Ideas, History, and Modern China

This book is the first and only English-language edition of Huang Xingtao’s Reshaping China, translated by Lane J. Harris and Mei Chun.

In this landmark text, Huang Xingtao uses a cultural approach to the history of ideas. He traces the complex contours in the discursive debates around the concept of the Chinese nation (Zhonghua minzu) from its origins in the late Qing; through the pivotal moment of the 1911 Revolution; into the contentious revolutionary upheavals of the 1920s, amidst the national crisis brought on by Japanese invasions in the 1930s; and culminating in the widespread acceptance of the concept during the Civil War. By the late 1940s, the Chinese nation came to represent the idea that all peoples within the country, whatever their ethnicity, were equal citizens who shared common goals and aspirations.

In this book, Ying Zhou argues that educational reform filled a critical role in bridging the precarious gap between democratic ideals and political realities in late Qing and Republican China, where institutional change in education and the cultivation of a qualified citizenry were two sides of the same coin in the development of democratic education.

Through a multi-level analysis of the (re)arrangements of national education and teachings of citizenship, Zhou unravels the complex political and educational nexus in China between 1901–1937, where the hope of education was to bring both political modernity and social progress.

Contrary to the usual sympathetic image of Kang Youwei found in historical studies, The Big Cheat offers a starkly negative portrayal of Kang. Its author, Huang Shizhong, a late Qing revolutionary and prolific author of over 20 novels, depicts Kang as a lifelong master fraud. His attack on Kang sheds light on the reform-revolution divide featured in every narrative about the rise of modern China.

Huang’s novel stands as a period testimony to the political and ideological struggles for China’s future during the last years of the Qing dynasty before it fell in 1912. This is the first English language edition of the novel, translated by Luke S. K. Kwong, who offers an extensive introduction contextualizing Huang's novel in historical perspective.

The breakup of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) in 1991 had significant repercussions on Chinese politics, foreign policy, and other aspects. In this book, Jie Li examines the evolution of Chinese intellectual perceptions of the Soviet Union in the 1980s and 1990s, before and after the collapse.

Relying on a larger body of updated Chinese sources, Li re-evaluates many key issues in post-Mao Chinese Sovietology, arguing that the Chinese views on the Soviet Union had been influenced and shaped by the ups-and-downs of Sino-Soviet (and later Sino-Russian) relations, China’s domestic political climate, and the political developments in Moscow. By researching the country of the Soviet Union, Chinese Soviet-watchers did not focus on the USSR alone, but mostly attempted to confirm and legitimize the Chinese state policies of reform and open door in both decades. By examining the Soviet past, Chinese scholars not only demonstrated concern for the survival of the CCP regime, but also attempted to envision the future direction and position of China in the post-communist world.

This book offers the first comprehensive study of the ways in which China’s men of guns (so-called “warlords”) and men of letters (May Fourth intellectuals) engaged one another for the making of a Chinese federation between 1919 and 1923. Breaking the constructed dichotomy between the men of guns and men of letters, Vivienne Guo’s analysis reappraises Chinese warlordism against the backdrop of the Chinese enlightenment. Exploring the ideological underpinnings and political vigour of the Chinese federalist movement, Negotiating A Chinese Federation provides a fresh interpretation of China’s cultural renewal and state-building.

Both Karl Marx and Max Weber inspired the writing of the two volumes of The Market and the Oikos. Weber coined a market versus oikos contradiction, in which oikos not only means house, household or family, but later also the state, while Marx saw a town versus country antagonism. Both scholars, however, explained insufficiently these most complicated concepts, let alone some mutual relationships. This second volume, The Market and the Oikos, Vol. II: The Peasant and the Nomad in History, continues the analysis of their antagonisms in their mutual relationships by providing the main practical characteristics in different historical, economic and sociological contexts, based on the writing of Max Weber as explained in Vol. I. While the first volume tried to characterize the relationships from economic and historical points of view, this second volume takes a historical/sociological angle. In both volumes, Hans Derks’ argument proceeds from early world historical examples to the present context of contemporary China, stressing the highly neglected role of nomads in history.

This book recounts two deaths, the murder of Mr. Wang Jin by 31 Red Guards in the Nanjing Foreign Language School, where the senior author was a young student at the time; and the earlier murder of Mrs. Bian Zhongyun of the Girls School affiliated with the Beijing Normal University in 1966. The book is a history of two small incidents in a massive social injustice and also an attempt to understand the Cultural Revolution (CR) within the framework of modern social movement theory. The book elaborates on the sources of violence in the CR, and the definition and periodization of the CR (that is, what was it, and when did it begin and end?).

In A Modern Miscellany: Shanghai Cartoon Artists, Shao Xunmei’s Circle and the Travels of Jack Chen, 1926-1938 Paul Bevan explores how the cartoon (manhua) emerged from its place in the Chinese modern art world to become a propaganda tool in the hands of left-wing artists. The artists involved in what was largely a transcultural phenomenon were an eclectic group working in the areas of fashion and commercial art and design. The book demonstrates that during the build up to all-out war the cartoon was not only important in the sphere of Shanghai popular culture in the eyes of the publishers and readers of pictorial magazines but that it occupied a central place in the primary discourse of Chinese modern art history.

The Chinese Cultural Revolution is the single most important internal social event in contemporary Chinese history. The plethora of history, literary, and artistic representations inspired by this event are critical to our understanding of the diversified, often contested, interpretations of contemporary China.

Li Li’s critical examination of autobiographic, filmic and fictional presentations in Memory, Fluid Identity, and the Politics of Remembering: The Representations of the Chinese Cultural Revolution in English-speaking Countries demonstrates that “memory works” not only reflect memories of those who lived through that period, but memories about their past, and, more importantly, about their identity remapping and artistic negotiation in a cross-cultural environment.

In A Modernity Set to a Pre-Modern Tune, Haosheng Yang provides an in-depth study of the classical-style poems of the most iconoclastic May Fourth Chinese writers (Lu Xun, Yu Dafu, Zhou Zuoren, Guo Moruo, and Nie Gannu) and highlights the five literary masters’ engagement with traditional lyricism as their critical response to the sociopolitical turbulence of twentieth-century China. This study challenges the bias against classical forms as allegedly outdated modes incapable of representing modern reality in current Chinese literary history.
Yang’s fascinating book positions modern Chinese literature’s formalistic nonlinearity, representational experiences, and aspiration for a new voice through an old form as factors that are all crucial to exploring more fully the blurred boundary between the traditional and the modern.

Imperial-Time-Order is an engagingly written critical study on a persistent historical way of thinking in modern China. Defined as normalization of unification and moralization of time, Qian suggests, the imperial-time-order signifies a temporal structure of empire that has continued to shape the way modern China developed itself conceptually. Weaving together intellectual debates with literary and media representations of imperial history since the late Qing period, ranging from novels, stage plays, films, to television series, Qian traces the different temporalities of each period and takes “time” as the analytical node by which issues of empire, nation, family, morality, individual and collective subjectivity are constructed and contested.

Covering half a century, from 1895 to 1945, The Allure of the Nation examines three interlocking aspects of Chinese nationalist modernity: (1) the quest to balance global connectivity and ethnic authenticity; (2) the desire to balance national unity and local autonomy; (3) the drive to balance history’s place as a tool of political propaganda and as a weapon used to critique orthodoxy and political suppression. By viewing the nation as a cluster of spatial-temporal relations that link individuals to a territorial state, this book provides a different view of early twentieth-century China where the party-state did not have full control of political and cultural affairs, and alternative political perspectives (such as local self-government and democratic aristocracy) could be freely expressed.

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.

Tapestry of Light offers an account of the psychic, intellectual, and cultural aftermath of the Chinese Cultural Revolution. Drawing on a wide range of works including essay, fiction, memoir, painting and film, the book explores links between history, trauma and haunting. Challenging the leftist currents in Cultural Revolution scholarship, the tone pervading the book is a rhythm of melancholia, indeterminacy but also hope. Huang demonstrates that aesthetic afterlives resist both the conservative nostalgia for China’s revolutionary past as well as China’s elated, false confidence in the market-driven future.

Huang engages with prominent Chinese intellectuals, writers, artists and filmmakers, including Ba Jin, Han Shaogong, Hong Ying, Zhang Xiaogang, Jiang Wen and Ann Hui.

In Signposts of Self-Realization, Xinmin Liu offers an ontological study of education and development of the individual self through the prisms of ethical progress and social evolution in the context of modern Chinese literature and film.

Did self-realization in the Chinese modern follow the law of Social Darwinism: the biggest ego always won out? Is individualism always self-regarding, never other-regarding? How did the Greater I evolve out of the Lesser I socially and ethically? Confronting these questions, the author navigates through the terrains of paraphrastic translation, Buddhist nonself, lyrical epiphany, redemptive memory and ethnic orality to map out an alternative path for the growth of a modern Chinese self.

As China enters the second decade of the 21st century, it faces tremendous challenges and crisis. How did China arrive at this point of crisis? How do we understand the nature of the challenges? More than any existing study of reform-era China, this volume offers a theoretical discussion of the cultural and social roots of the reform. It does so for the purpose of further exploring whether or not it is possible to imagine alternatives. Contributors to this second volume of “Culture and Social Transformations in Reform Era China” address these questions by exploring some of the most contentiously debated topics including liberalism, human rights, rule of law, the state, capitalism, and socialism.

Buttressed by an autocratic system, China’s colossal economic growth over the past decades seems to have had the paradoxical effect of undermining the foundation of Western domination but at the same time invigorating Eurocentricism. In particular, it highlights the current relevance of the central conviction of Weber’s Orient: the absence of civic roots in non-Western societies will create a kind of “uncivic” capitalist system in which one has no choice but to seek to compensate for instabilities through authoritarian institutions. Does this mean that the West may alone afford to harmonize political stability with the universalistic ideal of justice as the basic structure of society? If not, how then is it possible to develop a notion of the primacy of social justice that transcends the limits of liberal democracy? This book aims at addressing these timely questions by drawing on “Confucian Marxism”—a distinctive perspective on civil society.

In Gilded Voices: Economics, Politics, and Storytelling in the Yangzi Delta since 1949, Qiliang He pieces together published, archival, and oral history sources to explore the role of the cultural market in mediating between the state and artists in the PRC era. By focusing on pingtan, a storytelling art using the Suzhou dialect, the book documents both the state’s efforts to police artists and their repertoire and storytellers’ collaboration with, as well as resistance to, state supervision and intervention. The book thereby challenges long-held scholarly assumptions about the Chinese Communist Party’s success in politicizing popular culture, patronizing artists, abolishing the cultural market, and enforcing rigid censorship in Mao’s times.

The story of Hong Kong’s New Asia College, from its 1949 establishment through its 1963 incorporation into The Chinese University of Hong Kong, reveals the efforts of a group of self-exiled intellectuals in establishing a Confucian-oriented higher education on the Chinese periphery. Their program of cultural education encountered both support and opposition in the communist containment agenda of American non-governmental organizations and in the educational policies of the British colonial government. By examining the cooperation and struggle between these three parties, this study sheds light on postwar Hong Kong, a divided China, British imperial ambitions in Asia, and the intersecting global dynamics of modernization, cultural identity, and the Cold War.

Chinese modernity discourses have been dominated by nationalism and revolutionary radicalism in much of the 20th century, but liberal cosmopolitanism has always been an important force in modern Chinese intellectuality, though a much neglected topic in modern Chinese studies. This book is a cross-cultural critique on the problem of the liberal cosmopolitan in modern Chinese intellectuality in light of Lin Yutang’s literary and cultural practices across China and America. It includes comparative reference to other discourses of major literary and intellectual figures such as Zhang Zhidong, Liang Qichao, Gu Hongming, Hu Shi, Lu Xun, Zhou Zuoren, Pearl S. Buck, Agnes Smedley and Edgar Snow. It also demonstrates that a liberal cosmopolitan road, which suggests a middling Chinese modernity, is both possible and desirable.

In face of rapid social and economic changes since the late 1970s, where is China transforming toward? If culture, in the form values, ideals, and ideological struggles, plays a key role in China’s latest round of social transformations, what are the cultural legacies and resources that are at play and in what ways they do so? This collection of essays aims at addressing these questions. Written by some of the leading intellectuals and thinkers, in and outside of contemporary China, these essays, in different ways, re-examine and reflect on the extent to which three major cultural legacies, namely traditional, May Fourth, and socialist, can function as cultural resources under the changed and changing social and economic conditions of the reform era.

The emergence of the Chinese socialist realist novel can best be understood in light of the half-century long formation of the modern concept of literature in China. Globalized in the wake of modern capitalism, literary modernity configures the literary text in a relationship to both modern philosophy and literary theory. This book traces China's unique, complex, and creative articulation of literary modernity beginning with Lu Xun's “The True Story of Ah Q.” Cai Yi's aesthetic theory of the type (dianxing) and the image (xingxiang) is then explored in relation to global currents in literary thought and philosophy, making possible a fundamental rethinking of Chinese socialist realist novels like Yang Mo's Song of Youth and Luo Guangbin and Yan Yiyan's Red Crag.