This paper close-reads the short fiction of Fei Ming (1901-1967). Widely appreciated for the recondite lyricism of his prose, Fei Ming has also been chided for the "obscurity" of his works, lauded for his refusal to accede to the nation-building imperatives of the New Literature of the May Fourth era, seen as a pastoral modernist, and interpreted in terms of his immersion in Buddhist thought and premodern Chinese poetics. I propose here that the stylistic obscurity of Fei Ming's short stories may voice an ethical as much as an aesthetic impulse. At a syntactic and semantic level, Fei Ming's work often gives us pause or omits critical information. His opacity forces us to read slowly, or not at all. Fei alongside the writings of May Fourth luminaries such as Lu Xun and Zhou Zuoren on the pages of Word-Threads (Yusi). Is it possible to read Fei Ming's reticence not as a repudiation of contemporary debates about realism, illiteracy, and the woman question but as a reflection on the limitations of the short story as a narrative form and an ethical response to the dilemmas of literary representation?
This article examines ethnic minority portrayals in wuxia cinema, distinguishing between productions from mainland China and Hong Kong. Through a comparison of portrayals of Han-nomad relations with Hollywood Westerns' depictions of white settlers and Native Americans, it highlights mainland Chinese cinema's unique approach to ethnic dynamics and illuminates the varied ways majority ethnicities depict other ethnic groups and frontier conflicts across different cultural contexts. Focusing on the depictions of historical Han-nomad relationships in the Western Regions (Xiyu), this article first outlines the underlying sociohistorical and ideological influences and then charts their cinematic evolution, culminating in an examination of recent shifts in the portrayal of ethnic dynamics in the new millennium. Unlike Hollywood and Hong Kong commercial films' frequent oversimplification of ethnic conflicts into moral binaries, post-1980 mainland Chinese wuxia epics often emphasize the sociohistorical complexities underpinning ethnic dynamics and prioritize promoting ethnic solidarity and harmony while potentially sidelining in-depth explorations of the psyches of individual Han and nomadic characters. The new millennium has witnessed an increasing ideological alignment between Hong Kong and mainland Chinese narratives and their tendency to embrace transnational storytelling.
This article argues that the sensation of touch in Jia Zhangke's 2004 film The World (Shijie) offers a lens for imagining globality beyond the reductive terms of capitalist globalization. The entrapped lives of the protagonists in Beijing World Park, a space filled with replica landmarks from across the globe, embody the tension between the imagined mobility of a cosmopolitan middle class and the involuntary (im)mobility of national and transnational migrant labor. Using hapticity as an analytical framework, I show that the film manifests alternate global space-times from the bottom up, through material and sensual experiences that resonate among the characters. Their haptic encounters, including those enacted virtually through media, transform interactions with fake architecture into real sentiments of globality. The sensation of touch rechannels their inability to see the outside world into anticipation of other transnational connections. Their shared experiences of captivity reject capitalist models of smooth cultural exchange and facilitate alternate modes of globality that emerge from embodied exchanges.
Captain of the Roving Bandits (Liukou duizhang) was a three-act play first performed in Yan'an in 1938. Written by Wang Zhenzhi, it was designed to remind audiences about the threats posed by "traitors" (hanjian), and the need for resistance fighters to behave in an upright manner in their struggle against Japanese imperialism. The same play was specifically chosen by the Ministry of Publicity under the "collaborationist" regime of Wang Jingwei in 1941, however, as a means of promoting the anti-resistance Rural Pacification campaign and as a warning against the dangers of communism. The story of the transformation of this play from an anti-hanjian work of CCP propaganda into an anti-resistance work of "collaborationist" propaganda - as well as the controversy that this engendered within the close-knit theatrical community that worked for organs of the "occupation state" - highlights the common practice of cultural borrowing across wartime borders, but also the shared provenance of so much Chinese cultural output during the war, be it communist, Nationalist, or "collaborationist." Moreover, this case underlines the difficulties that cultural workers employed by the Wang Jingwei regime in Nanjing faced when trying to strike a balance between the political necessities of occupation and a desire to celebrate forms of modern Chinese cultural expression that had developed in the pre-war years, including spoken drama.
The efforts of Chinese filmmakers during World War II have garnered increasing attention as more literary and visual materials continue to be unearthed. The era's frequent displacements and nationalistic imperatives created a distinctive filmmaking landscape. This article delves into the director Zheng Junli's quest for an authentic representation of China in his propaganda documentary Long Live the Nation (Minzu wansui) from 1943, which showcases the unity and diversity of six Chinese ethnic groups in the borderlands. One of Zheng's central concerns in the filmmaking process was zhenshi (authenticity), which I put into a broader context of individual travel experiences and cultural interaction. Factors such as Zheng's previous film practices, resource limitations, daily travel encounters, and desire to portray reality contributed to his documentary decisions. Foregrounding Zheng's individual experiences, the article contends that the process of making this travel documentary involved negotiation and compromise between the traveler and the destination, culminating in a performative authenticity that depicts a united China unfolding on screen. The study sheds light on the complexities involved in crafting wartime travel propaganda documentaries and proposes the importance of studying travel and mobility to understand the artistic creations during the wartime period.
This essay examines how the 1921 reprint of Zhou Shuren (Lu Xun) and Zhou Zuoren's Collection of Stories from Abroad by the Shanghai Qunyi Book Society transformed the late Qing translation anthology into a modern literary classic within the discourse of the literary revolution. Through textual analysis of the Qunyi edition and its 1909 Tokyo original, the study reveals how the reprint - with twenty-one new translations, revised annotations, and cataloging by nationality - served as a symbolic act to legitimize the revolution. It argues that figures like Qian Xuantong and Cai Yuanpei weaponized the collection in debates against Lin Shu's translations, framing its archaic style as proof of the New Culture advocates' literary prowess. Zhou Zuoren's expanded author biographies embedded "humane literature" ideals, while Lu Xun's preface recast the collection's commercial failure as avant-garde resistance to traditional literary norms. The Qunyi edition's shift from endnotes to interlinear annotations and simplified punctuation democratized readership access, aligning with vernacular language reform. This canonization process, the study concludes, exemplifies the revolution's dialectical strategy: rupturing with tradition while retroactively constructing a genealogy that linked late Qing practices to May Fourth modernity, thus solidifying the collection as a foundational text of modern Chinese literature.
Zhang Wei's novel The Ancient Ship (Guchuan, 1986) was an important text of the Enlightenment campaign in the 1980s, but it deviates from the typical stance of the prevailing Enlightenment discourse that propelled the transformation toward individualization and de-collectivization. By reading this novel alongside other literary representations of local Communist cadres and delineating the genealogy of "protective cadres" and "predatory cadres" in socialist and reform literature, this essay examines Zhang Wei's complex positioning within the reform discourse. Further, through a sociohistorical analysis of Zhang Wei's imagination of a form of collective economy that is historically related to the township and village enterprises in the 1980s, this essay shows how Zhang Wei in The Ancient Ship presents an ambiguous longing for an alternative path of modernization entwined with a socialist past. This imagination of an alternative vision of modernity continues to influence Chinese society to this day.
Arising from his life as a high-explosive blast miner, Chen Nianxi’s poems describe not only his precarious life as a Chinese migrant worker but also a set of ecological concerns prevalent in post-socialist China. This essay contends that reading Chen’s poems as ecopoetry helps uncover the relationship between humans and nature in the social ecology of migrant worker poetry. Focusing on Chen’s iconic poem “Zhalie zhi” from 2013, translated here as “Explosion Chorography,” this paper proposes the concept of chorography as a lens through which to examine the nexus of materiality, pathology, and affect in Chen’s poetry. Chorography — the art of mapping a region or its features — teases out the ecosophical relevance and the ongoing process of social, cultural, and natural forces in Chen’s poetry. Drawing on Félix Guattari’s notion of three ecologies, my reading also compares Chen’s poetry with its predecessors in the socialist era and attempts to explore his potential contribution to ecocriticism in the post-socialist context.
This article addresses the affective pull of the idea or fantasy of the better life that is seemingly promised by neoliberalism. Chan Koonchung's speculative novel The Fat Years ( Shengshi: Zhongguo 2013 nian), now available in at least thirteen languages worldwide, is one of the most widely circulated literary works by a Hong Kong writer to date. Despite its global success, Chan's novel has been criticized for its Sinophobic and antiestablishment disposition. While some might frown on the perceived Sinophobic discourse in The Fat Years, this article argues for careful consideration of the novel as a complex exploration of the state's manipulations of happiness as a tool of political control, addressing the broader implications of such affective techniques in post-2019 Hong Kong. Although Chan's novel predates Hong Kong's 2019 National Security Law, I frame my analysis within the context of post-2019 Hong Kong to highlight how these new laws are part of a broader continuum of imperialist practices China has long used to exert control. Additionally, I argue that the novel functions as a “small story” — a conscious act of deconstruction or delegitimization of a hegemonic and monolithic image of the Chinese future, especially as it serves as a horizon of potentiality, a not-yet-here. Despite its apparent limitations, I argue that Chan's dystopia can be understood as an aid in affectively reaching beyond the boundaries and quagmire of the stultifying, deadening, capitalist present.
What insights can be gleaned concerning the aesthetic underpinnings of Taiwanese director Hou Hsiao-hsien beyond the long take, long shot, static camerawork, and his affinity for neorealism? This article explores Hou’s departure from language since the turn of the new millennium and its interplay with the modern Chinese lyrical tradition contextualized within the contemporary milieu. The article begins by dissecting Hou’s methods of diminishing language and rendering it unfamiliar. It then addresses the collaboration between Hou and Zhu Tianwen, a Taiwanese writer who serves as a scriptwriter, shedding light on Hou’s postmillennial disengagement from history and preconceived narratives. The accompanying aesthetic strategy of reducing and estranging language, in turn, facilitates a more genuine manifestation of the individual personalities of the actors, empowering them to create fiction. Hou’s method also influenced Zhu’s evolution as a novelist, which is visible in her latest literary work. By examining the lesser-known perspective of Shen Congwen concerning cinema, the article illustrates the convergence between Hou and Shen in their shared aspiration to cultivate an atmospheric cinematic ambience. The article posits that Hou’s postmillennial cinema outgrows the detached observational style of his, Zhu’s, and Shen’s earlier works. Instead, Hou’s departure from language as an information medium transforms the narrative into a transgressive lyrical experience, traversing subjective and objective realms and blurring the lines between fiction and reality.
This paper examines the remapping of libido and capital in Zhu Wen's Nanjing-based stories and discusses their influence from, and innovation against, modernist literary traditions. Drawing upon the theories of Walter Benjamin, Fredric Jameson, Henri Lefebvre, and David Harvey, as well as the scholarship on Chinese postsocialism, I contend that, like the Western flâneur whose existence and experience are key to our understanding of both modernity as an empirical experience and modernism as a literary-cultural aesthetic, Zhu's fictional urban wanderers and drifters present a self-reflective response not only to the changing conditions of the postsocialist subject but also to the representational endeavors of the postsocialist writer. In particular, the spatialized manners in which Zhu's wandering characters encounter history and temporality — often facilitated by the locale of Nanjing utilized as an ancient-capital-turned-modern-city and as a provincial capital — reveal the convoluted nature not only of China's urban (post)modernity but also of such attempted artistic “ruptures” by contemporary writers like Zhu Wen.
Discussions of the concept of love in Republican China have privileged romantic love and regarded the sentimental depictions of mothers by women authors as a conservative and outmoded legacy of the Confucian past. Scholarship has overlooked the discursive split between the material and spiritual formations of love throughout the modern period. Whereas Republican texts invariably depict the liberatory potential of romantic love collapsing under the weight of material forces, mother love is deployed as a spiritually pure affective force powerful enough to awaken China’s alienated youth and cathect them to the communitarian ideal of the nation. This article analyzes the trope of mother love, meaning both the child’s love for a mother and the mother’s love for her children, in fictional texts by Bing Xin and Su Xuelin to push beyond psychological readings of individual daughter-mother bonds. Both women rejected romantic love as offering liberation to women and instead promoted mother love as a philosophy that could save China. Even as mother love took on unique meanings for May Fourth women writers, male writers also embraced it as having a sublime and progressive affective power.
The 1954 release of Vittorio De Sica's Bicycle Thieves (1948) in the People's Republic sent shockwaves across the nascent state's cultural establishment. Amongst the Italian neorealist film's commentators were three powerful cultural bureaucrats: Ding Ling, Hu Feng, and Ba Ren — all influential writers of the Republican era. This article uses the three writers’ comments on Bicycle Thieves as a vantage point into how May Fourth realists were experimenting with literary form in the early PRC period, particularly through the notions of “life” and “typicality.” Their reviews demonstrate how the 1930s debates on how real life should be transformed into art continued to divide writers and critics in the early socialist period. Using Hu Feng and Ding Ling's comments on De Sica's film as a framework, the article investigates how both writers’ literary-documentarist prose from the 1950s can be seen as attempts to reinvigorate the realist literary style.
