uttered by the old white cat in the room. What ensues is almost a textbook version of “defamiliarizing” what is taken for granted as a modernist technique: the Cat enacts the role of an alter ego—his subconscious that has stepped out of his human shell, casts the being of “I” in an entirely “alien” perspective and interrogates the legitimacy of it all. What the Cat finds most despicable in human beings seems to be their ability to deceive their own kind and their desire to fabricate Bian li zhi chu (conveniences) in place of Tian ran de ben neng (innate impulses). In his “non-human” view, the Cat sees the insatiable human desire as the inner drive: Your kind can never understand: as you keep gathering man-made “conveniences” on the one hand, you keep losing your “innate abilities,” “guts to stand up to the natural world” on the other, while all this time your desires increase and multiply as each day goes by! In order to satiate these desires while not being capable of facing the natural world ­head-on, you then think up ways to cheat others; deception, tricks. You shameless, despicable “human beings!”72 In view of what the Cat says as a whole, the kinds of human beings it ridicules are probably those who use brain more than brawn. Their semblance is pertinent to the Cat’s chosen distinction between those who can still confront the natural world with their innately endowed skills and strength and those who have abandoned them in favor of mental power and wisdom. Incidentally, what the Cat accuses these brainy “invalids” of most is that they have instigated human desire that is ever-increasing. The accusation is especially resonant with the words of Roskolnikov (the protagonist in Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment) quoted by Qu in the epigraph for this essay. Roskolnikov, modern Russia’s archetype cynic, is depicted as desiring more than “to stay alive” for his existence; he never fails to think of wringing yet some more out of it. It is a bit of a stretch to say that Qu aspires after a hero of such dark, soul-rending proportion, by letting Roskolnikov preface his story. Nonetheless, that a noble-minded youth, when obsessed with pure ideas or ideology, can sink to such grim depths does ring a timely bell for someone like Qu. Insofar as he can see, the class to which Qu used to be “in” is headed in a similar downward spiral. That class Qu was in but never “of” is the Chinese literati or in a vague sense, as he calls it, Shi de jie ji (the class of the literati). 71 72

Sheng cun 生存. Ibid., 1: 167. Bian li zhi chu 便利之处; Tian ran de ben neng 天然的本能. Ibid., 1: 168.

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A case in point: in November 1921, Qu received his first letter from home since his arrival in Russia, but little was he prepared for the deluge inundating his mind upon reading it. Rather than triggering nostalgic memories of his home, the letter thawed open the rigid tundra of his thoughts on the nature of sociality by way of the literati class; for it was that class, its beliefs and values that had nursed his youthful mind, fashioning it in the mold of a “top-heavy,” “handicapped” pedant.73 To Qu’s mind, the literati had been politically privileged in dynastic China thanks to their mindless service to propagating Confucian ideals and decrees in the interests of Imperial rulers. They themselves should have been held responsible for their lack of “social awareness,” not so much for the stifling of their free-thinking instincts as for the surrendering of their “social life” to the Confucian officialdom. Why Qu was so anxious to blame the absence of sociality on the literati’s lack of keen and effective sentience alone remains to be further scrutinized. Suffice it to say that it has brought into sharper relief the magnitude of interactive motion and energy between the laboring masses and the pedantic individual, and it has begun to shed light on why Confucian morality (most beneficial to the literati’s resort to socialization as a path to fame and status) should be held accountable for a quaint Chineseness— “[being] less suppressive of individuality than negligent with individual being.”74 Qu has now been convinced of the necessity of relying on the newly reclaimed strength of mass psychology to ensure the inner cohesion of the literati to resist their internalized socialization of the Confucian kind. In the wake of ­foreign military invasions and their subsequent capital investments in early twentieth century, the social realm broke new ground with the budding class of the petty bourgeois. What had been left of the literati was a choice between facing a final bankruptcy both in material and spiritual terms and being lured into a cross-over to the modern bourgeois state; or else, the literati individuals will be cast out on a rudderless voyage to seek their own lives. Qu Qiubai has his personal grudge against this defunct system: it has bequeathed to him an overburdened mind trapped in a handicapped body— his TB-wrecked health. The hindrance has especially hurt him as he believes, on Buddhist accounts, that he would be omitted as a useless part in the fata morgana continuum, and the social evolution will as a result bypass him unless he participates in the “proletarianization of the literati.”75 His paranoiac urge 73 74 75

Shi de jie ji 士的阶级. Qu gives a scathing dissection of the literati class in the essay entitled “A Letter from Home.” Qu, Wenji, 1: 163. Ibid., 1: 171. Ibid., 1: 164.

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explains to us why in almost every journalist sketch he wrote praise was liberally dosed out to the laborers, the common and lowly, the rural and the folksy. In general, Qu is so susceptible to their robust physiques, simple and upfront behavior, their endurance in harsh conditions that he is ready to accede to their innate ability to embrace nature, to their immunity against the kind of anxiety-ridden life the literati lead.76 In a self-degrading contrast, he feels, he is like an overdeveloped mind caged in a wobbly body, unable to respond to the world’s sea change due to his fraught intellect. It is only natural for him to envisage the opposition between Zhi (the intellect) and Xin (the sentient) as the cause célèbre of the Chinese “superfluous men.”77 Making his own dent to the notion of the “superfluous man,” Qu defines its Chinese variation primarily in the light his own understanding. The superfluous Chinese, Qu writes, has been accustomed to inhabiting a human “cocoon” with virtually “no social life”; his sight has not been quite adjusted to discern the whereabouts of true reality; he has kept up a disproportionate faculty of cognition and intellect at the expense of his abilities to feel and intuit. This last-mentioned lack becomes the most superfluous among all his undesirable traits. In explicating it, he once again deploys the trope of the underdeveloped body: For over two decades in which social reforms have been tried out, China has barely awakened, her eyes are still diluted from her state of being without any social life, . . . She has never seen her own limbs or skins or hairs, still less her own internal organs such as the heart, the liver, the lungs and the kidneys. Her existence has been in deep slumber, which is even crueler than total annihilation.78 二十余年来的维新的中国，刚从“无社会”状态出来，朦胧双 眼，---像没见着自己的肢体肤发，不用说心肝肺脏了，他酣睡 中的存在，比消灭还残酷。 The image standing out from this passage is the disembodied being. In a cruel yet fitting sense, this is also the mode of existence for Qu who had never had a 76

For the same reason, I disagree with Tsi-an Hsia over his interpretation of “The Heart’s Feelings” as Qu’s resistant inner feelings towards the “dumb masses,” a phrase that betrays Hsia’s own lack of perception towards Qu’s newly acquired strength in the role played by mass psychology. See Hsia, Darkness, 34. 77 Sketch no. 35 of this book is in fact entitled “The superfluous men in China.” More will be discussed in the following comments. 78 Qu, Wenji, 1: 170–171.

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gratifying feel of his visceral being, whether it was due to poverty in childhood or youth, or illnesses in adulthood. The long aridity leads to an excessive or alternatively narrow desire for what is absent. In the case of Qu, he is led to emphasize the dire necessity of bodily health, rigor and toughness as the primary basis for a social self. What he insists on as the “vitalized self” or “vitalized life” is a mere philosophized edition of the palpably physical, the direct or the vigorous. He has almost turned his back on the imminent and the latent as the Confucian source of rejuvenation or creativity. His steadily impaired view of the intellect causes him to gradually lean toward the viscerally interactive as the path for refueling his journey of self-fulfillment. There are indeed a few moments in his current book where the reader comes closest to seeing a testimony to his disinheritance of Confucian selfhood. Occasionally we hear the real Qu come forward with a beleaguered ­confession of his change of heart. In “Wo” (I), he seems willing to portray himself poised between the “old” and the “new” phases of socialization and decries that “no matter who he is, it is so hard after all to preserve the abstract innocence of his personality—the environment (perhaps known as the so-called “social life”) never fails to engrave its traces on it.”79 The real nature of his selfhood notwithstanding, his affirmation of the social is enthusiastic and ­steadfast, but not unequivocal for it lands him right at the intersection of forked roads between 1) to pursue the original path of self-development against all odds without any hesitation or promise until the self exhausts all his/her originality while trying, and 2) to hold no interest in self-development and allow oneself to be totally “swallowed” or permeated by societal influence. Qu seems to favor the middle ground: a choice between pursuing self-proclaimed path of development while being tactful and flexible in averting confrontation with or subservience to the social domination. But with the social being so pervasive and influential, is it still astute to speak of, as Qu does here, piloting “the cultivation of the ‘private self’ with any arbitrary means”? Qu sheds unique insight on an individual’s self-effacing endeavor to surmount all obstacles blocking his/her self-realization, thus draining off his potential creativity and progress. It remains to be asked: is Qu shrewdly pondering these as genuine causes for concern? How does the kind of denial of individuality he last mentions actually occur when it is swallowed by the “society”? Incidentally, this last case would instantly put on the spot Qu’s professed immersion of the ego with social psychology. It would be inescapable to inquire the degree to which the latter could be distinguished from the former. In fact, Qu himself would be hard pressed to account for the demand he has vehemently made: “. . . a human 79

Wo 我. Ibid., 1: 165.

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being should be devoted to this process (of making progress for the whole of mankind) while simultaneously attaining a distinct identity of his own self.”80 Ostensibly agonized by the challenge, Qu ends this essay with a high-flown, but unavailing passage on what “I” ought to mean. He declares that: “there will be no society without an ‘I,’ even less so without a vitalized ‘I.’ ”81 But his argument quickly turns to challenge itself on a paradoxical turn: “Without society and the world,” he stresses, “without society and the world that are at once intermingling and synthetic, collective and whole, there will be no ‘I’ whatsoever . . .”82 Given the aversion he feels towards the traditional form of society and its organizing ideology, we assume that the form of society and the ego he approves of should be equally vitalized even though he does not define them in so many words. In this case, it poses as well a personal challenge because he is acutely aware of his “lack” of a full-fledged body to become an integral part of the whole society on a visceral level. It is this empirically-induced inequality, as is indicated earlier, that mounts a physical curb to Qu’s full participation in the great flux of life.83 Nevertheless, he feels he can fall back on his tacit trust in the Yogācāric “continuum”—the cosmic power to array all sentient beings in an effusive yet interlocked bond. But these offer little more than seeming prospects of henceforth getting around Qu’s own intellect/affect conflict. If the ego acts as though it can impact on some ipso facto reality by virtue of the store consciousness, it is imperative to ask whether and how one’s affective faculties impinge on viral empirical reality with the help of the idea of perfuming mediation. Answering the above query will lead us to face a more compelling one: does Qu believe in an evolutionary move from the store consciousness to impacting on the world of reality by means of a psychologized ego? The answer should help us discern a ­watershed in Qu’s intensely fluid mindscape. Oddly but ineluctably, Bergson’s peculiar brand of vitalism enters here as a vital reference. As an anomaly rather than an opposition to reason, Bergson proposes a form of intuition derived from “memory.” Setting it against the sensory perception of images, Bergson regards memory as that faculty of the human body which “edits,” so to speak, the images being perceived, adding or subtracting them in preparation for its own instinctive interactions. In doing so, its perception of and response to the surrounding world become individualized instincts as they unfold within the self’s situated being. In short, he observes, human 80 Ibid. The emphasis is by Qu himself. 81 Ibid., 1: 166. The emphasis is by Qu himself. 82 Ibid. 83 Refer to earlier passages and notes of this chapter that deal with the dependability of the ego on cosmic consciousness other than its self-nature for its being.

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memory assuages the perceived image without suppressing what precedes it and what follows it, and also all that fills its present. As he outlines it: To obtain this conversion from the virtual to the actual, it would be necessary, not to throw more light on the object, but, on the contrary, to obscure some of its aspects, to diminish it by the greater part of itself, so that the remainder, instead of being encased in its surroundings as a thing, should detach itself from them as a picture.84 Characteristic of his mediating effort, Bergson singles out from this process a liminal moment to meet his need of keeping the flow of the flux by prolonging the accented image and expanding it into something else, more accurately, a picture with which the subconscious interacts as an immediate given because of its linkage to both the virtual and the actual, remembering and perception. In Bergson’s view, the pivot lies in the self’s body endowed with the intersecting role of memory: for one thing, one’s body that houses the mind is part of the mental representation of the world of objects one has so far received; it selects and stores up those images as concern one’s needs, interests and functions. For that matter, memory foregrounds the image one conceives of with surviving images from one’s past constantly intermingling with that of the present and assuaging it until it is submerged in one’s experiencing of the present. Thereby is ensured an endless flux of moments of an endlessly divisible time. For the other, memory calls forth “pure” perception in which the reality one perceives here and now is not constructed or reconstructed, but “touched, penetrated and lived.”85 Which means the subjectivity of one’s perception ­consists of a share of objects’ images. Thus, the sensible qualities of the thingin-itself (ding-an-sich ) would be known in themselves—less from without than from within. But this cannot be accomplished without the help of duration (durée) which asserts that pure perception always involves experiencing time as an on-going process of permeated and interlocked moments from the past to the present. Thus configured, our successive perception of the intrinsic views is linked up by the continuous thread of memory. They are moments of 84 Bergson, Matter and Memory, 36. This incidentally is accorded with historical significance by Deleuze who picks up the point and develops it into his concept of the “movementimage” for his theory of the cinema. Consult Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson & Barbara Habberjam (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1986). 85 Bergson, Natter and Memory, 66. “Pure” perception is contrasted with natural perception in which the image of objective reality is merely projected externally and is understood as equaling the thing-in-itself.

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our consciousness as well as of things in themselves.86 This bestows on our consciousness intimate knowledge of concrete matter. But there is little, if any, modus operandi for orienting the process (owing to the peculiar function of memory) towards a distant future, let alone a concrete goal such as the nation state. Attuned hence to life-world’s inner pulsation, our memory functions organically only in retrospect as if it were motored by stored-up life force to act out its existence in perfect unison with the here and the now, and the “continuous flux” of living reality is thus hardly attuned to any future-bound design with a télos pending an unfolding process. Qu Qiubai was very enthusiastic (as testified to by his many quotations and adaptations from Bergson in these two books) about the French vitalist’s efforts to psychologize cognition in order to free the human intellect from the mechanistic models set up by empirical positivism. Not incidentally, Bergson’s recourse to “the great flux of life” is also derived from his crusade against the rational intellect which, to his mind, thrives on a bondage to stasis and solidity and its natural aversion to motion, change and life. Bergson relates this obsessive bent of rationality to a peculiar gift of human intelligence which is innately adapted to discerning relations governing the objective world without being in contact with any real objects.87 As Bergson explains in his key treatises, the human mind supplies a postulated frame by means of which the on-going reality might be dissected and assessed in still-life. Knowledge resulted from such conjectures is uniquely capable of establishing logical relations among objects in terms of number, bulk, position and so on. Intelligence (Bergson’s code word for rational judgment), when aided by this formal and relational knowledge, can introduce order, causality and unity into the world of the inert. However, as Bergson disputes, no matter how the material universe is deciphered, the empiricist must resort to these enmeshed “units” (which stand as precursors to Qu’s “snapshots”) as its building blocks whose discontinuity and immobility become the cognitive limits for the materialist’s view of the universe. In consequence, the empiricist is very much handicapped in dealing with human ­psychic activities which resemble a fluid mass and refuse to be held captive to any rigid and immobile mode of thinking. When Qu echoes the Bergsonian line quoted in his uncle’s farewell poem (October 1920), this is what he says: “we are but resolved to go ahead alongside ‘Nature’—engage in creation without creating it; achieve uniformity without

86 87

Ibid., 70. See Bergson’s Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience. Genève: Éditions Albert Skira, 1889, 90–91.

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unifying it.”88 What makes this remark so vaguely suggestive is the revelation of his unsuspecting likening of Bergsonian evolution to the Yogācāric “flux.” Qu seems to infer that the French vitalist’s notion emphasizes a power analogous to a cosmic force; hence, he equates it with ãlaya that is creative but not so self-centered in a subject/object conjugation as illustrated by Bergson’s “­fundamental I.” Without intending to exaggerate the analogy, we should nevertheless be reminded that Bergson’s stance originates from an embedded dualism. His “fundamental I” allays the precepts of absolute vitalism by mediating them with the claims of empiricism (as in the case of memory). Such mediation is possible only within the binary frame of Western ontology—a point that should help clarify much of Qu’s thinking which originates in Yogācāra. For instance, Bergson anchors his vitalist selfhood on the grounds of a certain existence which is more than that which the idealist calls a representation, but less than that which the empiricist calls a thing—an existence placed halfway between idealism and empiricism.89 This accords at least in part with Qu’s own take on the Buddhist (especially the Yogācāric) premise of ontology—fata morgana. He is captivated by this halfway position between a mechanistic reflection and an idealist holism, not only because it bolsters his own refutation of those abstract and pedestrian ideologies and systems of thought, but it introduces him to an approach that peeks into the human subconscious and holds some promise of fresh insight on a stagnant problem. In either of his two books, we cannot fail to notice how frequently he describes the psyche, whether social or personal, in the same breath as energy, vitality and life force. However, is he right in expecting that an approach comparable to Bergson’s will help him convert the interactive mobility into forward progression, thereby channeling its fluid power onto a forward path of progress towards an end of greater good? Could his half-way position overcome the pitfalls of either extreme? We shall find out in the comments to follow. To make his own stance compatible to the Bergsonian one, Qu must first of all resolve his confusion as to whether objective reality exerts any impact on human consciousness which perceives it. As indicated above, Bergson hints at a positive reply to it: he has argued that the human body interacting with the external world is itself like an image among an aggregate of images. He has shown that durée enables the self’s mind to be attuned to the inner dynamism of objects themselves, and that the function of memory stems decidedly from 88 Qu, Wenji, 1: 31. The original line in his uncle’s letter goes: “Bergson says: all in the universe is creation,—a creation with every passing minute or hour.” The line is likely a translation of a remark taken out of Bergson’s L’Évolution créatrice (Paris: Librairie Félix Aloan, 1924). 89 See Bergson, Matter and Memory, 36.

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its interaction with material reality by token of images. For Qu, however, that has become an almost indomitable alternative. His repeated mention of economy and living conditions has pointed him to that direction; but he also ­concedes that what we perceive of it in our psyche is entirely different—it is permeated with images, relations and modalities impacted by the cosmic mind—what the Buddhists call Nei zai shi ji (intrinsic reality).90 In fact, whatever lies beyond is, Qu comes to realize, tantamount to nonbeing in Buddhist ontology. Even more pressing is Bergson’s notion of a “fundamental I” whose sentient being endures a psychologized memory and remains ever responsive to the subtle and varying impressions, pulsations and vibrations encountered by his subconscious as time passes. His (that of the “fundamental I”) ­egocentric spirit refuses to be fashioned into “types” needed by cultural and ideological indoctrination to establish norms and their conformity. By virtue of individualized intuition, as Bergson believes, the individual being avails to himself the irreducible and continuous bonds between subject and object to bring into active play between him and other psychic beings—the interactive process that Qu’s sociality already encompasses. What still remains amiss, we note, is the ability to design oriented actions that actualize a gradual working-out by way of the self’s psyche with all its affective capacities. That would spell out for Qu the necessary intermediary steps to connect the overarching goal of greater goods and the individual being situated in the visceral body. Yet to do so immediately brings the individual to a crossroads: what lies ahead for his/her developing ego is forked into two modes of realization—to attain a sensible and psychological fulfillment of the self? Or be elevated to an intellectual and theoretical realm by dissolving the embodied self altogether? A corollary to this conflict is the Chinese concept of Ti (the body). The simultaneous interplay between the intellect and the affect is what ti endows the body with in a more diverse realm of being. Since ancient times, a continuum of meanings has evolved in Chinese philosophy for the concept of ti.91 It commences with its rudimentary form of juxiang (corporeal image), which simply denotes a human body or the bulk of an object, but ranges all the way to the height of the essential, the infinite and the abstract, covering a wide spectrum of interfaced polarities such as part/whole, 90 91

Nei zai shi ji 内在实际. Evidently, the exegesis of Ti is worth volumes of scholarly research on Buddhist ontology. Here I dwell only on those pertaining to Qu’s awareness of them, e.g. one of his most frequently mentioned conditions is his physical state of being as in Qu ti (the physiological body). For a more comprehensive study of Ti, see Jing Haifeng, Xiong Shili (Xiong Shili, the Great Master of Buddhism, Taiwan: Dong da tu shu Gong si, 1991), 132–140.

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one/many and concrete/abstract.92 More strikingly pertinent is ti’s “transplanted meaning” of philosophical implication, which is at once epistemological and ontological. In this sense, the noun form of ti becomes a verb that signifies an embodied self in simultaneously transitive and intransitive relationships with the world around him: it is transitive in the sense that the sentient subject apperceives the non-self world with his/her sensory impressions as well as intellectual reflection (it is therefore epistemological as well); it is intransitive in the sense that the subject is never in a position to objectify the world being apperceived, for the individual always implicates the self in his/ her effort to objectify, and consequently rescinds any disinterested objectivity all together and is in turn subsumed by a pan-subjectivity (it is peculiarly ­ontological just like the Yogācāric store consciousness). The ontological supposition in this case is that the body is like a staging ground amassing both physical and metaphysical forces, and that its contribution to the epistemological activities is a combination of sensory reflection and intuition. In the midst of all this, the role of the self is valorized insofar as it provides for this intuitive process a specific site (of this particular body) and a concrete moment (of this very instance). As is summarized by one notable scholar of Buddhism: . . . [W]hat is striking here is the particularity of the subject (incidentally this given person) and the instantaneous nature of its apperception (this very minute). The result is that it [the intuitive process] cannot be ­logically reasoned and transmitted, nor can it be repeatedly enacted unconditionally. These are precisely the quintessential features governing the thinking mode of intuitionism.93 The scholar goes on to praise intuitionism for instilling morally uplifting ­activism and vitality into the subject, and acknowledges it as the buttress of traditional Chinese ontology. But he has in so doing accounted for the need to dissolve the palpable entity of the individual body, making the embodied self a dispensable or even superfluous point in the continuum of ti. As it turns out, this ephemeral character of ti is a dead-end for the questing provisional self of Yogācāra. At the heart of Qu’s disinheritance lies this fatality of transience, which, when coupled with the lack of teleological vision, valorizes as well as depreciates the self as a provisional site. For this reason, the ego’s subconscious must at once fulfill the twofold function of the tenor and the vehicle: the self is 92 93

Ju xiang 俱像. The critic is Jing Haifeng whose remarks are quoted in Xiong shili, 138–139.

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simultaneously the affect’s agent of intuition and the receptacle of what it intuits. But once drawn into the intuitive process, the self’s body meets its nemesis: its apperceived reality tends to render itself one transit stop of the process of manifesting what is intrinsic and imminent. In addition, the activism and vitality injected by his notion of the great flux into the process of becoming make it necessary for them to permeate rather than solidify sites of selves. In other words, the disparate selves can only become moments of a flight, not points of a trajectory.94 All of the above is perhaps what leads Yogācāra to regard the ego’s subconscious as duplicitous and ultimately denies its permanent existence. As a result, the ego of the self loses its separate, ­independent character as it yields its finitude and individuality to a fluid and infinite process. In this respect, Qu, too, is to yield the tangible body of the self; he does so evidently by necessity because of his lack of a full-functioning corporeal entity. But this makes him all the more anxious to be subsumed in mass psychology because his lack of a full-bodied affect can now be compensated by the power of the body psychic which knows no mortal or temporal limits. Akin to the conversion of the concept of ti from its designating to its activating roles, the effacement of Qu’s self could now be seen as a step in intellectual elevation and personal progress; it is after all a transmutation of the ephemeral self into a more vital, creative identity that salvages him from being a mere physical invalid. Due also to the intuitive turn of his understanding of ti, Qu’s desire for integral essence of the self begins to vaporize, and whatever sense of the individual subject he possesses changes into a self-styled proclivity for embracing the laboring masses via social psychology. Unlike some of his senior Marxist colleagues, Qu does not start to formulate the class condition of laborers along lines of class-based discrimination and conflicts. His formulation is, at the outset anyway, primarily psychological and behavioral, motored by his intuitive sense of a synecdoche-type correspondence between the individual and the society at large. Here we can evoke his earlier belief in Bodhisattva to trace out the hidden metaphorical junction. Because ãlaya lies imminent in the cosmic universe, we are reminded, there is an intuitive potential and tangible chance of becoming Bodhisattva deposited in every single human being. The select few who have achieved enlightenment are the ones awakened from their dormant mindsets sooner; whereas the slumbering multitudes are yet to have their share of demiurgic potential tapped and realized to the full. This is one

94

This notion is also the outcome of Qu’s fixation with the flux, which, too, resembles what Bergson claimed to be characteristic of his notion of durée. See Bergson’s Essai, Chapter 2.

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reason why, to Qu’s mind, the subconscious of the mass has kept itself in perpetual motion. However, as the essential self is disinherited, this synecdoche connection might in all likelihood be induced to yield to the scheme of a “great chain of being” not unlike the Marxist agenda of attaining a classless human society by means of a fight-poison-with-poison antidote—using class division and conflict as the very key to ignite and drive historical changes and progress. In Hegelian terms, this stage of eliminating classes once and for all is the negation of an earlier negation of classless society by the property-owning, class-based strata. This logical working-out through negation of a negation clearly signifies a linear, staged pattern of development during which the proletariat is destined to claim its crowning victory. This reminds us of Qu’s youthful ideal projected onto the proletariat who, as the last “grave-digging” class, were to level up all systems of social theories, state apparatuses and other obstacles of human artifice and bring about the realization of the final apogee of human strife. But unlike followers of the Hegelian and later Marxist approaches, Qu seems to avert any step-by-step and long-term engagement with social transformation, and it is only his zealous interest in mass social psychology and mass movement that kept him lingering in the ranks of those revolutions undertaken by the Russian and Chinese Marxists. This is most likely what eventually caused the mature Qu to part ways with the Marxist approach to social change, and turn singularly susceptible to the cosmic perception of mass movements by way of the Yogācāric provisional self. For all its “provisional” nature in “situating” human bodies, Qu seems to be enchanted by it because it exhibits a kind of law of inevitability raging forth from the psychic flux. It is neither deterministic nor teleological. Not only is the individual bred (perfumed) and shaped by this huge aggregate of energy and vitalism, but certain patterns of historical evolution would take shape and connect him to the store consciousness and the path to the supreme publicness designed for self-realization and social achievement. Ironically, what he sets out to negotiate by the concept of ti ends up an inversion, if not a subversion, of his pursuit of truth and reality: his initial resistance to preconceived theories or formulas of social transformation in order to get at a fresh and autonomous perspective on reality has now morphed into a diminution of a free and independent grasp of the social milieu so as to make way for a collective yet unbound course of historical evolution. Yet what he now intuits (as against what others still reason about) is not supposedly the realm of the noumena, but the world of empirical reality. With such an inverted frame of mind, we cannot but anticipate the kind of “historical mishaps” as the last piece that completes the puzzle of his hiatus in Yogācāra, which results in

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his reliance on the ego’s affective faculties in the hope of intersecting the diverging paths of self-realization. When his dysfunctional health puts his physical being under severe limits, this deficiency also prompts Qu to more readily accept the body psychic—his belief that the psychologized state of being is what forges a link between him and the mass or social formation—the Yogācāric way of a final fulfillment of the self.

chapter 6

Non-Epiphany in Ye Shaojun’s Lyrical Vision Ye Shaojun’s Ni Huanzhi (formerly translated as Schoolmaster Ni Huanzhi, 1929) features a choice specimen of Chinese apprenticeship fiction (Lehrjahre) that only the ethos of the May Fourth era could conduce and nurture.1 The novel traces the protagonist’s footsteps on his life-long trek, beginning with his adolescent angst, his career as a teacher and his active involvement in school reforms, his romantic courtship and disappointing family life, his participation in a major revolutionary insurgence, and ending eventually with his unheroic death. Often viewed as Ye’s thinly adorned autobiography, it is one of the earliest full-length novels of the modern era that exhibits the potential and limits of education as a form of self-realization. As such it emulates the European Bildungsroman, trying to rehearse how ideas of social evolution (chiefly appropriated from the West) come into conflicts with principles of personal cultivation (basically a Confucian heritage) against the backdrops of China’s social conditions. And to that effect much has been said by Ye’s Chinese critics in their extensive but flawed studies of his works and life. One basic flaw rests with these critics’ unsuspecting espousal of a Marxist interpretation of human perfectibility, which maps out a uni-linear pattern of social advancement (a crude adaptation of the Hegelian Aufhebung).2 The positivist télos creates a revolutionary agenda of social rupture coupled with ideological coercion. This Marxist orthodoxy privileges a trite deterministic model for edifying society and the individual which hinges vitally on the causality between the economic base and the superstructure. Human history, according to this model, must move through stages of clearly defined socioeconomic development before it reaches the pinnacle of human perfection (aka communism come true). A person is and will at best be, it follows, as his/ 1 Yeh Shao-chun 叶绍钧, The School Master Ni Huan-Chih, 倪焕之 trans. A. C. Barnes (Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1958). The German term is generally originated with Goethe’s Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre. Although comparisons with Western apprenticeship novels will be given where they are relevant, my discussion hereafter will mainly be focused on the fundamental distinctions exhibited by the Chinese apprenticeship fiction in terms of perceptual vision, self-identity and intellectual cultivation. 2 In passing I will point out that the Chinese revolutionary utopia is an estranged progeny, spawned via Soviet communism, Hegel’s notion of disparate nations awakening and maturing to a single ultimate state of existence—the absolute spirit. More will be provided in detail in the ensuing pages.

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her position in economic and social relationships dictates, unless he/she foresees and pursues the doxa of a revolutionary utopia. Only when the truth of this utopian vision is set firmly in mind can the individual relate to the final essence of human existence whose strength he/she can rely on to transform his/her imperfect and incomplete state of being—his/her here and now—and move it towards its ultimate fulfillment. At the heart of this utopia of “historical inevitability” is the Marxist cultural formula “being determines consciousness.”3 This much too simplified version of materialism figured prominently in nineteenth century Europe’s quest for determinism and law in all areas of science and culture. Positivism reigned supreme as scientists, economists, sociologists sought hard to prove the predictable causal dependence of man’s mental and cultural activities on his economic conditions. Its influence on literature and art was perhaps best illustrated by the views of the French theorist Hippolyte Taine who regarded literary characters as “types” (“le personnage regnant”) shaped by such determining forces as “race,” “milieu” and “moment.”4 But from its outset the Marxist design already embedded an ambiguity, if not a paradox: its dialectic alternative—consciousness affects being—cannot be exorcised away from the formula (much as Karl Marx would like to). Instead it constantly reminds us that “circumstances are changed precisely by men and that the educator himself must be educated.”5 In sum, the crux lies with the issue of “agency” of the historically determined individual. It is thus not surprising that critics today are still harsh and unrelenting in their verdict on Ye Shaojun’s grim portrait of a promising revolutionist who rigorously pursues his education against daunting social odds only to be crushed by his own limited vision. They all hasten to point out how Ye’s consciousness, largely delimited by his socio-economic status (i.e. that of the petty bourgeoisie, in Marxist lexicon), impinges on his ability to discern the fundamental goal of social evolution, i.e., toward a Proletariat-led socialism, as these critics insist; it results in his eventual inability to align the goal of education— of his students as well as his own—with such a forward-looking teleology. Given such an impaired historical understanding, they argue, Ye’s self-seeking hero cannot but be confined to a limited vision at each stage of his life journey and be eventually crushed by his despair before the ever-receding goal of an 3 For a more detailed explication of this formula, see Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Selected Works (New York: International Publishers), I. 356. 4 Hippolyte Taine, Histoire de la littérature anglaise, 12th ed. (Paris, 1905), I. See also René Wellek’s discussion of Taine’s literary views in A History of Modern Criticism: 1750–1950 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1965), iv. 5 Marx & Engels, Selected Works, I, 472.

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ideal.6 Evidently, we see in such views the lurking specter of Qu Qiubai; the decades-old dilemma between “the determinist” or “the vitalist” still haunts them. “What is the nature of Ye’s educational reform?” they question, “how does it stand in relation to the overall struggle for social progress?” An inquiry like this gestures towards the agency issue, but does so in utter subordination of the determinist agenda. There seem to be, for instance, directly opposed opinions as to how to assess Ni Huanzhi’s abortive trial of educational reform. Critics like Jin Mei assault Ni from the more deterministic stance.7 They find fault first with Ni’s class status (of a petty bourgeois intellectual) and blames it for his flawed understanding of the extent to which educational reforms can assist fundamental changes in social systems. They insist that Ni’s fatal error is to place an idealistic education reform above the more pressing class and political conflicts, thus failing its role as a handy tool to be utilized in the foremost task of debunking the prevalent social system. But having said so does not help them dispel the risk of losing touch with the télos of socialist utopia, nor can it excuse them from the duty of saying what Ni ought to be to keep in step with it. Other critics seize the same set of facts but argue to the contrary: the author’s awareness of the total vision, according to Wan Song whose view is more teleological, requires him to put Ni’s educational experiment in perspective, i.e., to portray its role in direct proportion to its formulaic role in a positivist teleology, of which it partakes by resonating with the final télos.8 And Ye Shaojun’s realistic depiction of Ni’s educational reform does precisely that! They comport with Ni’s belief in mobilizing students by way of enlightening ideals and converting them into daring thinkers of new thoughts in the struggle to oust the 6 For example, Sun Guangxuan 孙光宣, “Du Ni Huanzhi” 读《倪焕之》(On reading Ni Huanzhi) Wen yi Lun cong, 8 [1979] (Review of Art and Literature, 1979), and Jin Mei 金梅, “Wusi qian hou xiao zi can jie ji zhi shi fen zi si xiang li cheng de zhen shi xie zhao” 五四前 后小资产阶级知识分子思想历程的真实写照 (Realistic portraits of the intellectual development of the petty-bourgeois intellectuals before and after the May Fourth Movement) Wen shi zhe 3 [1979] 文史哲 (Literature, History, Philosophy). Critics like these are invariably positioned in hard-core socialist realism, and their critical views are permeated in a politicized aesthetics engineered and enforced by the ruling official ideology. However, as will be shown in the following passages, the way they privilege a class-oriented scheme of social progression and legitimize it with appropriated western notions of evolution and development should shed light on the problems facing writers like Ye Shaojun caught in a strenuous transition from the traditional to the modern. 7 Jin, “Realistic portraits,” 33–35. 8 See Wan Song 万嵩, Ye Shengtao xin lun 叶圣陶新论 (A New Critique of Ye Shengtao) (Lanzhou University Press, 1991), Chapter 6. Ye Shentao is Ye’s another frequently used formal name.

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traditional system of education. For this reason, they contend, Ni’s failure cannot be ascribed to his idealistic principle alone, but to the overwhelming odds of resisting feudal classes and the despondent masses he faced in his time. But again their perspectival view cannot whisk away Ni’s political outlook as one determined by his social and economic conditions, while the key question remains only partially answered as to what Ni is. That is to say, how he actually goes about negotiating between his idealistic education and the specific demands of the historical reality. In either case, as a result, these critics are befuddled by the elusive boundaries between what is and what ought to be. Thus, in self-mockery, the hero of revolutionary literature never should nor does become realistic because it is duplicitous—deterministic and teleological—from his birth.9 Most Chinese Leftist writers were all hard pressed to deal with the overspill of this ideological controversy into the literary realm, and in one way or another they bestride a slippery tightrope between the “is” and “ought to be.” One telling example was the need to diffuse the lyrical “I” in the growing process of the revolutionary heroes. We notice a shift in the biographical narratives from a self who is consummated in lyrical epiphany to one who is grappling for and resetting of orientation in social crises. Such a process can be perceived in the dis­­ parate narrative stances deployed by Ye Shaojun for his lyrical and ironic perspective. The first, a rather short story called Han xiao de qing ge (Fiddle Music in a Cold Morning) from his first collection, Gemo (Barriers, 1922), seems to typify Ye’s unsuspecting rendition of lyrical epiphany.10 By and large, Ye enters into a nearly transparent relationship with the narrator “I” whose sympathy towards fellow beings takes the form of an exercise of “objective correlative” in lyrical sentiments. At the outset, what the “I” does is to project his personal anxiety and dejection on the bleak nature scene of a cold December morning in the hope of finding some cathartic relief. As his search for empathetic objects is presently disturbed by some intruding music played on the Erhu (a two-string Chinese fiddle), so his curiosity in finding out who is playing this music gives him another chance to carry on his internal act of lyrical refinement. To his 9

10

Marxist epistemology is in part curbed by its teleological, and fundamentally coercive, end. So it can never be truly committed to the principle of verisimilitude. Marston Anderson has discovered the same disjunction from a different standpoint. See Marston Anderson, “Introduction,” The Limits of Realism: Chinese Fiction in the Revolutionary Period (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990). Han xiao de qin ge 寒晓的琴歌. Yeh Shao-chun, The Barriers and Other Stories 隔膜短 篇小说选 (Shanghai: The Commercial Press, 1922), 125.

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question “where is the music from?” for instance, comes promptly an inadvertent thought of his as the answer: it is those singing girls who only are able to practice their music by themselves after long hours of entertaining their c­ lients throughout the night. Since the narrator knows of them by chance, which he frankly admits, his thoughts cannot but cast a projection based on his feelings of empathy. When his eyesight cannot expand beyond the tightly closed windows of the singing girls’ house, it is again his imaginative mind that extends his vision over into the house interior: “A young girl is rehearsing on a Chinese fiddle which she cradles as some unfamiliar and horrible object. . . .”11 When the I-narrator hears the singing that accompanies the fiddle playing, he at once conjures up the image of a girl of twelve or thirteen years old whose timid and withered voice lets out the sorrow buried deep inside the souls of all the weak and the insulted. Thus the author is able to mentally inscribe the entire scene on the objects of his empathy without having to witness what actually goes on inside their house. If, however, this signifies the point of lyrical epiphany in the story elevating the “I” to being one with the objectified world, his subjectively construed unity is not without its moment of disquiet. It is when he realizes that he is the only person listening to and figuring out what these faint, fragmented sounds might mean—the knowledge that affirms his own power of objectification, but excludes any interactive contact with the real other—in this case, a singing girl who is nowhere in sight! Meanwhile he is duly perturbed by the fact that the singing girl, fully capable of singing and playing pleasing music in front of her clients, is now playing in a way so uncharacteristic of herself as if her music were meant exclusively for his ears. Naturally, one is here urged to ask: could it simply be that he is making all this up in his mind? Inarticulate as they are, thoughts like this must have been flashing through Ye’s mind as he concludes the story by saying that “. . . a weird feeling comes intruding into my heart.”12 The second story, Ku Cai (Bitter Greens), turns that troubling moment into a genuine crisis about the narrator’s self-awareness.13 The I-narrator has to confront the challenge of a dispirited other—the hired gardener—to unravel the beguiling and unrewarding end of self-cultivation after the image of a lyrical self. He decides to reclaim a plot of “waste land” and grow fresh greens with the knowledge and skills of Futang, the hired farm hand. As he toils on the stubbly 11 Yeh, The Barriers, 126. Translations from hereon are mine. 12 Ibid. The translation provided here is based on a version by Anderson; I have made some slight changes where I deem it necessary. 13 Ku Cai 苦菜. Yeh, The Barriers, 126.

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land, he becomes increasingly lyricized so that, to him, gardening epitomizes intellectual enlightenment, and growing vegetables resembles the ­nurturing of his own subject. Fittingly, he is soon uplifted by an ecstatic epiphany: I did not feel time passing; no thought or emotion occurred to me. I was transformed! Power is I, I am power; . . . A state of mind like this can only be felt, not verbally expressed.14 我不觉得时间在那里移换：我没有一切思虑和情绪。我化了， 力就是我，我就是力。这等心境，只容体会，不可言说。 What relates him with Power is an idealized self that transcends his timebound existence, specifically, his earlier life that has come to be “routinized.” Equally idealized is his notion that true human essence rests with manual labor, which alone can gratify men’s intellectual pursuit. Apparently, the haughty, axiomatic tone of such a lyrical vision gives away its covert ideological underpinning. But it is not so much its illusory guile as its risk of displacement that matters in what ensues.15 Ironically, the gardening project in which the “I” participates does not “turn a new leaf” in his self-growth; rather it gradually dawns on him that his own identity is beset with flawed presumptions. Painful as it may be, the narrator’s self-awakening is called forth precisely through a subtle demystification brought to bear on his prior self-assessment by the epiphanic self. At first, the “I,” self-conscious of his own social and cultural superiority, is in a position to size up Futang’s entire life, objectifying his “other” easily within the parameters of his own subjectivity. Inadvertently, he finds himself doing what the “I” is doing in the first story—second-guessing what Futang wishes to, but does not, express in so many words. And the discrepancy between their opinions, of which Futang constantly reminds him, i.e. his polite cautioning that gardening is not what a desk-bound scholar can handle without an effort, seems tangible enough to be resolved on his part. If anything, it proves to the contrary that the narrator is capable of handling the timing and the extent of it—when to contain it and how it can be gratifying—even though he is somewhat disoriented 14 15

Ibid. The translation provided here is based on a version by Anderson; I have made some slight changes where I deem it necessary. I here differ from Anderson in that he sees the narrator’s self-knowledge as a result of transgressing the class boundaries. My emphasis is laid on the author’s awareness of the self-estranging effect of Futang’s unrewarding life once the narrator turns round to view his own artistic pursuits. See, Anderson, Limits of Realism, 98–99.

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at first. All this seems to indicate that he is well on his way to the predicted realization of a unitary self/other relationship. The turning point that catches him unawares is the sickly growth of the greens they have planted. Coupled with his observation of Futang’s unfeeling absenteeism in saving the pest-infected greens, the incident causes him to reconsider his appraisal of Futang as his co-author in the project of self-rejuvenation. He is shocked by Futang’s story of the bitter years he has spent tending to fields and crops, but never able to avert the random befalling of misfortunes or earned enough to support a family of a wet-nursing wife with five daughters and a dying baby son. Rather than occasioning a rehearsal of authorial empathy, Futang’s vain efforts now discloses the reason why the hired gardener has lately become inert, despondent and loathed towards such a potentially fulfilling enterprise as gardening. And eventually this eye-opening incident has made it clear to the “I” that Futang represents a way of enduring human existence drastically different from his own, and that the sense of identity of the “I” to envision a self-cultivation not unlike his abandoned effort in growing the greens is rather limited and inadequate. It has wrongly taken for granted the non-identity of Futang, whose role he regards as merely instrumental and expendable to his own end. But to reckon with Futang’s view of life implies that he has to confront aspects of personal and social reality, which dislocates him from his secure sense of selfhood and further leads to a disturbing, though ephemeral, self-displacement. So what is far more urgent and crucial to his self-possession now is to embrace an other like Futang and in turn recognize in himself a realistic, imperfect being dependent upon others for meaning of life—a delimited (borné) self he was originally unaware of: “I begin to feel that this ‘me here and now’ is this composite amassed out of sadness, anxiety, illusion, guilt and so on.”16 Contrary to his initial intent, his gardening project has resulted in a complex and ambiguous, though equally bitter, self-discovery. This newly acquired identity of “I” is a composite of disparate selves who bespeak convincingly what Wan Song has suggested but not yet affirmed—the need to configure the lyrical subject as a mostly ambiguous and sometimes conflictual entity located in a nexus of intersubjective relationships. It opens up a new angle for us to observe how Anderson reads the “limits of realism.”17 16 Yeh, The Barriers, 91. 17 For my discussion that follows, I am obliged to the late Marston Anderson whose reading of the lyrical short story still remains a crucial milestone in the studies of modern Chinese literature. My discussion is also an attempt, not so much to problematize, as to complicate his comments on the “reality effect”. See Anderson, “The Morality of Form: Lu Xun and the Modern Chinese Short Story,” Leo Ou-fan Lee, ed., Lu Xun and His Legacy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 32–53.

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Thanks to this interrelated subjectivity, we find it necessary to complicate some of the conclusions drawn by Anderson with regard to the “reality effect” exhibited in the May Fourth short stories. He has, rightly, focused on the subject’s struggle with and retreat from the “meaningless” object as one key defining component of the lyrical short story. According to him, it is due as much to the resistance to meaning on the part of the victimized Chinese working poor as to the failure of the May Fourth realists to come to grips with them in literary realism. While agreeing in the main with Anderson’s critical stance, I do think it too hasty for him to pass the verdict on the writers’ “failure” in inscribing lyrical validity onto the “Other.” For one thing, this so-called “failure” could be the very moment where the author, the undeniable third party distanced from the first two, achieves ironic awareness of his true self. For the other, if that warrants the “reality effect”—in the sense that the subject is denied an ontological privilege over other subjects—the “failure could ironically be a step closer to reality concerning the self.” Anderson has in fact raised serious doubt against the kind of “irony” Schlegel and Hegel expounded in relation to the genial godlike irony, which holds in negative regard other beings who are historically determined and culturally bound.18 Now what valorizes such a “superior” viewpoint of the others by the “I,” as we learn from German idealism, is the Hegelian Absolute subject that at once invests and divests the validity of the others’ existence in accordance with his subjective consciousness. When Anderson uncovers the limits of realism, he seems content with his critique of the inherent handicap of the Western model of realism without going all the way to its cognitive root cause. Yet thanks to Anderson, we are now better able to discern the obstacles latent in this narrative nexus via the author-narrator-character triad. With their help, we can observe, on the one hand, the realist’s retreat (as in Anderson’s reading) “into a pose of objectivity” and his futility towards the others’ “resistance to meaning” might lead to a disturbing, if not altogether subversive, inquiry of the subject’s ability to encompass the entire world, be it natural or human, other than himself.19 For instead of being submissive to the subject’s dominance, the objects’ despondency serves to diffuse or displace its power or authority, forcing the former to readjust itself to a shared relationship between them. On the other hand, we should see how the subject/object binarism, a direct 18

See Note 48 of the Introduction Chapter 1. An interesting observation is in order here: Hegel refers to the inferior beings other than the “I” with the French term borné, which also stresses the condition of being delimited or bounded by historical particularity. It is therefore rather evident that Schlegel, Hegel and later de Man all endorse the unequal relationship between the subject and the object. 19 Anderson, Lu Xun’s Legacy, 36.

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offspring of the Absolute Subject, still endeavors to hold sway over the reciprocal process of the subject vs. object relationship. As is often the case with the epiphanic lyrical subject, if transcendence is insisted upon as the consummate end for its selfhood, the lyrical subject, after its expendable interaction with its objects, is inclined to restore itself to elitism and privilege over others.

Impasse of Human Gardening

Often considered the father of China’s modern education, John Dewey’s approach to experience left an indelible signature on the issue of human growth. His idea of selfhood entails destabilizing variations of a lyrical epiphany, a self both fractured and reunited, which are notably identifiable to the growth of the lyrical self short of a transcendent finale. As shown earlier, the brevity of the short story form requires that the story lines end abruptly. In a generic sense, therefore, the short story lends itself to a poetic elation ending in a seemingly epiphanic moment. But when set in a time-bound narrative of coming of age, as in a biographical novel, the process in which the self is reconfigured cannot be neatly framed in with a formal closure such as the lyrical ending of a short story. Moreover, the challenge it faces is more than formalistic; it signifies a perceptual need for the author to adopt a reciprocal self/other dynamic in lieu of a self-directed epiphanic “I” so as to continually instigate the awareness of the self Is. So it is time for us to observe similar incidents and characters figured in both Ye Shaojun’s short stories and his apprenticeship novel Ni Huanzhi in order to see how he grapples with the slippage from the lyrical mode to the historical narrative. The identity of “The Gardener,” or the lack of clarity as such, is at the center of Ye Shaojun’s literary endeavor at delineating the interaction between the old and the new, the burgeoning self and the changing reality. Traditional Chinese culture had long celebrated the role of a teacher—as an ethical and cultural exemplar—with the honor of a Yuan ding (the gardener). But the advent of a Western-style education in China had by now eclipsed its former role, reducing it to marginality as it was increasingly becoming a career-oriented profession. The “gardener” is also a crucial yet disconcerting trope for our critical review of Ye’s various portrayals of it: it is crucial because it offers us the “lyric vs. epic” kind of comparison between his short stories and his full-length novel, Ni Huanzhi; it is disconcerting due to the fact that the career of the novel’s main protagonist as a gardener presents an exposé and reappraisal of the analogy of “gardening.” Ni Huanzhi, the exemplary figure in the novel, goes to a small town-school located not far from Shanghai with an important

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­ ission—to carry out an unprecedented education reform according to “new m concepts of pedagogy.” The core of these concepts—inspired mostly by Dewey during his lecture tour to China then—seems a hasty adaptation of Dewey’s notions such as “process,” “experience” and “interaction” to China’s pedagogical needs.20 As we learn from some of his recollected incidents early in the novel, Ni had his first taste of Dewey’s principles of education thanks to a touching anecdote he witnessed: a teacher straightened out a bullying brat in school by engaging, sincerely and persistently, in a face-to-face chat with him till the latter wept.21 The pedagogical method used here is that of “interaction,” that is, to ignite the student’s spontaneous sense of fairness, justice and responsibility to interact with the environment by way of partnering with the teacher on an equal footing. As a result, the student came to his senses on his own, and he began to remedy his faults. That incident, the author tells us, sent himself cramming books on education which he used to detest. By all accounts, Dewey was among those he read, and it is believed that ideas from those books have led to his dedication to the teaching profession. Bolstered by the newly-acquired pedagogical thinking he has read, Ni first braves through a daunting squall during his boat ride to the school and instantaneously feels transposed by the serene rustic scene of peace and innocence surrounding him. Buoyant in self-confidence, he succumbs to the overwhelming feeling of lyrical enlightenment that elevates him to idyllic heights. He describes what he sees this way: He thought that the people he had seen this morning seemed unusually calm and self-possessed. . . . Most of his experience of town life over the past few years had been in the realm of cut-throat competition and fraud. But this place had probably not yet been contaminated by these evil practices.22

20

My reading of Ye Shaojun’s critique of Dewey is mainly on based on how Ye mediates Dewey’s philosophical notions through the educational reform he helps initiate at the local school. It should not be taken to mean that Ye actually responded critically to Dewey’s ideas point by point. For the influence Dewey exerted on educators in modern China, see Note 22 and also Chapter 1, the Introduction. 21 The incident is described in a flashback in Chapter 3 of Ni Huanzhi. Yeh, Ni Huan-chih, 29–31. It is to be noted that the spelling of the author and the protagonists vary from the Pinyin to Wade-Giles versions. 22 Yeh, Ni Huan-chih, 52. All translations are by A. C. Barnes unless otherwise stated.

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Under the spell of his own imaginings just like the “I” in “Fiddle Music in a cold morning,” Ni does not hesitate to inscribe his subjective impressions onto the people he has hardly met, still less known. Within days of his arrival, he makes the same mental projection about his students, praising their superior love of nature and humble eagerness to learn and forgiving their worldly, homespun and provincial mentality. Tailoring their lives to suit his inner impressions, Ni is positive that he can open the students’ eyes to the outside world, arouse their intellectual curiosity and rid themselves of small-town bias and ignorance. Even with their obvious flaws—harassment of poor students by the children of the rich, for instance—Ni has already come to terms (subjectively, of course) before actually seeing them in person. For such class-based discrimination, he has prescribed ready-made remedies—what he learns from Dewey’s “interaction” with other subjects: respect others as one would oneself. He is ready to resolve the class hostility among students because he truly believes that a school is a “paradise on earth” where equality for all its members alone reigns supreme. Up to this point, the author plays almost a transparent role narrating Ni’s inner thinking as if he were an “I.” Then an incident occurs to put this to a full test: Jiang Hua, the son of local gentry has hassled the son of a local carpenter over a loose ball in an athletics class, and he is caught right on the spot by the gym teacher who has brought him to Ni to be punished. Contrary to what is expected, Ni, holding hands and gentle in tone, enters a prolonged conversation with the school bully. He tries to invoke the boy’s sympathetic understanding, pleading to him that bullying somebody just because this person is of low social status (as in the case of the carpenter’s son) would only betray himself to be selfish, abject and incompetent, and would lower others’ respect for himself. Eventually, the erratic youth gives up his hostility and agrees to Ni’s demands. The incident could have concluded right here to wind up this “soul-rendering” lyrical short story with a perfect ending. But it is not at all clear whether the boy has been truly persuaded by Ni’s soul-searching talk because, and, this is where the narrator’s ironical distance sets in, the boy feels as if he had been under the influence of “the flat, monotonous voice of a hypnotist; a kind of weariness, a listlessness, slowly made itself felt and spread throughout his body.”23 As it turns out, Ni’s hypnotic kind of “interaction” is far more unilateral than reciprocal, for it depends exclusively on a plain subject/object relationship and seldom activates a more intersubjective dynamic on the teacher-student basis. The student here is plunged into a “situation” deemed to be “educational” by his teacher whose taste of 23

Ibid., 81.

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e­ xperience is a bit more complex than that of the youth, and Ni’s pedagogical aim is only slightly less dogmatic than the old way of mind feeding. For example, Jiang Hua, have been lectured on the ethics of being a fair-minded person, poses his question back to Ni: why is class oppression socially practiced and accepted, but cannot be tolerated in school? The question should give Ni pause to ponder where the limitations of his curriculum reforms lie, but he brushes it aside. The reason why Ni evades the question is probably due to the risk of being distracted from his focus on the subjective passions, taking control of the interaction and, for that matter, from eventually contributing to a fulfilling course of progress. As done earlier in “Bitter Greens,” Ye Shaojun is to unsettle Ni’s sense of the self from his self-induced gratification and esteem via dislocation of a sort, i.e. through someone whose sharply different perspective on the incident annuls in the subject any sense of his self’s fulfillment or completion as would occur in a short story. But unlike the ending of “Bitter Greens” which leaves the “I” reflexive but considerably intact, about an inter-subjective self-awareness, the novel is capable of extending the plot over a temporal sequence and rehearsing the same incident retold by other colleagues of Ni to complicate or even reverse it. This helps Ye to undercut the protagonist from his falsely secured subjectivity. Thus, the role of Ni’s colleagues, particularly Lu Sanfu and Xu Youfu, also part of the environment for Ni’s students, is hereby brought into play to carry on the “process” in a manner quite beyond Ni’s expectation. And their grasp of the incident, especially of how Ni persuades the bully to own up to his erroneous conduct, contradicts, if not totally negates, Ni’s sense of a successful interaction. These “othered” subjects, relate to another incident in which a schoolmaster like Ni would be misled time and again by his students, who promptly shed tears to fake their repentance, to believe that they were moved by his method and would foolishly let them get away with their misconduct each time. These colleagues conclude that Ni has been deceived by Jiang Hua in exactly the same way, and Ni’s method of passionate interaction has proved a total failure!24 In actual fact, this cruel judgment is an accurate prediction of what would become of Jiang Hua years later. The boy grows to be a seasoned opportunist in the ranks of the Nationalists who helps his gentry father usurp the local Nationalist Party leadership, fan up popular hostility to topple a family rival— the local head schoolmaster—and slyly deflects the drive of the revolution originally aimed at the local rich like his family.25 Although this thread of the 24 25

Ibid., 90–91. Ibid., Chapter 26.

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plot is eclipsed by Ni’s progress in the spot light, Ye has made good use of the novel’s expanded canvas to emphasize the futility of interactive pedagogy in the face of the vaporous social context, revealing its misleading or adverse results for which it fails to prepare us. But more important than a foresight is Ye’s use of the narrative open-endedness to dislodge Dewey’s subject-oriented interaction. If we recall our earlier point that Dewey’s interaction is not of a reciprocal nature, we realize that what Ni’s two colleagues demur about and how subsequent events unfold is precisely Ye’s effort to call into question Ni’s one-sided interaction with his students.

Demise of Interactive Bonding

A more intricate, though equally problematic, case of interaction is observed in Ye’s representation of Ni’s sense of self identity through his love relation‑ ship. In the short stories collected in Ye’s Huo zai (Conflagration, 1923), Xian xia (Under the Line, 1925) and Cheng zhong (In the City, 1926), there is selfevident preoccupation with male characters whose growth to maturity is depicted at intervals through their love relationships with women.26 Be it traditional or modern, the protagonists’ self-awareness is at the mercy of prevalent gender relationships as they take part in the routines of falling in love, courtship, marriage and having family. Here the he vs. she interaction is often substituted for the self vs. other dichotomy, and the male character’s subjective self is frequently enhanced in a lyricized scene only to be dashed to bits by a sobering discovery of the changing reality in gender attitudes. A reversal like this can be simply compressed into a short yet unforgettable instance of awakening to reality—the reality of oneself via a female other. This is what captivates the heroes in “Liang feng hui xin” (Two Replying Letters, 1920). Hanging in suspense till literally the last word, the plot, if there is one, aims to exert an ironizing impact as much on the hero in the story as on the story-teller or the implied author: their complete failure to come to terms with the mind of the other, in this case, a woman referred to as merely Yi (she) is cruelly devoid of any ­meaning.27 She remains, throughout the story, the voiced but disembodied signifier for the imaginary lover with whom the hero exchanges correspondence. Given such a role—that of deferring his self-discovery from 26 27

Huo zai 火灾; Xian xia 线下; Cheng zhong 城中. For details on these books, see Works Cited. Liang feng huixin 两封回信. Yi 伊 is an old personal pronoun for the modern-day Ta 她 (she), and the appellation here betrays the male narrators’ superior authorial status.

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joining with any definite referent—the hero can all but be engaged in a ­ceaseless polemic with himself. He is obliged to refashion an image of himself best-suited to answering to the kind of woman he imagines her to be. But, rather expectedly, the abrupt ill-fated turn of his fortune in wooing her sets in precisely to shatter that self-styled image. As the hero gives voice to his nebulous yearning for her in his letter, he confidently learns from the refusal of her first replying letter (the one addressed not to himself, but to a friend of his, Hanqing). But after he rephrases his own expression in a far superior manner that it potentially uplifts him to a rare spell of spiritual transcendence, her reply—an equally flat denial of love—arrives to bring his male selfhood down from its heights of lyrical delusion. The same motif recurs in “Yi ge qing nian” (A Young Man, 1924) in which the heroine, Ms. Wan, now endowed with a name and a career, remains, nonetheless, a mediating other for the male protagonist’s self-pursuit. Ms. Wan’s attractive image, so easily sizable and admirable, accords exactly with what the protagonist, Lianshan, aspires after in his dreams of love and marriage, and for that matter, sets his amorous feelings aflame. Having once conversed with her over the art of calligraphy, Lianshan is ready to declare to himself that “if you ever want to entrust your soul to someone, she is the one, she is the one not to miss!”28 Here again we see what Lianshan’s need for Ms. Wan plainly rests on: it echoes the typical male-centered will of the earlier story; it bears down on his intersubjective empathy that absorbs the other in an encounter whose terms are solely prescribed by the male. It is in reality a jointly enacted monologue, rather than a true “dialogue” between two equal beings, whose exchange of views, by way of letters, turns out to be no more than a mutual gloss of each other’s professed ideas. The clue that discloses this monological nature of their correspondence is the young man’s unique way of intriguing the lover into far-ranging, unending replies—from calligraphy through art, music, poetry, literature, translation to Western thoughts and world views. In order to entice Ms. Wan to reply again, Lianshan deploys a hard-to-reject tactic of engagement to conclude each of his letters—what he calls “an entwining vine.” What he would do is to compel Ms. Wan to agree (or disagree) with some abstract views on art and literature and then write: “. . . I have always known you, my respectable lady, to be wholeheartedly devoted to artistic issues. My remarks above must have articulated your opinions.”29 When the other, as seen here, is expected to be no more than 28 29

Yi ge qing nian 一个青年. Yeh Shao-chun, Under the Line (Shanghai: The Commercial Press, 1925), 133. Ibid., 135.

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an echoing voice, his discursive device is intended to extend his own range of monologue in the hope of trapping Ms. Wan as his catch; she, as the other, again acts as the catalyst for his own untangling of the self is and the self ought to be. Why have the heroes failed to evoke the nod of approval from their female lovers even when they compare them to larger-than-life beings in their love letters?30 The answer has to arise out of gender politics. It may be attributed not only to the fact that they have transported, in all eagerness to impress as suitors, a live being to the realm of lyrical purity and innocence, but to the fact that they have unwittingly characterized their love of women in the same way that their senior May Fourth realists were apt to objectify, by way of compassion, “the people”—the poor, unlettered and despondent mass. In other words, they fetishize women as they do the idea of conjugal love, collapsing the self “is” with the self “ought to be” by way of the feminine “other.” Time and again, they reiterate in private their love for women in a wholly empathetic and even subsuming manner: “you must find a final end for your soul; you must come to grips with the genuine meaning of your existence.”31 She, a fullyembodied individual, is here grossly reified as his abstract goals to be pursued, abstract values to be fulfilled, all to his selfish end. Thus, in catering to these male-oriented ideals, she is completely disembodied. In the short story whose brevity lends itself to a lyrical epiphany as an ending, the male characters can be rounded up with tension or suspense between him and the elusive women figures, but their selfhood still stays intact and central in the narrative vision. Admittedly, given the formal limitation, this is as far as ironic reversal can go in exposing facets of the male self. We now turn to the novelistic narrative of Ni Huanzhi. Ni’s falling in love, courtship, marriage and having family constitute major steps of his life-long pursuit of progress. The dichotomy, as in she vs. he, in lieu of the self vs. the other, is the axis around which all these events evolve. At first, the romance— Ni’s attraction to Miss Jin Peizhang and her return of his love—stages almost a mimicry of the male characters’ subjective impression, empathy and what not—except for the ironic reversals—in the short stories. He is the one to initiate love with all poise and conviction whereas she is the one to be awakened to love, to undergo psychological ups and downs and then to be yearned for as the safe haven of his soul. Instead of letting it entice his sexual desire, Ni ties love 30

31

In her reply, the woman in “A Youth” remarks: “Since you asked me to house your soul in the capacity of a superhuman, I have to declare that as I am not a superhuman, how could I accommodate your soul?” Ibid., 12.

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in with his ideals in the educational reform and seeks to draw on its energy, novelty and dedication. Miss Jin is at best cast in a dual role, that is, being at once his inspiration and goal, and she desires on her part no more and no less—she wishes fervently that the day will soon come for her to be at his side, although she is not clear in what role—as a lover? Or else as a colleague? She tries to dispel her melancholy (for having lost her mother from an early age) from forcing her to lose hope in life, and in him she has found a comforting shoulder to lean on.32 He has filled her heart with courage and hope by sampling none other than his own experience. It is thus no surprise that when Ni is appointed to head the “gardening project” at school, he feels overwhelmed by memories of her remarks and her maiden beauty—needless to say, the two are always identifiable and are presently identified. As a result, we hear him think out aloud the same male-centered wish: . . . there ought to be somewhere where his mind could sometimes go besides education, just as a man with a satisfactory office to work in must also have a comfortable room to relax in, and the most suitable place seemed incontestably to be in Miss Jin’s heart.33 Echoing the male characters we have read before, what motivates Ni’s love at this point seems to rehearse the problematic of the gender issue facing most of the May Fourth activists of social reform: as the subject, he strives for liberty, autonomy and social equality for all individuals; yet when it comes to love, his pursuit of these ideals will only be complete if a woman he desires is included as an integral goal—a rewarding bonus rather than an individual seeking all these ideals like himself. In other words, if the male subject is engaged in an interaction immersed in his pervasive passion for the ideal, including ideal woman and marriage, then his “undergoing,” to borrow Dewey’s term, has somehow made it invariable that a woman’s love be part of his fulfilling end, and for that matter, she must have her individuality erased in order to fit in such a role. Judging by how his short stories end, we know that Ye is setting up this maleoriented ideal as a ploy for a reversal. But how does Ye go about executing his reversals in a narrative “bound” by one perspective, one vision, or one theme? How does Ye displace, as a corollary, the centrality of Dewey’s subjective “undergoing” in a heterogeneous world of reality? The to-be-continued part of 32 Yeh, Ni Huan-chih, 120. 33 Ibid., 121.

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Ni’s love, marriage and family life in the novel offers Ye plentiful yet toilsome space to probe at the answers. What indeed emerges as the novel’s departure from the short stories is Ye’s mounting urge to create reciprocal interaction between Ni and Miss Jin. To begin with, Ni has to deal with the ambiguous yet malleable character of Miss Jin. As the novel continually unfolds, the author is able to instill a measure of complex duality into the much too idealized portrait of Miss Jin. Thus, by embedding layers of innuendoes, Ye helps to free Miss Jin from her bondage to Ni’s stereotype—the trophy maiden of Ni’s risky reform effort. This in turn reveals the hidden depths of Ni’s own ambiguous and adaptable state of mind. For all her girlish verve and enthusiasm in modern ideas, and despite her being a good trainee at an urban all-girl normal academy, Miss Jin remains for Ni an immediate and potent link to the local reality where still prevail values and “virtues” prescribed for women by the Confucian codes. Being acquainted mostly with book knowledge, however, she has only been taught uncontested idealistic cures for social biases against women, but hardly exposed to the reallife burdens, difficulties and pains inflicted on a woman in a local community barely reaching the doorstep of modernization. Yet harsh reality always catches one unawares: no sooner has she lapsed into a content moment than she finds herself at a loss with what is always accepted as conventional for a woman to do. For instance, she cannot write in colloquial Chinese, still less to express her delicate feelings with it in a love letter. When discussing how to plan their wedding, she insists on being formal and ceremonious in all the ritualistic details a traditional wedding would require. After her first born, she is ready to give up her books, her ideas and her career as a teacher and be totally preoccupied with nothing but child care. Irrelevant as they might sound, these are, nevertheless, precisely the grounds that refuse to be easily circumscribed by Ni’s idealistic bent, and turn into thorny knots to untie in recovering Ni’s touch of reality. It therefore is crucial for the author to get Ni involved in undergoing with an other in inter-subjective terms. Chapters 14 through 16 of Ni Huanzhi present us a somewhat different “interaction” between the young lovers, Ni and Miss Jin. By no means an accident, the two find themselves in a communicative “trap” in which they choose not to chat face-to-face in favor of writing to each other even though they live under the same roof. Initially, Ni dreams of how “his whole being was bathed in the exuberant happiness of youth” because “a girl such as Miss Chin [Jin] made an ideal object for his affections, . . .”34 Before plucking up his courage to 34

Ibid., 165.

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write his first love letter, Ni is still daydreaming about his future with Miss Jin as his bride—a future unmistakably revolves around him as the center: It was useless for one heart to burn alone without evoking the sympathetic response from another heart which is necessary to complete the picture; and if he hoped to get such a response from another heart he must first rap on it just as one must strike a bell before one can get a note from it.35 Even when imagining how Miss Jin would answer his letter, he impersonates her in the same self-assured tone to convince himself of an immediate assent— yet another example of how Ni tends to gravitate toward his own centeredness even as he sets to outgrow it with a perspective other than his own.36 This is exactly where Ni would face a shock and then a desperate need to interact with her. Neither a yes nor a no, Miss Jin’s reply has ambiguity written all over it, which, ironically, compels Ni to reckon with her as an free, dissimilar, and gendered individual not to be easily abstracted into his own self. First of all, Ni is nearly taken aback when she emphasizes that she is unable to make a decision because “I am after all a woman.”37 But by placing himself in her place, it brings him around to see that her remark shed light on facts he would otherwise be ignorant of in his single-minded pursuit of an ideal new woman: her milieu and the times she lives in. He becomes aware of the social odds against which she must go if and when acting in defiance of the convention of arranged marriage. Secondly, a closer reading of the letter alerts him to her subtle hint that they should write to “other people,” and again overcoming his initial shock, he becomes convinced that her hint is meant as “nothing more than paying lip-service to convention.”38 In other words, it is not her approval, but that of the community at large, that is at stake in order to win sympathy, and if possible, support for their marriage. Thirdly, savoring the shades of subtle and ambiguous meanings latent in the classic style of writing, he has come to appreciate the depths and capacities for this remnant of traditional legacy he used to detest. In harboring all these after-thoughts, he has gained a genuine foothold in the consciousness of the other(s), whose view of himself has not only led to a dislodging of the status quo of his subjectivity, but relocated it in a time-bound context of history. 35 36 37 38

Ibid., 167. Ibid., 169. 我毕竟是个女人。Ibid., 174. Ibid., 179.

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However, the relocation of Ni’s self does not necessarily result in what Dewey calls the equilibrium in self-realization. In fact every such equilibrium signifies at once the end of a beginning for a second, a third, and an infinite chain of self-displacements. In this sense, the marriage of Ni and Miss Jin hardly means they can lay to rest the necessity to contend and mediate over the he vs. she relationship. Rather, they are involved in fluid and endless rounds of interactions that have barely gotten underway. In Chapter 18, for instance, the couple witnesses another stormy feud over Miss Jin’s pregnancy and then their new born son. Right amidst their married bliss comes Miss Jin’s pregnancy and promptly throws their emotions out of kilter. She gradually succumbs to the lure and leisure of a typical wife—an indulgent young mother and a content housewife—drifting away from her career and her ideals and becomes increasingly alienated from Ni. Embittered, Ni comes to the conclusion: “now that he had a wife he had lost a sweetheart and sharer of his aspirations!”39 Here we witness a typical instance of a Lukácian hero whose own growth is always indirectly affirmed by his finding others lagging behind in self-fulfillment. But Ni’s feeling so is only facilely justified because his estimate of other’s inability to keep up has been affirmed with the presumption that his own self, which never fails to progress, remains the unfailing gauge. In contradistinction with this single linear and monological pattern of the subject’s growth stands the heterogeneous social milieu. And the society at large is far more complex than Ni’s self-styled Garden of Eden—with numerous displacements and readjustments for the self to handle. This is precisely what punctures Ni’s illusion of attaining a dream realization of both a renovated pedagogy at school and a modernized marriage at home. Ye Shaojun suggests that Ni’s loss of equilibrium in this case is due as much to the ebbing of Jin’s intellectual strengths as his own failure to perceive the social milieu shaping her plight. In this phase of self vs. other interaction, therefore, Ni’s lack of social awareness as its premise is at fault: he overlooks her upbringing in the social customs she has been steeped in; and he does not continue to share Jin’s feminine concerns over the social and domestic burdens troubling an educated female from her viewpoint; he is willing to bear with it only insofar as they can be tolerated and quickly sent away. A case in point is how Ni refuses to be bothered by Jin’s nagging fear that she might have difficulty in labor— a psychological state most common to pregnant women with their first ­delivery.40 Jin’s fear is actually fanned up by a middle-aged lady serving on her who fills Jin’s ears with nothing but horror tales of demons, spirits and dead 39 40

Ibid., 215. Ibid., 212.

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babies. Unaware of the fact that the lady servant has been Jin’s only link to the outside world of town life during her pregnancy, Ni blames his wife for being too much at leisure and suggests literary readings as a remedy. Which, of course, leads her to overreact with a vow never to pick up a book or return to teaching again.41

Analogies to Narrative Failures

The case above brings into sharp focus yet another facet of the multifarious other: its being situated in historical details particular to itself. This facet has not as yet been given the full and close examination it deserves, so let us first return to the agency (in Dewey’s term, environing capacity) of the subject in his interactive act. To a remarkable extent, Ni’s biographical facts have been presented against the backdrops of a visible line of historical development— the narrative of radical politics of modern Chinese history. From the May Fourth movement (led by protesting students), through the May Thirtieth Incident (led by striking workers), to the partisan in-fights of 1927 revolution (between the GMD and CCP), the historical narrative has delineated a path of political and social endeavors moving steadily away from the intellectuals to the laboring classes and then to the rivaling political parties. The ideological underpinning here is all too clear: history progresses along a politically viable teleology. Running almost parallel to it, Ni Huanzhi’s life story keeps in sync with this linear, staged and teleological course of history. As Anderson states: “Each subjective metamorphosis Ni undergoes throughout the novel is pointedly correlated with a development in the period’s political history: . . .”42 But terminating each of these phases of the social revolution is a scene in which we find Ni suffering from either a setback or disorientation. What does the author imply? Barring a total coincidence, this seems to me to reflect Ye Shaojun’s veiled doubts, not so much about the intellectuals’ defect of being petty-bourgeois as about their misplaced faith in a linear and unitary narrative to rationalize historical progress. It questions which—the political party, or the inspired individual, or the social environment—has the primary impact on one another in the history-making process. Dewey’s ideas applaud the ideal-inspired individual, with his subjective passion to “environ” the society to the effect of an ideal, of course. The political parties, on the other hand, underline their own ­agendas, 41 Ibid., 214. 42 Anderson, Limits of Realism, 113.

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leadership and actions, which lead, beguile or force the public to be oriented towards a partisan goal. Hence, social environment, left in the middle, looks as if it were at the mercy of these forces. In the case of Ni’s “romantic” marriage with Miss Jin, we have seen how he has embarked on an interaction with her as the idealized other without taking into account her being situated in a concrete social context. Ni has failed to steer her towards the comrade-companion partnership of an ideal marriage he originally envisaged, because he has been unable to make serious adjustments or even compromises with Miss Jin’s social upbringing while keeping his original idealistic goal in sight. Interestingly enough, such a judgment brings us full circle back to the dispute between the determinists and the vitalists alluded to early in this chapter. However, social environment is far more involved and persuasive than either Dewey or the party ideologues would have us believe. To grapple with the vital issue, we need to examine how Ye reacts to Dewey’s notion of “­process” by way of the school farm experiment which Head Schoolmaster Jiang Bingru set up early in the novel. Again, we start off with a short story that contains in miniature all the ingredients of this abortive educational experiment. The story “Xiao zhang” (The Headmaster, 1923) is the first of a series of experiments on human gardening in Ye’s fictional world. Shuya, the Headmaster, has carried out a curriculum reform since he took office. The small but daring project includes reclaiming some wasteland behind the school where his pupils have been growing corn, potato and other vegetables. As the new garden is inaugurated, he becomes exulted at the sight of the sprouting greens because they look like “the young shoots of an ideal school, . . . it is a safe bet that they will before long spread their leaves and branches, bloom and bear fruit.”43 Harm, to be expected, comes its way—three of his teachers are found gambling before and after school, and one of them is even accused of having extramarital sex, a scandalous deed so intolerable to the local residents that it could easily ruin the school’s reputation. As he tries to persuade these teachers to mend their ways, he talks of teaching as “being the guardian of humanity,” “concern for the future of the next generation” and “sensitivity for work ethics and respect for personal uprightness” so sincerely that he himself is on the verge of weeping in front of the three offenders. That these offenders are not moved at all is parodic but anticipated; yet the author’s real aim is for the school principal to direct that same moral scrutiny to his true self when confronted with the need to implement the toughest part of his reform—dismissing these trouble-­ makers—which is as necessary, though painful, as to redefine his being. 43

Xiao zhang 校长. Yeh, Under the Line, 82. Translation is by the author.

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Here we already see Ye losing patience with one defect of the short story: its narrative brevity with a closure. By no mere chance, the story sets its beginning in media res, as the past is being recalled: the menacing protesters painfully remind Shuya that the reform plan and its designer are at fault for neglecting the social dimension of the participating children. The past involves the same offender he now faces, a Mr. Chen, the former Headmaster who is regrouping in crooked ways to topple him. Since his dismissal from the school, Mr. Chen has led a crusade of gossip among parents of school children against the “incompetent and mercenary” Headmaster, stirring up enough popular sentiments to reverse his dismissal and in turn bring about Shuya’s downfall. But the real backbreaking straw is that Shuya’s moral confusion and frailty to confront the public—his lack of courage to head off rumors about his inadequacy for the position, his reluctance to expose and discredit the perpetrator of the slandering rumors. Without these, of course, his reticence could easily be taken as hints of his hidden guilt or negligence, if not concealed wrongdoings. So the recollected past is, to Shuya, almost like the future, his future, projected with his own thoughts about the possible outcome acted out by way of the past, the other’s past. It also offers him a scenario of “what ends shall I choose” when caught in a similar plight as he presently is, and this replaces the version of “who am I” that Sandel addresses in the Introduction, Chapter 1. This would prove after all the “me here and now” could sway the outcome of “the composite amassed out of sadness, anxiety, illusion, guilt and so on,” in other words, the historically determined self, no more and no less.44 If Shuya’s self-immolation betrays his steadfast fall-away from an illusive self-mastery to a realistic self-disclosure, the social reality, as shown with his embroiled colleagues, is the painful means by which he complicates his self-knowledge as a pedagogue and remedies the elusiveness of his earlier selfcontentment. But in what ways can such a process foreshadow the gradual meltdown of Head Schoolmaster Jiang’s pedagogical project and the ominous rise of his rival Jiang Shibiao (nicknamed Tiger Jiang) in Ni Huanzhi? And how does it anticipate the advent of Wang Leshan, a radical revolutionist who perceives social environment so much differently? In posing all these questions, I would like to argue that Ye is probably pursuing his skepticism to its core: what constitutes a more adequate interaction which informs one’s awareness of the other(s) determined by his/her social specificity? Again the extended narrative of the novel, with its ability to accommodate visions, actions and habitats of various subjects, creates this diverse universe where the centric, absolute or transcendent outlook of a single authority must be contested, 44

See Note 4 in Introduction, Chapter 1.

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de-centered or displaced. As a follow-up to his short story, it remains for Ye to depict for the rest of the novel how Ni the schoolmaster fares during the process of interacting and intersecting with others’ historical beings. Likewise, Ye is expected to expand the scope of interaction beyond the marriage of such like-minded subjects as Ni and Miss Jin, to engage them in conflictual, contending and simultaneous interaction(s), which enable Ye to demonstrate how the neglect of the social dynamic delimits or falsifies Dewey’s ideas of inter­ action under the volatile conditions of China’s transition to the modern age. Although pursuing the Chinese tradition of “gardening of human souls,” Head Schoolmaster Jiang’s experiment of a school farm bears a direct lineage to Dewey’s notion—learning by doing. That apparent lineage is, in Ye’s view, also the source of mishap, confusion and misunderstanding for the Chinese educators. With regard to the social milieu as the premise of his theories, Dewey reiterates the fact that human beings are an integral part of the environment (sometimes, he refers to it as nature) and they always enjoy a consistent and cumulative harmony between the past and the present which the society relies on to preserve the prior legacy for the sake of promoting the present. By the same token, this human community alone “can utilize them [the past and the present] in determining and directing the course of future events and experiences.”45 No doubt, Dewey takes for granted a society operated in a sustained tradition of law and order, equal freedom and rights for all individuals, which ensure social continuity and adaptability in pursuit of its desired future. Even when Dewey does speak of “social control,” his rendition of it as a game theory rests solidly on the basis of this type of civil society. For instance, he defines social settings as consisting of individuals equally governed and protected by law and order just as a game is played with rules commonly observed: where authority is sanctioned by tradition and precedent, and where the general principle of social control of individuals is enforced without violating his/ her freedom. What merits our attention are two extremely crucial attributes of Dewey’s system of thoughts: (1) the democratic tradition of governing; (2) the individual as the mainstay of the society. But Dewey’s highlighting of these two has also veiled the most pragmatic aspect of it—representation in and arbitration of this process must entail disputes, rivalries, mediations and so forth in the effort to affirm, improve and mediate over the interests of all the parties involved in the process. Without revealing these dynamic and tendentious aspects of it, Dewey’s social environment would only lead to an abstract and often misleading interpretation of his theories of education, making them—ideas and 45 Dewey, Democracy and Education, 153.

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­ rinciples such as Dewey advocates—prey to distortion and misappropriap tion. These features, Ye seems to suggest, are precisely what caused confusion and misconception to the Chinese Dewey followers—educators and writers who tend not to differentiate the objects of their education, assuming them to be always already there and all alike. When transplanted in the Chinese context, clearly marked by the lack of two such pivotal features, Dewey’s social environment becomes a square peg in a round hole. As is shown in the novel, Headmaster Jiang feels so inspired by Dewey that he simply transplants a specimen of a utopian commune on the hitherto undeveloped rural town. And Jiang does so in disregard of the local customs, opinions and power-seeking relationships, and without the slightest clue to run into and cope with any possible doubts, hindrance or resistance. For he is genuinely convinced that he is promoting historical progress and bringing the lethargic local people in step with the forward march of the times; hence he expects whatever is new, progressive and liberal-minded to prevail easily over whatever is old, dormant and narrow-minded. Evoking Anderson’s remark earlier, we realize that Jiang casts himself in the role of the enlightened intellectual (the superior subject) inscribing meaning and values on the unlettered lowly (the obedient object) and rehearsing familiar but thankless May Fourth poetics of compassion.46 As with Anderson’s frustrated characters, our reform-minded hero cannot escape the same disastrous fate—facing an unappreciative reaction from the townspeople. They presently start circulating rumors about how the school farm project, while reclaiming some nearby wasteland for growing vegetables, leads students in mangling their ancestral burial grounds, and the rumors are supported with “eye-witness reports’ of students dumping the decomposed remains of the buried into a nearby river and even some farfetched speculations that ghosts of the abused dead would seek revenge with a town-devastating scourge. As a result, the teachers are ostracized; many students withdraw their registration and the school is disgraced. Worse than that is the fact that the Headmaster runs the risk of facing a legal indictment brought against him for allegedly pilfering land from its “lawful” owner—Tiger Jiang. Himself a member of the local gentry often in rivalry with the school, Tiger Jiang presents an almost perfect counterfoil, squaring the former off over all crucial issues in town politics. He is vile, selfish, manipulative and downright worldly. In framing up the charge against the Headmaster, he defends social prejudice in the guise of legitimate self-interest: he silences those who know the history of the reclaimed land; manipulates the public to yield to his authority in interpreting the local chronicles; he contrives a version 46

See Notes 15 & 17 above.

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of the land’s prior ownership, rendering it in accordance with fraudulent titledeeds. Feigning to be kind-hearted to the landless poor, he induces his audience to believe that his private rights are being trampled on and that he is all justified in suing the school for the public good of the town. The extent to which he succeeds in swaying the public opinion to his favor can be seen by those noms de plume fliers posted in the streets of the town which assault the Headmaster for grabbing land as his private property, pillaging ancestral graves of others to jeopardize the peace of the townspeople and vowing to dislodge him from his position as the Headmaster.47 Ironically, the fliers, signed by “the Public-spirited” or “the Fair-minded,” all claim to represent the consensus of the town. There is undeniably the ironical reversal here—the Headmaster has all along been thinking that by carrying out the educational experiment he is doing the public good. As it turns out, he fails to expose Tiger Jiang’s forged title-deeds because, although knowing it for a fact, he does not have any historical documents or evidence to bear it out. Hence, what he does has been outdone by someone with an ulterior motive coupled with a crafty sense of appropriating history and social tradition. On the one hand, we are shown how easily Tiger Jiang has tampered with the validity of “history” to suit his personal ends, and how the practice of governing this “civil” society is disclosed to be exactly the opposite of the “democratic tradition of governing.” On the other, we seem to observe how this incident hinges on the manipulation of one individual, Tiger Jiang, but he is by no means a liberally conceived subject that forms the backbone of a Western democratic society. He is one that has internalized the repressive rule and the power ­hierarchy—with its latent leverage of empowerment peculiar to the traditional Chinese society—which is all but what a democratic society should be. Thus we cannot but be aware of Ye’s intention to mock at the rationale behind the historical continuity as the reader knows it from the ideologically tainted “histories” underlining the entire novel. We can now see why Ye has inserted a character to offset the Headmaster, whose disrespect and mishandling of historical truths is contrary to yet reciprocal with our hero. In contrast, moreover, the Headmaster is so naive and out of sync with historicity because he is so obsessed with uncontested and ahistorical ideas of education and with a reform based on abstract principles without tailoring them to local conditions. The presence of Tiger Jiang, in spite of or thanks to his abusive rivalry, always poses a threat to the self-possessed Headmaster’s purist vision of a civil society. His purposeful defilement of local history serves to shock the Western-inspired pedagogue into recognition of the 47 Yeh, Ni Huan-chih, 128.

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gap separating his bucolic commune from the harsh reality incarnated in Tiger Jiang. It is precisely this capacity of the latter that renders his rivalry the indispensable counterweight to the character of the Headmaster. By the same token we might consider him the Conradian “secret sharer,” the hidden alter ego, in order for the Headmaster to apprehend the town’s underlying nexus of political and social interactions. What surprises us with this strange pair of bedfellows is that throughout the book neither the Headmaster nor Ni has had any one-on-one encounter with Tiger Jiang. The fact might just be insignificant unless we view their odd rivalry as a kind of intersubjective correlation in which the one accomplishes what the other affirms (with dramatically inverted results, of course), even though they can never affirm nor accomplish what they believe in along the same line. Thus, in a totally unexpected way, there is this interdependence welding what one affirms with what the other accomplishes, yet it also ratifies the rift dividing them. A case in point is how the Headmaster thwarts his own resolve to “change society rather than accommodate itself to what society dictates.”48 For a time he insists on pursuing the project in defiance of public hostility. But what forces him to finally back down is his own inability to engage the hostile public, clarify the rumors and persuade them to take risks with a drastically new pedagogy in the interest of their children’s future. Instead of “undergoing” it with his subjective passion in the Deweyan sense, he withdraws into the isolated world of private misgivings about losing his battle to Tiger Jiang (a reminder of its lineage to the short story) and ruining the chance of a decent education for his two sons. By contrast, Tiger Jiang attains to the triumphant end of winning the public by goading them into embracing his abuse of historical facts, posturing himself as deputizing the law-abiding concerned residents and forcing the public to rally behind his wretched scheme of undercutting his rival. As far as social interaction is concerned, Tiger Jiang is ironically the one that truly outdoes the Headmaster. Given such a background, missing Ye’s critical point via such a dramatic pairing would be an unthinkable oversight. By now, the drawback of the individual’s subjective passion, in spite of being enlightened, has been fully exposed in his/her social interaction; likewise, the impasse of educational reform, in pursuit of Dewey’s ideal, has clinched its doomed fate. But the way this stage of crisis (prior to Ni’s crisis with his ­marriage) is resolved leaves much for the protagonist to think over: it is a remark made by the Math teacher who, in his habitual caution, warns: 48

Ibid., 132.

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“we shouldn’t overlook [the fact that] the opposition is obviously organized.”49 His words hit right on the mark. If the educational reform has to retreat in the face of organized social hindrance, it is imperative to ask, what should be done to enable education to counter and overcome such oppositions? This is exactly what the author attempts to probe at with his depiction of the most important step in Ni’s progress in self-realization—a giant leap from the pedagogical reform in the schoolyard to social activism on the urban streets.

In the Company of the Embattled Buddhist

Ni’s reunion with a former classmate, Wang Leshan, marks a turning point in his career in the teaching profession. His need to leave the small town school in search of a more fundamental answer to the crisis of education has been pointed out to him by Wang, who is now a labor activist with a faint affiliation to the undercover Chinese Communists in Shanghai. As if to act upon the Math teacher’s warning against the organized rivals, Wang advises Ni to quit tinkering with the existing pedagogy in favor of the more robust strategy of social resistance. He tells Ni candidly that the social environment is “an organized thing” and then forcefully adds: “If you’re going to change society, to reform society, then you simply must go about it in an organized manner!”50 As a result, Ni accepts a job in a Shanghai girls’ school teaching “Social Problems.” Since this happens to be a tumultuous time for political movements in metropolitan Shanghai, he has since taken part in street demonstrations, made rallying speeches at street corners and rubbed shoulders with the bare-chested, sweat-soaked laborers whom he now regards as stronger, nobler and wiser beings than his intellectual colleagues. Above all, he has come to discover what solution there is to the crisis of education: “today’s education should take revolution as its starting point.”51 However, it remains to be asked: in what respects is revolution able, for example, to secure for Ni the correct path out of the kind of impasse facing his own growth? How does revolution as Wang envisions it get individuals organized to effectively interact with and transform the social milieu of China? And in what ways can it allow them to work towards the 49 50

51

Ibid., 138. Wang Leshan 王乐山. Wang’s organizational affiliation with the CCP is hinted by his participating in and possibly leading the series of strikes, shut-downs and demonstrations in the Shanghai industrial sections right after May the Thirtieth Tragic Incident in 1925. Ibid., 242–243. Ibid., 252.

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i­ deals they share with an expanding cause of radical politics without giving up on their interests for self-realization? Despite his newly acquired vigor, Ni’s conversion to radical politics—his support for the CCP agenda leading an anti-imperialist insurgence, getting the laboring masses organized and enlightened, and spurring them in pursuit of a Proletariat-led struggles for power—has to be charted over rough and murky waters. For all the lofty and hyperbolic rhetoric of “strike,” “patriotism” and “revolution” peppering these pages, Ye has chosen to render much of this stage of Ni’s experience in a mixture of modes: first-hand witness accounts, flashbacks, third-person story-telling, interior monologue, etc., that leave the reader with a sense of being overwhelmed by actions, impressions and historical narratives. The kaleidoscopic view of the social scene has literally diffused, if not obscured, a solid grasp of Ni’s own identity. So, in view of his skeptics about the epic drift of a narrative of historical progress, we shall see Ni’s experience of the social scene reflecting his critical stand on this issue by way of the author’s perspective. Specifically, let us examine whether Ni’s plunging in the teeth of the stirring social storms is a leap beyond his self-centered world. One crucial test for Ni is how he embraces the social milieu and interacts with it in his new world of radical politics. It follows that once Ni joins in social activism claiming to represent historical progress, he should be guaranteed of a sure and steady course for the realization of his own worth. But is he? In fact, Ni’s direct participation in social activism presents new and fundamental challenges to his bond with the social environment in a way vastly unlike that of Headmaster. A few noticeable differences are worth observing here: first and foremost, Ni’s inter-subjective relationship with Wang Leshan puts to the test the limits of a self vs. the other dynamic: when the self is recruited by a collective cause organized in an unmistakably top-down fashion, it entails that the individual consciously surrender his/her rights to the will of an absolute subject. It is noted that Wang suffers from an acute consumptive condition, which is a compelling parallel to Qu Qiubai’s dysfunctional lungs; he never hesitates to give all his gusto and passion to the exhausting duties of a labor activist. Inspired by such selfless zeal, Ni is now convinced that the individual, be it an educator or a learner, “wants to be an ordinary stone that will be built into an imposing edifice, remaining unknown but doing his whole duty.”52 In his view, the individual’s self-fulfillment, to use the same architectural metaphor, is none other than the means (brick and mortar) that serves the end (erecting the edifice). But he is not fully aware that Wang might have implied in it the presumption of a lopsided self/other relationship: while 52

Ibid., 272–273.

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filling its proper role in building the edifice endows the individual brick with purpose and value, having the construction of the edifice as the sole rationale of existence can as often as not obscure or even eradicate the value of each brick. Wang himself attempts to convey that when he compares the advent of the Republican revolution as the proverbial tidal waves of the Chientang: “each of us was conscious of the immensity of the forces of nature and also his own insignificance.”53 Enlightened by this voluntary disinheritance of the self, we can now better appreciate why Ye has his protagonist recalling his days of labor activism, rather than narrating them in chronological order; in a letter to Jiang, the Headmaster: Ni recounts how the Chinese laborers have come of age politically and stood in the van of the struggle against the oppressors, how the Chinese peasants have borne the brunt of usury, famine and warlord fights, how the city of Shanghai has lately witnessed wave after wave of strikes, street rallies and other activities led by radical revolutionists. All these historical facts or events are of national stature and have been recounted with equal width and generality by Ni’s detached and confident tone. This quasi-objective stance of Ni’s recounted happenings has definitely done away with whatever personal psychic effects that might have tainted Ni’s observations; by adopting such a tone, on the other hand, Ni confirms the fact that he is, as an individual, reduced to a mere anonymous voice echoing the entire chorus of radical politics. Secondly, Ni is newly aware of the need to identify, not with a single subject or object, rather with this burgeoning mass of the poor and the oppressed that have finally erupted into a gigantic revolting force. Unlike other May Fourth iconoclasts who empathize with the underclass by abstract association, Ni is quite enamored by “them” because they have displayed valor, honesty and simplicity in their rough-and-tumble strife against a repressive political authority. He is even self-conscious about enlisting their view of the world in order to refresh his own vision: If I could see the world through their eyes I expect it would look quite different. The sight of this different aspect should do me good, at least

53

Ibid., 281. Chientang (Qiantang) 钱塘 is now known as Hangzhou Bay 杭州湾 is where the Qiantang River 钱塘江 (in Zhejiang Province) empties into the East China Sea. The bay is a famous tourist attraction mainly for the spectacular view of the Qiantang tidal waves in August annually. Ni and Wang both hail from this region and must have been familiar with the sleuth of literary allusions about the spectacle in classical poetry.

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demonstrate to me that I haven’t taken the wrong road and give me greater courage to go forward.54 Ni’s interactive impulse, as seen here, is still sincere and judicious, as he feels the need to keep the interactive dynamic and brings the vision of “them” back to his own imperfect self. Yet, he is also inclined to be “submerged in the sea that was ‘them,’ [to be] immersed in ‘their’ outlook on life.”55 In other words, his view verges on a self-denying submission to this colossal but nondescript crowd. Here we detect hints of his duplicitous attitude toward “them,” a collectivist subject closer to social reality than his is, yet not firmed up politically enough to subsume his own. Furthermore, there is the tendency, as borne out by his own inner thoughts, for Ni to associate what Wang has said about organ­ ized social transformation with the rising power of “that Party” (the CCP) whose class-line agenda “was now gaining a foothold in his mind . . . and taking shape as a clearly-defined concept.”56 These fleeting thoughts would resurface in Ni’s subsequent political involvement, and it is unmistakable that he is heavily inclined towards the CCP newly-minted agenda of endorsing the proletariat-led socialist revolution.57 Thoughts like these are bound to thwart Ni’s interactive impulse and hasten him toward being an unquestioning party faithful for the CCP’s radical politics. This brings us to the third aspect of Ni’s interactive experience, i.e. to examine perhaps the least suspected ambiguity of Wang Leshan’s character in Ye’s perceptive treatment of him as Ni’s inalienable other. By now a CCP party faithful himself, Wang’s self-styled submission to the radical cause of organized resistance has been an unfailing intellectual impetus to the fledgling Ni. As Ni pictures Wang to the Headmaster, but really to impel himself to emulate him: He may be considered one of those who ride on the crest of difficulties and who are richly endowed with fortitude. . . . he carries on with his job as if nothing out of the ordinary were happening. Arrest, interrogation under torture, execution—all these he regards with equanimity.58 54 55

Ibid., 264. Ibid. This remark reads like an unintended yet cogent explication for Dewey’s term of “undergoing.” 56 Ibid., 252. 57 The Chinese Communist Party was founded in 1921 near Hangzhou. Read Chapter 14, “The Clash” in Jonathan Spence’s The Search for Modern China for a good survey of the CCP agenda and its strenuous alliance with both the Nationalist party as well as the domineering Soviet leader Joseph Stalin via Comitern advisors in China in this period. 58 Yeh, Ni Huan-chih, 275.

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With the word danran (equanimity), this almost perfect portrait of a revolutionary hero betrays shades of duplicity which, unknown to Ni at the time, is later to reveal the unheroic side of Wang’s character. Similarly, at the height of their exhilarating praise of the tidal wave-like forces of the revolution, Wang divulges his deep anxiety, confessing to Ni that he cannot yet look forward to a finale to this drama of history or be certain that if things will proceed the way they hope that he might have to exchange his head for them.59 Wang’s sudden loss of nerve so astounds Ni that Ni mistakes it for a joke. In a sober or even cruel way, nevertheless, Wang’s voiced anxiety illuminates the underlying issue: whatever the ideological persuasion, is a positivist future predictable and viable? The author seems to be compelled to ask if ideals, configured politically or ideologically, should be regarded as universal laws of historical progress, no matter how appealing they look, and by the same token, if personal development should in turn be modeled on them exclusively. Few would doubt that, under Wang’s tutelage, Ni has by now aligned the path of his self-realization with that of radical politics so firmly that whatever the latter envisages, endeavors and achieves is instantly internalized and automatically translated by him into the overarching goal of his individual progress. A quick example in this case is found in Ni’s habit to indulge in frequent interior monologues which permit him to consume and absorb political issues. What fills the hearts of Ni and his fellow labor activists with confidence, hope and a sense of fulfillment is the long-awaited finale for the revolution—the Nationalists-led Northern Expedition forces about to take hold of the largest Asian metropolis of Shanghai.60 However, while Ni finds himself drawn increasingly deeper to the professed goals of social revolutions, Wang manages to rid himself of a clear-cut sense of purpose, meaning or fulfillment in the much anticipated seizure of Shanghai by the revolutionary forces. When asked about his lack of enthusiasm in the upcoming event, Wang bluntly admits that he never expected it to be “something really marvelous.” He then adds: I realize that you can’t expect superhuman achievements from mere human beings; to think that when one lot of people make a mess of things, you can get a sudden improvement by changing them for another lot, is a delusion that doesn’t take history into account. People who

59 Danran 淡然. Ibid., 283. 60 Again consult Spence, The Search for Modern China, Chapter 14, “The Clash.”

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c­ herish this delusion have their just reward, which is: the depression that comes with giving up hope.61 This rather abrupt and baffling passage is an enigmatic key to unlock Ye’s perception of Wang’s character. Has Wang thrown his arms up in despair against change? To call it Wang’s momentary lapse of pessimism is misleading because the last thing he tolerates is delusion, which, he contends, only preys on those who turn round about after losing hope and become depressed (a very befitting foreshadow of the ending of this novel). For all his poised, cynical mis­ givings, Wang remains motivated and determined about the role of radical politics in making history. But it is a role proven to be startlingly different from what Ni expects. Wang’s statement in the above quotation makes a distinction between two groups of history makers; his prediction turns out to be true to China’s historical reality: there were two main rivaling political parties—the Nationalist party and Communist party—which formed a tenuous yet still effective alliance at this time in an effort to defeat separatist warlords and unify China. Judging from the conversation, it may be adequate to think that Wang is referring not as much to the current political situation as to some general human predilection. But for the reader who has gone through the previous two chapters of the novel, the odd series of events that have taken place in the small town (where Ni has previously taught) the striking impressions made upon him/her are a hard-to-ignore link between the concrete and the general. At the epicenter of the local events stands none other than the opportunist Tiger Jiang we know so well from earlier in the novel. And what he has accomplished this time in anticipation of the arrival of the Northern Expedition forces reads almost like a re-enactment of his past endeavor—preempting and usurping local responses to political changes to serve his selfish ends. Mindful of his land-ownership credentials and the possibility of him being targeted, Tiger Jiang is shrewd enough to sense the fierce onset of anger, hatred, revolt and violence to be triggered off by the revolutionary forces that he decides to embrace and manipulate it rather than resist it head-on. He makes a few shrewd moves to first renew his ties with the Nationalist Party, secure the trust of a few radical youth leaders, and then direct their fuming fervor to the idealistic Jiang, the Headmaster—cashing in on the radical youth’s reckless passion and distorting the iconoclastic rhetoric to suit his own design. In the end, he seizes hold of the leadership of the newly founded town council and craftily sidesteps the revolution from its original course. This little shocking drama attests to the dualistic bent of the radical theories on social revolution; it dis61 Yeh, Ni Huan-chih, 314.

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closes the vulnerable nature of the laboring mass—“the crowd.” It belies the superficial flare and frenzy of the radical changes being made to coat over the status quo or the regressive in historical reality. Above all, the most shocking lesson Tiger Jiang forces on us is the danger of substituting one type of victimization for another in the name of making radical social change. This lesson directly addresses the harsh verdict Wang later hands out to the inability of human evolution to make steady and unending improvement in history. To the sober-minded Wang, that danger always foreshadows any form of political activism, radical or otherwise; this is the source of his inner trepidation over the inability of radical and idealist politics to cope with fraud, manipulation and deliberate obstruction, causing its delay or derailment. In the reader’s mind, likewise, it has already come to materialize in the scene described a little earlier—after Tiger Jiang arouses the local crowd in their mass rally to denounce the Headmaster as the enemy of the revolution, he cannot help gloating over his newly usurped power: “You’re all mine now!”62 The personal intent Tiger Jiang divulges here is not a mere ironic reversal to uncover this opportunist’s true colors; it also confirms that history often moves in zigzags or even circular fashion. In this case Tiger Jiang has succeeded not only in restoring himself to a despotic rule, but in preserving the status quo of local politics in the name of the upcoming social revolution. In retrospect, we are able to associate this historical inevitability and what Wang later summarizes in relation to the indeterminate nature of social reforms: as any persistent, forward movement is strenuous and uncertain, so is relapse to the past tangible and unavoidable. Unbeknownst to all, Ni and the other social activists are the only characters left in the dark as to what will befall them in the finale of seizing the city of Shanghai. A crucial query is inescapable at this point: if Wang has foreseen the likelihood of a tragic end to this finale, why is it that he continues to play the leading role in activities ostensibly headed in its dire opposite? Could it be that he believes in fatalism? Or is he inspired by martyrdom of a sort? To find the answer, we need to compare him with Tiger Jiang—the two figures standing at opposite ends of the social spectrum. The fact is that they have managed, each in his own way, to shed light on the same historical truth—the futility of positivist teleology and the permeability of a progressive cause. In words and in deeds, Wang and Tiger Jiang conjure up a curious pair of “doppelgangers” slated for the interactive undergoing of the protagonist, with whom one prophesies while the other performs, revealing indeed the dialectical opposites of the same historical process. Only the mortal world they reside in condemns 62

你们完全属于我了! Ibid., 308.

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them to status, beliefs and lives wide apart. This at once conflicting and converging alliance makes it all the more difficult for Ni, being the ideal-prone type he is, to grasp the surprising discovery he makes as to the true cause of Wang’s undaunted drive for radical but unfocused actions. Ni’s discovery follows his discussion with Wang about their role in pushing the wheels of history. Weary of lapses or reversals, Ni suggests that they should go all out to elevate the movement to a new height, and he even challenges Wang to share his insights with others about pitfalls, errors and misjudgments so as to avoid possible disruption and disorientation before the finale—in his own words, to make the wheels of history turn faster than usual. What brings Ni to such an agitated state of mind is understandable in view of the fact that it is Wang who has previously motivated him with such a final end in the first place. Ni feels exactly like someone who has been given a prized treasure which turns out to be flawed or blemished; but ironically the one who deems it flawed or blemished is the very person who has originally given him that precious trophy.63 It was Wang’s instructive talk on “organized” social resistance that once guided Ni to seek a self-fulfillment alongside the realization of an ideologically construed goal. Since ideologies often embed their laws of finality or, the lack of such, in concepts like positivism, utopia, nihilism, anarchy, etc., they always appropriate the role of the individual in line with these goals. For instance, as Ni’s positivist view of history makes it necessary to anticipate history to develop incessantly higher and faster towards a universal or transcendental end, the particular, local interests of the individual self must likewise be eclipsed or emptied out in order for it to blend in with the overall pattern of historical progress. Given this lesser-to-greater trajectory of the self, in Ni’s view, the individual being must undergo experience, though not with his subjective passion exclusively, surely with a personal consciousness raised in answer to the ultimate goal of the entire revolutionary course. Evidently, Ni’s notion of individual accountability is still rational, teleological and self-­ reflective—a carry-over from his earlier belief in Dewey’s self-realization. By contrast, Wang bases his conception of the individual self on socially determined attributes, i.e. economic well-being, class status, etc.; he is no stranger to an acutely imperfect world—fraught with inequality, prejudice and injustice that divide rather than unite the human community. Awareness of reality makes him less likely a victim to volitional or subjective imaginings than the Headmaster or Ni. In fact he is a devoted materialist tainted by Buddhist inclinations. He seems to believe primarily in an overarching order of existential nature that regulates ways and laws of growth and change through 63

Ibid., 282.

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the handling of sheer material forces. This renders him occasionally susceptible to a fatalistic interpretation of history, seeing it as propelled by contingent or irrational events and prone to returns of the past in a cyclic pattern. It is thus not surprising that he sometimes regards individual beings as mechanisms to operate this fate-like order and leans toward averting the intuitive and volitional aspects of human affect. This propensity to view things mechanistically forces Wang into a moral quandary: on the one hand, he rides the intense thrust of a passionate and sweeping revolt whose victory hinges on feeding off the fluid, spontaneous force of the laboring masses. On the other, he yearns, at least inwardly, for the beckoning of an external power to enlighten his decisions and steer his course of action. The former explains why he is so insistently “undergoing” hands-on contact with individuals of all social and political stripes, enduring crises and upheavals, rather than being fed with “forcibly injected knowledge.”64 The ­latter hints at the fear he harbors about the latent jeopardy of its spontaneous and reverberant energy being abused, misguided or hijacked as a result of a blinding rupture of action. It is indeed his quandary that renders him vulnerable and exposed to secrete misgivings and tentative decisions. He therefore rejects Ni’s challenge for timely or critical counsel to errors, flaws and setbacks suffered by the revolution, a rejection which he justifies by comparing them to “the child playing with fire or knives.” He prefers the play-driven “children” to those who stand outside the actual movement wisely looking on, because these children get out there to learn by doing it: The things that are being done wrong at the present time are an exact parallel to the child playing with fire or knives; when he’s burnt his hand or cut his finger, he will have gained some real and effective knowledge. If you look at it in this light you’ll see that it’s not altogether pointless.65 The comparison in fact resonates strongly with Ni’s earlier setback: the flawed manner in which the social changes are being effected is not that different from Ni’s school farm project which urges children to gain knowledge by trial and error, and Ni should know better than feel dejected over realistic turns of events in the course of growth. The remark also reflects on the implied meaning of what Wang once said about pushing the wheel of history: to him, it is essential to keep up a spirited involvement in social movements so that history will keep moving along its own course irrespective of mistakes or setbacks. It 64 Ibid., 316. 65 Ibid.

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is, to return to his metaphor, to keep turning the wheel of history hands on, but never be a wise onlooker. It is nevertheless clear as well that Wang’s revolutionary bravado keeps him cocooned in the intensity of “here” and “now” with little or no vision to canvas a world farther and larger than the present. Here we are given a sneak preview of one as yet unknown aspect of Wang’s mind—his Buddhist inclinations. He now associates the fate-like order of the existential world specifically with Buddhist world views and reveals his unswerving readiness for martyrdom in a way similar to Buddha’s self-­ sacrificing act in the faith of Bodhisattva. He declares: “Perhaps the Buddha was a life-long inhabitant of hell, because he wanted to suffer the same retribution and the same fate as all living creatures!”66 It is not so clear whether, besides his willingness to face death, Wang is also referring to the common fate of human endeavors—all perish in vain eventually. If he is, he surely is prophetic about the ending of the novel: there comes a sudden reversal of reality resulted from the internal split of the Nationalists’ ranks, which set the conservative faction purging the Communist-sympathizers in a bloody massacre within the KMT. Writers, student organizers and labor activists are arrested and executed en mass; strikes and rallies are called off and the anti-imperialist forces led by Communist organizers are routed and forced to flee for life. Wang, one of the leading figures of the labor movement, cannot escape the tragic fate—he is bayoneted to death by the very troops he and others thought were coming to their aid. What was meant to be a grand finale for the progressive forces in Shanghai turns out to be a self-killing, self-canceling ruinous end for the radical political movement. Ni, who has barely survived the massacre, is left dumbfounded by the abrupt reversal of history—his heart broken, his mind confused and benumbed—he drinks heavily and dies of typhoid at the prime of his life. In spite of his heroic death, Wang’s role in leading Ni away from the impasse of a subjective interaction has fallen far short; Wang has brought Ni to a deadend, failing to direct him onto a progressive path of social engagement with a fulfilling end. His Buddhist view has led to Ni’s belated awareness of a cyclic rotation of “transmigration” spinning the giant wheel of “fate.” The fact that these words are uttered by Ni as he lies dying is significant: it is as if our hero’s pursuit of a meaningful life has been terminated with an ironic neuter. Such an ending addresses the author’s double-edged goal of repudiating a purely volitional and aridly deterministic approach to historical development. To that effect, the complex figure of Wang Leshan is, I believe, very effective and evocative. But as the key “other” engaged by Ni in an intersubjective relationship, 66

Ibid., 317.

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Wang pales in comparison to the character Tiger Jiang whose sly and aggressive take on the changing reality is a forceful contrast to Wang’s fatalistic aloofness. In a sense, Tiger Jiang’s ability to rise to meet the challenge of adverse situations before they manage to debilitate him is effective enough a ploy to our protagonist Ni who keeps slipping between a volitional and a deterministic perspective on history. Jiang’s last act of gloating over the renewal of his repressive authority over others offers a provocative piece of the puzzle that not only rounds out his career of political opportunism, but, by analogy, harshly shortcircuits Ni’s penchant to internalize the position of a dehistoricized subject. In this respect, it seems disappointing that Ye Shaojun, as the author, has inadvertently painted a full-fledged portraiture of a cocky, chameleon-like villain. In the end, what Ni is initially to encounter—a more divergent and dynamic social environment—has failed to materialize. Instead, the interactive subject of “I” goes through an ideological conversion only to surrender himself to a supreme subject (such as “Them”) or a will (such as “Fate”) that denies the validity of the self in the name of a universal, uncontested notion or cause. The term “social” in this case does not mean a community of disparate individual selves with whom the “I” can engage, but a designated mass of subordinates enlisted for some ideological persuasion. Of course, Ye’s use of the conversion theme succeeds in rupturing the centric confines of the lyrical subject, but it has in turn transposed the interactive “I” in another bind—to be copped out, erased or abandoned by a grand historical subject. And it seems Ni is on his way to meet such an end as long as he allows himself to be dictated by it. Ye Shaojun’s awareness of what this conversion might lead to is perhaps ambiguous enough to warrant the death of Ni Huanzhi; but even death is too vague a message to be heard when the individual is blindly dispensable for the interest of the ideological goal.

Part Three Post-Revolutionary Self-Remaking and Global Development

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How Steel Is Tempered: The Making of a Revolutionary Hero Ostensibly a plain term used for tempering metal, Bai lian cheng gang 百煉成 鋼 (Steel is made through persistent tempering) in fact touts a surprisingly opulent history of philological blending, cultural transformation and its latterday ideological refashioning. The term has acquired its linguistic range and depth thanks to its profound root in ancient Chinese philosophies and its gritty endurance in the course of tempering through historical upheavals and traversing political and ideological terrains. The Chinese word, gang 鋼 (steel) is normally written with a metal radical and denotes a metallic alloy. But in classical Chinese, the character used to be used interchangeably with a homophone, gang, 剛 meaning the quality of being firm and unyielding. Since the latter is usually paired with the character yang 陽 to make yang gang 陽剛, signifying that which is masculine, aggressive and sublime, using either character seldom fails to implicate the concept of yin-yang 陰陽 in its ethical, educational as well as aesthetic dimensions. China claims to be the first nation in the world to invent the techniques of tempering steel out of pig iron, yet what appeals to us is how the early steel makers in China improved ceaselessly on the technique of tempering rather than what metallic elements they could mix in. The preferred stress had much to do with the antiquarian concept of lian 煉 (tempering), a character with a fire radical, which denotes an alchemist cleansing and renewing amidst blazing heat and cold liquid. Prevalent in ancient China, alchemist tempering of the Daoist sect was believed to offer supernatural means to assist human mortals in their attempt to transcend to heavenly elixir of life or nature-defying longevity.1 Mysticism notwithstanding, the principle governing the process of lian does include such human-enacted rituals as “Shamanistic divination,” “starving meditation” and “alcoholic imbibing” in the hope of launching the soul into “other-worldly” realms and elevating the mind 1 Out of etymological consideration, the above and following Chinese characters are given in the traditional font in the text. Here I refer to the ancient Shamanistic practice of lian dan 煉丹 (alchemist melting of mineral ores, gases, chemical liquids) to make elixirs believed to infinitely extend the lengths of human life. See K. C. Chang, “Shang Shamans,” in The Power of Culture: Studies in Chinese Cultural History, eds. Willard J. Peterson, Andrew H. Plaks, Yingshih Yu (Hong Kong: The Chinese University Press, 1994), 10–36.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���4 | doi 10.1163/9789004265356_008

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to supernatural heights.2 The Daoist term, lian du 煉渡 (tempering and transporting) for instance, refers to a tempering process for deceased souls, which includes an alchemist cleansing through fire and water so that the soul can be devoid of impurities before its resurrection.3 Thus, it may be noted, metaphysical mysticism had nurtured the roots of lian gang 煉鋼 and its extended meanings, but as time elapsed, the term took on a modern identity of philosophical and ethical import. The earliest possible usage of Lian gang (making something sturdy and durable) is found in The Book of Liezi, Chapter 5: “Questions of Tang” Tangwen 湯問 which recounts a legendary sword, named after its birth place “Kunwu” 錕鋙. The sword was forged in such a way that “it was sturdy with a piercing blade through tempering; therefore it cut jade as if it were scrapping off mud.”4 Though of a mythical origin, the description in this early Daoist work serves to highlight the vital fact that the sword’s quality of being firm and sharp derives from incessant tempering while being made. That fact was spelled out in substantial detail when Shen Kuo (1031–1095), the renowned polymath of the Northern Song, underscored the necessity of persistently tempering pig-iron in the process of making it steely. In one of his “Dialectics” essays included in his Meng xi bi tan (Brush Talks from the Dream Brook, 1088), Shen depicted how the process of tempering steel resembled that of cleansing the gluten off the wheat flour dough and then writes: The same holds for making steel. Select exclusively the finest pig iron and temper it through over a hundred quench-hardenings. Measure its weight after each quench-hardening; its weight should decrease with each tempering until the measuring records no further weight diminution after multiple temperings. That’s pure steel.5 煉鋼亦然。但取精鐵鍛之百余火。每鍛秤之。一鍛一輕。至累 鍛而斤兩不減。 則純鋼也。

2 For details see K. C. Chang, “Shang Shamans,” in The Power of Culture, 1994, 10–36. 3 “Liandu” Ru Fuo Dao bai ke ci dian 儒佛道百科辞典 (Encyclopedia for Confucianism, Buddhism and Daoism) eds., Laozi, Shengli zhu bian, li jiang chu ban she chu ban, 1994, 531. 4 The Book of Lieh-tzu: A Classic of Tao, trans. A. G. Graham (New York: Columbia University Press, 1960), 117. Lie Zi 列子. 5 Shen Kuo 沈括, Meng xi bi tan xiao zheng 梦溪笔谈校正 ed. Hu Daojing, (Zhonghua shuju chubanshe) 135. Translations in the following pages are provided by the author unless stated otherwise.

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In the meantime, the quality of being steely and resilient had evidently found its resonance in literary and cultural writings which emerged in reputable anthologies of the intervening centuries.6 These works offered a variety of official eulogies, tributary odes, personal essays reflecting on the exemplary virtues of scholars and officials, and they resorted to the use of personification metaphors such as the one of persistent tempering in making steel. Even though these authors could hardly boast as firm a claim as Shen Kuo to accurate observation, concise description and ample scientific knowledge, they nevertheless intensely intuited what lian gang implied for the human character fostered through trial and error, through setbacks and triumphs, often times in the face of public humiliation, ensuing fall into obscurity and even sacrifice of life.

Sagehood: Apex of Steel Making

Given such an intriguing set of backdrops, it is pivotal to examine what was continually brought to bear on the meaning of gang owing to dominant Confucian thinking throughout history. In antiquarian China, gang was often juxtaposed with Yong, 勇 which denotes a noble quality of being heroic and valiant usually epitomized in those born of noble descent and excelling at ­martial prowess. By the early Warring States Era (480–221 bce), there had emerged a trend amidst the Confucian literati of viewing gang and yong as their crowning achievements by which they could refine their upbringing and reify it at the height of martial prowess. But Confucius intervened, stating eloquently that: “for the gentleman it is righteousness that is supreme.”7 Zilu, Confucius’ loquacious disciple, is quoted as saying that the Master appeared wary of the fallible and transgressive potential of “unfettered” martial valor and urged the Shi community to cultivate moral vigilance and bring martial valor under the control of Yi 義 (moral faith). Mencius, on the other hand, regarded yong more positively, but identified its essential quality as moral 6 While searching for linguistic samples of lian gang, I have consulted a number of eminent anthologies which collect these writings. They include: Han shu 汉书 (Prose Works of Han Dynasty), ed. Zhou Shouchang (Shanghai: Shanghai gu ji chu ban she, 1995–1999); Zhaoming Wen xuan 昭明文选 (Prose Works Selected by Prince Liang Zhaoming), ed. Li Shan (Tainan: Dadong shuju, 1966); Quan Tang wen xin bian 全唐文新编 (Newly Compiled Complete Prose Works of Tang Dynasty), ed. Zhou Shaoliang (Changchun: Ji lin wen shi chu ban she, 2000). 7 The Analects. Trans. D. C. Lau (Harmondsworth, England: Penguin Books, 1976), 147–148. The Chinese original is: 子曰：君子义以为上。

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r­ ighteousness rather than mere fearlessness. Imbuing the concept of qi (vital energy) with weighty ethical implications, Mencius proposed a blending of courage with moral vigilance, which entailed rigorous self-discipline in ethical decency on the part of the literati, such as Confucius’ valorized yi.8 Judging from these instances, it proves beyond doubt that both Confucius and Mencius stood for a balanced nurturing of martial valor and moral righteousness, even though the two thinkers emphasized different aspects of achieving gang or yong. Their focus on a balancing act of moral refinement surely reflects a shared sense of fulfillment that culminates in a circular and reciprocal course between martial prowess and moral righteousness. One intriguing manner through which the literati were urged to achieve of the apex of gang (now reads moral equilibrium) was indeed inspired by the mirror-like surface of well-tempered steel whose role is to faithfully reflect moral strengths and failings of human beings. A case in point is Qiao Lin’s ode to a steel mirror that had been contributed by blacksmiths of the City of Taiyuan during the Jin Dynasty.9 Assuming that the steel mirror made of five different metals, Qiao also describes the forging of metals as “Persistent tempering to make it (the mirror) steely” (Bai lian wei gang). He then concludes with these accolades for the mirror: The steel is so refined that numerous other treasures all emulate it, The mirror is so brilliant that myriad objects are all imprinted in it, It is so utterly crystal clear that it disallows a smearing speck of dirt, It is most revealing that the ugly kinds are ashamed of one another by it.10 金之精兮。眾寶所參。 鏡之明兮。群像所含。 清至瑩兮。氣埃不雜。 明至察兮。丑類相慙。 8 Yi 义; Qi 气. Mengzi zheng yi 孟子正译 (Proper Explications of Meng Zi), ed. Jiao Xun, 焦 循 Ch. 6, 189–202. For a lucid summary of Mengzi’s interpretation of qi, consult also Martin Huang, Negotiating Masculinities in Late Imperial China (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2006), 16–17. 9 Taiyuan 太原. Qiao Lin 喬琳 (?–784 ce), “Ode to a Steel Mirror Contributed by the City of Taiyuan,” in Zhou, ed., Prose Works of Tang, 4072. This prose piece was written around 750 ad. Qiao Lin was one of the highly literary talents serving the court of Emperor Dezong 德宗 of the Tang Dynasty. He was especially talented in ci poetry, but was often times ridiculed because of his eccentricity. He remained loyal to Dezong and the ensuing Tang rulers, but was first driven into Buddhist priesthood and later beheaded on charges of mutiny against the court. 10 Bai lian wei gang 百炼为钢. Qiao Lin, “Ode,” 4072.

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The most profound dimension of this passage is the correlation Qiao drew between the exquisite features of the steel mirror and the exemplary qualities of a worthy person. Embodying the characteristics of the shining virtues of the archetypal literati, the steel mirror became a perfect personification of what the literati class aspired to whether a given literatus stood at the peak of a successful career or descended to the abyss of an unfortunate setback. Ironically, it is often when the members of the literati sank low in their careers, feeling crestfallen and grappling with frustration and self-doubt, that the uplifting values of their mentors, friends and fellow sufferers “being tempered like fine steel” appealed to them most profoundly and triggered their creative impulse to compose these tributary odes. Liu Yueshi of the Han Dynasty (271–318 ce) concluded his long poem reattributed to Lu Chen, his fellow supporter in a rebellion, with a renowned couplet in which the phrase Bai lian gang (making steel by way of persistent tempering) appears. But it was immediately contrasted with the phrase Rao zhi rou (gently recoiling around fingers). The contrast revealed a seemingly drastic turn-round in Liu’s attitude towards moral cultivation; he morphed from his earlier belief in pursuing aggressively a moral betterment to his now dispirited self-consolation, wrapping himself up, as it were, in a cocoon of self-pity and unassuming despair.11 The character Rou 柔 is often paired with yin to form yin rou, meaning femininely tender and compliant. This phrase invariably evoked its antithetical yang gang which, as mentioned earlier, signified a dialectical opposite—the literati’s penchant to follow the proverbial yin-yang interchange and withdraw from a goal-oriented public career to a reclusive self-exile in quiescence.12 This self-styled retreat seemed to signal a certain culminating end for those literati in pursuit of personal ideals, yet ironically it tended to lead him away from the world of practical affairs and oriented him beyond towards the realm of metaphysical harmony and tranquility. And on the individual level, the literati were typically rewarded with a compromised achievement in personal cultivation and were confronted with a self-inflicted banishment from the society at large. Dynasties rose and fell, and the path of self-tempering remained forever open and luring for poets and writers in the ages to come. It might be noted that only rarely did history offer us instances in which the literati writer not 11

Bai liang gang 百炼钢; Rao zhi liu 绕指柔. Liu Yueshi 刘越石, “A Poem Rededicated to Lu Chen,” in Selected Prose by Prince Zhaoming, ed. Xiao Tong. Liu Yueshi was an important historical figure as well as a literatus in the late years of the Han Era. He had to switch his political alliance between the remnants of the Han rulers and the intruding nomad tribes so that he could preserve what had left of his nobility family heritages. He was arrested as the accomplice to a frontier rebellion and died in prison in 317 ce. 12 Yin 阴; Yinrou 阴柔.

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only extolled his fellow literati’s exemplary character of being “persistently tempered like steel,” but himself embraced its moral uprightness and lived to his last moment in emulation of the role models. Though such figures were rare, they shone radiantly in history. Wen Tianxiang (1236–1283), for one, eulogized about two patriotic Tang generals who had given up their lives while defending the city of Weiyang from the invading insurgent troops headed by An Lushan. Wen wrote in adoration of the generals’ unbending uprightness with the phrase 后來者, 無二公之操, 百煉之鋼 (None of your successors had any of your moral righteousness, the steely uprightness honed through persistent tempering).13 As is recorded, Wen himself was later captured by the intruding Mongol armies led by Kublai Khan; he refused to surrender and remained defiant during his four-year captivity before his execution by the Yuan rulers. Put in perspective, Wen Tianxiang’s martyr-like death marked a significant turning point in literati class’ pursuit of ethical righteousness in the later Imperial periods: the elites of the Shi class, having risen from humble social origins by virtue of their education, began to steer away from a self-effacing withdrawal and move towards a more socially engaged fulfillment. The shift seemed to coincide with the rise of Neo-Confucianism in late Tang and Song dynasties and resonated with what Ying-Shih Yu explicates as the epoch-­ making “this-worldly turn” in Chinese intellectual tradition. Previously, the literati believed that falling short of the goal of a public career could not detract from the edifying triumphs of having been tempered through thick and thin in personal cultivation; for they held the view that the tormenting ordeals such as “persistent tempering” were but ennobling steps, not in pursuit of public fame and fortune, but in an uplifting reflection of the self. Such feelings, when carried to excess, had habitually led them to turn inward and self-aggrandizing and given rise to the trend of “reflexive poetry” surging over the more publicminded “expressive poetry” during the eras leading up to the Sui and Tang.14 13

14

Wen Tianxiang’s poem is a famous Song lyric included in Quan Song Ci 全唐词 (Complete Song Lyrics of the Song Dynasty), eds. Ma Xingrong, Liu Naichang & Liu Jicai (Liaoning ren min chu ban she, 1997). Wen Tianxiang 文天祥 was a master poet and a remarkable military leader of the Southern Song Dynasty (1236–1283). When Mongol troops invaded and overran much of China’s central plains, Wen launched a fierce resistance with his own troops and fought hard against them. He was captured and imprisoned for many years by the Yuan rulers and rejected outright their attempts to lure him to surrender. He was executed in Beijing in 1283. Wen has since been extolled by the Chinese as a great patriotic hero who would rather face death than betray his nation. Ying-Shih Yü 余英时, “Intellectual Breakthroughs in the T’ang-Sung Transition” in Peterson et al., The Power of Culture, 158–171. For the expressive genre, read Yu-kung Kao 高有功, “Nineteen Old Poems,” in Peterson et al., The Power of Culture, 82–83.

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As a backlash against the collectivist trait of the Han Confucians, the Daoist and Buddhist schools of thought jointly ushered in a more individualistic fashioning in aesthetics and ethics towards a decidedly self-centered and selforiented cultivation. In keeping with the Daoist and Buddhist spirits of those times, character refinement of a literatus could only be culminated in “innerworldly” perfection. Therefore, when steel’s extraordinary metallic texture was transposed to humanistic values, its persistent temperings were upheld as rites of passage for personal maturity, integrity and triumph, and its literati practitioners were invariably oriented towards the metaphysical “other shore” as the destination of their personal pursuits. They were so ontologically preoccupied that social reality seemed worlds apart from them. However, the tide seemed to have turned again alongside the rise of Li xue (the study of Principle of Nature, a.k.a. Neo-Confucianism) in the Song (960– 1279) and Ming dynasties (1368–1644). The collapse of both Han-ruled empires at the hands of the invading Mongols and Manchurians heralded the perilous excess of self-indulgent perfection. And the pressing fate of nationalistic renewals became the overriding moral issue for the humiliated literati elite. Zhu Xi (1130–1200) and the Cheng brothers (Cheng Hao 1032–1085; Cheng Yi 1033–1107) revived Confucianism with a re-oriented elucidation of Tian Li (Heavenly Principles), which posited a more socially engaged world view and more public-oriented concerns on behalf of the literati. Corner stones were laid for revamping Confucian tenets not only by adopting an ontological approach that deemed qi (substance of the material universe) the primary force of objective reality, but by positing li in the humans’ original nature and exercising a causal and determinative power over their growth.15 Here we witness an intriguing instance in which is detected a surprising analogy to the tempering of steel: with the heavenly principle as innate in humanity, the process of personal cultivation entailed a constant refining away of aberrations and impurities of their worldly existence so as to eventually reach the end of full moral goodness engrained in them. Discontent with a possible ontological dualism suspected of Buddhist origin, later Neo-Confucians went even further by denying a dualist split between a pure li and an imperfect qi and by stressing Li yi fen shu (principle is one; its particularizations are diverse).16 In so doing, they were able to reconcile the fact that principle in general was always disposed towards moral perfection 15

16

Zhu Xi 朱熹; Cheng Hao 程颢; Cheng Yi 程颐; Li Xue 理学. I have here drawn on Wang Hui, Chapters 1–2 in “Li and Materiality” of Part I, The Rise of Modern Chinese Thought and Irene Bloom, “Introduction” in Knowledge Painfully Acquired: The K’un-chih chi by Lo Ch’in-shun (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987), 1–48. Li yi fen shu 理一分殊. See Bloom, Knowledge, 17–18. Translation is by Irene Bloom.

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with the belief that refining towards and attaining highest goodness took varied forms with disparate individuals. In the realm of individual cultivation, it followed that the literati were oriented towards moral goodness, not by virtue of a self-obsessed quest for unrealistic goals of social apathy and intellectual quiescence, but by embracing objective realities, engaging in diverse social praxes and relying on the web of interrelated individuals. A case in point is Luo Qinshun (1465–1547) who shed insight on a socially defined goal for personal quests for moral enlightenment and spent over sixty years striving to reach it himself. In elucidating Luo’s idea of moral achievement, Irene Bloom writes, Moral goodness is understood to follow from an objective awareness of the principle which unites oneself and others. Such awareness is equivalent to insight into one’s place in the totality of things, one’s role in the process of life as a whole.17 What Luo exhibited here is a rudimentary awareness for the literati class to seek knowledge from the current social reality, participate in social activities and commit their talent and power to moral cultivation that aimed to promote the ethical wellbeing of the society at large. In the early Qing Era this awareness was much enhanced with the innovative thinking of Wang Fuzhi (1619–1692) who, among other things, emphasized that one’s social actions and experienced life constituted the primary criterion for his perception of “principle li.”18 Wang revived the yin-yang dialectic that he applied to the grasping of law of historical development. Such a law, as he perceived, was an interminable growth alternating between conflicts and harmonies, which inevitably brought about change and progress towards new levels of tension and unison. This law of materialist evolution implied that phenomenal movement was purposive without reference to external idea.19 It helped Wang discern patterns beneath chaotic social changes and foretell overall “orientation” for the course of evolving history at both the individual and the societal levels. Wang termed this télos-like Shi (a directive propensity) with which he tried to delineate how this directive notion served to embrace 17

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Luo Qinshun 罗钦顺. See Bloom, Knowledge, 19. Translation is by Irene Bloom. Luo Qinshun was a renowned educator and scholar of the Ming Era. He followed the NeoConfucianist precepts and applied them to the pedagogical principles of his time. Wang Fuzhi 王夫之 Wang is one of the towering figures in Chinese thought in Imperial China. He adopted a materialist world view and reputed the core decrees of Neo-Confucianism. See a detailed analysis by Frederic Wakeman Jr., History and Will: Philosophical Perspectives of Mao Tse-tung’s Thought (Berkeley: University of California Press), 78–87.

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the fluidity of history, allow for its contingencies and enhance its ability to steer human history towards a truthful end.20 Judged by its affirmative content, Shi, seemed to be inclined towards the ultimate triumph of moral goodness attainable to men; but men could not attain it without living through ordeals of disarrays, deviations and even falls. Thus, there arose tension between Wang’s notion of history’s directive potential, which posited a teleological cause, and his appeal to the yin-yang dialectic that favored an interactive blending of rivaling forces. By this time, trade routes leading to China’s imperial gate had seen throngs of European travelers in search of not only oriental exotica but opportunities to preach Christianity and spread scientific knowledge garnered by Europe’s Enlightenment Age. Western sciences such as arithmetic, physics and geography had already found their way into China through many Jesuit missionaries and Chinese translators, bringing natural sciences and empirical methodologies to bear upon China’s self-assured ways of learning. Li Madou (Matteo Ricci, 1552–1610) was the first to introduce cartography to China; Xu Guangqi (1562–1633) translated Euclidean geometry into Chinese, and Fang Yizhi (1611–1671) compiled a primer of physics, to mention just a few.21 All these efforts bore fruit in so far as empirical thinking was implanted, struck roots and made inroads into China’s ethics-centered cultivation. It was clear that as this generation of Confucians endeavored to renovate or reconsider the process of personal cultivation under prevalent social demands, they differed vastly from the Song and early Ming thinkers in the following ways: ⑴ rather than exiting the experiential world in favor of an inner withdrawal and quiescence, they anchored the process of moral growth and maturity by way of social reality, thus emphasizing social conduct as the pivot of moral cultivation. Alongside that new emphasis was a notable shift on the part of the literati from onto­ logical concerns to empirical endeavors for the betterment of humanity; ⑵ Lingering in the shadow of Buddhist and Daoist metaphysics, their path of personal growth was now increasingly oriented toward an ameliorative goal for the sake of communal and societal wellbeing during his “this worldly existence”; ⑶ With their adopted assurance in instrumental reason while 20 21

Shi 势. Li Madou 利马竇 was the best known Jesuit Missionary who first visited China from the West. He wrote profusely about his impressions while in China. Xu Guangqi 徐光启 was a mathematician and military scientist in late Ming Dynasty. Fang Yizhi 方以智 was a Ming Era Buddhist monk who specialized in science, philosophy and herbal medicine. For details of the cultural influx in general, see Wang Hui, “The Concept of Science and China’s Modern Identity,” in Wang, Self-selected Works (Guilin: Guangxi Normal University Press, 1997), 210–224.

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a­ cquiring scientific knowledge from the West, their cultural loyalty and ethical roots came under profound impact: the foremost is their faith in holistic progress of humanity which now was being contested by utility-centered principles entailed in Western technical know-how. In a sense, Western science was no stranger to China since Chinese home-grown thinkers had long before crossed the threshold of fundamental ideas of empiricism. Empirical thinking was, however, delimited to a minor role in the shadow of the predominant li of Neo-Confucianism. Nonetheless, China experienced the most traumatic coming-of-age at the dawn of the modern era. In late nineteenth Century, British gunships relied on superior cannons to crack open China’s coast lines during the Opium Wars (1839–1841). The French invaded Southern China for her slice of the coveted interests in 1884–1885. Japan launched an invasion into Korea and forced a naval war on China in the Yellow Sea in 1894–1895, and then in 1900 the EightNation Alliance unleashed their armed incursion and overran Beijing, the Qing imperial capital. These humiliating defeats at sea and on land left this once “Central Kingdom on Earth” reeling in shame and panic; her fate sank even deeper as the foreign powers demanded huge territorial privileges and costly reparations. Deep humiliation and agitation fueled the literati’s urge to develop science and master technologies in order to build China into a modern nation of power and wealth. It was precisely at this crisis-ridden moment that some eminent literati candidly embraced Western learning by way of introducing science, philosophy and political thinking—commonly believed to be the key to Western nations’ material strength and technological advances. Foremost among them was science, which the reform-minded literati not only adopted wholesale but considered to be the panacea for all China’s ills and vices. Along with their fervent worship of science grew an eagerness to promote it as a set of universals—similar to principle li of the Neo-Confucians—without being fully aware of what science specifically entailed. Their misguided enthusiasm would soon lead to a “misplaced” trust in empirical science’s authority to establish a new world order with modern ethical tenets. This shift was bound to culminate in “ordaining” an empirical methodology and utilitarian positivism as the final ends of their persistent pursuit of change. Yan Fu played a decisive role in this Yangwu yun dong (Western Affair Movement, 1894–1896) by way of translating into Chinese such specimens of the Western spirit of science as Spencer’s A Study of Sociology, Huxley’s Evolution and Ethics, and Smith’s Wealth of Nations.22 Yan focused on “­evolution” 22

Yangwu yun dong 洋务运动. Though lasting only a couple of years, the Yangwu movement was actually a school of thought advocating a whole sale borrowing of Western

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as the core notion of modern European thinking which would, if accepted by Chinese, enable them to rise to a superior stature in power and wealth comparable to that of the West. Yet, as he engaged in a sort of “transformative” translation of Spencer and Huxley, he allowed his deep learning of antiquarian China to not only creatively reinterpret the novel Western concepts away from their original contexts, but unknowingly gloss over some vital conflicts on the nature of evolution in the context of individual vs. society that existed between Huxley and Spencer. In his endeavor to advocate evolution for the cause of national salvation, he ardently applauded their theories as the cardinal law of Western science while heeding little as to whether such laws of nature could be freely grafted onto other human societies. As a result, for instance, he overlooked Huxley’s ethical assertions of social progress and his abhorrence of Spencer’s cosmic evolution which prompted him to reject the latter’s human “natural” selection. Yan was decidedly convinced that the natural and human worlds were one, and that what made it possible for men to move higher and further on the evolutionary ladder was their unsurpassed ability to form collective polities that ensure peace and security shared by all.23 It is therefore reasonable to conclude that Yan assumed that evolution was what implicated Huxley and Spencer in premise, and that they in turn enabled Yan to feed off their disparate insights to firm up his own claim. If what motivated Yan’s paraphrastic translation of evolution was national pride, then what prompted Chen Duxiu’s idolization of evolution was the aspiration of a national rebirth. Borne and reared in a scholar-gentry estate, Chen started his pursuit of moral goodness with reality close at hand—as a rebel to his own social class—and his advocacy of Western science (including evolution) was chiefly aimed at replacing Imperial China with a born-again modern nation. Much like Yan, he focused on Western-inspired laws of science as universally applicable, and set them as the paths for the human pursuit of moral perfection, a goal which Chen revered with fervor and conviction as if it were a religious faith. In his editorials for the May Fourth Flagship journal, New Youth, Chen would never hesitate to cite the authority of science in calling for a thorough break-up with the “traditional” ways of thinking and conduct; he also stood for an unconditional acceptance of the laws of modern science, by virtue of a tradition-defying revolution, that would sweep Confucianism into its final grave and raise scientific reasoning and pragmatism to the altar of absolute

23

science and technology to build up China, oftentimes at the expense of Chinese interests. For a slightly different approach on this issue, consult Wang, Self-selected Works, 225–237.

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unifying power. In his editorial on “Zai lun kong jiao wen ti” (Revisiting the Issue of Confucian Religion) for instance, Chen stated: In the future, humanity will evolve in accordance with what has just budded with science (the law of nature) today. It will develop and strengthen increasingly and remedy all human-made laws, rendering them as equal and effective as the law of nature. Only then will cosmic world and human existence truly become one.24 人类将来之进化，应随今日方始萌芽之科学。日渐发达，改正 一切认为法则，使其与自然法则有同等之效力。然后宇宙人生, 真正契合。 As he delved into the iconoclastic potential of scientific laws, Chen regarded them as the new ethical tenets for the new modern state; in so doing, he inadvertently embarked on a mission not unlike that of the Neo-Confucians’ endeavor to promote the principle li; he first acclaimed empirical methodologies as the touchstone for testing truth from falsehood; he then extolled utilitarian thinking to enhance one’s political awareness, social activism and nation-building as crucial rites of passage in an individual’s search for a process of self-realization. Thus, like Yan Fu, he eventually infused laws of science with credible potentials of reaching ethical perfection since it was ameliorative in its process and teleological in its destiny. No wonder Chen was able to declare in “Wu ren zui hou zhi jue wu” (My Highest Point of Awareness): “Ethical awareness is the highest of my highest point of awareness.”25

Steel-making’s Modern Apotheosis

From advocacy of Western science as a world view to positing the ultimate aim of ethical wellbeing for the whole humanity, the dots were now connected and a new and practicable route had opened up to those seeking self-realization in the modern age. But who would be these seekers of such a goal? The answer was given by the May Fourth New Culture Movement. Chen’s rebellious breakaway from his privileged class background already revealed the tip of the oncoming sea change against the social polarization of the “haves” and 24 25

Zai lun kong jiao wen ti 再論孔教問題 Chen Duxiu, New Youth (Shanghai: East Asia Library & Bookstore of Seeking Benefits, Vol. 2, Issue 5, 1917), 3. Wu ren zui hou zhi jue wu 吾人最後之覺悟. Chen, New Youth, 4.

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the “have-nots.” Alongside the spread of new learning in science, literacy gained ground among the commoners, which in turn kindled their desire for social equality and justice. Likewise, what moral goodness used to hold out for the literati and gentry now had to be re-constituted to meet the demands of vastly different settings. The challenge Chen and his New Youth associates now faced was how the scientific reasoning, when applied to social development, could ensure fair and just values and rights for the public at large. By the same token the emphasis of ethical triumph began to shift from the elite literati’s private upbringing to education for the minds and bodies of the commoners. However, as science was endowed with prevailing capabilities coextensive with economics, politics, religion, and morality as well as education, it ought to be responsible for providing wide-ranging means for the great majority of Chinese to achieve this common objective. But what pressed Chen most was this: with what means and how to go about it? In an intriguing manner, Chen and his pro-science cohorts found themselves at a crossroads: when applying scientific reasoning to the ever-­changing social reality, would one’s ethical growth be “malleable clay” in the hands of external conditions and utilitarian ends? Or would there be certain critical orientation for human progress above and beyond such a process? The debate on “Science vs. Metaphysics” (1923–1924) sheds light onto Chen’s inner ­ambiguity.26 Positioned on the high grounds of moral positivism, Chen spoke with urgency and weight. True to his staunch belief in science, he leaned towards Ding Wenjiang (1887–1936) and the pro-science faction, yet his intervention focused on the fault line of the entire debate, i.e. whether scientific laws could prevail as an all-embracing “view of life.” He cautioned that rigid mechanistic causation was too deterministic to cope with the complex and precarious course of human strife, but he also urged that science offered the human a way of knowing the “laws of necessity” in any historical process. His position entailed an amenable sense of studying and improving his knowledge to keep in step with the open-ended process. Chen called the human’s amenable ability jue wu (awareness), and suggested that the person’s “maturing” of awareness must be co-terminus with the prevalent conditions of each historical stage.27 Therein, Chen argued, laid a kind of evolutionary potential that 26

27

To keep the focus of my argument, I choose not to delve into the ‘science vs. metaphysics’ debate in detail. Readers are urged to read Charlotte Furth’s chapter on this debate in her Ting Wen-chiang: Science and China’s New Culture (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1970), 94–135. Jue wu 觉悟. I have quoted from two sources: 1) Chen, New Youth Vol. 1, Issue 6, 1916, 4; 2) Chen’s views found in Zhang Junmai 张君劢, Ding Wenjiang 丁文江, etc, Science and Metaphysics, ed. Zhang Limin 张利民 (Jinan: Shandong ren min chu ban she, 1997), 1–8.

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correlated to the laws of scientific reasoning, and it would orient and move human conditions steadily towards the pinnacle of ethical perfection. Surely, Chen’s views were favorably echoed by such fellow debaters as Hu Shi, Wu Zhihui and Fu Sinian who asserted each in his own way that the world governed by scientific laws could implement a positive transformation to “eradicate” moral vices and “remedy” social ills thanks precisely to the fluid and innovative nature of historical changes.28 Rejecting their opponent’s insistence on human “intuitive knowledge,” they were all assured that the eventual goodness of scientific progress would overcome human errors caused by prejudice, ignorance, derangement, hatred, etc. It appears that while Chen had succeeded in deposing the Neo-Confucians’ heritage of li, he turned out to have followed a de facto “traditional” route after all owing ironically to his antitraditional endeavors. Inadvertently, he was thereby faced with the same dilemma that once confronted Wang Fuzhi and his ilk: he promised that some kind of ethical synthesis could arise from scientific progress, while offered little as to how it could be specifically ensured now that the pathway to a yin-yang style of metaphysical destiny was invalidated. As for his educational task to “awaken the youth,” what could be upheld as the exemplar of the moral good in place of the rejected innate or intuitive conscience? Chen’s solution seemed to lie in praxis vigorously engaged in at the social level, yet the seekers’ path clearly veered from a broad-based ethical legitimacy to a class-centered social schema.29 The Chinese Republic saw its growth stunted time and again during the 1920s: the warlords’ divisive wrangling, foreign powers’ subversive dealings with warlords, and their joint resistance to the north-bound drive of the Nationalist forces led by Sun Yat-san all hampered the Nationalist Party’s efforts to overtake and stabilize the whole of China. On the other hand, following its birth in 1921, the Chinese Communist Party not only swelled in size, but spread its roots broadly to the rural as well as the urban areas. In 1927, wary of the ccp’s growing threat, Chiang Kai-shek led a bloody purge of ccp members inside and outside the Nationalist Party ranks and forced the ccp to go underground with an ensuing reign of “White Terror” in much of the 1930s. Determined to follow the footprints of the Russian Bolsheviks’ October Revolution, ccp leaders like Qu Qiubai and Wang Ming began to openly wage an ideological war with the gmd, embarked on a lock-step strategy for 28 29

Hu Shi 胡适; Wu Zhihui 吴稚晖; Fu Sinian 傅思年. See relevant chapters by these debaters in Zhang and Ding, Science and Metaphysics. I am using the term as it first appears in Karl Marx’s Economic-Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 and later in Georg Lukács’ The Process of Democratization (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1988).

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building labor unions and peasant associations as its power base, and recast the Left-wing forces, laborers, peasants and activist intellectuals all included, in the mode of a Proletariat-led armed revolution in the hope of eventually seizing national power. Analogous to this partisan turn in national politics, there occurred among the Leftist writers a notable shift from Literary Revolution to Revolutionary Literature. Led by Cheng Fangwu and Qian Xingcun, Leftwing theorists espoused a Marxist approach to literature as a propagandist tool in trumpeting revolutionary ideas and actions at the behest of the proletariat, and as such its leading function must first be Fu zi (a battleaxe), rather than Jing zi (a mirror), in the hands of the laboring underclass.30 It followed that radical literary associations, such as Chuang zao she (the Creation Society) and Tai yang she (the Sun Society), considered it foremost for bourgeois intellectuals to rid themselves of their class upbringing by way of “negating” or “denying” their “tainted nature” (for they were inevitably imprinted with the worldviews of the exploitative classes) in favor of a “collectivist” approach guided by the proletariat.31 In terms of literary methodology, likewise, these theorists vehemently stressed the need to “organize life” and “create life” and implement the social mission of literary endeavors in order to gain ethical legitimacy for a vanguard party such as the ccp. To truly embody the geist of the age of revolution, they ardently proposed that: Art is not a way to reflect life, but a way to create life; acknowledge no realism, acknowledge no objectivity; oppose realism while applauding propaganda. Reject objective experience while embracing voluntarist acts; eliminate form while substituting purposefulness. . . . The purpose

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Fu zi 斧子; Jing zi 镜子. Cheng Fangwu 成仿吾 (1897–1984) writer, educator and translator, was a leading figure of the Creation Society in Shanghai in the 1920s. Qian Xingcun 錢 杏邨 (1900–1977) literary theorist, historian and writer, was a leading figure in the Sun Society in later 1920s in Shanghai. The comments came from Mao Dun in a review published in 1932, who had noticeably renounced his earlier position of regarding literature’s main task as a mirror-like reflection of social reality. For further reading, see Lin Weimin 林伟民, Zhong guo zuo yi wen xue si chao 中国左翼文学思潮 (Trends of Thought in China’s Leftwing Literature), Shanghai: East China Normal University, 2005. Chuang zao she 创造社; Tai yang she 太阳社. For further detail, see Kirk Denton, ed., Modern Chinese Literary Thought: Writings on Literature 1893–1945 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), 257–262.

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lies in creating art of the proletariat and opposing all literature that belongs to the non-laboring underclasses.32 Apart from the all-too-evident sloganeering, views like this attempted not only to project future prospects of bringing intellectuals and artists of bourgeois origin into active play amidst the laboring masses, but endorse them as a rite of passage of self-realization—they must complete the act of “reforming” their social origin before they could hope to mature into a full-fledged fighter in the ranks of the proletarian revolution. Incidentally, comparing revolutionary literature to a battle axe surely resonates with Lu Xun’s famous mantra of his essays compared to “daggers” and “spears” in that Left-wing writers all shared the stand of using literature to tear open and topple the mask of civility deployed by the exploitative classes. But the analogy stretches only this far chiefly because the use of this battle axe is now dictated largely by the status of who the user is. We need not look too hard to discern the primarily instrumental role that is embedded in this trope: (1) the progressive intellectual must allow his/her individual talent and desire to be harnessed, expended and, if necessary, sacrificed by the overriding needs of the revolutionary cause; hence, only when the individual willingly aligns the pursuit of his/her personal fulfillment with the final goal of the proletarian revolution does his/her self-realization become legitimate and feasible. (2) for those who were born with a “tainted” social origin, their making of a true revolutionary intellectual has to endure additional rigorous tempering. This usually implies that the individual has to use the battle axe to sever his/her own ties with the class of his/her birth. A severance act like this, a betrayal of one’s own upbringing really, became a favored conversion motif for Leftwing fiction of the 1930s. Extolling the disavowal as a ritual of political coming-of-age, writers such as Ba Jin, Yang Hansheng, Ouyang Shan and Jiang Guangci offered a rich gala of valiant revolutionists who for once in their life had to stand the agonizing test of loyalty to revolution by being disloyal to their parents and families.33 32 33

Qian Xingcun, “On Jiang Guangci’s ‘On the Yalu River’.” Also quoted in Lin, Trends of Thought, 176. Ba Jin 巴金 (1905–2004) was originally Li Yaotang, one of the towering figures of modern Chinese fiction. His many novels are based on his personal life experience of painful betrayals and thrilling pursuits during the 1930s and 1940s. Yang Hansheng 阳翰笙 (1902–1993), dramatist and writer, was once a leading figure of the Left-wing writers. His life story followed a similar set of rites of passage as Ba Jin. Ouyang Shan 欧阳山 (1908– 2000) fiction writer and dramatist. Unlike the other two, Ouyang’s life started in dire poverty, so his early fiction focused on the down and out commoners. But his later fiction

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A case in point is a novella entitled “Pao xiao le de tu di” (The Land up in Roar) written by Jiang Guangci in 1930.34 Jiang was himself a vocal advocate of revolutionary literature in early 1930s and had earlier undergone a class conversion himself before leaving to study in Soviet Russia. In the novella, Jiang depicts a brave and noble character, Li Jie, who is the son of the wealthiest local landowner. Li has been inspired by modern values at a young age and escaped from home to join the revolutionary army in South China. Now Li returns to his home village to lead the local peasants in getting organized and launching a land reform campaign against his father, the head of the local gentry. To convince the local peasants of his unswerving stand as a revolutionary, Li has time and again overcome his moderate instincts and adopted the blunt and violent tactics put forward by the local peasants. In the end Li agrees with their plan to burn down his father’s mansion with his old mother and bedridden sister inside—an act amounting to the ultimate betrayal and infidelity in the eye of Confucian ethics, but is deemed hugely loyal and selfless by the author to earn him a berth at the pantheon of revolutionary heroes! The plot ends with Li’s dauntless death which puts a neat end to his career dedicated to the cause of revolution, but ironically foreshortens the expectedly long ordeal of self-reform through “persistent tempering.” Like his heroes, Jiang’s creative interlude of passionate and radical writings came to an abrupt halt, ending with his premature death caused by illness. Had he lived on, he would have to be most astounded by what was to become of such a rite of passage. Deadly political strife between the gmd and ccp in the following years did its bit to fuel what the rhetoric of Revolutionary Literature sparked off in the nature of tempering one’s worth to achieve moral righteousness. Now bitterly contested and eventually coerced, the trope was converted into a harsh apprenticeship by the ccp to educate thousands of youths who had been inspired by ideals of revolution. This brings us to the Yan’an era in which the ccp found itself barely able to hold onto its decimated Red Army after the Long March (1935–1936), and, holed up in the rigid loess highlands of Northwest China, would be compelled to regroup its forces and revamp its ideological scheme while staying engaged in the anti-Japan resistance. In the annals of ccp history since 1949, the ccp would perpetually exalt its political and ideological growth

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began to dwell on sons and daughters of the rich who changed their political faith and allegiance. Life of Jiang Guangci will be given in the ensuing note. “Pao xiao le de tu di” 咆哮了的土地. Jiang Guangci 蒋光慈 (1901–1931), a child prodigy born in a salt merchant family, Jiang broke away from his family and attended Moscow University in USSR in 1921. He helped establish the Sun Society in 1920s. He died of TB in Shanghai. See Jiang Guangci, Jiang Guangci xuan ji (Selected Works of Jiang Guangci), (Beijing: People’s Literature Press, 1983), 378–576.

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under the leadership of Mao Zedong (1893–1976). It would tirelessly claim that the ccp owed its rebirth to Mao’s ability to perceive the “destiny” of China’s socialist revolution, steer off obstacles and dangers posed by its ideological foes, both foreign and domestic, and take the lead in persistently tempering himself while guiding the ccp through thick and thin. The solution seemed to lie in transformative social praxis. Among the upcoming generation of revolutionary leaders, incidentally, one would be able to simultaneously perceive the “destiny” of social evolution and personally participate in mediating the laws of necessity through actual practice. That person was Mao Zedong. Mao spent his early years “swimming” in the currents of these philosophical discourses, tempering his intellect and physique for the daunting task of mediating Marxism to suit the context of Chinese revolution. In the years following the May Fourth Movement, Mao joined the ccp, organized a coal miners’ strike in Jiangxi (1922), mobilized Hunan peasants in local movements against landowners and warlords (1926), and personally led an Autumn Harvest Uprising against the Nationalists in Hunan (1927). None of these endeavors could escape the fate of a futile or fatal end, leaving Mao disoriented with his belief in Marxist tenets on constant struggle and continual becoming but falling way short of an ethically gratifying outcome. In retrospect, Mao later recognized that his social praxis was misguided by the impact of Chen Duxiu’s effectual anti-traditionalism.35 The ambiguity in Chen’s process of maturing awareness, we may recall, was primarily an intellectual battle line drawn between abstract notions of modernity vs. tradition, West vs. East—an ambiguity Chen had inherited from Wang Fuzhi. But Chen’s blunder laid not so much in his half-digested Western “scientific laws” as in his oversight concerning the intricacy of their local realization: he seemed to have enforced a mechanistic one-way relationship (awareness to praxis) in applying scientific notions to the Chinese context. Up till then Mao’s participation in May Fourth cause had followed a tri-step course as: Zhi-Xin-Xing. According to this formula, zhi 知 stood for the idea or principle which came from learning; xin 信 meant belief or ideology that was reached or formed on the strength of ideas; and xing 行 indicated actual actions to execute the belief or principle.36 If one followed a straightforward order, it would simply be a linear progression from idea to action, from the 35

Mao Zedong 毛泽东. For further comments on this issue, read Chapters 6, 11, 13–15, 18–19 in Wakeman, History and Will: Philosophical Perspectives of Mao Tse-tung’s Thought (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972) and Li Rui 李锐 The First Thirty Years of Mao Zedong’s Life 三十岁以前的毛泽东 (Sanshi sui yi qian de Mao Zedong) (Taiwan: Shi bao wen hua chu ban qi ye you xian gong si, 1993). 36 Zhi 知; Xin 信; Xing 行.

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abstract to the concrete, which essentially spelled out the guidelines for the pro-science debaters and the May Fourth revolutionists. Bitter failures in Mao’s earlier praxis had proved it a dead-end. While grappling for a solution, Mao looked the other way: he boldly inverted the order of social participation by plunging himself in praxis—investigating peasants’ subsistence, organizing rural insurgencies, leading guerrilla warfare and eventually securing his grip on the ccp leadership through compromises and maneuvering. He deftly fended off interventions from the Europe-based Comintern and boldly deviated from the classical Marxist model of relying on the urban and industrial proletariat. Mao’s rural-rooted vision of social progressivism proved a perfect fit for the indigenous conditions of early modern China, and his praxisoriented strategies helped the depleted ccp turn the corner for a more promising future. Much has been written about the inspiration of Mao’s early thinking by the German philosopher Friedrich Paulsen (1846–1908) through Mao’s May Fourth mentor Yang Changji.37 A la Yang’s tutelage, Mao read Paulsen’s A System of Ethics thoroughly and made extensive notes on the book’s margins; Mao was most impressed with Paulsen’s justification of the individual’s will while carrying on social activities and dealing with relationships.38 Following Paulsen, Mao realized that the primacy of human praxis would be most effective when resisting rather than obeying social conditions, so Mao was able to enhance his awareness of the social implications of implementing such thinking and the necessity to replace the societal status quo with strife and contention. But it was Paulsen’s idea of the primacy of the individual will that triggered Mao’s preoccupation with the “superhuman” figure that could almost will changes to happen, as it were, when he became an “agent” of the orientation of a particular age dictated by the irreversible laws of history. No doubt Mao himself would soon be sanctified as precisely such a larger-than-life mover of history, testified by his guidance in the historic rise of the ccp to national power. 37

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Yang Changji 杨昌济 (1871–1920), ethicist and educator. Yang received his education in Japan and Britain, and did his part in organizing the student movements in Beijing while teaching there. He returned to his birth place in Changsha, Hunan to study the classics. When Mao Zedong attended the First Normal School at Changsha in 1913–1918, Yang took him under his wings and groomed him with ideas from Wolf, Hegel and Paulson. Yang also included in his textbooks some of Paulsen’s A System of Ethics, which was taken from Cai Yuanpei’s translation from Japanese. Most worth noting is the fact that his daughter, Yang Kaihui, 杨开慧 was Mao’s first wife. See Li Rui, Mao Zedong before Thirty, 215–225; Li Yongtai 李勇太, Zhong xi wen hua yu Mao Zedong zao qi si xiang 中西文化与毛泽东早期思想 (East-West Cultures and Mao Zedong’s Early Thought) (Chengdu: Sichuan University Press, 1991), 166–240.

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A strenuous but effective course of military victories scored by the ccp’s Red Army was believed to be the brainchild of Mao: relying on his folk knowledge and associational skills with the mutinous peasants, Mao repeated that success by functioning as the chief supervisor of the Ruijin Soviet in the Jinggang Mountains (1933–1935). He led the besieged Red Army in a desperate escape through several blockades set by the Nationalist troops in Jiangxi and Hunan (1934–35); on route he presided over the Zhunyi Meeting at which he secured his supreme authority over the ccp; he personally planned and commanded the Long March through West China’s frontier and wilderness regions to avoid frontal clashes with the Nationalist or Japanese troops (1935–1936).39 From this self-exiled expedition, he emerged with a triumphant though dramatically diminished Red Army at Yan’an in northwest China. Once in Yan’an, Mao lost no time in rebuilding a soviet-like base, firmed up his ccp leadership, unabashedly claimed territories, both geographical and intellectual, to be governed by his ideological hegemony; he then aggressively embarked on a drive on political, economic, social and institutional fronts for national dominance. All these historical instances were craftily woven into a mytho-logic discourse aimed at an ideological christening of Mao as a visionary leader of mythical proportion.40 Grounds were thus paved for Yan’an to become the allegorical cradle of a New China nursed and groomed by the ccp and, more importantly, for the hagiography of a revolutionary giant, Mao Zedong, to embody the heroism of that national coming-of-age. In the ethical and ontological realms, Mao’s success appeared to have subverted the order of Chen Duxiu’s linear causation, but its true weight shifted to the agent whose awareness became the modus operandi to act on both knowledge and praxis. It also enabled the individual to negotiate between inner voluntarism and external determinism in the course of action. Above all, it enabled Mao and the ccp ideologues to posit concrete legitimacy for an ideological role model as well as for telescoping the ccp into an otherwise unknowable destiny. In other words, the allegorized hero, following the footsteps of Mao, would be a powerful inspiration for all revolutionaries to individually align “What Is”—one’s erratic present—with “What ought to be”—an ideal future. At a ccp congress held in Yan’an, Mao recounted to all delegates 39 Ruijin 瑞金; Jinggangshan 井岗山; Zhun yi 遵义. These were places where Mao led the Red Army in a strategic escape from the encircling armies of gmd in 1935–1936. They have now become milestone sites ordained in the annuals of ccp’s history. 40 Yan’an 延安. I am here indebted to David Apter’s idea of a Yan’an Republic and ccp’s narrative construction of the Chinese revolution as a Maoization. Read David Apter & Tony Saich, Revolutionary Discourse in Mao’s Republic (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994), 1–30.

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present an ancient tale about how Yu Gong, a dull-witted old man, removed two mountains blocking his doorway with the sheer force of his determined will. Even at a glance, it is not difficult to detect the legend’s similarity with “making steel through persistent tempering,” and Mao’s allusion to it was not only to bask in the legendary shine of the ancient legend but to educate the young communists by way of emulating the exemplary can-do spirit of Yu Gong. Yet how did the average ccp member get inspired by Mao’s allusion to Yu Gong? In what possible manners could he/she correlate with the prophetic force of Mao’s superhuman heroism in a way meaningful to his/her own life? David Apter depicts how individual self-interest was interfused with and absorbed by an “exegetical bonding” in the movement to raise political consciousness the Yan’an way. While participating in a reeducation process, the aspiring individuals “. . . had transcended individual limitations, had ‘overcome’ one’s deficiencies, and therefore had gained more from the collectivity than one had given up.”41 Following a ccp-favored motto, “the power of a role model knows no limit,” I believe such acts of intersubjective transference were especially effectual with individuals with the socially discriminated, deprived and disempowered. In a similar fashion, emulating revolutionary heroism called for a conscious and determined effort to model one’s personal life, less in total than in concrete deeds, on the hero’s flawless life and be inspired to overcome vulnerabilities, deficiencies and biases inflicted on the individual by hostile social environments. Contrary to some hasty criticism of the ccp’s propaganda, such tales of heroism, brimming with uplifting and emancipatory force, indeed infused with vigor and creativity the disparate characters and figures who enlivened the pages of modern Chinese history with verve, originality and a fullness of ­reality.42 There is no doubt that revolutionary heroism of Mao’s Yan’an brewed a heavy flavor of a communist utopia when the hero’s legendary feats were later canonized as the irreversible apotheosis of Maoist voluntarism. Nevertheless, for any critique to dismiss it as totally phony, impractical or contrived propaganda would be in for a grave oversight. Such an oversight, often revealing its own ideological bias, could blindfold us to the fact that ethical impulses had always endured with the public awareness, and that it was typical of the 41

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Yu gong yi shan 愚公移山. David Apter, ‘Ya’an and the Narrative Reconstruction of Reality,’ in Daedalus, vol. 122, no. 2, spring, 1993 (Cambridge: Journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences), 208–211. I have drawn on Ban Wang’s comments on the sublime ethos in the revolutionary literature and films even though my comments have a slightly different focus as will be demonstrated shortly. See Ban Wang, The Sublime Figure of History: Aesthetics and Politics in Twentieth-Century China (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), 123–132.

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Chinese intellectual heritage to have long nurtured an ethical watchfulness on behalf of society at large. Despite the ccp’s ideological extremism, there is no denying the fact that the early development of its cause had no shortage of ennobling and constructive enterprises such as the deposing of rapacious landowners and the resistance against foreign invasion and plunder. It is therefore to be expected that these tales of revolutionary heroism provided the denizens of Yan’an with the occasion to evoke and revive their vigilance against the moral laxity and failure of the Nationalist government in favor of the hope and promise Yan’an held out to their pursuit of ethical righteousness. Such persistent belief harbored by public consciousness would time and again prompt the aspiring Chinese of Maoist China (since 1949) to stand up in defiance against the ccp’s aberrant leadership at the risk of sacrificing their careers and even their lives. They would go against political trends, voice their conscience and spearhead one populist dissent movement after another. Let’s take the illustrative case of a Soviet Russian novel named How Steel Was Tempered written by Nikolai Ostrovsky in the 1930s.43 Translated from the English version (1942) into Chinese, the novel presented the life journey of Pavel Korchagin, a thinly outfitted persona of the author, seeking a fulfillment of social justice, moral truths and individual happiness. Like the author’s own, the hero’s life-long pursuit was coterminous with the history of the newborn Bolshevik state’s build-up, the fight to exterminate civil insurgencies, and the Great Patriotic War (against Nazi-Germany). Driven by his zealous faith in Communism, Korchagin emerged triumphant in his struggle against oppression, social bias, war and terminal illnesses. His life exhibited unmatched enthusiasm, vigor, endurance and dedication of an unceasing quest for the supreme good; thus his name became synonymous with iron-willed revolutionaries who never took “no” for an answer, and who could in the end ascend to dignified social recognition and honor in spite of their lowly origins.44 43

44

Nikolai Ostrovsky (1904–1936) renowned Soviet Russian novelist. He was born in a Ukraine working-class family, but attended a parochial school with honors. He later worked at a number of handy-man jobs before becoming Bolshevik party activist. He served in the Soviet Red Army, but was soon wounded and had to be demobilized. Upon returning to civilian posts, he rose through the ranks, but was declared an invalid owing to his worsening health. While being blind and bedridden, Ostrovsky wrote his first novel How Steel was Tempered (1932–1934) which was based mostly on his own life. He died in 1936. Yu Mingling 俞敏玲 has published a lengthy study of Korchagin’s influence on the Chinese in PRC since 1949; the article was published in New Historiography, Vol. 12, No. 4 (Taiwan: Academia Sinica, 2001), 25–74.

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Seeing its profound educational value, the ccp ideologues did all they could via the ccp institutions, affiliates like the Communist Youth League, and every possible educational channel to campaign for the allegorical importance of Korchagin’s heroism to the cause of Maoist socialism. True to the ccp’s partyminded agenda, the key message they delivered was that Korchagin’s moral keenness matured only as a result of being doggedly tempered by the ordeals of harsh life, military strife and class conflict—symbolic rites of passage to political enlightenment under ccp tutelage. It apparently implied that for our hero and all youth alike only communism could embody the hope for and access to the realization of moral goodness. That Korchagin was matched before long by a Chinese counterpart should come as no surprise. His name was Wu Yunduo (1917–1991), a self-taught army ordnance specialist groomed and honored by the ccp, whose life exemplified a buoyant and progressive story revealing traces of being “organized” and “created” for didactic purpose. Parallel to Korchagin’s exemplary life, Wu’s self-told life experience portrays an iron-willed person’s fight against the odds of lowly birth, poverty, class exploitation, high-risk ammo tests and a much maimed body in his pursuit of revolutionary heroism. Wu’s extraordinary qualities brought to fruition a succession of staged growth that seamlessly fit the ccp’s mode of “persistently tempering.”45 Born in a poor coal miner’s family, he had an early taste of class oppression by mine owners by way of cruel foremen who trashed him like dirt when he worked as a mechanic apprentice. As he was precocious enough to learn skills and knowledge about mining machinery, he cherished naïve notions about leading a better life in the future as long as he learned fast and worked hard. But his innocent dream was dashed when he was framed by a foreman for the damage of machines he didn’t cause, which filled him with profound but despairing hatred against the exploitative mineowners. Soon a ccp labor activist opened his eyes to the root of class disparity and injustice, and Wu began to comprehend his misery and suffering in the light of class conflict; he grew steadily resolved to win equality and freedom under the leadership of the ccp for those suffering like him. Becoming a ccp member in 1939, Wu embraced the goal of selfless dedication to the party-led war against the Japanese and all other oppressors, sought to overcome his rash and aberrant ways, and worked tirelessly for what he believed to be the most just and noble social cause. Once this cause attained the utmost legitimacy as a goal for his life, he was willing to cast aside any 45

Wu Yun-to 吴运铎, Son of the Working Class: the Autobiography of Wu Yun-to (Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1956).

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selfish concerns or individual needs and was even ready to sacrifice his physical being to meet that end. He devoted all his mechanic’s skills and knowledge to the building of the Red Army’s arsenal, repairing jammed rifles, taking apart unexploded bombs, building make-shift equipment and risking his life to test out and manufacture weapons of their own design. He confronted every lifethreatening instance as if it was a test of his faith in the ccp and his resolve to pursue its goal, and time and again he sustained critical physical injury or deformation. In the end he lost his left eye, left hand and his right leg and had numerous metal bits buried in his body. However, like a hardy cogwheel in the machine of revolution, neither physical torments nor threats of death would prevent Wu from being worn down or forced to give up. Ironically, his undaunted will, incomparable tenacity and extraordinary gift were gravely eclipsed by his unwariness and gullibility in his social and political behavior. A total stranger to leisure, emotions, romantic love or personal physical fitness, Wu’s life story, albeit recounted as his most intimate experience, seems to be anything but personal or quotidian. It is no mere happenstance that Wu’s life at this point sounds like echoes to Ostrovsky’s How Steel Was Tempered. No wonder that, after a terrible explosion that nearly pierced his heart (had it not been sheltered by his pocket watch), the first words that popped up in his mind were: “. . . all my life, all my strength were given to the finest cause in all of the world—the fight for the liberation of mankind.”46 In the end, alongside the birth of New China in 1949, Wu’s long-drawn-out tempering came to a triumphant close: the ccp sent him to Moscow, USSR for health rehabilitation, promoted him to high official positions and rewarded him with national honor and an opportunity to meet the greater leader Mao Zedong in Beijing in 1951. All this indeed helped raise Wu onto the pedestal of the ccp’s iconic heroes inspired by communist ideals. Ironically, however, it also set Wu the mortal worlds apart from the reality of genuine, day-to-day humanistic values. There is little doubt that revolutionary heroism of such a legendary stature shaped the aura of a communist utopia that was badly needed by ccp propaganda during times of war. In a do-or-die rivalry with the Nationalists perched in the seat of ruling power, a hero’s superhuman feats such as Wu’s proved most effective for the ccp in mobilizing multitudes of the lowly and the oppressed to rise up and form a broad basis for unseating the Nationalists from national rule. But as the era of socialist China dawned, and such revolutionary heroics was eventually canonized as the elitist aspirants of Maoist voluntarism, ­fracture already incurred between its didactic loftiness and the sincere ­expectations 46 Wu, Son of the Working Class, 27.

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of the ccp followers would soon be widened, for in times of peace and urban and industrial construction, “tempering” of the ccp cadres did not take such acute forms as “hunger and cold,” “bloodshed,” or “selfless sacrifice.” Instead, the aspiring cadres were entrusted with authority, therefore wielding unprecedented power and influence over the broad masses in work and life, which ineluctably made their position accountable as well as vulnerable. Herein lies the inescapable dilemma: only in the name of people were they supposed to rule whereas they now believed they were entitled to overruling people. As it turned out, however, what has often revived the public memory of Korchagin’s heroism in the Maoist eras is Korchagin’s keen sense of what is right or wrong and his fearless resolve to get justice served in every kind of daily situation and political “microcosm.” Rather than his political loyalty and ideological faith, though a dose of that is still mixed in, people are just as ready to evoke Korchagin’s spontaneous ability to be fair-minded, justice-loving and self-effacing when dealing with real-life inequity, corruption, victimization and other grievances in a daily context. Facing a reality slipping in materialistic frenzy towards a gaping moral void, they seem to find in Korchagin and other figures of a kindred spirit the repository of human ideals of fairness, honesty and integrity that resonate with the ancient Confucian heritage and extend into the future. Little wonder why to this day Korchagin’s image is still so pervasively and profoundly engraved in popular memory that it literally found itself in the ranks of such legendary folk heroes as Lu lin hao han (Robin hoodlike outlaws), and Bao Qingtian (the Incorruptible Judge Bao). A case in point is the public online debate hosted by the Beijing-based China Youth Daily that took place in March 2000.47 The website ran a hotline entitled “Who Is Your Hero, Bi’er (Bill Gates) or Bao’er (Pavel Korchagin)?” and asked its readers to cast votes online. The result surprised all: not only were the votes evenly divided (50/50%), a considerable size voted a merge of the two as a standard model figure for the common good. What could be better proof to testify for Korchagin’s valiant and unselfish acts of heroism than his undying loyalty and respect?! On the other hand, ethical orientation, or the banishment of it, also reminds us of the need to dissect the self-aggrandized manner in which Mao privileged his voluntarist approach to socialist praxis: we shall question the motive behind his launching a series of political campaigns aimed at stifling political dissent or curtailing inner-party debate to keep him and the ccp in 47

Lu lin hao han 绿林好汉; Bao qingtian 包青天. For details of this public debate, see the end section of Chapter 8, Note 52.

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­ nchallenged authority in the post-1949 years. Ironically, what triggered Mao’s u personal cult during the Cultural Revolution and his subsequent tumble from the pedestal was long before implanted with his subversive strategy, i.e. placing top priority on radical praxis commanded by individuals whose will was greatly inflated with voluntarism. Mao himself, needless to say, impersonated such a Messianic figure most compellingly. Yet what in the end toppled this deity-like giant was precisely the same oversight that helped him gain the advantage over his May Fourth seniors early in his Marxist apprenticeship. The unraveling that prevented Chen Duxiu, Hu Shi and others from a hands-on grasp of the concrete social reality was rooted in the their one-sided embrace of social evolution to the neglect of ethical wellbeing. When they dethroned the Confucian tradition in the name of “scientific truths,” their conviction was naïve in that they believed knowing the truths would necessarily bring about a moral enlightenment alongside it. In a sense, therefore, they replicated Wang Fuzhi’s ambiguity about the tension between linear history’s purposive progression and the dialectic of moral equilibrium. For all his iconoclastic rhetoric and action, Mao could not escape replicating the same impasse, and did so with far more ruinous outcome. He steadily enforced a complete break between revolutionary praxis and intellectual inquiry on ethical reasoning and replaced it with a mythical despot reigning over a nation of subdued and unfailingly loyal followers. In the decades leading up to the 1966 Cultural Revolution, Mao never ceased denouncing ‘impractical’ book learning and individual moral refinement disassociated with social context. At his behest, the ccp revved up party-minded educational drives through which revolutionary heroism was broken down to a select body of formulas, rigorously overseen by ultra-leftist ideologues. Needless to say, new figures of revolutionary heroism were christened usually after the details of their lives were carefully sanitized and reordered. There appeared an inundation of Maoist Heroes like Wu Yunduo, Lei Feng, Wang Jinxi, Ou Yanghai, Wang Jie and others whose growth followed a formulaic journey, and whose deeds embodied an illustrious unity of ‘theory and praxis,’ and whose lives, all conveniently punctuated by death, were resurrected by the ccp media, books and documentary films, endorsed as canonical texts and studied and emulated by millions. But while revolutionary hero-worship was growing ever more frequent, its rhetoric ever more fanatic, a chasm set in between the simulated cosmos of heroes with their idolized deeds and the mosaic world of the ordinary people. Mao usurped that ultimate goal of ethical wellbeing; he is and will be none other than the goal himself whereas the projected moral enlightenment becomes emptied out of any social appeal or cultural allure. Without

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the ­balancing force of moral oversight, Mao of his own accord signaled the end of the human progress and the beginning of his own undoing. It is so ironical for Mao to be the prophet for his meteoric rise to domination and hegemony, but the moment he reached that summit he immediately found himself disembarked from the pursuit of moral goodness he once offered hope and access to.

chapter 8

Retributive Memories: Self-Realization in the Post-Mao Era It is almost a given assumption of late that, when written memoirs of China’s political past, such as the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, need a generic makeover, film is always there as the most favored medium. What is not so readily comprehensible is the fact that films depicting such personal or collective histories have recently taken a turn for the unheroic and the mundane. These films have withdrawn from cathartic tales of betrayal, persecution and suffering of the heroic victims (mostly public social/cultural figures) and replaced them with bittersweet remembrances of everyday life by ordinary Chinese on the center stage. What makes it even more intriguing is their tendency to reminisce over those unforgiving times by way of one’s childhood; when placed against the fuzzy, naïve and playful humdrum of childhood, one could feel less depressed and offended about them. Is the turn towards everyday life a backlash against indiscriminate or even disingenuous indictment against the Maoist revolution? Or is it a playful trivialization of political traumas in the postmodernist vein, or even a mere rhetorical flourish of the quotidian as a critical vogue? In response to such queries, we take note of an impressive turnout of indepth journal articles and personal profiles of filmmakers that focus on how films’ depiction of everyday life hinges on a dynamic shift in memorializing personal or collective sufferings. Equally impressive, if still inconclusive, are the views derived from such studies: scholars have revealed the critical vigor of the quotidian in probing the presumed télos posited in prevalent memoirs and histories, but have parted their way over how the emphasis on the everyday unsettles or diffuses the grand narrative of political memoirs and official histories.1 Chen Xiaoming reviews the potency of adolescent sexual rivalry and fantasy in recent cinema as the form of quotidian that successfully evades the 1 There are many journal articles on critiquing the teleological end of modernity by virtue of the quotidian in the realm of political memoirs of China’s recent past. Of these three have focused intensely on filmic memoirs such as Jiang Wen’s Bright Sunny Days 阳光灿烂的 日子 (aka. In the Heat of the Sun), and they are collected conveniently in one issue of boundary 2: an international journal of literature and culture (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997), Vol. 24, Number 3, fall 1997. Detailed citation of individual works will follow.

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politically oriented trope of national allegory, affirms contemporary China’s consumerist culture as “the residual by-products of globalization and its cultural imaginary,” and declares that “China . . . seems to have inevitably moved toward the final ‘end of history,’ or the ultimate triumph of global capitalism.”2 Chen seems to be aware of China’s need to charter alternative routes to modern development, but he is content to see China chug along the path of modern capitalistic development. Liu Kang, on the other hand, revives and affirms the quotidian in Mao’s political repertoire to underscore the concrete, the material and even “the bodily needs of the masses at the everyday level.” He evokes this culture of the masses as a crucial step in the Marxist historical teleology that informs Mao’s utopian vision of a ccp-led cultural transformation. While echoing socialist modernity as a carrier agent of alternative modernity, Liu deplores Mao’s error during his many political campaigns in letting this “everydayness” be sidetracked by the “non-everyday”—the political and social events such as violence, death, catastrophe and revolutionary martyrs that far outweigh the trivial and the ordinary in revolutionary rhetoric. His critical thrust is justly directed at the process of political instrumentalization and manipulation at the hands of Mao Zedong, a driven and often ruthless social transformer. Yet it is also obvious that Liu regards Mao’s historical insight to launch a social revolution “as an alternative to the capitalist modernity,” and that as such, Mao considered it an exclusive (and often exclusionary) goal to conduct a downright ruinous crusade against bourgeois liberalist values, of which the quotidian forms a part.3 Had it not been these erratic disturbances, Liu seems to suggest, socialist China might have progressed successfully further towards the Marxist teleological end. Without a doubt, the end projected in Liu’s revival of the Maoist everyday stands at odds with what Chen Xiaoming perceives as the culminating end of a modernist order of things. As much as we commend Liu’s effort for its intellectual valor and insight, his project to explore everyday life as an alternative modern development remains incomplete: he hardly brings critical scrutiny to bear on how the popular and the ordinary in life during these historical events can be invested to discern errors and pitfalls in Mao’s flawed strategies. Likewise, Liu has not demonstrated how personal experiences of the quotidian in those times can be valorized by way of the visual and

2 Chen, Xiaoming 陈晓明, “The Mysterious Other: Post-politics in Chinese Films,” boundary 2, 141. 3 Liu, Kang 刘康, “Popular Culture and the Culture of the Masses in Contemporary China,” boundary 2, 120–121.

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narrative modes to uncover and restore creative and constructive vigor to mass culture so that it could survive in ill-advised radical social movements. Liu Kang’s reluctance to tackle the everyday analytically is not atypical. Amidst the wealth of critical and scholarly writings on major political events of the Mao era in the us, there is evidently a lack of consistent, in-depth study from the perspective of the non-heroic and the ordinary because, due to the Cold-War conflict between Socialist East and Capitalist West, such historical occurrences have been all along dubbed as inherently violent, fanatic and catastrophic. They have thus served as the watershed for attesting to the rift between liberals and conservatives in the American academia. Be it authoritarian repression or revolutionary free-for-all, they have been the favored venues for the extremists of both camps to articulate and confirm their own political assertions as the moral high ground. So oddly enough, the pursuit of the quotidian as moral redemption has also brought about an unexpected coalition of polarities among China scholars in the study of Mao’s political undertakings.4 Despite their ideological differences, they have both valorized teleological value in political campaigns carried out by Mao’s socialist revolution and have either condemned them as retrogressive acts against humanity no less comparable to the defamed Stalinist “Gulag,” or praised them as daring experiments in seeking alternative models for a socially superior system. It comes therefore as no surprise that China specialists on both sides of the ideological divide tend to treat resistance to Mao’s politicization of China as if it were the correlative extension of the partisan ideologies in the us. In the light of such academic allegiances, the quotidian takes on a mediating and interlacing role: located amidst the banal and the routine, daily existence in the 1950s and 1960s is where the ordinary Chinese tried to grapple with meaning and snatch their survival from the oncoming juggernaut of the State with its overriding power, rationale and intent. As we learn from Svetlana Boym, the everyday is a story of modernity “in which major historical cataclysms are superseded by ordinary chores . . . the everyday is anticatastrophic, an antidote to the historical narrative of death, disaster, and apocalypse.”5 This is best illustrated by remembrance of Mao’s political era by way of childhood and adolescence, in which the stress is laid on the mischievous energy and blithe vitality of children and adolescents who had been overlooked or 4 Timothy Cheek, among others, has commented insightfully on the preoccupation of “utopian moralism” on the part of both academic liberals and conservatives. His perspective has informed my view considerably. 5 Boym, Svetlana, Common Places: Mythologies of Everyday Life in Russia (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994), 21.

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sidelined by the dominant state power; but they had used whatever means was available in everyday life and appropriated their social upbringing in ways that suited their own desire and interest to create a meaningful and livable subculture for themselves. Here memories of the quotidian manage to carve out an unusual enclave where their childhood is revived and affirmed. However, we must also confront the dualistic function of the quotidian by negotiating its interlaced aspects—between its submission and resistance, between opposition and complicity, and between critique and reconstruction. We need to be aware that on the one hand the everyday can help its practitioners resist being turned into spectacles of moral dichotomy typical of any master narrative of political allegory. On the other, in our effort to affirm the social relevance of everyday life, we should not regard it “as an autonomous, positive entity in itself, a repository of bold independence, strength and creativity, a happy space in which people can arguably stay outside of, and resist, the hegemonic field of force.”6 Instead, we should treat the everyday as a conflictive, unstable and fluid site where memory, mediation and reproduction of institutional history, personal testimony and communal experience are carried out. It is precisely this interplay between political dramas and their context of everyday life that I intend to investigate memoirs of the Mao era in my reading of Chinese films. Adapting their scripts from political memoirs by the once-persecuted intellectuals, Chinese filmmakers have been drawn to the generic affinities between narrative texts and filmic narration, but have been confronted with the danger of emulating the narrative denouement at their own peril. What started out as a critical and liberating boost for the persecuted individuals so as to contest and indict the hegemonic and the repressive has ironically rendered them liable and vulnerable to a different kind of subjection and self-effacement: their memoirs have become a form of marketable capital for a runaway spread of consumerism and for driving a global sweep of capitalistic development. Some filmmakers and memoirists are tempted by the film’s melodramatic appeal to visually exhibit the abused, the wronged and the persecuted as mere media icons of political exotica, turning real people and genuine events into “stick figures” of morality plays totally dissociated from Chinese historical contexts. They use filmic narratives to “package” cultural allegories to the exclusion of native/local histories as if by resorting to the visual as the marketing ploy they are ensured of attracting global humanistic empathy. But sadly their melodrama of “noble sufferings of tragic heroes” is only staged at the expense of 6 I am drawing on Ien Ang’s critique of the quotidian in his “Culture and communication: towards an ethnographic critique of media consumption in the transnational media system,” in John Carey Ed. What is Cultural Studies? A Reader (London: Arnold, 1996), 242.

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the native, the local and the individual, because, as Ban Wang best states it, “We console ourselves by turning away from a history where precisely heroic virtues were of little use, where we are as much victims as victimizers.”7 That history happens to be one invested with an underlying logic: all paths end in capitalistic modernity. A case in point is how the memoirists tend to foreground their narrative present in the post-Cold War world of “today” and judge China’s concrete historical realities by token of certain bourgeois humanistic ideals as the ultimate measure. Their memoirs have allowed themselves to fit in story lines that embrace the narrative doxa of the teleological “progress” epitomized by the liberalist, capitalistic West. They willingly align personal testimonies of political atrocities committed during the Great Leap Forward or Cultural Revolution with the Then vs. Now analogy: they reject their personal sufferings as the Then whereas they embrace the Now whose triumphant end hints at a global acceptance of liberalist, middle-class values (i.e. freedom, equality, and the pursuit of happiness) as the culminating point of historical progress. “I feel at home right away,” as the narrator of Wild Swan: Jung Chang would say when describing her first taste of personal freedom as soon as she set foot in London in 1978.8 Thus, remembrance of personal sorrow, misery and loss incurred under the repressive political system during those traumatic years has been branded, rather sweepingly, with a pattern of “that was then, this is now.” Hence, they echo Francis Fukuyama’s neo-liberal mantra, “the End of History,” by which it is asserted that the capitalistic West can now celebrate a global triumph of bourgeois liberal beliefs following the collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989, and that all are encompassed into the orbit of capital and market, a culminating end towards which all previous historical development advances. As Fukuyama says, “. . . there would be no further progress in the development of underlying principles and institutions, because all of the really big questions had been settled.”9 We hardly need to be reminded that this is cause for concern. .

7 Ban Wang, Illuminations from the Past: Trauma, Memory, and History in Modern China (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004), 152. Wang offers one of the most insightful critiques of post-revolutionary melodrama in the chapter entitled “Traumatic History against Melodrama,” 142–162. 8 Jung Chang 张戎, Wild Swan: Three Daughters of China (bbc Filmmakers Production, 1993). 9 Fukuyama’s remark is from his The End of History and the Last Man (New York: Avon Books, 1992), xii. It must be added that Fukuyama largely reneged his own view later when he published another book entitled America at the Crossroads: Democracy, Power, and the Neoconservative Legacy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006).

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What is ironic about this be-all and end-all télos of Now is its absurdity when placed in the context of contemporary China. Indeed, most of the memoirists’ narrative closure seems to be grounded in the culminating Now—what some call the “collapsed space” of global capitalism—in which market-driven values reign supreme and wealth ownership garners an automatic membership in the club of teleological progress whose fulfillment only capitalist development is entitled to represent. Granted that many of them have chosen to reside in the us and Europe or have been exiled away from China due to political causes, it is still naïve to fantasize about oneself being the “emancipated,” therefore “unbiased,” witness to what occurred during those years of political trauma inside China. That view becomes especially tenuous if one realizes that these memoirists, had they still been living in 1990s’ China, would have been engaged with anything but an end in the historical or teleological sense. The 1990s witnessed China grappling with a host of contentious and discordant political forces: the pre-capitalist, the capitalist, the socialist, the post-socialist, the modern and the post-modern, all vying for legitimacy and hegemony. It is, as Dirlik and Zhang have characterized, “a situation of simultaneous unity and dispersal.”10 In such a diverse and conflict-ridden context, options for assessing history are disparate and contentious, and none of them can presume a position superior and infallible. To add to complexity, one would disregard at his/her own peril the discrepancy between the official rhetoric of wealth and power in the name of “socialism” and the dire reality of social disparity, division and unrest making inroads on existing historical consistency and clarity. For instance, we need to ask ourselves: how do we historically characterize China’s “present”? Is it in the “elementary stage of socialism?” or the “early capitalist stage of recklessly amassing wealth?” In this case, what Mikhail Epstein writes, in response to Fukuyama’s directionality in history, that . . . the collapse of communism was not simply the end, but rather an inversion of beginning and end, an almost impossible anomaly of time. The “communist future” has become a thing of the past, while the feudal and bourgeois “past” approaches us from the direction where we had expected to meet the future.11

10 Arif Dirlik & Zhang Xudong 张旭东, “Introduction: Postmodernism and China,” in boundary 2, 7. 11 Mikhail Epstein, After the Future: the Paradoxes of Postmodernism and Contemporary Russian Culture (Amherst: The University of Massachusetts Press, 1995), xi.

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Incidentally, Epstein addresses his remarks to the situation found in postSoviet Russia in early 1990s, but they shed abundant light on China’s paradoxical plight in the post-Mao era. Redressing such a confusing inversion of historical development cannot but be one of re-evaluating and reconstructing histories, i.e. to be engaged in modes of memory in a dialogic, critical and non-linear fashion. One issue of foremost importance is to steer clear of the tempting pitfall of the Then-Now linear causality, which tends to recapture the personal past under Maoist Socialism from the present of the PostMao Eras in an intrinsically teleological narrative. Such a narrative mode of remembrance is bound to collapse and freeze the most complex, fluid and conflicting social settings found in reform-era China. Further, it does so at the expense of the individuals’ self-realization since the narrative closure of their quest journeys, taking Now as the culminating end of their coming-of-age, can only signify a total disconnect of the individual from real-life social or ethical contingency. What follows is an illustration of how filmmakers demonstrate their critical sensibility while dealing with the Then-Now causality in memoirs of the past.

Child’s Play and Domestic Implosion

In Lan fen zheng (The Blue Kite, 1993), filmmaker Tian Zhuangzhuang invokes the specter of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, not from the “infallible” stand of official rhetoric in the post-Mao era, but from the fickle yet bubbly mind of a boy growing from a toddler to an adolescent.12 By angling his camera from the height of the boy and panning his gaze from the boy’s point of view throughout the film, the director frequently sizes up the adult world through the wide-eyed Tietou who trains his inquisitive gaze on conflicts between the grownups. In one scene, we see Tientou set free a chick sparrow that has been caught by adults and is about to be killed in a massive urban campaign to Chu si hai (“Wipe out Four Pests”). In another we see him casually tear off a Da zi bao (“Big Character Poster”), while his Mom inquires with a co-worker about his father’s political fate.13 In yet another, he insistently beats a toy drum to interrupt the adults engrossed in a heated, absorbing dis12

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Lan feng zheng 蓝风筝. Director, Tian Zhuangzhuang. Performace, Pu Cunxin, Lu Liping, Li Xuejian. Kino International Corporation, 1994. DVD. Tian Zhuangzhuang 田壯壯 (1951– ) is one of eminent figures of the Fifth-Generation film directors in China. Chu siha 除四害 was a nation-wide campaign the ccp government launched to eradicate sources of plague and viruses around mid-1950s. Da zi bao 大字报 was the main form of mass condemnation and thought reform used during the Cultural Revolution.

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pute over political issues. Whether out of innocence or by chance, Tietou’s childish acts punctuate at intervals the tedious and overriding political concerns of the adults, which enables Tian to use the child’s lack of such interest to trespass and challenge the rigid instrumental turf of politics and thaw out a stiff binary that underlies the grownups’ anxiety about their ideological correctness. By aligning his view with the boy’s, the director also tactfully averts being caught in the linear trajectory of the hackneyed political melodramas. He further diffuses the validity of official claims to objectivity with an intentionally fragmented memory: Tietou’s memory of the past is triggered repeatedly by ruptures of losing a “father.” Like Benjamin’s view of history “to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger,”14 Tietou’s revived experience of the past is prompted by his acute sense of a “lack,” of being “deprived of” parental, especially fatherly, guidance. The story line is set to flesh out images and scenes of the protagonist whose growth in the remainder of the film bears witness to the very process of how the ccp rule relegates the quotidian to the role of a political tool. (Figure 3) With a voice-over of Tietou at the outset, the film records the series of events that led to his parents’ wedding, thus implicating the yet-to-be-conceived son as a stealthy witness who inherits their sense of play and demands that he be a part of their marital intimacy. For the parents and the child alike, therefore, the linkage of social relatedness begins and ends with play amidst the relational community. The film soon presents Tietou’s improbable testament to his parents’ wedding, in which we see the newlyweds get into a childlike play of “piggybacking” in their room when left alone by others. As the bride timidly tries on the traditional Qi pao (cheongsam) while seemingly out of the public eye (needless to say that the audience is watching all this through the camera), the groom goads her into covering her head with a bright red scarf, just as any bride would have done in a traditional wedding.15 When she reluctantly dons it, he pretends to answer a knock on the door and feigns to let the visitor in. Scared of being seen in such attire by anyone other than the groom, the bride takes off the head-cover only to discover that he has tricked her. What follows is a moment of ageless fun and joy—she gently lashing him with the scarf and he piggybacking her round and round while blissfully humming old wedding tunes. All this nuptial merry-making is depicted by the camera through a sequence of close-up shots that creates a touch of spontaneous, intimate and good-

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Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schodken, 1969), 255. 15 Tietou 铁头; Qi pao 旗袍.

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Director Tian Zhuangzhuang and the author taken in summer 2012. Courtesy of Xinmin Liu.

humored relationship between the husband and wife—a subtle contrast to their earlier more stiff and formal ceremony with many of their co-workers. In comparison, that ceremony, hastily done by singing revolutionary songs and extolling highfaluting ideals, seems better suited to a swearing-in of the young couple when joining a formal and impersonal cause and aligning their marriage to the overarching social goal set by the ccp. There is hardly any festive mood, let alone any uninhibited celebration or lighthearted revelry that is disallowed by the reigning ideology for fear of behavior either too personal or too traditional. From this point onward the narrative subtly shifts back and forth between public displays for the political and private expressions for the domestic, thus setting the stage for the drama of “instrumental turn” of the everyday to meet political ends. It probes into the dwindling of the relational space to reveal the undying desire of ordinary Chinese to act on parental obligations and deepen familial ties by being playful in the daily context. On the part of Tietou, the first menace he feels directly from the instrumental push of the adult world is the fact that it upsets his routine of play. “Who is going to play with me?” Tietou demands to know every time his parents are summoned

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to attend political events away from the home. Throughout the film, the director makes a striking impression that ccp politics casts its ubiquitous shadow on the children in the neighborhood like some unknown hobgoblin lurking in the dark and would come out at any moment to rob them of their good fun. So much so that it becomes a predictable pattern for the film to begin with a blissful scene of children playing in the communal yard, but always end up before long with a disruptive turn of events triggered by political needs dispersing all children out of sight. In this sense, the action fulfills a diegetic role typical of the director’s critical approach to indict the past political blunders on genuine social relatedness. However, Tian evokes childlike playfulness not merely to alleviate the repressive mood of the era of authoritarian politics. More importantly, he does so to acquaint the viewers with the impact, or the lack thereof, of the relational nurtured by everyday life. Since the audience is visually obligated to be the boy’s playmates as childlike adults, they are invited to relive the boy’s curious, naughty but adorable acts around a caring and trustworthy home, and endure the bitter contrasts of loss, sorrow and despair when the family caves in under a disorderly and destabilizing society of instrumental pursuits. One most telling instance is how the diminishing of Tietou’s play time with his parents, which robs him of the caring and guidance he deserves, is paralleled with a domestic implosion that relentlessly wears down the parents’ emotional bond with him. This is why Tietou’s fading plea to his grown-ups to play with him can be seen as evidence of his retreating from the everyday world in the face of mounting political tension. It also serves as a nagging reminder for the parents of their neglected sense of play as familial bonding. As it turns out, however, the grownups never truly get into play with Tietou either because of the disruptive turn of political events, or because of their ill-omened absence. The camera is quick to capture scenes in which the grownups are called away hastily by other anxious grownups in the middle of their play with kids, or they are so bewildered by the flip-flops of political fortunes so as to allow the effect to disrupt their normal interaction with the children. One shot sequence describes a scene in which Tietou’s father, who is flabbergasted by the political misfortune that has fallen on him (mainly because he steps out of a meeting to use the bathroom while others vote to decide who is a Rightist), he takes out his exasperation on Tietou by dragging him from his play and spanking him. Indeed, at a time when the boy sorely needs to develop his character and forge his identity by connecting with his beloved family and peers, the parents are shown unable to fend off political pressure from interfering with their parental understanding of and guidance to their children. Their role is often reduced to a passive deed of good-heart but ineffective—often a regrettable choice like

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corporally punishing the boy, thereby further estranging him. Once again the director focuses on the parents’ teetering role in nurturing Tietou while barely coping with a world made infinitely complex and incomprehensible by the ideological hegemony. Tian is tentatively able to posit an underlying ethical conscience, but cannot yet resolve to anchor it in any single individual whose coming-of-age can evoke an alternative path of resistance to a misguided ideology. Close-knit and trusting as they all are, Tietou’s family all display an exceptional ability to “feel” and “endure” wrongs and injustices, but are collectively handicapped by their unsuspecting “innocence” in detecting and expressing what is behind their victimization. Political instrumentality has thus made insidious inroads into the everyday at home. As the futility of the grownups with the ideological repression wears them down, benumbs their feelings towards the child’s curiosity, they are forced to undermine their own roles as the educator and role model. If Tietou’s early upbringing is in any way guilty of adding to the boy’s troubled growth, then the grownups’ continual internalization of repressive politics should in part share the blame. Ironically, the only time when the boy’s “fathers” offer him comfort and care is when after Tietou’s toys are broken they offer to fix or replace them. The most telling instance is found in Tietou’s bonding with his “Uncle” (later his first stepfather), who has inadvertently informed the local ccp leadership on a close friend of Tietou’s father and in turn politically implicated Tietou’s father. After Tietou’s father is crushed to death by a felled tree while lumberjacking in a labor camp in Northeast China, the “Uncle” enters the boy’s world with the single-minded aim to “redeem” himself in the eyes of the child, hoping to rid himself of the guilt of betrayal. Yet, despite his selfless deeds that indeed have brought moments of joy to Tietou and his mother, the stepfather dies prematurely of over exhaustion at work and malnutrition. While celebrating the Chinese New Year, the paper lantern the stepfather made for Tietou catches fire as the boy plays hide-and-seek with other kids. The ominous accident bodes ill for the boy in anticipation of the Uncle’s unexpected death and his loss of another “playmate.” He too fails, sadly but pitifully, in improving the boy’s life and healing his inner wounds. While granting that youth subculture is always in close vicinity to the everyday, Tietou’s assertive plea for play with his parents and its futile effect on the relational community goes beyond the insularity and self-sufficiency of the quotidian. With his rites of passage through childhood and adolescence, Tietou’s growth traces out a critical subplot that demonstrates how ordinary domestic life is permeated by hegemonic politics and falls prey to its manipulation. It is no mere accident that Tietou’s coming-of-age parallels the

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silent but unrelenting disintegration of domestic intimacy and cohesion, the once venerated values of sanctity in Confucian ethics. The film begins and ends with the voice-over of a nursery rhyme chanted in two sharply contrasted times for the child, a time of domestic love vs. the time of virtual orphanage. Tietou’s estrangement from the relational base of his social participation reminds us that the child’s loyalty to his family has been eroded, and it bears witness to the fact that his parents’ innocent political faith has been commandeered and abused by the hegemonic ideology. The film thus belies those self-serving claims of victimization by political repression we have come to know, and reroutes them by way of the humdrum of daily life, which remains rather intimate and unguarded until politics rudely sets in. It is not until then that we realize that daily quibbles among grownup siblings can take on the weight of public debates of political loyalty, and that the parent-child bond is by all likelihood subject to political whims as erratic and disorienting as the zigzag turns of political campaigns. When deprived of their everydayness, even casual and unthinking acts can instantly turn violent and destructive despite their innocent and plain intention. For this reason, the case of domestic implosion offers a most realistic and powerful sample of a “historical presence” that faults and falsifies the now-familiar stereotypical figures of “perfect” victims at the mercy of political repression. It offers us one vital testament to the film’s uniquely genuine take on how collective politics of the instrumental kind can permeate and plague the most intimate and inhibited corners of the human world by means of self-censorship. Evading the Then vs. Now continuum, Tian instead directs a candid gaze at the forgotten or obscured sites and sights, such as the family meal, a home visit and a mid-night chat in bed. Only occasionally does he shift the camera to focus on the workplace, the meeting room and other public spaces. The latter, we recall, are the key spaces of political institution where the persecution scenes are graphically staged and have been heavy-handedly stressed by other political memoirs in keeping with the veracity of a perfect victim in total social insulation. Tian’s narrative keeps the exposure of such political sites in the film at a minimum precisely because this is what renders such storied individual victims “imperfect”; it is imperfect in the sense that these individuals must have thought more or less about their inescapable complicity and it is what makes the camera gaze of The Blue Kite silently interventionist. As the ccp’s favored mechanism of ideological coercion, these sites are now forced to exit the center stage in our historical memory; we as the audience are urged to focus critically on these relational spaces where political repression is least suspected and resisted. Analogous to this stands the authorial self that

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must be contested and negotiated between that of an integral part of relational solidarity and that of a mirror image of the ruling regime. The making of The Blue Kite proves no easy course in navigating from these perilous poles. Here the director’s narrative design becomes intriguingly ambiguous; the ambiguity arises from a few discrepancies in the boy’s reminiscence that eventually prove disconcerting to the director’s intent. (1) Who is remembering? The past is apparently recalled by Tietou, yet his voice is limited only to the role of threading the episodic pieces of the plot. There are adjoining stitches in the narration that reveal leaps and lapses of memory not quite fitting the narrator at his age. The abrupt and wayward manner in which traumatic events unfold, for instance, reinforces the workings of a limited and partial view; on the other hand, we keenly feel the director’s cool hand in steering the course of the unfolding story line. In its overall design, this lends Tian a hand in avoiding the pitfalls of a teleological course of “political redemption.” But the gap between the boy’s memory and the director’s filtering of it also betrays a lack of rapport between the twin strands of narration—an occasional yet vital lack in the sense that the boy’s embodied memory of the past is recognized whereas that of the director’s present is acutely not. Such a gap implies that even though the director is capable of positing an underlying ethical conscience, he has yet to anchor it in any individual or community whose resilient endurance to the present bespeaks eloquently the success of outlasting the anonymous collectivity of the ccp ideology. One such anchor could, for instance, be found in Tietou’s maternal Uncle and his fiancé, Zhu Ying. Uncle Chen was once a gmd fighter pilot before defecting to the People’s Liberation Army (pla) air force, whereas Zhu is a young actress of beauty and talent working for a pla art and dance troupe. Having a knack of merry-making around children, the uncle never fails to bring fun to Tietou when he comes to visit the boy’s home. His calming and sonorous voice commands instant admiration and respect not only from Tietou, but the boy’s parents and everyone in the family. But as the events take an ominous turn, he is now placed under political surveillance because of his “tainted” former career, and his agony over his political fate is causing his glaucoma to worsen. However, neither his blindness nor the threat of political risk could deter him from making a long journey to the forced labor camp where Zhu Ying is imprisoned to express his unswerving trust and love for her. In her own way, Zhu proves his equal in moral strength and integrity—she refuses to be a dance partner for pla officers at the weekend dance parties and is for that reason persecuted and imprisoned because of her political disloyalty to the ccp. Her traumatic sufferings at the hands of a senior pla officer threaten to expose the

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scheme of marriage in exchange for political security which the ccp silently endorses. Both the uncle and Zhu Ying are political victims banished from the safe haven of the ideologically anointed collectivity, but both stand firm in their relatedness to each other and their families and refuse, albeit it reluctantly, to bow to any brazen acts of ideological hegemony. Yet to our dismay, the couple simply fades away in the end, leaving no dent on the boy’s impressionable mind. On the one hand, they jointly display a surreal ability to “feel” and “endure” wrongs and injustice, while on the other are curtailed by their unsuspecting “goodness” as lonely individuals and fail to take it beyond their own victimization. In view of this narrative flaw, I would conclude that Tian overlooks any viable linkage between the relational community and the imminent force of conscience for fear of being accused of nostalgic ties with the collective subject at the beck and call of the unitary State. Similarly, he foresees little chance of upright individuals getting ethically mobilized for a cause of civil disobedience in opposition to the mind-bending collectivity. (2) Why only guilt? Throughout the film, the upright individual is always seen beating a dreaded retreat from the tyranny of the ccp’s hegemony and by the coerced space of collectivity. So much so that, rather than uncovering how the ccp has coerced him/her into internalizing its repressive politics, the individual loner is made to bear the overwhelming burden of guilt and remorse for the human lives victimized and lost. Li Guodong, for example, is a workmate of Tietou’s father, who has earlier informed the local Party chief on some complaints about the Party’s policies exchanged among his workmates in private. After the workmates were singled out as targets of a Maostyle thought rectification, Li is first totally dumbfounded and then turns into this arch sacrificial figure typical of a sinner-turned-redeemer tale. Akin to other guilt-stricken mortals of the Maoist campaign, Li resorts to his selfless love and obsessive care for young Tietou and his widowed mother as a way to rid himself of the guilt for his ideologically induced felony. But the camera never attempts to focus on him individually to reveal the inner trauma that gnaws at his conscience. Indeed, the entire film seldom identifies with any individual characters’ self-reflection, revealing traces of his/her inner trauma of well-meaning susceptibility giving way to ideological coercion. As a result the audience is never asked to plumb their psychological depths for clues of ideological conditioning by examining, for instance, how one’s intuitive goodness can turn into a politically lethal weapon and how ideological coercion conceals its manipulation of one’s latent moral upbringing. Given this context, the film’s plot of personal redemption begs more questions about these individuals’ social relatedness than answering them.

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It follows to ask candidly (3) Why a grim ending? It is now evidently true that the memoir hinges on an underpinning of self-sustained conscience which resonates with the traditional family values; thanks to the ever-present images of the family settings, the film beams a strong message to the audience that what is left of the familial trust and harmony in post-1949 China is about to relinquish this last hold of moral legacy of the past. Whether such a message succeeds in awakening the audience remains in question. In this sense, the camera’s riveting focus on the interior of the traditional household displays more than just exotic visual appeal. It hints at a different and subtler kind of alternative growth—posing a contrast to the aspiring subject of collectivity to be cloned en mass according to ccp-endorsed ideals. While the director’s focus does not make this memory of the political past any more redemptive or less ambiguous, nor does he shy away from the need to grope intensely at any tangible path of the boy’s self-formation. He is largely skeptical towards openly embracing a universal goal of liberalist values by tentatively suggesting a path be shaped out of the “relational” everyday amidst its clash with one of “collective” anonymity molded from the ccp’s ideological regiment. But his historical vision often implicates a “present” of dualistic ends—culminating in a nativist self-apology or in liberalist triumphalism of the West. Wary of postrevolutionary giddiness and global marketing lures, Tian remains skeptical of the hegemonic gaze searching for self-apology from within or craving for cultural exoticism from without. And the dangers of internalizing a home-grown ideological monolith that has been enmeshed in his own aesthetic and ethical being has also alerted him to the risks of being alternately displaced by the homogenizing gaze of Western liberalism. He realizes that he has to confront this double jeopardy, reckons and mediates with distantiation as a latent modal that links past ordeals to present triumphs. But he chooses to posit social relatedness as his legitimate grounds to question the reductive Then vs. Now and avert the atomist self-realization, and in so doing he allows evoking neither self-instantiation nor self-effacement for the growing youngster. Instead he opts for negotiating with the unconscious and engages in a powerful critique against domestic repression and a history of triumphalism. For all their tireless grooming and touching care, the young son seems to grow visibly disobedient and skeptical. If the film records any growth at all, it is rather surprisingly the boy’s rough-and-tumble tenacity that fuels his survival against the odds of alienation, implosion, and ideological frenzy around him. Indeed, as warped as it seems, Tietou’s future hangs precariously just like the fate of the kite he flies with Niuniu as the film concludes: one moment it may fly freely up in the air, the next moment it might be broken loose by a haphazard shift of wind and left stranded upon top of tree branches. His survival, if at all possible, would

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resonate with Sandel’s judgment on “What ends shall I choose?” with an odd twist thanks to the director’s inconclusive ending.16

Rethinking Juvenile Prank

In In the heat of the sun, Jiang Wen takes the quotidian to task by means of its prosaic imagination and his juvenile antics.17 The film focuses on Ma Xiaojun and his wayward gang who pass through a succession of carefree, prankish rituals of adolescence while the rest of China toil through the tumultuous times of the Cultural Revolution. On the surface, these juvenile anti-heroes seem inexplicably oblivious to the fanatic and unruly events happening outside their domain of mischief, adventure and revelry. Yet like the Red Guards who were feverishly chasing their revolutionary dreams, Xiaojun and his cohorts too are fired up by their adolescent desire for fantastic, earth-shaking changes, such as an imaginary World War III, to break out so that they would stand a better chance of becoming a hero. Their sense of play is geared precisely to performing such imagined feats: to do whatever it takes to earn bragging rights, to impress girls and bully peers, and to let off that irrepressible restlessness characteristic of all youths growing in eventful times. While all this makes these youths look much like China’s version of “boyz in the hood,” they should not be dismissed as carbon copies of the Wang-Shuoesque Liu mang (hooligans) right out of the pages of Wang’s novels, even though they are indeed adapted from his original novella “Dong wu xiong meng” (The Ferocious Beast).18 Rather they are, as Jiang Wen rightly says, “a bunch of brazen, adventurous youngsters ablaze with the passions of love and hate.”19 However, there is more to 16

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See Note 4 of Chapter 1: the Introduction. The interested reader can also relate Terdiman’s take on the memory function as “Present Past” which I applied to my critical approach in Chapter 2: the Introduction. Yang guang can lan de ri zi 阳光灿烂的日子. Director, Jiang Wen. Performance, Xia Yu, Ning Jing, Feng Xiaogang, Tao Hong, Jiang Wen. China Film Co-Production Corporation, Dragon Film. Golden Harvest Company, 1994. DVD. Jiang Wen 姜文 (1963–) a wellknown film actor as well as a director of the Sixth Generation. Among the films he has directed are 太阳照常升起 (The Sun Also Rises, 2007) and 让子弹飞 (Let the Bullets Fly, 2010). Liu mang 流氓. Wang Shuo 王朔 (1958–), a well-known fiction writer whose original story The Ferocious Beast 动物兇猛 (1991) was adopted as the script for Jiang Wen’s film In the heat of the sun. Jiang Wen, “Ran shao de qing chun meng” 燃烧的青春梦 (The Burning Dreams of the Young), Dang dai dian ying 当代电影 (Contemporary Cinema) Vol. (1996), 59.

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it than what this portraiture presents on the surface: their imagined history induces us to revisit the “could have beens” and “would have beens” in their past instead of blindly taking the present as the culminating end in total disregard of what is historically realistic and contingent. To reflect on this last need more accurately, the everyday becomes precisely the springboard to a contested viewpoint of their present past. The narrative takes us back to prankish days of Xiaojun and his buddies in which they embraced whatever was around them, the army compound with its small enclosed park, their bikes and the freedom to roam in the back alleys, the communal shower room and the storage basement which they turned into a local Bolshoi, in other spontaneous and innovative ways that suited their own desire and interest to create a meaningful and livable world of their own. It would be a serious oversight to miss the inseparable bond between their daily beat of prankish acts and the physical places surrounding them. A case in point is the tall chimney whose height becomes the ultimate measure of an improvised contest of bravery among the boys, and climbing it means nothing short of winning a combat on a battlefield and possibly the chance to win girls’ hearts—both dreams of glory bred out of the favored staple of revolutionary war heroes. In sum, their prankish endeavor to reclaim their youth from the “missed scenarios” of their shared histories compels us to focus on memories of youth unfolding against the once-familiar “hangouts” and home dwellings in Beijing; they do so not so much to preserve testimonies of lost youth as to trip up, divert or derail the smooth “forward” advance of urbanization and global capitalism. We find their days of “goofing” around in rare bravado and defiance not only helps unsettle the causality of redemption from trauma to rehabilitation, but flashes up images of live beings and bubbly places suffused in sharable pasts with its wayward verve and nonchalance. The latter reminds us of Walter Benjamin’s critique of the urban novel as the proliferation of stories without a single sharable experience, which he contrasts with storytelling that “achieves an amplitude that information lacks” and forces on the audience “the psychological connection of the events.”20 Benjamin’s idea should help us define a social relatedness that avoids being yoked to a linear and lockstep developmental path reified by a totalizing “present” while resisting falling captive to what Ban Wang calls the “essayistic structure of feeling,” i.e., a prosaic, marketable packaging style of writing well-suited to the urban consumer’s instant, intimate but incoherent, needs.21 Herein lies precisely what the roguish remembrance of these boys accomplishes: by toeing the tightrope 20 Walter Benjamin, Illuminations (New York: Schocken Books, 1955), 88–89. 21 Wang, From the Past, 172–176.

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of imaginative memory, they steer away from the gimmicks of a postmodern kaleidoscope while redeeming the past of historical memory for the present. One way to approach the narrative of Jiang’s In the Heat of the Sun is to go in reverse, beginning with its closure to see how it is purposely unsettling and evocative. Xiaojun the protagonist and his former buddies, now all middleaged, are celebrating their reunion in Beijng riding in a flashy stretch-limo and toasting expensive wines on board. But as the vehicle moves along a newly-built thoroughfare flanked by new high rises, their joyful smiles do not last as long as the wine toasts; indeed silence soon reigns while they stare at each other dazed and perplexed. Not even their encounter with their old neighborhood idiot can stir the painful silence. The last closing shot shifts from the despondent looks of the riders on board the limo to the idiot trotting along on his makeshift “horse” by the roadside; as he turns round to look at them, the idiot jabs a rude curse right in their face, “idiots!” Not to over-read this offensive curse, we are compelled to see it as a disenchanted backlash at the pranks-turned-riches on the quotidian’s behalf owing to the rapid urbanization of Beijing. Further, the entire sequence is shot in black and white as if it were a nostalgic gig from a historical documentary. If this is a rejection of Beijing’s Now, how does the director recollect the world of Then bathed in bright sunny days? What makes his take on the history of the Cultural Revolution intriguing is his turn towards a fuzzy, gullible and playful memory of their adolescence to recollect those stirring times. Critical of the hasty and disingenuous indictment of China’s political pasts, Jiang focuses on the prosaic quality and playful intent of the everyday, not as ploys to revive the traumatic past for a sugarcoated present, but to use them in both contesting and interstitial ways: the banal, the routine and the amorphous of their retrieved past are located where the aspiring minors would grapple with the advent of adult life and wrest their adolescence from the jaws of the raging storms stirred up by the ccp and the State. As we learn from Boym, the everyday is a story of modernity “in which major historical cataclysms are superseded by ordinary chores, . . . the everyday is anti-catastrophic, an antidote to the historical narrative of death, disaster, and apocalyse.”22 This is best illustrated by the film’s deliberate color toning of the past scenes that stress the sunny, the vivacious and the creative aspects of their coming-of-age and are contrasted with the black-and-white shots of the narrator’s present. The message it sends is loud and clear: there is hardly any ethical progress from “what we were” to “what we are,” and the vibrant and colorful Then does not necessarily lead up to the extravagant but lifeless Now. Unlike millions of Chinese youths living in that era, Xiaojun and his gang had grown 22 Boym, Common Places, 21.

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up in the “comfort zones” provided for the elite class of the ccp’s military leaders and staffers.23 It is true that Maoist political campaigns allowed no safe havens, and that the young shoots out of these gated hotbeds were as soon and as fully exposed to the repressive political climate as any other—all had their everydayness deprived in the name of ideological regimen. It is worth noticing, nevertheless, that these roguish youths seem to enjoy more freedom and independence in their day-to-day living despite the overall repressive context. The relative insular settings offer them mental as well as physical space for conjuring up an imagined world where they are sheltered in sexual fantasy and revelry in complete isolation from their parents and that era’s political turmoil. Their attitude toward life is indeed one of actively, though often teasingly, integrating elements of the reigning ideology with untrammeled vigor and youthful bravura. Their daily routine of play, coupling daring acts of the “emergent” era with mocking deeds of the “residual” times, is precisely what constitutes the historical relevance of their daily existence to Mao’s revolutionary era.24 And they perform the routine with barely little care or supervision by their parents. It can even be argued that their prankish behavior resonates Michel de Certeau’s “make do” (bricolage) tactics, which stress the necessity of “dispersed, tactical and make-shift creativity” performed by the “dominees” under a repressive discipline who are passively manipulating practices of the dominant “in order to evade them.”25 In contrast to the Europeans living in the era of the post-Industrial Revolution that de Certeau described, the behavior of these Chinese adolescents reflects a unique adaptation to a survival characteristic of remarkable freedom, strength and self-confidence. In the Heat of the Sun is full of such instances of adaptation in which the deviant teenagers are shown mimicking the deeply engrained icons and postures of hard-core socialist art and literature with a twisted though discernible posture or theme. When Xiaojun succeeds in picking a padlock at home 23

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These privileged living quarters, known as Jun dui da yuan 军队大院, were a product of the Sino-Soviet Russian collaboration in 1950s and 1960s; they feature Soviet style apartment complexes, usually located in the scenic suburbs and, like typical satellite towns, they provide ample daily-needs supplies, easy and free transport, sports facilities and high security. I am applying these two terms from Raymond Williams to a context similar to his original intent, but I am wary of his more or less structuralist interpretation of the “dominant.” See Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 121–127. Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley: University of California Press, c 1984), xvi, 175–177.

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in his first try of burglary, he admits that the clicking of the opened lock fills him with the same gratification as that experienced by the Soviet Red Army breaking through the German defense lines of Leningrad. When he and the boys jump off heights in an improvised contest to win girls’ favor, they fall with valiant outcries of “Protect Lenin!”—clearly imitating a scene from the Soviet film classic Lenin in 1918 that was known to every Chinese household in 1970s. In one bloody skirmish, as the gang members are smashing each other with kitchen knives, bicycles and bricks, the solemn notes of the Internationale, the rally song for Paris Commune of 1871, is blaring in the background. And all these take place under the watchful eye of the armed gate sentinels or the staring gaze of revolutionary heroes painted on wall murals. Apart from occasional brushes with the security police, the teenagers’ daily routines never seem deterred or repressed by the revolutionary rhetoric and policies of the time. It is therefore quite logical for the director to convey the impression that these youths do not have to harbor animosity against the dominant ideology of the ccp, nor do they have to fear the threat of persecution of the political campaigns. Yet, despite their life-trashing coolness, bitter lessons of life are in store for them. Instead of imploding under menacing political fervor, as did the Chen family in The Blue Kite, Xiaojun and his gang take the chaotic times in stride, draw on their political upbringing to not only survive but seize and fulfill, to the extent they are driven by mischievous gusto, their chance to play to their hearts’ content. Once comparing the Cultural Revolution to a giant rock’n’roll concert with Mao as the leading rock star, Jiang Wen now performs one himself by directing the camera playfully but insightfully; he pokes it into every domestic and private corner that have been off limits to the ideologically groomed youths and lays them open as free and impressionable game-playing. In this sense, the director’s hand in guiding their playful exploits takes on a twofold task: to poke fun at the sanctity of Mao’s revolutionary heroism and to unseat the authority of ccp-approved records of political realities. To this end, viewers are enticed to join in Xiaojun’s illicit, inquisitive probe into the world of guarded privacy and concealed truths beyond the public spaces to take a peek on the fringe youth subcultures during the political era. But more importantly, it is this unique “retro” view of the Cultural Revolution, under the apolitical pretext of the quotidian, that drives a wedge between two claims to the Maoist revolution: it teasingly defies on the one hand the West’s denunciation of the Mao era as an undistinguished stain of human wickedness; on the other, it rejects many Leftwing intellectuals’ lingering idolization of Mao’s revolutionary fervor. Located between and mediating these two views is, in de Certeau

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parlance, that “make-shift creativity” which enables those dominated to avert the beguiling indoctrination of the dominant. We find Xiaojun and his like doing precisely that. With precocious bravado and cunning, Xiaojun turns his playful break-ins into exceptional lessons about his parents’ life under Maoist revolution. He has learned how to duplicate keys and begun to unlock restricted areas, which garners him not only illicit entry into neighbors’ apartments but into hidden truths of his own parents. The first victim of his lock-picking is his father; ironically Xiaojun admits that his counterfeit skill is inherited from his father who applied his thieving talent to the task of disabling US time-bombs in the Korean War of the 1950s, for that his father earned honor medals. Upon prizing the desk lock open with his “key,” sure enough, Xiaojun discovers those medals of military honor, which he then wears on his T-shirt and mimics the gait of a war hero marching in a victory parade. Thus concludes the first sequence that flawlessly mimics a key motif of father-son affinities as in the revolutionary lore of ccp political succession. Yet when the next sequence starts to roll, Xiaojun is seen opening his father’s diary, and after he flips some pages, the shot zooms in on two condoms inserted in the pages like a bookmark. In the next few shots, we see him blow up the condom as if it were a balloon, and playfully head the inflated condom as if it were a soccer ball. The huge white balloon floats lightly and agilely like an aimless meteor before it is abruptly pierced by some pointed object and is instantly deflated. This comedic spoof begins and ends with playful impertinence, but the message comes through loud and clear: behind the veil of every honor, hero and revolution lies the most mundane detail of everyday life such as having sex without love and getting unwanted pregnancy. Later in the film, after his mother gives birth to his baby brother, it suddenly dawns on him that the inflated condom is at the root of his mother’s unplanned pregnancy since it leaves a hole in the condom, and it is the punctured condom that accidentally becomes the means to bring his younger brother into this world! Now a totally unintended consequence of playfulness has turned into a comical sidebar for the collection of the ccp’s heroic lore. It is not so hard to imagine that Xiaojun’s mischievous burglary has triggered off a ripple of anti-heroic misdemeanors. But it would be a grave error if we thus construe such an unleashing of antics as light-hearted anti-social conduct; he and his thrill-crazed sidekicks were barely a step away from crashlanding into the world of the grownups with its duties and responsibilities. For by now Xiaojun finds himself already half way lost in the complex and exasperating maze of a historical past: he stumbles into the harsh reality of his parents’ troubled relationship and has inadvertently extended the endless

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round of their domestic ordeals. And this is exactly where he finds himself being hurled in a splash-down on the rough waves of social relatedness as well. Not far beyond his familiar turf of juvenile pranks and fantasy lie not only the space where the reality of humdrum and banality holds sway, but where the everyday turns out to be inevitably suffused in political intrigue and human sacrifice. He learns that his mother was born in a family whose political profile was “tainted,” and that she has had to give up her academic career in order to be married to his father, an army officer with a promising future, which leaves her no alternative other than spending the prime of her life making home and bearing children in the gilded ghetto of an army complex. It is quite possible that with the awareness of his mother’s fruitless life comes the rude awakening for Xiaojun; his playful antics have ironically brought light to a hidden lesson: it has foreshadowed his dream of being a tide-stemming superman, a prince charming for damsels in distress, or a Godfather idol for teen rebels. Such knowledge has in turn led him to cast doubts on their own aberrant behavior, such as fooling around with girls like Milan, as though they were totally unfettered and disembodied in suspension from the raw life of the historical past. Incidentally, as far as the story goes, we have reached the turning point where Xiaojun and his cohorts begin to fall away from the allure of susceptible inspirations of Mao’s political rhetoric, and from the cohesive bond presumed between one another by dint of the social relatedness. Xiaojun’s dream of being a heroic and charismatic leader is punctured by the dwindling trust and friendship of his playmates, while he himself is forced to crawl out of the quagmire of a love triangle involving Liu Yiku, one older gang member who has been Xiaojun’s love rival. As Yiku displays his charm to gain an upper hand in the tug-of-war romance, Xiaojun feels his hold on the affections of Milan, the girl he courts, is slipping, which puts him increasingly on the defensive when hanging out with them. Feeling alternately frustrated and desperate, he accepts from his taunting buddies the challenge of climbing the dizzying heights of the tallest chimney in their neighborhood only to fall deep into the bowels of black soot on his descent, nearly losing his life on the bet. Rather than winning the joust of romance against Yiku, Xiaojun suffers the double humiliation of his dangerous slippage and, with his face smeared by soot and his pride bruised by the humiliation, the fate of a vanquished fall. It is plausibly fitting that incidents like this occur, abruptly yet at intervals, in the latter part of the film, thus proving beyond doubt that his prankish behavior has caused as grave social and political consequences as the bloody gang fights he witnesses. On the other hand, Xiaojun’s sense of the historical context has bled dry any idealistic or heroic marrow, watered down to a tad of libidinous vehemence and

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emotive jealousy. But we are sharply reminded of a glaring disconnect between the Then that once bred and fed his memory of the adolescent “sound and fury” and the bleak and dispirited Now shown through the scenes of the narrative present. Whatever directionality is invested in Then vs. Now has now turned out to be totally unrelated to the self-styled, sex-craven and frolicsome icons of the Hippies’ culture in protest against the jaded middleclass values of the liberal West in the 1960–1970s. By this time, the mischievous thrill in Xiaojun’s pursuit of Milan is long gone, replaced by his urge for any opportunity to get even with Milan or Yiku for any emotional betrayal against him. To that end, the camera begins to train calculatedly on Xiaojun in solitary and pensive moments, and the film’s prevalent mood noticeably shifts to one of lonely anguish, distress and bewilderment. Time and again Xiaojun breaks off the smooth unfolding of the story line and inserts cinematic sequences that tend to overturn the table on his youthful adventures. For instance, his futility in trying to close the gap between the elapsed time of loving and loitering and the emerging harsh reality is mirrored by his mad and aimless hunt for the ever-elusive Milan, which would always end in his returning empty-handed and mentally sinking ever deeper in a vapor-like self-effasement.26 These candidly prove an encroaching sense of futility Xiaojun now feels with his remembered past; they also disclose the discrepancy between the real-life Milan he has come to know and the disembodied Milan he was earlier enchanted by when looking at her swimsuit pose through a telescope—a monocular view typical of Western self-centered perspectivalism. By turning the tables on his most fantastic experience of youth, he seems to tease out his own confession of a disillusioned growth based on a flawed sense of individualist values. Likewise, he seeks from his viewers a shared awareness to reject the presumed worth of individualistic heroism acknowledged by way of self-serving memoirs. Xiaojun’s self-deprecation in the end brings renewed distrust and uncertainty to bear on his and the director’s nostalgia towards revolutionary politics and on the misconceived role of the everyday.

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Scholars have already noted many an instance late in the film that illustrates the futility of Xiaojun when he is rejected by Milan and dejected about his own miserable plight. Yomi Braester, for one, has written on the nightmarish experience of having to resort to his mental “playback” of a scuffle between him and Yiku. Yomi Braester, Witness against History: Literature, Film, and Public Discourse in Twentieth-Century China (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), 195–205. I acknowledge his input in developing my approach.

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Youth Dreams Lost and Found

Zhang da cheng ren (The Making of Steel, 1997) is directed by Lu Xuechang, a Sixth-generation director, who has served his apprenticeship under Tian Zhuangzhuang. Judging by the official English translation of its title (literally translated as “growing up to be an adult”), it is no surprise that the film presumes literary lineage to a predecessor known throughout the socialist block: the Russian writer Nikolai Ostrovsky’s autobiographical novel with the same title published in the Soviet Union in 1934.27 In the heyday of the Stalinist state, the already noted novel received an extravagant idolization from the Soviet ideologues by dint of its hero’s lowly-to-saint path of Bildung. Pavel Korchagin, the hero, embarks on a journey of self-fulfillment, braves through countless trials and setbacks, and ultimately ascends the unparalleled altitudes of political maturity and ideological perfection that earns him a berth at the pantheon of Soviet revolutionary models.28 The Herculean will and strength Pavel (as he is widely known) embodies in pursuing a life of epic travails sets a prototype for the hero-making education of all socialist nations. Expectedly, when Lu begins narrating the life journey of his would-be “hero,” Zhou Qing is cast in the image of a rebel with little life skills but plenty of adolescent gusto. He has just quarreled with his father over his punk-style overgrown hair; after a brief scuffle with his overbearing parent, he gets himself thrown out of home, roaming around like a homeless kid. One day, he comes upon a half-torn children’s picture book—one of those widely-read educational classics under Mao—which quickly arouses his curiosity, but in turn puzzles him since the book’s title, How Steel Is Tempered, misleads him to regard it as an industrial manual. His curiosity is kindled but then dissipated because the other half of the book is missing. Taking this as a cue, we are apt to assume that the rest of the film’s plot is about the protagonist’s growth through the thick and thin of social changes, but we remain curious as to whether there will be some aspiring subplot of Zhou seeking to follow the footprints of the iconic Pavel from Russia. Indeed, that turns out to be case, in the end, but not without some disquieting twists and turns. Zhou’s social initiation coincides with his exile from home, leaving him pretty much a fatherless figure. From the outset, therefore, 27

Zhang da cheng ren 长大成人 (Growing with Pains, aka. The Making of Steel). Director, Lu Xuechang. Performance, Li Qiang, Lu Liping, Tian Zhuangzhuang, Zhu Hongmao, Zhu Jie. Beijing Film Studio, Beijing, Great Wall International Advertising. 1997. DVD. Lu Xuechang 路学长 (1964–) is a graduate of the Beijing Film Academy. For details of the Soviet Russian writer Ostrovsky, see Chapter 7, 218–219. 28 Ibid.

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his coming-of-age, reaching adulthood, and eventual maturity, delineate a quest that parallels a search for fatherly guidance relationally as well as socially. Unlike Xiaojun and his gang who are safely sheltered by their parents’ political vestiges, Zhou launches himself at the lowest rung of the social ladder, and for that matter, without parental support; he thus faces the acute need to survive on an uphill climb the moment he is cast adrift from home. A far more daunting obstacle to Zhou’s social growth is that what used to define social relatedness has yielded to deep slippages in social mores as a result of major shifts in political orientation—the displacing of moral ideas, not unlike parental dysfunction alienating the young Zhou from home, owes to an allout, uncontested adoption of market-driven pseudo-ethical pragmatics. The ethical orientation of Maoist socialism, now totally discredited because of its affiliation with ruinous policies and tyrannical rule, has crumbled in moral ineptitude and social turmoil. What used to motivate and lead ethical progress from “what we were” to “what we are” during the post-1949 Maoist era ceased to fuel Chinese youth’s drive for social progress in the recent decades. On the other hand, the rise of capitalistic modernity, boosted by the collapse of the Soviet-led Socialist bloc triggered by the fall of the Berlin Wall, is posing bourgeois ideals as a final goal of social enterprise as well as personal realization. As China stands at a crossroads, Chinese youth have lost interest in the ccp’s indoctrinating ideology in favor of the merits of bourgeois liberalism in the West. But due to the ccp’s heavy-handed but shrewd meddling, they are being coerced into seeking material affluence as the one and only worthy objective, which has left them politically cynical, inert and unthinking—sure signs of an intellectual limbo. Caught drifting amidst ebbs and flows of such a mental void, they have been grappling frantically for anything in semblance of meaning or value since the 1990s, and have become restlessly susceptible to a swath of “manufactured” images and “imagined” success tales in pursuit of wealth and power that have been feverishly circulated and consumed in Chinese media. It is not difficult to see that this newly minted Now has been unsuspectingly taken as the substitute goal of their self-pursuits from now on; how then does this appeal to the liberalist values as a renewed purpose of life impinge on the everyday? And in what ways does it impact on the aspiring youths in the reform eras? This time of Now is precisely the settings that unfold the latter half of Lu’s film: Zhou has returned from his stint of professional training on the guitar in Germany and falls right into a totally altered cityscape that can hardly be related to the Beijing he grew up in. Presently his life is literally flooded in disorienting and meddlesome anecdotes that seem to vie for his attention yet do not care about his belonging in return. Zhou is reunited with his former

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band players who are now wallowing in money and sex, cozying up to agents for seedy contracts or simply getting their sanity screwed in dope dens. Rather than sit down with him to “catch up” in relatable places, they ride in expensive foreign cars and SUVs, get boozed at glitzy bars, or have their bodies scorched, their minds torched by drug addiction. It is wryly ironical to Zhou that everyone seems so anxious to dash ahead in a race to the finish while the finish line means no better than instantaneous oblivion or self-effacing mindlessness— a sobering reminder to someone whose recent memory is grimly marred by his German guitar tutor who also seduced his girlfriend, causing her to nearly lose her life in an aborted suicide. What’s worse is that when they occasionally become sober, they seem to share a tacit consent to make verbal communication obsolete, bringing little from their past to share with or contribute to their present except for instant visceral needs. As their verbal needs are nullified, so are their mental links to the times of parental care, early schooling and communal support that nurtured their earlier growth. With their ties to a shared past thus severed, their lives have become an uprooted heap of egoism sprawling on the market of capital, driven mostly by a self-consuming desire to go for whatever exhilarates, whatever titillates and ultimately whatever hobbles human decency. Given this, we can better resonate with the sobering alarm sounded by Ban Wang and other scholars in critiquing the re-enchantment of everyday led on by the viral commodified culture.29 Their critique is aimed at the manner in which feelings and memories towards the past are channeled into essayistic sentiments that are episodic in style, instantly gratifying, and easy to be packaged into readily consumablegoods.30 The everyday, thus reenchanted to serve marketable goals, cannot help but play a role of a consumerist accessory; its bedrock in propping the mainstay for the relational community is crumbling under the pressure of a social grouping motivated by the harsh yet dubious rules of monetary transactions. Evidently, the everyday Zhou now faces is no longer that of a domestic refuge shielded by lingering social virtues or moral conscience, but is fraught with sexual lures, commercial hoaxes, drug addiction and even deadly crimes. The ethical orientation that not so long ago undergirded the everydayness is now backsliding towards the dregs of moral despondency, cynicism and hedonism. 29

I have here drawn in particular on Ban Wang’s critical insights shown in two chapters, “Re-enchanting the Everyday” and “Remembering Realism” in his book Illuminations from the Past. See Wang, From the Past, 181–211, 235–257. Other works include a number of articles collected in Zhang Zhen 张珍, ed. The Urban Generation: Chinese Cinema and Society at the Turn of the Twenty-first Century (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007). 30 Wang, From the Past, 163–167.

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There is hardly any ethical progress expected of linking “what we were” to “what we are,” and the vibrant and colorful Then we witness with Xiaojun and his gang seems now banished out of public memory to make way for the glitzy, extravagant but dispirited Now. What blots out Zhou Qing’s affinity to the present is the Janus-like ambiguity of the quotidian present, as Maurice Blanchot informs us, “Man (the individual of today, of our modern societies) is at the same time engulfed within and deprived of, the everyday.”31 Indeed, the ubiquity of capital and its pervasive inroads have cast a double-whammy of dominance and oblivion on the everyday. But Blanchot also insightfully reveals the dynamic of the everyday’s “insignificance” which can be turned around and inside out to become its opposite: “It belongs to insignificance, and the insignificant is without truth, without reality, without secret, but perhaps also the site of all possible significations.”32 Key to such a reversal, Blanchot declares, “. . . it will be a question of opening the everyday onto history,” which is precisely the critical strategy that the French philosopher insists on in regaining the everyday lost to the engulfing modernity.33 I here take history, as Blanchot stresses, to mean the pasts that are based on historical contexts in which there ought to be truths to be sought, secrets to be uncovered and reality to be contested and restored. This seems to be the trajectory Lu, the director, has outlined for our protagonist’s eventful rites of passage attempting to unravel the murky disarray of the present and scrutinize how the “revamped” every day came into being. Let us then follow his dual-aimed quest to rediscover the past while leading the plot forward. When Zhou Qing takes the lowly job as a boiler-stoker in a Beijing railroad freight-yard earlier (before the 1990s) in the film, he makes friends with a locomotive engineer in his early thirties whose extraordinary sense of justice and compassion makes him “stand out” in an odd way: in the eyes of others this man is a walking replica of the “bygone” ages—a paradigmatic exemplar of social justice and moral conscience no long in vogue presently. Ironically, it is this man of such “old-school” sensibilities who acts as young Zhou’s mentor and guardian, to be there to help him stand up to local bullies, or help Zhou pay for expenses when the boy’s family is cash-strapped. In a supreme Samaritan act, after Zhou’s leg is broken in an accident, this man offers his own bone to be transplanted to the boy’s injured leg while he himself becomes crippled for

31 32 33

Maurice Blanchot, “Everyday Speech” in Yale French Studies, vol. O, issue 73, Everyday Life (New Haven, Yale University Press, 1987), 12–13. Ibid., 14. Ibid., 12.

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the rest of his life.34 In him Zhou, who has thus far remained the “disowned” child, has at last found a fatherly figure—whom the boy rather fittingly calls Zhuhelai (Juhlai), named after the charismatic Bolshevik leader he has read about in that half-torn children’s picture book.35 It must be noted, moreover, the Then time of Zhou’s earlier story offers a rich cache of recollected youthful adventures that answer for Benjamin’s notion of “sharable” tales, as Zhou and his peers lived through the 1976 Tangshan Earthquake, giddying teen love and illicit sex, fights with home-made firearms in back alleys and their improvised band playing the music of the then pop queen Teresa Teng—all unfurling in the midst of local and familiar details of their neighborhood.36 The hazy and captivating scenes of the crowded, poorly-lit but cozy space in the communal Si he yuan (the residential courtyard) make it irresistibly enticing for viewers to sink deeply in their own memories of the myriad and impenetrable times of adolescence spent close to their home dwellings. The film narrative has hitherto run parallel to the chronicle of Zhou’s coming-of-age, and the camera is consistently trained on our young apprentice rubbing shoulders with workers in greased overalls, with smokebelching locomotives roaring by—the places and scenes made all too familiar in films of socialist realism; the viewers are likely induced to anticipate an edifying but predictable drama of a hero in the making akin to those promoted with ccp accolades. It perhaps remains to be seen whether this would lead to an apotheosis of the post-Mao literature of rehabilitation, namely, an old hero is reborn while new youths are fired up to emulate him. Rather than following that beaten track, Lu the director has his own roadmap to travel. It is in recollected instances like these, he wants us to believe, when impregnated with layers of lived and shared everydayness, that we come to grips with what 34

Despite the popular praise of him, this man is never officially given a name and remains somewhat a maverick figure, keeping the ccp organization at an arm’s length. By his temperament and belief, he should be the best candidate to be exemplified by the ccp, but he is also so critical minded that there is no chance whatsoever that he is to grow into a “robotic” model ccp member and be trumped up by the party-controlled propaganda. The character is superbly played by Director Lu’s mentor Tian Zhuangzhuang. See Note 12 above. 35 Zhuhelai 朱赫萊 is a middle-ranking political commissar in Ostrovsky’s novel How Steel Is Tempered. 36 Tangshan Earthquake 唐山大地震 struck a heavily industrialized area northeast of Beijing in 1976. Teresa Teng 鄧麗君 was a Taiwan-born superstar of pop music in the 1970s and 1980s. Her pop songs were perhaps the first wave of pop culture that swept into mainland China as the Cultural Revolution era drew to an end in 1976.

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histories have preserved for the Now. He stresses that this is what histories should feel and sound like to those living through them and can be re-invoked, not through trite nostalgia, but by contested and critical memory. All this, however, seems to have been siphoned off by an engulfing void set forth by the political events in 1989.37 In its absence arose an altered everydayness—one beset with all the glitzy trappings but little historical substance. Given the memory outage imposed on recent history leading up to the post1989 present, Zhou Qing, newly returned from a trip overseas, has to renew and revitalize his sensibility to what transpired during these years by way of a productive tension—an effective healing of his estranged personal past to be retrieved from and reconnected with both the traumatic national history on the one hand and, on the other, keep it from being diluted or misled by the kaleidoscopic, forever on-edge but evanescent time of the Now. How does Lu succeed in harnessing the productive tension between the Then and the Now as the plot ensues? First and foremost, Lu posits Zhou’s self-renewal during the time of the Now as the pivot intersecting two kinds of the everyday: the one is relational, namely, comprising his family and personal life, and the other of associational and instrumental; in other words, he is to focus on Zhou’s stint with the rock band which hired him as a guitar player on a contractual basis known then as Zouxue (freelancing as a sideline or moonlighting).38 Like other zouxue artists and professionals, Zhou was hurled into the heady whirlpools of Xiahai (“Plunging into the Sea—becoming an entrepreneur”), an early stage of the subsequent market-oriented reforms which Deng Xiaoping

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Lu Xuechang shoots a subtle drive-by of the Tian’anmen Square taken by Zhou Qing during his taxi-ride after his return to Beijing; the blurred images of those crowds of tourists and passers-by look very similar to what Beijing residents could still remember soon after the Martial Law was lifted following the military crackdown of the student protesters on June 4, 1989. The fact that he rides around the square twice is rather significant in its hinted meanings. Zouxue 走穴 (freelancing on the side; moonlighting) was the prevalent form of working outside the state-run performing troupes at the time, which began as short-term, freefloating performances by singers, dancers and comedians for extra income in the 1980s. The practice of zouxue quickly spread to other professions, mostly notably, education, medicine, media celebrities and even governmental officials who take on sideline jobs to earn kickbacks and other additional revenues. Due to its dualistic nature, zouxue has become a very popular money-maker for some talented Chinese without having to go completely private—hotbeds of corruption and embezzlement.

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endorsed with his dubious blessings.39 Needless to say, the economical boom took off and the development bubbles continued to inflate for nearly three decades. But not without a heavy toll on the nation in terms of socio-psychological effects! The frenzy of demolishing old sociable and neighborly habitats has not only transformed Beijing’s physical appearance, but impacted the ordinary residents with hobbling human costs and sacrifices. As time and space have been compressed into a calculus of instrumental values and profitable revenues, such as the proverbial GDP, gone are the histories that once intimately fleshed out these memorable sites and places. And the most ruinous is witnessed in the widespread setbacks and breakdowns suffered in the moral sensibility of the society at large. Amidst of these daunting and ominous changes, not surprisingly, Zhou, our would-be hero, confronts a world fraught with greed and depravity; anywhere he turns, he finds himself in skirmish with his zouxue “buddies” who are caught in despicable acts of boozing, doping, and predatory sex. Anything he promptly does in reaction against them is instantly met with a blatant rebuff: “Bie ba ni zi ji dang hui shi” (Don’t regard yourself as somebody)!40 It seems as if, beset in the abstract nexus of capital, being nobody is synonymous with a goahead for moral anarchy. All of their acts are hereby granted total exemption from ethical obligation or social responsibility. On the other hand, sadly, being somebody also makes it inevitable for individuals like Zhou to run counter to the single-track trajectory of economic “liberalization” enforced under an authoritarian rule. Against the double-dosed odds, however, Zhou pursues his journey of self-remaking owing precisely to his resolve of being that somebody who refuses to bow down and go along. In his lone but unyielding fashion, Zhou takes ethical vigilance into his own hands and stands in the way of the zouxue artists forestalling their base and wicked breaches of human decency. He becomes every pervert’s nightmare: it is he who steps in timely to stop Punk

39 Xiahai 下海 was the widely used term to refer to those who engage in private entrepreneurship in business. The word “dubious” is being used as an understatement. The consequences and its future were of course not well thought out when Deng Xiaoping issued his directives for the reforms to implement economic liberalization. Deng’s famous mantra goes like this: “treading across the river, one stepping stone at a time.” In no way does this mantra bear any trace of a thoughtful, long-term concept of reforming the economy, which has been borne out by the increasingly ruinous consequences the ordinary Chinese have faced today. 40 Bie ba ni zi ji dang hui shi’er! 别把你自己当回事儿！

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Jiang, the foot-fetish action artist, from raping the girl from Lanzhou;41 it is he who challenges the lead singer of the zouxue rock band to drop his mask of phony angst; it is again he who braves through threats and dangers to raise money so that Lao Mo, the drummer, can be released on bond because the latter has been framed by the band leader and detained by the police for a serious charge of cocaine consumption and trafficking. Quietly but persistently, Zhou averts and thwarts the debasing acts they are to commit in denial of basic human dignity and compassion in any place, at any time and with any means within his/her reach. In the footsteps of “Juhlai” (his boyhood mentor), Zhou’s obstinate sense of being fair and just seems so anachronistic in the eyes of his contemporaries, but it urgently affirms an aspect of sociality long since disfavored and forgotten: there still exists a great deal of genuine, though random, awareness of moral righteousness upheld by individuals in pursuit of goals or intents other than worldly rewards. It also begs a question: Can Zhou, or any such individual, single-handedly stem the tide of the commodified every day and fill the void of the Now created by rampant moral decay? The short answer to that is no; but given the pervasive encroachment on the quotidian by marketcentered values, options for asserting Zhou’s illustrative deeds are a limited few; they are further complicated by the beguiling persuasion of disinterest and dystopia often conveyed through an either/or moral judgment: if it is not individualist, it must then be collectivist. Public insensitivity to ethical wellbeing has been so extensive and unchecked that there is no acknowledging the middle grounds between Maoism and Meism.42 Rather than reverting back to Maoist collectivism, Zhou relies on a keen sense of relatedness he grew up with prior to his departure for Germany, which is demonstrated through his emotive bond with Lao Mo, the closest friend of his childhood, his closeness with his older sister, his concern for his disgruntled mother and even his eventual reconciliation with his domineering father. The bond between him and the family/community has stood firm and steady, even though it has had to weather unsettling strains and breaches now and then. 41

42

Another nameless protagonist, she is known as “the girl from Lanzhou” 兰州来的 姑娘; Lanzhou is a distant northwest city. She is typical of those youths known as the clan of Beipiao 北漂 (North China-bound floaters), who are normally educated, but unemployed and come to Beijing or other big northern urban centers to look for jobs and/or relationships to help them launch their careers. The term Meism is borrowed from the Discovery documentary series entitled The People’s Republic of Capitalism with Ted Koppel, directed by Ted Koppel and Robert Goldsborough (Discovery Channel: DiscoveryStore.com, 2008).

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A case in point is how the impact of Zhou’s unfaltering faith in true love between man and woman forged on honest and genuine terms bears profoundly on his vigilance against adulterous and abusive sex. Perhaps stung by the tragic fate of his German lover, Zhou refrains from the zouxue code of “sexploitation” right from the outset. One is indeed struck by how he coolly defies sexual promiscuity while “hanging out” with the Lanzhou girl; despite being attracted to her youthful beauty and musical talent, he accepts her as she is, gets concerned with her safety and wellbeing, and never takes advantage of their being close together. His repulsion against exploitative sex is so candid and strong that he sets to deflate the affected seductress image of Fu Shaoying, who was his schoolmate and friend, but now assumes a Japanese name and does “mistressing” with an older businessman in exchange for his bankrolling her own jewelry store. Likewise, he refuses to accept the fact that the wife of his surrogate father Juhlai divorced him, forsaking their love forged through the hard times they spent as sent-down youths in Northeast China’s wilderness. What irks him most is her decision to abandon him after he was brutally beaten and blinded while trying to break up a gang rape a few years back. Tracking her down, he confronts her with an old photo of the couple, the sight of which at last melts down the façade of her heartless ingratitude and brings her to tears of remorse and guilt. This last trigger of historical memory is that old photo, which Zhou has used as a bookmark when reading Juhlai’s copy of Ostrovsky’s How Steel was Tempered. Thus the photo brings us in full circle back to the unsolved riddle of Juhlai’s whereabouts. With neither eyesight nor a proper name, Juhlai seems to have survived mostly in the historical memory that resonates, by dint of imagined nostalgia, with the heroic ideals of humanism during the post-1949 decades and rejects a sell-out to the lures of capital that has led a mindless stampede to the commodified Now.43 Zhou embodies a contested duality of inspired nostalgia, drawing forth idealistic energy and ethical resolve that concurrently reject the Now as the culminating end and re-connect the Then by means of a renewed historicity. As diegetic tangibles for his narration, a contested duality has served the director well by way of animating its denouement before its ending. Lu attempts to steer the progression of the intertwined narrative threads towards a closure, but the closure cannot but be 43

I am here resonating with Ban Wang’s critical reading on the role of imagined nostalgia when he writes: “If there is a romantic nostalgia here, it is not to be read as another advertising gimmick or tourist attraction derived from an aesthetic that treats history as a spectacle. It is a nostalgia that is still able to imagine a past that refuses to succumb to the change-crazy present.” Wang, From the Past, 210–211.

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at once revealing yet inconclusive: for one thing, Zhou’s journey is to end at its long-awaited destination—a reunion with his fatherly moral tutor, Juhlai; for the other, prospects are anything but definite and promising to inspire new goals of self-realization now that the teleological leap from the Then to the Now is exposed as flawed and disingenuous. How can the one and the other interrelate and complete each other out? In other words, how can progress of the hero be forward-marching and historicized at the same time? The answer needs to be sought from alternative teleologies that negotiate the primacy of ethical and communal wellbeing against the overriding economic priorities of the Now. Lu’s flashy display of directorial savvy presently comes in the form of exhilarating drama—a spying mission, a dreamy bicycle ride in the Hutongs, and a climatic bursting of action concluded with a highly suggestive coda. This rather melodramatic interlude fulfills far more than its task of entertainment: it asserts the relevance of critical nostalgia “that is still able to imagine a past that refuses to succumb to the change-crazy present.”44 It begins with Zhou stumbling upon a newspaper clipping which relates how Juhlai accidentally ran into a gang of hooligans raping a film actress a few years back. During their tangle, Juhlai fought off the rapists, but was brutally blinded by one of the attackers; in return, Juhlai bit off a chunk of one rapist’s left ear. Impelled by the inciting words from Juhlai’s ex-wife, Zhou sets out on a man-hunt of this criminal escapee to bring justice to his rape and eye-poking crimes. He seeks out the rape victim, discovers the restaurant owner’s maimed ear, and, by connecting the dots, he exposes the true identity of the fugitive in disguise. In a daring charge, Zhou hunts the restaurant owner down, single-handedly tackling him and, in order to incapacitate him, poking his eyes out. Precisely at this moment, however, the action sequence comes to a screeching halt; the narrator tells us, calmly and with a slight deadpan, that what has just transpired actually did not happen; alas! he admits, it was a day-dream! With the velocity of the crime-busting action still fresh in our minds, it would be wrong to regard his deeds as “mock heroic”; we therefore ask: what is the director’s true intent in backtracking the happenings he has just unfolded? Does it in any way resonate with the loss of eyesight inflicted upon Pavel, his Russian precursor? On the surface, it has much to do with the herculean deeds of Pavel who lost his eyesight to nerve infection caused by a piece of shrapnel in his head. Pavel overcame the disability of blindness and completed the writing of his autobiographical novel How Steel Is Tempered. At the hand of Lu, the brutal injury to Juhlai’s eyes by the rapists and Zhou’s vengeful act of poking the 44

Ibid., 211. See the original longer quotation in the above note.

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fugitive rapist’s eyes in revenge serve well to correlate Juhlai to Pavel as aspiring parallels in the heroes’ moral valor and magnitude. Yet a closer look sheds fresh light on Lu’s resolve to restore Zhou to the relatedness of his past—an ethical righteousness enmeshed in his own growth—without reverting to the heroic stereotype, which can easily be seen as revived copycats comprised of the collectivist attributes indoctrinated under Mao. Thus, though Zhou’s ethical impulse remains potent and imminent, it is not translated literally into personal vendetta, nor is it miscued as political nostalgia for Maoism in disregard of changed social contexts. Viewed in this light, the narrator’s canceling out of Zhou’s lone-ranger crusade as a dream sequence transitions well, by way of contrast ironically, to what ensues closely: amidst a bustling Beijing scene decked out in the latest markers of the economic boom—glistening signs of the McDonalds, KFC and Pizza Hut—we see a city sanitation vehicle diligently watering the lawns on the street sidewalks. The symbol of spraying water to quench the dehydrated vegetative life in water-thirsty Beijing speaks candidly to the urgency of redressing the long-ignored moral degradation amidst entrepreneurial frenzy and anarchy. With an abrupt turn, we learn that Zhou has accidentally spotted the sale of a new book entitled Gang tie shi zhe yang lian cheng de (This Is How Steel Is Tempered); the book is published by none other than Juhlai, presumably written after his blindness. Hugely elated and inspired, Zhou and the Lanzhou girl set out on the final leg of their trip to where Juhlai now lives—a reunion at the end of their journey latent with profound symbolic and prophetic meanings. In retrospect, how this film ends heralds a raging comeback of Pavel the Hero that figured prominently in a nation-wide debate in the upcoming years; as the new millennium dawned, the destiny of Pavel too turned a brand new leaf in China when Wanke Television and Film Corporation decided to shoot a twenty-episode TV drama of Ostrovsky’s autobiography. The TV drama makeover, entitled The Making of Steel, was scripted by an elite group of writers headed by the noted author Liang Xiaosheng, who in 2000 released a book under his name chronicling the rewriting of Ostrovsky’s book to tailor it to the TV drama format.45 Endorsed by the Ukrainian Ministry of Culture and 45 Wanke 万科 (known in full as the Vanke Corporation Limited) is based in Shenzhen, China’s first major Special Economic Zone in the 1980s. Vanke executed and funded the production of the TV drama series, entitled The Making of Steel, in 1999–2000. This TV remake of Ostrovsky’s original was directed by Han Gang and his entire hired cast of Ukrainian actors and actresses. The TV drama was premiered on the eve of China’s National Day, October 1, 2000 to wide and positive acclaim. Liang Xiaosheng, Chong su Bao’er Kechajin 重塑保尔-柯察金 (Reconstructing Pavel Korchagin), Beijing: Tong

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buoyed up by Wanke’s success in stock trade, the Wanke production employed a complete cast of Ukrainian actors and actresses and shot the entire series on scenes in Ukraine. One key aspect of Liang’s rewriting the Soviet literary classic is the stress he places on Pavel’s affinities with the everyday as the ordinary Soviet citizens experience it, thus deliberately downsizing his heroic stature to that of a human mortal.46 Liang candidly voices a dislike of Pavel’s intoning of such superlatives as Zhengge (totality) and Quanbu (entirety) in his many crowd-rousing speeches, and took the liberty to omit the hero’s favorite sayings about “devoting one’s life ‘utterly’ and ‘absolutely’ to serving the greater good.”47 “How many of us in this world,” he quips, “can afford not to spend some of his/ her life time and energy on these so-called totally private and familial duties? If so . . . can one say that taking care of these chores is the same as vulgarly wasting away one’s prime of life?”48 Liang’s levelheaded concern mirrors the mindset of the emergent middle-class in China. This is surely indicative of a tentative yet steadfast step in a gradual process of liberalization compared to their years of benumbing passivity caused by an overkill of hyperbolic and worn-out jargons of Maoist ideological campaigns. But the present-day turn towards the primacy of the everyday should not be mistaken as a total cop-out by the commodified Now. Liang’s critical sensibility ensures it does not. He never hesitates to evoke the edifying drive of Pavel’s moral courage and ethical integrity and explore the profound inspirational power of a heroic exemplar in his bid to upstage the odds of moral depravity in a profit-centered society. (Figure 4) A case in point is Liang’s conscious evocation of Pavel the Hero to put a stop to the pervasive contagion of me-only mentality contracted from unbridled entrepreneurism. To that end, he brings to sharper focus Pavel’s ability to draw on the intuitive sense of being just, fair and empathetic from his mother, his brother as well as the residents of his hometown that helped nourish and temper his growth, and tries, by virtue of the irresistible appeal of humanism, to Xin Publishing House, 2000. Liang Xiaosheng 梁晓声 (1950–) is noted for his fiction on the life of the sent-down youths in China’s Northeast Wilderness during the 1960s; he also adapted his stories, many of which are based on his own experiences as an educated youth, into a film script for the popular film Jin ye you bao feng xue 今夜有暴 風雪 (A Snowstorm Is Coming tonight!) in 1986. Liang went on to be one of the most influential authors of his generation and became a prominent social critic with booklength reportages on such issues as business corruption, societal polarization and moral degradation. 46 Liang, Reconstructing Pavel, 15. 47 Ibid. Liang’s deleted words are: zheng ge 整个 and quan bu 全部. 48 Ibid.

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Figure 4

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Pavel Kochagin and Nickolai Juhlai in the film How Steel Was Tempered, jointly produced by China and Ukrain. Courtesy of the Vanke Corp of Television and Film Production.

“refine this [aspect of heroism], reinforce it, supplement it.”49 It is exactly his determination to inherit Pavel’s selfless and undying faith to a social cause and public service that motivates Liang to renew and reinvent a Pavel hero that remains illustrious and inspirational to the audience today. Towards his prospective viewers, Liang enters this plea, It [the rewritten story] intends to let those youth readers who have just read the original book feel that even though the myriad portraits of Pavel in the TV drama differ largely from those in the original book, they seem to better comprehend the submerged texts of the original, to perceive what underlying bonds there exist between the various Pavels and the ordinary people with their fates; they should not feel offended by it, they would not blame us for “affixing a lousy sequel to a fine work.”50 它使近几年才看到原著的中国青年们看电视剧时觉得，虽然电 视剧中的保尔们已不完全是书中的保尔们，但似乎是同时看到 了原著的下部，看到了原著中的保尔们在下部的人物关系与命 运，并且不产生反感，不指责我们是在做一件狗尾续貂的 蠢事。 49 50

Ibid., 38. Ibid., 61. Liang’s original words are a well-known Chinese idiom, Gou wei xu diao 狗尾续 貂. The English translation is mine.

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Due largely to Liang’s alert watch and deft maneuver, the TV drama adaptation of Pavel Korchagin not only remains faithful to Ostrovsky’s original, but strikes deeper roots of ethical righteousness into the minds of the public at large. Incidentally, Liang refers to those roots as Yan chang de ying zi (extended shadows) and writes: “Indeed, we have attempted to posit our interpretations of the humanistic values in characters that might differ from those in the original, and have cast them as the long shadows of those protagonists that have come to be part of the sphere of our comprehension.”51 Reading between the lines of Liang’s stated aim, we seem to detect a logical extension from the past to the present, so a question is thus broached: how is this sort of teleological thinking different from the one we dwelled on earlier? Liang’s words prove more prophetic than he probably realized at the time. It is precisely the “extended shadows” that have time and again blended a life force feeding the roots that bear their fruits. In March of 2000, barely six months after the widely popular TV drama How Steel Is Tempered hit the airwaves in China, the public media was abuzz with discussions and debates on Pavel the Hero that it now warranted a public forum hosted by a major official media, China Youth Daily.52 Despite the fact that the debate is centered on “Who is your hero, Pavel Korchagin or Bill Gates?” the wide range of views and opinions that came streaming through the editorial office’s “hotlines” converged on a core of issues as to what constituted a hero: 1) the moral and spiritual authority the hero commands; 2) the inspirational power he/she wields socially and communally; 3) the process of historical continuity and sedimentation of which the hero’s growth offers a choice sample. These are approved by both voting blocs—those voted for Pavel and those named Bill—as criteria gauging the underlying qualities that make a hero a hero. Although the eventual vote count recorded an approximately even split, how each of them measured up to these criteria discloses a dynamic and mature state of mind collectively shared by all the participating netizens. When the issue of amassing wealth with the aid of advanced IT was raised, for instance, a great many believed that wealth 51 52

Ibid., 62. The Chinese phrase is: 延长的影子. The China Youth Daily 中国青年报 is the official media organ under the direct leadership of the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Youth League, which has long been lauded as the “cradle of future ccp leaders”. The data presented below is collected from the internet version of the Forum “Who is your hero, Pavel or Bill” hosted by the Editorial Board of the newspaper. The views I have commented on are from printouts of the online forum running from March 11 to March 24, 2000. I hereby express my thanks to Ms. Zhang Wen, an independent scholar residing in Vancouver, Canada, who provided access to these printouts.

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alone should not count as central to Bill Gates’ candidacy for a hero. In fact, they argued, he would only be considered a worthy candidate whenever he ensured that his Microsoft venture would result in direct and affordable access to IT for the general public and at the time when he decided to donate a greater portion of his wealth to charity and other public causes.53 In comparison, in terms of the hero’s timeless and transcending impact, most bloggers agreed that what enabled Pavel the Hero to match his lasting eminence is not just his extraordinary will, resilient disposition and physical tenacity which certainly undergirded his faith in the Bolshevik revolution, but the fact his ascent to heroic stardom started from the humble beginnings of an ordinary person just like us, which was well illustrated in his lowly birth and his prankish behavior as a boy.54 Hence, in Pavel’s life story resides a vital, beckoning appeal to us: we can all be like him so long as we try! In both cases, to be noted, the impact of historical development in close relation to specific social contingencies vitally shapes the trajectory of the heroes’ paths that conjoin the past with the present constantly but with critical intervention when needed. Pavel’s hero-making life fed off the fearless drive and fiery enthusiasm the Bolshevik revolution once mirrored on behalf of the oppressed laboring mass in Russia at the turn of the twentieth century; whereas Bill Gates’ upbringing and career success stands as the crystallization of an easy, secure and urbane growth in the midst of American middle-class comfort—a profound contrast of historical reality that most Chinese netizens seem ready to overlook. Unlike the Then vs. Now trope, nonetheless, consensus emerged out of the seemingly divided public in the end: the Chinese nation now needed both to be their heroes. The consensus is a contested one in that many of the discussants expressed grave concerns at the alarming debility of moral decency China presently faces despite or thanks to its frenzied economic liberalization—at a time when her intellectual and social wellbeing are at a historical low. To navigate beyond the low ebb, they assert, heroes like Pavel must come to the fore to right the course of development and steer the nation’s progress in the direction of a more righteous and sustainable future.

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This view is a summary of two bloggers’ entries posted on March 13, 2000 by Hong Yuan from the Beijing University of Science and Technology and Yang Xiaoyang from the University of Sun Yet-san in Guangzhou China. This view is a summary of views expressed at a colloquium hosted by the editorial board of China Youth Daily on March 21, 2000. Attending this colloquium were mostly scholars and researchers from the Social Science Academy and other institutions of higher learning in Beijing.

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Zhang Chengzhi’s Reinvention of Ethnic Identity How does self-realization impact upon the revival of humanistic values in China while the nation tried to right the course, redress wrongs, shake off the shadow of the Maoist eras? To be concrete, what does the revival of humanist values bring to bear on the validity of self-formation facing the odd wedlock of economic frenzy and political intolerance? Over the past three decades, China’s recovery from the trauma of the Maoist era—which was indeed nationwide rehabilitation and healing—has been inundated by wave upon wave of shocking identity confusion: they have been wildly disoriented by the State’s erratic shifting of gears; social and political reforms have been kept under wraps while the reckless, freewheeling market economy has held sway; moral stewardship by the intellectual elite has been weak, aberrant or even commandeered by the authoritarian ideology; fast-track profiteering and quick-fix entrepreneurship have been the order of the day; high culture is out, consumerist “pop culture” are in. Feeling confused, sidelined and betrayed, the intellectual elites are confronted with an ever more acute need for readjusting the self/State relationship they used to take for granted. Since collective identity endorsed by the State ideology is now reduced to an abstract and skeletal role, the educated individual is indeed thrown off the age-long continuum that supposedly leads from the lesser to the greater self-realization. As a result, many ­intellectuals have joined in Xia hai (plunging into the sea of entrepreneurial business).1 Some of them have jumped on the bandwagon of raging post-modern, neoliberalist and global discourses and tried to get a role or two in the chorus line of the renewed official ideology.2 There are indeed those who have turned their backs on all this and have defiantly sought to renew the individual self in their encounter with a multitude of “others.” Zhang Chengzhi is one of them; he tries to reinvent his individual identity by recovering his long lost ethnic lineage as a Muslim Chinese: his self-remaking takes the route of refashioning his ethnic identity amidst a culture fraught with pragmatic fervor and ethnic supremacy. 1 Xia hai 下海. Refer to Note 39 of the previous chapter. 2 A case in point is a recently published book entitled Zhongguo ke yi shuo bu 中国可以说不 (China Can Say No). Collectively written by a group of young intellectuals, the book attempts to model on certain anti-American sentiments of the Japanese Right-wing in the Nineteenseventies to help turn up the sound bites of the official discourse of nationalism by the Chinese government. © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���4 | doi ��.��63/9789004265356_�1�

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In a society where ethnic supremacy is a frequent accomplice to social and political repression, Zhang’s self-remaking all but reveals the inner workings of its ethnic dominance in the name of social progress. It also gives the lie to the belief that ethnic identity is some hard-and-fast quality—the thing-in-itself— to be simply dusted off and retrieved from the forgotten past. A Chinese Hui acculturated as a Han, Zhang’s renewal of an ethnic subject offers us a specimen of self-making.3 It uncovers the process in which one’s ethnic identity has to be contended and negotiated against the grains of cultural and ideological primacy. Being a Muslim, he must exert his intuitive knowledge in response to the calling of the ethnic primordial against his internalized sense of Han culture; being Chinese, on the other hand, he has to rely on a political deftness to cope with any circumstantial hindrance designed to efface the identity of a Muslim Chinese. From the outset of his career as a writer, therefore, he envisioned that ethnic selfhood would have to be shaped out of ontological and ethnic realms in the shadow of ambiguity and complexity. Not surprisingly, Zhang’s first open volley was fired at what he calls the “destitution” of art and literature as a result of a hastily commodified society. His outcry against the popular consumer culture pitched almost a singlehanded battle with rampant commercialism in post-1989 China.4 Likewise, he spared no abhorrence and disdain in his vehement tirades against newfangled theories and avant-garde elitism of his fellow writers and intellectuals. At a time when most Chinese were caught in a frenzy to go overseas, seek foreign citizenship or attract foreign investments, he declared that he had given up on all foreign miracles or deities, and staged the symbolic act of tearing

3 The Chinese character Hui 回 stands for sinicized Muslims whereas Han 汉 is the character designating the predominant ethnic group in China. There are up to 470,000 Hui Chinese living in China’s northwestern regions. Read Dru C. Gladney, ed. Making Majorities: Constructing the Nation in Japan, Korea, China, Malay, Fiji, Turkey and United States (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998) and Jonathan N. Lipman, Familiar Strangers: A History of Muslims in Northwest China (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 1997). 4 While aware of his widespread repute as a fiction writer of the sent-down youth literary movements before the 1990s, I will focus for this chapter on collections of Zhang’s essays published right after the 1990s and beyond, which collectively reflect a critical scrutiny towards the advent of China’s unbridled tolerance of commercial values imported from the West. The citations of these essays will follow. Interested readers are urged to read my entry essay on “Zhang Chengzhi,” Dictionary of Literary Biography: Chinese Fiction Writers, 1950– 2000, eds. Thomas Moran and Ye (Dianna) Xu (Detroit: Gale Cengage Learning, vol. 370, 2013), 278–285.

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up his visa permits.5 Confronting the rampant fetishism of material affluence, he defiantly dared the entire society to quit hedonism and think in earnest about the importance of having faith. In his renowned manifesto “Yi bi wei qi” (Upholding your pen as a banner, 1993), he astounded the public by declaring: Even if they fabricate ten thousand kinds of literature, I still believe in the taste of this kind of literature only—it is not called something like pure literature or serious literature or modernist elitism, neither is it called Yang chun bai xue ( literature of the educated elite). It does not seek to provide leisure, ironic playfulness, aesthetics or artistry—what it does have is nothing less than faith.6 哪怕他们炮制一亿种文学，我也只相信这种文学的意味。这种 文学并不叫什么纯文学或严肃文学或精英现代派，也不叫阳春 白雪。它具有的不是消遣性、玩性、审美性或艺术性—它具有 的，是信仰。 Faith, in Zhang’s view, is the overriding humanist concern. Yet does his humanist faith verge on a religious revival? And what form of self-identity can correlate his faith? If we take his faith to be just a born-again Islamist, we would be doing Zhang grave injustice, to say the least. For all his candor and hardiness, Zhang is not immune to the ordeal of having to rediscover his own faith in the midst of wide-spread distrust and even disregard of intellectual pursuits. But what makes his self-remaking unique is the dual purpose of his self-acclaimed marginality. Like all those not given up on humanistic values in return for monetary gains, he emphasizes intellectual freedom of the individual as the locus for renewing a worldview not shaped out of some official-approved common “wisdom.”7 In doing so, however, he instills a measure of skepticism as to how 5 Zhang Chengzhi 张承志, “My God does not reside overseas,” in The Heroes’ Path in Wilderness 英雄荒芜路 (Shanghai: Zhi shi Publishing House, 1994), 253–264. 6 Zhang Chengzhi, “Upholding your pen as a banner” 以笔为旗. This is Zhang’s best known essay for his uncompromised belief that literature is nothing if not a form of faith. The essay originally appears in Shi Yue 十月, No. 3, 1993. See also Xinhua Yue bao 新华月报, No. 3, 1994, 108–109. 7 One such so-called wisdom is conveyed through the near-obsession of building a Xiao kang society (a “well-off” society); it was aimed at coercing the public to channel their focus to the improvement of living conditions at the expense of their intellectual liberalization under the official aegis. In retrospect, I believe, the public played right into the designed agenda at the time and allowed themselves to disavow their interests in striving for political liberalization in favor of the much craved material gains.

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ideology goes about manipulating the public by way of its customary homogeneity. In addition, he brings the already skeptical humanist home to himself: to see the nature of his individual existence, not as a mirror-image of any grandiose subject, but as a defamiliarized self through the eyes of an “other”—an individual whose cognitive outlook inherently differs from his. His recourse to the other’s disorienting lens is thus the first necessary step for both offsetting the snares of the individual’s submission to the internalized subject and for compelling him to come to terms with a disclosed, albeit dislocated, self. Zhang loves to hike in wilderness alone. He has journeyed, on foot whenever and wherever possible, through the Inner Mongolian grasslands, the Uigur steppes and the Muslim-inhabited loess in China’s Northwest. The ethos of all three regions, thanks precisely to their severe climates, precipitous terrain and harsh living conditions, has steadily flown into a reservoir of talent, intuition and desire constantly feeding and renewing Zhang’s literary resources. And Zhang, nourished by his Islamic roots and inspired on his part by a sense of belonging to these people and their lands, has given it the most befitting voice. His books have exhibited a rare collective portrait of human-like steeds, caring Mongolian Eijis,8 hearty Kazakhs and the taciturn Jahriyya Imams.9 These are living characters who have seldom been found in the mainstream of literary protagonists up till now, and even in their rare appearances of the past have all but served as exotic yet minor accessories. The common readers, predominantly Han Chinese, have hitherto marginalized these characters on the basis of their ethnicity. When Zhang brings these characters to the center stage in his stories, he persistently denies the readers the right to objectify or circumscribe them from a central and unitary standpoint buttressed by a cryptic ethnic supremacy. In fact the defamiliarized undertakings of Zhang’s literary world induce a large measure of alienation, on the part of the readers, from their usual vantage view, and thereby unsettle their discriminating ideology from its seat of authority.

8 Eiji, a common way of addressing a Mongolian mother. 9 Kazakhs are Turkic-speaking nomadic Muslims who inhabit a region bordering on West China, Kirghiz, Uzbek and Turkmen Republics in central Asia. Jahrinya 哲赫忍耶 is one of the Islamic sects among sinicized Muslims most bravely pursuing a transformationalist view of the Islamic precepts and have aroused deep hostility from dominant ethnic groups of Imperial China and led to the latters’ continuous persecutions of them.

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Resistance and Dialogic Narrative

In his novella Huang ni xiao wu (The Little Mud Shed, 1985), Zhang unfurls a cacophony of voices and feelings that seemingly complies with, but truly undercuts the paradigm of class oppression and conflict as the only legitimate creative force for literary writings.10 The paradigm, once widely revered as the ccp’s tantamount rules for all writers in post-1949 China, dismisses any alternative way of viewing what creates human tension and conflict, thereby pushing history forward. In a pithy and touching style that approaches a Shakespearean tragedy, Zhang presents a soul-stirring story of love, empathy and resistance staged by a few Muslim sharecroppers attempting to eke out a meager living on the edge of the “civilized” world. Though the time and settings against which the drama unfolds are uncertain, the fate of these Muslim Chinese is all clear at the outset: their existence has already been condemned to the margins of the social and cultural norms. For instance, the only way to reach this little human outpost in the loess highlands is to tread along Sanbian, the “three peripheries” (peripheries of hills, of waters and of towns).11 Their only means of staying alive is to wrest a potato crop or two from the jaws of scorch summer heat, icy winter storms over rigid, barren lands; but meager and humble as they are, their personal possessions would always include a forthcoming impulse for empathy and justice. Akin to their undaunted faith in Islam, these lowly born and bred souls embody a fearless instinct for survival that no worldly troubles can deter. They may talk dirty; they may commit theft; they act slow-witted, or even pose for a time as a bully or a tramp. Yet for all their brief moral lapses there is in the end always a profound self-urge to be just, to be hearty and sacrificing. It is this rock-firm faith that prompts Zhang to depict the love between Su Gasan and Ga Meizi as one example of how the inner bulwark of human decency triumphs over the outer world devoid of even the least moral and material well-being.12 But their strength to rise above the hostile forces, whether physical or human, does not stem from the inner values cherished by the individuals 10

11 12

Huang ni xiao wu 黃泥小屋. The text of this story used by the author is collected in Zhang Chengzhi ji 张承志集 (Collected Works by Zhang Chengzhi, 1986), Fujian: Hai xia wen yi chu ban she, 1986, 163–238. Sanbian 三边, the three margins or peripheries refer to the footpaths favored by Muslim Chinese in the Northwest regions of China. See Zhang, Zhang Chengzhi Ji, 163. Su gasan 苏尕三 and Ga Meizi 尕妹子 are the two young lovers in this story who stand up to the lewd and oppressive local landlord who is about to rape the helpless girl, and they escape to freedom in wilderness.

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alone. It draws on the young Muslim’s ability to contest and negotiate with his given—his social and ethnic marginality: Su pursues his personal dream of finding peace and happiness in a “mud shed” home, but readily gives it up in exchange for danger, hardship and uncertainty when he decides to help the young Meizi, the ethnic Han girl, escape her fate. She is about to be assaulted by the local landlord and seeks the Muslim youth’s protection and love. Young Su lays aside his pious inhibition against the Huo yu (firebranding hell) incited by the well-meant Imam to deter him from such a self-sacrificing act for a nonMuslim; he transcends ethnic barriers and rushes in time to snatch the endangered Meizi away from the paws of the lecherous landlord. As the suppressed and victimized other, Su enacts the classic tale of the other upstaging the dominant subject. He indeed rejects the authority imposed on the have-nots by the haves, but his is not the enactment designed for the oppressed to be motivated by the formulaic realization of “coming-of-age” for an ethnic dissenter turned an ardent follower.13 Such a formulaic hero utilizes otherness to disrupt the hegemonic rule, only to profess and legitimate its own absolute centrality, thus replacing the overthrown class with its own equally repressive authority. A most telling case would be the ccp’s use of classliberating and nation-building discourses to preempt the space of the ethnic minorities in China. In this case, the absolute leadership the ccp assumes over all under classes enables it to instill a revolutionary télos to pre-empt the critical potential of those forces as the objectified other at the margin. The motif of a spontaneous rebel would, as a rule, require the protagonist to be sent on a perilous course of conflicts and setbacks against the repressive center until he/she is offered a timely awakening by the rivaling subject, followed by the hero’s going through a linear and graduated growth via trial and error. By the same token, a de-centering discourse serves, in effect, to valorize its opposite, the subject or the center, by way of the binary. But The Little Mud Shed proves revealing to the contrary: Su refuses to become prey trapped by the snares of such a complicity by opposition. By his intuitive sense, he adeptly breaks free of the centripetal drift of a teleological unfolding. The last of such fulfilling acts inevitably presents the hero confronting the arch class enemy in a face-to-face showdown that neatly resolves the opposition as the expected fulfillment of the predetermined télos. Instead of re-enacting that formula, the story ends almost in an anticlimax: Su tears himself away from the Imam, rushes to the landlord’s house to confront the landlord, only to discover that 13

For this point, I have drawn on both Rey Chow, “Against the Lures of Diaspora,” Writing Diaspora (1993) and Arif Dirlik, “Culturalism as Hegemonic Ideology and Liberating Practice,” Cultural Critique, no. 6 (Spring 1987).

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the rival is nowhere to be seen, and that he would not recognize him even if the rival were standing in front of his eyes. After a long probe into his inner self, he concludes that the landlord is indeed a specter! Feeling hollow and dreadful, he slowly comes to his senses: The specter will be following you wherever you go! This stalking and indestructible specter will forever be haunting you. . . . You thought you could empty out your blood to end this, dead or alive. But this world of yours is far more vicious than you thought. . . . What you wanted is to give up your life to save this heart; the world insists on ruining your heart and sparing your life. It leaves you stuck in suffering this life of unbearable bitterness.14 这鬼还要随着你呢，这甩不掉劈不碎的罪孽也许永也不放开 你。。。。你盘算着寻个你死他活血溅黄土，可世上的事比你 盘算得更恶。。。。你求的是舍条命护住心，它偏要毁了你的 心留下你的命。留你一条命受这熬不住的苦。 His valor and rashness deflated, Su becomes aware that this enemy “cannot be dealt away with a stroke of your pickax.”15 He finally sees where the real enemy is: it lurks in the shadow of a dilemma in which whether he destroys the symbol of oppression or not matters little. With or without the landlord, he would be trapped in a world of inequality and injustice predestined for him and his fellow Muslims. Indeed, here lies the author’s message: ethnic oppression does not pose itself in the presence of one or two evil persons; it is encoded in the whole social and cultural systems and pervades through one’s attitude towards ethnic differences. Zhang’s adroit use of narrative voices consciously shapes up, by virtue of a scheme, a multi-faceted world so dynamic and de-centered as to enable young Su to maneuver against such snares throughout the entire story. In terms of its narrative scheme, The Little Mud Shed was a novelty in its time. Some critics have accredited it as one of the earliest Chinese literary works modeled on a Bakhtinian heteroglossier.16 At odds with the Hegelian mode of the evolving character who considers the individual to be merely indexical of the totality of a télos, Bakhtin sees no direct causality between the overriding télos and the maturing individual. Rather he posits a loose relationship between 14 Zhang, Collected Works, 222. Translation is mine. 15 Ibid. 16 See Ding Fan 丁帆, Zhongguo xiang tu xiao shuo shi lun 中国乡土小说史论 (On the History of China’s Native-soil Fiction), Jiangshu Art and Literature Press, 1992, 325–351.

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them which needs be mediated against the contexts of historical specificity and contingency. Bakhtin thus finds fault with Piaget’s developmental mode of psychology, calling into doubt the latter’s presumed congruity between the growing child’s ability at a particular stage and a predetermined goal for his entire life. In contrast, Bakhtin stresses an “approximal development” which hinges on the ability of the child to negotiate the immediate (approximal) conditions of his growth at a specific point in his life.17 Such negotiations, according to Bakhtin, are usually undertaken with the other(s) via a simultaneous exchange between one another rather than with a single unitary subject. Glossing Zhang’s narrative scheme against Bakhtin’s simultaneity, we realize that the narrative nexus that informs young Su’s escape with Meizi consists, not of a unified world encircled by a be-all and end-all vision of the author, but of a simultaneous interplay among rivaling viewpoints held by different characters evolving alongside the storyline. They each stake their own claims to a slice of the world revolving around Su’s selfless act to save Meizi, trying to turn the fluid situation to the advantage of his own: the Imam guards over the boundaries of ethnic and religious piety and tries to tame the young Muslim before he turns himself into a scapegoat for the Han landlord’s lewdness and cruelty. In the end, lighting a bright fire as if to honor their new life and ward off the firebrand Hell, the Imam in his own way accepts the young couple who finally brings about their own reunion. Din guaizi (Ding the cripple) also sets his lewd eyes on Meizi to satiate his sexual craving; irritated by his jealousy for Su, he cowers at the landlord’s threat to his life and agrees to tie up Meizi’s watchdog when the landlord assaults the helpless girl. But spineless as he normally is, he is eventually brought to his senses by none other than the dog in captivity: when he discovers that even the dog turns its look away from him in contempt, his sense of decency is pricked and awakened. Just as he earlier could not but be tempted to desire women like any other bawdy man, now he cannot but be burdened by his conscience like a decent Muslim. He unties the dog, setting it free in time for it to rush to Meizi’s rescue. Zei wazi (the thieving boy) in his turn can never satiate his hunger, and he stops at nothing in cheating food out of others’ hands. He repeatedly cashes in on Meizi’s passionate love for Su, eating up whatever food she entrusts him to deliver to Su. He abuses the kindness of all his poor fellow Muslims, stealing their leftovers or possessions. He besmirches their self-acclaimed faith and piety under such severe living conditions, he trashes his self-esteem for pitifully little food he gets in turn. But, ironically, it 17 Bakhtin, Toward a Philosophy of the Act, 9–18, 40–43. See also Note 9 in Chapter 1, Introduction.

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is race-motivated hate that finally crushes his indifferent greed and brings him the tragic end: the Han landlord thrusts a pig bone into his face and taunts him to eat it. The insult overwhelms him in shame and disrespect so much that he jumps and drowns himself in a waterhole. Notably, most of the happenings revolving around the three characters are deftly narrated, not through the objectifying eye of a third-person narrator, but through individual viewpoints that bring themselves into active interplay among one another. The explicit textual trait for this is the absence of the direct exchange of utterances between these characters throughout the story. Instead the author allows each character to indulge in a stream of inner thoughts as if he or she were engaged in a conversation with another character. For instance, young Su never speaks to the Imam about how he comes to the decision to rescue Meizi and elope with her, but his thoughts on this matter are clearly addressed to the Imam.18 Ding the Cripple, on the other hand, aims his intent alternately at Meizi and her watchdog even though neither one is on speaking terms with him.19 Such narrative uses indeed are apt to implicate other characters as their invisible interlocutors. As the hero or heroine assumes his/ her role by way of interacting with their minds, they help him or her foster an intersubjective nexus for mediating and clarifying his own. Thus, this nexus of interlocutors enables young Su to seek out forms of otherness in a simultaneous exchange that eventually help him choose his own path of escape.20 To return to the issue of self-remaking, it remains vital for the Bakhtinian idea of developing the self to deploy a dialogic mode in a self-making narrative, for such a dialogic does not arrest on an instantiated role imposed on itself by a global subjectivity. As demonstrated by The Little Mud Shed, Zhang seeks to explore the process of mediating social and ethnic odds for a solution at the margins of a racially centralized society; he does so in order to distance his protagonists from any preordained télos for his act of self-making. For that very reason, The Little Mud Shed has taken a giant step in Zhang’s overall strategy of cultivating ethnic identity. What might have seemed elusive to us before is now taking shape: Zhang has embarked on a cultural critique that cuts under the State’s “legitimate” claim to an overarching authorship of social progress that denies the legitimacy of other authors and suffocates emergent ethnic pluralism. The dialogic leanings of his ethnic intervention also reflect how Zhang seeks to posit and enhance his stakes in reviving humanism: they forge a path 18 Zhang, Collected Works, 199–200. 19 Ibid, 215–216. 20 Bakhtin, Toward a Philosophy of the Act, 9–18. See also Note 10 in Chapter 1, Introduction.

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of remaking his ethnic identity by mediating between the primordial and the circumstantial, between spirituality and humanism, between a self grown in tune with the strides of nation-building and a self shaped out of continuous strife with ethnic and ethical contingencies. Considering such a simultaneous interplay we can see why Zhang’s arguably excessive stress on the Qing (purity) and Zhen (truthfulness) of Islam is in essence not so much a call to religiosity as a drive to bolster genuine reverence for ethnic identity by means of reclaiming forgotten or suppressed ethnic heritages.21 Only by seeing his overall strategy will we in turn become aware of the promises and limitations of his revamping his distinct idea of a selfhood and subverting a hegemonic subjectivity.

The Heart’s Self-seeking Journey

What do we see behind Zhang’s professed image as a loner? In what ways can we fully comprehend his avowed pursuit of humanistic truths? The answer, I think, can be found in his two books Xinling Shi (History of the Soul, 1992) and Huang wu Yingxiong Lu (Heroes’ Paths in Wilderness, 1994).22 The first book, History of the Soul, is a work of historical fiction, recounted by an authorial “I,” tracing the rise and fall of the Islamic Jahriyya order in their ceaseless struggle against the ethnocidal suppression by the Han and Manchu governments for seven successive generations.23 Zhang declares at the outset that his is not an officially approved and compiled history, and that his authorship of the Jahriyya’s historical past differs from that recovered from an officially approved storage of institutionalized memory.24 His disclaimer is clearly 21 22

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The Chinese term for Islam is fittingly translated as qing 清 (purity) and zhen 真 (truthfulness). Zhang Chengzhi, Xinling shi 心灵史 (History of the Soul), (Guangzhou: Hua cheng chu ban she, 1991). Zhang, The Heroes’ Path In Wilderness (see Note 5 above) and his other writings on this subject previously published. Jahriyya 哲赫忍耶 is the Islamic sect among sinicized Muslims most actively pursuing a transformationalist view on implementing Sophist precepts in Muslim Chinese communities and on its relationship with the dominant cultures. For the past five centuries, they have been the worst victim of frequent ethnic cleansings carried out by Han and Manchu Imperial rulers in an effort to contain and suppress them. Herein lies Zhang’s professed discovery of his own methodology in relation to the suppressed and distorted history of his fellow Hui people, and, as will be shown later in the chapter, Zhang makes a point of implementing such a methodology throughout the writing of this book.

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attested by the manner in which he recounts the forgotten past: the narrative view he commands appeals to the readers through his retelling of ethnic histories; its narrative unfolds in a way intertwined with the progress of the author’s consciousness so as to trace out the trajectory of his own soul’s journey. To a large extent, Zhang accomplishes this by punctuating his narrative with a direct “showing” of Hui sites, figures and events of historical interest accompanied by his commentary. He makes these textual forays via the narrative “I” on purpose: to arouse the readers’ attention to the mediating effort by a diegetic narrator behind it. Thus, at regular intervals, he provokes the readers’ situatedness of their own historical beings by way of his intrusive remarks, reminding them of the gap between what took place historically and what the institutional memory insists on telling us as official histories. Zhang would, for example, begin retelling a past incident as though he could rehearse it in his mind, and that he were thus licensed to supply many of the causal links missing from the official version of the historical incident in question. What makes him confident in doing so is his ability to fill in the psychological “vacuum” of those involved in the actual incident—precisely what official historians choose to omit for fear of being too personal or subjective for their kind of historiography. A case in point is how Zhang relates the Chinese Jahriyya’s custom of presenting a simple plate of dry fruits, instead of a costly dinner, for an Imam’s prayer service. Basing his narrative on the oral history circulating amidst the Chinese Jahriyya folklore, Zhang defines the ritual as the hallmark of “the religion of the poor” and retells it as the chief reason why Ma Mingxin, the founding father of the Chinese Jahriyya sect, abruptly rose to popular sainthood in northwest China in 1750s.25 It is pertinent to note that Zhang has recaptured these details of an obscured historical event through what he has termed Jiao nei ji yi (memory preserved within the Jahriyya sect). These mainly consist of tales, anecdotes and narratives that have never been recorded in writing but have been orally preserved and passed down through many generations for fear that the Imperial Court might possess and destroy them. The profound credibility Zhang places in this oral literature arises from his deep ethnic impulse lately awakened by his return to his Muslim root. As he now shares full confidence and trust with the Jahriyya Chinese in Xihaigu, his recollected memory hinges on an interaction between his intuitive knowledge of the ethnic primordial and the circumstantial historical settings in which he

25

Ma Mingxin 马明心 (1719–1781) was widely respected among other Islamic sects even though he rose from a humble origin. See Zhang, History of the Soul, 21.

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has been aculturated since childhood.26 Furthermore, since Zhang is bound up by the historical reality of his own time, it is also inevitable that his recollection of the raw historical memory is contested as well as mediated by his own anxieties and concerns. Likewise, the fact that he decides to uncover the concealed facts of the Jahriyya history tells us as much about the reign of ethnic terror in China of the 1750s as it does about the uninhibited desertion of spiritual and intellectual values in favor of materialistic idolization in China’s reform era of the early 1990s. As is clear from his manifesto earlier, Zhang is openly hostile to the deluge of desire and greed released by a post-socialist society now recklessly obsessed with its pursuit of a market economy and commercialism. He has single-handedly crusaded against social values drastically plagued by a materialistic society and verbally assailed the “spiritual void” created in its aftermath. His effort to bring contrasted historical realities and ethnic values into such a valiant encounter results in nothing less than a rewriting of China’s intellectual history! Such a historical makeover is indeed transgressive, yet interactive and simultaneous. With such a critical intervention, Zhang is able to raise amidst cynicism and disbelief his own standard of a genuine humanist spirit. The above instance spells out a constructive reading that suggests how Zhang has already undertaken to map out the routes for his journey to the realization of his ethnic identity. A more telling instance results from his inherent distrust of officially licensed histories on ethnic others and reveals his impulse to decipher the extant official historical records. It centers around the Salar Hui insurgency of 1782 during the Qianlong reign.27 Where the historical text registers a mere phrase Nian jing qi dao (Read the Quran aloud and offer prayers), Zhang daringly fleshes it out with his acquired knowledge of the known Muslim ritual, and in doing so, he evokes a kind of mystical or divine intervention to bear on his interpretative reading. Having drudged through 26

27

Xihaigu 西海固 is the acronym for the tri-county area consisted of Xiji 西吉, Haiyuan 海原 and Guyuan 固原counties in Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region. For a biological fact, Zhang grew up in Shandong, East China, received education in Beijing and for a long while lived in Inner Mongolian grassland before settling down in Xihaigu region following his induction to the Jahrinya sect of the Muslim Chinese living in northwest of China. See also my entry essay “Zhang Chengzhi” in Dictionary of Literary Biography, vol. 370, 278–285. The Salars 萨拉尔 are a Muslim minority inhabiting mostly the mountainous areas in Qinghai and Ningxia Provinces of China. Su Sishisan 苏四十三 (the Forty-Third Grandmaster of the Su lineage) is the name of the insurgence leader who led the rebel troops in a raid on Lanzhou that year (circa 1872). For more detail, see Zhang, History of the Soul, 68–73.

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anecdotes amassed by such official histories as Qin ding Lanzhou ji lue (The imperial records of the Lanzhou incident), he succeeds in locating the crucial piece of the puzzle to one unsolved mystery: why the rebel leader, Su the Forty-Third, decided to retreat to Hualing shan (the Hualing Hill), a waterless and indefensible hill outside the city of Lanzhou, to wait for the besieging Qing army to deal a death blow. The Salar Hui leader’s retreat is his response to a primordial calling through his intuitive faculty to seek divine guidance and prepare to die a martyr’s death.28 What common sense would regard as a desperate retreat taken by the rebel leader perhaps in pursuit of martyrdom Zhang casts in the light of the mystical and the fantastic. And he ascertains that the Hui rebels’ communion took the form of a dialogue with Allah, the Islamic deity. Based on his ethnic instinct, he comes to the conclusion that the Salar leader was performing a prayer ritual in order to seek a dialogue with the divine being so as to bring them rainwater to quench the thirst-­ shriveled rebels.29 As if by miracle, it rained during the following days, which is recorded even in the official versions, although the rain did not save the Salar rebels from their eventual doom. This dialogue seems all but mystical and futile in heralding a losing cause. But it does signify, for Zhang, the leader’s exertion to defy and obstruct the Imperially-decreed execution for the revolting Salar Huis, which is spelled out for them by Emperor Qianlong’s imperial directives. Zhang, in his rewriting mindset, is fully aware of the role of the mystical or the fantastic expected to valorize for his ethnic memory: if not to deny altogether the function of the margin prescribed by the center for the completion of a premeditated repressive cause, to at least unsettle and reject the instantiated and subordinate position of the powerless at the mercy of the ethnically repressive court. It also suffices for Zhang’s argument that in life-or-death moments like this intuited rapport with the providential will is uniquely capable of revealing the mental and psychological dynamics that has always been swept under the rug as mere superstition by the so-called “serious” historiography. What then do the intuitive and the mystical bring to bear on writing in the historical mode? Here Zhang finds his ethnic memory poised on the boundary between the primordial and the circumstantial: in recovering obscured ethnic 28

29

The following are the Chinese characters for the terms Zhang uses in the book: Qianlong 乾隆; Nian jing qi dao 念经祈祷; Qin ding Lanzhou ji lue 钦定兰州记略; Hualin shan 华林山. Zhang writes about his thoughts on reading the various historical records of this soulstirring incident in “Wei sheng shi de shi pian er zuo” 为盛世的诗篇而作 in Zhang Chengzhi, The Heroes’ Path. 93–96.

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memory and de-centering a linear, teleological advance of the “law” of human history, both must be invoked; neither can remain uncontested. If one relies on the circumstantial to seek out a simultaneous interchange with other(s), he/she now and then calls forth the primordial deep in one’s “ethnicized” memory that functions more or less “id-like.” Michael Fischer defines this “idlike” notion of ethnic remembrance as enduring and powerful: Ethnicity is not something that is simply passed on from generation to generation, taught and learned; it is something dynamic, often unsuccessfully repressed or avoided. It can be potent even when not consciously taught; it is something that institutionalized teaching easily makes chauvinistic, sterile, and superficial, something that emerges in full—often liberating—flower only through struggle.30 What is evident in the above is that the potency of the embryonic existence of one’s ethnic memory does not function in the same way as laws of rationality. Fischer’s emphasis on its epiphany-like sprouting is not indexical of a graduated expansion and elevation; one is presently reminded of the distinction we made in earlier chapters between instantiation and immanental patterns of development.31 The momentous awakening is rather in the form of an expedient calling forth of the underlying truths from one’s unconscious. Zhang seems to argue that the ethnic impulse thrusts itself forth in moments of acute conflict with the institutionalized memories (such as official histories) countervailing or chipping it away. It is with such conflictual encounters (“struggle” in Fischer’s terms) that one’s ethnic identity constantly comes alive, yet never allows itself to be codified. This is exactly the kind of dynamic Zhang has enacted in his effort to unseat the authority of official history with respect to its discriminatory hegemony. To his mind, a historian faced with such self-defining moments must be accountable for his/her ethnic awareness without being interfered with by the socalled disinterested discourses, be it professional or academic. However much the individual has internalized their claims to be objective or disinterested, he/she will sooner or later hear that primordial calling of his/her nascent ethnicity and respond to it. The primordial presents itself in the form of what Zhang calls yuan chu zhi wen (originary interrogation): How do you account for 30

31

Michael Fischer, “Ethnicity and the Post-modern Arts of Memory,” Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography, ed. James Clifford and George Marcus (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 195. See Chapters 3, 4, 5 and 7 passim.

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your being in the face of your own soul, when there is nothing scientific or academic fending you off from this ultimate accountability? What constitutes the ultimate boundary of your ethnicity?32 Zhang argues that the answers to these can be derived from one’s affective faculties: Qing gan (emotional propensities), Xue tong (ethnic lineage) and a Qian ding (prefigured intelligibility), all of which are intuitable and intuited only by virtue of one’s primordial impulse informed by his ethnic lineage.33 However, one’s sensibilities of the affect are at their most potent when exercised in the context of real, situational needs, i.e., encounters and conflicts with a dominant culture or ideology. In short, the primordial must be sought out and enacted through the circumstantial in order for it to be effective in identity politics. On such grounds, Zhang launches an assault on the falsely fixed boundaries of official Hui history whose authorship is complicitous with the reigning ideology of the Chinese state. He affronts the historical verdicts of many Chinese historical figures who were ethnically Hui (such as Hairui, Li Zhi and Zheng He), but allowed themselves to be assimilated by the ruling ideology of Han for the sake of their careers.34 He castigates them for their eventual submission to the discourse of historical positivism and alienation from their Hui ethnic origin in the name of self-fulfillment. Yet what his critique intends to drive home is really the ingrained drawbacks of the Hui cultural heritage since Ming China: its fondness of career success or commercial gains at the expense of its ethnic and moral integrity. This self-induced nemesis has beguiled generations of outstanding Hui youths to model their upward mobility on those whose cultures mold and assimilate them intellectually. The same nemesis is chiefly responsible for hatching out the system of munafeles—Hui collaborators with Manchurian or Han governments. The double-dealing munafeles 32 33

34

Yuanchu zhiwen 原初质问. Zhang, The Heroes’ Paths, 125. Qiang gan 情感; Xue tong 血统; Qian ding 前定. These terms, which I suspect are Zhang’s own coinages, are scattered all over his essays collected in The Heroes’ Paths. Though he has not defined them in any systematic fashion, we can still grasp the essence of their meanings from their disparate contexts. One such is the essay entitled “Lu shang geng jue gu xiang yao yuan,” 路上更觉故乡遥远 (Once on the road, you feel more intensely your homeland is far away), 120–126. Hai rui 海瑞 (1515–1587) An important court official of the Ming Dynasty, Hairui is renowned through his audacious denunciation of the Emperor during a court hearing and was therefore dismissed from his post. Li zhi 李贽 (1527–1602) One of the most talented and controversial literati figures (1527–1602) of the Ming era; his daring literary views and rebellious character led to his imprisonment and suicide. Zheng He 郑和 (1381–1433) A world-class navigator and a commander of the Ming Imperial Navy in Ming China.

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pinpoints for Zhang the very impasse where the situational approach must give way to the primordial impulse—a painful choice of cutting one’s ties, and with it all the worldly rewards, off a prevailing culture in favor of one’s own with little hope of career advancement. As diagnosed by Zhang, the impasse gets in the way of all Hui overachievers who have ventured too far out from their ethnic roots. There will inevitably come that agonizing moment of disorientation (Zhang calls it a “void”) through which they must all grope before emerging on the safe shores of the primordial. What the munafeles did is precisely to bypass or ignore the impasse and continue to function with the false sense of ethnic anonymity. Urged by his inner distrust, Zhang directs his scrutiny to the traditional historiography on the Muslim Chinese—one that depends on empiricist standards for verifying relevant historical records collected and documented under the supervision of many Han and Manchu rulers. This methodology has thrived for centuries on account of its affinities with a positivistic interpretation of historical progress, which has been favored by those whose stakes are premised on holding power. No doubt the allegedly impartial stance borne out of such interpretations has thus been compromised by its veiled complicity with the legitimacy of preserving their domination. Of course, the very act of calling such methodologies into question entails a demand for a “paradigm shift.” It is, as Zhang himself has elaborated, “to disinherit the whole positivist baggage of the conventional historiography, and reach for the complex intuitive faculty of your individual soul.”35 What may surprise us, however, is that Zhang has left us with little clue as to how he himself has accounted and interpreted the hidden history of the Jahriyya order, and how he has himself gone through the momentary self-dislocation—the “void”—to discover the right mode of retelling an ethnic history as enlightened by both the primordial and the circumstantial. Indeed, little has been offered in his History of the Soul about how his inner self grapples with the impasse facing all Huis assimilated, to a greater or lesser extent, by the mainstream culture. After all, he is undeniably aculturated by the Han education system that nurtures part of his growth, and it is reasonable for us to implicate him in what he has so far applied to the case of others. If we indeed search for this in Jahriyya history as its rewriting by a reinvented Hui soul, then we need to ask: whose soul? In the “Afterword” to his book, Zhang bids his readers a solemn farewell: “From now on, I will no longer exist. Please forget me. That previous ‘I’ is 35 Zhang, The Heroes’ Paths, 125.

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gone forever.”36 Sure enough, the author who finally emerges from this soulsearching history to write his next book, Heroes’ Paths in Wilderness is already a different “I,” a self that is devotedly at one with the believers of the resurgent Islamic order, has redeemed his own “profane” past and gratified his yearning for a spiritual rebirth. He now relies on his reinvented identity to uphold the banner of the cause of humanism. But the question remains: what has actually taken place in his intellectual life that brings about this giant leap to faith? While there has indeed been a metamorphosis of him as an individual, he has not yet traced the trajectory of it alongside the revealed history of the Jahriyya Sufis with whom he now identifies. Zhang seems to have embedded his inner growth in the History of the Soul, because for him, whatever rites of passages he has endured in his growth have to be correlated to the presentation of the obscured history of a “marginal” ethnic group; both have to be concurrently carried out in the context of mediating with the reality of political authoritarianism. That is to say, he has to simultaneously leverage the token privilege granted nominally to ethnic minorities as “others” by the ruling ideologies, and upturn their token function of ethnic harmony to undercut the falsified authority on which these official histories rest. Likewise, the remaking of his self-identity has to be oriented ethnically and ethically in contestation with what is etched out as ideological decorum by the State. Such a double-edged intervention almost inverts the role of those Munafeles, posing a fundamental threat to the authority of the official histories and the centrality of the Chinese state. Given its subversive nature, Zhang has no qualms about where his critique may prove most potent: at the beguiling link between the lived philosophy of Han Chinese and the coercive State. The foremost hurdle Zhang faced was ostensibly erected by his fellow humanists who advocated a restoration of Xuetong (governance through Confucian learning).37 To his dismay, much of the public debate at the time on how to revive humanism in China had been sidestepped by the anxiety the humanists harbored towards modern pop culture. Many of them had come to regard the unbridled impact of the commodity culture, now galvanizing the public, as the main culprit in spelling the doom of the Confucian heritage. They tended to neglect the declining but potent ideology deeply engrained

36 Zhang, History of the Soul, 279. 37 Xue tong 学统。See the second roundtable discussion of the Du Shu 读书 forum published in Du Shu (Beijing: The Commercial Press), No. 4, 1994, 46–55.

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in China’s social fabric and their own complicity with it.38 Still feeding on its umbilical cord, they thus overlooked the fact that “social conscience” itself was fatally undermined by assaults of moral and spiritual breakdown. As they dallied with the belief that their outspoken hostility towards commodity culture might spur the besieged “system” to awaken to the danger of an all-out collapse, it proved to Zhang that theirs was a retarding tactic to avoid or postpone a paradigmatic dispute with the dominant ideology.39 For the kind of mental “convulsion” to which Zhang had been exposed made it axiological for his need to confront that “black-out” crisis before undertaking the remaking of his identity. But he endured his with little risk of a total disorientation since deep in his inner horizon there shone a light, faintly but steadily, of a mentor and interlocutor—Lu Xun. With this in mind, we will first take a closer look at Zhang’s essays in Heroes’ Paths in Wilderness, published on the heels of History of the Soul, which reveals to us a rare personal testimony to how Zhang, consciously or otherwise, resorted to an “other” of historical specificity to probe at the depths of his self-reorientation.

Ethical Aporia in Self-Remaking

The truth is that “the other” has been a mental fellow traveler in Zhang’s tenuous but steadfast rebirth all along. The author that wrote History of the Soul indeed grappled with a similar kind of convulsion while giving a voice to the 38

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I share this view with many scholars in China. Cai Xiang, one of the participants of the second Du Shu roundtable, writes that we should not let our objection to the commodified excesses of the public blindfold our inherent alliance with hegemonic ideology. See Du Shu No. 5, 1994, 52. It is worth noting that Zhang had during this period (circa 1984–1989) gone on many investigative tours of China’s northwestern loess highlands, where inhabit a large population of Muslim Chinese. One key fact in Zhang’s resolve to embrace the ontological and ethnic “other” is his resignation from the official system of Writers’ Association under the State Council of the ccp. He formally went free-lance as a writer in late 1989, a decision which has led Stefan Henning to relate Zhang’s writing of the book History of the Soul arguably as a direct response to the State’s resort to violence in quelling the Beijing students’ protest in Tian’anmen as seditious social unrest. I find Henning’s argument weak but I accept the overall orientation of his critique as Zhang literally and figuratively gravitated towards an “Other” by this very publicized move in his career. Stefan Henning, “History of the Soul: A Chinese Writer, Nietzsche, and Tiananmen 1989”, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 2009, 51(3) (London: Cambridge University), 473–501.

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Jahriyya oral history long-encrypted via voluntary silence. Zhang’s critical aim was from the start aligned with a de-centering drift: the retrieval of personal and ethnic memories from the brutal erasure forced on the Sufis by a dictatorial court. In The Little Mud Shed we discussed earlier, that the overbearing subject, be it in the form of human bigotry, cultural tyranny or racial malice, had always been questioned and unsettled, if not openly subverted. Even in his chosen academic field, as mentioned earlier, Zhang never hesitated about targeting the status quo in research methodology and findings, and had singled it out for scrutiny, not as a given, but as a suspect. His grappling with an “othered” self was perhaps the chief reason why he adopted the unusual form of narrating the Jahriyya history mostly as if his own had been embedded in it. All this, however, had been staged as an overture to the climatic encounter between him and Lu Xun. Lu Xun came to be Zhang’s interlocutor of self-orientation and self-fashioning in a quite enigmatic time and setting: between May and August 1988, when Zhang was in the thrall of the writing of the History of the Soul, he was fascinated with the darkness of night: his intense mind would be frequently visited upon by feelings of dread, bitterness and schizophrenia, but he did not seem to be repulsed by them. Instead darkness rendered his mind so malleable and fluid that he felt “as if there were somebody who was other than me in the dark, or that somebody were the ‘true’ me.”40 That figure, Zhang admits, was none other than Lu Xun whose struggle with a similar sort of enigmatic darkness crystallized in the writing of his prose poem collection Ye Cao (Wild grass).41 Zhang readily empathized with Lu Xun as the self-tormented doyen who too was wrestling with an annihilating “void,” and whose truthful insights were so grim, fierce and seditious that only he and a rare few could understand today. In his essays dated during these months, Zhang carried on a nocturnal dialogue with Lu Xun over how to decipher the symptoms of their tortured psyches to get at the taunting but concealed meanings. In self-styled soliloquies that resemble the dramatic monologue, he impersonates one of Lu Xun’s confidants who explicates the latter’s self-parodying agony of a madman’s delirious rhetoric and posture. Yet much of what Zhang lays bare turns out to be in fact the trajectory of his own mental metamorphosis—what he perhaps could not have spelled out openly while recounting the obscured counter-history of the Jahriyya Sufis.42 40 Zhang, The Heroes’ Paths, 90–91. 41 Lu Xun, Ye Cao 野草, trans. Yang Xianyi and Gladys Yang (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1974). 42 See Zhang, “Du ye hai ji” 渡夜海记 (A Crossing of the Nightly Sea), “Fang cao, Ye cao” 芳草、野草 (Sweet Grass, Wild Grass) and “Jing ye gong ke” 静夜功课 (Quiet-night Readings) in his The Heroes’ Paths.

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The revelation is profoundly significant insofar as the dialogue with Lu Xun mobilizes the self/other dynamic to close a disquieting gap in the course of Zhang’s intellectual rebirth. But the extent to which he truly deploys it as the grid (read “methodology” in his terms) poses a challenge, causing him to grapple with the recuperating self before guiding it on a “Hero’s path.” The key to emerging from the void lies in what he calls the “ultimate boundary” bonding a historically determined self with the a priori world of spiritual belief.43 According to Zhang, Lu Xun’s inability to leap from the one to the other results from his lack of “a more overarching frame of reference.” As Zhang further elaborates: He [Lu Xun] is deeply aware of the vermin in Chinese culture; he is embittered by the lack of cause for self-salvation. On the other hand, he detests the myriad forms of worshipping things foreign or overseas. At the same time, he cannot but seek to survive under the chronic conditions of China—as if imprisoned by a magic circle or a ghost wall, the honorable Teacher. . . . fails to find an all-embracing system of belief.44 痛知中国文化之毒，苦无中国自救之理，又憎恶形形色色的媚 外媚洋，而自己最终又不得不向中国这无限的存在去求活—宛 如魔圈，宛如鬼墙，先生孤身一人，。。。他没有找到一个巨 大的参照系。 Evidently, what Zhang finds wanting in Lu Xun is a resolve to disavow the hidden partiality of the Chinese heritage so that the latter could ascend the heights of spiritual transcendence in the guise of “religiosity.”45 But he sheds little light on how such a spiritual conversion, were it to occur, would come to pass across the treacherous turf setting Lu Xun’s ethic ideals apart from the convoluted conditions of his time. Likewise, he seldom explains what enables Lu Xun to break free of an inherent complicity with the indoctrinated Confucian teachings.46 Like Lu Xun, Zhang is inwardly disgusted 43 44 45 46

Zhang, “Ji xiansheng shu” 寄先生书 (To the honorable Mr. Lu Xun) in The Heroes’ Paths. 104. Ibid., 102. The emphasis is mine. The term “religiosity” I use here is admittedly broad and will be explained in detail in the section on my responses to other scholars below shortly. A case in point is Lu Xun’s The Madman’s Diary in which the victimized brother, the Madman, finally begins to suspect that he has himself taken part in eating the flesh of humans such as his younger sister. This scathing self-revelation is proven to be the most provocative and enduring aspect of Lu Xun’s works.

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about the Chinese habitual weakness of Kan sha (watching fellow Chinese being executed by foreign foes) and vows to rid their souls, rather than their bodies, of the insidious atrophy.47 Yet apart from applauding their scathing assaults on the exterior symptoms, neither offers a root-cause diagnosis on the historically honed attributes of the Confucian orthodoxy. On the other hand, there always is a presumed assurance in Zhang’s impassioned assertion of the Jahriyya Sufis against lures of avarice and voracity; by virtue of that, taking it for granted spares him the need to specify that against the complexity of historical in-fights among the Sufis over illicit handlings of internal revenues and donations.48 However, while upholding his personal belief in a taciturn télos that overarches the Jahriyya’s spiritual pursuit, it is indubitable that Zhang also implicates an interrogation of the narrowly asserted teleology embedded in the rash pursuit of wealth and power by the State’s market-centered reform. His interrogation homes right in on the Zhi shi jie ji (the class of the educated elite). Concurrent with his skeptical query of Lu Xun, Zhang embarks on a lone, crusading critique of the elite intellectuals at large, reprimanding them for the deficiencies of moral duplicity and spiritual aphasia they exhibit. Disputing the State’s agenda for attaining social “progress” to the exclusion of spiritual values, he lampoons their hypocrisy, complicity and dissociation from genuine humanism in their “vanguard” roles under the aegis of the State. If we may recall the lesser/greater evolutionary continuum dwelled on in Chapter 4 of this book, we are urged to probe at the slippages and pitfalls in their changed roles. We need to ask: what is it in their current pursuit that has drawn fire from Zhang’s profound suspicion and relentless reprimand? Is it the fact that they have unalloyed faith in the State’s zealous search for power and wealth? 47

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Kan sha 看杀 (watching the execution of one’s own countryman). This widely known phrase originated with Lu Xun’s description of a situation of Kan sha (in slides of newsreel) he experienced in his early life when still studying in a medical academy in Shendai, Japan. Read Rey Chow, Primitive Passions: Visuality, Sexuality, Ethnography, and Contemporary Chinese Cinema (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), 4–11. There have been known rivalries among the Sufis recorded in some histories, most prominent of which is one between the Khufiyyas and the Jahriyyas. It is widely acknowledged that the Khufiyyas have established the Sufi sect in northwestern China for a longer period than the latter, and have amassed more wealth and influence for their mosque communities, therefore, rendering them vulnerable to embezzlements and other corruptions. While it is true that Ma Mingxin, the founder of Jahriyya, led the new sect in its rise against Khufiyyas’ cumbersome rituals and exacting expenses, thus earning the nickname “Religion of the Poor” for Jahriyyas, I deem it wrong and unjust for some historians, both Han and Muslim Chinese, to regard the Qing’s many suppressions of Jahriyya as a necessary strategy to intervene in an intra-sect feud.

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Or is their complicity with the latter’s reckless implementation of pragmatics based on a Faustian pact of despicable opportunism? And should their willing allegiance with the State’s policy be held accountable for the vast and grim erosion of social conscience and a runaway deterioration of ethical values and moral standards? To me these questions force Zhang and his readers alike to determine what one should do, as an individual, in defense of ethical wellbeing and social justice when the State has forfeited the intangible télos that inspires values of moral decency and fairness for people at large; when the ship of State is caught listing from erratic flip-flops over stormy waters, what can the individual count on as a preserver in hopes of survival while grappling to free themselves from the whirlpools of faith loss and bottomless greed? Zhang’s choice is firm and fast: let out cries to awaken “a different imagining of China.”49 As he has broadly hinted, the aim of his vindication of the Jahriyya’s victimized past is not just to identify with a suppressed ethnic subject against a hegemonic state, but more importantly, to help reshape a nationbuilding project oriented in worthy prospects that outweigh and outlast the goal of “letting some get rich first.” His appeal to revive the humanist spirit of the 1980s reveals his deep-seated idealistic objectives geared to all-round social and political transformation; it has hence earned a chastising remark from Jian Xu who pinpoints Zhang’s viewpoint as one that molds the “religiomystic” textual effect into the “aesthetic-ideological” function. Xu then concludes: “The aporia . . . of religious faith and political voice are reconciled not in the real but in the symbolic efficacy of the representation.”50 Whether real or symbolic, however, siding with a historically victimized ethnic minority in post-1989 China had to be, willy-nilly, a de facto act of dissenting with the

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The phrase is from Howard Y. F. Choy “ ‘To Construct an Unknown China’: Ethno-religious Historiography in Zhang Chengzhi’s Islamic Fiction” positions: east asia cultures critique, volume 14, number 3, winter 2006 (Durham: Duke University Press, 699). I agree with the overall drift of Choy’s critique as a response to earlier comments (including my own) on Zhang’s works, but would suggest that he needs to further fine tune his remarks that Chinese intellectuals in general tend to adopt a centrist approach (with racist undertones) when making judgments about ethnic minorities. Jian Xu, “Radical Ethnicity and Apocryphal History: Reading the Sublime Object of Humanism in Zhang Chengzhi’s Late Fictions,” positions: east asia cultures critique, volume 10, number 3, winter 2002 (Durham: Duke University Press, 542. I concur with Xu’s insightful summary, but would differ on his notion as to which is “real” and which “symbolic.” I therefore disagree with Xu’s ensuing reading of Zhang as being responsible for “turning the Jahriyya people into the ‘thing’—a sublime object”. More on this point a little later.

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prevalent sociopolitical order upheld by the State.51 His call to fellow humanists to stem the tides of market-driven pragmatics in favor of a revival of spiritual values was menacingly real in the eyes of those who hopped on the bandwagon of Deng Xiaoping’s renewed call for economic reform—widely known as his brainchild from the 1980s. Overshadowed by the Tiananmen “incident,” the Deng-style reform that ensued turned out to be a contingent and covertly evasive strategy of the State that aimed at stabilizing and prolonging the political status quo in postTiananmen China. Barely surviving its feeble infancy, the reform agenda was now stripped down, again in a top-down fashion by the State, to a unitary and linear mode of “developmental thinking”, i.e., to enforce a no-holds-barred, profit-only new economic order. As Wang Xiaoming wrote in 2003, “. . . what it [the reform] wanted was only efficiency, wealth and economic competition. What it avowed to improve was merely the material livelihood of the society.” And Wang minced no words about its glaring blind sight: “. . . democratic political process, environmental protection, restoration of ethical obligations, education of cultural standards . . . were altogether banished from our horizon.”52 Given this lop-sided objective, it is not surprising that the impact of the reform fostered the subjectivity of the upcoming generations of youth in connection to the State’s narrowly defined goal of modernization whose prosperity was gauged exclusively by material affluence. This is precisely what Zhang chooses to challenge: the fast-track, short-sighted rationale behind this brand of progress. To counter it, he evokes, by way of the figurative narration of Jahriyya’s lofty faith, an overarching frame of reference that defies and detracts it as the only “teleological” path to the Xiao kang (well-off) prosperity as the State ideology espouses it. Thus, his real aim in valorizing the ethnic Other is to re-align with the aesthetic and the ethical orientation, which have never failed

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This is an argument keenly made by Stefan Henning in his journal article “History of the Soul;” see Note 39 above. While assenting to Henning’s revealing reading that selfsacrifice made imaginable by the Jahriyya sufis on an existential level as a political protest against State authoritarianism, I remain yet to be convinced that Zhang’s writing of History of the Soul was a direct response to the CCP’s crackdown on the student protesters on the Tiananmen in June 1989. Wang Xiaoming 王晓明, “New Ideology in China’s 1990s” in Half the Face: New Ideologies in China (London: Oxford University Press, 2003). I find this statement exceptionally pointed and penetrating, and I am all the more amazed by the fact that Wang delivered it back in 2003. In retrospect, we find ourselves now faced with mounting evidence as to what went wrong with the so-called developmental thinking behind the Deng-style economic reform. Translations are mine.

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to undergird the faith of the ethnically oppressed, in order to interrogate and refute the State’s flawed télos for modern progress.

Lu Xun, the Interlocutor

Zhang’s task of fostering new imaginings of China entails that the individuals’ identity formation be re-positioned and re-aligned in contestation with the modern State. This would place him on the same path that Lu Xun once journeyed for decades when critiquing the teleological end of the modern Chinese State in its infancy. So it is to Lu Xun we now return. Zhang’s reading of Lu Xun’s Wild Grass has dubiously brought to the fore his view that Lu Xun is unable to raise his critical acumen to a higher level all because “he failed to find an overarching frame of reference.”53 It indeed is misleading for him to suggest that Lu Xun failed to envision across the gap between what is and what ought to be for he was unaware of the partiality inherent in his native Han culture. I argue to the contrary: precisely because he is critically aware of his Confucian upbringing and Han acculturation, Lu Xun embarks, when writing Wild Grass, on an unrelenting self-scrutiny by way of an interlocutting other. Lu Xun’s uncontested self is time and again thrust into relentless self-interrogation to discern any intrinsic conceptual drawbacks as the self is being refashioned through a dialogic interaction with the other(s), thereby undoing the one-way submission to the State’s unitary subject.54 To construe such a dialogic skepticism as Gui qiang (imprisoned in ghost walls) would be an inadequate observation of Lu Xun’s self-reflexive vision. We have come to realize that May Fourth writers, in general, tended to bracket out in their writing the concrete feelings, impulses and vexations they experienced during similar moments of confronting their identity void. For what these writers pursued was a rationally contrived mold of linear progression (e.g., the lesser/greater continuum) which effaced the individual in his/ her merging ascent to a subjectivity allegorically overarching as a national destiny. The latter would eventually absorb the situated being of the individual, thereby obscuring the interactive agency fielded by the concrete, the contingent and even the primordial; thus whatever he/she encountered as the continuum unfolded would consequentially be offset by the primacy and grandeur 53 54

See Notes 45 and 49. The quote is from Zhang, “To the honorable Mr. Lu Xun” in The Heroes’ Paths. 102. My reading is based, among others, on two major essays, i.e., “Fu chou” 复仇 (Revenge) and “Ying zi de gao bie” 影子的告別 (Shadow’s Farewell) from Lu Xun’s Wild Grass.

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of historical determinism. We need not look far to see ample literary precursors in Lu Xun’s short stories which testify that Lu Xun remained ever vigilant against fostering the identity of the individual along such totalizing schemes. His works of fiction as well as Za wen (miscellaneous essays) are peppered with dagger-like jibes at the all-encompassing May Fourth subjectivity. A case in point is the typical narrative closure Lu Xun carefully crafted for his short stories, a closure that reveals the contestation and vacillation at work in his evervigilant mind. Mirroring his awareness of both the contingent and ideological, Lu Xun would conclude these works by appending a positive ending to a largely anticlimactic story line, so that the reader, on the one hand, is made aware of the discrepancy between narrator’s internal inclinations and the external demands of his time. The author, on the other hand, uses such an “impairing” appendage to disclose the open-ended contestation of his interior world.55 Zhang’s ambivalence with Lu Xun’s “tentative” endings points us to the necessity to “dialogize” the self/other dichotomy as Bakhtin instructs us.56 For only a critical, open-ended and interactive dialogue between the self and the other(s) can help avert the one-way rush to a conceptual dead-end. As a dialogic exchange diffuses the subsuming gaze of the unitary subject, it also undercuts the attempt of any single subject to force others into the orbit of his own teleological scheme. This essentially constitutes the gravitational pull that draws Zhang to Lu Xun: initiating an inner dialogue between the individual and his/her spiritual belief signifies a crucial first step to resist the homogenizing drift of a positivist télos. But more needs to be done to keep it afoot: Zhang should see to it that such an initial gain be steered off ambiguity to end up in a mere reversal of the self/other dichotomy, i.e., turning the center/periphery on its head, but leaving the unjust power relationship intact. As a conceptual grid, notably, the self/other dialectic has always proved susceptible to a positivist rationale. We are reminded of Gladney’s criticism of the Hegelian dialectic, which results in “a negation of the prior subject with the resolution of a new synthetic form.”57 For instance, in his quasi-philosophical writings in the 1940s, Mao Zedong made it a rallying call to strive for synthesis out of contradiction/unity dichotomy, and his unitary ideal still leaves us tussling 55

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Marston Anderson offers a most brilliant study of Lu Xun’s use of “appendaging” for his short stories. See Marston Anderson, The Limits of Realism: Chinese Fiction in the Revolutionary Period (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), Introduction, 1–26. Mikhail M. Bakhtin expounds and renovates the self/other dialectic in, among other works, “Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity,” Art and Answerability, 22–27. See also my remarks in the two chapters of the Introduction. Gladney, ed. Making Majorities, 121.

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with its lingering shadow of unidirectional progress and the totalizing synthesis of self/other, subject/object relationship. True to his keen mindset, Lu Xun unmistakably felt the menace of an overarching teleology of becoming modern, one that was instigating China to desire a coveted berth in the global alliance of capitalistic modernity. Barricaded between a Soviet-led Comintern and the Euro-American Free West, he did his utmost to fend off the authoritarian State under the gmd on the right and the rising but dictatorial ccp under Mao on the left. He bore the brunt of a confluence of sinister assaults and ominous fawning, but he never wavered in his focus: to persuade the educated elite of the ineluctable need for other frames of reference for leading China to a modern condition best geared to her uniqueness and contingency. His dedication to the task was best illustrated in his doggedly enduring the endless “see-saw” ordeals revealed via the persona in the Wild Grass essays.58 Through self-cleansing crucibles, the mettle of Lu Xun’s individuality is being refashioned via the lenses and voices of other beings despite their difference, tension and even hostile resistance. How he traverses the darkening voids and emerges in a new phase of life is perhaps best summarized in these words found in his “Foreword”: The past life has died. I exult over its death, because from this I know that it once existed. The dead life has decayed. I exult over its decay, because from this I know that it has not been empty.59 Seemingly tautological at the first glance, he interjects between life and death, decay and existence, being empty and being fulfilling, and then embeds a forward movement that signals progress of a different sort: its ability to differentiate is surely predicated upon self-negation alternating with self-rejuvenation. His essays are teeming with such brilliant hermeneutics—narrated in a tempo that moves a step forward and then a step back, followed by two steps forward. Ontologically speaking, it exhibits precisely the reciprocal rounds of

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Ban Wang, Illuminations from the Past: Trauma, Memory and History in Modern China (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004). Wang devotes the entire first chapter to exploring Lu Xun’s unique approach to the evolutionist theme in the May Fourth Movement, and his discussion of Wild Grass is especially insightful. 51–57. Lu Hsun (Xun), Wild Grass (Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1974), 3. Translation is by Feng Yu-sheng, which had never appeared in print prior to the 1974 edition. But the fact that Feng asked Lu Xun to write a Preface for the English edition proves that he was among Lu Xun’s contemporary allies.

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dialogic interaction in a communicative act.60 It is such an insurmountable loss that Lu Xun’s search was brought to a screeching halt when fatal diseases outpaced his questing journey. But there was plenty in these essays to avow Lu Xun’s recourse to interactive dialogic with other(s) and, in contrast, nothing to insinuate that he would disallow this dialogic process in the name of synthesis once and for all. If anything, his persona stands poised to reject the disembodiment of the self in his eager embrace of the idealized other or to resist a total submission of the periphery to the center in search of modernity. In a sense, what Lu Xun attempted to shed light on to shock and awaken the educated elites back in Republican China is a precursor to what Zhang is trying to accomplish in order to astonish and sober up the educated elites in the new millennium. But it is alterity rather than lack of overarching ends for embarking on China’s journey to a powerful and wealthy nationhood. What happened to Zhang in 1999 over the editorship of an upcoming magazine looked as though it were a choice of personal belief at first but soon proved to him an epic lesson in choice-making on the national scale.

The Case of the Botched Human Geography

The last millennium closed with a rowdy finale of cultural polemics in China, in which all had to be disputed and aligned anew and in which border-crossing became the rule rather than the exception. As the dispute between the socalled the Xin zuo yi (New Leftists) and the Xin zi you zhu yi (Neo-liberalists) took center stage, the issue of what constitutes China’s modernity revived in the forms of heated pen warfare and media talking points.61 While its media exposure remained volatile and murky for a while, its key issues nonetheless shored up in clear shape. Chief among them was the issue of who should constitute “the people” and to what extent the Deng-styled “middle class” is plausible and legitimate in China’s realignment of social strata as China embraced the new global order of capitalistic modernity. As a concept, the 60

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See Bakhtin, Art and Answerability, 22–27. Read also Howard Choy’s reading of Zhang Chengzhi’s dialogical imaginings via Tzetan Todorov in Choy, “ ‘To Construct an Unknown China’ ” positions, 707. Xin zuo yi 新左翼. In general, these New Leftists include scholars like Xu Angang 许鞍钢, Wang Shaoguang 王绍光, Cui Zhiyuan 崔之元, etc. Xin zi you zhu yi 新自 由主义. The Neo-liberalists include Zhang Wuchang 张五常, Mao yushi 茅于轼, etc. Another key issue that divides the two camps is the orientation of the on-going economic reform: the Neo-liberalists stand for a wholesale restructuring modeled on the Western capitalist market economy whereas the New Leftists call for a renewed socialistic style of economical reform.

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Chinese “middle class,” was being considered China’s willing subscription to the Western-inspired “universality” and her much desired membership in the global club of wealth and power. The divisive issue promptly galvanized the public with a frenzied sense of immediacy and vengeance. It didn’t take long before attitudes and sentiments revolving around the idea of the “people” not only grabbed public media “hot spots” of the day, but churned out waves of nostalgic memoirs of bygone eras. A case in point is how in 1999 the publishers of the Sanlian Joint Publishing House abruptly withdrew a newly launched journal called Ren wen di li za zhi (Human geography) and how it precipitated a series of cultural feuds over the journal’s editorial principles and readership. This is where Zhang, once the editor of this short-lived journal, entered the fray.62 Zhang Chengzhi was at first asked to take charge of the editorial duties of the new Human Geography by the Sanlian publishers in early 1998, and to the interested reading public, no one could be a more fitting candidate for the job: Zhang had participated in numerous archeological excavations and research as a doctoral student and later as a professional anthropologist. He had studied and researched the Altaic and Turkic languages spoken in China’s north­western regions, and had personally lived, traveled widely through and written prolifically about these and other geographical areas. Needless to say, Sanlian offered Zhang the editorship precisely on the merits of these qualities. What the publishers did not foresee, however, was Zhang’s divergent views on what human geography meant, how local travels, field work and research of ­indigenous customs and rites should be conducted, and who would hold the key to the essence of geographical, anthropological and ethnographical knowledge at theses locales. In the meantime, Sanlian officials were lured by the prospects of a large-size urban readers’ market if they imported a world-class magazine such as the American National Geographic. The same publishers were therefore under enormous pressure to make a swift decision to market a Chinese “copycat” of the American mega-journal for profit. Hence, the soon-tocome split between the Sanlian publishers and Zhang that caused the former to cancel the journal’s publication right after the debut issue, its only issue, and inadvertently forced the latter to rise to his own defense in public. Zhang’s defense came in the form of essays collectively entitled “A Folder on Human Geography” published in late 1999 which include two letters from the 62

Ren wen di li za zhi 人文地理杂志。SDX (Sanlian) Joint Publishing Company 三联书店 出版社 is a renowned press as old as the history of modern China. Consisted originally of three separate publishing houses, i.e., Life, Reading and New Learning, Sanlian was merged into one conglomerate press shortly after and chose Peking for its headquarters in 1932.

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editor-in-chief and an editorial feature penned by himself.63 Brief and succinct, these writings mark a critical turn in Zhang’s already embroiled career. He had lately resurfaced from a hiatus following a public feud over Chinese intellectuals’ capitulation to consumerist culture in 1995. While echoes of his mock heroic diatribe (I despise surrender . . . I loathe intellectuals who have made a career out of capitulation) were still stirring the hearts of some and vexing the minds of others, Zhang’s call to his peer contributors to forge a humanistic perspective on geography conveys a more composed, if still combative, figure of public conscience.64 He has muffled his verbal jibes on the intellectual notables who had aligned themselves with the nouveau riches—the rising commercial and entrepreneurial class; he has toned down his critical reviews with persuasive and cogent rhetoric. He has finally shed the mental coziness of an enclosed Jahriyya community and extended his horizon beyond a solitary enclave of the religious faith. Yet, he has never lowered his guard against any form of ethnic or cultural hegemony in the guise of “scientific” truths or social “progress.” He speaks candidly to convey his suspicion of being “stalked” by the imminent intrusion of National Geographic and points out the danger of “copycatting the American-type of global outlook adopted by the National Geographic.” In a memo addressed to the Sanlian publishers, he stresses the crucial need of “giving voice to the toiling masses who speak from within their native communities, from within poor, weaker nations.”65 What distinguishes his renewed humanistic concerns more than before is a keen urge to dialogue with commoners and intellectual peers, across disciplines and stay in close proximity with the real. I will now spell out his position on human geography in three aspects and relate them to his overall view of humanism. With the global context in view, Zhang takes stock of the prevailing intellectual trends and injects a critical awareness of the affective—he terms it Zhu guan—to head off a growing trend of professional, disinterested expertise in the fields of humanity studies. In his editorial named “Thoughts on a methodology informed by human geography,” he critiques positivist thinking hastily adopted as the locus of human sciences

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These essays are included in Zhang Chengzhi, Holding up the Pen as a Banner 以笔为旗 (Beijing: China Social Sciences Press, 1999), 112. 64 Zhang Chengzhi, Wu yuan de si xiang 无援的思想 (Unassisted Thoughts), (Changsha: Hunan Art and Literature Press, 1999). Quoted by Geremie Barmé, In the Red: On Contemporary Chinese Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 304–309. 65 Zhang, Holding up the Pen as a Banner, 112.

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by chastising its role in doing “field work.”66 Finding fault with the technical meaning of this catch-all term, he points out that the writers’ telescopic and impersonal view of local ethnological “sites” allows only a technologized gaze of the indigenous cultures as fixated objects and fails to distinguish live human beings with on-the-ground settings. Focusing on their routines of using premade questionnaires and imported procedures, he questions: “how can the researcher ever ‘get a thorough feel’ for the essential questions without putting his/her own life on the line?”67 With this last query, Zhang echoes his earlier rebuttal of the kind of “intellectual escapism” found among many intellectuals in the early 1990s.68 Initially a survival tactic to avert political repression in post1989 China, this trend gained currency as some intellectuals and professionals who used to engage in political activism now withdrew into secluded fields of specialist research. They believed that this was where they could lay claim to intellectual excellence as their regained moral high grounds and where they could practice professional elitism as a testimony to their social validity. These so-called “New Scholars” valorized scholarly endeavor as “not just a matter of knowledge or profession, but more fundamentally, a form of life choice and value attainment.”69 Alongside this act of self-authorization, they also sported a sweeping disdain toward mass culture or other non-professional cultures. Rather than adopting it as a maneuver of resisting widespread moral failure, their shared mentality much resembled getting a membership in a “country club” that morphed into collective escapism in the guise of professional disinterest. Zhang’s editorial also rebukes a voyeuristic view that dissects and colonizes the local geographical and ethnographical knowledge in the name of a onesize-fits-all homogenized civilization. He indicts this “colonialist” mindset detected among ethnographers who are too blinded to discern the Orientalist encroachment upon local resources. It is well known that Zhang openly detests the ethnocentrism of the Euro-American kind furtively harbored by today’s Chinese academics trained overseas. Prompted by his ethnic stance 66 67 68

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I translated Zhang’s phrase Zhu guan 主观 into the affect rather than the more literal “subjective” because that is exactly what he is addressing. Ibid., 116. Ibid., p. 115. Dai Jinhua 戴锦华. I am quoting the phrase from Dai Jinhua’s journal article “Hidden Narratives: The Politics of Mass Culture in the 1990s.” Her view is critically assessed by Chen Jianhua 陈建华 in his “Local and Global in Narrative Contestation: Liberalism and the New Left in Late-1990s China” in Journal of Asian Pacific Communication, Vol. 9, Nos. 1 & 2, 113–29. Chen Pingyuan, “Thoughts on Research of Scholarship History,” Xue ren I, 2–6. Translation is mine.

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as a Muslim Chinese, Zhang intentionally launches a crusade among his fellow Muslims against the Euro-American intellectual order of the world. Long before the first public debate over such issues took place, his History of the Soul brought the “impartial” search for historical truths under critical scrutiny. Positing the ethnic unconscious as the testing site, Zhang assaulted the falsely fixed standards in documenting Hui histories whose authority had been an accomplice to the chauvinistic State ideology. He berated the methodological status quo in Muslim Chinese scholars’ historiography for tailoring local and ethnic memories to fit the prejudice of its hegemonic control. In the same vein, he now calls into question the validity of collecting and editing historical documents according to empiricist standards, chastising its total submission to a positivist view of historical development via the lens of professional objectivity. He expressly targets the renowned Hui historian Yang Huaizhong whose investigation of munafeles—Hui collaborators with Manchu and Han rulers—had, in Zhang’s view, internalized the reigning codes of the hegemonic power-knowledge alliance. Despite Yang’s refined appraisal and extensive research, Zhang reproves his aloof standpoint: “On the one hand, you try to reflect critically your tradition and yourself; on the other, you want to bring to light the suppression and violation committed against the human soul. How can the kind of subject you’re studying still be the same historiography?”70 If, in Zhang’s mind, Yang had yet to shake off the false sense of ethnic anonymity, Zhang does not make it any easier for himself when faced with the historical injustice inflicted upon the Jahriyyas. At the Jinji Bao (the Jinji Fort), a historical site of many quelled Hui uprisings in 19th century, he could not help but chide himself for not “avenging the historical wrongs” but followed the instincts of a professional historian. He confesses in a 1996 essay entitled “Odes to Waves”: It so happened that I was born of Hui parentage, yet I attempted to skirt around it, but could not escape this historical site—the wintry mist shrouding Jinji Bao pounded me wave after wave, pressing me to make a

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Munafeles is the Muslim term for Hui Chinese collaborators 回奸. Yang Huizhong, also known as Yang Mohammed Usiar, is a well-known Hui historian who has done crucial research on 18th Century Jahriyya sufi uprisings. Zhang’s critical comments aim at his compromised stand at the behest of the ccp government. These remarks appear in The Heroes’ Paths in Wilderness, 125.

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pledge, to declare a nietie, to make good the pledge of being dedicated to the people I rather casually took for granted years ago.71 偏偏我又出生在回族的血胎之中，我想躲绕但我走不出这块土 地了—金积堡冬日的迷茫四野用大潮大涌击打着我，要我明 誓，要我举意，要我实行当年我粗心大意就嚷出的为人民 的宣言。 This is not an occasional outburst of emotions for the sake of letting off his own guilt. This is a sincere self-reproach to prod himself into keeping his ethnic memory and affective empathy from being worn thin by his years of academic studies, field work and research. Contrary to the search for “disinterest” and neutrality, Zhang opts valiantly for the role of ethical and social activism: to knock down barriers erected by “objective” histories, penetrate the walls of political and religious phobias and uncover the buried truths of ethnic repression and violence. One might fault Zhang’s view of historical scholarship as being emotive and skewed, thus running the risk of demeaning historiography into personal vendetta. But in the process of remaking ethnic identities, Zhang believes, it is precisely the affective and the personal that keep our ethical awareness alive and urge us not to turn a blind eye to subjugation of ethnic distinctions to the reductive criteria of universal knowledge. Among the editorial standards he proposes, Zhang focuses on the journal’s urgent need to “speak directly from within the native indigeneity.”72 As it happened, he entered the debate of “the ultimate concern” of the mid-1990s on his own terms. He put forward an ethnographical approach consisted of values, such as emotive penchant, ethnic lineage and prefigured intelligibility, that functioned in a nexus of ethnic and cultural immersion. He then probed at the myth of setting ahistorical, values-free modes of professionalism by means of Yuan chu zhi wen (originary questions). He asks, for instance, “how do you account for your being in the face of your own soul when there is nothing scientific or ideological to fend you off from this ultimate accountability?”73 To him what motivates his ultimate humanist concern is his Hui ethnicity. It is thus the subconscious, “id-like” sentient that lays the ground for one’s 71

Jinji Bao 金积堡 is located near Wuzhong in the Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region. “Nietie” is a sinicized Islamic term for “taking a devotional vow.” It is also known as Juyi 举意 in Chinese. The quotation is from Zhang, Unassisted Thoughts, 37. 72 Zhang, Holding up the Pen as a Banner, 112. 73 Refer to Note 32 above. Zhang, The Heroes’ Paths in Wilderness, 125.

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ethnic/cultural conditioning and in turn brings it to bear upon one’s historical awareness. Likewise, born an ethnic “other” predisposes Zhang to be watchful of the State’s covert practice of ethnocentrism in the name of social progress and scientific rationality. Egged on by his renewed ethnic ethos, Zhang had no qualms in issuing a call to all historians: “. . . disinherit the whole positivistic baggage of the conventional historiography, and seek out the complex intuitive faculty of your individual soul.”74

Who Constitute “We the People”?

A great deal of ruckus was raised over Zhang’s “obsessive” emphasis on “purity” and “truthfulness” as the locus of the Jahriyya’s overarching faith. He was disparaged by some critics as “the most self-satisfied” man in China today, due precisely to his unalloyed adoration of the close-knit and reclusive Jahriyya community.75 So why so much hostility towards Zhang? Did he hit a raw nerve with his momentary outburst of religious zeal? Is he an inveterate believer in the Maoist-style authoritarianism? Should his concept of Min zhong (the common people) and his attempted “revival” of it be branded as “retrogressive fascism,” colliding head-on with the fledgling “middle class”? We might find the answers by returning to Terdiman’s notion of “interlocking” those whose historical sense enables them to “think problematically” about the past and those whose sense of history evinces a purposeful working-out linking the past to the future through the present.76 We notice that a number of télos-minded intellectuals take this interlocutor’s stand, giving a boost to the now beleagered spirit of humanism; at the same time, they remain wary of any likely lineage with Western binary thinking and fielded nuanced claims to the ultimate worth of humanism. Wang Xiaoming, for one, emphasizes the personal aspect of harboring fundamental concerns about humanity and argues: “you can only search for the ultimate value from your personal experience; what you find is 74 Ibid. 75 Zhang Yuanshan 张远山, “Zhang Chengzhi—the Most Self-Pleased Writer” at Xin yu si dian zi wen ku 新语丝电子文库 (@ WWW.XYS.ORG), listed under Zhang Yuanshan. Harsh criticism and sometimes vicious slander were leveled at Zhang publically and in private at this time. Read Chapter 3 in Wang Yuechuan 王岳川, Chinese Mirror Images: Cultural Studies of the 1990s (Beijing: Central Translation Bureau Publishing House, 2001), 32–33. 76 Min zhong 民众. Terdiman, Present Past, 38–42. Refer also to Note 23 in Chapter 2, Introduction.

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your own interpretation of what the ultimate value is, not the ultimate value itself.”77 Akin to Wang’s view, Zhang’s attitude towards human geography shares a sense of human finality in that it favors a self-motivated quest for moral virtues, both pragmatic and idealistic. In fact, what he aspired to more openly than all others—the genealogical blended with the visionary—proves his exceptional insight for closing the chasm, welding a genealogical de-legitimation of inherited structures of hegemonic power with his voluntary, faith-motivated dedication to the underlying télos that leads historical changes. In reality, Zhang has doggedly kept alive public-spirited criticism of social ills and moral depravities despite the fact that, as a free-lance writer, he needed to survive on his book contracts and revenues. He has shown extraordinary ethical acumen and fortitude in resisting the lures of fast money and meteoric fame, which could easily come his way if he wanted. What those seekers of human goodness and inner sublimation failed to hang onto in the face of impressionable public opinions, Zhang has indeed carried on with farther insight and steadier resolve thanks to his dialogical grasp of the modern teleology: to both de-legitimate erroneous historiography and affirm overarching goals of becoming. Zhang senses that the real aim of those who retreat to their arm-chair studies of the human condition is to avoid social impact and ethical obligation, and he detests their doing it so to avoid being an accomplice to the State’s hegemony. But his most scathing exposé has been reserved for the “mainstay” intellectuals rather than the money-grabbing nouveau riches or the newly-minted class of urban consumers. It is these intellectual elite’s uncritical embrace of the reformist adage Yu shi ju jin (To march in step with the time) that have borne the brunt of his fiery onslaught.78 As stated earlier, their emulation of the Euro-American modernity gave rise to a vaguely defined “universalism”, i.e., market-driven economic liberalization. Buoyed by the economic booms in urban and coastal China in the 1980s and 1990s, the core ideas of this universalism tilted heavily towards the instigation of a rapid mimicry of the Western model of industrialization and urbanization in disregard of China’s own indigenous conditions. Not surprisingly, its followers fell madly for the “miracles” of copycatting Western, especially American, technology, expertise and professional institutions. In the case of the Sanlian publishers, their most 77 78

Zhang Rulun 张汝伦 et al., “The Humanist Spirit: Whether and How Is It Possible?— Reflections on the Humanist Spirit, Part I” in Dushu 3, 2002, 3–13. Yu shi ju jin 与时俱进 has been a rather vague and unfocused adage for the reform era. Basically, the crucial meaning is for China to march in step with the rest of the world, which can be easily taken to mean so many things in so different contexts.

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plausible mimicry of The National Geographic consisted mainly of launching a journal with a superpower aperture, a global readership and a “universal” gauge for assessing (read discriminating) the various cultures and civilizations being written about. Truth be told, this is the chief reason behind their push for a world-class journal: it can assist the predominantly Han Chinese State in regaining an ethnocentric mode of self-empowering in a renewed China-West rivalry. It is therefore not hard to comprehend why Zhang’s editorial principles made him probably the least desirable candidate they deemed fit to take charge of the new journal. Zhang’s most powerful self-defense is his response by going public with the entire botched case. His writing a counterhistory of the Jahriyya Sufis has already spoken convincingly to undergird his critique of the unjust relationship between the Chinese State and the ethnic minorities. To counter the veiled aim of Sanlian publishers, he now presses on to drive home the more crucial aim which is, as Ban Wang says, . . . to hold up the universal principle more vigorously, and to hold the violators accountable to this principle, so that both the strong and the weak are constrained by it, as one of many, as equal members of the world community.79 Here Zhang upholds the universal principle of fairness and equality for all, but stacks up the ethnocentric practices of National Geographic against it before revealing the upshot of his criticism: the knowledge of the historical geography is underwritten by a Euro-American ethnocentrism, therefore, it falls short of being universal. Anticipating Ban Wang’s discerning outcry: “it is . . . not universal enough,” Zhang believes that the imported model of economic liberalization, as replicated by the Chinese reformists, is in dire need of being extended beyond the materialistic goal to encompass ethical wellbeing, social justice and intellectual enlightenment in actual historical practice.80 He is not as biased against material gains and social gentrification as some critics have labeled him to be. Rather, he is unyielding towards the educated elites’ cowardice in ignoring facts of social malfunction and shunning rampant injustice 79 Wang, From the Past, 27. 80 Ibid. I echo Wang’s insight, but would like to add that efforts to compel the center of power to expand and implement universalism thoroughly often start with deconstructing historical wrongs and injustice by embracing alterity within the center, as attested in Wang’s own criticism of Fukuyama’s “There is no alternative.” (TINA).

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as a result of the ill-advised economic practices, and he is most relentless in indicting what some of them have committed in inciting the blindly wrecking “market forces” and the despicable deals under the new wealth and power alliance. In 1999, Zhang wrote Zai zhi xian sheng shu (Again to the honorable teacher,) a sequel to his 1991 tribute to Lu Xun, in which he argues, in much sharper wording, why Lu Xun’s relentless social and cultural crusades are more relevant and immediate in China of the 1990s.81 He writes: The populace in this nation have little power or scarce hope. But they are quick to discover: when they suffer and despair under the heavy burden of tyrannical rule of the bureaucratic few, “the intellectual class” turn out to be, after politicians and money, yet another cruel oppressor. The broad masses want nothing more than to be fed and clothed. But they need the intellectuals to keep alive the basic and constant criticism of the social elite and the powerful. Otherwise, their plight would be unthinkable.82 民众在这个国度无权无望。但他们发觉：当他们在暴政官僚的 重压下绝望痛苦的时候，“智识阶级”  却是政治金钱之后的又 一个凶恶的压迫者。大众但求温饱而已，但他们需要智识分子 始终对社会和权力保持基本的批判火力。否则，底层的处境不 堪设想。 We, as readers of Lu Xun’s essays, are immediately struck by the familiar tone, the similar wording and the keen views that have implausibly found their way into Zhang’s writing over half a century later. Does this make him a solitary seeker of moral perfection in a morally promiscuous age? Zhang’s editorial for Human Geography does not refrain from raising doubts about a pure, unbiased ethnography that can be founded and validated without being tested by the wisdom of those who inhabit the sites. On the other hand, he is one of the few who candidly defends the pivotal role of having faith, be it idealist or religious, as the ultimate end of a fulfilled humanity. One might ask: is Zhang grandstanding while basking in Lu Xun’s aura? I think not. Reasons are many, but a foremost one proves that Zhang’s detractors deserve his feisty rebuttal. They have unjustly accused him of indulging in “authoritarian” nostalgia, lingering in the Red Guard spirit of the Cultural Revolution, and inciting ethnic nationalism to destabilize China’s new 81 “Zai zhi xiansheng shu” 再致先生书. Zhang, Unassisted Thoughts, 102. 82 Ibid.

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economic growth.83 Such accusations prove, ironically, the warped fruits borne out of a manic frame of mind that has constantly prompted the hegemonic ideologies to claim their “vanguard” leadership guiding the Chinese nation in social transformation. Only this time around, they actually “lead” by way of tailoring their developmental thinking to fit in the unidirectional orbit of capitalistic modernity. At the behest of this new global order, it follows, their vanguard role assumes a dualistic function: when facing the advanced industrial nations, they would look up and ahead in admiration, intoning something like what Spartacus once said: “We are what you were; we will be what you are.” In doing so, they cannot help but revitalize the ancient jungle law that lay at the root of the ignoble annals of historical conquests and exploitation by Western imperialism and colonialism. When turning around to face other(s) at home, in contrast, be it the ordinary Chinese, the ethnic minorities, the frontier regions, etc., they would be enticed to visualize these as undeveloped “alterity,” which, according to this teleological causality, i.e., being linearly ahead or behind, is apt to convert the human condition into one fraught with discrepancy, unevenness and regression. These in turn would become the grounds of justification for the few ahead to cheat, exploit and pillage the many behind. I find it truly mortifying how this evolutionist law is hijacked to mutilate the Enlightenment ideal of self-determination and equality for all human beings, and how Western teleology is turned into a tool to splinter and hierachize the social fabric, rendering them malleable for a born-again jungle law of letting “the rich get ahead, the poor stay behind.”84 Given this newly revived discriminatory order, Zhang finds himself the lone outcast doubly ostracized: he is concurrently targeted as a suspect of ethnic unrest and religious extremism by the pro-State elites, and as a stumbling block in the path of commercialism fueled by post-modernist theorists. It is this warped developmental pragmatic that has coupled the State’s ethnocentric hegemony with the consumerist mayhem driven by the urbanization boom. Zhang’s detractors hit the same accusatory note from the angles of both 83

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Zhang has categorically refuted these accusations in his Mo nong shi jing wu yu 墨浓时 惊无语 (When the ink is ready, I am utterly wordless) in Zhang, Holding up the Pen as a Banner, 49–51. These passages have since been quoted by many of his supporters to disclose how misleading and unjust the accusations are in their groundless assaults on and senseless smear of Zhang’s character. I am drawing in part on the insightful point Ban Wang makes about “not liberal enough.” I take his “not enough” to mean that the Western Enlightenment ideal of equality and selfautonomy must be applied fully, not just to all without bias towards any person or nation, but to the Western powers themselves, to compel them to embrace those differences that are premised on divergent paths of evolutionary change. Wang, From the Past, 27.

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the elites’ moral dislocation and the public’s ethical dysfunction, a sometimes odd but flawed wedlock between China’s ideological domination and consumerist ambience from mid-1980s to the new millennium. But I would emphasize that Zhang is neither a firebrand of egalitarian idealism nor an extremist mired in religious fundamentalism. His self-styled apologist persona may appear a tad zealous and haughty, yet he has never claimed to be a self-righteous, narcissistic paragon of spiritual purity and moral perfection. He is more bent on waging a “mobile warfare” in the Gramchean sense: sniping at the unjust and the corrupt here and there, and forever beaming his discerning sight onto the noble and unselfish in the interest of the society’s greater good. While the cultural debate in the 1990s struck a bitter discord between the Neo-liberalists and the New Leftists over the ultimate concerns of the humanist spirit, Zhang has been relentlessly lucid and unambiguous as to what humanist spirit constituted—always be the social conscience for defending the disadvantaged and the impoverished in China.85 Although in terms of who “we the people” are, he stands in close proximity to the New Leftists, he does not convey his views as if he were parroting the latter’s. Rather, he distills the critical efficacy in his dispute with the misleading “developmental thinking” and implants it in his critical strategy as a mobile yet vital position. To engage in a dialogue with these lowly masses, he observes, is for the intellectuals “to forever keep a watchful custody of such people against the socially established and the powerful.”86 Before the sound and fury over the botched editorship of Human Geography died down, Zhang was on the road again, more focused than ever, doing what the Sanlian publishers deprived him a chance of doing; his perennial geo-cultural travels are now increasingly extended overseas, crisscrossing China’s hinterland and frontier ethnic minorities to explore their historical roots, livelihoods, cultural impact, especially their interconnections with the enriching heritages of Islam.87 Contrary to what he sometimes

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For further readings on this dispute, read Li Shitao, ed. Zhi shi feng zi li chang: zi you zhi yi zhi zheng yu zhongguo si xiang jie de feng hua 知识分子立场: 自由主义之争与中国思 想界的分化 (The position of Chinese intellectuals: The divided intellectual circles over the issue of liberalism) Changchun: Shi dai wen yi chu ban she, 2000. Zhang, “Again to the honorable teacher” in Unassisted Thoughts, 104. I have written about Zhang’s writings on his travel and cultural explorations in North Africa, Southern Europe and the Middle Eastern region in a piece on his contribution to human geography and humanist ecology elsewhere. After much deliberation, I have decided that since 2005 Zhang’s writings have shifted the focus to the human-land affinity, they will be included in my next book project on China’s ecological humanity, one of the pivotal themes for the fast-emerging field of human ecology.

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claims—to jettison the baby of the educated elites with the bathwater of “unreligious” impurity, Zhang has always shown us, by way of his lived faith, how to re-orient our self-making with a vision that is expository but not dispossessing, diagnostic but not agnostic, and independent but not self-insulated. The key to his reinvention of self-identity is a firm commitment to engage aggressively in the voice and presence of the other(s) in and around one’s living habitats for the family and the communities, while never lose sight of an overarching frame of reference for ethical and political orientation. It is by negotiating between these stances of individual conviction that Zhang aims to maintain a vigilant and constructive horizon by which we can redress the wrongs of social injustice. If we may allude to Wang Xiaoming again, whose studies persistently track the evolving trends of the intellectual elites throughout the entire decade over the turn of the new millennium, this is what he found in 2008: . . . the endearing means in which the majority of Chinese identify with the State of ‘China’ remains deeply inclined towards the economic-only, or even the materialistic-only. . . . Much in the same manner in which the ownership of cars and apartment homes effectively constitutes the awareness of our individuality, salaries, central business zones, airfares for tourist travels overseas nowadays have begun to motivate our identification with the “State.”88 。。。那个主体人群体认“中国”之可爱的途径，依然表现出深 刻的唯经济—甚至是唯物质—倾向，。。。就像公寓和汽车有力 地塑造了我们对于“个人”的体认一样，薪水、中央商务区、出 国旅游的机票等等，也开始有力地牵引我们对“国家”的体 认了。 Wang’s persistent study, rewarded with penetrating insight, advocates for the moral and political terrains Zhang’s strenuous journey has traversed. Despite the fanfare about the gdp-driven “rise” of China on the global stage, as Wang hints at above, the exterior glamour of its success can hardly paper over the acute concerns over the neglected costs, losses and impending crises the State faces and the people (the large, discontent public) endure daily in broad social sectors besides the economy. It is irrefutable to construe from the above a total88

Wang, Xiaoming, “Reality and Expectations for China’s Identity Today: Thoughts after the Earthquake Disasters in Sichuan, Shaanxi, and Gansu” Frontiers 天涯, volume 3, 2008. Translation is mine.

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izing collapse between the State’s unchecked pragmatism and the individual’s coerced loyalty and commitment to the State. This signals a contractual basis for exchange of service and benefits rather than an ethnic, linguistic and cultural sense of belonging between the individual and the State. It has turned the modern citizenship into a lucrative deal binding the individuals (mostly unban Chinese) who are attracted to the consumerist allures of the State’s brand of progress conditionally as in, if you will, a seller-buyer relationship over commercial products. Put in perspective, Zhang’s acerbic reprimand is vindicated; we have put ourselves on the spot: is it not time for us to reconsider Zhang’s “apocryphal history,” albeit told in jarring, zealous and radicalized notes at the time, and genuinely savor his intellectual foresight, moral courage and personal integrity? Are we not ready to admit today that we should have heeded critics like Zhang rather than accusing them of being too zealous, too extreme, and overly idealistic back then?89 We realize, with remorse, that we all owe them an intellectual debt, a debt deserving to be repaid most copiously by emulating their valor, insight and uprightness. In the same vein, instead of mistaking Zhang as the “fanatical,” “populist” and “anti-progressive” crusader, we do ourselves a service by bolstering our moral strengths, sharpening our critical sensibility and returning to humankind the long deserted posts of intellectual foresight, moral guardianship and social conscience.

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Another vocal and prominent critic like Zhang Chengzhi at the time is Zhang Wei 张炜 (1956–), a renowned writer in Shandong, China. Authoring a series of scathing commentaries in journals, Zhang Wei addressed similar issues vehemently and defended what he termed the “spirit of humanism.” One work that collects these social commentaries is Zhang Wei, Returning home in Anxiety and Anger 忧愤的归途 (Beijing, Huayi Publishing House, 1995). I, for one, regretfully admit my mistaken view about Zhang Chengzhi expressed in my previous writings in which I wrote unfairly about one problematic aspect of his self-reinvention and used terms and phrases such as “creating the atmosphere of ‘awe and fear’.”

Glossary A Anhui

安徽

B Ba Bai lian cheng gang Bai lian gang Bai lian wei gang Bajin Bao’er Bao Qing tian Beijing Bei piao Bian Bian li zhi chu Bie ba ni zi ji dang hui shi’er Bi’er Bu zhuo xiang er zhuo xiang

跋 百炼成钢 百炼钢 百炼为刚 巴金 保尔 包青天 北京 北漂 辨 便利之处 别把你自己当回事儿 比尔 不作像而作像

C Caishiji Chang Jung Chang shi Chen Duxiu Chen lun Cheng Fangwu Cheng Hao Cheng Yi Cheng zhong Chen Jianhua Chen Pingyuan Chen Xiaoming

彩石矶 张戎 藏识 陈独秀 沉沦 成仿吾 程颢 程颐 城中 陈建华 陈平原 陈晓明

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glossary Chiang Kai-shek Chi du xin shi Chien tang (Qiantang) Chi guihua Chong su Bao’er kechajin Chou chu Chuang zao she Chun feng chen zui de wan shang Chu shi jian Chu si hai Ch’ü Ch’iu-pai (Qu Qiubai) Cui Zhiyuan

蒋介石 赤都心史 钱塘 迟桂花 重塑保尔-柯察金 抽出 创造社 春风沉醉的晚上 出世间 除四害 瞿秋白 崔之元

D Da cheng qi xin jing lun Da du bi qun, qun bi yi du chang Dai Jinhua Da ji Dan ran Dao Da tong Deng Xiaoping Dezong Ding guaizi Ding Wenjiang Du Ni Huanzhi Duo xing hua Duo yu de hua Du Shu Du ye hai ji

大乘起信经论 大独必群，群必依独成 戴锦华 大己 淡然 道 大同 邓小平 德宗 丁拐子 丁文江 读《倪焕之》 惰性化 多余的话 读书 渡夜海记

E Er mei Er hu E xiang ji cheng

二妹 二胡 饿乡记程

304

glossary

F Fang cao, ye cao Fang Yizhi Fa zhi Feng Guanglian Feng jian Feng Youlan (Feng Yu-lan) Fu chou Fujian Fu Shaoying Fu Sinian Fu zi

芳草、野草 方以智 法制 冯广联 封建 冯友兰 复仇 福建 付绍英 傅斯年 斧子

G Ga Meizi Gang tie shi zen yang lian cheng de Gang tie shi zhe yang lian cheng de Gao Yihan Gemo Gong de Gong li Gong wo Gong yang san shi Gou wei xu diao Guangxu Gui hua Gui qiang Guo wen bao Guo wen hui bian Gu yi yuan kao Guyuan

尕妹子 钢铁是怎样炼成的 钢铁是这样炼成的 高一涵 隔膜 公德 公理 公我 公羊三世 狗尾续貂 光绪 桂花 鬼墙 国文报 国文汇编 古议院考 固原

305

glossary

H Hairui Haiyuan Hangzhou Han-liang Hanshu Han xiao de qin ge Hong Zhicun Hsin Hsin-p’o Hualin shan Huang ni xiao wu Huang wu ying xiong lu Huang zhongze Hui Huo yu Huo zai Hu tong Hu Shi

海瑞 海原 杭州 含量 汉书 寒晓的琴歌 洪志存 心 心波 华林山 黄泥小屋 荒芜英雄路 黄仲则 回 火狱 火灾 胡同 胡适

J Ji Jiang Bingru Jiang Guangci Jiang Hua Jiang Shibiao Jiang Wen Jiang Yihua Jiao dian Jiao nei ji yi Jiao Xun Jie shao yi ge wen xue de gong shi Jin Jinggang Jinggang shan Jing ye gong ke

计 蒋冰如 蒋光慈 蒋华 蒋士彪 姜文 姜义华 焦点 教内记忆 焦循 介绍一个文学的公式 金朝 井冈 井冈山 静夜功课

306 Jing zi Jinji bao Jin Mei Ji sheng sheng ya Ji xiansheng shu Jin ye you bao feng xue Juewu Ju fen jin hua Juhlai Ju luan shi Jun dui da yuan Jun zi Ju xiang Ju yi

glossary 镜子 金积堡 金梅 寄生生涯 寄先生书 今夜有暴风雪 觉悟 俱分进化 朱赫来 据乱世 军队大院 君子 俱象 举意

K Kang-liang Kang Youwei Kan sha Kao Yu-kung Ke xue yu xuan xue zhi zheng Ku cai

康梁 康有为 看杀 高有功 科学与玄学之争 苦菜

L Lan feng zheng Lanzhou Lao Mo Laozi Lei Feng Leo Ou-fan Lee Li Lian Liandu Liangang Liang feng hui xin

蓝风筝 兰州 老莫 老子 雷锋 李欧梵 理 炼 炼渡 炼钢 两封回信

307

glossary Liang Qichao Liang Qichao zhu shu nian pu Liang Xiaosheng Liezi (Lieh tzu) Li Guodong Li Hongzhang Li Madou Li Po Li Qingzhao Li Rui Lishi de wuhui Li Zhi Lin Weimin Liu Kang Liu mang Liu Yiku Liu Yueshi Liu Zhenren Li xiang Li Xue Li yi fen shu Li Yongtai Lu lin hao han Luo Qinshun Lu shang geng jue gu xiang yao yuan Lu Xuechang Lu Xun

梁启超 梁启超著述年谱 梁晓声 列子 李国栋 李鸿章 利玛窦 李白 李清照 李瑞 历史的误会 李贽 林伟民 刘康 流氓 刘忆苦 刘越石 刘珍仁 理想 理学 理一分殊 李勇太 绿林好汉 罗钦顺 路上更觉故乡遥远 路学长 鲁迅

M Ma Mingxin Mao Yushi Mao Zedong Ma Xiaojun Meizi Meng xi bi tan Meng xi bi tan jiao zheng Mengzi zheng yi

马明心 茅于轼 毛泽东 马小军 妹子 梦溪笔谈 梦溪笔谈校正 孟子正译

308 Milan Min Min ben Ming Ming jing Min Zi Min zhong Mo nong shi jing wu yu Mou Zongshan

glossary 米兰 民 民本 明朝 明镜 民子 民众 墨浓时惊无语 牟宗山

N Nanqian Nei sheng Nei sheng wai wang Nei zai shi ji Nian jing qidao Nietie Ni Huanzhi (Ni Huan-chih) Ningxia

南迁 内圣 内圣外王 内在实际 念经祈祷 念贴 倪焕之 宁夏

O Ouyang shan

欧阳山

P Pan Fanyuan Pao xiaole de tu di Pi Han Ping tian xia Pusa xing

潘凡远 咆哮了的土地 批韩 平天下 菩萨行

309

glossary

Q Qi Qian ding Qianlong Qian Xingcun Qiao Lin Qi jia Qin ding Lanzhou ji lue Qing Qing Qing dai xue shu gai lun Qing gan Qi pao Qi wu Qi xin Qiu an er dong Quan bu Quan Song Ci Quan Tang wen xin bian Qun Qun dao Qun ji quan jie lun Qun xing Qun xue yi yan Qu Qiubai Qu Qiubai wen ji Qun zhong xin li

气 前定 乾隆 钱杏邨 乔琳 齐家 钦定兰州记略 情 清朝 清代学术概论 情感 旗袍 齐物 起信 求安而动 全部 全宋词 全唐文新编 群 群道 群己权界论 群性 群学议言 瞿秋白 瞿秋白文集 群众心理

R Ran shao de qing chun meng Rao zhi rou Ren wen di li za zhi Ren sheng guan Rou Ru fo dao bai ke ci dian Ruijin

燃烧的青春梦 绕指柔 人文地理杂志 人生观 柔 儒佛道百科辞典 瑞金

310

glossary

S Sanbian Sanlian Shao nian zhongguo She hui xin ling de jie jing She hui sheng lang Sheng cun Sheng huo tu xian Sheng ming da liu Sheng ping shi Sheng zhong Shen Kuo Shen lou Shi Shi Shi Shi Shi de jie ji Shiji Shi jian de Shi jie de bu ping deng xing Shi ji nei li Shi Lun Shiwu bao Shiyue Si de Si he yuan Sima Qian Siwo Song Song Ziming Su Gasan Sui Sun Guangxuan Sun Yat-san Su Sishisan

三边 三联 少年中国 社会心灵的结晶 社会声浪 生存 生活凸显 生命大流 升平世 圣钟 沈括 蜃楼 诗 势 识 士, 士大夫 士的阶级 史记 世间的 世界的不平等性 实际内里 诗论 时务报 十月 私德 四合院 司马迁 私我 宋朝 宋子闵 苏尕三 隋朝 孙光宣 孙中山 苏四十三

311

glossary

T Ta Tao Tai ping shi Tai yang she Taiyuan Tang Tang Xiaobing Tangshan Tang wen Ti Tiananmen Tianjin Tian li Tian ran de ben neng Tian xia Tian yan lun Tian Zhuangzhuang Tietou Tsi-an Hsia

她 道 太平世 太阳社 太原 唐朝 唐小兵 唐山 汤问 体 天安门 天津 天理 天然的本能 天下 天演论 田壮壮 铁头 夏志安

W Wai wang Wang Fuzhi Wang Hui Wang Hui zi xuan ji Wang Jie Wang Jinxi Wang Leshan Wang Ming Wang Shaoguang Wang Shuo Wang Xiaoming Wang Yangming Wanke Wan Song Wei chi fan de

外王 王夫之 汪晖 汪晖自选集 王杰 王进喜 王乐山 王明 王绍光 王朔 王晓明 王阳明 万科 万嵩 为吃饭的

312 Wei sheng shi de shi pian er zuo Weishizong Weiyang Wei zao huan xiang cuo jue Wen Wen-Hsin Yeh Weng Lian Wen Tianxiang Weng Zesheng Wen ren Wen shi zhe Wen yi shang jian zhi pian’ai jia zhi Wo Wo zhi Wu Wu bing shen yin Wuchang Wu ren zui hou zhi jue wu Wu si qian hou xiao zi chan jie ji zhi shi fen zi si xiang li cheng de zhen shi xie zhao Wu yuan de si xiang Wu Yunduo (Wu Yun-to) Wu Zhihui

glossary 为盛世的诗篇而作 唯识宗 未央 围遭幻想错觉 文 叶文心 翁莲 文天祥 翁则生 文人 文史哲 文艺赏鉴上之偏爱价值 我 我执 物 无病呻吟 无常 吾人最后之觉悟 五四前后小资产阶级知识分子  思想历程的真实写照 无援的思想 吴运铎 吴稚晖

X Xia hai Xian du Xiang Xian qin Xian shi sheng huo Xian xia Xiao ji Xiao Kang Xiao ya Xiao zhang Xihaigu

下海 限度 响 先秦 现实生活 线下 小己 小康 小雅 校长 西海固

313

glossary Xiji Xin Xin Xinbo Xing Xinhai Xin hua yue bao Xin li Xin ling shi Xinmin Xin qing nian Xin zi you zhu yi Xin zou yi Xiong Shili Xixue Xiu shen Xu Angang Xue tong Xu Guangqi Xunxi Xunzi Xu wei miu wu

西吉 信 心 心波 行 心海 新华月报 心理 心灵史 新民 新青年 新自由主义 新左翼 熊十力 西学 修身 许鞍钢 学统 徐光启 薰习 荀子 虚伪、谬误

Y Yan’an Yan chang de ying zi Yan Fu Yan Fu Juan: Zhongguo xian dai xue shu jing dian Yan Fu Si xiang shu ping Yang Yang Changji Yang chun bai xue Yang gang Yang guang can lan de ri zi Yang Hansheng Yang Huaizhong

延安 延长的影子 严复 严复卷：中国现代学术经典 严复思想书评 阳 杨昌济 阳春白雪 阳刚 阳光灿烂的日子 阳翰生 杨怀忠

314 Yang Kaihui Yang wu Yang wu yun dong Yang yan Yan shi guan Ye Cao Ye Shaojun (Ye Shao-chun) Ye Shengtao Ye Shengtao xin lun Yi Yi Yi bi wei qi Yi ge qing nian Yin Ying Ying-Shih Yu Ying zi de gao bie Yin rou Yin xian Yin-yang Yin ying Yi ren Yi yü zhui yü Yong Yuan chu zhi wen Yuan ding Yu Dafu Yu Gong Yu Gong Yi Shan Yu Minling Yu shi ju jin

glossary 杨开慧 洋务 洋务运动 阳焰 厌世观 野草 叶绍钧 叶圣陶 叶圣陶新论 伊 义 以笔为旗 一个青年 阴 影 余英时 影子的告别 阴柔 印现 阴阳 阴影 伊人 译余缀语 勇 原初质问 园丁 郁达夫 愚公 愚公移山 俞敏玲 与时俱进

Z Zai Zai lun kong jiao wen ti Zai zhi xian sheng shu Za wen

在 再论孔教问题 再致先生书 杂文

315

glossary Zei wa zi Zhang Chengzhi Zhang Chengzhi Ji Zhang da cheng ren Zhang Dongsheng Zhang Hao Zhang Junmai Zhang Rulun Zhang Taiyan Zhang Taiyan ping zhuan Zhang Wei Zhang Wuchang Zhang Xudong Zhang Yuanshan Zhang Zhidong Zhaoming Wen xuan Zhen Zhengge Zheng He Zhi Zhi Zhiguo Zhi guo ping tian xia Zhi shi jie ji Zhongguo ji ruo su yuan lun Zhongguo ke yi shuo bu Zhongguo xiang tu xiao shuo shi lun Zhongguo zuo yi wen xue si chao Zhong min Zhong xi wen hua yu Mao Zedong zao qi si xiang Zhong xi zhe xue zhi hui tong shi si jiang Zhong zi Zhou Qing Zhou Shujia Zhou Zhenfu Zhuangzi Zhu guan

贼娃子 张承志 张承志集 长大成人 张东升 张灏 张君劢 张汝伦 章太炎 章太炎评传 张炜 张五常 张旭东 张远山 张之洞 昭明文选 真 整个 郑和 知 智 治国 治国平天下 知识阶级 中国极弱溯源论 中国可以说不 中国乡土小说史论 中国左翼文学思潮 众民 中西文化与毛泽东  早期思想 中西哲学之汇通十四讲 种子 周青 周叔伽 周振复 庄子 主观

316 Zhuhelai Zhunyi Zhu Xi Zilu Zixing Zi you zhu yi zhi zheng Zouxue

glossary 朱赫来 遵义 朱熹 子路 自性 自由主义之争 走穴

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Index affect  105 Ālaya-vijñāna  19 alterity  46, 288 Analects  199n Anderson, Marston  160, 161n, 162, 162–5, 176, 180, 286 Limits of Realism   160 n15, 162n, 163n, 164n, 176n, 286n “reality effect”  164 Ang, Ien  227n “Culture and Communication”  227n An Introduction to Metaphysics  12n anarchism  23 anti-heroic  45, 244 anti-progress  301 a priori  76 Apter, David/Tony Saich  217 Revolutionary Discourse in Mao’s Republic 216n “Yan’an and the Narrative Reconstruction of Reality”  217n Arendt, Hannah  34n The Human Condition  34n Art as Experience  26n, 27n, 28n “As though” metaphor  98 Aufhebung  5, 125, 157 Bahktin, Mikhail M.  7, 7 n9, n10, 8, 8 n11, n12, 36, 67, 67n, 68, 269–70 Art and Answerability  8 n11, 10 n13, 286n The Dialogic Imagination  66n dialogism  36 non-alibi in being  7–10 simultaneity  25 Toward a Philosophy of the Act  7 n9, n10, 269, 270n Bai lian cheng gang  197, 200n Ba Jin  44, 212, 212n Bao Qingtian  221, 221n Barmé, Geremie  290 In the Red  290n Bei da huang  255 “Beipiao”  254n Belinsky, Vassarion  123

Benjamin, Walter  231, 251 Illumination  231n Bentham, Jeremy  17 Bergson, Henri  10, 12, 12 n16, n18, n19, 19, 20, 26, 41, 42, 115, 148–5 “Conventional I (me)”  11 Durée  149, 151 Essai sur les données de la conscience 150n, 154n “Fundamental I (me)”  11, 12, 151, 152 L’Evolution créatrice  128n, 151n Matter and Memory  149 n84, n85, 151n psychologized consciousness  11–13 Bergsonism  128, 148–50 Berlin, Isaiah  22 Four Essays on Liberty  22n Berlin Wall  228, 248 Bian  140, 140n Bildung  25, 247 Bildungsroman  123, 157 Blanchot, Maurice  250, 250n “Everyday Speech”  250n Bloom, Irene  204n Bodhisattva  128, 135, 154, 192 Bolshevism/Bolsheviks  42, 123, 136, 261 (the) Bolshevik Revolution  43 borné  164n boundary 2: an international journal of literature and culture  224n Boym, Svetlana  226, 241 Common Places  226, 241n Braester, Yomi  246n Witness against History  246n Buddhism  19, 57, 85, 133 Buddhist nonself  19 Buddhist school of thought  203 Buddhist self-nature  21 Burwick, Frederick and Paul Douglass   128n The Crisis in Modernism  128n Cai Xiang  279n Cartesian perspectivalism  38n Cartesian subject  20

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330 Cascardi, Anthony  90n The Subject of Modernity  90n CCP (the Chinese Communist Party)  35, 36, 37, 43, 44, 45, 118, 124, 183, 183n, 186, 210, 214, 216, 217, 220–1, 231–3, 234, 236, 237, 241, 244, 248, 267, 284, 292 Chan, Wing-tsit  137 A Source Book  137n Chang, Hao  15, 16, 17, 18 Liang Ch’i-ch’ao  15n, 16n, 17n, 18n Chang, Jung  228 Wild Swan  228, 228n Cheek, Timothy  226 Chen Duxiu  1, 49, 49n, 124n, 129, 207, 209, 209n, 210, 214, 216 New Youth  39, 49, 78, 207, 209 “Wu ren zui hou zhi jue wu”  208, 208n “Zai lun kong jiao wen ti”  208, 208n Chen Hao  203, 203n Chen Jianhua  291 “Local and Global in Narrative Contestation”  291n Ch’en, Kenneth  19, 20, 137 Buddhism in China  20, 133n, 137n Chen Pingyuan  291 “Thoughts on Research of Scholarship History”  291n Chen Xiaoming  224 “The Mysterious Other”  225n Chen Yi  203, 203n Cheng Fangwu  211 Chernyshevsky, Nikolay  123, Chiang Kai-shek  210 Chientang (Qiantang) tidal waves  185 China Youth Daily  221, 260 “Who Is Your Hero, Bi’er (Bill Gates) or Bao’er (Pavel Korchagin)”  221, 260–1, 261n Chinese Democracy  16n Chinese Muslim (aka Muslim Chinese) 263, 263n, 277, 282, 292 Chi Zhonghu  55n Chow, Rey  282n Primitive Passions  282n Writing Diaspora  267n Choy, Howard Y. F.  283n Chuang zao she  211, 211n Chu si hai  230, 230n citizenry  16 clan lineage  21

index Clifford, James and George Marcus   275n Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography  275n “coalition of polarities”  226 Cohen, Ted and Paul Guyer  97 Essays in Kant’s Aesthetics  97 collapsed space  229 collective strength  59 collectivism  19, 51 collectivity  33, 36, 62 coming-of-age  40, 49, 88, 251, 267 Comintern  124, 124n, 214, 215 Communism  120, 120 Communist Youth League  219 Comparative Studies in Society and History 279n, 284n Confucian  49 heritage  49 morality  18 orthodoxy  33 sagehood  5 selfhood  3 Confucianism  2, 19, 50, 58, 85 Confucius  20, 36, 67, 75, 199, 200 Conradian “secret sharer”  182 Continuum  44, 72, 86, 94, 285 hierarchical  7 organic  6 private-public continuum  17 Xiaoji-Daji continuum  51 correlativity  31 Critical Terms for Literary Studies  88n Cultural Revolution  222, 224, 230, 239, 241, 243, 297 Da cheng qi xing lun  119 Dai Jinghua  291n Daji (the greater self)  51, 78 Dang dai dian ying  239 Danran (equanimity)  187 Daoism (Taoism)  50, 57, 67, 85 Daoist school of thought  203 Darwin, Charles  17, 22, 57, 65 Datong utopia  56 Da zi bao  230, 230n De Certeau, Michel  242 “Make do” (bricolage)  242 The Practice of Everyday Life  242n defamiliarizing  39

331

index Deleuze, Gille  13n, 149n Cinema 1  149 The New Bergson  13n De Man, Paul  164n democracy  3 Deng Lijun (aka Teresa Teng)  251, 251n Deng Xiaoping  252, 253n Denton, Kirk  211n Modern Chinese Literary Thought   211n depoliticization  3 determinism vs. voluntarism  122, 125, 127, 159, 216–7 developmental anxiety  45 developmental dilemma  45 developmental thinking  284, 299 Dewey, John  26, 26n, 28 n54, n55, 43, 165–166, 176, 179–80, 190 Democracy and Education  179n duplicity  26 environment  179 estheticness  26, 27 experience  26–27, 165, 166 Experience and Nature  28n equilibrium  175 Ethics  27n evolving self  27 interaction  26, 165, 166–9, 173, 179 process  166, 177 undergoing  172, 186n, 191 unity  28 dialogism/dialogic  266, 286 dichotomy  19 Dictionary of Literary Biography: Chinese Fiction Writers 1950–2000  263n Ding-an-sich (the thing-in-itself)  20, 149 Ding Fan  268n Zhong guo xiang tu xiao shuo shi lun 268n Din Wenjiang  12, 12n, 209, 209n Dirlik Arif and Zhang Xudong  229 “Introduction: Postmodernism and China” 229n, 267n distantiation  38, 39 Dostoevsky, F. M.  9, 144 Crime and Punishment  144 Dualism  7

Duara, Presenjit  34n “Bifurcating History”  34n Durée  11, 19, 20 Du Shu  278n, 279n Eagleton, Terry  97, 97n The Ideology of the Aesthetics  97n Eastern Miscellany  39, 78 Egan, Michael  92 Eight Nation Alliance  206 Eijis (Mongolian mothers)  265n Eliot, T. S.  108 Elman, Benjamin  85 On Their Own Terms  85n embeddedness  38 embodied vision  9 Emerson, Caryl  66n empathetic seeing  88 Empress Dowager  56 Emperor Dezong  200 Emperor Qianlong  274 Emperor Quangxu  9, 53, 55 empathy  43 empathetic seeing  8, 9 Epstein, Mikhail  229 After the Future  229n epiphany  275 epistemology  37 equilibrium  27 ethical imperative  47 ethnic pluralism  46 ethnicized memory  275 everydayness  39 evolution  3, 30, 41, 49, 50, 52 “expressive poetry”  202 Fa zhi  64 Fang Yizhi  205, 205n Fengjian  33, 34n Feng Youlan  131 A History of Chinese Philosophy  131 n37, n38, 133n, 134n, 137n First World War  12 Fischer, Michael  275 “Ethnicity and the Post-modern Arts of Memory”  275n Foster, Hal  37n Vision and Visuality  37n

332 Furth, Charlotte  15, 15n Ting Wen-chiang  209n Fukuyama, Francis  228, 296n American at the Crossroads  228n The End of History and the Last Man 228n Fu Sinian  86, 87n, 210, 210n “Ren sheng wen ti fa duan”  87n Fu zi  44, 211, 211n Gálik, Marian  128, 131 “Young Qü Qiubai”  128n, 135n gang  197, 200 Gang tie shi zhe yang lian cheng de  257 Gang tie shi zen yang lian cheng de  260 Gao Yihan  78, 78n “The Public State and the Self-Awarenss of the Youth”  78 Garden of Eden  175 Gemeinschaft  37, 95 German Idealism  164 Gesellschaft  37 Gestalt  110 Gladney, Dru  286 Making Majorities  263n, 286n global capitalism  225, 229, 240 GMD (the Nationalist Party)  116, 118, 210, 213 Goethe, Johann Wolgang von  157n Wilhelm Meister Lehrjahre  157n Gogol, Nikolai  143 Goldman, Merle  92n Modern Chinese Literature in the May Fourth Era  92n Gongli  32, 33n “Gong yang san shi”  34n, 56 Gongwo  51, 78 Great Patriotic War  218 Great Leap Forward  224, 230 The Greenwich Naval Academy  14 Guang Sheng  78 Gui qiang  285 Habermas, Jürgen  36, 87, 87n Communication and the Evolution of Society 87n Hai jun da shi ji  55n Hai Rui  276, 276n

index Hall, David L. and Roger T. Ames  25, 77, 82 Thinking through Confucius  82n Han Chinese  263, 263n Han Dynasty  201 Hansen, Chad  17, 17n, 24 “Individualism in Chinese Thought” 24n Han Shu  199n Han Yu  55 Harpham, Geoffrey  88 “Ethics”  88n Hartz, Louis  58, 59, 60, 62, 63n (the) haves vs. have-nots  267 “heavenly mandate”  4 Hegel, G. W. F.  19, 22, 26, 31, 43, 65, 125, 155, 157, 157n Absolute subject  164 Aufhebung  157n inner purpose  31 Henning, Stephan  279n “History of the Soul”  279n, 284n Hermeneutics  287n heteroglossia  9 historical materialism  128 historical positivism  276 historical teleology  225 Hobbes, Thomas  37, 77 Holism  25 Holquist, Michael  8 n11, n12, 66n, 67, 67n “Author and Hero”  8 n11 “Introduction”  66n Mikhail Bakhtin  8 n12 Horatio Alger  35 Hsia Tsi-an  122n, 127 The Gate of Darkness  122n, 128 n24, n25, 146n Hua lin shan  274 Huang, Martin  4 Literati and Self-Re/Presentation  3n Negotiating Masculinities in Late Imperial China  200n Huang, Philip  15 Liang Ch’i ch’ao and Modern Chinese Liberalism  15n Huang Zhongze  89, 89n, 94, 96n Human Geography  288, 297

333

index Hunter, Ian  104n, “Aesthtics and Cultural Studies”  104n Huo Jianqi  121 Qiu zhi bai hua  121 (caption for Figure 2) Huo yu  267 Hu Shi  129, 210, 210n Huters, Theodore  50, 59, 60, 61, 93, 93n Bringing the World Home  50n, 53n, 59n, 61 n25, n28 Huxley, Julian  68, 69n, Huxley, Thomas  14, 30, 41, 51, 56, 60, 62, 67, 68–73, 69n, 74–75, 85, 207 Evolution and Ethics  27n, 68, 69n, 71, 206 Horticultural Process  69, 70, 80, 80n, “I”

I-for-myself  8 historicity of  7 situatedness of  8 unitary  7 I-hero  113 I-narrator  91, 111, 112, 160, 161, 272 I-persona  91 I-subject  89, 96, 101–105 I-voyeur  91 idealism  7 individualism  15, 19, 25, 33, 35, 41, 51, 58, 62, 73, 81, 85, 87 Individualism and Holism  17n, 24n Individuality  6 inner consciousness  000 intelligentsia  29 interdependence  22, 25, 52, 83 interlocution/interlocutor  41, 57, 285 internal otherness  46 the Internationale  243 intertextuality  68 Islam/Islamic faith  263n, 266, 299 Jahriyya Sufis  46, 265, 271–79, 271n, 277, 280, 282, 283, 292, 294, 296 Jameson, Frederic  32 “national allegory”  32 The Political Unconscious  32n Jay, Martin  37, 37, 38 n19, n20 “Scopic Regimes of Modernity”  37 n17, n18

Jiang Guangci  44, 212, 213 Jiang Guangci xuan ji  213n “Pao xiao le de tu di”  213, 213n Jiang Wen  45, 239–46, 243 Yang guang can lan de ri zi  224n, 239–46, 239n Rang zi dan fei  239n “Ran shao de qing chun meng”  239n Tai yang zhao chang shen qi  239n Jin Dynasty  200n Jinggang Mountains  216, 216n Jin Mei  159n Wu si qian hou xiao zi can jie ji zhi shi fen zi si xiang li cheng de zhen shi xie zhao 159n Ji sheng sheng ya  121, 121n Jing Haifeng  152n Xiong Shili  152n, 153n Jing zi  44, 211, 211n Jones, Andrew  14n Developmental Fairy Tales  14n Kan sha  282 Kang-Liang constitutionalists  2, 50 Kang Youwei  49, 49n, 56 Kant, Emanuel  8, 97, 98 Kao Yu-kung  202 Karcevskij, Sergi  66, 66n, 67 Korchagin, Pavel  218, 219, 221, 247, 258–62 Korean War  244 Khufiyya Suifis  282n Kirghiz  265n Kublai Khan  202 Kun wu sword  198 laissez-faire  8, 34, 52, 74 Late-Qing era  59, 60, 86 Lao Zi  67, 119 Lee, Leo Ou-fan  88n, 90n, 93, 163n The Romantic Generation  88n, 90n, 93n Lehrjahre  157 Levenson, Joseph  15 Liang Ch’i-chao and the Mind of Modern China  15n Li (rites)  79, 203, 205 Lian  197 Lian du  198 Lian gang  198–199

334 Liang Ch’i-ch’ao  16n, 17n Liang Qichao  1, 10, 10n, 13, 15, 19, 33, 33n, 42, 44, 49, 49n, 52, 55, 56, 88 citizenry  16, 16n, 17–19, 41 Hsin-min ts’ung-pao  16 Liang Qichao he zhongguo gu dai xue shu de zhong jie  56n Liang Qichao zhu shu nian pu  56n nation state  17–18 The New Citizen  10n, 16n, 17n Shao nian zhong guo  49, 49n Yin bing shi he ji  33n Zhongguo ji ruo su yuan lun  33n Liang Xiaosheng  257, 258 n46, n47, 259n Chong su Bao’er Kechajin  257n Jin ye you bao feng xue  258 Liapnov, Vadim  8n liberalism  5, 19, 59, 60 Li Dazhao  49, 49n Lie zi The Book of Lie zi  198, 198n Li Hongzhang  9, 53, 55 linear trajectory  231 Lin, Weimin  211 Zuo yi wen xue si chao  211n Li Po  95 Lipman, Jonathan N Familiar Strangers  263n Lipps, Theodor  100 Einfuhlung  100 Li Qingzhao  107, 108, 108n Li Rui  214n San shi sui yi qian de Mao Zedong 214n, 215n literati (class)  3, 14n, 132 literary revolution  44, 211 Liu Kang  225, 226 “Culture of the Masses”  225n Liu, Lydia He  50n, 51, 78n, 86n Translingual Practice  50n, 51, 78n liu mang (hooligans)  239, 239n Liu Xinmin  263n, 273n Liu Yueshi  201, 201n Lived philosophy  278 Li yi fen shu  203, 203n Long March  213 Li Yongtai  215 Zhong xi wen hua yu Mao Zedong  215n

index Li Zhi  276, 276n Lukács, George  6, 6 n5, n6, 7 The Process of Democratization  210n The Theory of the Novel  6 n5, n6 subjectivity  5–7 Lu lin hao han  221, 221n Luo Qinshun  204, 204n Knowledge Painfully Acquired  203 n15, n16 Lu Xuechang  45, 247, 247n, 255 Zhang da cheng ren  45, 247–59, 247n Lu Xun  13, 29, 86, 87, 116, 117, 118, 129, 279, 280, 281, 285–8, 297 A Madman’s Diary  118, 281 Bi shou  212 Fu chou  285 Tou qiang  212 Ye Cao  280, 280n, 280 n41, n42, 285, 285n, 287 n58, n59 Ying zi de gao bie  285n Za wen  286 lyrical epiphany  161, 165 lyrical vision  162 Ma Mingxin  272, 272n, 282n Mao Zedong  44, 127, 214, 215, 220, 225, 243, 286 Maoist Era  218, 221, 262 Maoism  254n, 257 Maoist Heroes: Lei Fu, Ou Yanghai, Wang Jie, Wang Jinxi, Wu Yunduo  222 Marxism/Marxist  119, 120, 125, 154, 155, 157 Marx, Karl  158, 210n The Communist Manifesto  119 Economic-Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 210 Selected Works  158n May Fourth Movement  1, 25, 51, 93, 119, 120, 129, 176, 208, 214, 215, 286 May Thirtieth Incident  176, 183 Mayakovsky, Vladimir  142 Meism  254, 254n Mencius  36, 75, 200 Meng Zi zheng yi  200n Mill, J. S.  17, 41, 60, 71 On Liberty  17n Min zhong  3, 294

335

index Ming Dynasty  61, 203 Min Zi  78, 83 “Wo”  78n “Mistressing”  255 mock-heroic  45 modernity  41, 225, 228, Mou, Zhongsan  126 Zhong xi zhe xue zhi hui tong shi si jiang 126 n20, n21, 127n, 140 Munafeles  276, 277, 292, 292n Munro, Donald  17n, 24n Murthy, Viren  33 “Modernity against modernity”  33n Nathan, Andrew  16 Chinese Democracy  16n National Geographic  289–90, 295–7 nation state  17, 23 Neisheng  4, 4n Neo-Confucianism (aka. Li Xue)  202, 203, 203n, 205 New Culturalists  51, 81, 86 New Historiography  218n Ng Mau-sang  94 Nian jing qi dao  273, 274n Nietie  293n Niset, Robert  72n, 73n History of the Idea of Progress  72n, 73n non-epiphany  157 nonself  19, 20, 21, 22, 43, 87 Northeast China’s Wilderness  255 Northern Expedition  187 North Sea Fleet Academy  53 Nouveau riches  290, 295 Objective correlative  43, 100 October Revolution (by Russian Bolsheviks) 210 Ontology  30, 126 Opium Wars  206 Orientalism  46 other  25, 267, 278 objectification of  8 othered subjects  168 other-for-me  8 otherness  42, 43, 46, 114, 270 other-worldly  197

Ostrovsky, Nikolai  218–9, 220, 247, 260 How Steel Was Tempered  218, 219n, 220n, 247, 251n, 255–7, 257n, 259 (caption for Fig 4) outsideness  10, 13 Ouyang Shan  212, 212n paraphrase  41 paraphrastic translation  59, 63, 75, 81, 207 Paris Commune  243 patriotism  184 Paulson, Friedrich  215 A System of Ethics  215n “perfuming”  19, 43 perspectivalism  37, 246 People’s Liberation Army  236 People’s Republic of Capitalism  254n Peterson, Willard, Andrew H. Plaks and Yu Ying-shih  197n The Power of Culture  197n, 198n, 202n Piaget, Jean  269 Pickowicz, G. Paul  122n, 135 Marxist Literary thought and China  122n, 123 n13, n14, n15, 124 n16, n18 The Influence of Chü Ch’iü-pai  128n Ping tian xia  31, 31n Pogson, F. L.  11 position: east Asian cultures critique  283 n49, n50 Post-Cold War  228 Post-Mao era  45, 230 Post-1989 China  263, 284 professionalization  3 progress  2, 47, 50, 228, 282 publicness  21n, 33 “Pusa xing” (Bodhisattvahood)  120 Qi  200, 200n, 203 Qian Xingcun  211, 211n Qiao Lin  200, 200n Qijia  30, 31n qing  106 Qin ding Lanzhou ji lue  274, 274n Qing Era (court)  46, 59, 204 qi pao  231

336 Qi wu  32, 32n, 34 quan bu  258, 258n Quan Tang Ci  202n Quan Tang wen xin bian  199n, 200n Qun dao (Ch’untao)  70, 70n, 71 Qun xing  82, 82n Quotidian  231, 234, 237–9 Qu Qiubai  23, 42–43, 115, 116, 118, 122, 123–4, 131, 133, 138, 145, 150, 159, 184, 210 Ãlaya consciousness  133, 133n, 135–8, 151, 154 “Ba”  136 Bu zuo xiang er zuo xiang  134, 134n Chi du xin shi  42, 129, 129n, 138 “Chu shi jian de”  121, 121n Duo yu de hua  116, 116n, 124 n17, n18 E xiang ji cheng  129, 129n Fata morgana  130, 134, 145, 151 “Ge ming de lang man di ke”  123n Ju xiang  152, 152n, 153n “Li shi de wu hui”  116 Luan tan  123n “Nei zai shi ji”  152 “Qiu an er dong”  132, 132n Qu Qiubai shi ge qian shi  116n Qu Qiubai Wenji  120n, 123n, 129n, 131, 133n, 134n, 138n, 141n, 142 n65, n66, n68, 146n, 151n “She hui sheng lang”  132, 132n “Sheng huo tu xian”  136, 136n Sheng lou  130, 134 “Sheng min da liu”  129, 129n Sheng zhong  139, 139n “Shi ji nei li”  129, 129n “Di liu shi”  131n, 132 “The Superfluous Man”  146 Wei shi zong  131n “Wei zao huan xiang cuo jue”  131 “Wo”  147, 147n Wo zhi  138, 138n Xin  130, 146 Xin bo  135, 136, 136n Xin hai  135 Xun xi  133, 133n Yan shi guan  120 Yang yan ( fata morgana)  141, 141n Yogācāra Buddhism  19, 20n, 21, 43, 123, 125, 130, 131–5, 138, 140, 148, 153–6

index Rawls, John  5 received stereotype  24 reciprocity  25, 50 Red Guards  239, 297 “reflective poetry”  202 Religiosity  281 Renaissance  19 Ren sheng guan  120, 120n Ren wen di li za zhi  289 Republican era  86, 88 revolutionary heroism  217–8 “revolutionary literature”  44, 211 Ricci, Matteo (Li Madou)  205, 205n Ricoeur, Paul  98 The Rule of Metaphor  98n Rightists  233 Rom, Mikhail Lenin in 1918  243 Rousseau, Jean-Jacque  37, 76, 77 Social Contract  76 Ru Fuo Dao bai ke ci dian (Encyclopedia for Confucianism, Buddhism and Daoism) 198 Ruijin Soviet  216, 216n Sagehood  4, 199 Said, Edward  46 “Orientalism”  46 Salars Hui  273, 273n, 274 San lian Joint Publishing House  289, 289n, 296, 299 “San bian”  266, 266n Sandel, Michael, J.  5 5n, 178, 239 Liberalism and the Limits of Justice  5n Schiller, Friedrich  99 Letters on the Aesthetic Education 99n Schlegel, Friedrich  164 Schopenhauer, Arthur  100 Schwartz, Benjamin  6, 41, 52, 55, 55n, 57, 59, 59n, 62, 63, 63 n30, n31, 64, 68n, 74n, 81 Yen Fu and the West  52, 55n, 59n, 74n, 75n School of the Mind  12n Science and Metaphysics  209, 209n “Scopic regime”  37 Seed  19

index selfself-achievement  4 self-effacement  238, 246 self-alienation  3 self-apology  238 self-aporia  57 self-articulation  42 self-authorization  291 self-canceling  192 self-censorship  235 self-cultivation  162 self-deprecation  246 self-discipline  200 self-disinheritance  116 self-dislocation  277 self-displacement  175 self-education  113 self-formation  238 self-fulfillment  25, 276 self-growth  162 self-identity  3, 60n, 86, 264, 278 self-interrogation  285 self-making  270, 300 self-mastery  118, 119 self-nature  19, 20–22 self-negation  287 self-parodying  280 self-realization  5, 13n, 20, 23, 25, 26, 28, 29, 38, 40, 41, 43, 45, 50, 77, 81, 82, 83, 106, 109, 114, 147, 190, 208, 212, 230, 262 self-rejuvenation  113, 287 self-remaking  195, 263–4 self-renewal  252 self-revelation  114 self-salvation  281 self-transfiguration  9 -self actual  7 Buddhist  19 Confucian  14 Greater  34 inner  7 interiorized  12, 13, 42 Lesser  34 lyrical  109 private  142 provisional  21 vitalized  147

337 -selfhood de-ontological  5, 8 non-contextual  5 self/other dichotomy  286 “sexploitation”  255 Shen Kuo  198, 199 Meng xi bi tan  198 Meng xi bi tan jiao zheng  198n Shi  3n, 4n, 140, 140n Shi (a directive propensity)  204, 205 Shi wu bao  55 Shi yue  264n signpost  41 Sima Qian  77, 78 Shi ji  78, 78n situated body  10 situatedness  5 Siwo  51, 78 Sixth-sense consciousness  131 Smith, Adam  15, 59, 77, 206 Wealth of Nations  206n the Social  3 social evolution  35, 41 sociality  6, 10, 22, 23, 35, 36 social praxis  44, 214 social progress  83 social psychology  130 “social relatedness”  38, 231, 237, 240 “social reality”  129 Social Darwinism  35, 71, 75 Song Dynasty  61 Song Ziming  10n “Preface”  10n Southern Song Dynasty  202n Soviet Russia  43, 122, 123, 130 Soviet socialism  128 Spartacus  298 Spence, Jonathan The Search for Modern China  186n, 187n Spencer, Herbert  14, 17, 26, 30, 41, 52, 53n, 56, 60, 62, 63, 64–66, 64n, 65n, 67–68, 70–72, 74–82, 207 A Study of Sociology  64n, 65n, 68, 71n, 206 Essays: Scientific, Political and Speculative 74n innate discreetness  71n

338

index

The Man versus the State  72n The Study of Evolution  53, 71n Unfettered individualism  72 (the) State  45, 86, 283, 284, 285, 300, 301 Stalinist “Gulag”  226 Steiner, Peter  66n The Prague School  66n Straw Sandles  102n Subject bifurcated  6 interiror  6 larger-than-life  7 lyrical  43 universal  7 subjective vision  10 subjectivity  94 sublimation  5 substantive rights  79 Sumner, William  75n Social Darwinism  75n Sun Guangxuan  159n “Du Ni Huanzhi”  159n Sun Yat-san  210 supreme publicness  22 “The survival of the fittest”  74 symbolic identification  46

Tian’anmen Incident  284 Tian Li  33, 33n, 203 Tianxia  18, 18n Tian Zhuangzhuang  45, 230, 230n, 231–5 Lan fen zheng  230, 230n, 235–9, 243, 247 Tolstoy, Leo  119 Toynbee, Arnold J.  29, 29n A Study of History  29n, 30n Transgredience  24, 67, 68 Transmigration  192 Transvaluation  50 Turkmen  265n

Taine, Hippolyte  158 Les personage regnant  158 Histoire de la literature anglaise  158n Tai yang she (the Sun Society)  211, 211n Tang, Xiaobin  15 Global Space and the Nationalist Discourse of Modernity  15n Taylor, Charles  43, 85, 85n, 95, 101, 103 Sources of the Self  85n, 95n teleology  16, 38, 39, 81, 120, 225, 275, 298 télos  8, 23, 32, 37, 41, 77, 106, 125n, 150, 229, 267, 283 Terdiman, Richard  36, 37n, 39n, 239n the dominant  39 Present Past  36 n14, n15, 37n the dominee  39 the instrumental  37, 38, 39 the relational  37, 38, 39 terminal community  18, 33 Then vs. Now  38, 39, 45, 228, 229, 230, 235, 238, 254–6, 261 Ti (the body)  152, 153–5

Waiwang  4, 4n Wakeman Jr, Frederic History and Will  204n, 214n Wanke Television and Film Corporation 257, 257n, 258, 259 (image caption) Wan song Ye Shengtao xin lun (A New Critique of Ye Shengtao)  159n, 163 Wang Ban  217, 228, 249, 249n, 287 Illuminations from the Past  228n, 240, 240n, 249 n29, n30, 255n, 287n, 296n, 298 The Sublime Figure  217n Wang David Der-wei and Ellen Widmer  93n From May Fourth to June Fourth  93n Wang Fuzhi  204, 204n, 210, 214 Wang Hui  19, 20, 21, 22, 29, 30n, 31, 33n, 34n, 41, 51, 52, 53n, 60–3, 82, 117 Bu shu yu  117, 117n Schwartz  63–4 Spencer  63–4

Uigur  265 Ultimate concerns  293 Universalism  295 Universality  33, 289 unpredictability  28 un-teleological  28 Utopian Socialism 9, 120 Uzbek  265n Versailles Convention  12 Vitalism  10, 14, 155

index Yan Fu  29–31, 41, 63–4 Zai  117, 117n Zhang Taiyan  19–22, 32–35, 41 Wang Hui zi xuan ji  20, 20n, 117 n2, n3, 207n Zhongguo xian dai si xiang de xing qi 21n, 30n, 63 n31, n33, 203, 205n, 207n Wang Ming  210 Wang Shaoguang  288 Wang Shuo  239 Dong wu xiong meng  239, 239n Wang Xiaoming  284, 294, 300 Half the Face  284n Reality and Expectations for China’s Identity Today  300n Wang Yangming  12 Wang Yuechuan  294n Chinese Mirror Images  294n The Warring States Era  198 Weber, Max  36n, 114 The Nature of Social Action  36n Wei shi yan jiu  141n Wellek, René A History of Modern Criticism  158n Wen ren  3 Wen Tianxiang  202, 202n Westernization  29 Western Spirit  61, 63 What is vs. What ought to be  160, 171, 216, 285 Williams, Raymond  242 Marxism and Literature  242n Wordsworth, William  92 “The Solitary Reaper”  92 Writers’ Association  279n Wu bing shen yin  108, 108n Wu chang (sûnyatâ)  120, 120n Wu Yunduo  219–220 Son of the Working Class  219n, 220n Wu Zhihui  210, 210n Xia hai  252, 262 Xiaoji  51, 78 Xiao kang she hui  264 Xiao tong  199n Zhao ming wen xuan  199, 201n Xihaigu  272, 273n Xin  214n Xinchao  87n Xing  214, 214n

339 Xin hua yue bao  264 Xin zi you zhu yi  288 Xin zuo yi  288, 288n Xiong Chunru  61 Xiong Shili  12 Xiu sheng  30, 31n Xue tong  278 Xu Quangqi  205, 205n Xu Jian  283 “Radical Ethnicity and Apocryphal History” 283n Xun Zi  20, 31, 41, 67, 75, 79, 80, 133 Basic Writings  79 Yan’an Era  213, 216, 216n Yan chang de ying zi  260, 260n Yan Fu  1, 12, 14n, 17, 29, 30, 30n, 31, 49–50, 52–3, 53n, 55–9, 60–6, 67–9, 71–4, 75–80, 81, 85, 87, 207 “ Pi Han”  55 Qun  30, 30n, 31, 41, 67 Qun ji quan jie lun  71 Qun xue yi yan  71, 71n The study of qun  31 “Ten-Thousand-Word Memorandum” 53 “The total” vis-à-vis “the unit”  76 Tian yan lun  69, 70n Xun Zi  79–80 Yan Fu juan  64n, 71n, 76n, 78n Yan Fu si xiang shu ping  61 n26 Yan jidao yu Chunru shu zha jie chao 61 n27 Yi yü zhui yu  76, 76n Yang Changji  215, 215n Yang Hansheng  44, 123, 212, 212n Yang Huaizhong  292 Yang gang  197 Yangwu yun dong  29, 50, 53, 55, 60, 61, 206n Ye Shaojun (aka Ye Shengtao)  43, 157, 158, 165, 166n, 175, 178, 181, 193 Cheng Zhong  169, 169n Gemo  160, 160n, 167, 168 “Han xiao de qing ge”  160, 160n Huo zai  169, 169n “Ku cai”  161, 161n “Liang feng hui xin”  169 Ni Huanzhi, the Schoolmaster  157, 157n, 159n, 165, 171–9, 180–8, 188n, 189–93

340 Xian xia  169, 169n, 177n “Yi ge qing nian”  170, 170n Yeh, Wen-Hsin  19n, 32, 60n Becoming Chinese  19n, 20n, 32n, 60n Yi  79, 199, 200, 200n Yin-yang  197, 204, 205, 210 Yong  199, 200 Yu Dafu  41, 57, 85, 88, 88n, 89n, 90n, 91n, 92, 96, 105–9, 119 “Bo dian”  110n “Cai shi ji”  89n, 94, 98, 104 Chen lun  88, 92–4, 98, 104 Chi Guihua  106n, 111, 111n “Chun feng chen zui de wan shang” 101, 101n Jiao dian  109 “Jie shao yi ge wen xue de gong shi” 106 “Nan qian”  111, 111n “Qing yan”  110n “Shi lun”  106, l07n “Wen yi shang jian shang zhi pian ai jia zhi”  100, 100n Yu Dafu wen ji  90n, 91n, 100n, 105, 110 Yu Dafu xuan ji  89n Yu Dafu yan jiu zi liao  106n Yu Gong (the Dull-witted Old Man)  217, 217n Yu Mingling  218n Yu shi ju jin  295 Yu Ying-Shih  197, 202, 202n Zarathustra  94 Zeitgeist  110 Zhang Chengzhi  39n, 40, 46, 262–94 Huang ni xiao wu  266–71, 266n, 268, 271n, 280, 293n “Jiao nei ji yi”  272 “Ji xian sheng shu”  281n “Lu shang geng jue gu xiang yao yuan” 276 Qian ding  276, 276n Qing  271 Qing gan  276, 276n Wu yuan de si xiang  290n, 293n, 297n Xin ling shi  271–285, 277n, 278, 278n, 279, 292

index Xue tong  276, 276n “Yi bi wei qi”  264, 264n, 290 n63, n65, 293n, 298n Ying xiong huang wu lu  264n, 274n, 278, 279, 280, 285n Yuan chu zhi wen  275, 276n, 293 “Zai zhi xian sheng shu”  297 Zhang Chengzhi ji  266 n10, n11, 268n zhen (truthfulness)  271, 271n, 294 Zhi shi jie ji  282 Zhang Dongsheng  12n Zhang Junmai  12n, 209n Zhang Limin  209n Zhang Rulun  295n Zhang Taiyan  13, 19, 20–23, 29, 30, 33, 34, 42, 117, 125, 131, 131n Buddhist nonself  19–22, 20n, 21, 21n, 23, 32–34 Ju fen jin hua  34, 34n Zhang Taiyan Pingzhuan  34n Zhang Wei  301n You feng de gui tu  301n Zhang Wuchang  288 Zhang Yuanshan  294n “Zhang Chengzhi: the Most Self-Pleased Writer”  294n Zhang Zhen  249n The Urban Generation  249n Zhang Zhidong  10, 55 Zheng He  276, 276n Zhi  213, 214n Zhiguo  30, 31n Zhi shi feng zi li chang  299n Zhong min  56 Zhong guo ke yi shuo bu  262n Zhou Hongxin  116n, 118n Zhou Shujia  140, 141 Zhou Zhenfu  61n Zhuang Zi  32, 32n, 67, 119 Zhuhelai (Juhlai)  251, 251n, 255, 256, 259 Zhunyi  216, 216n Zhu guan  290, 291n Zhu Xi  203 Zi xing  20, 20n Zou xue  252, 252n, 253n Zuo Shunsheng  55n