Mo Yan’s historical novel Sandalwood Death revisits the Boxer Uprising, exploring a local structure of feeling from the point of view of oral transmissions that, one hundred years after the events, appears gradually to be receding into oblivion. It is a project of recuperation or, rather, aesthetic reconstruction of local knowledge. The staging of a variety of local performances, such as Maoqiang opera, seasonal festivals, military and religious parades, as well as of scenes of excessive violence in executions and battle scenes, appears to be a strategy for the cultural reclamation of these local experiences. The story challenges the ingrained dualism between foreign, modern imperialist and nationalist forms of rationality, and pre-modern, local patterns of behaviour and thought. Employing polyphony and multivalent historical representtations, the novel aspires to portray the social dynamics in a given geohistorical circumstances by measuring the spatiotemporal as well as the cognitive distance between the witnessed event, the testifying witness and the future receivers of the transmitted stories. Thus, the inquiry does not focus on the historical events as facts, but rather on their cultural afterlife in (founding) narratives. In times of a growing gap between the modernist vision of human liberation and the actual conditions of growing inequality, delegitimization and dispossession, this tale of unrest in the wake of globalization has as much to say about the world’s peoples around the year 2000, when the novel was published, as about the microcosm of Shandong Gaomi County around the year 1900, when the historical events took place. Taking into account that the novel was written as a local Maoqiang opera in the making and that theatres are major providers of cultural space for the enactment of the human self as the subject of history, Sandalwood Death can perhaps best be described as a theatre of reclamation.

Chi Zijian’s stories connect to the origin of her life’s journey, which is the “Earth Spirit.” Such a connection renders her stories characteristic of “custom history” by demonstrating how the writer reflects reality from her own perspectives, voice, and methods of narration. The narrative style adopted by Chi Zijian is different from that of other modern stories in which nature is allowed to take its course. Chi Zijian’s short stories employ many “accidents” and “coincidences,” bringing the audience back to the storytellers’ time of Chinese classical novels. From a writing perspective, a majority of Chi Zijian’s stories are about lower-class society and are a custom history for the silent population in the north of China.

In this paper I will re-contextualize Lu Xun’s early thought, as evidenced in his lengthy classical-style essays, which are concerned with issues in literature, philosophy, politics and aesthetics during an era when China was facing profound cultural changes. Part of their significance lies in the way they provide us with an unabashed glimpse at what Lu Xun set out to accomplish, early on, in his new-found literary career. Although they are mainly the product of his final Lehrjahre (years of study) in Japan, the fact that he chose to include the two longest of them in the very first pages of his important 1926 anthology Fen (The grave) indicates that he considered the views expressed therein neither too immature nor too passé to reprint at the height of his career as a creative writer. In fact, he wrote that one of his reasons for doing so was that a number of the literary figures and issues treated in these essays had, ironically, taken on an increased relevance for China “since the founding of the Republic.” The central concern of all the essays turns on questions of cultural crisis and transition. What I propose to do in this paper is to re-examine the essays within the context in which they first appeared, i.e., the expatriate Chinese journal Henan, then published in Tokyo as an unofficial organ of the anti-Manchu Tongmenghui (Revolutionary Alliance).

As we enter 21st century, with China’s economic rise, Chinese intellectual circle have come up with some new narratives regarding China’s position in the world order. Among these narratives, one that attracts most attention is the “civilization narrative.” It holds that China is not a general “nation-state,” nor a traditional “empire,” but a political body that should be described in terms of “civilization.” This article, by combining together intellectual history and social history, tries to make a critical evaluation of this “civilization narrative” from four aspects: first, the narratives about “civilization-state”; second, the relation between “civilization” and “China”; third, the contemporaneity of “civilization,” i.e. the historical condition under which classical canons and tradition are reconstituted in contemporary China; fourth, to examine the genealogy of “civilization narratives” and conceive the possibility for imagining a pluralistic world.

Jian bureaucrats as a group played an active role in the cultural and political life of China during the mid-Tang period (CE 766–835). Mid-Tang scholars engaged in literary pursuits formed strong attachments to jian positions and were eager to serve as jian bureaucrats. If experience had taught the mid-Tang jian bureaucrats anything, it was that they had to follow cautious strategies in making arguments or suggestions concerning government affairs. This paper aims to show that these jian bureaucrats tended to incorporate their political agenda for administrative supervision into literary writings. In this sense, the relevance between literary activities having political significance and the political agenda of the mid-Tang literati holding jian positions can be examined.

Of the many forms of literary experimentation that arose in China during the 1980s, Can Xue’s writing stands out as some of the strangest and most enigmatic. This article intends to examine her most significant work from that period, Five Spice Street (Wuxiang jie; first published under the title Breakthrough Performance [Tuwei biaoyan]), in light of one of the major intellectual concerns in literature at the time: the question of the human. Through a close reading of the novel, I investigate the ways in which Can Xue interrogates and destabilizes the notion of the human with regard to the relationship between subject and object, corporeality, animality, sexuality, language, and time. Overall, I suggest that while Can Xue succeeds in offering a unique and provocative conceptualization of the human in Five Spice Street, she also refrains from “breaking through” the general realm of humanist discourse current at the time.

Mu Shiying’s first short story collection, North Pole, South Pole (Nanbeiji) from 1932, is usually seen as socialist or proletarian literature preceding his later modernist writings. I argue that this view needs to be revised. In one short story Mu deliberately parodies the social agenda of contemporary leftist writers. The protagonists are neither enlightened workers nor victims of social injustice. On the contrary, they turn to rage, misogyny, and self-righteous violence, and their motives are rooted in their sexual frustrations and inability to cope with modern life. Their righteous ideals are based on fiction and an imagined tradition. Mu’s construction of the fictive tradition plays an important part in these early short stories, and, in this respect, I compare them with Shi Zhecun’s writings.

Established in the late imperial era, “one hundred beauties” (baimei) genre selected and portrayed one hundred beautiful women in Chinese history often through three cultural artifacts: woodblock print portraits, biographies, and poems. This paper takes as its focus the anthology Gujin baimei tuyong 古今百美 图咏 (Illustrated biographies of and poems on one hundred beauties of the past and the present, 1917), which has not received scholarly attention before. Bringing together collections of old and new-style beauties, the anthology is a showcase of the genre straddling two centuries. The transformation of the genre, as reflected in the Gujin baimei tuyong, complicates a simplistic distinction between tradition and modernity while enriching our understanding of the changing representations of women.

This article examines the literary imaginations of the White Pagoda and demonstrates a shift in its representation from a metaphor for the Song court’s fate to a fantastic site for the subjugation of unworldly beings. In the late thirteenth century, the Yuan-appointed Tibetan Buddhist monk Yang Lianzhenjia exhumed the imperial mausoleums of the defeated Southern Song, built the White Pagoda on the site of the old Southern Song palace in Hangzhou, and interred the exhumed bones under it. Enthusiastic Song loyalists thus considered the White Pagoda to be a symbol of a humiliating past in which the Mongol Yuan dynasty occupied the south. Meanwhile, Qu You, an early-Ming writer from Hangzhou, began to imagine that the White Pagoda served to pacify the innocent, lonely dead who died during the Song-Yuan social disturbance. Investigating the discourse of the early Ming literati in regard to the pagoda site and the supernatural in early Ming Hangzhou leads to the conclusion that the literary imagination of the White Pagoda would have also contributed to the development of the White Snake Legend, where a white serpent spirit was subdued under Thunder Peak Pagoda in Hangzhou.

The rhapsodies on the mind (xin-fu) is a major category of the rhapsody (fu) genre during the Wei and Jin dynasties. Those describing human sentimental psychology are known as the rhapsodies on thoughts (gan-fu). The rhapsodies on thoughts from this period embody a special proposition on how human aesthetic experience arises, which is termed as evocation (gan-xing). Evocation involves two dimensions: responding to objects (gan-wu) and responding to seasons (gan-shi). Together, they form the basic framework or mechanism that generates the abstract aesthetic experience in the rhapsodies on thoughts. More specifically, the rhapsodies on thoughts reveal five types of aesthetic experience generated: (1) aesthetic emotions triggered by natural sights; (2) philosophical insights triggered by natural sights; (3) aesthetic emotions triggered by social environments; (4) aesthetic experience triggered by natural sights and social environments; and (5) anti-evocation experience, namely an aesthetic response to the natural world triggered by specific scenes in life. These five evocation models broadly cover the aesthetic experience generated by the rhapsodies on thoughts from this period. First and foremost, evocation reveals the internal mechanism that generates aesthetic experience—external things evoke one’s inner feelings, thus creating aesthetic appreciation. Furthermore, it uncovers the normative significance of natural aesthetic appreciation as the prerequisite for artistic aesthetic appreciation: People are first moved by external objects in the realm of natural aesthetic appreciation before consciously developing the urge to express their emotions or feelings through natural images in the realm of artistic aesthetics. The rise of evocation, originating from the rhapsodies on thoughts of the Wei and Jin dynasties, signifies that Chinese aesthetic consciousness was attained during this period in relation to the mechanism of generating aesthetic experiences.

Chi Zijian's novel The Last Quarter of the Moon (E'erguna He You'an) is an excellent historical novel themed around the life of the Evenki people. It depicts the important theme of “looking back at home” and reveals a yearning for “poetic dwelling” shared by many contemporary people who feel lost. The novel’s unique perspective explores the “origin” of home and shows the close relationship between the lives of the Evenki people, the landscape, and their fate on the right bank of the Argun River. The unique grounds on which the novel stands can be found in its inquiry into the “uniqueness” of home, vividly describing the Evenki people’s special living “place” and their unique approaches to birth, death, marriage, and funeral. In this recollection, the novel shows us the unique ecological beauty of Evenki homeland, including the feminine beauty of harmonious well-being found between people and nature, as well as the masculine beauty of the struggle that exists between humans and nature, which are both reflected in the “ecological sublimity” of the primitive religious ceremonies carried out by two generations of shamans for tribal benefits.

This article analyzes two literary works by the Czech writer, Julius Zeyer (1841-1901), and Lu Xun (1881-1936) by elaborating upon two different myths concerning the Archer Hou Yi. These myths were presented by the missionary and Sinologist William Frederick Mayers in The Chinese Reader’s Manual: A Handbook of Biographical, Historical, Mythological and General Literary References (1874), and other Chinese sources. Zeyer highlighted the first myth, which was connected with the Emperor Yao and showed Hou Yi shooting arrows at the nine suns appearing together in the heavens, and Lu Xun preferred the second myth, where the Archer Yi rebelled against the Emperor Tai Kang, whom he drove from the Capital, and later was killed by Han Zhuo. The myth of Chang E who flew to the moon is described only by Lu Xun.

During the pre-Qin period, shi yan zhi (poetry expressing aspirations) was not a poetic concept. It primarily served to shape Confucian ideology, carrying significant discourse implications. The practices of shi yan zhi and bi zhi in religious rituals held important implications for poem reciting, a prevalent activity during the banquet ceremonies in the Spring and Autumn Period and its various forms. Together, they established the rites and music tradition characterized by yanshuo (speeches). This tradition further established the status of The Book of Odes as a classic, furnishing high-ranking officials and Confucian scholars with legitimacy and rich discourse resources to develop new ideologies. The different interpretations and applications of shi yan zhi resulted in diverse discourse models, such as duanzhang-quyi (to interpret out of context), xin’er youzheng (being reliable and borne out by evidence), wenwang yinyan (no word, no expression of thoughts) and yiyi-nizhi (interpreting a writing from one’s perspective). Through these different interpretations and applications, the scholarly-official class established multiple values and objectives, such as liyan buxiu (advocating lasting noble ideas untouched by time), xing-guan-qun yuan (stimulation, contemplation, communication, and criticism), shang you (befriending those superior to oneself), fa hu qing, zhi hu li yi (starting with feelings and control with propriety). In the process of building a unified ideology in the Han Dynasty, the “Introduction to Mao’s Version of The Book of Odes” advocated the unity of qing (sentiment) and zhi(aspiration), infusing shi yan zhi with connotations of enlightenment as well as extolment and satirical criticism. This advocacy redefined the political authority and discourse models of the scholar-official class, objectively unveiling the literary features of poetry, such as evoking an emotional response and commencing the practice of education through poetry teaching.

There are some drawbacks in evaluating literature purely in terms of its development and its historical setting, and the remedies may lie in cultural geography. The author argues in this paper that with the development of contemporary Chinese poetry, regional culture and aesthetics in poetry have also gradually developed. Contemporary poetry in recent years exhibits different regional ideologies. The cultural attitudes and poetry sensibility in Beijing, Shanghai, Guangdong and the southwest areas are completely different from each other. These differences in regional aesthetics enable a diversified development of contemporary Chinese poetry.

Within the few years of its first publication in 1980, Dai Houying’s most popular and controversial novel Human, Ah, Human! drew significant attention from literary scholars throughout Chinese and English world and was often interpreted by the liberal humanist discourse as the representative work of the “thaw literature” or as the plea to revive the “human.” Recently, such appropriations of the notions of “the human” have raised suspicions among some critics both from the Beijing‐based “revisiting the 1980s (重返八 十年代) group” and some Western critical scholars, who begin to reevaluate Marxist humanism in the 1980s China. This paper, however, attempts to utilize several post‐humanist critical theories that have been persistently on guard against the theoretical limits of both liberal and Marxist humanism to reinterpret this novel. Here, the novel Human, Ah! Human, is able to encompass both the contradiction and reconciliation of various kinds of “human” voices. This paper will revisit its theatrical setting where the newborn “human” figures encounter and contend with one another. Rather than the sudden emergence of a humanist hero, or a Marxist humanist hero, it is the encounter of the Machiavellian wild individual, the philistines who pursue earthly happiness, and the romantics, that offer the untrodden path to approach the historical “real.” This paper will exhibit their combinations, permutation, and rehearsal in the fictional structure.

Suzhou River, a 2000 film directed by Lou Ye, explores several tragic love stories set in Shanghai around the transitional period of 1980s and 1990s. Many critics have praised its technical excellence, yet generally they have not paid sufficient attention to its subject matter. This paper departs from previous interpretations of the film, which have tended to be premised on superficial readings of the plotline, and contends that the work constitutes a poignant socio-political critique, which is conveyed through the construction of differing love stories set against a changing socio-cultural landscape. The past and the present incarnations of the cardinal female protagonist—who can be understood as a symbol for the average Chinese (woman)—suggest the fact that the society has transformed dramatically across the three disparate eras of the past half a century; accordingly, the identity of the Chinese also shifts tremendously. In this way, Lou Ye in effect constructs a diachronic re-presentation of the changing social mores and varied cultural ethos in a synchronic structure, which is subject to be read as an ingenious historical allegory.

Commonly acclaimed for its black humor, Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out uses the Buddhist concept of reincarnation to follow two families during the second half of the 20th century. The novel exemplifies the strategies through which Mo Yan transforms the violent and absurd events of recent Chinese history into personal memory of historical trauma. It focuses less, however, on those events per se than on the traumatic effects they create on the individual victims, and on the ways through which personal trauma caused by historical atrocities is addressed and healed. This article analyzes three layers of the novel: the evolving mechanisms of violence that condition the formation of personal trauma; the theatrical manifestation of the state-endorsed violence, and its loss in the post-revolutionary era; and the rationalization of the tragicomic past through the dialectic of remembering and forgetting. Built one on the other, these layers constitute the very dynamic stage on which the individuals interact with the violent and absurd world to negotiate the meaning of their lives, make sense of historical trauma, and insist on driving historical change.

This paper aims to interpret Liang Xiaosheng’s novel A Lifelong Journey. It argues that the novel reproduces life from the 1970s till now. The people from various social strata including workers, urban civilians, intellectuals, and officials who are nurtured on the soil of civilians constitute the current Chinese society. Liang Xiaosheng takes workers back to the center of social analysis by portraying the life and spirits of the working class. With “good people” as the keynote in characterization, Liang Xiaosheng, in the debate about goodness, reaffirms the value of goodness in the novel which shines with the radiance of idealism. The narration of epic nature evokes people’s memory of the socialist era, and also presents a historical picture of the world.

A new trend has emerged in Chinese film over the past two decades in which the story of the working class has been narrated aimed at an authentic representation of the nation’s socialist past, against the general demonization of the Maoist era. Still, there are a number of problems existed in this cinematic “new wave.” This paper analyzes a recent example of this tide, The Road (Fangxiang zhi lü, 2006), and its implications. A careful examination of the film’s narrative strategy reveals that it is oftentimes entrenched in the bourgeois ideology of “human nature,” which circumscribes its intended agenda of making a genuine reflection on the past and present of Chinese workers. On the surface, this film offers a positive image of the Maoist period by presenting a vivacious revolutionary work ethic in the female protagonist and her master. However, on a deeper level, the film only gives an impression of pity for this wretched workwoman who has completely wasted her life. Her “human nature” has been distorted by her socialist work ethic that had been inscribed with imprints of Maoism. In the mean time, the movie’s repetition of political clichés against revolutionary discourse, and an artificial binarity between socialism and commercial culture, bring out the real effect that rather than departing from stereotypes, it in effect merely perpetuates the popular narrative that has come to stigmatize the Maoist era. By this strategy, the film also evades the responsibility of accounting for the real reason for the gigantic social-political transformation.

Chi Zijian’s literary narrative of northeast China over a century essentially embodies a serious and concrete historical record of the Chinese nation. It also makes efforts to explore the profoundness and vitality of history, the presence of northeast China, and the culture and spiritual philosophy of the region. Undoubtedly, such narrative is self-perpetuating, just as is the historical process of northeast China. Puppet Manchukuo (Wei Manzhouguo), The Last Quarter of the Moon (E’erguna He You’an), and White Snow and Crow (Baixue Wuya) written by Chi Zijian are all important contemporary literary works worth “rereading” time and again.

Baoshui Village, a full-length novel by Qiao Ye, presents to its readers an open, sensitive, holistic, and reflective experiential texture thanks to the writer’s years of preparation spent “going into” and “immersing herself in villages,” as well as her rural narrative focusing on the complexity, contemporaneity, and problem of rural revitalization. The novel employs dual-narrative technique of recounting emotional and village history to advance its plot, paints pictures of village life with polyphonous scenes of village gossip, and engages in participatory observation through the use of the narrator to construct an open subject consciousness that discovers blind spots, surprises, disparities, and paradoxes in the rural experience. By selectively reconstructing the experiences of three archetypal villages and creating the new literary image of a “rural construction expert,” the novel conveys a realistic attitude that values the subjectivity and endogenous power of the countryside. In doing so, this method takes the structure of reality as its core and calls for a pragmatic standpoint that suspends any judgment, so as to “read” the Chinese countryside through the texture of reality.

The extent of Lu Xun’s identification with the cause of the revolutionists who worked to bring about the 1911 Revolution has been the subject of debate among scholars ever since the year after his death when his brother Zhou Zuoren emphatically denied his membership in the Guangfu Hui. The scholars who think he did join (and actively participate in) that revolutionary organization rely on attributions to Lu Xun by third parties who conversed with him late in his life, but Lu Xun never actually addressed this question in his written or published works and, despite his student-teacher relationship with Zhang Taiyan (and therefore by inference the Tokyo and Zhejiang branches of the Guangfu Hui), no one has ever brought forth archival evidence to support the claim of his membership. Here I will examine the classical-style poetry Lu Xun wrote before and after the event in order to gauge through first-hand evidence his disposition toward the Republican revolution and the historic transition it signaled for China.

It has been argued that, starting in the late 1920s, Lu Xun’s intellectual development underwent a significant transformation constituting what the French Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser has termed an “epistemological break.” Some of the explicitly more positive comments about the masses that Lu Xun made in his later years have been used to demonstrate this point. However, the existence of such a “break” is still debatable, and a detailed examination of Lu Xun’s apparently optimistic comments reveals that Lu Xun possessed a more sophisticated understanding of the masses and the Chinese people. His understanding was informed by the concept of “national character.” This paper attempts to demonstrate the consistency of Lu Xun’s view of the masses and the Chinese people and to resolve an apparent self-contradiction in Lu Xun’s arguments.

Qianzi wen exerted great influence in Japan. Nowadays, experts find it necessary to further study the numerous and diverse sequels of Qianzi wen, because no systematic research had actually been made on them. This article, focusing on the spread of Qianzi wen in Korean Peninsula and Japan, is intended to discuss its influence on East Asian literature, especially on Sinological literature.

As a southern literature in China, Haipai Literature is rich with local characteristics. Nevertheless, it transcends any local restrictions at the same time, in the sense that it reflects the features of modern urban literature. Haipai Literature represents the earliest efforts and attempts of modern urban literature in China, manifesting the complexities of modern Chinese literature. As a new literary paradigm, Haipai Literature is not only flexible and innovative, but also adaptable to the modern urban life, becoming a modern mechanism of literary production and delivery. All literature-related systems, such as the earliest remuneration system, professional writers, literary magazines, newspaper supplements, were concentrated in Shanghai. These systems reflect from one profile the unique value and significance of Haipai Literature in the history of Chinese literature. To study Haipai Literature does not mean to reminisce, but to reexamine and make use of historical resources in the systemic innovation of modern literary mechanism. From the emergence and development of Haipai Literature, in the typological sense, it could be drawn that what kind of inner and outer premises are needed in the development of a new type of literature.

An examination of Soviet nostalgia—nostalgia for the times when the People’s Republic of China (PRC) had a close relationship with the Soviet Union, as it appears in contemporary discourses that reimagine the Soviet Union, is essential to understand the quotidian aspect and cultural history of the PRC in the 1950s, as well as cultural attitudes in contemporary China. Wang Meng’s In Remembrance of the Soviet Union (2007) and Feng Jicai’s Listening to Russia (2005) are characterized by nostalgia for the lost Soviet Union, which exerted a strong influence on the PRC during the 1950s. In contemporary China, where the market economy is the dominant mode of production, Wang and Feng’s Soviet nostalgia is a gesture of yearning for a type of historical temporality that has seemingly been lost. Their works express the desire to reclaim the historical past of the 1950s, which they portray as having been completely erased by the developmental logic of late-capitalism—the authentic cultural experiences in the 1950s, especially the everyday life along with the revolutionary ideals are rendered unreal within the post-revolutionary logic. The concept of Soviet “ji” ( 祭, “remembrance”) provides a theoretical framework through which to understand the way in which the phenomenon of Chinese nostalgia has the potential to shift contemporary social reality.