China & Inner Asia: Table of Contents
Organizer: Ann L. Huss, Colgate University
Chair and Discussant: Howard Goldblatt, University of Colorado, Boulder
Even from the layman’s point of view, China of the 1920s and 30s appeared a nation stretched apart by feudal remnants and colonial imperium. Perhaps nowhere else in the country could be found a more profound microcosm of this ban fengjian ban zhimindi society than in Shanghai, the part-time residence of Lu Xun’s creative spirit, hometown of Xiandai editor Shi Zhecun, and publishing center for periodicals including Lin Yutang’s The China Critic and Liangyou Pictorial. What on the surface seemed the paradisiac rendering of a city where the modern sprang forth quite comfortably from the ancient bulwark and West met East with a solicitous bow, was in actuality a hotbed of political-literary activity, a mockery of the popular theoretical opinion that China was "modernizing" at the gracious hand of its colonial "lessees." Shanghai of the 1990s gives one an odd sense of déjà vu.
The renewed interest in Shanghai in recent years reveals a tendency to reconnect aesthetic modernism with political modernity and colonialism. However, it seems that available discussions on the subject are constrained by a desire to antagonize specific ideological versions of realism, history, and social progress. How did (and how does) the urban setting of Shanghai, its cultural and racial mixture, its bilingual authors and audience shape Chinese modernism? Given that, as C. T. Hsia argues, Chinese modernist writers could never put away their "obsession with China," how does the consideration of these forms of particularity re-shape existing grand narratives of nationalism, history, and social progress? And how does the ambivalence of contemporary Shanghai writers inform our fin de siècle nostalgia for that bygone "Shanghai era"?
We’ll respond to these questions first by looking at the 1930s debate between Lu Xun and Les Contemporains editor Shi Zhecun, moving on to the transformation of "New Women" and city politics as evidenced on the pages of Liangyou huabao, then to a look at Lin Yutang’s English-language journal The China Critic, and ending with a comparison of two contemporary novels by Shanghai authors Sun Ganlu and Wang Anyi. In our choice of a variety of media—pictorials, magazines, personal letters, novels—both modern and contemporary, we hope to provide an amendment to the currently accepted "law" on Shanghai as a center of cultural production.
Ann Huss, Colgate University
"Modernization" in 1930s Shanghai was indeed taking place, but definitions of "the modern" and how it ought be related to "the past" changed daily with each new edition of the newspaper. Privately, Lu Xun and Shi Zhecun separately addressed the modernization of antiquity in their rewritings of old tales (see Lu Xun, Gushi xinbian; Shi Zhecun, Li Shishi; Shixiu) but little attention has been granted the more public "war of words" between Lu and Shi that was played out on the pages of a variety of periodicals including Wenfan xiaopin, Les Contemporains, and Shenbao, as well as in letters between Lu Xun, Shi Zhecun, and authors Yao Ke and Zheng Zhenduo.
If indeed the "old tales retold" of Lu Xun and Shi Zhecun embodied literary attempts at modernization emboldened by audacious, confident mergers of past with present, the "war of words" that ensued from 1933 to 1936 bared a chink in the wall of confidence that surrounded the two. The relationship between past and present and the separation of ancient texts and "new" literature that many believe to have been canonized by the May Fourth Movement of 1919 were still being questioned a decade later. Ironically, it was Shi Zhecun, editor of Xiandai (or "modern"), a journal which championed artistic freedom, who boldly expressed his reliance on ancient texts. Why then did his voice eventually take second-place to Lu Xun’s "call to arms" and what can their argument tell us about the complexity of the literary "modern"—a complexity often unacknowledged?
Jianmei Liu, San Francisco State University
As the formula writing of "revolution plus love" emerged and proliferated in the literary field during the period from 1926–1935, only leftist writings of this formula were noticed and discussed by literary critics, but other modes of writing which followed the same formula remained intact. As a result, for the most part, literary critics have assumed that there is some existing identity, understood through the formula of "revolution plus love," which not only initiates Marxist goals and interests within discourse, but also constitutes the progressive subject for whom political representation is pursued. However, what has been purged from the annals of literary history is the historical reappropriation and displacement of the very formula in the service of the qualitatively different situation of repetition.
In the context of hybrid culture in Shanghai, the fashion of "revolution plus love" chased by some writers of the School of New Sensibility or by mass culture has shown that there is no "original," single and stable identity embedded in the simulacrum of formulaic writings. However, why did these different groups of writers pursue this highly political theme? How did they deal with the relationship between Eros and revolution? What did revolution and Eros mean to writers who indulged in Western decadence in one way, but were concerned about national crisis and modern crisis in the other? What had the cultural practice of Shanghai to do with these different writings? How did they define "modernity" and "new" as they involved themselves in "un-new" imitation and repetition?
Shuang Shen, City University of New York
Postcolonialist revisions of historical studies of Chinese treaty-port culture such as the one conducted by Tani Barlow re-open several questions that revolve around how to discuss the issues of hybridity, agency, and difference in a culturally and racially mixed environment such as Shanghai. If hybridity is not the kind of "half and half" concoction described by Fairbank, what alternative narratives can we construct? If the Chinese subject is not as homogeneous and essentially different from the West as has been described by Fairbank, then where should we locate the site of this already fragmented subject? If treaty-port culture cannot be summarized by the social scientific binarisms of particularity vs. generality, subject vs. object, which in Fairbank’s paradigm parallel the division of East and West, how do we describe the ways by which culture comes into contact with society?
I will try to take up the challenge of these difficult questions by studying an English-language journal edited by a group of Chinese intellectuals in Shanghai between 1928 and 1945. The journal’s name is The China Critic. I will rely mainly on the editorials in this journal to illustrate the trajectory by which the editors defined their subject positions in the hybrid cultural context. I describe The China Critic as a hybrid cultural product for several reasons. Firstly, while its language is English, the editors were very much conscious of the double roles they played in this journal. They wanted to introduce China to foreigners and introduce the West to China. Secondly, since the journal was published in Shanghai, a treaty-port whose everyday life involved the negotiation of cultural and racial differences, through writing about Shanghai, the editors naturally encoded hybridity into the content of the magazine. Importantly, the geographical distance between Shanghai and Nanjing, the capital of the Nationalist Government, created a space for a liberalist tolerance of hybridity before it was turned into a rigid form of nationalism. Finally, as "returned students" from the West and "enlightened intellectuals," the editors perceived writing about cultural difference as a way of writing about the self. Their self-awareness as hybrid intellectuals created a particular position from which to criticize both Chinese culture and the West.
Robin Visser, Columbia University
In the wake of avant-garde redefinitions of urban/rural discourse of the late 1980s and early 1990s, contemporary Chinese literature tends to lack the oppositional geopoetic markers which have characterized most twentieth-century Chinese fiction. Much as the city/country dichotomy eventually lost potency in western literature during the course of urbanization and modernization, a literary aesthetic based on rigid geopolitics is diminishing in China as well. One of the most interesting developments in the 1990s is the rise of new forms of urban literature which depict unique regional responses to China’s rapid modernization. This paper will focus on distinctives of writing in Shanghai in the 1990s, as part of a larger project which will compare writing from various urban centers in China.
I will compare two novels by Shanghai writers who display similar characteristics in portraying Shanghai’s shimin (urbanite) culture primarily via eclectic relationships rather than concrete material markers. Sun Ganlu’s Huxi (Breathing) (1993) expresses the complexity of the metropolis from the internal perspective of a protagonist uncertain of his sexual orientation, his career pursuits, and the meaning of his existence in an urban scene constantly in flux. He is acted on rather than an actor, representing a passive response to the ever-changing city. Wang Anyi’s Changhen ge (Song of Everlasting Sorrow) (1995), on the other hand, is an attempt to describe the city from an external perspective. Despite being packed with metaphors and analytical descriptions of the "heart" (xin) of the city, however, the novel leaves the reader with an odd sense of being outside the city looking in, unable to emotionally engage in either the chaotic cosmopolitan life of the 1930s, or the programmatized modernizations of post-Mao Shanghai. The similarity between the two novels is that both characterize a metropolis which leaves its protagonists oddly static amidst allusions to constant change, indicative of a lingering ambivalence vis-à-vis Shanghai’s rapid modernization.