Politics of Art

In Politics of Art Zhiguang Yin investigates members of the Creation Society and their social network while in Japan. The study contextualises the Chinese left-wing intellectual movements and their political engagements in relation with the early 20th century international political events and trends in both East Asia and Europe.
The Creation Society was largely viewed as a subject of literary studies. This research, however, evaluates these intellectuals in the context of Chinese revolution and elaborates their theoretical contribution to the Chinese Communist Party’s practice of “theoretical struggle” as a main driving force of ideological construction. As this study tries to demonstrate, theoretical struggle drives the ideological politics forward while maintaining its political vigour.

Zhiguang Yin received his Ph.D. from University of Cambridge in 2011. He is Lecturer of Chinese Studies at the University of Exeter and a former Assistant Professor at Zayed University in the UAE. He has published many articles in the field of international history, Sino-Middle Eastern Relations, and modern Chinese intellectual history.

"Politics of Art is an innovative study of the political significance of the Creation Society (创造社), a celebrated literary society of 1920s China. Among its many insights, for example, it introduces readers to intriguing connections, such as that between the Frankfurt School and the Creation Society, via the Japanese Marxist Fukumoto Kazuo [...] all in all, Politics of Art makes an important contribution to our understanding of the history and historiography of some of the centrally important questions in twentieth-century Chinese intellectual history, such as the relationship between the intellectual and the people and the dialectics of theory and practice." - Liang Luo, University of Kentucky, MCLC Resource Center Publication, Dec. 2015
“Yin tries to restore the historicity of the politics of theoretical struggle, inherent in the Creation Society’s practice, which has been effaced by depoliticizing discourses, and to illuminate its relevance to contemporary politics. […] This book is a valuable addition to the existing corpus of scholarship on the Creation Society. The author has conducted substantial historical research utilizing numerous first-hand materials and archives.” - Xiangjing Chen, Cornell University, in: Frontiers of Literary Studies, 10.3 September 2016