Chapter Four

A LYRICISM OF BETRAYAL

The Enigma of Hu Lancheng

WITH THE POSTHUMOUS RELEASE of her autobiographical novel Xiaotuaoyuan 小團圓 (Little reunion, 2009), the phenomenon of Eileen Chang 張愛玲 (1920–1995) that began to boom in the 1990s—from publications to visual adaptations, from blogs to cartoons—has reached a new height. A roman à clef, Little Reunion reveals for the first time many details of Chang’s family history and personal life. Of all the episodes contained within the work, the most controversial is the one pertaining to the liaison between the protagonist and her lover, a collaborator, during the Second Sino-Japanese War. It rekindles “Chang fans’” (Zhangmi 張迷) curiosity about the author’s own romance in wartime Shanghai: not unlike her heroine, Chang had an affair and even a clandestine marriage with a collaborator, Hu Lancheng 胡蘭成 (1906–1981).¹

For years Hu Lancheng has played a double role in the legend of Eileen Chang. Her fans loathe him, for at least two reasons: Hu betrayed his fellow countrymen, and he was unfaithful to Chang throughout their short-lived romance and marriage (1944–1946). Hu was already thrice married when he approached Chang,² and he started another affair right after he married her. Worse, when he was on the run from the Nationalists after the war, he became involved with yet another woman, a widowed concubine from his benefactor’s family, all the while living on Chang’s support. And if all this seems unpalatable, it marks only the midpoint of the amorous adventures that filled Hu’s life.

However, Hu was also among the first few critics to appreciate Chang’s talent, and they mutually illuminated each other’s literary and intellectual paths. More important, Hu was a strong writer in his own right; as critics have observed, his style is so exquisite that it exerts an enchanting power over readers even to date.3 Chang left few clues to her private life during the war. Until the publication of Little Reunion, we had to primarily rely on Hu’s memoir, Jinsheng jinshi 今生今世 (This life, this world, 1959), and other writings by Hu to learn about her character, career, and love story. As a result, her fans can feel trapped in an ambivalent cycle of readings. Our fascination with Eileen Chang presupposes our fascination with Hu’s account of her; but this doubles our repugnance for Hu, for he was the source of pain to Chang and, by extension, to us. The publication of Little Reunion further complicates the cycle, for it points to the fact that Chang wrote her novel as a belated rejoinder to Hu’s account of their romance; she proves herself his primary implied reader.

Thus, through his writing Hu Lancheng enacted an unlikely hermeneutic of love, reminiscent of Roland Barthes pondering love’s slippery, textual nature in Lover’s Discourse.⁴ Readers’ affection for Chang comes as much from imaginary intimacy with her (writing) as from a love-hate relationship with her lover’s writing about her (love).

The “myth” of Eileen Chang could not have taken effect without the undesirable intrusion of Hu Lancheng. In the following pages, I trace how Hu acted out his unwelcome role throughout wartime and subsequent years, and thereby enacted a politics and poetics of betrayal. By “betrayal,” I do not refer merely to the fact that Hu Lancheng turned his back on his nation and broke his marital vows. I am equally interested in the way Hu explains, or explains away, his political and personal infidelity through a self-styled “lover’s discourse.” At its most exuberant, this discourse is expressed with recourse to lyricism, a rhetorical mode that most often suggests a truthful expression of innermost feeling.

Questions therefore arise: If lyricism expresses one’s intimate and sincere feeling, can it be used to facilitate a literature meant to be an alibi for betrayal? By laying bare his actions in a language full of poetic candor, did Hu Lancheng bring the power of the lyrical to the full or merely reveal the inherent performative, hence duplicitous, nature of lyrical writing?⁵ Does Hu’s case either sanction or belie a most important dimension of traditional Chinese poetics, one that valorizes the reciprocal ties between personality and poetic articulation?

These questions become all the more puzzling given that, throughout his life, Hu Lancheng never conceded to any charge of treason or infidelity against him. Instead, he eloquently defended his deeds in terms of intellectual necessity as well as affective imperative. Did Hu betray lyricism as we commonly understand it, or did he demonstrate a lyricism of betrayal that is too circuitous and oblique for general readers to appreciate? Finally, Hu’s lyricism touches on the ethics of readership. By wavering among the temptations of biographical, intentional, and textual fallacies, does a reader become part of the circle of betrayal and self-betrayal?

Hu Lancheng still remains an infamous name in China. By contrast, ever since the early 1980s there has been a coterie of appreciators overseas, thanks to his sojourn in Taiwan in the mid-1970s and his consequent impact on a group of young writers, particularly Zhu Tianwen 朱天文 (Chu T’ien-wen, b. 1956). Although Hu Lancheng has garnered attention in recent years, there has been little study of his life, let alone his works and thought.6 This chapter will focus on Hu’s writings at the turning point of his life—wartime and the first decade of his exile to Japan starting in 1951—a period that includes his two major prose narratives, Shanhe suiyue 山河歲月 (China through time, 1954) and This Life, This World. I argue that, like Eileen Chang, Hu provides a peculiar agenda of self-fashioning amid national calamities. His celebration of qing/feeling points to a radical interpretation of and intervention in public causes such as revolution, nationhood, and civil subjectivity, and his haunting image in the shadow of Eileen Chang indicates how difficult it is to exorcise a specter from history and memory.

No “Call to Arms”

In 1944, in the November issue of the magazine Kuzhu 苦竹 (Bitter bamboo), Hu Lancheng published an essay, “Gei qingnian” 給青年 (To youth), in which he wrote the following lines: “There are cases in which one does a wrong thing but is not deemed sinful, while one does the right thing but still does not appear to be great.”⁷ As its title suggests, Hu wrote the essay to advise Chinese youth not to be discouraged by the Second Sino-Japanese War. He equates the war to a revolution. Instead of following ideologies, from nationalism to communism to even pan-Asianism, Chinese youth, Hu suggests, should devote themselves to revolution as an undertaking beyond immediate political and moral judgment:

Revolution . . . is the completion of humanity; it is its own end. . . . We are fighting a war but we are not fighting for any goal. If one imposed a goal on it, the war would become something to put up with, rather than something to cheer for. I was dismayed when I first heard that one can willingly engage in a war that has no goal, but careful thinking has led me to realize the magnitude of its meaning.8

The year 1944 saw drastic changes in Hu Lancheng’s public and private life. He had been jailed in Nanjing the year before for criticizing the puppet regime headed by Wang Jingwei 汪精衛 (1883–1944),⁹ and was released later only after the Japanese intervened. Upon his return to Shanghai in early 1944, Hu came to know Eileen Chang, and they quickly fell in love. A few months later, Hu divorced his third wife and married Chang. By then, the war had taken a turn against Japan, and the puppet regime was faltering amid a mood of defeat. However, Hu’s literary career was thriving thanks to Eileen Chang’s influence. Not only did he produce a series of fine essays on a wide range of subjects, he also tried his hand at editorial work for magazines such as Bitter Bamboo. But Hu remained restless. By November, when “To Youth” was published, he had accepted a Japanese assignment to take over a propaganda newspaper in Wuhan.

In “To Youth” Hu urges his readers to take a value-free attitude toward the war so as to elicit the “magnitude of its meaning” as revolution. Revolution means not so much a political clash or mass violence as it does a moment of apocalypse, through which humanity is crystallized and the world order reconfigured. Hu concludes that only those who consider revolution a spontaneous illumination of humanity can truly revitalize the Chinese civilization in crisis.

This revolution, according to Hu, is motivated by qing or feeling, the most primordial human faculty.¹⁰ Thanks to its inchoate and amorphous nature, feeling is not to be bridled by discipline or ideology; rather, it calls forth a rhythm of life naturally in tune with time. “Revolutionaries never surrender or seek petty ways out because [they are] born with a firm and pure feeling.”¹¹ Feeling “is neither sense nor temperament; it is life in itself, as I have said, ‘on such a night, even the flow of a brook sounds full of feeling.’”¹² Hu Lancheng recognizes Lu Xun’s revolutionary bearing but regrets that the master harbored a “deep sadness,” which made him “miserable and desperate.”¹³ Being able to modulate feeling so as to elicit its “greatness and beauty” is the prerequisite for a revolutionary.

Hu Lancheng may have entertained such a vision of feeling and revolution when boarding a Japanese bomber for Wuhan in November 1944. But his experience in early life belied that vision. Hu came from a reputable rural family of Sheng County, Jiangsu. Although his family had declined by the time of his birth in 1906, Hu was able to acquire a new-style education in the wake of the May Fourth Movement. He attended a Christian high school in Hangzhou in 1921 but was expelled for rebelling against the school authorities. This kind of clash would become a pattern in his subsequent social and political encounters. In 1926, Hu headed for Beijing, where he served as a clerk at Yen-ching University. At this time he began to take an interest in Marxism and other kinds of radical thought, although he ended up joining the Nationalist Party.14 After a year’s fruitless sojourn, Hu returned home; in the next five years, he took a series of high school teaching positions, punctuated by long or short idle periods between job transfers.

In 1932, Hu Lancheng had a chance to teach in Guangxi, which enabled him to leave the stagnant life of his hometown. Hu spent five years in the southern province but left little record of his life during this period. We do know, however, that he published a collection of essays, his first literary attempt, and became more and more engaged in politics.¹⁵ Far from the political storms in Shanghai and Beijing, Guangxi was at that time under the control of local warlords, providing an unexpected haven for both leftist and rightist activists. Hu renewed his interest in Marxism and became a sympathizer with Trotskyism.¹⁶ The semiautonomous state of Guangxi came to an end in 1936 when Chiang Kai-shek succeeded in consolidating local forces. Hu quickly found himself in trouble for the political statements he had made in newspapers.¹⁷ He was put in jail that summer and told to leave the province for good upon release.

By that point, Hu Lancheng had turned thirty. He had spent ten years seeking a career, been married twice, and fathered four children. Not unlike many intellectuals of his generation, he was inspired by the May Fourth Movement, and aspired to change the status quo and create a new world, only to be restrained by the contingencies of reality. When he took his family to Shanghai in 1937, Hu was so impoverished that he had to watch his ill newborn baby die due to inadequate medical treatment. But, as he put it euphemistically, he still had a desire to “appreciate the vista of the world,”¹⁸ to risk the uncertainties of the time. He accepted an appointment as editorial writer of the Zhonghua ribao 中華日報 (China daily), under the aegis of Wang Jingwei. When the war broke out that summer, he saw his chance and decided to gamble on his fate.

In contrast to Chiang Kai-shek, leader of the Nationalist regime, Wang Jingwei proclaimed that China could not afford a war against Japan and that peace talks would be in the best interest of both nations. To promote his stance, Wang needed a theoretical preamble, and among his intellectual followers, he found Hu to be the one able to best capture his intent. Hu Lancheng had already moved to Hong Kong to serve as editorial writer for Nanhua ribao 南華日報 (South China daily), another organ supporting Wang. Throughout 1938, Hu wrote more than one hundred editorials and essays, of which “Zhannan, he yi buyi” 戰難，和亦不易 (To seek battle is difficult; to seek peace is no less easy) described China’s dilemma so persuasively that it became the most powerful statement on behalf of Wang’s cause.19 Wang Jingwei formally defected from the Nationalist regime in December 1938.

Hu Lancheng was appointed Deputy Minister of Propaganda in the new puppet regime, as well as Wang’s personal secretary. Lacking political resources, Hu assigned himself the role of intellectual watchdog, both lending advice to and critiquing the puppet regime and the government of Japan. This was a smart move, as it allowed Hu to maintain the lofty image of an intellectual at the same time that he made use of his political capital. But his tactic backfired in 1943 when he openly expressed pessimism about the prospects of the puppet regime.²⁰ What followed is by now a familiar story: Hu lost Wang’s favor, was jailed, and aligned himself completely with the Japanese upon release. His private life during this time was no less dramatic during this time. He divorced his second wife for a third marriage in 1941; two and a half years later, he divorced his third wife to marry Eileen Chang.

Quite contrary to his claim in “To Youth,” Hu Lancheng’s adventures from the May Fourth period to wartime could hardly be called “firm and pure.” For his political choice during the war, Hu Lancheng has been called a hanjian 漢奸, or a traitor to the Chinese.21 This label, however, tends to eclipse the nuanced motivations and consequences of Hu’s case. Scholars in recent years have tried to analyze the behavior of hanjian in the broader context of collaboration. While both terms connote a profound moral failure, “collaboration” carries far more ramifications in political judgment than the simple label of hanjian. David Barrett and Larry Shyu have compared life in Vichy France (1940–1944) and in the occupied areas in China and argue that there is a difference between “collaboration” and “collaborationism.” For them, whereas the former is a survival tactic, willful or reluctant, the latter stresses a “committed, ideological identification” with the occupying force.²² Barrett and Shyu conclude that the Chinese experience was more a collaboration, though admittedly there exists a vast middle ground between collaboration and collaborationism. By corollary, at the other end of the spectrum arises a no less ambiguous relationship between collaboration and resistance. Timothy Brooks calls attention to the existential circumstances of collaboration that arose “when individual people in real places were forced to deal with each other.”²³ In his study of life in occupied Shaoxing, Keith Schoppa discovers that “collaboration was not necessarily summed up by the word betrayal; resistance did not necessarily connote nationalism.”²⁴ Scholars such as Margherita Zanasi and John Hunter Boyle have taken a more sympathetic perspective from which to assess the motivation for Wang Jingwei’s treason.²⁵ The extent of the ambiguity is such that Werner Rings’ question about life in Europe under German occupation may be relevant: “Could not collaboration itself be a form of resistance?”²⁶

This is where the case of Hu Lancheng becomes intriguing. Throughout the war and the years afterward, Hu kept claiming that he was never a hanjian but a player with “the tide of his time,” trying to save China.²⁷ This of course could be a mere cliché of collaboration rhetoric. The thrust of Hu’s case is that, collaborator or not, he was at best a minor player in wartime politics. He occupies few lines in extant accounts of the puppet regime, which contain next to nothing about his aborted plan of rescuing China. While he fared far worse than he wished in the realpolitik, Hu proved to be a first-rate manipulator of language. In the realm of belles lettres, he deftly shifts his position from collaboration to collaborationism, and from collaboration to resistance and even revolution. Few of Hu’s peers could present these contested ideologies in a style so refined and disarming as to suggest a lyrical overtone. Whereas historians may overlook Hu as a result of his insufficiently condemnable record, I argue that Hu’s threat—and equivocal charm—lie elsewhere. Through literature, he collapsed distinct values and images and blurred conceptual and affective boundaries, thereby demonstrating the “art” of collaboration on its own terms. On top of the politics of betrayal, he introduced a poetics of betrayal.

I have in mind not Hu Lancheng’s editorials and political treatises but his engagement with the familiar essay, a genre associated with individual taste and private musings. Most of Hu’s essays appeared between 1942 and 1945, during a time when he was romantically involved with Eileen Chang and in the process of breaking away from the puppet regime. They were published in magazines such as Tiandi 天地 (Heaven and earth), Renjian 人間 (Human world), and Bitter Bamboo, all magazines associated with the collaborationist circles. Hu’s essays cover a wide range of subjects, from reviews of writers (such as Eileen Chang, Zhou Zuoren, and Su Qing 蘇青 [1914–1982]) to critiques of novels (such as Jin Ping Mei and the Dream of the Red Chamber), from sketches of the trivia of life to satires of Chinese mannerisms. For our concern, his essays on Chinese society and civilization, including “To Youth,” discussed above, are the most important.

In “Wenming de chuantong” 文明的傳統 (The tradition of civilization, 1944), Hu Lancheng pits Eastern civilization against its Western counterpart, contending that the former thrives on the mutual illumination of the human mind and objects of the world and the latter derives its force from materialism and reasoning. Hu deplores that China has been so overwhelmed by Western powers in recent decades that it has lost its spiritual resources. He finds in Japan a model for coping with Western cultural and political hegemony while retaining a “pure, immense, and prolonged feeling.”28 Accordingly, he advises his readers to keep in mind that the war was not really being fought between China and Japan, but between Eastern and Western civilizations.

The anti-Occidentalist argument in Hu’s essay is emblematic of Chinese intellectual conservatism since the late Qing. Hu acknowledges that he was inspired by Liang Shuming 梁漱溟 (1893–1988), whose contrastive study of the Oriental and Occidental civilizations was among the most popular treatises in China during the twenties.²⁹ Liang was a forerunner of modern Neo-Confucianism, a discourse with which Hu would have many dialogues in his later years. However, written in late 1944, Hu’s essay no doubt also echoes the tenor of Pan-Asianism, an ideology Hu’s political writings had addressed since the late 1930s. This makes his motivation dubious. To preserve Chinese tradition in opposition to the Western threat is one thing; to preserve Chinese tradition by enlisting an aggressor’s support is quite another. Neo-Confucian teachings highlight above all a belief in political orthodoxy and cultural authenticity. But, as will be argued below, Hu was neither a wholehearted Neo-Confucian nor a univocal Pan-Asianist. In shuttling between cultural essentialism and collaborationism, he demonstrated a far more intricate ideology.

Hu envisions the Oriental world as permeated with an aura of tranquility and decorum. It is a world still co-inhabited by human and divine beings. “Its air feels soft and bright, full of a simple form of pleasure.”30 By “divine,” Hu refers not to God in the Western religious sense but to “a feeling shared by the Orientals through thousands of years; a sense of reserved beauty arising from the great peacefulness of humanity.”³¹ Hu makes a point that his vision is not limited to a pastoral vision of tranquil beauty. Rather, “the great peacefulness of humanity” is said to provide the conditions in which “great adventures break out frequently.”³² Such a reciprocity of lyricism and dynamism “unleashes a life force that is almost purposeless.”³³ Looking back, Hu considers the Meiji Restoration in Japan and the 1911 Republican Revolution in China two recent moments of such great adventure, and he hopes that the ongoing war will release the “life force” anew so as to restore East Asian civilization.

It would take Hu Lancheng another decade to provide clearer clues to his thoughts, and more discussion on that account will follow in the next section. In his wartime writing, Hu had already shown two tendencies: a penchant for lyricizing everything, and an eschatological view that projects the rebirth of Chinese civilization on the basis of the “ruination of totality”—in the form of revolution. These two tendencies reinforce each other despite apparent contradictions. Whereas catastrophe eliminates the undesirable elements of reality, poetry is said to be able to transcend calamities to renew civilization. Neither is suggestive of the tenets of Neo-Confucianism. Rather, Hu’s yearning for amoral dynamism and the incessant cyclical cosmic force betrays his indebtedness to Chinese intellectual traditions such as Daoism in the vein of Laozi’s anarchism and the dictum of change in the I-Jing.³⁴

At a time when millions of Chinese were being coerced, exiled, and slaughtered by the invaders, Hu Lancheng’s lyrical appreciation of Oriental civilization could not have sounded more disturbing. It resonated with the Japanese imperialist discourse of Pan-Asianism, though Hu claimed that he was inspired by Dr. Sun Yat-sun’s dayazhou zhuyi 大亞洲主義 (Pan-Asianism).³⁵ By “aestheticizing” politics on a total scale, Hu’s writing smacks of fascism, similar to such contemporary Western cases as T. S. Eliot, Martin Heidegger, Ezra Pound, and Paul de Man, to name only a few.³⁶ Hu would have resisted such a comparison, for he was resistant to anything Western at the outset. Still, his writing recalls the aesthetic discourse of Japanese fascism at the time.³⁷ Whether Hu was fascist or not, my concern here is with the way he works out a poetics favoring collaborationism within a Chinese context.

This brings us to Hu’s May Fourth complex. Hu Lancheng suggests repeatedly that May Fourth witnessed the outburst of the “life force” that had previously given rise to the great dynastic civilizations such as the Han and particularly the Tang. Instead of “enlightenment,” he believed that the May Fourth spirit manifested itself in qing/feeling, and that only feeling could move thousands of people to change the world through revolution. To reiterate his point, he included the same passage in two essays, “Zhongguo wenming yu shijie wenyi fuxing” 中國文明與世界文藝復興 (Chinese civilization and world renaissance, 1945) and “Wenyi fuxing tishi” 文藝復興提示 (Suggestions on renaissance, 1945), as follows:

Cai Yuanpei 蔡元培 could invite Liang Shuming to teach at Beijing University simply based on a single piece of his philosophical treatise, and young students traveled from afar, transferring from one school to another, simply to attend a professor’s class. One could seek one listener after another to talk with about one’s favorite essay, just like a kid who loves his toy so much that he worries about it in his sleep and wakes up only to find it in bed. Even workers, farmers, and merchants demonstrated a grand manner. [The May Fourth Movement] was a time when streets, plants, and farm plots were all shining; clear days were shining, so were rainy days. The raindrops were all transparent. Therefore, people like Liang Qichao and Hu Shi could generate movements; Sun Yat-sun and Chen Duxiu could even lead the Northern Expedition.38

Just as great feeling accrues from an overflow of affective resources, so revolution can attain an “unnamable” magnitude only if undertaken without a premeditated goal. Here we see incipient signs of the patent style for which Hu was later known. He highlights images related to brightness, simplicity, immensity, and infantile spontaneity; mixes scenes from everyday life and popular culture with an epic vision; and imagines a world reverberating with anthropomorphic and animistic forces. Ultimately, as Hu puts it, this is a shining world of poetry,³⁹ in which enlightenment rests on epiphany and inquisitive desire gives way to intuitive ecstasy—history and poetry are folded into one.

Hu repeatedly observes that the May Fourth Movement was derailed by the advent of Occidentalism. The worst impact of this Occidentalism on China was the fostering of the twin political machines of Nationalism and Communism. Predicated on the strictures of reason, discipline, and uniformity, both ideologies allegedly curb Chinese youth’s capacity to feel, turning revolution into a stifling obligation. By the eve of the Second Sino-Japanese War, as Hu notes, China’s search for modernity had been trapped in a quagmire, and a radical rescue was in order. Hu casts a nostalgic look at ancient Chinese civilization, hoping to locate from within the tradition a force of self-regeneration. This posture is nothing new in the given historical context; what is new is Hu’s belief that the Chinese Renaissance cannot be accomplished without Japanese cultural and military intervention. As Hu puts it, “in the end, such an honor of [restoring Chinese] humanity will go to the Han people, but it is the Japanese people who best understand this.”40

This statement serves as blatant evidence of Hu Lancheng’s collaborationist stance, but it may point to something more. I argue that Hu’s proposal represents not an exception to but a radical variation of the May Fourth ethos that informed his upbringing. To further my argument, C. T. Hsia’s notion of “obsession with China” may still be of significance.⁴¹ As Hsia comments, the majority of Chinese literati and intellectuals demonstrate their deep-seated concern about China by denouncing China, thus creating a negative dialectic of sorts with respect to their nationalist consciousness. If this is the case, Hu Lancheng lets his “obsession with China” swing to the opposite extreme: he embraces everything that is Chinese, to the point where he claims that his love for China as a civilization impels him to transgress the limit of nationalism. Nation and nationalism, after all, are notions/institutions derived from the West. China as a nation, accordingly, already comprises the rich cultural and political heritage of the ancient civilization. Hu disputes being labeled a hanjian, for he believes that, compared with the Nationalists and Communists, who seek allies—collaborate—with either the Anglo-American forces or the Soviet forces, he should be less culpable for siding with Japan. Whereas these Western powers would erode irrecoverably the foundation of China, Japan, thanks to its Asian origin and affinity to Chinese civilization, would help reconstruct that foundation.

Hu may have “betrayed” more than he wanted to in taking such a stance. Hu himself belonged to the first generation of Chinese growing up in the wake of May Fourth; transitioning country to city, from classical learning to new knowledge, and from romantic yearning to ideological conviction, he experienced almost the full repertoire of adventures ascribed to the New Youth. But as discussed above, along the way he somehow missed almost all the turns that would have led to his desired destination. Between 1920 and 1937, Hu was constantly on the road in search of his vocation. If the bumpy path he took is a testimonial to the May Fourth spirit, it indicates anything but a “shining” domain full of brightness, simplicity, immensity, and infantile spontaneity, as his wartime essays suggest. Contrary to his celebration of the “free air” of May Fourth, traces of discontent loom behind his writing.

When relating the Second Sino-Japanese War to the May Fourth Movement, Hu Lancheng sounds as if he wants to give himself as well as his country a second chance to carry out the promise of a Chinese Renaissance. As he argues, since neither Nationalist nor Communist revolution had brought about anything positive, collaboration with Japan should be adopted as another option. But Hu’s argument falls short on at least two accounts. If a movement as shining as May Fourth had failed to attain Hu’s desired results, he could hardly justify that the Sino-Japanese War, which had inflicted enormous atrocities upon China, on the grounds that it would bring the country to a desired state of plenitude. And even if he intended to use collaboration to serve the end of restoring Chinese civilization, he willfully averted his eyes from the Machiavellian undercurrent of his collaborationism: that through it Japan might collapse rather than restore Chinese civilization in toto.

For all its theoretical holes, Hu’s personal crusade prevailed in the world of language. As if compensating for his political frustrations in political actuality, his essays became increasingly elated in mood and lyrical in rhetoric. Faced with mounting evidence of being on the losing side of the war, Hu argues that his vision enables him to “free” himself from any myopic projection of history and ideology. Above all, revolution as he conceives of it is a bold denial of establishments and temporalities, and qing/feeling is said to realize itself most prominently only when confronted with contingencies.

When even the May Fourth Movement proved to be a flawed origin for his grand revolutionary project, it did not take much effort for Hu to cross over to the other side of modernity, relocating revolution and feeling in the vast world of premodern times: “Man is not born in one specific period; rather, man is born in all periods.”42 His famous statement resounds: “Revolution is the completion of humanity; it is its own end. . . . We are fighting a war, but we are not fighting for any goal.”

Using such circuitous rhetoric, Hu Lancheng may have either made a leap of faith at a higher level or simply tried to preempt any foreseeable charges resulting from the end of the war. But there is an often overlooked, more ambitious side of Hu. Right after the Japanese surrender in August 1945, Hu, according to himself, staged a coup against both China and Japan, in alliance with remnant collaboration forces as well as a few Japanese radicals. The alleged coup failed in a few days; Hu’s own “revolution” ended up a mere joke. It nevertheless dramatizes his attitude: wavering between sheer naïveté and radical utopianism, opportunism and megalomania, he presents an image so evasive as to make any immediate judgment difficult.

In Hu Lancheng’s essay “To Youth,” he told his ideal readers that they represent the hope of China because they were endowed with a “surplus” (yuyu 餘裕) of feeling and therefore had the capacity to change the world. He did not tell them that his own youthful experience was ever haunted by liabilities—his family, romance, ideology, and nation—despite his emotional investments. Hu had been striving for change since his formative years, but the world did not change the way he had hoped. In the political domain, he betrayed not only the Nationalist government, the legitimate sovereign government of China, but also the collaboration regime he helped establish. In the private sphere, he was constantly tempted by new objects of desire. Hu had a momentary lapse when agreeing with a critic’s description: “Our time has failed Hu Lancheng, and Hu Lancheng has failed our time.”43 Hu confessed that he was moved upon reading this. Indeed, his is a story of great expectations betrayed. When advising the youth to seize their moment in the late fall of 1944, Hu should have been aware that he had missed his own time, and timing, and come to a point of no return.

A Poetics and Politics of Evocation (Xing 興)

Hu Lancheng fled Wuhan two weeks after the surrender of Japan on August 15, 1945. In late 1946, when taking shelter in Wenzhou, Zhejiang Province, Hu became acquainted with Liu Jingchen 劉景晨 (1881–1961), a local scholar of classical learning; he also managed to win Liang Shuming’s attention through correspondence. Under Liu’s and Liang’s influence, Hu Lancheng’s scholarship took a new shape, and he started to work on China Through Time, a comprehensive reflection on Chinese culture and history. After the New China was founded, Hu first hoped to win Mao Zedong’s favor, but he quickly became aware of his unpopularity with the Communist regime.⁴⁴ He fled to Hong Kong in the summer of 1950; three months later, he landed in Japan, where he spent the rest of his life.

Finished in 1954, China Through Time is Hu’s first book published in exile. In many ways, it captures the author’s conceptual and experiential transformation from the end of the war to the 1949 divide. The book takes up where his wartime essays leave off in probing for the “lyrical” relationship among language, culture, and national destiny. Although a review of Chinese civilization from its moment of inception to date, it does not follow conventional chronology; instead, it highlights only two periods, the early Chinese dynasties up to the Han and modern times from the late Qing to the founding of Communist China.

Hu starts by tracing the origins of world civilization to the Neolithic age, and quickly comes to a mathematical abstraction: that civilization came into being out of naught, just like the numeric discovery of one from zero. He contends that whereas Western and Indian civilizations were derived from the matrices of one to three (holism, dichotomy, and trinitarianism), Chinese civilization was able to conceptualize a multitude of numbers beyond three. He also finds in Chinese and non-Chinese civilizations a contrast between deductive mentality and reductive mentality. But most intriguing is his overview of civilizations in terms of color scheme:

[China, India, and Japan each took] a shade of gold, which is both color and light. . . . Egypt came across in blue gray, a sunny world turning blue gray because of it slave system. . . . Greece was white, which . . . is only light without color. . . . Western civilization evolved as a mixture of Egyptian and Greek colors, all the way down to the era of Victorian England. Germany and America are in steel gray, with America closer to Greece, with a touch of butter.45

Underlining Hu’s history of Chinese civilization is the dialogic between the well-field system (jingtian zhidu 井田制度) and the notion of xing 興 or affective evocation. If the well-field system projects the social and political blueprint Hu yearned for, xing is its conceptual provocation. Neither, however, would make sense without referring to the poetic imaginary.

The well-field system was a land distribution policy in ancient China that divided a field into nine blocks shaped like the Chinese character 井, with the eight surrounding parts farmed by individual families and the center worked jointly by the eight families in dedication to the lord.⁴⁶ The system is said to have satisfied both the popular interest and the royal mandate, both individual autonomy and public congregation. Hu amplifies its significance throughout his book, to the point where it becomes the trope of not only agricultural economics but also political management, ethical solidarity, and above all, aesthetic vision. The time of the well-field system is seen as parallel to that of the Classic of Poetry, in which “people lived restfully and interacted pleasantly.”⁴⁷ When perfectly executed, politics is poetics.

While Hu’s revisitation of the well-field system may suggest feudalist nostalgia, it had modern, radical origins. Hu reminisced about his fascination with Peter Kropotkin’s Fields, Factories and Workshops, a landmark piece of anarchism, in his formative years.48 He admired Kropotkin’s opposition to centralization and industrialization in favor of a local, self-sufficient communal life, such that he adopted the latter’s pastoral vision in his essay “Zhongguo xiangdang zhidu yange kao” 中國鄕黨制度沿革攷 (A study of the changes and continuities of Chinese rural society). Dated 1929, this essay is the earliest writing by Hu that scholars have been able to locate. It argues that Chinese society has never undergone a transformation from a slave system to an urban society as like Western societies have, and as a result, the Chinese people harbor much less resentment toward monarchal rule and a class system. For thousands of years, the Chinese have been sheltered by rural communal life, which provides both clan lineage and cultural continuity. Accordingly, for Chinese, the modern form of “nation is nothing but a morbid sign of society, a tentative product before urban and rural communities are fully developed.” Hu concludes that “if we really want to pursue the happiness of humanity, we ought to do away with such a grand institution [of nation] and start with the popular stratum of society.”⁴⁹

The well-field system as described in China Through Time may be read as a belated articulation of Hu Lancheng’s quasi-anarchist desire of the 1920s. At that time, however, Japanese Pan-Asianism had not yet influenced his thought. As Hu points out repeatedly, the well-field system worked in ancient times because it puts into practice the best part of the Chinese political imaginary. As long as the sovereign’s interest is adequately taken care of—as long as the center of the field is cultivated—the popular society can function like a self-contained sphere. At the system’s most utopian stage, the sovereign represents not an entity but a position, ready to be filled by whoever is in power, while the popular society carries on undisturbed.

Through knowledge of the well-field system, we may come to a better understanding of Hu Lancheng’s wartime writings. Insofar as nationhood never weighs much on his political agenda, the polity of China takes on a different dimension. His view of East Asian geopolitics sounds like a reinstatement of the harmonious rapport between the popular and the authoritative forces of the ancient time, and his interpretation of Pan-Asianism may as well be an international version of the well-field system!50 According to that trope, as Hu would have it, China is supposed to occupy the center of East Asian civilization, ever in fiduciary interaction with surrounding countries. In the Pan-Asian “field,” Hu argues that Japanese civilization provides no more than a conduit through which China can regain its lost golden time; Japan proves the old saying, “When ritual is lost [at the center], one turns to the peripheral” to retrieve it (lishi qiu zhuye 禮失求諸野).⁵¹ But Hu’s argument evades the fact that the well-field system may be an all-but-utopian construct recalled from ancient China, but the Japanese imperialist plan to denationalize and deterritorialize China was a menacing threat in actuality. Seated at the center of Hu’s wartime well-field space was never a sage king but a foreign usurper or his Chinese puppet.

The key to Hu’s lyrical fabulation of Chinese history and politics is xing or affective evocation. As discussed in the introduction, xing refers to a range of affective responses such as, among others, being evocative, creative, uplifting, and jubilant. The word is said to be derived from practice of mood related to the rituals of divination in ancient times; it became associated with the motivation of literary creativity in classics such as The Analects and the Zhouli.⁵² Xing gave rise to a wide range of interpretations after the Han dynasty, from divine inspiration to pedagogical ploy, ethical form, and political mandate,⁵³ and it continuously drew intellectual attention even in the modern age. Whereas both Zhou Zuoren and Zong Baihua consider xing the predominant trope of classical Chinese poetry, Liang Zongdai treats it as a Chinese equivalent to the concept of “correspondence” in French symbolism. Wen Yiduo surmises that xing may not be an immanent trope but a linguistic camouflage used to obviate political taboo. Chen Shih-hsiang, as argued previously, identifies xing with primitive festive occasions where people celebrate their communion though spontaneous dance and singing.⁵⁴

Hu Lancheng’s poetics has to be understood as part of this tradition. Hu first derives his definition of xing from the Classic of Poetry. As he describes, xing functions “like a lead-in rather than a prelude” of a poem, indicating not a causal linkage but a “seemingly relevant or irrelevant” connection to the text proper. From here Hu develops a metaphysical inference:

Xing is like zero in mathematics, which begets one with no cause. No cause, because it comes into existence the way it does. Its existence is its cause, and therefore it is something of joy. . . . There is no xing in the West; that which comes from the material is merely stimulus, and that which comes from God is merely inspiration. Xing is something pure [in its own right]; it is the graceful oozing, the shiny flux, of the charm of the material world. Above all, the intent of the material is the intent of the human.⁵⁵

A force of genesis or creation, xing nonetheless suggests neither divine will nor human artifice; it arises where the somatic and the semiotic, the natural and the figurative, meet. In Hu’s exegesis, xing is juxtaposed with fu 賦 or rhapsodic exposition, another trope of the Classic of Poetry. Whereas fu suggests an orderly configuration of the world, xing indicates a spontaneous presence of things. As a corollary, whereas fu manifests itself in li 禮 or ritual, xing, with its call for spontaneity and harmony, constitutes the spirit of yue 樂 or music. Ritual and music, as Hu reminds us, are the foundation of Chinese civilization.

At stake here is the way Hu brings xing to bear on history and politics. By upholding the inventive, spontaneous force of xing, China Through Time challenges the linear progression of time and the master narrative of telology that characterizes traditional historiography. Hu calls for a “new historiography” (xinshixue 新史學) that sees the past as if it were the present or vice versa. When temporalities are synchronized, “history is that which we are living through at this moment,” and a great historian is “he who forgets his engagement with history.”56 Hu’s attempt at subverting history culminates in his critique of Zhang Xuecheng’s 章學誠 (1738–1801) famous statement that “the Six Classics are all but historiography” (liujing jieshi 六經皆史). Whereas Zhang made himself a defiant voice in the late Qing era by decanonizing Chinese orthodoxy—the Six Classics—in historical terms, Hu goes one step further, arguing that “historiography is none other than poetry.”⁵⁷

By celebrating poetry as the primordial form that encapsulates and at the same time transcends history, what is Hu Lancheng’s agenda? Does he consider poetry a kind of arch-history, ahistory, or antihistory? Mencius once deplored that “When songs were no longer collected, the Spring and Autumn Annals were written” (shiwang erhou chunqiu zuo 詩亡而後春秋作);58 poetry is said to be the manifestation of immanence as opposed to history, a record of humanity after the fall. Hu’s project appears to be an attempt to retrieve the inchoate moment of Chinese civilization in the form of poetry. Given the context of mid-century crisis, Hu’s stance is peculiar in that it sounds both radical and conservative. Radical, because he sees history as nothing but a repository of feeling crystallized in language; conservative, because he also gestures toward the “golden time” when the word and the world are supposed to have been one. By yoking the metaphorical and metaphysical claims of poetry, Hu imagines a “history” that transcends temporalities with the evocative power of xing. But he never bothers to substantiate his proposal with either philosophical rumination or archival validation; he merely grants himself a privileged position, exempt from any extant historical programs. Hu reminds his readers at the outset that his is a time “after the fall” and that poetry is already in decline. As will be argued in the following, Hu cannot carry out his ontology of poetry without leaving clues that he is struggling to erase the imprints of his own checkered experience.

Few readers of Hu Lancheng would not have been impressed or intrigued by his imaginative descriptions of history. Chinese civilization is said to have flowered at the beginning of world history like garden blossoms extending happily beyond the wall, and the ups and downs of Chinese history appear to him like a sequence of folksong serenades between young men and young women. The polity of the Zhou dynasty is likened to a pastoral romance, thanks to the implementation of the well-field system; the audacious Warring States period is made comparable to a private overnight birthday party run by Jia Baoyu of the Dream of the Red Chamber. Lu Xun’s and fellow May Fourth intellectuals’ criticism of China, however bitter in appearance, amounts to no more than a girl’s pouting to her parents about her own less than desirable appearance.⁵⁹ In a nutshell, Chinese history proceeds like an unending merry time, full of juvenile vitality and a festive mood.

Hu Lancheng ascribes the agency of xing to the popular society, as opposed to the ruling class and elite that dominate traditional history. He contends that it is the commoners who lend each historical moment a lively form, which is best represented by folksongs, popular customs, and local festivities in accordance with the seasonal cycle (jie 節). The popular form is not always associated with peaceful everyday life, however. Xing is also said to be an impulse among the people for drastic change whenever life becomes unbearable; hence the eruption of popular uprisings (minjian qibing 民間起兵). Hu stresses that popular festivity and popular uprisings are not forces in antithesis; they are mutually implicated.

As mentioned above, the timeline of China Through Time takes a great leap forward from the Han to the late Qing. For Hu, the huge gap between post-Han and early Qing is excusable because he is concerned only about the changes in popular society. As long as Chinese popular society remained unaffected by the superficial turmoil of dynastic changes and continued to thrive, “nothing” happened in history, requiring no account. Ultimately, in Hu’s words, Chinese history comprises, as it were, a sequence of blissful surprises. Thanks to the agency of xing, this history witnesses any “encounter with a catastrophe” (jingxian 驚險) as if it were an “encounter with a beauty” (jingyan 驚艷); a moment of “calamity” (jie 劫), accordingly, could give rise to the sentiment of “festivity” (jie 節).

With elements such as poetic creativity, folk culture, and popular uprising well orchestrated in his vision, Hu Lancheng is ready to move on to discuss the meaning of modernity. He argues that China has been faced with an unprecedented crisis since the advent of Western civilization after the Opium War, a fact that makes recalling xing poetics cum politics all the more urgent. For Hu, the modern incarnation, “The essence of Chinese revolution is xing.”60 Revolution is both a military undertaking and a festive celebration; it is even said to give rise to the “jubilant air and exciting mood,” sentiments that enable young men and women to engage with the cosmic movement of the “sun and moon, mountains and rivers.”⁶¹ Accordingly, modern Chinese history from the Taiping Rebellion to the Republican Revolution, the May Fourth Movement, the Northern Expedition, the Second Sino-Japanese War, and the Chinese Communist liberation represents for Hu a sequence of xing or revolutions that testify to the continued “blossoming [of Chinese civilization] despite myriad calamities.”⁶²

China Through Time thus presents the Sino-Japanese War as a joyful moment because, as Hu believes, the war unleashed the pristine momentum of Chinese culture to create something new. Hu’s narrative brings to mind what Hannah Arendt describes as the “pathos of novelty” embedded in revolution, however different the context.⁶³ Despite all the disasters that have befallen China, Hu witnesses the eruption of revolutionary energy in anticipation of national rejuvenation. The great exodus of millions of Chinese to the hinterland, as Hu puts it, may as well have been a mass excursion, for the refugees were granted an opportunity to roam the good mountains and rivers of their nation that they otherwise would have been unable to access; meanwhile, local cultures were thriving regardless of any foreign occupation. Hu’s point is that, precisely because Chinese civilization is ever enlivened by popular culture, the Chinese people were able to carry on everyday life graciously despite the war. Beyond immediate devastations, they are said to harbor an “unnamable” vision:

The tactic of the war is one of ritual and music . . . people of the occupied areas interacted with Japanese in a casual, normal way . . . [they] reciprocated each other’s proprieties . . . people in the war zones and the hinterland never made it a definitive goal to win the war; although they might sound either sorrowful or courageous, they knew they did not mean it. The Chinese were not serious either about victory or defeat, either in talking peace or in combat. . . . This is something great [about Chinese civilization] because it has no bounds . . . the most real thing may look like the most unreal, because this is the way it is.64

Insofar as he associates xing with the festive and revolutionary impulse of the popular society, Hu Lancheng’s treatise, particularly the part on the politics of local theaters and festivities, may remind us of Mikhail Bakhtin’s (1895–1975) treatment of the carnival.⁶⁵ To be sure, Bakhtin was working under a different hegemonic circumstance in the 1940s—the Stalinist regime—and his intellectual stance is a far cry from Hu’s. Nevertheless, the two share something in common when endorsing the robust and lively energy of the popular society in opposition to the religious or political status quo.

Bakhtin finds an ideal example in the medieval carnival, in which hierarchies of authority are turned upside down, grotesquery triumphs over decorum, and collective laughter renews social communion. Hu Lancheng highlights seasonal festivities and local, celebratory occasions—and, in particular, the forms of folk dance and theater—as a force against the ossified establishment. His investigation leads him to conclude that the Sino-Japanese War fostered a prosperous popular society: “there suddenly arose Shaoxing opera in occupied areas; the festive competitions of parades and theater on religious occasions in Nationalist territories; folksongs and dances in the northwest,” all indicating “the beauty that China was about to act out through its power” of xing, that is, revolution.⁶⁶ This festive, revolutionary impulse culminated in the Communist liberation; for Hu, Chinese Communist success depended not so much on ideology as on the “unnamable great will” of the people, as expressed in the “ubiquitous performances of the rice-sprout song.”⁶⁷

Critics have discussed the ambivalent undercurrent of Bakhtin’s carnival: it is framed by a preordained calendar and spatial terrain, and therefore susceptible to authoritarian containment; however, it always entertains an impulse for excess that may lead to a violent denial of any kind of order. By contrast, Hu Lancheng’s Chinese festivity may appear much more benign at first, if only for lacking the kind of Dionysian urge inherent in the Bakhtinian paradigm. Bakhtin proposes an organic cycle of degeneration and rebirth, a bodily principle that defies abstractions, and a sphere of polyphony.68 Hu Lancheng plays out the antithesis of such a model, aimed at transcending time and body in the name of xing; instead of polyphony, unison rules. Above all, Hu means his festivity to be not a deviation from but a return to the desired orthodoxy—the sage kingship. Nevertheless, his paradigm serves a menacing agenda; he makes violence an integral ingredient in his lyrical take on the popular society. Before the sage kingship is restored, military measures are always called for; violence and atrocity are all but natural givens.

It is here that Hu’s politicization of lyricism reveals its amoral bearing. Some scholars have traced Hu’s affinity with the anarchist vein of the Laozi, which considers the world a coexistence of the human and the inhuman and subjects feeling and compassion to the law of transvaluation.⁶⁹ Despite its harmonious façade, Hu’s festivity smells of blood, and no one sensed the pitfalls of his theories more acutely than his ex-wife Eileen Chang. Chang’s first English novel, The Rice-Sprout Song (1954), came out at the same time as China Through Time. Referring to the same trope of the song of rural festivity that Hu considers essential to the spirit of the Communist Revolution, Chang’s novel describes the aftermath of the revolution as not a socialist carnival but a danse macabre.⁷⁰

Poetry and Deceit

Hu Lancheng’s theory was generated by, and contributed to, the “historical disquiet” of his time. One discerns in it a great tension between the world he resided in and the language he used to represent that world. From the well-field system to the polemic of xing, Hu Lancheng’s interpretation of Chinese history calls for a radical utopianism. While he was celebrating Chinese civilization as a pastoral romance, the Rape of Nanjing was still fresh in the memory of most Chinese people; while he compared the war to a harmless game, millions of Chinese were perishing as a result of it. To be sure, utopianism is by generic definition predicated on the dialectic between what should be and what is. But Hu’s vision is more provocative, if not more provoking, because he tends to omit the spatial and temporal distance often required of a utopian construct. He sought to establish his Peach Blossom Spring right on the spot where blood just shed had yet to dry. He sanctioned the beauty of everyday life when Chinese society had been already pulverized by the war.

Because of its polemical nature, Hu Lancheng’s theory of xing provides a Chinese perspective on the dialectic of poetry and politics that informed world literature during this time. In Europe, the decades between the two World Wars witnessed one calamity after another. There were times when even the most intelligent thinkers were impelled to imagine drastic measures with which to liberate humanity from either cyclical violence or sheer platitude. At the most extreme, they pursued a caesura of history—in forms from war to revolution, from religious awakening to ideological intervention—in hopes that a “breakthrough of perfectibility” could be attained.71 But no approach could be more unsettling than the invocation of poetry in service of violence.

For example, consider Martin Heidegger’s (1889–1976) “poetic turn” in conjunction with his acquiescence to the Nazi cause during the Second World War. Heidegger views Western philosophy as having originated with a brief time of authentic “openness to Being,” the pristine state of existence that pre-dated the rise of human engagement with metaphysics, followed by a long period dominated by the forgetting of this initial openness. The degeneration of Western metaphysics into nihilism bespeaks such a process. To restore the openness, he turns to the power of poetry, arguing for a poetic language that can unveil the fractured condition of the world, dismantle the “framing” brought by technology, and point to the divine state of plenitude. Such a description can hardly do justice to the nuances of Heidegger’s poetics, but it may serve as an entry point to the philosopher’s political engagement with the war. Despite (or because of) his promulgation that the human “dwells poetically in the world,” Heidegger endorsed Nazi propaganda. His advocacy for a language that transcends the bonds of “the earth,” “opening up” that which is in eclipse, appeared at a time when millions of social and ethnic “undesirables” perished in a most unpoetic way.

Heidegger’s “Letter on Humanism” (1946–47) came out right after the war. In this treatise, Heidegger sets out to distinguish the essence of the human from the essence of truth. “Only thought concerned with Being, never ‘action or praxis,’ can reveal the latter.”72 Reiterating his poetic vision, he seeks to liberate language from the “grammar” of humanism—in terms of metaphysics, subjectivity, reason—so as to return to the home of Being. Heidegger offers an apologetic review of his intellectual descent into a Nietzschean polemics of the will during the war, a descent which led him to aspire to political agency in the National Socialist movement. Nevertheless, he places his self-reflection in the context of the downfall of European civilization starting as far back as the Greek period. In other words, he regards his own political choice, and by extension, the rise of the Nazis, as a mere consequence of the long tradition of Western humanism, a “deviation” from the task of restoring Being. This brings him to the opposition between action and man’s philosophical leap forward into the light of Being. In that domain, as Heidegger’s logic goes, there is neither ethics nor conscience to speak of. As Anson Rabinbach puts it, the treatise is a “missive from Being to man, absolving its author from all responsibility.”⁷³

Hu Lancheng started the first draft of China Through Time at the same time that Heidegger began writing his “Letter to Humanism.” Granting the huge divergence between their epistemological origins and political choices, Hu and Heidegger came to similar historical junctures where they were compelled to defend themselves. Just like Heidegger’s “Letter,” China Through Time impresses the reader as a masterful statement of self-exoneration and a defiant manifesto of poetic immanence over history. Where Heidegger endeavors to recapitulates the arché, the primordial Greek beginning of the West, Hu Lancheng ushers his reader into the Chinese golden age, which is supposed to be in the early Zhou dynasty. Where Heidegger satirizes the victors’ “malice of rage” toward the losers, Hu Lancheng questions the self-righteousness of the Nationalist regime in persecuting collaborators regardless of its own infamous motives.

In particular, Heidegger’s call for poetry finds an uncanny echo in Hu Lancheng’s notion of xing, though there is no mutual influence to speak of—for example, in another passage of Hu Lancheng’s description:

Xing is not merely music. When effected by xing, writing is music; when effected by xing, any human deed is music. For music is that which is inherent in the xing of the world. . . . Xing is the intent of Nature on the move; when the world is endowed with the intent of Nature, everything is capable of xing. When a poet speaks of a beautiful force in the mountains and rivers, or when a diviner senses a kingly force in the southeast, it means xing. . . . Xing is genesis, facing the unknown, and becoming melodic in resonance with the wavelike breathing of Ether.⁷⁴

Hu Lancheng resonates with Heidegger in desiring a poetic interpellation that calls forth something from nothing, guiding the world beyond its destitute condition. Hu shows a strong inclination to intuitive awakening while by contrast, Heidegger immerses himself in phenomenological rumination. Both avert their eyes from the brutalities that contextualize their lyrical projects. Action and Being, in Heidegger’s phraseology, should not be confused with each other. When Heidegger and Hu contemplate history, they downplay the lived human experience of pain and loss as an inevitable interlude in the absence of Being or the Way.

Equally pertinent to our concerns is the case of Paul de Man (1919–1983), a leading deconstructionist in American academia in the 1980s. Four years after he passed away, it was exposed that, when in Belgium in the early 1940s, he had been a fervent contributor to a pro-Nazi newspaper. In almost two hundred essays, he promoted collaborationism and anti-Semitism. De Man’s case was scandalous not only because he covered up his past until the end of his life but also because his theoretical engagement, however illuminating, could have served as a ploy to excuse himself from his wartime ideology. His transition from a quasi-phenomenological stance to deconstructionism notwithstanding, de Man remained consistent in casting doubt on the truth claim of language and the representability of history. As the title of his famous book Blindness and Insight suggests, blindness and insight are mutually implicated in any cognitive effort as well as its textual representation; therefore, an aporia arises, ever ready to subvert the romantic assumption of intention and meaning as authentic entities.

Paul de Man’s stress on intralinguistic play and repetition enables him to deconstruct the relation between modernity and history. With the lyric as his point of reference, he suggests that literary modernity comes as a repeated attempt to achieve the “spontaneity” of action that is outside time and history, but it only exposes such an attempt as always already implicated within the intertextual representation of time and history.75 For de Man, the historical nature of poetry is not “its embeddedness and its functioning within a larger historical and cultural context but an ontologically defined temporality that is highly abstract and utterly remote from actual historical events.”⁷⁶ Thus in “Literary History and Literary Modernity,” he concludes that, because of its paradoxical nature, simultaneously “modern” and “historical,” literary textuality shows no clear distinction between allegory and reality, blindness and insight. As a consequence, “[the] relationship between truth and error that prevails in literature cannot be represented genetically, since truth and error exist simultaneously, thus preventing the favoring of one over the other.”⁷⁷

Hu Lancheng wrote numerous essays to support collaborationism in the early forties; to that effect, he behaved like de Man in occupied Belgium. The two even shared a similar conviction of nonresistance vis-à-vis invading forces, in hopes that the political circumstances would evolve into something “genuine”—National Socialism in de Man’s case and Pan-Asianism in Hu’s case.78 After the war, however, they took different approaches to deal with their wartime experience. De Man found shelter in American academia and tried to put his past “under erasure”; by contrast, Hu laid bare his ideology and wartime deeds with exhibitionist nonchalance. More intriguingly, when coming to terms with their collaborationist past, both resorted to rethinking language and its most refined form, poetry. Whereas de Man highlighted intertextuality and the infinite regression of meaning, Hu asserted lyrical evocation as the only way to Truth.

To be clear, de Man and Hu Lancheng share little intellectual heritage in common, and they reached extremely dissimilar conclusions. Here I call attention only to the way they take up the metaphorical power of language, either mythifying or demythifying it, in order to dislodge themselves from historical experience and ethical judgment. If the above quote from de Man about the lack of distinction between truth and error sounds similar to Hu’s statement about the indecisiveness of right versus wrong, it is because both argue for something in the character of language that is forced up against the limits of logic and representation. History can be deconstructed into an “allegory” about language in de Man’s case as much as it can be transcended to the poetics of xing in Hu’s case. Little surprise that de Man and Hu should sound uncannily alike in their observations of human atrocities:

DE MAN: “[Atrocity] merely confirms that the bases for historical knowledge are not empirical facts but written texts, even if these texts masquerade in the guise of wars and revolutions.”⁷⁹

HU: “Even if Mao Zedong and his cohorts have killed millions of people, I won’t blink my eyes for a moment. It is the way of the human not to kill the innocent; but it is the Way of Heaven to kill the innocent. I cannot be more benevolent than Mao Zedong.”⁸⁰

Both allow discursive mannerism to thrive at the cost of ethical commitment. There is an aporia in their arguments for the “caesura of history,” however. While de Man’s unconditional play with language betrays his semiotic totalitarianism,⁸¹ Hu Lanchang’s celebration of lyricism cannot do away with the inherent threat of self-irony. Poetry is invoked by de Man and Hu respectively to either evade or transcend the brutal conditions of history.

Sincerity and Authenticity of Qing

This Life, This World is the second and arguably the best book Hu Lancheng wrote in exile. It is meant to be a tell-all account of his early experiences, his intellectual pursuits, and his romantic as well as political adventures. Some chapters, such as those about Hu’s childhood years in rural Zhejiang and his trials in Guangxi before joining the collaborationist regime, are so vividly written as to take on an ethnographical dimension. But This Life, This World is popular mainly for the part where Hu details his affair with Eileen Chang, from their first encounter to their final breakup. Before Little Reunion came out, this was the only source from which we could learn about Chang’s wartime life. Yet Hu’s memoir also recounts his relations with at least another seven women, in or out of wedlock, throughout his life up to 1959. He narrates his romances in such a matter-of-fact tone that it may easily disturb either an Eileen Chang fan or anyone who believes in emotional integrity.

Hu Lancheng came to know Eileen Chang’s name by reading her short story “Fengsuo” 封鎖 (Sealed off) in 1943. Framed in the space of a tram car halted by an air raid in occupied Shanghai, the story focuses on a short-lived seduction between a jaded married man and a placid female teacher longing for love. The accidental romance no sooner takes shape than it vanishes when the air raid is over and the tram car moves again. In a way, the relationship between Hu and Chang is summed up by the story. They fell in love at a “bracketed” time when Hu was trapped in a political predicament and Chang was enjoying unexpected popularity. Historical contingency brought them together despite their distance in age, background, and experience.

Hu Lancheng had all along been proud of his intelligence and recalcitrance, but when he first saw Chang, he was so enchanted by her as to feel that “the whole cosmos shattered.”82 In the eyes of the veteran womanizer, Chang had an intriguing character—both innocent and cynical, awkward and smart—that exuded an irresistible charm. Their rendezvous, as Hu puts it, was as much an amorous engagement as an intellectual rivalry, almost suggestive of military combat (dou 闘). “I have never bothered to compete with anyone, but I could not but feel tempted to compete with Eileen Chang upon seeing her. . . . I fought with all my weapons but ended up a loser, while she won with recourse to nothing but empty hands.”⁸³ Hu notes a “freshness” in Chang’s character, something beyond the reach of moral judgment. Chang is said to be a selfish person, but her selfishness is derived from her egalitarian, impassioned view of the world; she is a rationalist, but her rationality leads her to see through anything based on rational claims. Through Chang, Hu comes to realize the conceptual and stylistic limitations of his earlier writing. Hence he relinquishes his argumentative style in favor of lyricism.⁸⁴ Without Chang’s influence, Hu could not have written China Through Time and This Time, This World in the style that made him famous.

The “love in a fallen city” between Hu and Chang culminated in their secret wedding in May 1944, with Chang’s friend Yanying 炎櫻 (Fatima) as the sole witness. On their wedding certificate Hu Lancheng wrote: “We wish that our time will be serene and well, our lives peaceful and stable.”⁸⁵ Nevertheless, neither the time nor the lives of the newlyweds measured up to their nuptial promise.

Hu narrates his romance with Chang as if they were soul mates, his praise for her amounting to apotheosis. Yet he faithfully describes his unfaithfulness to Chang in a Casanova-like manner. Hu Lancheng’s first marriage ended with his wife’s death; before marrying Chang, he had two other marriages during his Guangxi and Nanjing days. As described in the first section, in Wuhan Hu had an affair with a seventeen-year-old nurse, Zhou Xunde 周訓德, during his newlywed days with Chang; later, when hiding from the postwar Nationalist hunt, he seduced and impregnated Fan Xiumei 范秀美, a widowed concubine of his host family, while living on Chang’s income. Chang divorced Hu in 1946. After he moved to Japan, Hu first had an affair with his landlord’s wife for three years and then married She Aizhen 佘愛珍, widow of a Shanghai gangster cum collaborator. For Chang fans, this fact makes reading This Life, This World a challenging experience. Questions have been repeatedly asked: How could Hu pledge his love for Chang so unconditionally while refusing to make her his sole lover? How could he show such an undiscriminating taste for women of different backgrounds, classes, and ages if he truly appreciated Chang’s unearthly talent?

Controversy will continue as to whether Hu Lancheng wrote a powerful confession—exposing himself at the most embarrassing moments—or merely a tour de force of exhibitionism. In either case, and important to this study, as he makes his confession, Hu seeks to elucidate his theory of qing. In the name of qing, he weaves his erratic love stories into a hermeneutics of true feeling. And in his effort to lend qing an embodied figure, he introduces the dangzi 蕩子 (vagabond) as a modern subjectivity in both affective and ideological terms.

Hu describes himself in This Life, This World as a vagabond “not only in my hometown but also amid the passage of time.”86 Flamboyant and restless, the vagabond drifts along the margins of society but always entertains an “unnamable ambition.” He is not afraid of opposing the establishment, and his nonconformism is always in a cavalier style. The vagabond is a romantic saturated with feeling, but because of his “unnamable ambition” with regard to the world, he tends to appear radically detached from human relationships, and particularly detached from love above all; therefore, he is often mistaken as heartless. The vagabond is a man of becoming, destined to puzzle, offend, and betray his world and his beloved.

Hu Lancheng introduces a genealogy of the vagabond, including his father, who is said to have squandered the family fortune in his early years. A ne’er-do-well by conventional standards, he was nevertheless full of adventurous spirit. “My father and the Republican world were made for each other exactly thanks to such a [vagabond] spirit.”⁸⁷ Hu points out that dynastic founders are often endowed with a vagabond quality, Liu Bang 劉邦 (266–195 B.C.), the first ruler of the Han empire, being his case in point. As a corollary, even the men and women described in Gushi shijiu shou 古詩十九首 (Nineteen old poems) are said to be vagabond spirits, for they demonstrate the robust and authentic ethos of humanity (renshi de zhenqin 人世的貞親).⁸⁸ Ultimately, the vagabond character is brought to bear on romantic allegory on a universal scale: “the mountains and rivers [that constitute the kingdom] of China have been likened to the supreme beauty since ancient times, and the supreme beauty would be betrothed only to the vagabond.”⁸⁹

By naming the vagabond as the agent of his romantic and political vision, Hu Lancheng calls attention to a type of modern Chinese subjectivity hitherto rarely discussed by scholars. The vagabond shares the rebellious spirit of the New Youth, but has a cachet suggestive of the manners and morals of the old world. His charm and unscrupulousness are like what Lu Xun calls the “talent plus crook” (caizi jia liumang 才子加流氓), the stereotypical petty man of letters of the Republican era, but the vagabond is a larger-than-life figure in the political domain. At a time when fellow collaborationist literati defended themselves by identifying with either a hermit (such as Zhou Zuoren) or a loyalist (such as Wen Zaidao 文載道 and fellow writers of Gujin magazine),⁹⁰ Hu assumed a vagabond posture, and felt justified in claiming his independence and agency even if working under Japanese power.

At the core of the vagabond philosophy is his capacity of feeling/qing. With little training in Western literature and thought, Hu relied mainly on Chinese sources to support his theory, and he derived inspiration from a wide range of classics, particularly the Classic of Poetry, the teaching of the late Ming “cult of qing,” and the Dream of the Red Chamber. He also made use of Buddhism and Daoism in a highly selective manner.91 Thus, This Life, This World impresses as a fanciful, eclectic account of various discourses of qing. We can identify three distinct aspects of qing within Hu’s treatise.

First, Hu regards qing as an affective manifestation of xing; to that effect, he highlights the intuitive, evocative overflow of feeling. Such an expression of qing finds a particularly persuasive conduit in romantic love. Hu has wonderful things to say about the eight women featured in This Life, This World. He describes his first wife as a model traditional housewife and the last as a worldly woman. He justifies his adultery with Fan Xiumei as something “spontaneous and decent” (ziran pingzheng 自然平正).⁹² Similarly, he claims that his affair with his Japanese landlord’s wife enabled him to appreciate the true meaning of propriety and reverence. Hu is proud of having kept friendly ties to all the women, except Eileen Chang, after their romances ended.⁹³

Hu debates qing in terms of a logic of expenditure: his love for one woman accrues only to his romantic investment in many women. Hu claims that he saved for Eileen Chang the capital position among his beloved, but as he concedes, he failed to convince her that his passion for her became all the more abundant because of his attachment to other women. To the charges of infidelity, Hu argues that Chang was above the formality of marital bonding in the first place. “She [keeps an aesthetic distance from the sports of love], like a connoisseur of spring blossoms, thus exempted from the amorous bonding of qing.”⁹⁴ He even eulogizes their relationship as a reincarnation of the celestial pairing of Gold Boy and Jade Girl.⁹⁵ Therefore, Hu is justifiably befuddled when Chang challenges him to choose between her and other women.

This leads to the flip side of Hu Lancheng’s romantic persona—that he could be a man with no true feeling. Hu indicates that he developed since childhood a tendency to distance himself from any intense attachment. When his first wife was dying, he went to his godmother’s to ask for a medical loan, only to be enchanted by her flirtatious response into staying with her for several days. Hu nevertheless follows up by suggesting that such a seeming lack of feeling points to the fecundity of feeling. Hu finds in Chang a kindred spirit, concluding that they “feel so dear to each other as to feel no love for each other” (qinji wu’ai 親極無愛).⁹⁶ Their camaraderie is said to go “beyond the amorous dimension to where their innermost lives” (zhijian xingming 直見性命) are revealed to each other.⁹⁷

But is this Hu Lancheng’s own discovery? One cannot but think of the famous argument about qing buqing 情不情 (feeling no feeling) in the Dream of the Red Chamber. In her succinct study, Wai-yee Li has identified three layers of qing buqing. It could mean an empathetic projection of feeling in the aesthetic sense of union of the subject and the object; a “feeling too deeply and thus becoming unfeeling”; and a “metaphysical ideal of a love as deep as it is all inclusive, an obsessive attachment riveted as much on a single individual as on a general idea.”98 Nevertheless, there is an ironic subtext that casts doubt on the absolute claim of qing, since the world qing inhabits is already fragmented into subject versus object, naming versus feeling. As Li observes, the only way for the characters and readers of Dream of the Red Chamber to resist irony is to maintain the “radical innocence” of qing as well as its “presumed inexpressiveness.”⁹⁹

This “radical innocence” seems to be precisely what Hu Lancheng is aiming for in This Life, This World. But as a self-anointed vagabond, a man of the world, Hu could not be a Jia Baoyu, and China in the 1940s was anything but a Grandview Garden. However enchanting his confession, the lyricism of Hu’s pen begets ironies, and his language does not unveil “the innermost of life” but proliferates into rhetorical spectacles. What could be more disheartening, and more ironic, a scene in the memoir than the showdown between Hu and Chang, in which Chang blames Hu for breaking their marital vow for “a stable life”¹⁰⁰ and Hu faults Chang for failing to understand the magnitude of his love beneath his apparent betrayal?

My second observation pertains to Hu Lancheng’s argument that the vagabond’s feeling has to be nurtured by the sublime ethos of a time. The dynastic landscape (jiangshan 江山) serves as the backdrop against which qing prevails. Hu narrates, “Why should I be so concerned about politics? It is because I am a vagabond, not made for family ties or generative undertakings. . . . I was born to become who I am because this is a great time [for someone like me].”¹⁰¹ Historical hindsight, however, indicates that Hu’s sublime feeling may have been nothing more than wishful self-indulgence. When the collaboration regime fell, the vagabond became a fugitive.

Hu was in Hong Kong when Wang Jingwei declared his intent to collaborate with the Japanese. Hu describes his response: “It was a clear and peaceful day. All the mixed thoughts in my mind disappeared and I came to a crystal-clear attitude toward the vicissitudes of the world. After I came down from the mountain [where I sat on a rock thinking about my political decision], I agreed to join [Wang’s] campaign.”¹⁰² Hu points out that he was among the first eleven to promulgate the Peace Movement. Nevertheless,

I was alone when joining the Peace Movement, and I was still alone when leaving the movement. After the fall [of the collaborationist regime], I found my way back to where I had been, still a Stone under the Green Jade Peak [as in The Story of the Stone]. Wang Jingwei’s regime had its run in Nanjing for five years, leaving nothing [but ephemeral memories], just like the inscriptions on the Stone, traces in commemoration of the adventures of the Twelve Beauties of Jinling. All the realities and vanities, truthful intentions and fraudulent wishes, have become irrelevant to me. Only the words as inscribed [in my memoir] serve as testimony to my undertakings in the human world, between Heaven and Earth.103

Hu ingeniously frames his political decision within the mythological context of Dream of the Red Chamber, and turns a historical moment into an occasion of lyrical awakening. Thus, he likens his collaborationist campaign to Stone/Baoyu’s attempt to mend Heaven in the World of the Red Dust. They both are incarnations of qing, seeking redemption through undergoing various trials of attachments.

Hu Lancheng had claimed that only those endowed with genuine feeling could undertake the task of revolution. He explicates this claim in This Time, This World in terms of the “feeling no feeling” dialectic, arguing that precisely because his feeling for China, and by extension, Japan, is so strong, he cannot succumb to the strictures of patriotism. He has to love his nation less in order to love humanity more. Nevertheless, Hu’s theory backfires when applied to the lived experience of history. By describing national calamity as a festivity and celebrating the Chinese people’s jubilant mood in the exodus, Hu was bound to infuriate the majority of readers. Again, Hu comes to his own rescue, saying that one has to learn to modulate feeling so as to transcend it. He writes, “as a player with the ‘tide’ of the time, I have frequently come across grave crises and disasters. I may have looked sad or withered as a result, but more often than not, I had a feeling as if my circumstances were half unreal. One has to be playful about one’s own feelings so as not to sink [amid the torrents of time].”¹⁰⁴ This statement unveils the true colors of a vagabond. By “playful,” Hu may not mean that he is hypocritical, but simply that he is skillful in preserving himself, a sort of Daoist transvaluation of values. Still, there is something theatrical in his thought, something that covers rather than unveiling the “innermost of life,” as Hu would have it. This theatrics underlies his commitment to and denial of his “play” with collaboration.

My final point involves rethinking the intellectual dimension of Hu Lancheng’s exercise of qing. Kim-chu Ng has traced Hu Lancheng’s intellectual roots to the Neo-Confucian rumination about the immanence of mind, the assumption of ceaseless cosmic movement of the I-ching,105 the Buddhist wisdom of epiphany and revelation, and the nihilist ontology of the Laozi, among other sources.¹⁰⁶ In his later years Hu also tried to buttress his theory by referring to the ideas of the Japanese physicist Hideki Yukawa and mathematician Kiyoshi Oka. To this list we may add at least Hu’s early readings on anarchism and the Trotskyite vein of communism. Hu highlights his life experience as an endless process of gewu 格物 (exegesis through intellectual rumination and material encounter), a key concept of Neo-Confucianism. But unlike his Confucian predecessors, who inquire into the multitude of things and thoughts in the world, Hu makes woman his sole object of study.

Hu famously recounts that his first meeting with Eileen Chang brought him an earth-shattering “shock” (jing 驚) that revealed to him the eminence of femininity. This experience spurred him to engage in more exegesis of women. With his quadrangular romance with Eileen Chang, Fan Xiumei, and Zhou Xunde as an example, Hu comments that his pursuit should be reduced neither to an Ibsenian syndrome of erotic malaise nor to a Buddhist paradox of self-transcendence through sensuous physicality. “In China, the carnal pleasure between man and woman, or the marital happiness between husband and wife, can be manifested as a fulfillment of mind and authentication of destiny . . . as Mencius said, ‘know the nature of your engagement, and you know the mandate of Heaven.’”¹⁰⁷ Indeed, Hu Lancheng denounces the Western idea of “love,” which was not introduced to China until the modern age, in favor of “affinity” (qin 親) and “understanding” (zhi 知) as expressions of qing. “Romantic sentiment comes and goes and predestined love ends nowhere. Only mutual understanding can last.”¹⁰⁸ He cites the hero and heroine in Taohua shan 桃花扇 (The peach blossom fan, 1699) as paragons because, “once awakened [by Buddhist illusionism], they could renounce their mutual love while remaining dedicated to each other for good.”¹⁰⁹ Hu’s algebra of qing, however suggestive, falls short in examining its ethical consequences. Eileen Chang, for one, never benefited from her “understanding” of Hu; their “affinity” led to their breakup, which traumatized her for the rest of her life.

Of all Hu Lancheng’s intellectual sources at this time, the most notable is Tang Junyi 唐君毅 (1909–1978), one of the most important modern Neo-Confucians. Hu met Tang in Hong Kong in the fall of 1950, when Hu had just fled from Shanghai and Tang was struggling to establish the newly founded New Asia College, an overseas bastion of Neo-Confucianism. Judging by the abundant correspondence between them, Tang was quite familiar with Hu’s works, particularly China Through Time.110 Put simply, Tang is best known for his dedication to self-cultivation through learning, meditation, and epiphany, and his conviction in the human capacity to “transcend the self in reality, constituting a subjectivity that can consciously fashion itself, in anticipation of creating moral selfhood.”¹¹¹ Hu shares with Tang a belief in the innate power of the mind and the intermediary function of language between the mind and the transcendental being. Nevertheless, although he endorses intuitive enlightenment, Tang stresses over and again that enlightenment happens only after self-cultivation. Hu was much less patient about such a program. He believed that he could achieve an intellectual great leap forward as long as he held the immanent key to the mind.

The two stand further apart in their interpretations of qing. Whereas Tang sees qing as a treasured human faculty that helps advance the good, Hu proposes that qing helps one steer clear of the temptations arising from the desire for the good. Tang particularly relates qing to “historical pathos” (lishi de beiqing 歷史的悲情), as a result of both the recent Chinese Communist takeover of the mainland and the nostalgic image of the Confucian sage kingship lost forever. At a more metaphysical level, Tang recognizes the lack of feeling of the cosmos: “Heaven is that which creates, and that which destroys . . . the cosmos is always in the processes of killing that which it gave birth to . . . it in essence engenders all that makes us feel sorrow.”¹¹² By contrast, Hu Lancheng, as an vagabond and arch-advocate of historical festivity, advises his readers to feel nothing about the cruelty caused by the way of Heaven—as indicated by his indifference to the atrocities of the war and the Maoist regime. For him, qing reveals its transcendental magnanimity only when mundane attachments are refuted.

Above all, the debate between Tang Junyi and Hu Lancheng can be understood as one between a Confucian gentleman (junzi 君子) and a vagabond. True, Hu Lancheng aspires to build a utopia based on Confucian benevolence and propriety, but those qualities are mere objects of an intellectual flirtation (tiaoxi 調戲), subject to the masterful sway of the vagabond character. It is no surprise that Hu feels no qualms about toying with the Buddhist idea of renunciation or a Daoist moral laissez faire. The problem, however, is that the revolving door that leads to Hu Lancheng’s intellectual edifice turns so fast that one is never sure whether his qing is affiliated with any of the philosophies to which he alternately claims to adhere.

In the fifties, Hu Lancheng also approached Xu Fuguan 徐復觀 (1903–1982), Tang Junyi’s colleague and another strong figure of modern Neo-Confucianism. Hu failed to impress Xu, to the extent that Xu cautioned Tang Junyi against the vagabond in exile.113 Xu was known for his aesthetic training and literary taste, and he had something to say about qing:

Human feeling attains authenticity (zheng 正) through cultivation and sublimation; attains genuineness (zhen 真) through inquiry into the very depth of interiority. Authentic feeling comes from the social schematization of emotions as expressed by individuals. Genuine feeling comes from the individual’s inward turn and realization of the meaning of life when confronting external blows. At that epiphanic moment of realization, genuine feeling is authentic feeling.¹¹⁴

Xu Fuguan’s understanding of “authentic feeling” is derived from his Confucian training. But his valorization of “genuine feeling,” as noted by critics, carries an overtone of Daoism, since it aims at orienting feeling toward its open, natural state of origin.¹¹⁵ For Xu and his peers, there is a tension between the authenticity and the genuineness of feeling; how to balance the two constitutes a test for modern Confucians.

The case of Hu Lancheng dramatizes the tension between authentic feeling and genuine feeling. I argue that, instead of bringing together authentic and genuine feelings, as would have been endorsed by Tang Junyi or Xu Fuguan, Hu intensifies the tension between them, and thus brings about what I would term an “anomaly of feeling.” This anomaly, or bian 變, refers to the unwelcome element that has always underlain traditional ethics and poetics. For instance, in Confucian discourse, the contrast between the “authentic tone” and the “anomalous tone” of poetry has been taken as the political barometer of a given time. Besides anomaly or irregularity, bian connotes change, changeability, and by extension, reversal.

With bian in mind, I suggest that a book such as This Life, This World is symptomatic of its own time, a time of chaos, change, and anomaly. Indeed, rarely has there been a biographical account in premodern and modern China that so blatantly capitalizes on the virtue of anomaly, yet so lyrically delivers the law of changeability in political, ethical, and romantic terms. But my reading does not end with calling Hu a hypocrite or a traitor. However controversial he is to Chang fans as well as those who uphold a nationalist agenda, I contend that Hu played out the multiple conditions in the making of male Chinese affective subjectivity in the new era, and that his philosophy of the vagabond impels one to consider again the Zeitgeist called the Chinese modern.¹¹⁶

Coda

Hu Langcheng continued to publish during the 1960s and won respect among Japanese rightists. He was nevertheless disappointed that his scholarship was not appreciated in the Chinese world. His chance to establish himself in the Chinese world finally came in 1974. That fall, he was invited to lecture at a college in Taiwan, and his proposed courses include classical Chinese fiction, Japanese literature, Zen Buddhism, and “Sino-Studies, Science, and Philosophy.” It was not long before Hu was “outed” as a wartime hanjian; as a result, his newly published China Through Time was banned and his teaching position suspended. Finally, in 1976, he was asked to move off the campus.

This incident took an unexpected turn when a leading writer, Chu Hsi-ning 朱西甯 (1927–1998), came to Hu’s rescue. Chu had been a Chang fan, and was now totally converted to Hu’s thought. He invited Hu to stay with his family and to give private lectures. Perhaps even to his own surprise, Hu managed to draw a group of young followers in a short time. Upon his departure from Taiwan in late 1976, a literary group called Sansan 三三 (Three-three)—inspired by the dictum of the I-Jing—was founded, invoking Hu as its spiritual leader. This group was arguably the most important incubator for Taiwan writers of the next two decades. Its tendency to aestheticize politics, celebrate youth and feeling, and cultivate a self-styled cause of revolution clearly bears Hu’s influence.117

So, late in his life, in Taiwan, Hu Lancheng found himself the accidental mentor of dozens of aspiring young men and women. As these writers called for “revolution” and a utopia of lyrical China, they uncannily echoed Hu’s provocations in his 1944 essay “To Youth.” A ghostly déjà vu: after years of his own futile crusade, Hu finally gathered an audience for his cause. The most talented of Hu’s disciples is Chu T’ien-wen, 朱天文 (b. 1956), Chu Hsi-ning’s eldest daughter. Literally compared by Hu to Eileen Chang, Chu T’ien-wen eventually became one of the most important names of late twentieth-century Chinese literature; her works provide an ironic venue where the ideas of Hu and Chang are brought together in an imaginary dialogue.

Did Hu Lancheng’s Taiwan experience testify to his motto that an “encounter with a calamity” could turn into an “encounter with a beauty”? Or did his farewell stint with the Sansan Group merely realize an aged Peter Pan’s dream? At their most active, the Sansan writers vowed to carry on the unfinished Chinese revolution and restore the lost culture of ritual and music, though at best they succeeded in publishing fiction and prose in a patent Hu Lancheng cum Eileen Chang style. By turning political aspiration into literary performance, they unwittingly reinstated the dilemma underlying Hu Lancheng’s effort almost four decades before, while demonstrating little of the “vagabond spirit” that characterized their mentor and his time. In other words, they could appreciate only Hu’s lyricism, not his lyricism of betrayal.

Hu Lancheng died from a heart attack one hot summer afternoon in Japan in 1981. Not long before, he sent a long letter to Deng Xiaoping, then Vice Prime Minister of China, advising him on how to make China a strong nation.118 He never heard back from Mr. Deng. For all his talents and ambitions, he is best remembered as the man who failed both his nation and the most talented woman writer of twentieth-century China. The criticism Hu received in the forties still resounds: “Our time has failed Hu Lancheng, and Hu Lancheng has failed our time.”