Introduction to the Republican Era

For millennia China had regarded itself as the center of the universe, a vast land of unimaginable wealth and a most advanced civilization. Beginning in the nineteenth century, however, when British gunboats arrived in the China seas, the self-labeled “Middle Kingdom” experienced a rude awakening. The ensuing clash with the West led to a dramatic shift in the Chinese mind, a change of self-­consciousness aptly described by Joseph R. Levenson as “the contraction of China from a world to a nation in the world.” Not just any nation, but one that was defeated and humiliated time and again by the Western powers that were carving up the country like a juicy melon through unfair treaties involving territorial concessions. Internal strife—regional and nationwide rebellions—also added to the pressure on the Manchu regime teetering on the verge of collapsing. Barely able to maintain its imperial façade, the Middle Kingdom had by the late nineteenth century acquired a new epithet, the “Sick Man of East Asia.”

Modern Chinese literature was born in this crucible of national crisis. In 1912, Qing Dynasty was toppled, ending monarchism in China. In 1919, the May Fourth Movement began with students marching through the streets of Peking, demanding change. The zeitgeist of this transitional period may best be captured by Lu Xun’s Call to Arms (1923), with its dark metaphor for China (“an iron house”) and the madman’s desperate plea (“Save the children”). Lu Xun’s call was echoed, among others, by Guo Moruo’s Goddesses (1921), in which the poet imagines the rebirth of China like a phoenix out of the ashes. Interestingly, as leaders of the New Culture Movement, both Lu and Guo began as students of medicine and then realized that it was more important to save the soul than the body of the “Sick Man of East Asia.” This perceived centrality of literature to the life of a nation speaks to a dilemma that was faced, though often unacknowledged, by modern Chinese writers: in their bold attempts to dismantle traditional literature and culture, they unwittingly inherited the Confucian belief in the ties between writing and governance, the assumption that literature is essential to morality, social life, and politics. Shelley’s statement that “poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world” did not fall on deaf ears when translated for China, where for centuries the ability to write well was considered the prerequisite for, if not simply equivalent to, the ability to govern or legislate. Twentieth century Chinese writers would pay dearly, and occasionally get paid handsomely, for this belief in the power of literature. But we are ahead of our story.

Lu and Guo were also representative in another respect: they both studied abroad, in Japan. The repeated defeats suffered by China at the hands of foreign powers—in two Opium Wars with Britain, the 1894 war with Japan, the siege of Peking by the Eight-Nation Alliance (including the United States) in the wake of the Boxer Rebellion in 1900, to name just a few—made the Chinese realize that traditional Chinese culture had become a roadblock to progress and that they needed to learn from the powerful nations that had just bullied them. The experience of study abroad, predominantly in Europe, the United States, and Japan, produced a generation of writers who transformed modern Chinese literature: Hu Shih, Liu Bannong, Wen Yiduo, Xu Dishan, Ba Jin, Yu Dafu, Xu Zhimo, Bing Xin, Dai Wangshu, Li Jinfa, Zhou Zuoren, Lin Yutang, Qian Zhongshu, and so on. While direct exposure to foreign cultures helped to train the pioneers of modern Chinese writing, translations from Western literature also created a hotbed for new ideas and literary experiments. The unbridled wildness of Guo Moruo’s work claimed lineage from Shelley, Goethe, and Whitman. It was under the influence of British Romanticism that Xu Zhimo wrote the most beautiful lyrical poems penned since Chinese poetry had broken free from classical verse. Hu Shih’s famous proposal for replacing classical Chinese with vernacular Chinese as the literary language had much to do with his devotion to American pragmatism, a school of philosophy that taught him to question absolute authority, including the tyranny of the Chinese classics. Ba Jin’s indictment against feudal patriarchy in his novels was inspired by the anarchist and utopian ideas he had picked up while living in the Latin Quarter in Paris as well as from translated texts. The list can go on.

The disaster of the First World War might have made some Chinese intellectuals question the virtues of Western civilizations, but the success of the Russian revolution brought more radical ideas to China. Especially after the founding of the Chinese Communist Party in 1921, literature and politics seemed to have become conjoined. While in the first quarter of the century Chinese writers had enjoyed a degree of freedom in the absence of a strong political regime, Chiang Kai-shek’s consolidation of power in 1927 and his subsequent purge and persecution of communist sympathizers ushered in a period called the “Reign of White Terror.” The temporary setback to radical politics led to an outburst of both soul-searching and socially engaged writings, including Ding Ling’s Miss Sophia’s Diary (1928), Mao Dun’s Rainbow (1930), and Ba Jin’s Family (1931).

In 1931 Japan occupied Manchuria, alarming all Chinese that their country might be doomed. The rising tide of patriotism brought renewed energy to Chinese literature. Xiao Hong wrote her first novel, The Field of Life and Death (1935), after she had been displaced from her native Manchuria, followed by a semi-autobiographical piece, Tales of Hulan River, about a birthplace she would never see again. Shen Congwen published Border Town in 1934, a novel about western Hunan, a frontier area of pristine natural beauty and a simple way of life threatened by war and other human deviltries. In his 1936 novel Rickshaw, Lao She created a memorable character of a rickshaw puller whose life takes an unexpected turn after he is kidnapped by the army.

The full-blown Sino-Japanese War in 1937 further galvanized Chinese writers, many of whom participated directly in the resistance movement. The Communists, after a brutal Long March, had by this time gained a foothold in the Yan’an area in northern China. In 1942, Mao Zedong delivered a famous speech on art and literature, proclaiming that “literature must serve politics.” The full effect of Mao’s speech would not be felt until 1949, when the Communists defeated Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalists after a civil war (1945–49) in the wake of the Japanese surrender and gained control of the country.

Yet we should not forget writers who self-consciously turned away from overt ideological agendas and dwelled instead on topics of everyday life, pop culture, leisure, and so on. The rise in the 1920s of the School of Mandarin Duck and Butterfly, a genre of fiction featuring romantic love, scandals, and mysteries, as exemplified by He Haiming’s “For the Love of Her Feet” (1923), testifies to the vitality of popular literature. Lin Yutang’s gently humorous prose in My Country and My People (1935) made him the foremost interpreter of Chinese culture to the English-speaking world in the 1930s. He once stated that he would prefer to write about his toothbrush than about current national issues. Like Lin, Zhou Zuoren wrote about reading in the lavatory and other seemingly trivial matters. The kind of satirical verve and comic spirit so masterfully cultivated by Chinese literati for centuries found perhaps its best expression in Qian Zhongshu’s Fortress Besieged (1947), a novel of disarming wit and utter delight, a gem of fiction that would unfortunately be buried in the annals of literary history as twentieth century China entered the Revolutionary Era under Communist rule.*

* Due to difficulty in clearing permission from the Qian Zhongshu estate, we are unfortunately unable to include an excerpt from Fortress Besieged. For the same reason we are unable to include Love in a Fallen City by Eileen Chang.