Organizer: Kristin Stapleton, University of Kentucky
Chair: Philip A. Kuhn, Harvard University
Discussant: Guy S. Alitto, University of Chicago
The first half of the twentieth century was an age of "problems and isms"-a time when philosophers and political activists debated the meaning of China's past and competed to attract support for their projects to create a new China. This occurred as a technological revolution changed the way people communicated with one another. The growth of print and broadcast media allowed voices which formerly may have been confined to teahouses and temple stages to burst out into a broader public sphere. The nature of public discourse changed dramatically in the republican era.
One aspect of that change was a proliferation of humorous writing and radio performance. Although it has been largely overlooked by historians of the period, the huge volume of jokes, satire, and other forms of comedy published and broadcast in the republican period contributed to the cultural atmosphere in which the great arguments about China's future were carried out.
The participants in this panel propose to explore some of the humorous modes of the republican period to illuminate the ways in which humor served to define communities and condition public debates over such issues as women's proper roles and the legitimacy of militarist governments. Carlton Benson examines the creation and criticism of new Shanghai identities in radio performances during the 1930s. Kristin Stapleton considers how humor became a common strategy adopted by representatives of diverse political movements in republican era Chengdu. Finally, Peter Zarrow looks at the use of humor as a rhetorical device in the speeches and essays of several prominent cultural critics of the first half of the twentieth century. As a whole, we expect the panel to contribute to a more textured picture of cultural change in the republican period.
Carlton Benson, University of California, Berkeley
Tanci, a popular form of storytelling in late imperial Jiangnan, often relied on humor to attract an audience. When it became the predominant form of radio entertainment in Shanghai during the Nanjing Decade, storytellers continued to provoke laughter. They performed, for example, humorous kaipian, or opening songs, at the request of listeners. Among the most popular kaipian were songs that introduced an entire cast of funny new characters to the urban scene. These included "The Shanghai Girl," "The Shanghai Wifey," "The Modern Missus," "The Modern Mister," and "The Quarreling Couple From Jiangbei." This paper will contribute to the growing body of scholarship on urban identity in modern China by examining these songs both textually and in their performance context. The nature and function of the humor in these songs was traditional. Storytellers turned conventional patterns upside down to provoke derisive laughter aimed at irregular behavior and thereby impose order. But in 1930s Shanghai, storytellers lampooned new forms of unusual behavior to promote order not within a traditional type of community. Rather, they depended on radio air waves to build new relationships with a faceless audience of diverse sojourners for whom they helped to articulate a Shanghai identity. What were the primary features of this identity and how was it judged? A primary feature was gross consumption, and the diverse community of performers and listeners distinguished itself from the characters who represented Shanghai as clearly as they did from the ones who represented Jiangbei. Only silk merchants attempted to represent the Shanghai characters sympathetically, but they were fighting an uphill battle.
Kristin Stapleton, University of Kentucky
At the end of Ba Jin's novel Family, the ardent young hero, fed up with his repressive, backward looking, life sapping Chengdu family, boards a boat and heads downstream to the coast, where he hopes a new, healthy, progressive culture is taking shape. In real life, Ba Jin himself did just that, leaving Chengdu in the early 1920s and settling in Shanghai. In fleeing the interior, did he and many of his contemporaries leave intellectual life in cities such as Chengdu in the hands of characters like Feng Leshan, the reactionary old Confucian of Ba Jin's story? To the extent that the New Culture movement penetrated the interior, did it polarize the urban community? Was the republican period a time of cultural fragmentation in Chengdu? Who talked to whom about what? This paper addresses these questions via a study of popular literature of the 1920s and 1930s.
The paper focuses on two of the most celebrated authors in Chengdu during the republican years. Both were humorists, although of very different styles-Li Zongwu, founder of what he claimed was a religion devoted to the cultivation of thick skin and black heartedness, and Liu Shiliang, a poet and teahouse operator who established a newspaper to propagate the witty and caustic verses which he and his friends composed. An examination of the literary output of these two authors and the reaction to it within the literate community suggests that, despite its conservative reputation, skepticism toward the body of Confucian learning was rife in Chengdu. Perhaps the most interesting aspect of this comic commentary on cultural matters, though, is the way it changed the tone of public discourse. Even staunch defenders of "National Learning" began to turn to the art of ridicule as they discovered that their principled and righteous exhortations were being ignored by those in power. In so doing, they joined forces with writers of different philosophical persuasions in a common protest against the militaristic political authorities in Sichuan. My study attempts to gauge the attitudes toward political action reflected in and fostered by the humorous writing in 1920s and 1930s Chengdu.
Peter Zarrow, Vanderbilt University
One rhetorical strategy in the arsenal of persuasion of Chinese intellectuals was sarcasm, used to illustrate the futility of their opponents' arguments and to further their own. They wrote humorous but barbed passages carefully calculated to enliven otherwise completely serious essays and give the reader a bit of comic relief while simultaneously furthering their arguments. Chinese intellectuals in the late Qing and early Republic wrote to convince specific audiences of the truth of their arguments. Moreover, in urging particular courses of action upon the nation, they used a rhetoric of persuasion. The main forms of argumentation included historical example, authority, consequences, chain reasoning, and to some extent the syllogism, but irony and sarcasm were also used. Without them, arguments lacked a certain punch. Not every author argued with humorous devices, but most did. Wu Zhihui (1865-1953) is a particularly prominent example of an essayist who used every form of sarcasm and shock technique throughout his long career. He savagely ridiculed the Manchus, Confucianism, and religion; there was a bit of Voltaire in Wu. Liang Qichao (1873-1929), though usually associated with the utmost moral seriousness, also on occasion used gentle sarcasm, paradox, and the reductio a absurdum form of argumentation. Liang used these humorous devices to force his audience to think about their own assumptions. Not every intellectual was capable of humorous writing, but fengci (satire) was an important technique of argumentation.
Would you like to return to the China & Inner Asia Table of Contents? Choose another area?