19

Other Cosmopolitans

YAN HAIPING

“桥梁是自古有之, 最普遍而又最特殊的建筑物.”

—茅以升1

Bridges have been there since the ancient times, and are at once the most ordinary and most special architectures of the life world.

—Mo Yisheng

The idea of cosmopolitanism in the Chinese context, evoking an imaginary of a world in great harmony and peace, was cross-culturally produced at a time of total turmoil and extreme violence.2 Book of Great Harmony by Kang Youwei, the leading figure of the abortive 1890s Reform, appeared in 1935, when the Japanese imperial military, having occupied the old Manchuria since 1931, was poised to attack and penetrate north—and soon south—China. A founding document in what was later defined as Chinese utopianism, the book brings to light a state of plenitude where the earth’s human inhabitants are living together as free equals without cultural, national, racial divides. Completed in 1902 but hidden from public view for thirty-three years,3 the book is cognizant of European thought traceable to Kant and others,4 and at the same time cites directly the Confucian classic Book of Rites. It takes up in particular its chapter on “workings of the great Tao” in actualizing a harmonious lifeworld as the ancient origins of and new destination for a reimagined human community.5 The cross-cultural impetus potently active throughout the book is as striking as the worldwide rise of ethnocentric violence that surrounded its untimely publication. Against the backdrop of escalating violence, which seems to decree its subordination or eradication, Book of Great Harmony appears to be the unintelligible hieroglyph for an impossible insistence on a humanly transformative way of being and becoming.

Cross-cultural impulses like these, appealing to or evoking what the historical conjuncture seems to present as impossible, are recurrent phenomena in contemporary Chinese culture. Appearing amidst proliferating historical genres of representations in literature, the arts, and media, they are often predicated on revisiting the tumultuous China of the 1930s and 1940s. Arranging a few instances of these historical representations into a new constellation, the present essay tries to come to terms with the cross-cultural impulse at work in them and suggests that their boundary-crossing vibration may be critically relevant to current discussions on the need to reenvision “emerging communities” of various kinds,6 in an era of radical economic globalization laden with abiding ethnocentric conflicts.

Actual Bridges, or Imaginary Rainbows

One such representation is Memory: A Cultural Documentary, which first aired in 2001 and became an instant success with a record-making number of viewers. Another text that deserves a place in the canon of Chinese cosmopolitanism, the film comprises twenty-four episodes that retell the life stories of a group of “modern pioneers” in the fields of science, literature, the arts, education, journalism, studies of religion and commerce, and more.7 Among its magnificently reenacted figures, Mo Yisheng, a civil engineer renowned for the bridges he built during and after the 1930s, is perhaps paradigmatic. A graduate of Tangshan Polytechnic8 in China with further training at Cornell University and the Carnegie Institute of Technology in the United States, Mo completed a tremendous project in 1934, namely the Qiantangjiang Bridge, the first of its kind in China. The bridge enabled trains and road vehicles as well as humans to move across the Qiantang River, a river flowing through two provinces, including the affluent Yangtze Delta, leading to the Pacific Ocean via the East Sea. As one of the earliest specialists in Chinese civil engineering, Mo over the years not only built actual bridges but also loved writing about them as “imaginative stories of world arts and sciences” for the general public in China and as “Chinese arts and cultural history” for “friends beyond” China. In one of the pieces on “world arts and sciences” for a Chinese readership, for instance, he wrote of Leonardo da Vinci as a “human bridge leading to peace-making”:

In an age where the power of religion dominated human life, da Vinci’s creative work in both arts and sciences opens up imaginative new horizons, and enables human beings to break free from the grips of dogmatic powers to move beyond perceived absolute boundaries and travel long and far with their resilient human capabilities. Da Vinci’s time was ravaged by endless religion-driven wars. He opposed all such wars which, as he put it, were “catastrophes of inhuman madness.” Between the road to build peace and the dead-end of making wars, he chose peace with un-wavering resolve and infinite imagination.9

In another piece on “five ancient bridges in Chinese history” for international readers, he depicts those “straight bridge[s], suspension bridge[s], arch bridge[s]” with nuanced care in the style of Chinese classical poetry, and concludes with a description of their attributes in relation to all bridges around the world as follows:

[B]ridges across the world are of infinite variety in style, formation, and structure; they are always different and yet always in intimate dialogues with one another. They can crisscross with one another in semi-ring shapes in endless extensions reaching the horizons.… [W]hen we step onto such semi-rings, we reach where they reach, connect where they connect, arrive where they arrive, namely, to all corners of heaven and earth, and across all and any humanly made divides or boundaries. Bridges deserve our genuine respect. They offer others their bodies to support life-enhancing journeys across boundaries and limitations, while taking difficult challenges upon themselves. Those who build bridges during rainy days and times of storms are builders of the finest elements of humanity. Bridges are earthly creatures in tune with the rainbows in the sky, as brilliant, full of strength and enchanting. Rainbows in the sky are bridges on earth.10

It was in stormy times that Mo completed his first actual bridge project, inscribing these stories of “bridge-builders for life” in his memory. The cosmopolitan impulse, palpable in these writings, is characteristic of what is historically called the May Fourth generation, China’s first generation of publicly educated men and women coming of age at the turn of the last century and leaving their distinct imprint in the fluid making of modern Chinese cultural consciousness throughout the twentieth century.11 Memory: A Cultural Documentary, an influential model for numerous other series with increasingly enlarged scales and different perspectives, revisits many of these figures.12

Building bridges between the modern world’s different codes, classes, and components, be they material, cultural, or spiritual, is a complex struggle. In 1937, one year after Japan attacked the Lugou Bridge in the north and launched a total war with China, Japanese military legions were about to storm across Qiantang Bridge to penetrate the south. As masses of refugees were crowding across the bridge with the Japanese military at their heels, Mo found that his bridge built for connecting human needs was in danger of turning into part of an apparatus designed to destroy human lives and their connections. Saying nothing of his feelings, Mo revealed a surprising detail in his plans for the bridge. He had built into the body of the Qiantang Bridge one centrally located rectangular hole as well as a line of evenly distributed sites where explosives could be set off, triggering the swift and complete destruction of the bridge.13 And as Japanese troops advanced, this is what was done. Decades later, Mo wrote of the destruction of the bridge with a measured scientific clarity but still haunted by a touch of pain: “[That] we built the bridge with pre-calculated sites for explosives in order to destroy it in totality is a sign of an inauspicious time, writ large therein, however hidden.”14

As formulated by Kant and in many subsequent variations, the cosmopolitan idea is predicated on universal rationality and the promise of eternal peace. It was received by Mo Yisheng and his generation via Kang Youwei’s ideal of Great Harmony as the moral call of progress in, by, and for modernity. But it appears to invite both rainbows in the sky and explosives on the ground.15 Habermas tries to support rationality by distinguishing “a strategic use of language” from “a genuinely communicative use of language,”16 but his aid is ineffectual, for the explosives placed by the builders in the body of the bridge involve more than the norms of communication. Nor does Rawls’s procedure for attaining morality and universal justice—the expansion of the “human faculty” of “reasonableness”—seem any more capable of warding off injuries and suffering in this explosive history. These historical conditions raise conceptual questions and personal conundrums. How might Mo and his fellow bridge builders have come to terms with the very fact that they had to destroy with their own hands the “rainbows” they had internalized in their minds’ eye and then actualized in their lifeworlds as materializations of their lives “in harmonious relation to all other beings in the world”? How can anyone be or become a “citizen of the world,” free to travel anywhere, when the prevailing force fields of such a world stop her from even inhabiting it, let alone being a free spirit among equals?17 How might the bridge builders, obliged to blow up the bridge that materialized their labor, their work, and their meaningful action (in Hannah Arendt’s sense), even gain access to an ethic of cosmopolitan care about “people and the world as a whole,” much less become its champions?18

The Diasporic in the Homeland, or the Insistence of the Impossible in History

The Mo Yisheng episode in Memory: A Cultural Documentary, like most televisual representations of history, does not delve further into the consequences of the conundrums it registers. It ends on a conciliatory note, stating that Mo was to rebuild the bridge. The fact remains that the kind of self-implosion of their lifework that Mo and his fellow builders carried out tends to extend to all aspects of their lifeworlds including, in extreme junctures, their own lives. A profusion of what is currently called “life-writings” in recent decades (the genre of “biography”), similarly focused on the 1930s and 1940s, provides immense material evidence, no less mediated but more intricate and detailed, of the extremity of those historical predicaments. “Suddenly April: Remembering My Mother Lin Huiyin,” a nuanced account of the life and work of China’s first female architect, is a case in point. Drafted in the late 1980s and expanded in the 1990s by Lin Huiyin’s son Liang Congjie, “Suddenly April” brings a long underestimated artist to the center of public attention, serving as the introduction to A Collection of Lin Huiyin’s Works published in 1999, the first collection of its author’s literary and architectural writings.19 “Suddenly April” tells us how Lin Huiyin, born into an elite family, traveling in England and Europe at a tender age, and studying art and architecture at the University of Pennsylvania and Yale University, was cross-culturally cultivated in her social formation, becoming a gifted vernacular poet and an astute critic of literature and the arts. While Mo Yisheng was blowing up the Qiantang Bridge in the south, Lin Huiyin was leaving the Japanese-occupied city of Beiping in the north. The period of 1941–1945 saw her and her family living as war refugees in Lizhuang, a village in Sichuan Province. Suffering from severe lung disease, Lin Huiyin and her husband Liang Sicheng, the leading architect of China, persisted in their research while writing A History of Chinese Architecture in Chinese and An Illustrated History of Chinese Architecture in English, both of which became classics in academic historiography. In his memoir Chinabound, John Fairbank recalls his visit in 1942 to Lin and Liang, his “best friends in China, or anywhere in the world.” Fairbank was as stunned by Lin’s poor health conditions as by the couple’s impossible perseverance and dedication to their research under such harsh conditions.20 More relevant to the discussion here is the account of Lin Huiyin’s casual chat with her children in 1944, which discloses her view on “self-eradication” in extreme times:21

In Li Village, we were isolated. Mother had no one to chat with but us. So she talked to us about Shakespeare, Goethe, Turgenev, Michelangelo. All of that was incomprehensible to us. In retrospect, it was as if mother was playing the lute to a cow; we were the calves. Finally, one day, I could not help but ask: “Mom, what if the Japanese army finally comes here?” “For [some] of us, there is always the Yangtze River,” she replied contemplatively, “Mom will go there.” “But what about me?” I cried out. “Should this really happen,” Mom held my hands gently but tightly, said apologetically, “Mom won’t be able to take care of everything!” I was tongue-tied.22

A detail from a long past recollected by a loving son, this memory is no doubt personally inflected. Yet the sense of being shaken to the core by his mother’s willingness to contemplate self-eradication is palpably real. And the rivers across the Chinese landscape did receive human bodies along with the bodies of other species, dead or alive, on a massive scale, in its modern chronicles of structured catastrophe. Many memories have been repressed or erased, many details are beyond quantifiable measurement, and yet the archival evidence is there.

Given such a decisive detail, would we have to call Lin Huiyin, however cross-culturally cultivated in her personal and social formation, a China-centric “nationalist” after all? Are Mo Yisheng and his fellow builders essentially “nationalistic” in their blowing up of the Qiantang Bridge regardless of their well-articulated concern for peace and “harmonious relations” among the world’s peoples? Why or why not? These are questions arising from the conundrums with which Mo, Lin, and their generation struggled in the turbulent China of the 1930s and the 1940s. Their struggles are both subtly and sharply registered in all the genres and mediums of cultural rewriting today. However, they have yet to find adequate cognitive space in current China Studies. Indeed, scholars and critics have long noted how a mental habit of Eurocentrism, long established in China Studies, has forced modern Chinese history into the rubrics of English, French, German, or Japanese histories and in particular into the supposedly universal paradigm of modern “nation building.”23 Distorted by such rubrics and paradigms, the living history of modern China becomes one more variation of, or merely a footnote appended to, the logic of the nation-state. And Chinese cosmopolitanism can only appear as ethnocentric nationalism. Aligned with such a logic, figures of the tumultuous 1930s and 1940s like Mo, Lin, and others either find no significant or intelligible place therein or are assigned ideological labels like radical or conservative. All political categories stay within the possibilities or probabilities permitted by an overriding category of “nation building” or “national identity.” “They are all Chinese,” as a U.S. senior China specialist summed “them” up in the early 1980s, signaling his willingness to end the Cold War image of China and render “the Chinese” bioethnically-cum-“universally” intelligible again.24 But are they?

Or on the contrary, can they be thought of as cosmopolitans? Here some recent articulations on nationalism and cosmopolitanism come as a timely aid, especially Craig Calhoun’s insight about how “statements of cosmopolitanism as universalism echo rather than transcend nationalism.” Following this thought through, one might argue that Mo Yisheng’s “conundrums” sound a cautionary note about Eurocentrism and its claim to universality—indeed that they demand critical reflection on its limitations. Evoking Spivak’s classic question “can the subaltern speak?” one may ask whether the ethnocentrically marked body, as targeted object for aggression, subjugation, exploitation, and manipulation in world history, has some as yet unarticulated way of countering the ethnocentric operations of such a world in history? Could Mo’s act of “self-implosion” or Lin’s will to “self-eradication” be considered a life-affirming passage toward becoming non-ethnocentric Chinese—a historically embodied enunciation of being and becoming a Chinese cosmopolitan? Might Lin Huiyin and her fellow Chinese counter and foil their putatively structured destiny as the disaporic within the homeland by putting their comfort, education, social or class-based privileges, labor, health, and life in the service of “an appeal to and insistence on the impossible” in times of extreme violence governed by the logic of bioethnic politics? And if so, what might be the implications of such a countering beyond the definitions of “national loyalty” or “national identity” as understood in the normal vocabulary of the “modern nation-state” and its standard history?

In 1937, on the eve of Japan’s declaration of total war against China, Lin Huiyin, Liang Sicheng, and their assistants traveled to Mount Wutai in search of ancient Chinese temples and other historic architecture. A photograph was taken of Lin Huiyin at work. In it, she wears a simple traditional Chinese blouse and a round wide-brimmed soft straw hat, and is sitting under the arched roof of a brick kiln while taking notes from her field research. These notes and more constitute the foundation of A History of Chinese Architecture in Chinese and An Illustrated History of Chinese Architecture in English,25 the first such histories in the world. A ray of sunshine lights up the kiln and illuminates the contours of her body with a sense of luminous intelligence in a specific earthly existence.26 What kind of trans-social time and cross-cultural space is needed for us to enter into dialogue with such an existence? Further, in what kind of time and space will such dialogue be possible? Could this existence serve as a cross-cultural gift or an opening, and if so, how might one prepare to receive such a gift and take advantage of such an opening? This may be the right moment to remember Lin Huiyin’s best known poem, written in 1934, titled “You Are the Tender Month of April.” Her son, decades later, cites it in his account of the life and work of his mother “Suddenly April”:

You are the tender month of april

your laughters dance in Aeolus’s call

and swiftly change your steps in ripples of spring.

you are, resilient clouds writing in the sky

in murmurs of dusky air, stars sparkle

casually, when misty rain falls, upon flowers.

so radiant, so gently, and you, in these fairy hours

are crowned in Flora’s honor, innocence embodied

yet majestically, like a bright full-moon night,

or the newly thawing snow. And an aqua sprout

shooting in all suppleness, you are. Rejoice of seeing

the lotus flower upon the expanse of water shimmering.

You are blooming buds of trees across miles of miles vastness,

or a swift swallow, whispering at all windows of the humanly dwellings,

you are love, and a lyrical music in the worldly,

you are tender april on earth, enchanting plenitude of poetry.27

A poem penned in Chinese, it has been translated into twenty or so other languages, followed by many subsequent translations. As an architect, Lin Huiyin designed some of the most enduring memorials in China after the founding of the PRC in 1949. After her death in 1954, one of her designs was carved on the marble stone of her grave: a garland made of peonies, lotus flowers, and daisies—symbolizing the magnificent, the transcendent, and longevity in classical China—surrounded by resilient olive leaves representing the hope for peace in the Western tradition. The caption goes as follows: “Symbols originating from different civilizations are here coherently intertwined with one another, which amounts to a celebration of the harmonious interconnection between peoples in the world as well as poetic art and human history.”28 Might such a “celebration” be a momentary homecoming for the other cosmopolitans, as an embodied appeal to and insistence on the impossible?

Other Cosmopolitans, in China and Beyond

In his comments on Kang Youwei, Mao Zedong famously asserts that “Kang Youwei wrote Book of Great Harmony, but he did not and was unable to find a viable way of arriving at such a great harmony.” Such a task of way-making, Mao argues, will be accomplished by revolutionary transformations of China led by the CCP.29 How well Mao succeeds where Kang Youwei fails, as Mao puts it, or whether Mao and his peers succeeded or failed, as intensely argued or debated by so many over the years, or what constitutes “great harmony” and its “success” or failure” itself—this is a series of topics for other occasions. Suffice it to say here that Mao Zedong was not alone in appealing to the imaginaries of “great harmony” and in translating such appeals into practice, be it a modus vivendi or anything else, especially amidst the crises and catastrophes of 1930s and 1940s China. The unfathomable wealth of past praxis has been explored once again in present-day China with escalating intensity and deepening critical sophistication; there is yet no end in sight, given the unfolding results and potential consequences. The cultural documentary Memory and the life-writing “Suddenly April” are two examples of a duet from this wealth currently being retraced, recuperated, investigated, and represented in different mediums. East Wind Rain, a film that premièred in 2010,30 makes this duet into a trio.

A historical film predicated upon the lives of the citizens of Shanghai in wartime, East Wind Rain brings to light, for the first time in Chinese cinema history, a multinational constellation of those active in the resistance movements against the Japanese War of Invasion in China. The film opens with the execution of Ozaki Hotsumi by the Japanese. A core member of the Richard Sorge Spy Ring, centered in Shanghai and consisting of people of German, Japanese, Russian, and American nationality, Ozaki Hotsumi was gathering information about the Japanese military government’s strategy and conveying it to the Third International between 1929 and 1941, at considerable personal risk—ultimately a fatal one. He was arrested by Japanese special higher police in 1942 and was sentenced to death for “crimes of treason” in 1944.31 This ending differs from Mo Yisheng’s blowing up of the Qiantang Bridge and Lin Huiyin’s will to eradicate her own life in an extreme situation, yet it resonates fundamentally with them both. Nakanishi Masahiro, another Japanese national depicted in the film, was based on the historical figure of Nakanishi Tsutomu, a Japanese member of the Chinese Communist Party who worked in a Sino-Japanese intelligence group—which was also a part and parcel of—the resistance activities of the CCP-led Shanghai-Nanjing Underground. A range of other nationalities cross the screen, displaying different social formations and a profoundly convergent concentration on a goal that seemed most untimely or impossible: to be and to become non-ethnocentric citizens of a human world in a time of rising bioethnic violence.

In a rainy scene at a lakeside where Nakanishi meets An Ming (the Chinese field figure in the Underground) to decide how to deliver information to prevent another catastrophe from happening, for otherwise “more people will die,” both are aware of the consequences that such a decision entails for themselves. The succinct scene ends with An Ming, offscreen, quietly remembering in Chinese Rabindranath Tagore’s line, “let life be beautiful like summer flowers,” and Nakanishi’s low voice finishing the line in Japanese: “death like autumn leaves.”32 This is the spirit of cosmopolitanism.

Presented as “drama,” “suspense,” “war,” and “historical film,” respectively, East Wind Rain draws on the life writings (individual histories) of these historical figures of diverse nationalities while also imaginatively reproducing them on the cinematic screen as an epic of non-ethnocentric community, mobilizing the capacity of the audience to imagine a humanity beyond modern bioethnic codifications. A visualization of other cosmopolitans of China and beyond, offers up for recognition and cognitive reflection the otherwise largely unknown transnational genealogies of actual or imagined human praxis inherent in the history and memories of the city of Shanghai.

That such an epic of non-ethnocentric community and its genealogies of a humanity beyond bioethnic codifications are uncovered in the city of Shanghai is consequential not only in terms of the film’s genre, its period-specific aesthetic style, and its cinematic grandeur. As one of the crucial and most transformative urban nodes of China in the 1930s and the 1940s, the city is more than a material and symbolic focal point through which China was coerced into modernization with all the concomitant trials and tribulations, crises and catastrophes, as is mostly the case in contemporary Chinese cinema. Indeed, of the exponentially growing number of cinematic works on the Chinese lives of the 1930s and 1940s, especially with war thematics, the best in terms of aesthetic quality or the most powerful in cultural signification are primarily or entirely located in or merged with rural China. Evening Bell (1988), Devils on the Doorstep (2007), and The Year 1942 (2012), to mention the most obvious, are ample evidence.33 Renditions of modern China in contemporary Chinese films, in other words, draw their cultural strength largely from the rural world and its imaginaries. The result is a sense of locality lodged in a largely reactive resistance to the modern workings of universalizing ethnocentricism without the capacity to claim or transform that universalism. In East Wind Rain, on the other hand, the city is rearticulated as a crucible in which “other cosmopolitans” can appear and display their transnational significance, where they can move, engender, and reengender themselves, be and become representatives of a “China modern” or a “Chinese modernity.” The film’s Shanghai is pregnant with alternatives to the ethnocentric rubrics of the modern. In the fluid space of this Shanghai, world history is repopulated and rewritten.

Scholars and historians have long defined Shanghai’s fluidity in the 1930s and 1940s as “cosmopolitan,” but they have often done so without adequately specifying its “cosmopolitan” attributes or critical implications. Some ascribe this status to its political form as a city “antithetical” to that of the modern nation-state, indicating the fragmented sovereignty of semi-colonial China as embodied by the extraterritoriality of the French Concessions and International Settlements. Others focus on its “cultural hybridity” resulting from its mixed and fluid multinational populations. In 1936, according to Rhoads Murphey’s early work, there were approximately 60,000 “foreigners” in Shanghai. Among them were 20,000 Japanese, 15,000 Russians, 9,000 British, 5,000 Germans and Austrians, 4,000 Americans, and 2,500 French.34 Such features, emblematic of a city in flux and a struggling country at a most brutal juncture of its modern history, do not go unnoticed in East Wind Rain. But East Wind Rain does not rest content with these features. It also pays close attention to what has been called “an intellectual class” whose formative trajectories within overseas education afforded them cross-cultural experiences in personal learning and social knowledge production, as well as expanded connections for transnational alliances. It is important to note that such an “intellectual class” is composed of both “Chinese” and “non-Chinese” figures, including Ozaki Hotsumi, Nakanishi Tsutomu, and many others of different nationalities. These figures navigated extensive semi-professional Chinese cultural associations such as the Creation Society, the League of Left-Wing Writers, and the Japan-China Struggle League, making connections with key Chinese intellectuals such as Lu Xun, Tao Jingsun, Yu Dafu, Feng Naichao, Feng Keng, Ding Ling, and others who constitute the center of gravity for modern Chinese culture in critical transition. A mutual activation of a profound kind was at work when, for instance, Lu Xun, Ding Ling, and their Chinese peers mounted protests in 1933 on the streets and in writing against the torture of a Japanese Marxist Kobayashi Takiji by the Japanese Imperial government because of Tajiji’s antiwar activism.35 Such details run through modern Chinese literary and cultural history and require us to be cognizant of their transnational signification. The founding congress of the CCP in 1921 also included “non-Chinese” intellectuals, another detail the far-ranging implications of which have yet to be recognized. Literary and cultural scholars have generally viewed the ideological composition of such an “intellectual class” as, in the words of Leo Ou-fan Lee, “a loose alliance of the left-wing against Japanese imperialism in Asia and fascism in Europe,” motivated further by an international impetus of Marxist origin at work across the world.36 East Wind Rain goes much further and is much more specific. It locates in such intellectuals the concrete “other cosmopolitans” who put their comfort, education, social or class-based privileges, labor, health, and possibly their lives in the service of “an appeal to and insistence on the impossible” in a time of extreme violence governed by the putatively invincible logic of bioethnic politics. In so doing, they turn themselves into humanly embodied bridges that connect specific lives and daily life struggles, including their own, with a critical imperative to care about “the world as a whole,” putting their bodies on the line as it were in the search for a modern world capable of opening itself up to the yet-to-be-reckoned-with possibilities for making and remaking “great harmonies.”

In this time of global sea change and the flux of radical realignment, such humanly embodied bridges are as imperative as they have ever been since the dawn of human history. In the words of Mo Yisheng decades before, “[B]ridges have been there since the ancient times, and are at once the most ordinary and most special architectures of the life world. They offer others their bodies to support life-enhancing journeys across boundaries and limitations. Bridges are rainbows on earth.”37

NOTES

  1  Mo Yisheng, “Rainbows in the Human World,” Mutual Arriving (Tianjin: Baihua Literature and Art Publishing House, 2009), 25.

  2  “The Enforcement of Great Tao Is Great Harmony,” in Book of Rites (Shanghai: Shanghai Classics, 1987).

  3  See Li Zehou, Modern Chinese Intellectual History (Beijing: People’s Publishing House, 1997).

  4  N. G. D. Malmqvist, “On the Similarities and Differences between Chinese and Western Utopians,” 21st Century (Reshiyi shiji), June 1991, 11–16. In his Chinese Socialism to 1907 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1976), Martin Bernal traces Kang Youwei’s book to an influence from Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward, 2000–1887 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007) and its argument for socialism, or what one may call a “left cosmopolitan.”

  5  “The Enforcement of Great Tao,” in Book of Rites.

  6  The problem of the (re)making of “human communities” underlines much of the current theoretical debate, with issues ranging from cosmopolitan propositions to interspecies advocacy. For a recent reference, see the 2013 October special issue of Theatre Journal titled “Interspecies Performance” (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013).

  7  Memory (Jiyi), a documentary directed by Zhou Bing and produced by the “Time and Space in the East” Program hosted by one of the most popular media figures, Bai Yansong, at CCTV, first aired in August 2001. It is an early example of the era of “cultural documentaries.” Ever increasing in length, with 150 or even 200 episodes as of 2014, these documentaries—which have grown in quantity and aired over a long duration—have not only changed the field of visual representation in the country but the landscape of cultural memory itself.

  8  One of the earliest modern institutions in Chinese higher education, it was established in 1896 in response to the need to build a Chinese railway system and industries.

  9  Mo Yisheng, Mutual Arrivals (picide dida) (Tianjing: Baihua Literature and Art Publishing House) (Baihua wenyi chubanshe), 293.

10  Mo Yisheng, ibid., 25–26. Mo was born in 1896 and came of age during the high moment of the May 4th Movement when an important contingent of Chinese intellectuals embraced the idea of the humanistic individual, along with its inherent universalist logic of a Kantian lexicon. One of the leading philosophers of contemporary China in Shanghai, Li Zehou, is in fact presently teaching a very select seminar on Kant and the idea of cosmopolitan morality.

11  See Leo Ou-fan Lee, The Romantic Generation of Modern Chinese Writers (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1973).

12  Entering Their Worlds (zoujin tamen, Shanghai Media Group, 2009), Masters (dashi, Shanghai Media Group, 2011), and The Distinguished in Literary China (dajia, CCTV, 2012), are but a few of the more influential series in this genre.

13  Eight years later the bridge was rebuilt. It was fully functioning in 1949 when the PRC was founded.

14  Mo Yisheng, “On the Building of Qiantangjiang Bridge,” in Mutual Arrivals, 305–50.

15  While important in its complex historical ramifications, the distinction between Japan’s way to modernity and European rubrics of modernity is not central to the argument of this essay. Suffice it to note here that Japan’s colonial militarism is inherent in the Meiji Project. Its principle of disassociating itself from Asia and reassociating itself with (modern) Europe is part and parcel of the kind of “modernity” we have known in world history. See Stefan Tanaka, Japan’s Orient: Rendering Pasts into History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993).

16  Richard Rorty, “Justice as a Larger Loyalty,” in Cosmopolitics, ed. Pheng Cheah and Bruce Robbins (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), 55.

17  In a historical review of the life and work of Hu Shi, one of the “liberal cosmopolitan intellectuals” of the first half of the twentieth century, a critic defines him as an “idealist who ended up being in the service of the imperialist forces that ravaged China and its citizens.” Huang Jisu, Waves of a Century (bainianchao), June 1999.

18  It has been noted that Martha Nussbaum, Anthony Appiah, and Seyla Benhabib, among others, seem to regard the idea of cosmopolitanism as a cognitive vehicle for making a direct connection between the individual and the world as a whole. David Held’s notion of “cosmopolitan democracy” does not specify alternatives to such a direct connection. Ben Anderson, on the other hand, has long argued that, in complex and differential contexts such as that of South Asia, for instance, “cosmopolitans” can be or historically have also been “indigenous.” The conundrums suggested here are related but distinct from the problematics of the above-mentioned explorations predicated upon the binary between the transcendental or global “cosmopolitan” and the embedded or local “indigenous.” Rather, they point to the historical content—rather than the scale—of difficult but unavoidable relatedness across national boundaries in world history, a topic that requires extensive and sustained analysis which is beyond the scope of this essay.

19  Liang Congjie, “My Mother Lin Huiyin” (edited by Wu Wanru), in Waves of Youth (qinchun chao), September 2000. Liang Congjie, Introduction, “Suddenly April: Remembering My Mother Lin Huiyin,” in A Collection of Lin Huiyin’s Writings (Tianjing: Baihua Publishing House, 1999). Such “life-writings” of the cultural figures who came of age in the 1930s and 1940s, as a rapidly ascending genre in contemporary China, encompass a growing range of literature. The following are among the most notable works: Xu Renhua and Li Lu, eds., On the Twentieth of May (Beijing: People’s Publishing House, 1995); Yan Liang et al., eds., Stormy Lives, 4 vols. (Nanjing: China Culture Publishing House, 2008); Wang Lianjie, Nameless Heroes (Beijing: Tuanjie Publishing House, 2008); Li Jiefei, Paradigmatic Cases of the Literary World (Wuhan: Hubei People’s Publishing House, 2008); Dong Xiao, July in Exile (Wuhan: Changjiang Publishing House in Arts and Literature, 2013). For an important forthcoming series with a more self-aware cross-cultural focus, see Liu Jialin et al., eds., Journeys Overseas (Shanghai: Jiaotong University Press); Yan Haiping and Cao Li, eds., Circum-Pacific.

20  John King Fairbank, Chinabound: A Fifty-Year Memoir (New York: Harper & Row, 1982).

21  Liang Congjie, “My Mother Lin Huiyin,” edited by Wu Wanru, in Waves of Youth (qinchun chao), September 2000.

22  Liang Congjie, Introduction, “Suddenly April: Remembering My Mother Lin Huiyin,” in A Collection of Lin Huiyin’s Writings (Tianjing: Baihua Publishing House, 1999).

23  See, for instance, the observations in Naoki Sakai’s works on the subject of “Asia theory,” and on the recent “historical turn” in studies of Chinese women’s history by a new generation of Chinese scholars, including Song Shaocheng, Zhang Lianhong, Dong Liming, and Liu Jing. Such observations are applicable to the evolving field of China Studies within geographically defined China proper as well as the long-standing institutions of established area studies in the United States or Europe. For instance, Jonathan Spence, an outstanding historian based in the United States who specializes in modern China and whose monumental work, The Search for Modern China (New York: W. W. Norton, 1990) is a mark of achievement, nonetheless begins his Search with a comparison that evokes a Eurocentric logic: “Comparing with Japan or Germany” (let alone England or France), he writes, “modern China has still not achieved its sense of identity.” In the growing scholarly discourse of the past three decades that claim to be opening up new spaces for rethinking modern China, including its literary history, the “deconstruction” turn that focuses on unpacking the politics of ethnocentric nation-building or of the teleologically predicated idea of the “nation-state” in its omnipresent operation, often reinscribes what is being “unpacked” by fixating on the universal omnipresence of such an idea and its total power. Such a fixation, however critical, leaves little room for thinking beyond the very centrality of this “omnipresence.” Adequate explications of this observation constitute a large topic beyond the scope of the present essay.

24  A guest lecture series on “Modern Chinese Culture and Society,” October 5 to November 5, 1983, Uris Hall, Cornell University.

25  A History of Chinese Architecture was completed in 1944. See “Preface: On the new edition,” A History of Chinese Architecture (Tianjing: Baihua Publishing House, 2005). A Pictorial History of Chinese Architecture in English was completed in 1946 and published by MIT Press in 1984.

26  I used the photograph in my book. See the image on the front cover of Yan Haiping, Chinese Women Writers and the Feminist Imagination, 1905–1948 (Oxford: Routledge, 2006),

27  Translated by Zheng Songyun, unpublished manuscript.

28  Chen Xueyong, The Life of Lin Huiyin (Beijing: People’s Literary Publishing House, 2008).

29  Mao Zedong, “On People’s Democratic Dictatorship, June 30, 1949,” in A Selection of Works by Mao Zedong, vol. 4 (Beijing: People’s Publishing House, 1991),1468–82.

30  Liu Yunlong, dir., East Wind Rain (produced by Shanghai SMG, Beijing East Union Film, TV and Communications Corporation, and Hangmei Communications Corporation, 2010).

31  His position as a special advisor and private secretariat for Prime Minister Fumimaro Konoe gave him special access to top policy information, which he passed on to the Communist International.

32  Rabindranath Tagore, Stray Birds, trans. Xu Hanling (Tianjing: Education Press, 2007). The original Chinese translation of this line was rendered by literary and art historian Zheng Zhenduo, “生如夏花之绚烂, 死如秋叶之静美,” and has become part of the modern Chinese language.

33  Wu Xiniu, dir., Evening Bell (1988); Jiang Wen, dir., Devils on the Doorstep (2007); Feng Xiaogang, dir., The Year 1942 (2012).

34  Rhoads Murphey, Shanghai: Key to Modern China (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1953), 23. The statistics need to be updated, given recent research on and about the city and the regions.

35  Yuan Liangjun, ed., Materials for Ding Ling Research (Ding Ling yanjiuziliao, Tianjing: Tianjing People’s Publishing House, 1982).

36  Leo Ou-fan Lee, Shanghai Modern: The Flowering of a New Urban Culture in China, 1930–1945 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), 322.

37  Mo Yisheng, “Rainbows in the Human World,” in Mutual Arriving (Tianjin: Baihua Literature and Art Publishing House, 2009), 25.