China & Inner Asia: Table of Contents
Organizer and Chair: Zhen Zhang, University of Chicago
Discussant: Matthew H. Sommer, University of Pennsylvania
This interdiscursive panel focuses on the re-production and consumption of the concept and images of "xia" (knight-errantry) as it is manifested in mass media such as popular fiction, commercial cinema, and sensational journalism from the late Qing to the early Republican period. The shared concern of the panelists is to examine how the trope of "knight-errantry" prevalent in traditional history and literature gets reconfigured with the onset of modern mass media, and in particular the subsequent formation of the urban mass public. We are also concerned with how gender roles in these representations acquire both new cultural significance and social power during that particular historical period characterized by political instability and cultural experimentation. By bridging the late Qing and the early Republican period, it is hoped that the facile demarcation of the premodern and the modern will also be subject to examination.
James St. André researches a set of late Qing versions of the famous "martial arts" novel San Xia Wu Yi. He probes both the significance of the literary format and the social, political as well as well as gender implications of the novel as a product for mass consumption. Moving into the late 1920s, Zhang Zhen’s paper investigates the phenomenon of the "martial arts" film in Shanghai and its reception, including the paranoid reaction from both the Right and Left. She argues that the figure of the female knight-errant prevalent in this genre manifests a cultural anxiety toward the power of modern women as well as the power of film technology. Continuing the discussion on the image of the female knight, Roland Altenburger offers an intertextual reading of Zhang Henshui’s novel Tixiao Yinyuan. Eugenia Lean, however, brings our attention from the realm of fiction and film to that of historical representation. She focuses on a real-life incident in 1935 concerning a female assassin, and the subsequent mass reaction toward it and the gender problematic it represented. Her meditation on the cultural meaning of violence and the importance of media intervention resonates with similar concerns in the preceding papers and will provide the panel as a whole with a thoughtful conclusion.
James St. André, University of Chicago
Wuxia xiaoshuo (knight-errantry fiction) is often centrally concerned with unbridled power and its containment. This paper is concerned with different versions of the novel San xia wu yi (including Zhonglie xiayi zhuan and Qi xia wu yi) published between 1870 and 1900, when sales of cheap printed editions were taking off in the urban centers. These different versions, edited by a variety of men over a period of thirty years, demonstrate the ongoing struggle over a variety of political, social, and literary issues and how they are interconnected.
Briefly, on the literary level three main strategies are employed to contain oral popular material and subordinate it to elite standards: the use of classical language, the employment of a frame story featuring Bao Zheng from courtcase fiction, and the intertwining of what were earlier separate plots. These written literary techniques are paralleled by a consistent attempt to re-assert traditional political norms (center over periphery, civil over military, etc.) reflecting longstanding anxieties in Chinese society which were particularly acute in the 19th century. They also parallel an attempt to re-assert norms of gender identity, xia women not being allowed. Underlying all of these issues and driving the editing process is a concern with the concept of justice.
The verb "attempt" is stressed because none of the versions are completely successful in any of these areas. However, they are all more successful than, for example, Shui hu zhuan, where the re-incorporation of the heroes into the political and social structure at the end seems forced, and they prepare the way for the explosion of wuxia fiction and film in the 20th century.
Zhen Zhang, University of Chicago
The film scene in Shanghai in the late 20s and early 30s saw the booming of the so-called "martial arts-magic-spirit" (wuxia shenguai) film. My paper examines this mass cultural phenomenon with a focus on the image of the female knight-errant (nüxia) that caught the popular imagination of the time. I will argue that the proliferation of the "martial arts-magic-spirit" film manifests the cultural ambivalence toward "science" and "democracy" propagated by the May Fourth ideology. The excess of the genre in terms of film technology, "superstitious" beliefs, as well as the power of the female knight-errant proved too dangerous to the cultural establishment of both the Right and Left. The films to be discussed include Red Heroine, White Rose, and The Female Knight-errant from Huangjiang.
Eugenia Lean, University of California, Los Angeles
This conference paper will examine the manner in which the mass public in 1930s China appreciated a real life female assassin in terms of the literary trope of the xianü. On November 13, 1935, Shi Jianqiao sought revenge for the murder of her father by killing ex-warlord Sun Chuanfang. The assassination and the ensuing legal trial attracted an inordinate amount of public sympathy on the one hand and sharp elite criticism on the other hand. Public support eventually grew to such proportions that the Guomindang state found it expedient to sanction the behavior of the filial daughter through a highly-publicized pardon.
Public fascination with the cause célèbre was contingent upon Shi’s embodiment of both filial piety (xiao) and knight-errantry (xia). In this paper, however, I will focus solely on her xianü persona, a heroic agent whose personal sense of justice allows her to transgress the rules of propriety set by the existing social and political order. In particular, I will review the coverage of the case in the commercial press and analyze a serialized fictional adaptation to show how this xianü trope provided a means for readers to explore and define "modern" gender roles. I will furthermore make an inquiry into other significant historiographical questions, including the cultural significance of violence and the relationship between the press, coverage of a news event and its fictionalized adaptation. Lastly, I hope to argue that the reading mass "public" even while seeking entertainment was not without political influence, making its political presence felt through its consumption of such media accounts.