A New Literary History of Modern China

INTRODUCTION

Worlding Literary China

DAVID DER-WEI WANG

A New Literary History of Modern China is a collective project that introduces the long modern period of Chinese literature from the late eighteenth century to the new millennium. The volume, with 161 essays contributed by 143 authors on a wide spectrum of topics, is intended for readers who are interested in understanding modern China through its literary and cultural dynamics. At the same time, it takes up the challenge of rethinking the conceptual framework and pedagogical assumptions that underlie the extant paradigm of writing and reading literary history.

The past two centuries have been an era of constant turmoil for China. The nation has been wracked by military and political upheavals, from the first Opium War (1839–1842) to the Taiping Rebellion (1850–1864), the Boxer Rebellion (1900), the first and second Sino-Japanese Wars (1894–1895; 1937–1945), the founding of the Republic of China (1911–) and the People’s Republic of China (1949–), the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976), and the Tiananmen Incident (1989). Chinese society has undergone cataclysmic social changes, running the gamut from advancements in technology and commerce to a revolution in epistemology. Modern China has been the site of drastic contestations between indigenous innovations and foreign stimuli, radical provocations and conciliatory responses. Now, in the new century, another drastic change is taking place in China amid calls for its peaceful rise and the global dissemination of the Chinese Dream.

This was also a period that saw literature conceptualized, practiced, circulated, and assessed in ways without precedent in Chinese history. Imported printing technology, innovative marketing tactics, increased literacy, widening readership, a boom in the diversity of forms of media and translation, and the advent of professional writers all created fields of literary production and consumption that in the preceding centuries would hardly have been imaginable. Along with these changes, Chinese literature—as an aesthetic vocation, scholarly discipline, and cultural institution—underwent multiple transformations to become literature as we understand the word to mean today. The shifting definition of literature was indeed one of the most acute symptoms of Chinese modernity.

The World of Chinese Literature

According to conventional wisdom, literary history is a coherent narrative of canonical figures, masterpieces, and notable movements and events, and an articulation of national characteristics. Such a concept was introduced to China at the turn of the twentieth century and still remains dominant in Sinology in general. In fact, the institution of literary history has had profound political implications for modern Chinese literature. This volume seeks to explore new ways to engage the roots and ramifications of modern Chinese literary history. It proposes that we rethink issues such as the periodization of modern Chinese literature, the conceptualization of Chinese literature, the feasibility of literary history, and, more controversially, the meaning of Chinese literary history.

To begin with, according to the extant paradigm, the May Fourth Movement—a nationwide cultural and political campaign begun on May 4, 1919, that called for self-rejuvenation in response to China’s setbacks in post–World War I international politics—was the turning point in China’s search for literary modernity. By contrast, the late Qing era (that is, the last decades of the Qing dynasty [1644–1911]) is seen as a transitional moment between the collapse of the old sociopolitical and literary order and the establishment of a new one. Scholars have taken issue with this paradigm in recent years, suggesting that the conception, production, and dissemination of literature during the late Qing possessed a vigor and variety that exceeded the narrow confines prescribed by May Fourth discourse.

What makes Chinese literature since the nineteenth century modern? One way to answer this question is to consider the historical context in which this inquiry is grounded. In the storyline drawn by political scientists and (literary) historians, China’s literary initiation into the modern was a process of inscribing, and being inscribed by, developments such as the advent of Western powers; the call for constitutional democracy and vernacularism; the discovery of psychologized and gendered subjectivities; the industrialization of military, economic, and cultural production; the rise of an urban landscape; and, above all, the valorization of the forward movement of historical time as an evolutionary or revolutionary sequence. These phenomena first developed in Europe, but, as they reached non-Western civilizations such as China, they gained global relevance and took on local urgency.

This imagined scenario describes the conditions that gave rise to modern Chinese literature, but falls short of explaining the distinctive modernity that characterizes Chinese literature alone. Literary modernity may arise in response to the shared global phenomena of political and technological modernization, but it need not repeat the same predetermined order or content. As a collective reimagining of the function of literature vis-à-vis the invention of a modern China, this volume addresses the following questions: How has modernity manifested itself in the specific regional context of China? Is modernity an imported conceptual and empirical entity, and therefore a product of cross-cultural translation and transaction, or is it a native force of self-renewal arising in response to external stimuli? Can terms commonly associated with modern, such as novelty, creativity, and rupture, shed new light on a literary tradition that has valued convention, derivativeness, and reactionary reform? Finally, to what extent did the Chinese experience contribute to the global circulation of modernities?

With these questions in mind, A New Literary History of Modern China proposes to view Chinese literary modernization not as a monolithic process, with each stage inevitably leading toward a higher one in accordance with a certain timetable, but as a process with multiple entry points and ruptures.¹ As demonstrated by the essays in the volume, the advent of the modern at any given historical juncture resulted in a fierce competition of new possibilities, and the winners of this competition were not necessarily the best of those possibilities. For instance, Chinese literary modernization used to be attributed to the rise of vernacular literature; recent scholarship indicates nevertheless that a domestic transformation of the classical concept of literariness (wen) and the culture of translation fostered by missionaries might have played equally important roles. Many innovations, whatever their capacity for generating more positive outcomes, nevertheless perished due to the contingencies of history. To say that the end of this process is not necessarily the best of all possible worlds, however, does not mean that the very idea of literary modernization is meaningless. Rather, it simply means that there is no one set path of literary evolution and that no outcome could have been predicted from the outset; indeed, no discrete constituent factor could ever be replicated were the process repeated, because any pathway to the realization of the modern proceeds through countless mutable and amorphous stages.

Second, Chinese literature as we understand it in academia today is a phenomenon that arose in late imperial China and gradually became institutionalized at the turn of the twentieth century. In 1902, at the order of Cixi (1835–1908), the Empress Dowager and then de facto ruler of China, the politician and educator Zhang Baixi (1847–1907) proffered several regulations to reform the recently founded Imperial University of Peking. Via these regulations, Zhang introduced wenxue ke, literally division of literature, which covered the following programs: Confucius Studies, History, Ancient Thought, Archival Studies, Foreign Languages, Philology, and Literary Works (cizhang). While similar in some ways to the liberal arts, wenxue ke reflected the traditional paradigm of Chinese literature, one that comprised several different fields of humanistic learning. The prototype of literature in modern terms was the program of Literary Works. The core curriculum of Literary Works featured courses such as Methodology of Literary Study, Etymology, Phonology, Literary Trends across Dynasties, and Classical Treatises on Writing. Combining traditional Chinese philological study and the Western Romantic appeal to aesthetic taste, the program paved the way for the eventual institutionalization of literature as an exercise and appraisal of rhetorical forms and fictional narratives.

Nevertheless, though it has adopted the Western system of generic classification with categories such as fiction, prose, poetry, and drama, and though it experiments with modern discourses ranging from realism to postmodernism, modern Chinese literature continues an implicit dialogue with the traditional concepts of wen and wenxue. That is to say, writers and readers of Chinese literature tend to associate literary exercises not only with the endeavor of using the word to represent the world, but also with the continued process of illuminating a cosmic pattern, a process that purportedly emanates from the mind and finds manifold manifestations—in corporal, artistic, sociopolitical, and natural terms—in the world. Thus, instead of merely playing with the dialectic of truth versus fiction, modern Chinese literature implants itself at every level of human experience, forming an ever-amplifying orbit of manifestations that are imaginatively evoked and historically embedded.

This understanding of literature is deeply imbricated in the ancient poetics of wen, a classical Chinese term that can mean ornamentation, pattern, sign, artistic inscription, cultural upbringing, civilization, and a sign of the movement of the cosmos. By extension, wenxue, or literature, refers to the art of registering, and being registered by, the incessant metamorphosis, from era to era and from region to region, of forms, thoughts, and attitudes regarding wen.² In Stephen Owen’s words,

If literature (wen) is the entelechy of a previously unrealized pattern, and if the written word (wen) is not a sign but a schematization, then there can be no competition for dominance. Each level of wen, that of the world and that of the poem, is valid only in its own correlative realm; and the poem, the final outward form, is a stage of fullness.³

Beyond the familiar canon of literature as representation, we need to include the tradition of literature as manifestation, on both textual and contextual levels, in a history of modern Chinese literature. Therefore, in addition to familiar genres, this volume features a diverse lineup of forms, from presidential speeches to pop song lyrics, from photographs to films, and from political treatises to prison house jottings—forms that not only represent the material world, but can also shape it and complete it. All of these forms manifest in one way or another the evolving and changing concept and pattern of wen in modern China, a concept that has evolved in terms of both what it aims to enact within the world and how it aims to enact it. As Owen puts it, The process of manifestation must begin in the external world, which has priority without primacy. As a latent pattern follows its innate disposition to become manifest, passing from the world to mind to literature, a theory of sympathetic resonance is involved.⁴

Such a belief in wen as a manifestation of the heart and the world explains why literature was taken so seriously in China throughout the modern century: in the 1900s, when Liang Qichao (1873–1929) promoted a literary reform as the foundation of national reform; in the 1920s, when post–May Fourth radicals debated not only literary revolution but literature as revolution; in the 1940s, when Mao Zedong (1893–1976) made literature a key principle of communist revolution; in the 1960s, when literature became the key to the revolution fought in the deepest niche of the soul during the Cultural Revolution; and in the 1990s, when the nation was engulfed in a frenzy for the Nobel Literature Prize.

Third, A New Literary History of Modern China seeks to engage with the institution of literary history as a humanistic discipline in modern China. Although there was a cornucopia of historical accounts recording literary figures, activities, and accomplishments in dynastic China, the writing of Western-style literary history did not take place until 1904. When the Imperial University of Peking established its Literature Program, a young teacher named Lin Chuanjia (1877–1922) was commissioned to write a History of Chinese Literature for the purposes of teaching. Modeled after the Japanese scholar Sasagawa Rinpū’s (1870–1949) History of Chinese Literature (1898), which was in turn inspired by European literary histories, Lin’s history is an eclectic undertaking that comprises genre classification, philological inquiry, and chronological periodization. He highlights the vicissitudes of intellectual history from Confucius onward and describes the transformations of classical prose, paying little attention to poetry, vernacular fiction, and drama. The same year also saw the publication of the History of Chinese Literature written by Huang Ren (1866–1913), a scholar at Soochow University. Huang’s history, by way of contrast, takes the form of a quasi-encyclopedic narrative of bygone literary events.

During the Republican era (1911–1949), classical literature was the dominant subject of literary historiography, and modern literature was rarely taught in schools. Although May Fourth leaders such as Hu Shi (1891–1962) and Zhou Zuoren (1885–1967) published books on Chinese literary history during the 1920s and 1930s, new literature represented only a small part of their investigations. From the 1930s onward, new literature attracted more attention from leftist historians such as Wang Zhefu and Li Helin (1904–1988), yet in general it remained marginal in the discourse prior to 1949. In 1951, a young scholar and Communist Party member, Wang Yao (1914–1989), published A Draft History of New Chinese Literature, the first major modern Chinese literary historiography. Since the publication of Wang’s work, hundreds of histories of modern Chinese literature have been published in China, a level of production of literary historiography unparalleled by any other country in the world.

The upsurge of modern Chinese literary historiography after 1949, to be sure, is related to the ideological agenda of the Communist regime. According to communist ideology, literary development parallels political development; as the allegorical other of politics, new, robust literature is said to replace old, feudalistic literature on the path to the socialist telos. But this ideology alone does not explain why literature and literary history matters so much to the new regime and the Chinese public. As I have discussed, although it has been deeply influenced by the Western impulse to develop systems of representation, modern Chinese literary practice still reflects the time-honored concept of wen. Despite its antitraditional platform, the Communist regime uncannily has held on to this concept. As a matter of fact, the regime seems to have continued to implement the concept of wen in everyday life and even in the realization of national projects. The regime therefore cannot treat literature as merely a linguistic, fictitious representation of the world, and instead must view it as an integral part of the process by which ideology becomes rooted in one’s heart and blossoms into an ideal polity. By corollary, literary history, as a chronicle of the zeitgeist, is subject to careful writing, reading, and revision.

With this ideology in mind, we must rethink the intertwined relationship between literature and history in traditional Chinese thought. Scholars have long pointed out that the representability of historical experience was a contested issue among ancient Chinese historians.⁵ Narrating history—fleshing out the figures and events under treatment—requires not only archival data and a theoretical framework, but also rhetorical expertise and personal integrity. According to the Analects, Confucius said that "when there is a preponderance of acquired refinement (wen) over native substance (zhi), the result will be ornamentation as performed by historians and bureaucrats (shi)."⁶ Contrary to the conventional wisdom that favors history as more reliable than literature, the sage seems to suggest that historical discourse tends to be more exaggerated and insubstantial than literary engagement, and that both history and literature should be modulated in such a way as to illuminate the world truthfully. Thus, the arch-historian Sima Qian (135?–86 BCE) is said to have created in his work the ideal juncture between the represented and representation, and between objective facts and palpable truth. With Sima’s Records of the Grand Historian in mind, Shen Congwen (1902–1988), the greatest writer of lyricism and nativist literature in modern China, concludes that a great history must be a literary history.⁷

Ever since the ninth century, the concept of poetry as history (shishi) has become a fundamental idea within Chinese poetics. The ninth-century Tang literatus Meng Qi (fl. ninth century) commented, When a poetic incantation is occasioned by an event, it is precisely where deep feelings concentrate (chushi xingyong, yousuo zhongqing).⁸ Meng considers both the circumstantial and emotive functions of feeling (qing), thereby articulating the reciprocal relationship between historical experience and poetic mind. Accordingly, when Du Fu (712–770), the Sage of Poetry, is honored in traditional Chinese historiography as the arch-practitioner of poetry as history, the title refers not only to his skill in rendering mimetic accounts of historical events, but also to his poetic vision, which resonates with human and cosmic movements. The discourse of poetry as history reached a climax in the mid-seventeenth century, coinciding with the cataclysmic decline of the Ming dynasty (1368–1644). Hence, to slightly paraphrase the Ming loyalist Huang Zongxi (1610–1695), Where history collapses, poetry arises.⁹

The structural framework of A New Literary History of Modern China has been influenced by a variety of Western theories, ranging from Walter Benjamin’s constellation, to Mikhail Bakhtin’s heteroglossia, Michel Foucault’s genealogy, and Gilles Deleuze’s assemblage. However, it is the mutual illumination between wen (literature) and shi (history) that underlies my editorial vision. How modern writers reflected on, and how modern literature came to reflect, this dialogic remains a central concern of this volume. Through the essays, I intend to configure a world in which literature of myriad attitudes, styles, and levels is brought to bear on history, and history is similarly brought to bear on literature. Each essay in this history is identified by a date and a corresponding event. These events are of very different sorts: the publication of a particular work; the establishment of a specific institution (a society, a magazine, a publishing house); the first use of a notable stylistic, thematic, or technological innovation; a debate or controversy over a specific issue; a political action; a romance; a scandal.… The purpose of each essay is to elicit the historical significance of that event, as represented through literary texts or experiences, be it in terms of its particular circumstances, its long-term relevance, or its contemporary resonance or dissonance.

Moreover, insofar as poetry as history compels one to treat even a fantastic work as a unique factual account of an experience in historical time, a human consciousness encountering, interpreting, and responding to the world, I encouraged the contributors, some of whom are renowned creative writers, to adopt whatever form they felt best expressed their historical feeling.¹⁰ For instance, Ha Jin writes a story about how Lu Xun (1881–1936) composed A Madman’s Diary, the harbinger of modern Chinese fiction; Uganda Sze Pui Kwan personifies Sir Thomas Wade (1818–1895), whose audience with the Tongzhi Emperor (r. 1862–1874) helped institutionalize the practice of translation in early modern China. Ari Larissa Heinrich’s contemplation of Qiu Miaojin (1969–1995) and queer writing leads him to compose a piece that can be read with any paragraph as the starting point. By combining selectivity and intensity of focus with a flexible frame of inquiry, I hope to produce a constellation of essays that will each illuminate a singular cultural-historical moment and a literary mind, and that collectively will resonate with one another in such a way as to provide a more nuanced reading of the literary rendition of history.

Finally, we come to the subject of literary history and national representation. Chronologically, this volume covers literature through a series of political regimes, from the late Ming dynasty to the Qing dynasty, and then from the Republic of China (ROC) to the People’s Republic of China (PRC). Although China is the umbrella term used to refer to all of these political regimes, we must keep in mind that China as a political, racial, and cultural entity has been defined differently at different points in history. According to historians Cho-yun Hsu and Ge Zhaoguang, the earliest usage of the Chinese equivalent to China, zhongguo, dates as far back as the Zhou dynasty (1046–256 BCE), when it referred to the spatial position right in the middle of a social and geographical domain. China gradually came to apply to the nation as a whole during the Song dynasty (960–1279), when barbarian regimes in the north intensified the Song court’s awareness of territorial rule.¹¹ China was invoked to represent both the Ming and the Qing; it was not until the early twentieth century that China became associated with political sovereignty and nationhood in the modern sense. The ROC was founded in 1911 after the revolution to overthrow the Qing. The PRC was founded in 1949 after the victory of the Communists in the Chinese Civil War (1946–1949). The ROC government withdrew to Taiwan, where it continues to exist to this day.

Therefore, when we discuss the literary history of modern China, there are at least four layers of meaning that compose the term China that we must consider: China as a historical process, as a cultural and intellectual lineage, as a political entity, and as an imagined community. Since the Great Divide in 1949, modern Chinese literature has bifurcated into two traditions, each with a distinct national agenda. For all the ideological antagonism between the two traditions, there were striking similarities between Nationalist and Communist governance of literary activities during the 1950s. However, the sixties saw the unlikely advent of modernism in the literary scene of Taiwan, followed by the nativist debate over whether China should be located in exile in Taiwan or on the mainland (to be restored eventually by the nationalists). Meanwhile, the Cultural Revolution pushed Chinese socialist literature to the extremes of collectivity. Literature in both Chinese communities underwent a shakeup in the eighties. As various movements have come and gone in both the mainland and Taiwan, China has been postsocialized, decolonized, postmodernized, deconstructed, gendered, and even de-Sinicized. For advocates of Taiwanese independence, China has become a politically incorrect signifier. By contrast, as nationalism gains new momentum on the mainland, the government has coined the surprisingly literary term Chinese Dream—uncannily resonating with the familiar American Dream—in order to consolidate public feeling.

In 1971, C. T. Hsia (1921–2013) coined the term Obsession with China to describe the ambivalent attitude of modern Chinese literati toward the challenges of Chinese modernity. Hsia holds that modern Chinese literati are so obsessed by national crises as to turn their repugnance for the status quo into a masochistic mentality. These literati see any given social or political malaise as a sickness unique to China, and thus grapple with Chinese modernity only negatively, by denouncing it.¹² To remedy this syndrome, Hsia calls for a cosmopolitanism characterized by interaction with Western literature. Hsia authored A History of Modern Chinese Fiction (1961), which remains to date the most influential book of modern Chinese literary history in the English-speaking world. Although it has been criticized, particularly among leftist circles, for endorsing Cold War ideology, Western liberal humanism, and New Criticism, one cannot overlook its polemical power. Now, almost half a century after Hsia’s critique, the Obsession with China still casts a shadow over Chinese discourse, but the phenomenon has developed in unexpected ways. Whereas writers and readers on the mainland have turned their obsession into something more complex—from fanaticism to cynicism, from passion to nonchalance—their radical counterparts in Taiwan have come to love hating everything about China, such that, in an ironic way, they reinstate the classic symptoms of obsession with China.

A New Literary History of Modern China seeks to record the changing imaginaries of China by assessing the enunciative endeavors, ranging from classical treatises to avant-garde experiments, from foreign thoughts to native ruminations, that have informed Chinese literary discourse, and also to identify the historical factors that have affected the interplay of Chinese (post)modernities. More significantly, it recognizes the fact that modern Chinese literature is not merely a national project, with distinct linguistic, discursive, and cultural characteristics, but also part of a transnational endeavor that defines the nation in relation to other political and cultural entities. At a time when both mainland China and Taiwan are developing literary histories hemmed in by ideological guidelines and cultural provincialism, we need additional perspectives in order to expose the limitations of Chinese national literatures. As will be elaborated in the rest of this introduction, I argue that this volume, by involving contributors from various communities in greater China and beyond, and by covering subjects that transcend conventional national and generic boundaries, can contribute to a vision of literary China more complex than those sanctioned by either the PRC or the ROC.

Worlding Literary China

A New Literary History of Modern China is the fourth volume in Harvard University Press’s series of national literary histories, following A New History of French Literature, edited by Denis Hollier (1989); A New History of German Literature, edited by David Wellbery (2004); and A New Literary History of America, edited by Greil Marcus and Werner Sollors (2009). All three previous volumes seek to revise the traditional formula of writing and reading literary history, one that places masters, canonical works, and crucial events into a linear sequence informed by politics. Instead, these volumes feature a series of entries based on seemingly arbitrary dates and data, and generate from them a web of mutually illuminating timelines and meanings. By combining both the pointillism of the chronicle and the comprehensiveness of grand récit, this revisionist endeavor has been received with much critical acclaim.

These three volumes differ, nevertheless, in their visions of literary history. Both A New History of French Literature and A New History of German Literature begin in the eighth century CE and move forward to trace the multiple literary representations of societies that predate the emergence of the modern French and German nations. But whereas A New History of French Literature recognizes the role of contingency and playfully deconstructs the grand narrative of history, A New History of German Literature tries to identify a set of framing conditions—such as mediality, time, linguistic-national identity, and communication—so as to reinstate the thematic structure in historical inquiry.

A New Literary History of America begins in the sixteenth century but focuses mostly on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It tells the story of an imagined nation that in many ways preceded the emergence of recognizable American society. To quote Marcus and Sollors, unlike its French or German counterpart, American literature was not inherited but invented, as if it were a tool or a machine, or discovered, as if it were a gold strike or the next wonder of the Louisiana Purchase. Thus, no tradition has ever ruled and no form has ever been fixed.¹³ The volume introduces a multitude of representations of the American experience—ranging from political speeches to poetic articulations, from constitutional negotiations to novelistic adventures—and frames them as literature.

While following compositional principles of the three previous volumes, A New Literary History of Modern China makes a few conceptual and structural innovations that respond to both the distinct characteristics of modern Chinese literary culture and developments in literary studies in the past few decades. One of the most salient features of this new volume is that it presents not Chinese literary history in its entirety but only modern Chinese history. Thus it has to engage at the outset in reconciling—indeed, rethinking—the temporal and conceptual frameworks proposed by the French, German, and American literary histories. In light of the lineage of Chinese literary culture spanning more than three thousand years, it has to account for the ways in which the moderns inherit or abandon the resources of tradition. On the other hand, in view of China’s drastic sociopolitical transitions during the modern era, from a dynastic monarchy to a republic and then a socialist nation-state, it has to deal with the way in which literature is continually reinvented in response to each emerging ethos.

The key concept for this immense display of topics, figures, objects, and events has been the idea of worlding literary China. Worlding is a term originally coined by Martin Heidegger (1889–1976).¹⁴ By turning the noun world into an active verb, Heidegger calls attention to the way in which the world is constructed and exists eternally in a constantly shifting state of becoming. Worlding is a complex and dynamic process of ever-renewing realities, sensations, and perceptions through which one incessantly works to access the Open of the world.¹⁵ Insofar as worlding is always already a flux of unfolding experience, it suggests a world as familiar as it is forever fresh. Importantly, Heidegger stresses that worlding is not a task in which we engage volitionally, but emerges automatically in response to specific phenomena, or things: If we let the thing be present in its thinging from out of the worlding world, then we are thinking of the thing as thing.¹⁶

The concept of worlding has been adopted by critics in recent years to describe projects ranging from urban planning to comparative literature and medicinal studies.¹⁷ The term is often used, however, merely to refer to global or transnational projects, a far cry from the Heideggerian definition. In his study of contemporary China, Arif Dirlik describes the end of revolutionary politics and the rise of cultural nationalism since 1978. He places these developments within a global context, ultimately making a case methodologically for worlding China: bringing China into the world and the world into China.¹⁸ Lisa Rofel takes up the recently recanonized term tianxia (under heaven) and proposes strategies for cosmopolitan, socialist worldings.¹⁹

My approach is inspired by but not limited to these scholars’ adaptations of the term. While examining the making and becoming of literature in the context of China encountering the world through the past two centuries, I call attention to the subtle reverberations between wen (the literary; literariness) and the Heideggerian concept of worlding. Worlding describes the conditions of being-in-the-world in relation to the foregrounding and evolvement of things as such. The conditions are less fixed essences than conduits of differences between verbal, written, and mental concepts. According to Heidegger, it is poetry that brings the world and things together in a topology of being, gathering into a simple onefold of their intimate belonging together.²⁰ As discussed previously, wen points to a multitude of artifacts, locations, or encounters that manifest the world over time. Wen is not a sign so much as an articulation of the meaning of the world through a set of correlating ideas, objects, or doings. To be sure, Heideggerian philosophy and traditional Chinese literary thought differ greatly in their conception of what constitutes the world, let alone the meaning and practice of literature.²¹ My point is that the concept of worlding nevertheless may help us to understand Chinese literary modernity in the broader sense of wen, as a vehicle bringing the world home, and, more importantly, as an agency that continuously opens up new configurations of the world.²²

With this argument in mind, A New Literary History of Modern China introduces the following four themes of worlding Chinese literature: architectonics of temporalities, dynamics of travel and transculturation, contestation between wen and mediality, and remapping of the literary cartography of modern China.

ARCHITECTONICS OF TEMPORALITIES

Readers of this volume will first be struck by the conflation of, and conflict between, two historiographical schemes in the volume. On the one hand, the volume introduces the significant figures, works, discourses, and movements that have constituted modern Chinese literature in chronological order. On the other hand, it also features a series of dates, events, and encounters of relatively lesser significance, making them points of reference to more significant historical phenomena. Alternating between presenting time as a causal sequence and time as a contingent or coincidental arrangement of events, the volume encourages the readers to observe—and imagine—the kaleidoscopic organization of temporalities that inform the literary dynamics of modern China.

As mentioned previously, the current paradigm of Chinese literature sees May Fourth as the point where modern Chinese literature began. Following this paradigm, literary history is streamlined into a linear, progressive agenda, with thematic axes of revolution versus reaction, enlightenment versus tradition. Insofar as the Western model of modernity is treated as the authentic, original gold standard against which all other modernities are measured, its Chinese counterpart is always already beset by a defeated sense of belated modernity. This volume instead argues that even at its earliest stages, modern Chinese literature had complex conceptions of the modern that existed independently from the conceptions offered by the West. Along the same line, Western modernity has to be understood as a diversity of experimentations rather than a unified phenomenon. To be sure, May Fourth writers set in motion a series of epochal shifts that late Qing literati would not have been able to imagine. But May Fourth claims to modernity may equally have obscured, or even eliminated, much of the potential that existed within the late Qing or earlier times; in different circumstances, these possibilities could have given rise to other, richer configurations of literary modernity for China.

For instance, the volume questions the beginning of modern Chinese literature by offering two dates in place of May 4, 1919: 1635, when the Confucian scholar–cum–Catholic convert Yang Tingyun (1562–1627) set out to redefine wenxue according to concepts inherited from both Jesuit cultivation and classical Chinese learning; and 1933, when Zhou Zuoren and Ren Fangqiu (1909–2000) traced the origin of Chinese literary modernization to the early seventeenth century. As such, the beginning of modern Chinese literature suggests both a moment of genesis and a retroactive discovery. Another possible beginning point is 1792. That year witnessed two apparently unrelated events: Lord George Macartney’s (1737–1806) diplomatic mission to China, and the publication of Cao Xueqin’s (1715–1763) novel Dream of the Red Chamber. However, when juxtaposed, the two events shed new light on each other. As Andrew Schonebaum describes in his essay, whereas the Macartney mission (1792–1794) raised the problems and promises of modernity, particularly of foreigners in China, Dream of the Red Chamber created a world that encapsulates late imperial Chinese culture at its most intricate, one that signals the beginning of the ending of a civilization; hence the rise of anticipatory nostalgia.

Reexamining May 4, 1919, the canonical date of Chinese literary modernization, reveals a multitude of ironies. According to Michel Hockx, the day turned out to be one without much significance for someone like Lu Xun, the champion of New Literature, and a very significant day for writers of popular (and occasionally pulpy) Mandarin Ducks and Butterflies fiction, who have been marginalized in conventional literary history as apolitical spectators. Time reveals its thick, synchronic dimension in a year such as 1935, when cartoonist Zhang Leping’s (1910–1992) comic strip about the vagabond boy Sanmao became immensely popular; Qu Qiubai (1899–1935), once the leader of the Chinese Communist Party, was executed, leaving a memoir intriguingly entitled Superfluous Words; movie star Ruan Lingyu (1910–1935) committed suicide and became a media sensation; and the peasants of Ding County, in Hebei Province, staged an outdoor avant-garde theater production. Time allows for the hindsight of archaeology. In 1970, the Angel Island poetry was excavated, bringing to light the untold stories of Chinese laborers in the United States during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Time continues the mysterious cycle of fate. In 1927, the aesthetician Wang Guowei (1877–1927) committed suicide by drowning, and his colleague Chen Yinke (1890–1969) penned his famous epitaph in response: This spirit of independence and the freedom of thought. Forty-two years later, Chen himself died tragically during the Cultural Revolution, his words for Wang turning out to be a foreboding self-elegy. Finally, we look forward in time through visions of the future. In 2066, according to the science fiction writer Han Song (1965–), Martians take over both China and the United States, rendering moot all quests for national glory.

More polemically, many essays in this volume highlight the dialogue between modern literary culture and the classical tradition. Despite the iconoclastic rhetoric of modern Chinese literature, from the May Fourth era to the Cultural Revolution, tradition haunts the modern Chinese mind. Whether inheriting or dispensing with the resources of the classical tradition, through its ingenious appropriations or impassioned negations, the modern is intimately intertwined with the past. His indebtedness to Friedrich Nietzsche and Max Stirner aside, Lu Xun expressed his modernist angst by revisiting the abysmal pathos of both Qu Yuan (340–278 BCE) and Tao Qian (365–427). Wang Guowei strove to cope with his existential crisis not only in terms of Immanuel Kant’s and Arthur Schopenhauer’s philosophy, but also through the concept of a mental vista (jingjie), which originates in Buddhist thought. Zhu Guangqian’s (1897–1986) career path took him from Nietzsche to Benedetto Croce, Karl Marx, and Giambattista Vico, all the while pondering how to modernize the classical concept fusion of sentiments and scenes (qingjing jiaorong). In the leftist camp, Qu Qiubai demonstrated a strong penchant for lyricism and Buddhism despite his commitment to Anatoly Lunacharsky and Georgi Plekhanov, and Hu Feng’s (1902–1985) avant-garde subjective fighting spirit carried traces of both Mencian concepts of mind and György Lukács’s Hegelian / Marxian revolutionism.

It is not until recent decades that writers and readers finally came to terms with a startling paradox: many of the putatively modern writers enacted the least modern of modernities, while select conservative writers made use of the most unconventional conventionalities. The rediscovery of Eileen Chang (1920–1995) sheds light not only on the sensibilities of the Shanghai Modern, but also on the aesthetics of decadence that anticipated fin-de-siècle postmodernism. Chen Yinke, often regarded as the most talented historian of modern China, took a literary turn in his last years; he embedded a metaphorical discourse in his scholarship, calling for an esoteric interpretation of history. At a time when modern and even postmodern are transforming into historical periods, one comes to realize all the more acutely that tradition is not a prescribed program but a succession of inventions, anti-inventions, and noninventions.

DYNAMICS OF TRAVEL AND TRANSCULTURATION

A New Literary History of Modern China contends that modern Chinese literature is part of the global circulation of discourses and practices of modernity. This circulation comes about through travel, both in the sense of physical mobility and conceptual, affective, and technological transmutation through space and time. More than half of the essays in the volume touch on travel and transculturation, bringing into full relief the concept of worlding Chinese literature. Whereas Qiu Jin (1875–1907), the first Chinese feminist, traveled to Japan and was politically radicalized, by way of contrast, the Taiwanese essayist Sanmao (1943–1991) settled in the deserts of Western Sahara in 1973, as part of an effort to develop her own individual identity. Qu Qiubai took a cross-Siberia train ride to Moscow in 1920 in order to be properly baptized as a Communist; W. H. Auden (1907–1973) and Christopher Isherwood (1904–1986) arrived in China in 1938 to witness the Chinese crusade against Japanese aggression. Some travels had profound cultural consequences. For instance, in 1807, British missionary Robert Morrison (1782–1834) arrived in Guangzhou, only to be turned away and end up in Malacca, where he began his enterprise of translating the Bible into Chinese, a project that inaugurated translated Chinese modernity. In 1987, Gao Xingjian (1940–) exiled himself to France, where he continued to write and eventually won the Nobel Prize in 2000.

To these writers, travel became both the impetus for and subject of writing, enabling them to register in various genres and styles a world yet to be fully presented to the majority of Chinese people. Meanwhile, travel took on a different dimension as a result of historical contingencies, from the Long March to massive exile to immigration. Eighty million Chinese people were forced into exodus during the Second Sino-Japanese War; five million fled overseas in the Civil War; sixteen million were sent down to the countryside during the Cultural Revolution. For these Chinese people, travel was not a romantic subject but the tragic consequence of historical turmoil. There are cases in which objects travel, too, tracing unexpected trajectories of experience. For one generation of Chinese writers exiled to Taiwan after 1949, food of their home regions triggers a Proustian memory of their bygone days on the mainland. In 1948, a Shanghai high school girl named Nana Hsu daydreamed in her literature class and scribbled on the margins of her textbook. The same textbook turned up miraculously in 2011, testifying to the ups and downs of not only Nana but also the transformation of literature as such through the tumultuous decades.

Travel leads to transculturation: the linguistic, cultural, and intellectual interactions between continents, nations, societies, institutions, and communities. Essays in this volume pay particular attention to the relationship between global impacts and local responses, and between state force and popular resistance. News about the downfall of the Ming dynasty (1644) circulated fast in Europe, inspiring two Dutch plays as early as 1666. In the new millennium, the nationalist-tinged Japanese web comic Axis Powers Hetalia garnered a Chinese fan base, and that same fan base produced a parody, One Born a Dragon, in the name of patriotism. In the heyday of the New Culture Movement, Hu Shi underwent an intellectual metamorphosis as a result of not only his study at Cornell and Columbia Universities, but, according to a recent discovery, his romantic ties to Edith Williams. Hu’s time in America was thus both an intellectual baptism and a sentimental education. In Yan’an, from 1940 to 1942, Zhou Libo (1908–1979) taught Western masterpieces by writers from Aleksandr Pushkin to Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Honoré de Balzac, thus introducing world literature in a revolutionary light. But the West was not merely a source of inspiration for Chinese artists and writers; they, in turn, inspired Western modernists. Mei Lanfang (1894–1961), the king of Peking opera, was a major influence for European film and theater workers, such as Sergei Eisenstein, Konstantin Stanislavsky, and Bertolt Brecht, and America’s Denishawn Dancers. Transculturation can also entail violence. In 1930, hundreds of Japanese settlers were beheaded in a riot launched by Tayal aboriginals in Taiwan, then a Japanese colony. As the novelist Wuhe (1951–) tells us, whether the bloody incident should be understood as an anticolonial uprising or an action in the context of aboriginal headhunting rituals remains a subject for debate.

Harvard University played a meaningful role in facilitating transcultural China. Chen Yinke, Lin Yutang (1895–1976), and Wu Mi (1894–1978) were all educated at Harvard during the 1910s and 1920s. Wu later introduced his mentor Irving Babbitt’s (1865–1933) new humanism to China, promoting an alternative modernity to a country inundated with radical calls to arms. I. A. Richards (1893–1979) first visited China in 1927, and remained fascinated with the nation until the end of his life. During his residence in Beijing, he was a major influence for a group of the best Chinese poets and critics. Harvard hosted Hu Shi as a visiting professor in 1944, and Eileen Chang as a residential writer (at Radcliffe College) in 1967–1968. The great Czech Sinologist Jaroslav Průšek (1906–1980) taught at Harvard right before the Prague Spring broke out.

The most important medium of transculturation is, without a doubt, translation, through which China and other civilizations encounter and generate new forms of knowledge, feeling, and power exchange. Translation made a formal entry into Chinese discourse when Thomas Wade (1818–1895), in an audience with the Tongzhi Emperor in 1873, offered to set up what became known as the Interpreters’ College. Throughout the twentieth century, from Lin Shu’s (1852–1924) entrepreneurial, collaborative translation of foreign literature to Guo Moruo’s (1892–1978) leftist rendition of Goethe’s Faust, from the wild popularity of Soviet fiction during the early years of socialist China to the fever of consuming Western avant-garde literature in the post–Cultural Revolution era, translation has been the venue where language has been refashioned and thoughts negotiated. Sherlock Holmes, Baron Münchhausen, Shakespeare, and even Socrates arrived in China during this modern century. Whereas The Brothers Karamazov confronted the post–May Fourth youth with the ethical dilemmas of patricide and punishment, Pavel Korchagin, from Nicolai Ostrovsky’s How the Steel Was Tempered, captured the hearts of millions of Chinese socialist readers with his selflessness and dedication. Franz Kafka, Ernest Hemingway, Gabriel García Márquez, and, later, Haruki Murakami liberated another generation of readers from their ideological shackles in the aftermath of the Mao era.

Above all, transculturation has made a remarkable impression on the discourse of Chinese literary historiography, from its institutional mechanisms to its stylistics of writing. As mentioned previously, literature underwent a drastic redefinition at the turn of the twentieth century, as a result of the importation of Western aesthetic education. The very concept of literature has been an object of contestation among competing political agendas and cultural values during the post–May Fourth era, the Yan’an era, the Cultural Revolution, and the New Era. Seven essays in the volume introduce key transcultural encounters that affected the field of modern Chinese literature: in 1904, when a vision of literature adapted from both Chinese and non-Chinese models was institutionalized; in 1906, when Zhang Taiyan (1868–1936) promoted a revolutionary view of literature by restoring the ancient concept of wen; in 1932 and 1934, when the modern origin of Chinese literature were traced back to the late Ming; in 1942, when Mao yoked literature to politics; in 1952, when the first official version of modern Chinese literary history came under severe attack from the party; in 1963, when C. T. Hsia and Jaroslav Průšek engaged in a debate over the methodology and ideology of modern Chinese literary studies; and in 1988, when the rewrite literary history campaign ignited debates over not only the definition of literature, but also the definition of history.

CONTESTATION OF WEN AND MEDIALITY

Readers more familiar with a conventional definition of literature that limits the concept to fiction, poetry, drama, and prose will find in A New Literary History of Modern China a scope of literature that is far broader than expected. Indeed, we have tried to rethink boundaries of genre by looking into the question: What makes Chinese literature modern? Thus, besides the traditional genres just listed, this volume features essays that look into letters, jottings, diaries, manifestoes, public speeches, comic strips, textbooks, folk theaters, traditional operas, minority ballads, films, pop songs, and even pageants. As readers move toward the end of the volume, they will find discussions of animation, comics, and Internet fandom.

In these forms, the indigenous and the foreign, the popular and the elite, the hegemonic and the subversive are brought into play. These forms are not just aesthetic constructs but medial conduits through which the structure of the feeling of a period is formed. For instance, just as the advent of newspaper supplements, fiction magazines, and pictorials in the late nineteenth century fostered a mediasphere that transformed the production and consumption of literature, the Internet boom at the turn of the twenty-first century gave rise to a new media ecology in which literature was created and circulated in ways unimaginable decades before.

Some readers may feel that featuring so many textual and media forms risks shunting aside traditional considerations of literature in favor of a postmodernist carnival. I disagree. Although the volume adopts a pointillistic method and refers to a diverse set of media at the same time, it seeks to introduce a critical inquiry into the persistence of wen—as a pattern, a linguistic register, a sign system of sensory data, and a textual display—in modern times, and as such contribute a Chinese dimension to contemporary media discourse. Through the exercise of wen, the relationships between the author, the text, and the world begin to manifest themselves. Let us rethink Liu Xie’s (465–ca. 522) argument in Literary Mind and Carving the Dragon (Wenxin diaolong), arguably the most important text of literary thought in ancient China:

There are three basic principles in the Way of setting forth pattern (wen). The first is the pattern of shapes, which is constituted of the five colors. The second is the pattern of sounds constituted of the five tones. The third is the pattern of the affections constituted of the five natures. A mixture of five colors forms the pattern of imperial brocade. The conjunction of five sounds forms the Shao-xia [a legendary piece of ceremonial music]. The five natures come forth and they are pieces of language.²³

Liu highlights the transfiguring power of wen by linking the animate and inanimate worlds, and semiotic and somatic forms. To adapt Liu’s conceptualization of wen for our own era, the shapes, sounds, and affections of modern wen are manifested in the media chain from the textual to the audiovisual, from the bodily to the digital.

In order to pursue the medial implications of wen, this volume contains essays structured around not only dates, events, or texts, but also objects with graphic implications. The Chinese typewriter invented by Lin Yutang, the Chinese costumes and fabrics studied by Shen Congwen, and the first computer purchased by the poet Hsia Yü (1956–) are used to expand the set of associations around what literature / wen is and is about. Furthermore, though the individual essays are relatively brief and specific, each tells a story and places it in a broader historical context. As such, each essay does not merely highlight a form (or set of forms) of mediation, but also turns itself into a medial point through which a new linkage is manifested, and a new history unfolds.

One such unlikely linkage is between the discovery of oracle bones and the invention of literary modernity. In 1899, a late Qing official purchased pieces of medicinal dragon bones only to realize that they were animal bones inscribed with the earliest Chinese characters identifiable to date. But the fact that the bones—as well as the history they represent—were not discovered until the turn of the modern century synchronized, so to speak, the temporalities of past and present. In her essay, Andrea Bachner contemplates this paradoxical synchronicity as she discusses a 1995 story by the Chinese Malaysian writer Ng Kim Chew (1967–). In the story, a Chinese Malaysian scholar performs a nocturnal ritual of killing tortoises and producing oracle bones, so as to communicate with the dead and the missing. Thus, through the medium of the oracle bone inscriptions, the essay brings to light the linkage between premodern augural technology and postmodern medial haunting, late Qing archaeological discovery and fin-de-siècle diasporic nostalgia.

We also consider the phenomenon of re-mediation, which results from the circulation of and interaction between multiple media forms. On International Women’s Day in 1935, the silent movie star Ruan Lingyu committed suicide, closing her suicide note with the line Gossip is a fearful thing. A ghostly epitaph, the handwritten line would be reproduced in newspapers, inscribed on banners at her funeral, and circulated and contested for years to come. As Kristine Harris points out, the charged phrase was already deeply embedded in Chinese culture, from The Book of Songs to the Qing play The Palace of Everlasting Life. But these words meant even more in an era of modern media, when motion pictures, the emergent periodical press, serialized novels, vernacular fiction, teahouse storytelling, new-style operas, and spoken drama all jostled for attention. The story of Ruan finds its sequel in the story of Teresa Teng (1953–1995), a Taiwanese pop singer who won transnational popularity in East Asia in the 1980s. Teng’s soft, soothing voice, broadcast in private, literally re-formed the sonic culture of socialist China, such that she was nicknamed Little Deng (Teng), a nickname that implicitly contrasted her to Old Deng—Deng Xiaoping (1904–1997). Teng adopted a traditional Chinese lyrical style, a style she accentuated by featuring songs inspired by classical Chinese poetry and song lyrics. Teng died a sudden death in 1995, but she made a digital comeback in 2013, when she appeared as a three-dimensional hologram of her youthful figure and enchanted another generation of fans.

Last but not least, while acknowledging the uncanny autonomy of media in modern Chinese literary culture, I argue that human agency is still the key nexus in the network of wen. When Lu Xun imagined a Mara poet who could pluck the heart of the Chinese people, when Mao mandated a national form through which the proletariat could be reached, they both sought to refashion the Chinese body and soul through literature. Bodily investment in literature was not, however, confined to the official discourse. One recalls the case of Lin Zhao (1932–1968): jailed in the 1960s for her antirevolutionary thought, she ended up writing on her stained shirt, in her own blood, to protest political oppression. Lin was executed in 1968. She turned her corporal existence and annihilation into a theater of cruelty. Where blood is mixed with ink, literature demonstrates its primitive power. Or consider the case of Chu Hsi-ning (1926–1998), who wrote and rewrote his family saga nine times, refashioning and re-creating it until the end of his life. And no one could be more demonstrative of the power of literature to physically move people than Cui Jian (1961–), the first rock-and-roll singer of socialist China, singing Nothing to My Name to, and with, more than a million demonstrators on Tiananmen Square one May afternoon in 1989.

TOWARD A NEW LITERARY CARTOGRAPHY

In this final section, I take the geographical locale in which this volume was conceived and produced seriously, and reflect on the mapping of modern Chinese literary history from an overseas perspective. As mentioned previously, a considerable number of Chinese writers were shaped as writers by their encounters with the foreign, both imaginary encounters and actual adventures abroad. Their Obsession with China was always already imbued with their fantasies of, as well as anxieties about, the world outside China. Yu Dafu (1896–1945), for instance, was driven to his notorious patriotic cries by the experience of being a frustrated student in Japan. Lin Yutang’s long-term sojourn in Europe and America enabled him to write about the Chinese experience from a cosmopolitan perspective. Eileen Chang first achieved popularity in wartime Shanghai by writing about Hong Kong; she fled Shanghai to Hong Kong after the Communist Revolution, finally finding refuge in the United States. Many modern Chinese writers shaped the spatial imaginary of the mainland from the vantage points of expatriatism, exile, and diaspora.

What is more controversial is the recently introduced concept of Sinophone literature: Chinese-language literature produced in the regions of greater China, such as Taiwan, Hong Kong, and the Chinese communities in countries such as Malaysia and Singapore, as well as by Chinese-speaking subjects in diaspora. In contrast to the term overseas Chinese literature, which connotes a geopolitically peripheral position in relation to literature originating on the Chinese mainland, Sinophone literature refers to a heterogeneous body of articulations related to, but not necessarily subject to, the dominant discourse of China. The Han language, the predominant language of the Chinese people, serves as the common denominator of Sinophone literature. Nevertheless, this language comprises numerous dialects and topolects, and constitutes only one branch of the Sinitic language family.

In her pioneering work on the issue, Shu-mei Shih argues for a Sinophone literature that highlights both writings produced in overseas Chinese-speaking communities and minority literatures on the mainland. As such, her vision of literature is opposed to the hegemony of the PRC literature.²⁴ In contrast to such a resistance approach, Jing Tsu argues for the theoretical framework of literary governance, which refers to the imposed or voluntary coordination between linguistic [and political] antagonisms and the idea of the ‘native speaker’ that produce national literature as a common interest as well as a source of strife.²⁵ Tsu calls attention to the ironic fact that globalization has increased rather than decreased the value of nation and national literature.

I welcome Shih’s and Tsu’s critiques, but think neither goes far enough in its engagement with China to realize the full potential of the concept of the Sinophone. While exuberant in their depictions of the heteroglossia of the diasporic communities, they leave China, the source of their Sinophone polemics, intact. I suggest that if Sinophone studies is to successfully intervene in the current paradigm of Chinese literature, it must expand its domain from overseas to China proper. Instead of merely critiquing the hegemony of national language and literature, Sinophone studies must also account for the generative power of linguistic nativity within the national territory of China. The result is a discovery of multiplying individual voices, regional soundings, dialectical accents, and local expressions that are in constant negotiation with official linguistic and literary mandates. The Han Chinese language, however standardized by the state, is no monolithic language but comprises a diverse and lively set of complex voices. And a corollary to this principle is that so-called standard Chinese literature, despite the restrictions of the state, is capable of alternative expressions and experimentations.

A New Literary History of Modern China features essays that deal with literature by writers from greater China, as well as from the broader Sinosphere. Literary phenomena, such as the Angel Island poetry produced by Chinese laborers in the United States or the circulation of the leftist guerrilla novel Hunger in the jungles of northern Malaysia, point to the immense space in which Chinese experiences have taken place. This volume pays attention to minority literatures produced by Tibetans, Muslims, and Taiwanese aboriginal cultures, among others. To avoid the pitfall of tokenism, it looks into specific cases in which literature is invoked to challenge conventional geopoetics. Cases in point include modern, bilingual Tibetan verse and the postmodern forms of southwestern minority poetry. The volume introduces the historical account of Zhang Chengzhi (1948–), a Han Chinese writer with a purportedly Muslim origin. Zhang was one of the first students to call himself a Red Guard during the Cultural Revolution. He later transferred his fervor to the Jahrinya school of Islam, a sect that spread throughout northwestern China during the late Qing, and has vowed to write on its behalf. By way of contrast, the volume introduces the mythological narrative of Alai (1959–), a Rgyalrong Tibetan writer with a Muslim paternal background. Often labeled a leading writer of Tibetan culture, Alai has nevertheless shunned any easy identity politics by declaring, I don’t represent.

Finally, this volume introduces the imaginary spaces of China. In Flowers in the Mirror, the writer Li Ruzhen (1763–1830) ushered his readers into the fantastic maritime world of the Tang dynasty before the Opium Wars. In Atlas, the Hong Kong writer Kai-cheung Dung (1967–) set out to map the mysterious V (for Victoria) City on the eve of the 1997 handover of Hong Kong to the PRC. Shen Congwen’s West Hunan and Mo Yan’s (1955–) Gaomi County are Chinese counterparts to William Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County or García Márquez’s Macondo Town. In Han Song’s 2066: Mars over America, the year 2066 marks a turning point in the Sino-American relationship. By then, America has crumbled as a result of both economic and political disasters while China has become a superpower, ruled by the artificial intelligence program Amando, an entity that collapses when mysterious Martians descend on Earth. The reference to Mars (in Chinese, literally Fire Star) in Han’s title brings to mind Red Star over China (1937) by Edgar Snow (1905–1972), the first English account of life in Yan’an. By playing with Snow’s title, Han prompts us to rethink the geopolitics of utopia—or dystopia—in terms of socialist (China), capitalist (the United States), and extraterrestrial space.

Together with more than 140 scholars, I have worked out a literary history that may raise many eyebrows. By way of conclusion, let me stress again that A New Literary History of Modern China is by no means a complete history in the conventional sense; rather, it takes into consideration seriously the Quixotic attempt of any historiographical attempt vis-à-vis inexhaustible data and experience. It creates more interstices than it can fill. As such, it invites readers to imagine the vast space implied in the concept of modern Chinese literature, ponder its shifting boundaries vis-à-vis history, and, more importantly, explore its horizons as part of a process of worlding.

Accordingly, the Sinophone intervention represents yet another attempt to broaden the scope of modern Chinese literature. It does not seek to overwrite the extant imaginary of China, but rather seeks