Cosmopolitan Publics: Anglophone Print Culture in Semi-Colonial Shanghai

Cosmopolitan Publics

V

Cosmopolitan Publics A ng loph one P ri nt C ulture in Semi-Colonial Shanghai

Shuang She n

Rutge r s Unive r sity Pre ss New Brunswick, New Jersey, and London

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Shen, Shuang, – Cosmopolitan publics : Anglophone print culture in semi-colonial Shanghai / Shuang Shen. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN ‒‒‒‒ (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. English periodicals—China—Shanghai—History—th century. I.Title. II.Title: Anglophone print culture in semi-colonial Shanghai. PN.FE  .'—dc  British Cataloging-in-Publication data for this book is available from the British Library. Copyright ©  by Shuang Shen All rights reserved No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. Please contact Rutgers University Press, 100 Joyce Kilmer Avenue, Piscataway, NJ 08854-8099.The only exception to this prohibition is “fair use” as defined by U.S. copyright law. Visit our Web site: http://rutgerspress.rutgers.edu Manufactured in the United States of America Composition: Jack Donner, BookType

For Ken and my parents

C onte nt s

Acknowledgments

ix

Introduction: Anglophone Periodicals as Cosmopolitan Publics

1

The China Critic: Writing the City, the Nation, and the World

33

2

T'ien Hsia: Cosmopolitanism in Crisis

59

3

Internationalism as a Culture of Translation: Anglophone Internationalist Magazines and Literary Translation

95

1

4

Migration and Diaspora: The Afterlife of Chinese Cosmopolitanism

135

Notes Bibliography Index

161 173 179

vii

Ac k nowle dg m e nt s

This book would not have been completed without the inspiration and continuous encouragement of Professor Leo Ou-fan Lee. His work on cultural appropriation in modern Shanghai inspired me to think in broader terms, namely, about the overall relationships among cultural borrowing, urban history, modernity, and colonialism in the Chinese context. His focus on creating a bridge between area and ethnic studies, between the discourse of multiculturalism in the United States and the concerns with heterogeneity and democracy in the Chinese context moved me to think beyond the conceptual and geographic borders of the nation-state. Over the years, Professor Lee showed his interest in my intellectual development in his characteristically subtle and warm-hearted manner. He encouraged me and provided me with many opportunities to exchange ideas with other scholars at conferences and graduate seminars. Without his recognition, encouragement, and guidance, I would not have been able to finish this book. I have also had many senior colleagues, peers, and friends who accompanied me through what sometimes felt like an endless journey of writing. Members of the Asian American Women’s Writing Group, Lok Siu, Sandhya Shukla, Evelyn Ch’ien, and Mary Lui embraced this not-so-typical Asian American studies project with an open heart and pushed me to think critically about issues of transnationalism and migration. My good friend and historian Mae Ngai involved me in a translation workshop at the University of Chicago, which gave me an opportunity to share a portion of this book with colleagues from other disciplines. My colleagues at the English Department of Rutgers University, David Eng, Edlie Wong, Sonali Perera, Chris Chism, Brent Edwards, Mary Sheridan-Rabideau, María Josefina SaldañaPortillo, and John McClure, read different portions of this book at various stages of completion and gave me a great deal of constructive criticism. My good friend and colleague David Eng, in particular, set up a very useful workshop for junior Asian American scholars, which allowed me to share my work with colleagues with similar research interests. Shu-mei Shih, Dorothy Wong, David Eng, and Sonali Perera read the entire manuscript at its last stage of completion on short notice and left me with many challenging questions to ix

x

Acknowledgments

consider with regard to some key arguments. I was deeply touched by their attentiveness, professionalism, and spirit of camaraderie throughout the whole process, and the manuscript has been greatly improved because of their constructive criticism. I would not have been able to acquire the necessary broad knowledge base to finish this project of an interdisciplinary nature without the continuous support of mentors and friends in East Asian studies. Professor David Der-wei Wang took time out of his busy schedule to discuss with me the project’s conceptual framework—sometimes between stops on his lecture tours of various universities. His questions and suggestions urged me to situate this focused study more firmly in the broad historical context of traveling cultures in late Qing and Republican China. The organizer of the Modern China Seminar series at Columbia University Eugenia Lean provided me with an opportunity to present a portion of this work at a faculty seminar, where Adam McKeown, Dorothy Ko, Eugenia Lean, and Rebecca Karl, among others, gave me some valuable feedback. I have fond memories of conversations with Ted Huters over delicious spicy food and beer in a small Szechuan restaurant in Beijing. He later sent me a manuscript of his own single-case study of the usage of English in modern Chinese intellectual discourses, which was for me further proof of the importance of the subject matter of my own project. In addition, my good friend Zhang Zhen supported me spiritually and emotionally by sharing with me her own experience of living and working in a cross-cultural context. Shu-mei Shih has also been extremely helpful and generous in guiding me along the path of intellectual development. Friends and colleagues in Asia, including Leung Ping-kwan of Lingnan University and Lam To-kwan of Oxford University Press in Hong Kong, guided me through the labyrinths of archival and social networks in Hong Kong, which enabled me to have a clearer picture of the activities of some of the migrant writers in the Hong Kong phase of their lives. This book received a generous grant from the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation for International Scholarly Exchange, which provided some much-needed relief from the financial stress of academic publishing today. Finally, my sincere thanks to my editors Leslie Mitchner and Rachel Friedman and the staff at Rutgers University Press, who provided me with crucial guidance through the various stages of publishing. Many thanks to Ken, who patiently put up with my need to disappear into work over the years and entertained me with lively conversations about intellectual matters in broad strokes that eventually turned out to be rather useful to this book. My parents, who have been far away, nevertheless placed a great deal of trust in me and quietly supported me by relieving me of many necessary family responsibilities and chores. I am deeply grateful to my families in the United States and China and dedicate this book to them.

Cosmopolitan Publics

introduction

Anglophone Periodicals as Cosmopolitan Publics

Can English be regarded as a Chinese language? What does it mean for English to become a Chinese language? In fact, what is a Chinese language after all? Does “Chinese language” refer to the actual languages spoken by people of Chinese descent, which in many cases are likely to be regional dialects, or does it refer to Mandarin Chinese as the national language? There are many ways of answering these questions. What I intend to highlight by raising them is the tension between addressing China as a nation-state and the history that emerges when one focuses on a linguistic medium that is assumed to be un-Chinese.These difficulties are encountered not just by the contemporary scholar who studies the subject of English periodicals in Shanghai but also by the cosmopolitan subjects who are the main characters of this book—the Chinese intellectuals who had been educated in the West and returned to China in the late 1920s to publish these periodicals. The disjunction of their chosen linguistic medium with the subject of their concern and their immediate environment is intrinsic to the production of meaning in these periodicals, and this tension also inspired the editors’ imagination of the home and the world.The main task of this book is to reveal and examine the significance of their cultural productions by working through this tension. Conventional Asian studies have not paid enough attention to cultures produced in languages other than the national languages in Asia. Rey Chow, among others, has challenged the dominant status of Mandarin Chinese from a polemical perspective that brings her to examine the disciplinary ideology of area studies. She argues in Writing Diaspora and other works that the assumption that Mandarin Chinese is intrinsic to the notion of “Chineseness” is actually generated extrinsically through a particular kind of cross-cultural referencing that reinforces existing inequality between the East and the West.1 Yet Chinese studies have evolved a great deal in the past few years, with many new works recently published in the field that go beyond the conventional confines of area studies by engaging in diaspora studies and the circulation of 1

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C o s m o p o l i ta n P u b l i c s

ideas, culture, and people pertaining to the Chinese context.2 The boundary between area studies and ethnic studies is also beginning to be loosened.This book follows this trend and offers a historical study of the usage of English in one particular setting—the periodical culture in semicolonial Shanghai. This focus immediately implies two new perspectives to Chinese modernity: one, it highlights a public sphere that has certain multilingual, translational, and transnational qualities; second, instead of emphasizing the nation as a homogenous entity, this book takes as its subject of analysis a smaller locale than the nation— the semicolonial city Shanghai in the first half of the twentieth century. This choice does not mean that this urban locale was cut off from the rest of the country; on the contrary, by focusing on traveling individuals and interregional and interlingual circulation of public culture, this book emphasizes the need and difficulty of communicating within China and with places outside China and examines the making of Chinese culture at subnational and transnational scales.3 Shanghai was not the only city where there were English-language publications; however, Shanghai’s history as a place of diverse backgrounds and translational languages offers a unique vintage point from which to observe the making and unmaking of this cosmopolitan discourse. The travel of English is related to the history of colonialism. However, colonialism does not necessarily have a formulaic history or standard practice throughout the world. Although colonialism had intricate connections with the circulation and globalization of certain forms of knowledge and some languages, the actual usage of English, a colonial language, in some contexts could still vary depending on specific situations and histories. In conditions of more or less formal colonialism, such as India and certain parts of Africa, the history of Anglophone writing inevitably began with the institutionalization of colonial education. Take the Indian case as example. Gauri Viswanathan’s book Masks of Conquest opens with an examination of the Charter Act of 1813, which formally defined Englishness in terms of language and taste as the goal of colonial education.4 Gayatri Spivak’s article “How to Read a ‘Culturally Different’ Book” draws our attention to another set of issues with regard to Indian Anglophone literature—the fraught relationship between Anglophone writers and vernacular literary traditions.5 This relationship was historically complicated by internal conflicts and competition among the vernaculars and the establishment of Hindi as the national language in post-Independence India. Anglophone literature from India and Indian diasporas witnessed a renaissance symbolized by the publication of Salman Rushdie’s novel Midnight’s Children in the early 1980s.6 From the point of view of Indian writers, this renaissance altered the original status of English as an outsider’s language through a process of “domestication” and “remaking,” a process that allows English words to be mixed with various Indian vernaculars.7 The increasing popularity of Anglophone literature from India in the

Introduction

3

West has also helped to forge an image of Indian English as a new global vernacular rather than a language from the colonial periphery. This history is only selectively relevant to China. Although the work by scholars such as Wen-Hsin Yeh reminds us that there were also colonial cultural institutions in China starting from the late 1920s, the impact of this colonial education did not result in the dominance of English-language writing in China. Historically, English-language literature in Chinese-speaking regions has not been able to compete with Chinese-language literature in terms of social status and amount of literary output. In the contemporary period, Anglophone literature by writers from Chinese-speaking regions do not enjoy as prominent of status as Anglophone writings from India. Successful writers of Chinese descent who write in English, such as Timothy Mo, Maxine Hong Kingston, and Ha Jin, are often put in different categories of ethnic, immigrant, or diaspora literatures, suggesting different forms of exclusion from national and world literatures. In the early twentieth century, the usage of English, Westernization, and Chinese Enlightenment as both ideology and practice were intersecting but not perfectly overlapping concepts.The lack of a clear boundary among them made it possible for Chinese writers to not stick to one category, so that many writers who advocated Westernization in social and cultural life continued to write in Chinese, not English or other foreign languages. In the case of other writers, such as Gu Hongming, bilingual ability did not translate into enlightened or modern worldviews. Until very recently, Chinese studies in Chinese-speaking regions and many North American universities have been reluctant to include Anglophone literature written by writers of Chinese descent within the curriculum of Chinese literature, assuming that these works have nothing positive to offer to Chinese studies as a discipline. These nationalist biases, which actually go beyond bias against a foreign language, deserve criticism; however, from another perspective, the relative weakness of English in China has historical reasons that are worth investigating.The history of fragmented and incomplete colonialism, which has been characterized as “semicolonialism” by some political leaders and scholars, has not been studied sufficiently in terms of its effect on cultural production.8 This may imply that the politics of cultural mixing in semicolonial contexts such as the city of Shanghai also would require new theoretical languages and paradigms. In this book, the story of English in China will not be approached from the perspective of an ideological critique of colonial discourse, but as a culture of circulation. This perspective gives more fluidity to English as a language and cultural signifier without suggesting that the usage of English had nothing to do with colonialism as a political history or ideology, or that there was no power differentiation between cultural articulations made in English and those made in indigenous languages—vernacular Chinese or a particular Chinese

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dialect. Rather, this perspective allows us to examine the formation of colonial discourse as a result of circulation, rather than assuming the preexistence of such a discourse in its complete form. In the Chinese context, anti-imperialist sentiments or social movements against the domination of Western powers and Japan were often not accompanied by a cultural critique of the West, particularly Western modernity, a situation that has been described by Shu-mei Shih as the bifurcation between “the metropolitan West” and “the colonial West.”9 As a result of the separation between the political and cultural critique of the West, it is not hard to imagine that the status of English was variable and complex in relation to dominant colonial discourses. It is possible for English to reinforce colonialist ideology and political hegemony in one situation while playing an important role in decolonization movements and nationalism in another. Furthermore, perceiving English as a culture of circulation juxtaposes this language as a cultural signifier with other new things and cultures that shaped Chinese modernity. In Metaculture: How Culture Moves through the World, anthropologist Greg Urban argues that modernity is characterized by a metaculture of newness, which decouples cultural dissemination from replication (“the creation of a new thing that shares the abstract form of an older one”), resulting in speedy movements of culture from one location to another without complete duplication of the original cultural form.10 The term “metaculture” refers to the abstract form that controls the movement of culture from one location to another. Although Urban’s macrodescription of the culture of dissemination under the conditions of modernity does not deal with the question of what kind of cultural circulation would produce colonialist hegemony, his argument is provocative because it helps us situate the use of English within the local context of a burgeoning modernity. Since according to Urban, modernity values dissemination more than replication, English can be put in a comparable position as other foreign cultures and things circulated in modern urban centers in China. Several chapters of this book will show that the cultures covered by these English-language periodicals are rather mixed; they did not originate just from English-language countries and regions and certainly did not represent only Englishness in terms of value; rather, English culture was set side by side with other foreign cultures and objects as well as Chinese culture. The cultural imagination implied by this kind of mixing is more complex than the mixing or antagonism of the colonial vis-à-vis the native; it is closer to the picture of colonial modernity that scholars such as Andrew Jones have depicted in the case of popular music in China.11 In other words, English can be looked upon as a new and modern instrument or technology such as the stenograph.The use of English in modern China did not take place outside a general context of modernity. In fact, the identity of

Introduction

5

English was the focus of contestation by different users of this linguistic medium. In addition, focusing on circulation foregrounds a zone of contact and crossing in association with a particular geographic location (Shanghai in this case) and certain cultural forms (the periodical in this case). These cultural sites are by nature impure; but their impurity is different from the connotation of hybridity in contemporary postcolonial discourses. While hybridity as a postcolonial keyword implies a dialectical reversal of the Social Darwinian hierarchical structure of race and culture, the impurity I describe in this semicolonial context does not readily manifest itself as a subversive cultural strategy. Rather, this impurity comes from the spatial closeness of multiple languages and cultures in what Ackbar Abbas considers an overly complex city— Shanghai.12 Abbas suggests that a politics of indifference was the only way of dealing with the multiplying differences in this complex place.This may not always be the case, since the periodical as a cultural form has a number of ways of representing and organizing the multiple cultures and languages, as I will discuss later in the introduction. Finally, approaching English as a culture of circulation allows us to consider the (dis)connection between this supposedly “foreign” linguistic medium with Chinese modernity without presuming the history of modernity as always already “Chinese.” In the case of the two periodicals that I analyze closely in this book, a “Chinese” perspective and subject position were loudly advertised to distinguish these publications from others using the same language or belonging to a similar type. Whether we can accept this distinction as the editors would want us to do is another question. In any case, it shows that nationalism was actively being made in a context of a variety of foreignconnected products that were in circulation. National culture as a category was being defined at the moment of the publication of these periodicals. Nationalism was by no means a pregiven category in the late 1920s. In spite of some available studies of literary culture of the same period, particularly the study of modernism that specifically addresses the question of cultural appropriation, the question of how cultural appropriation in general related to colonialism and produced or challenged nationalism is far from clear, and I suspect that this relationship is perhaps more multifaceted than singular.13 This study that focuses on the use of English in public culture offers one particular instance of the politics of cultural appropriation in a particular context. It also seeks to broaden existing studies of Chinese literary modernism by raising more general questions about language (can a modernist work written in English but circulated in China be accepted into the canon of “Chinese modernism”?), genre (what is the relation between the “periodical” and accepted literary genres such as poetry and short story?), and location (is

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what makes Chinese modernism “Chinese” its location in China?). In the rest of this introduction, I will provide some background information about the history of English in China and explication of the methodology used to conduct the current study in order to elaborate on the claims made above. English in Chine se Cultural Discour se s The subject of this book—English-language public culture in semicolonial Shanghai—cannot be analyzed without some discussion of the history of English in China. Other than some sociolinguistic accounts of the spread of English in China, cultural historians have done very little to analyze how English was integrated into Chinese cultural discourses. What I will be able to provide in this section is hardly a comprehensive review of the social, political, or psychological impact of absorbing English into the Chinese system from the late Qing to the Republican period. What I want to emphasize with regard to this period is that first, English was transformed from a mostly commercial to a cultural language, and second, its usage and social status were closely related to the shift of cultural paradigms in the Chinese-language field. In a study of “guru English,” a religious register of Indian English, Srinivas Aravamudan states that “empires and religions have been the two most obvious vehicles of linguistic universalism.”14 It seems that this statement would hold true for the Chinese context as well. According to Rowell S. Britton’s 1933 study of Chinese periodicals between 1800 and 1912, Catholic and Protestant missionaries were responsible for introducing Western-style journalism into China. One of the earliest periodicals was a Chinese-language monthly magazine “under the title Ch’a-shi-su Mei-yueh T’ung-chi-ch’uan, which [the publisher] Milne rendered: A general monthly record, containing an investigation of the opinions and practices of society.”15 It was published by Robert Morrison and William Milne of the London Missionary Society in 1815. Around the same time, English- and Portuguese-language periodicals also emerged in South China and Southeast Asia. Britton mentions an “English secular newspaper,‘The Prince of Wales’s Island Gazette’” published in Penang between 1805 and 1827 and a quarterly Indo-Chinese Gleaner which was financed by Milne and Morrison and published in Malacca between 1822 and 1827. These are some early examples of English periodicals in regions outside China. Although these periodicals were not published within China proper, in Milne and Morrison’s case, Chinese printers were involved in the publication, and printing equipment was shipped from Canton. Inside China, “‘Canton Register’ (an English-language magazine), a biweekly and later weekly, was begun in 1827 by W. W. Wood, of Philadelphia,” according to Britton’s study.16 However, before Milne and Morrison’s English-language periodicals were published, contact between European traders and the Chinese in South China,

Introduction

7

particularly in the port of Canton, enabled the emergence of a hybrid linguistic form—pidgin English. Kingsley Bolton states that “the first attestations that are available for Chinese speakers of English date from the 1740s and have been cited by a number of pidgin scholars and creolists as early examples of ‘Chinese pidgin English.’ The term ‘pidgin English’ was not, however, used until around 1859, and throughout the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, reference was typically made to the ‘broken English,’‘jargon,’ or ‘mixed dialect’ used at Canton.”17 This hybrid language emerged out of the necessity of communication during trade transactions and under the condition that hardly any foreigners tried to learn Chinese, according to Samuel Wells Williams’s account in 1836. Williams wrote in 1836 that “the foreigner on landing hears a dialect spoken, which with an entire disregard of all rules of orthography and syntax, he can soon ‘pick up,’ which is sufficiently extensive for commercial intercourse with the Chinese. With this jargon he soon becomes well acquainted, and in a short time looks upon the acquisition of the language as a useless as well as almost impracticable undertaking. Indeed, of so long standing is the gibberish spoken here, that few ever think of paying any attention to the Chinese.” Williams, himself a missionary printer, appears to be critical toward pidgin English here, an attitude that was shared by many missionaries in the nineteenth century.18 In addition to these scattered accounts of the spread and usage of English in the earlier periods of Europe-China contact, we also have a “Glossary of words and phrases peculiar to the jargon spoken at Canton” compiled by John Robert Morrison in 1834.The small number of examples from this glossary provided in Kingsley Bolton’s article demonstrate that the so-called “Cantonjargon” came from a variety of linguistic sources, including Cantonese Chinese, Portuguese, and Malay. For instance, we are told that the word “chop” comes from the Malay word chapa, referring to “a seal or stamp, any thing sealed or stamped.” Hence, “chop” means “government edits, licenses, &, also stamped or printed documents. Again, a thing licensed, as a chop-boat; also, a place able to give licenses, as a chop-house, i.e., a custom-house.” For the word “sabbee,” we are told by Morrison that it comes from the Portuguese word “saber, to know.” “‘My no sabbee’ i.e. I don’t know him.”An example of Canton jargon that originates from Cantonese Chinese is the word “hong,” which according to Morrison refers to a “factory, a place of commercial business, a commercial establishment. Hong merchants are by the Chinese called ‘foreign hongs,’ there being also silk hongs, tea hongs, &.” Bolton observes that many items in the 1834 list composed by Morrison can also be found in “various styles of Hong Kong English” still used today. Bolton further proposes that Hong Kong English should be considered as an “autonomous variety on par with such other Asian Englishes as Indian English, Singapore English and Philippine English.”19 This observation, if taken seriously by scholars in literary and

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C o s m o p o l i ta n P u b l i c s

cultural studies, should change the perception that the predominantly Chinesespeaking region is monolingual. Pidgin English in China has an interesting history of transnational and translocal migration, and its sociopolitical significance changed in the process of these travels. Bolton mentions that in the 1860s and 1870s, pidgin English appeared in the British publication Punch and in Charles Godfrey Leland’s Pidgin-English Sing-Song, which portrays China and the Chinese in a comic light. Leland’s book, which was circulated in the United States in the late nineteenth century, supported the anti-immigration discourses in the same period. At the end of the Opium War, pidgin English traveled to the newly opened northern port cities and facilitated the communication between foreigners and the Chinese there.20 Several linguists have noted that the spread of English in China in the nineteenth century underwent a change from pidginization to standardization due to the establishment of missionary schools and colleges as well as translation and language schools that were sponsored by the Qing government.21 This change was also partly due to the prejudiced attitude toward pidgin English held by both missionary educators and Chinese nationalists. Shanghai was one of the five cities that opened to Western traders, as stipulated by the Nanjing Treaty. There are many recent studies of Shanghai’s urban history and culture from the second half of the nineteen century to the early twentieth century; however, a clear picture of the interlingual and cross-cultural arena has not yet been constructed. Whether the circulation of English and the changes in the Chinese language happened in entirely separate spheres is a question that has yet to be answered. However, we do have some information about Chinese representations and use of pidgin English published in the British-owned Chinese-language newspaper Shen Bao (Shanghai Times). Shen Bao published the “bamboo-rhymes” (Zhi Zhici) written by Yang Xun in February 1873, which incorporated Chinese renditions of pidgin English.22 “Bamboo-rhyme” is a poetry genre that dates back at least to the Tang Dynasty, and in the late nineteenth century many Chinese poets used this form to compose poems that depicted Shanghai’s modernity. Close to one hundred poems collectively entitled “Pidgin Bamboo Rhymes” were written by Yang, and some of them provide vivid descriptions of the culture of this nineteenth-century treaty port from the point of view of cultural and linguistic mixing. Yang himself was not a pidgin English speaker. He had studied in a government-run translation school in Shanghai and could speak fluent standard English. In Guide to English, an English textbook written by him and published by the Commercial Press in Shanghai, Yang emphasized the importance of taking a scientific approach to the teaching of English.23 Consistent with this emphasis on standardization, his preface to the pidgin poetry collection conveys

Introduction

9

a condescending attitude toward pidgin English:Yang mentioned that he wrote the poems in pidgin mainly because he wanted to document some common mistakes in pidgin usages. He also stated that the reason pidgin English emerged was that English teachers did not pay enough attention to grammar. From the content of these poems, one can see that his criticism of Shanghai went beyond pidgin English as a language and extended to Shanghai’s emerging modernity, evidenced in the growing number of foreign business and material objects from the West. This attitude is typical among “bamboo-rhyme” poets. Barbara Mittler argues that the portrayals of Shanghai in “bamboorhymes” in the end of the nineteenth century, regardless of whether these poems contain pidgin words or not, tend toward two extremes: one presents Shanghai “as a city of Qi,” a place of “mystery, and the unusual,” “a city of extravagant palaces and dreams”; the other presents the city as a place of danger, shame, decrepitude, and the loss of traditional and rural values.24 These two extreme perceptions often coexist in the same poem. The contrast is particularly obvious in the poems that use the courtesan as a representative figure standing for the modern city. From this perspective, Yang Xun’s relationship with pidgin English is complex: while he looked down upon this lower form of cultural hybridization from the elitist position of the cosmopolitan literatus, he also had a tendency to flaunt his knowledge of pidgin, showing off his command over it in the same way that he would do with material objects newly imported from the West. Some sentences in his poems are so densely packed with transliteration of pidgin words that their meanings are hardly discernable or coherent.Technically,Yang’s pidgin poems, which are in Chinese, do not offer a case of straightforward usage of pidgin English; they present a case of grafting—the transplantation of words from one linguistic context into another. Since the word to be transplanted is already a garbled form of English, this kind of grafting can only enhance the degree of linguistic corruption of both English and Chinese. Some linguistic effects are not obvious when the poems are translated back into English, particularly standard English, so I only include some examples of Yang Xun’s poems in a note.25 Even though Yang’s poems cannot be taken as a case of straightforward usage of English in either standard or pidgin form, his poems are informative about the environment of the circulation of English in Shanghai of the same period.This environment is also embodied by the newspaper Shen Bao, itself a product of mixing of a particular kind. Established by the British merchant Ernest Major in 1872, this newspaper used Chinese language, was edited by the Chinese, and catered to the taste of Chinese readers. If one thinks of Shen Bao, Yang Xun’s pidgin poems, and the standard English-language public culture together, then one gets a picture of the coexistence of multiple forms of cultural mixing targeted at different communities of interlocutors

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C o s m o p o l i ta n P u b l i c s

in Shanghai. To what extent these communities overlapped with each other is a hard question to answer at this point; however, we know that there were individuals such as Yang Xun who were in-between figures and moved easily in more than one of these communities. The fact that he wrote for the Chinese-language newspaper and authored a textbook of English proves this point. His pidgin poems can therefore be considered as a playful commentary on one type of performative connection between Chinese and English. Shen Bao and Yang Xun’s pidgin Chinese poems remind us that the Chinese-language public culture underwent significant changes at the same time that standard English became available to native Chinese speakers. Barbara Mittler’s recent study of Shen Bao provides many detailed descriptions of how this Western-style newspaper had to “domesticate [this foreign medium] for Chinese use and Chinese understanding,” including printing a narrative history that emphasizes Western newspapers’ similarity and continuity with Chinese newspapers, publishing editorials written in the genres of classical Chinese prose, and reprinting news from the government-owned newspaper Jing Bao.26 However, this ostensible image of “Chineseness” was only one side of the Shen Bao. In other sections of the newspaper, such as advertisements, many foreign objects and foreign imagery were placed side by side with traditional Chinese imagery and allusions. Just like the Shen Bao itself,Yang Xun’s pidgin “bamboorhymes” also convey what Mittler has called “an existence amid multiple systems of meaning making” in the everyday life of the treaty port.27 The use of isolated English words in predominantly non-English literature and culture carries great symbolic significance. For instance, around the 1910s, a few English words that appear in the writer Su Manshu’s novel Sui Zan Ji (Tale of the Broken Hairpin) indicate that a new community of foreignlanguage-speaking cultural elites was being formed and about to overtake the authority of the cultural arena. Serialized in Qing Nian Za Zhi (The Youth Magazine) in 1916, the novel is an imaginative retelling of the story of the 1848 French novel La Dame aux Camellias. According to Hu Ying, this story had already been retold twice before Su Man Shu published his book. A very liberal Chinese translation of the novel had appeared in 1899.The translator of the novel, Lin Shu, famous for his excellent command of classical Chinese and little knowledge of the foreign languages from which he translated, turned the story into a morality tale of traditional virtues represented by the female protagonist, the Lady of the Camellias. Differing from both Lin Shu’s translation and the two previous rewritings of this French story, Su Manshu represented the East-West juxtaposition of his era through inserting English sentences into his Chinese-language text. There are two ways in which Su’s text anticipated an important cultural change—the New Culture Movement that was about to take place shortly after the publication of his novel. Written in classical Chinese, Su’s story bases

Introduction

11

several characters in the novel on the real-life model of the returnee—the student who studied abroad and returned to China. Almost all major participants in the New Culture Movement fit this profile; therefore, it is not surprising that Su Manshu’s romantic story could find its way into The Youth Magazine, the stronghold for cultural radicals in the 1910s. The background of some characters as students who studied abroad conveniently allows the entrance of a particular kind of foreign knowledge—English––into the narrative. Here English is not associated with foreign products and modernity; it indicates the emergence of a new form of cultural authority defined according to competence in a foreign language.A few years after the publication of Su’s novel, one of the New Culture intellectuals Hu Shi would advocate the replacement of the classical literary language with vernacular Chinese. In this context, one can say that English and vernacular Chinese joined hands to overthrow the authority represented by the traditional literati, including those who were receptive toward the West, such as people like Yang Xun. Su’s “Tale of a Broken Hairpin” describes a love triangle among a young man, his wife-to-be according to his parents’ arrangement, and another woman of whom his parents disapprove.This story shows that the romantic ideals of the younger generation are bilingually coded and incomprehensible to the older generation because of linguistic and cultural differences. In one moment of the novel, Lianpei, a young woman secretly in love with the male protagonist of the novel Zhang, accompanies Zhang’s aunt to an opera performance, which happens to be in English. Although Lianpei has been interpreting for the elderly woman all along, she stops when one of the actors in the play utters, “What the world calls love, I neither know nor want.”This line, which articulates her own frustration toward Zhang’s inability to reciprocate her love toward him, introduces a public of affect from which the monolingual aunt is kept out. Unable to understand the meaning of this utterance because of Liangpei’s refusal to translate it, Zhang’s aunt can try to make sense of it only from a traditional perspective based on some contextual clues: the fact Lianpei chooses not to translate this sentence must mean it is an “obscene” utterance. The literary scholar Hu Ying has aptly described this moment as staging a linguistic “tug-of-war.”28 One can also see that between Yang Xun’s sinicized pidgin English poems and the insertion of an English sentence into Su Manshu’s Chinese text, a shift of paradigm had occurred that enabled English to become a language of cultural capital. Theodore Huters also argues on the basis of a case study of the Commercial Press that a violent shift of paradigm occurred in the cultural arena between the 1910s to the 1920s that displaced the traditional wenren (literati) from their position of cultural authority; instead, the Western-trained English-speaking academic intellectual began to occupy the center of the picture.“If the period between 1905 and 1920 had been marked by a creative, if anxiety ridden,

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mixture of Western and Chinese ideas, the imposition of the new regime in the post-1920 publishing world signaled the advent of the epistemological pre-eminence within China of a discursive system based on the Western academic ideas enshrined at Beida by Cai Yuanpei,” Huters claims.29 Although the Commercial Press was started by several enterprising members of the traditional literati background, it, too, contributed to the spread of English in Chinese education and public life by publishing English textbooks, dictionaries, and Chinese literature in English translation from the beginning of the twentieth century to the 1920s. In the preface of the English version of Su Manshu’s Lone Swan, published by the Commercial Press in 1925, the translator George Kin Leung tells us that the publisher’s original plan was to publish this book in a bilingual format, so that Chinese readers could use it as an English textbook. We can see from this statement that the importance of English as a foreign language was growing in the local arena. In the 1920s, according to Wen-hsin Yeh, English became increasingly important in secondary and higher education institutions, both state-sponsored and private or missionary, where it was used as the language of instruction in the teaching of science and social science subjects. This dependence on English as language of instruction resulted in “low interest and capability in Chinese,” especially among students in private and missionary colleges, and broadened the divide between the city and the country, coastal regions and the hinterland.30 However, as Yeh reminds us, the dominance of English was by no means met without resistance and debate. It also did not mean that no other subjects in the universities were taught in Chinese. In state-run universities such as “Beida” (Beijing University), traditional learning and methodology represented by the philological research of the Qing School still had a great deal of power, so much so that Western-trained scholars such as Hu Shi or radical antitraditional intellectuals such as Lu Xun were pressured to conform to this mode of teaching and research while they were at Beijing University.31 In the humanities and history, ideological conflicts between the old and the new, the East and the West were particularly intense, but in other social scientific disciplines, such as archeology, the Western notion of objectivity and classical Chinese knowledge seemed to blend in a more harmonious fashion.32 Yeh’s study documents resistance of various kinds toward English: while some humanistic scholars such as the historian Chen Yinke evoked imperialism to condemn the dominance of English in higher education, Marxist intellectuals considered English as the language of the bourgeoisie and the urbanite.33 From Yeh’s study of the academy in Republican China, one can see that the localization of English or Western knowledge in China in the Republican era was not an apolitical process. In addition, one big difference in terms of the spread of foreign language and knowledge in the 1920s compared to the late nineteenth century is that many political and cultural institutions inter-

Introduction

13

vened in this process. The Nationalist Party as well as the university as a modern institution of knowledge played important roles in shaping and controlling the flow of foreign knowledge and culture. Although the usage of English was intimately connected with the spread of Western knowledge and the increasing disparity in terms of class, region, and gender, cultural translation of the West was not necessarily accompanied by foreign-language usage and linguistic mixing in either the late Qing or Republican period. The status of English also underwent transformation during these years. In Yang Xun’s poems, English was associated with foreign commodities, but by the time of the late 1920s, it gradually was transformed into a language of communication with English-speaking people and nations. This transformation in terms of the perception of English paralleled changes that occurred in the realm of the Chinese language. In a condition of global unevenness, are there ways of utilizing English in imaginative ways that do not reproduce the total control of Western hegemony? Much that has been written about the New Culture Movement or the May Fourth legacy seems to suggest that the radical cultural transformation in the late 1910s directly or indirectly contributed to the domination of Western-centric universalism by directing the target of criticism internally toward Confucianism and Chinese tradition rather than to the West.34 However, it is doubtful that this critique of the May Fourth legacy would mean that the case is closed on the usage of English or other foreign languages in China. In fact, my discussions in the rest of the book will suggest that we should not think of the May Fourth tradition in monolithic terms, and that some important players during the New Culture Movement, such as Lu Xun, problematize the seemingly natural association between writing in English or other foreign languages and the embracing of Western-centric universalism. Rather, English along with other foreign languages were used to establish transnational connections for various political purposes, including leftist internationalism and nationalism. Translating Contemporary Discour se s of C o smop ol i tan i sm In the late 1920s, according to the historian of journalism Hu Daojing, “newspapers which are targeted for a foreign audience and run by the Chinese government and public organizations became popular only after 1927. The English-run newspaper Peping-Tientsin Times has made comments on this phenomenon with a tone of curiosity and amazement: ‘An interesting phenomenon that occurred during China’s Nationalist Revolution was that in Shanghai as well as other places, English-language publications emerged like surging waves’ (Peping-Tientsin Times, 1932, 12. 2).”35 Several periodicals that I discuss in this book fall into this category; two of them, in particular, namely, The China Critic and T’ien Hsia, were edited by Chinese intellectuals

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who had studied abroad and returned home. In one editorial of The China Critic, the editors embraced the identity of the “citizen of the world” and proposed that the magazine should become a platform for discussion of problems that confront all humankind, not just Chinese people. How do we interpret this claim of cosmopolitanism in relation to the social condition of partial colonization on the one hand, and the performance of the periodical as a cultural form on the other? How did these English publications address global and local issues such as imperialism, the war, and modernity? What roles did the language—English––play in a predominantly Chineselanguage cultural environment, which in itself was undergoing drastic change and reinvention? The answers to these questions overlap with but also diverge in important ways from some contemporary discussions of cosmopolitanism, and it is necessary to illuminate and clarify these connections and differences here. The term “cosmopolitan” was not an uncontested category in the 1920s in China, nor is it in the contemporary period. In addition to this instance of usage of the term “cosmopolitan” in The China Critic, the Marxist scholar Zheng Boqi wrote an article “On National Literature” in 1923 in which he claimed that “we are citizens of the world and are Cosmopolitans [this word is in English in the original text].This is our ideal; however, we are Chinese and members of the Han ethnicity.This is our reality.”36 Zheng’s main agenda in this article is to promote national literature and dismiss “Welt-literatur” as idealistic and unlivable. In his own words,“the world is . . . like a Phantom [this word is in the English in the original text], a loose collectivity and ungraspable.”37 Zheng’s refutation of the cosmopolitan and “Welt-literatur” did not stop others from making efforts to make the world into a tangible and coherent collectivity through various publishing and other kinds of projects. His use of English words in a Chinese article was in itself an indication of the increasingly cosmopolitan domestic cultural circle. Perhaps the most well-known endeavor to create “Welt-literatur” in Chinese is the publication project “Library of the World” (Shijie Wenku) spearheaded by Zheng Zhenduo in 1935. Another less well-known but equally intriguing project is the periodical Sulian Wenyi (Soviet Arts and Literature), which carried out many debates about the idea of cosmopolitanism (in Chinese “Shijie Zhuyi”) in association with Soviet music, drama, and film. Founded in 1942 in Shanghai, this magazine published articles on Soviet culture and Soviet reception of Chinese literature. Almost all the articles published in this magazine were written by Soviet authors and translated into Chinese. Involving Chinese readers in indepth discussions about Soviet cosmopolitanism must have required some imagination of the world that was concrete and beyond a mere “phantom.”

Introduction

15

Publications of this kind showed that “Welt-literatur” was very popular and specific in spite of Zheng’s dismissal of the concept as merely phantasmagoric. Partly because cosmopolitan cultural practices such as translation were of such a great variety that it is hard to reach a coherent conclusion about their politics, criticism from the academic field toward early twentieth-century cosmopolitan culture in the Chinese context has been mixed. In Revolution and Cosmopolitanism:The Western Stage and Chinese Stages, Joseph Levenson sets the Shanghai cosmopolitans in opposition to Chinese revolution and the nationalist thinking behind it, and considers the bourgeois cosmopolitans as too alienated from society.38 However, through close analysis of modern culture in Shanghai, Leo Ou-fan Lee poses a conclusion divergent from Levenson’s, suggesting that the Shanghai cosmopolitans were in fact more “Chinese” than “colonial.”39 In fact, the politics of Shanghai or Chinese cosmopolitanism remains to be clearly described. Critics, themselves situated in transnational and bilingual academic contexts, tend to be influenced by specific theoretical discourses and respond to the condition of the world at particular moments when it comes to defining the ideal form of cosmopolitanism as politics and cultural practice. Other scholars addressing the issue of Chinese cosmopolitanism, such as Ackbar Abbas and Ien Ang, link this notion with the contemporary conditions of globalization and diaspora.They both question the extent to which Chinese cosmopolitanism reproduces hegemonic notions of identity that do not address the real condition of transnational capitalism or create real opportunities of heterogeneity.Abbas argues that the cosmopolitanism in former colonial cities such as Shanghai emerged out of a condition of colonial chaos or dependency; therefore it is predicated upon a loss of identity, not really a glamorous tradition to fall back upon. Ang argues that Chinese cosmopolitanism is merely a reaffirmation of Chinese centrism and cannot represent the social condition and sensibility of diasporic Chinese. In a different context, a recent monograph by the cultural historian Meng Yue, Shanghai and the Edges of Empires, studies what Meng calls the “unruly practices” of linguistic and cultural translation, which contributed to the formation Chinese cosmopolitanism toward the end of the last Chinese imperial regime. This study offers a number of concrete case studies of cosmopolitan translation, which is lacking in many polemical discussions of Chinese cosmopolitanism.40 These various case studies and conclusions about Chinese cosmopolitanism suggest that it may be less helpful to think of this term as referring to a continuous tradition than to consider it as concrete cultural practices situated in specific times and places. Thus, even though cosmopolitanism is about traveling cultures and transnational concerns, the temporal and spatial specificity of its manifestation and practice is crucial for its effectiveness and critical evaluation. The topic of cosmopolitanism has also gained some renewed interest from scholars in the

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humanities and social sciences lately. In different contexts,Vinay Dharwadker and the editors of Cosmopolitanism, Carol Breckenridge, Sheldon Pollock, Homi Bhabha, and Dipesh Chakrabarty, have separately observed that current interest in the topic of cosmopolitanism can be accounted for in terms of three reasons:“the consolidation of new types of nationalism, based on . . . programs of racial, religious, or cultural purification,”“the empowerment of new immigrant communities in the national public spheres of the North and the West,” and “the accelerated globalization of capital and material production and consumption.”41 As ethical imperatives, philosophical tradition, or cultural politics that attempt to address the condition of the world today, it is not surprising that a variety of perspectives and answers have been presented, yet contemporary discussions of cosmopolitanism and cosmopolitcs need a lot of translation in order to connect with both Chinese history and the contemporary context. Actually, from the writings of both proponents and critics of cosmopolitanism, we can see that different scholars have different versions of cosmopolitanism in mind, which they either criticize or promote this concept. Critics of cosmopolitanism such as Craig Calhoun, for instance, identify cosmopolitanism as a global project of civil society in association with some form of world government or transnational NGOs. In conjunction with this definition, Calhoun’s criticism of cosmopolitanism is that it is unconcerned with the particular and the local and that it basically represents a Western worldview and perpetuates the binary opposition between West/modernity and non-West/tradition.Another critic,Timothy Brennan, equates cosmopolitanism with the logic of global capitalism. Cosmopolitans are intellectuals from the third world who have gained recognition from the West and lost their non-Western attachment or affiliation. On the other side of the spectrum, proponents of cosmopolitanism such as James Clifford use this term to dismantle the opposition between the cosmopolitan and the local. For Clifford, locality and traveling are integrally related to each other although different gender, class, and racial subject positions determine different forms of traveling and ways of narrating the local. Bruce Robbins characterizes cosmopolitanism as a receptive attitude toward the Other and a recognition of the interconnectedness between different cultural and ethnic groups.The sharing of knowledge about each other is crucial to Robbins’s understanding of cosmopolitanism as a political and educational project.42 The fact that almost all of these discussions about cosmopolitanism have been taking place within the Western academic circle exposes one of the major shortcomings of recent discussions of this issue. Although contemporary proponents of cosmopolitanism have insisted on making a difference from old cosmopolitanism by arguing, for instance, that old cosmopolitanism is singular, universalistic, and detached whereas new cosmopolitanism is plural,

Introduction

17

situated, and actually existing, it seems that still more people tend to trace contemporary theories of cosmopolitanism to the Western Enlightenment tradition and significant thinkers such as Immanuel Kant than to Asian philosophy and religion. There are relatively few studies of “actually existing cosmopolitanism” situated outside the West.43 Vague as the concept may seem to be, I am not sure that cosmopolitanism as a grounded history and cultural practice applies only to the privileged West or that a non-Western location such as China does not have its own cosmopolitan discourses circulated among local readers and audiences. In fact, at least recently in mainland China, cosmopolitan consciousness has had some clear articulations in underground or semiofficial public culture. Let me give one example of a recent occurrence. In the past several years, economic growth in China has boosted national morale and confidence, and one witnesses a resurgence of nationalistic sentiments articulated by both government-controlled media organizations and ordinary citizens, particularly those who have benefited from globalization. One frequently encounters on the Internet and through official and not-so-official channels expressions of pride of being a subject of the Chinese nation-state. At the same time, the West’s less-thanobjective representations of China in mass media also stimulate nationalistic responses from the Chinese in both China and diasporic communities. As I am writing this chapter in the beginning of 2008, with the Beijing Olympic Games approaching, some nagging problems that China has not been able to resolve, such as human rights violations, damage to the environment, and problems with pollution, have been repeatedly brought to world attention by powerful media organizations mainly situated in the West. The March 14, 2008, riot instigated by a few activists of the “Free Tibet” Movement further provided an opportunity for “outsiders” to criticize China’s poor record of human rights. In April 2008, CNN anchorman Jack Cafferty made some derogatory remarks on the air, calling the Chinese “goons and thugs” and stating that products manufactured in China are mere “junk.” My previous description already suggests that nationalism in contemporary China is often international in terms of origin, cause, and articulation. Whereas the majority of responses toward prejudiced representations of China is to counter nationalism with a different kind of nationalism, something of our own so to speak, there are also more complex responses that on the one hand call for more democracy and multicultural awareness, and on the other hand hold a critical position toward the Western media’s prejudiced representations. It is significant that some of these complex responses were made from the location of Hong Kong, a city whose status as part of China is newly acquired. One commentator of Phoenix TV, a Mandarin Chinese TV station whose audiences either live in mainland China or are new immigrants from

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China to Hong Kong, wrote a number of articles and taped two programs that openly discussed the Tibet controversy. During the April 3 program, commentator Liang Wendao invited his audience to think about some broader questions: What is the role of independent media in China and the world? And what does independence mean in the media business? How can this independence translate into a greater degree of sensitivity in cross-cultural representations and multicultural awareness?44 Throughout the program, Liang repeatedly evoked cross-cultural references and cultural values that carry a certain degree of universalism. Liang’s reflections on these subjects were not merely philosophical; they enabled him to make some nuanced criticism toward both the West and China. “While we criticize the Western media for their prejudiced representations of China, shouldn’t we also do something about our own media’s lack of transparency?” Liang asked. Liang refused to take an easy position by choosing between two nationalistic interest groups. Rather, from the point of the view of a journalist himself, he called for more independent thinking and a greater degree of objectivity and transparency. By taking up a position as citizen of the world toward the end of the show, Liang implied that the values he advocates do not belong to just one nation; China needs to accept some values as universal and use them as standards not just to evaluate other nations’ performances, but also those of their own. With regard to the Tibet issue, Liang cautiously suggested that the first step was to allow both local and nonlocal media to report the Tibet incident, and if the media was responsible, to consistently educate the general public about the politics and cultures of Tibet. Liang’s cosmopolitanism is not ungrounded. Working for a state-owned media organization, his appeal as a journalist to professional standards and self-criticism is perhaps more context-specific and tactful than some protests against China’s violation of human rights coming from Western media, because Liang’s criticism uses understandable language and has the advantage of geographic proximity to its targets. In light of the fact that a rerun of Liang’s TV program was canceled, the implication is that his message carries some critical power toward certain nationalistic tendencies coming from both above and below in China. In some articles he wrote after the broadcast of this TV program, Liang also repeatedly evoked strategic cosmopolitanism as a way of untangling the deadlock of conflicting national interests and opening up some new areas of discussion and engagement. Although not all of these articles were published in mainland newspapers, with the help of the Internet, the circulation of the articles, sometimes in their complete version, was wide, and responses posted on the Internet were numerous and enthusiastic. In one article entitled “Searching for the Largest Common Denominator—Praying for Interethnic

Introduction

19

Reconciliation,” Liang pointed out what mainstream media in China have been reluctant to talk about after the Tibet riot, that is, multicultural and multiethnic consciousness.45 Since the eruption of the riot, most of the media coverage both inside and outside China had cast this conflict in terms of territorial integrity versus separatism. Liang, however, recast the conflict in a different way. He wanted his readers to reexamine the state’s developmentalist and secularist consciousness that form the foundation of China’s national policies toward minor nationalities (a term in domestic policies for ethnic groups). Liang directly located the problem of Tibet in the heart of national consciousness and policies. His critique of the nation-state is partly informed by some Western or to a certain extent global discourses on multiculturalism, difference, religiosity and secularism, even though it is obvious from his writings that he is highly sensitive to the specificity of the Chinese situation. Liang is also the host of an eight-minute book review program on TV in which he discusses very recent books in English or in Chinese translation. It is fair to say that his articles demonstrate a vision of multiculturalism that has been inspired by an eclectic body of intellectual and spiritual resources, including Western Enlightenment philosophy, critiques of the Enlightenment in the West, and Buddhism of several different schools. Finally, one recent and noticeable development in Chinese cosmopolitanism is an emphasis on the local, in this case Hong Kong, in national and international geopolitics. The year 2008 is indeed a time for national and international interests to become entangled in China. So far the Olympic games have been an opportunity for China to flex its nationalist muscles, but cultural commentators such as Liang Wendao and others argue that truthfulness to the Olympic spirit should not be perceived as just a strategy to defend the nation on the global stage; rather, it should become an opportunity to examine and educate the public about global issues and concerns. In one article, Liang asks rhetorically, “What if the counter-protestors (those on the opposite side of the Free Tibet protestors) during the Olympics torch relay in places like Paris and San Francisco decided to hold Olympic flags rather than Chinese flags? Would that strategy have been more or less effective?”46 Of course, one could criticize him for still thinking within the national framework, for the Olympic spirit, which is about friendly competition among nation-states, is still different from transcending nation-state as a category. However, Liang’s message is meant to invite his readers to move to a larger scale, from the national to the inter-national.This change of scale by no means implies giving up one’s local anchor, for it has a specific aim of trying to change the national psychology of victimization to an attitude of playing the game, and this is a significant step toward changing certain fixed behavior and mentality.The Olympic flag in this case could imply competing within certain

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parameters and rules that have not been determined by a singular nation; it also means recognizing the existence of the other as a partner in this game and as someone who shares a common goal. Local history and tradition with regard to Hong Kong have become the center of attention in recent discussions about the Olympic torch relay.The criticism over the Hong Kong leg of the relay has inspired a discussion of Hong Kong’s mechanism of dealing with and diverting dissenting voices.47 The attitude of Liang, a native of Hong Kong, toward the city is interestingly mixed: in one article, he suggests that Hong Kong has something unique to offer in terms of providing a legitimate outlet for dissenting opinions to be heard. In another article, he criticizes Hong Kong government’s preference of “patriotic” government officials to “local heroes” to be the torch bearers. Consequently, the torch relay in Hong Kong was not an adequate reflection of the city of Hong Kong, but a national allegory that disregarded the interests and preferences of ordinary citizens. One sees from this ambivalent attitude that Liang does not attempt to present Hong Kong as a model of democracy, which is the image forged by the former British colonial government to distinguish itself from the “authoritarian” Chinese government. At the same time, Liang also recognizes the difference of Hong Kong from the authoritarian Chinese state and the possibilities opened up by this distance; for instance, there is some degree of institutional recognition and accommodation of difference here. On the latter issue, another local cultural worker, Deng Xiaohua, has made a similar point.48 She nostalgically longed for the peaceful democratic demonstrations on July 1 in Hong Kong several years ago; at the same time, she contrasted that with the brutal treatment of “unpatriotic” and “anti-Chinese” demonstrators during the torch relay this time. The significance of these discussions taking place in Hong Kong is that they represent a subtle position of being rooted in the local and at the same time defending certain values that are not uniquely particular or local. This complex position usefully opens up an alternative space within the monolith of the nationalist nation-state, but at the same time, because these discussions have been conducted in Chinese and circulated in Chinese-language media, including the Internet, it is likely that they are more effective than public criticism conducted in English or other foreign languages. I do not want to suggest that inside mainland China there have been no dissenting voices from the official rhetoric of nationalism. However, it is interesting to observe how interregional flow between Hong Kong and mainland China has facilitated the public expression of dissenting views. I think of these examples as manifestations of “actually existing” cosmopolitanism, following the definition given by Bruce Robbins.49 They demonstrate the interregional interactions inside the Chinese-speaking world as well as multifaceted and complex relationships to the nation-state as both

Introduction

21

a political entity and a cultural concept. If one only uses the nation to understand the political dynamics of this part of the world, one would be missing several other scales of political action where the local-national-international interactions shape people’s day-to-day social and political life. This reflection on contemporary Chinese culture shows that global thinking and imagination are not the exclusive right of the West. In the Chinese case, late Qing and early Republican Chinese intellectuals such as KangYouwei and Liang Qichao all had different formulations of global unity based on ideas drawn from myriad sources, including Confucianism, Buddhism, and Western Enlightenment philosophy. Although these cosmopolitan ideals were proven to be unrealizable by the turn of historical events, this did not prevent thinkers and activists of a younger generation such as Sun Yat-sen to construct their own pictures of global alliance based on commitment to decolonization and socialism. It is not true that these forms of cosmopolitan thinking originate from one source, the West, and in fact, the pluralization of cosmopolitanism both in terms of type and location is one of the goals of contemporary discussions of new cosmopolitanism, even though concrete case studies of cosmopolitanism on the periphery are still relatively few. Chine se Co smopolitanism as a H i stori cal Pe r spe c t ive The English-language periodicals studied in this book do not exactly fit with many contemporary arguments about cosmopolitanism because, first, the existence of these periodicals was related to the historical context of a certain moment.The relationship between these cultural productions and the historical moment is a topic that in itself needs to be studied. Second, some of these cosmopolitan practices do not represent flawless or even sound ethical positions from the contemporary point of view. Some texts show more acute awareness toward one form of otherness at the expense of others. One periodical I discuss in the last chapter is plainly imperialistic. It is not my intention to discuss these cosmopolitan cultural productions as exemplary social and ethical programs, although this is not to deny that all of the texts had certain political implications. In other words, this book has moved away from the focus of some contemporary discussions of cosmopolitics and concerns with global civil society, democracy, and transnational nongovernmental organizations and turned to the analysis of the politics of cosmopolitan cultural productions, although I think these two perspectives can be related in more than one way. In Visuality and Identity: Sinophone Articulations across the Pacific, Shu-mei Shih makes a useful distinction between “politics of democracy around the world” and “the politics of cosmopolitanism”; within the latter she includes intellectual strands that would not normally be considered part of the current discussion of cosmopolitanism, such as postcolonial theory.50

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This book follows Shih’s distinction and is more concerned with the latter term than the former, although I consider the two different kinds of inquiry related to each other. In fact, the study of cosmopolitan culture and its politics sets up a broad comparative and transnational context within which we could consider a great variety of traveling cultures, theories, and political programs, including the ideals that some proponents of cosmopolitanism advocate, such as democracy or civil society.As Timothy Brennan has suggested in his criticism of cosmopolitanism, “intellectual export (and import, I would add) [can] be seen as a heuristic model for understanding how the concept of cosmopolitanism functions.”51 If we agree to Brennan’s statement, then it seems to make sense to study the history of intellectual import and export in order to understand what kind of cosmopolitics would be viable in a particular local context. Based on Lydia Liu’s argument that Chinese modernity is a “translated modernity,” we can say that in the twentieth century at least, there were multiple and different cosmopolitan cultures.52 Yet the trajectory of translation Liu traces in her book seems to end with China and Chinese national culture as a destination. Although this book also deals with translation, it describes multidirectional and complicated trajectories of translation both from China outbound and among different localities in China, which often do not fit into the genealogy of national culture As Liu’s book indicates, current discussions of new cosmopolitanism may overlap with some existing scholarship of similar concerns in Chinese studies; still, the concerns and issues discussed by contemporary theorists of cosmopolitanism can bring new perspectives and open up new areas of interest that have been glossed over by existing approaches to study China. First, theories of new cosmopolitanism actually examine more rather than less closely the question of commitment.Theorists of new cosmopolitanism argue that detachment and attachment, displacement and commitment should be considered as connected terms, thereby linking the individual’s self-choice and quest for identity with collective goals and ethics. On this issue, one proponent of modernist cosmopolitanism, Rebecca Walkowitz, states, “Late-twentiethcentury theories of cosmopolitanism rely on three, somewhat different traditions of thought: a philosophical tradition that promotes allegiance to a transnational or global community, emphasizing detachment from local cultures and the interests of the nation; a more recent anthropological tradition that emphasizes multiple or flexible attachments to more than one nation and community, resisting conceptions of allegiance that presuppose consistency and uncritical enthusiasm; and a vernacular or popular tradition that values the risks of social deviance and the resources of consumer culture and urban mobility.” 53 Highlighting contradictory terms such as “detachment” and “attachment,” Walkowitz troubles the seemingly natural connection between

Introduction

23

cosmopolitanism and detachment by pointing out that “detachment” has different meanings and multiple standards are used to measure it. She further argues that detachment from or attachment to one particular culture or community has to be studied in conjunction with the meaning of “culture” in a particular historical context. Walkowitz’s discussion shows that in contemporary discussions of cosmopolitanism, cosmopolitanism is not necessarily accompanied by an uncritical and unconditional celebration of detachment. This leaves the door open for discussions about belonging and the language used to define belonging in cosmopolitan formulations. Belonging and affiliation are issues of creative tension that need to be worked out only by the cultural worker; yet although existing scholarship has done a great deal to reexamine the canon and nationalist history of modern Chinese culture, the tendency of automatically aligning certain cultural forms, language, and area of production with commitment to China still goes uncontested in certain areas. For instance, films produced during the time of Japanese occupation are still not available for public viewing and academic discussion in mainland China. Needless to say, the peripheral status of China in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is a main factor that causes many scholars to lean toward nationalism and stops them from embracing cosmopolitanism even when they promote translation or transnationalism. Whether nationalism and cosmopolitanism are necessarily opposed to each other in non-Western contexts such as China is a difficult question. My readings of some periodicals suggest that some forms of cosmopolitanism in early twentieth-century China were not in opposition to nationalism, especially in the case of publications during the Sino-Japanese War, when the threat of colonization was real and immediate. Even in the case of The China Critic, which was published before the Sino-Japanese War, it is significant that selfidentification as citizens of the world by the editors was accompanied by an equally emphatic statement that this magazine was the first Chinese-edited English periodical, which appeared in almost every advertisement for this magazine. However, the magazines did not just participate in the making of the nation in the ways that we now commonly assume to be what constitutes the Chinese nation. These magazines, being an eclectic cultural form, also present themselves as cases of political, geographic, and linguistic transgression. It is this supplemental information that makes us question the historical narrations of national culture. Just as contemporary discussions of new cosmopolitanism have drawn our attention to detachment/attachment as a question, they also enable us to think of the category “local” in more complicated ways. Contemporary proponents argue that new cosmopolitanism is not purely celebratory; it is not “virtuous identities,” but about historical embeddedness and local situatedness. Cosmopolitan worldviews are specific; they are not views from nowhere,

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but are contextualized by particular conditions and marked in terms of class and gender. It seems that what the term “local” means, and which “local” has historically played a more significant role in the geography of the nationstate, are questions worth asking in the Chinese context. Interregional variations with regard to their different relationships to the West and the Chinese nation-state would be more fully studied from the lens of new cosmopolitanism. Contemporary turns of history make it more and more difficult for us to think of “China” in unitary or monolithic terms or consider our object of study in singular terms in reference to mainland China only. In this context, the idea of the “local” needs to be pluralized. In the period discussed in this book, namely, from the late 1920s to the early 1940s, which was a period of great mobility and circulation, the complex interaction between the cosmopolitan and the local is an important theme that shapes discourses of cultural politics. In the early 1940s, responding to the needs of the Sino-Japanese War, many intellectuals and cultural workers left urban centers along the coasts for the hinterland and rural areas. In terms of aesthetics, many of them attempted to blend urban-based Western cultural forms with folk cultural elements. Mao Zedong’s “Talks at the Yan’an Forum” issued in the early 1940s responds to this wave of internal migration and attempts to foster, shape, and manage these multifaceted efforts of indigenizing and localizing cosmopolitan culture. (In fact, prior to this talk, the Nationalist government also made some efforts to encourage intellectuals to “go to the people.”)54 The result of Mao’s intervention was mixed. Although a few works produced in the 1940s were able to successfully utilize the knowledge of the cosmopolitan intellectuals and appeal to a rural audience at the same time, there were also many cases of failure as well.55 After 1949, more attempts at regulating the integration of the cosmopolitan and the local and shaping the cultural flow between the country and the city were made, often in a top-down manner, resulting in the elevation and fetishization of certain localities and forms of localness at the expense of others. Ironically, while the cultures produced in these localities are presented as authentic and indigenous, they are actually products of cosmopolitan translation as well. Overall, one can say that the cosmopolitan intellectual’s intervention can be found everywhere in the cultural history of twentieth-century China, and attempting to find a truly uncontaminated local and truly un-Westernized voice is difficult, if not impossible. Since the interpenetration of the cosmopolitan and the local is pervasive and characteristic of twentieth-century cultural formation, the formation of various discourses of the local in themselves needs to be examined. Some perspectives in current discussions of new cosmopolitanism can help us evaluate and examine the commitment to and distance from the local by the cosmopolitan intellectual through open discussions of texts as well as cultural

Introduction

25

and social practices, rather than through administrative means in a top-down manner. In James Clifford’s writing “Travelling Cultures,” for instance, travel does not refer to only physical movements on a transnational and translocal scale; it also refers to the production of the local from the point of view of a cosmopolitan subject.56 Interrogating preexisting fixed notions of the local, the cosmopolitan subject’s connection to the local is complex and a matter of negotiation.The discussion of cosmopolitanism allows us to uncover previously ignored and unexpected transnational and translocal connections, unsettle existing dominant discourses that censor and manage our discussions of crosscultural translation, and create new possibilities of interregional and translocal alliances. As I have already mentioned, modern Chinese cultural history is replete with cosmopolitan personalities and cultures, not necessarily because Chinese culture is constitutionally more open than other cultures, but because the perceptions of Chinese modernity as belated and Chinese culture as peripheral on the global stage have been popular perceptions. However, attention to global and local unevenness often results in reaffirmation of the nation-state as a solution to these problems. The tension of some traveling individuals, ethnic or diasporic subjects, with nationalism is thereby ignored. This negligence is symptomatically manifested in the traditional division between Chinese studies and ethnic and diaspora studies. In addition, even though new work in the area of popular culture has told some fascinating stories of the circulation of ideas and technology along with the traveling of cultural workers, the paradigmatic significance of these existing studies of popular culture to Chinese studies as a whole remains to be formulated.This kind of perspective requires that one take a critical perspective on existing institutions of knowledge that discipline cosmopolitan translation by setting up boundaries between the high and the low, the elite and the popular. Overall, I would argue that the binary opposition between the cosmopolitan versus the local without properly questioning the meaning of either side of the opposition has been so repeatedly evoked and has so exhausted its energy that it cannot offer a venue to find out what is the true “local.” Instead, I think that attention to the complex intertexuality of cosmopolitan cultures should be a viable alternative that would lead us to discover the true local in the political and ethical sense. Co smopolitan Publics In this study, the English-language magazines as a cosmopolitan cultural formation are situated within the polemical context of the “Chinese modern”— a term with many related connotations: it implies a geopolitical global condition of inequality and unevenness, the pursuit of self-independence and autonomy by the Chinese, the desire for equal recognition and competition on

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the global stage, and the internal reorganization of cultural institutions and knowledge systems according to Western models. In this context, the two sides of the phrase—“Chinese” and “modern”––are mutually constitutive terms, both with global and local connotations. The relationship of cosmopolitan cultural appropriation and circulation with the discourse of Chineseness is complex and entangled, sometimes mutually reinforcing, at other times antagonistic to one another. English as a foreign language is a small example of this much larger picture I try to describe in this book. Almost all recent studies of the Republican period contain some empirical evidence of how various cultural products, ranging from intellectual concepts (such as the term “self ”), cultural technology (such as the movie or popular music), literary figures and trends (such as modernism), moved across national borders and impacted cultural formation in the domestic Chinese context, and vice versa. Many of them show that transnational cultural exchange in this period was vibrant and uneven, and the circuits of cultural movement were not unidirectional but multidirectional, involving not just China and the West but also the Soviet Union and other nonWestern powers such as Japan. In addition to adding onto this growing list of circulating cultures, this book is specifically interested in exploring how the looser collective of the periodical organizes the translation and circulation of foreign cultures. In fact, the Anglophone periodicals discussed here served as a translational platform that resulted not in the systematic production of “Chinese modernity” as a national culture, but rather in scattered and momentary interactions of a smaller scale between the local and the global, the particular and the universal.This case shows that translational activities in the Republican period were so heterogeneous and vibrant that many of them exceeded the boundaries of what was deemed canonical or acceptable by nationalistic cultural institutions. Characterizing these publications as “cosmopolitan” indicates a revisionist perspective on nationalist cultural history by drawing attention to messy cultural interactions that have been left out of this history. Although cultural institutions and literary canons supported by the nationstate became an increasingly determinant factor in twentieth-century China, this does not preclude the existence of translational activities that fall outside this institutional structure. For instance, some recent studies have shown that even during the tightly controlled period of the Cultural Revolution in mainland China, underground reading groups could still be formed, and the circulation of foreign books by Soviet and American authors along with subversive literature by Chinese writers played an important role in cultivating several modernist trends in the post–Cultural Revolution era. 57 Furthermore, in spite of tight border patrols among various Chinese-speaking regions including mainland China,Taiwan, and Hong Kong and very different

Introduction

27

cultural genealogies and canons in these places, exchange in the Chinesespeaking world has still occurred in an “unruly manner,” to use a phase by Meng Yue with which she describes cosmopolitan cultural formations in the late Qing period.58 It is not my intention to produce a holistic and complete description of Chinese modernity, since we cannot assume that all periodicals mediated between the foreign and the domestic, the cultural and the political in the same manner. In fact, the variety within a periodical and differences among various periodicals offer a perspective of comparison between different cosmopolitan cultural formations in different languages. Available discussions of the periodical suggest that it is a cultural form that lends itself to the representation of cosmopolitan subject matters. Some critics describe the periodical as not easily falling into the traditional taxonomy of literary forms and suggest that one of the key questions to be asked about this form is how open and closed it is. The periodical has certain characteristics that are associated with openness, such as its mixing of different genres and authorial voices and resistance to temporal boundaries by virtue of being a serial publication. These traits seem to encourage readers to produce their own readings of the text. However, the openness of the periodical form also has a number of qualifications. Margaret Beetham points out that “the relationship to time is the central characteristic of the periodical but this means that the form has a deep regular structure.”59 Weekly magazines bought as a treat conform to rather than resist the structure of work-time. In addition to temporal regulation, serial publications require a certain degree of continuity in terms of “format, shape and patterns of content,” and “maintaining a regular readership means offering readers a recognizable position in successive numbers, that is creating a consistent ‘reader’ within the text.”60 It is these qualities that make the periodical both “open-ended” and “end-stopped,” “Janus-like,” a form that offers a well-defined range within which the editor and the reader produce meaning. Print culture has historically been associated with the emergence of the public sphere and the practice of democracy in modern Europe.61 In Chinese studies, there have been similar discussions about the public sphere in the Chinese context. Particularly after the Chinese government’s crackdown on the democracy movement in the late 1980s, scholars have been interested in investigating the question of the public sphere and civil society in China. As a 1993 debate in the journal Modern China shows, however, many scholars interested in exploring whether an equivalent to the bourgeois public sphere as described by Jürgen Habermas has existed in China had to confront a methodological difficulty of using a European society of a particular historical moment as the model for the study of Chinese society. Since this debate, some historians in Chinese studies such as Bryna Goodman and Eugenia Lean have gone beyond searching for structural proximity between Chinese and Western soci-

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eties.Their studies focus on “publics” that are “less as place, but more in terms of processes and practice.”62 Their studies of urban publics emphasize the ways in which different social groups used cultural means to interact with ruling regimes or how public sentiments enabled participatory politics in the Republican period.63 This book similarly moves away from the sociological inquiry of whether a truly liberal public sphere has ever existed in China. But it specifically discusses one approach to the public and public participation that has not been fully explored by scholars in Chinese studies, that is, the public that is both empowering and self-limiting as a space of translation, encounter, and comparison. To think of the public in this way depends upon some perceptions of the public as plural, limiting, and self-limiting, perceptions that are results of studies in fields of study other than Chinese studies. Writings on the public by scholars such as Michael Warner draw upon literary analytical skills to examine the form of public discourses and the limitation determined by the form. He argues that “the discourse of a public is a linguistic form from which the social conditions of its own possibility are in large part derived. The magic by which discourse conjures a public into being, however, remains imperfect because of how much it must presuppose. . . . It [a public] appears to be open to indefinite strangers but in fact selects participants by criteria of shared social space (though not necessarily territorial space), habitus, topical concerns, intergeneric references, and circulating intelligible forms (including idiolects or speech genres).”64 Other critics also question the exclusion of the liberal public sphere by calling attention to the existence of alternative and counter-publics of women, gays and lesbians, and members of ethnic or minority groups. In his introduction to The Phantom Public Sphere, Bruce Robbins argues that the public sphere is simultaneously “invested with power” and “serves as a critique of monolithic notions of power.” “Unlike ‘hegemony,’ the public sphere is less on the side of rule, more open to opposing views. Unlike ‘culture,’ it is more obviously a site of interaction with other classes and cultures.”65 Existing discussions of the public provide methodological guidelines to my reading of the periodicals in the following chapters by suggesting that the periodicals as cosmopolitan publics should be looked upon as a space of encounters between cultures and with other equally cosmopolitan cultures, including those that do not use English as the medium of communication. If we accept the Chinese editors’ self-designation as “cosmopolitan” and consider the periodicals as cosmopolitan publics, then on the basis of available discussions of the public, we must realize that like all publics, as Michael Warner has argued, these periodicals as public discourses are “self-organized” and “constituted through mere attention.” The use of the English language in a predominantly Chinese-speaking society is of course an obvious trait of

Introduction

29

cosmopolitanism, but this language choice also makes it very uncosmopolitan because it shuts off non-English-speakers and readers from this social space. In terms of the relationship with non-Anglophone publics, my readings of the periodicals show that some magazines are actually “unusual in the degree of [their] social porousness, the range of voices that [they] make audible, the number of contexts that [they open] for transformation.”66 However, this does not mean that they gave even and sufficient representation to Chinese culture in all forms. Therefore, this version of “Chinese cosmopolitanism” represented by these periodicals is by nature discrepant, not equivalent to any kind of unconditional openness. Perhaps because the magazines were situated in a Chinese locale (some of them claimed to have worldwide distribution, but it is hard to verify the range and success), the magazines actually did more in terms of representing China than representing the outside world or the West to China. In other words, their relationship to the West and to China was not one of equilibrium, and their affinity could be easily detected if not already clearly pronounced. Since these periodicals are closely related to representing China, it is necessary to discuss here what kind of picture of China they produced. Here I need to engage with another influential discussion of the circulation of print culture—Benedict Anderson’s famous 1983 study of nationalism as imagined community. Anderson singles out the newspaper and the novel as the two cultural forms that create a sense of togetherness in time and place across the national territory. According to Anderson, newspapers, like “one-day bestsellers,” provide a basic pattern of organization for world events happening in disparate locations based on “the steady onward clocking of homogenous, empty time.”67 In a later article, Anderson further proposes that we should read the newspaper as a logic of unbound seriality that erases the differences between the domestic and the international arenas, the former colonizer’s and the colonized’s worlds, through reinforcing a standardization of vocabulary.The newspaper is the form of universalism established through linguistic equivalents and temporal simultaneity; in Anderson’s own words,“unbound seriality, which has its origins in the print market, especially in newspapers, and in the representations of popular performance, is . . . for example, the seriality that makes the United Nations a normal, wholly unparadoxical institution.”68 Although the English-language periodicals discussed in this book are serialized publications like the newspaper, they do not exemplify the kind of unironic and unparadoxical universalism that Anderson describes here. In fact, Anderson’s notion of unbound seriality presents a very idealistic picture of serialized publications, ignoring the actual reading experience of print culture that creates its meaning. He makes no distinction among different kinds of serialized publication, nor is he attentive to various forms of linguistic coding— for instance, references to and insertions of texts from another linguistic

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context—in some serialized publications such as the ones that I will be discussing in this book. In addition, English-language serial publications such as The China Critic and T’ien Hsia did not exist in a cultural vacuum, but had immediate connections and intense negotiations with other periodicals published at the same time. One can clearly see through the many intertextual references in these periodicals that nationalistic sentiments are not fostered through creating unbound seriality, but through negotiating with other public cultural productions. For instance, an editorial published in the September 26, 1929, issue of The China Critic, which I will discuss in greater deal in the next chapter, demonstrates the power struggles in the bilingual and interracial public sphere of the semicolonial city. In fact, it was necessary for the nationalistic position of The China Critic to be established precisely because of the context of heterogeneous publics which were in competition with one another.69 In this context of heterogeneity and conflict, the cosmopolitan public, through its ambitious scope and international outreach, depicted a contested nation both internally and externally.The raison d’être for some of the Englishlanguage periodicals was actually derived from this unevenness on both global and local levels. However, this reflection of unevenness does not mean that the cosmopolitan public of the English periodicals can be considered as a counterpublic or an alternative public. It has it own ideological blindness and can be politically more ambiguous than a counterpublic. In a study of an entirely different context, eighteenth-century England, Michael McKeon measures the internal contradiction of the public sphere against its ideal of inclusiveness: The public-sphere ideal of inclusiveness is not the ideological formation of a self-conscious class strategically concerned to universalize its own interest. It is the discovery, in a society stratified by status, that the idea of the public interest (or the national interest, or the commonwealth) has meaning only if it is premised on the conviction that interests are multiple and that no single interest—not even that of the monarch— is universal or “absolute.”The public sphere’s impulse toward universality bespeaks, not a (bad-faith) claim to equality of access and representation . . . but the will to act upon the notion of a discursive and virtual calculus capable of adjudicating between an indefinite number of inherently legitimate interests.This was to be by definition an explicit exercise in conflict.70 In light of this observation, we can say that the contradiction of the publicness of the English-language periodical was the very contradiction of the world that these periodicals tried to represent. This contradiction was internal and intrinsic to the form of the periodical as world-making cultural

Introduction

31

mechanism. From the point of view of the content, the cosmopolitanism embodied by these periodicals meant coming to terms with this global context of inequality and competition and articulating a desire for “equality of access and representation” on the global stage. In Publics and Counterpublics, Michael Warner distinguishes between the “stranger-relationality” in a public in modernity from the premodern public’s treatment of the stranger. Whereas the premodern treatment of the stranger operates according to a paradigm of exoticism versus commonality, strangerhood is the “constitutive and normative environment,” the basis of the paradigm of the modern public.71 The public, according to Warner, is essentially a relationship with strangers. However, the public’s ability to mediate between strangers does not automatically guarantee a public’s openness. Warner has warned us that a public is by nature limited both by “material limits— means of production and distribution, the physical textual objects, social conditions of access—and by internal ones, including the need to presuppose forms of intelligibility already in place, as well as the social closure entailed by any selection of genre, ideolect, style, address, and so on.”72 Following this analysis, the cosmopolitan performance of English periodicals such as The China Critic is made up by not just the claims of the editors; rather, it is a discourse that is both “self-organized” and embedded, through indexicality and intertextuality, in a context of similar type of cultural productions in the same time period in Shanghai and beyond. Indexicality and intertextuality define the magazines’ location as transnational and urban.The rest of the book will provide more detailed descriptions and concrete examples of the openness and closedness of specific English-language magazines as cosmopolitan publics. This book contains four chapters following this introduction. A sustaining trope in all four chapters is travel, which happens to both people and culture on literal and imaginary levels. The first chapter focuses on one particular locality—the semicolonial city Shanghai from the perspective of the overseas Chinese student who had returned home.The editorials in their publication The China Critic (1928–1945) convey the excitement and anxiety toward the rapidness of circulation of all kinds of cultural products and ideologies.The focus on the editorials simultaneously reveals the ambitious scope of this publication, reflects the emerging urban modernity through heterogeneity in terms of subject matter, and exposes the ideological construction of this cosmopolitan public at the same time. The second chapter deals with another kind of real and imaginary travel across the divide between the city and the country through close examination of another publication, T’ien Hsia (1935–1941).The translocal scope of this publication replaces homogenous and unitary notions of national time and space with cosmopolitan time and space. Whereas cosmopolitan space

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brings into focus both the disparity and connectedness between the country and the city, cosmopolitan time implies concreteness and intertextuality when time is conceived in association with a particular place and the overlapping of the modern and the premodern. The third chapter studies the construction of internationalism in a group of English periodicals with leftist orientation.The translations of contemporary Chinese literature in these periodicals repeatedly bring attention to the pluralistic conception of internationalism. The fourth and last chapter follows some editors and writers for these publications to other locations and other times as they traveled and immigrated to the colonial city Hong Kong and the American city New York in the 1950s. These places and locations continually trouble a singular conceptualization of China and Chineseness by drawing attention to various forms of translation in relation to displacement and exile.

C hap te r 1

The China Critic Writing the City, the Nation, and the World

T HE C HINA C RITIC was founded on May 31, 1928, by a group of Chinese intellectuals who had studied in the United States and returned to China. It was an English-language weekly with a history of almost two decades, from 1928 to 1945. During the magazine’s existence, the editorial board had many changes, but the long-term members, such as Ma Yinchu, Pan Guangdan, Gui Zhongshu, and Zhang Xinhai, came from a similar background of intense Western education and solid grounding in classical Chinese culture. They graduated from the Qing Hua Preparation School for Chinese Students Going to the United States (Qinghua Liumei Yubei Xuexiao), which later evolved into Qing Hua University, and studied literature, sociology, law, and journalism in American universities. After returning to China, some of them taught for several years at Qing Hua University in Beijing for a few years before leaving for Shanghai to work for The China Critic. The China Critic’s funding might have come directly from the Nationalist government. In fact, several members of The China Critic’s editorial board also held important positions in the Nationalist government around the time of the founding of the magazine. Some worked in the Legislative Yuan headed by Sun Ke, Sun Yat-sen’s son, who frequently wrote for The China Critic, especially in the first few issues. Several years after The China Critic was founded, Sun Ke became the director of a cultural institution called “Sun Yat-sen Institute for Advancement of Culture and Education,” which funded translation projects. Even though this cultural institution was founded later than The China Critic, it is possible that The China Critic’s funding source was connected with this organization. The China Critic fits the theme of this book because the word “cosmopolitan” was actually used in the pages of this periodical. Used in various different contexts, it acquired multiple connotations that related this word with other words such as “hybrid” and “internationalist.”This word was 33

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sometimes associated with the self-fashioning of the editors and used interchangeably with their self-description as “citizen of the world.” One instance, for example, was an editorial published in the third-year anniversary issue of this magazine, in which the writer proposed to set up a “liberal cosmopolitan club” made up of “men who are citizens of the world and can come together to thrash out some of the problems confronting the mankind as a whole.”1 It is important to bear in mind that since this was an English-language publication, the editors used key terms such as “liberal” and “cosmopolitan” directly in English.There was no translation involved on the linguistic level. However, the usage of this term or terms with similar meaning could also be seen in Chinese-language documents of the same period, where foreign cultures and languages were assimilated into the local context in a different way from the English publications considered in this book. It is usually understood that the cosmopolitan individual has a certain distance from the local context; however, it would not be possible to understand the discourse and practice of cosmopolitanism in The China Critic without situating it in local politics and cultural discourses. It appears that this magazine’s discourse of cosmopolitanism had three related aspects: in terms of international politics, these editors advocated anti-imperialism. In terms of cultural position, the editors promoted the fusion between the traditional and the modern and exhibited an attitude of acceptance toward Chinese traditional culture. Facing a rapid turnover of new ideas and ideologies, the editors promoted slow change and peaceful transformation. These two related aspects of the cosmopolitan discourse are reflected in the editorials of this magazine. In the first few years of its publication, the editorials and some contributed articles deal with the issue of imperialism as manifested in the urban space of Shanghai, such as debating the abolition of extraterritoriality and equal access to public facilities in the concessions. (The concessions refer to several sections of Shanghai that were under the control of various foreign governments, creating a condition of the simultaneous existence of several sovereignties in the city.) As the Sino-Japanese War approached, this magazine was gradually taken over by topics related to Japanese invasion. At the same time, this nationalist position was accompanied by a culturally moderate position, which distinguished the editors from their predecessors, the cultural radicals of the New Culture Movement. The third aspect of this cosmopolitan discourse had to do with this magazine’s cultural expression in terms of both its language—English––and its employment of modernist poetics for purposes of self-definition, selffashioning, and the representation of the city of Shanghai. In this respect, Rebecca Walkowitz’s study of cosmopolitan style is useful for our analysis of The China Critic, particularly the writings of one editor, Lin Yutang.2 In discussing “cosmopolitan style,” Walkowitz demonstrates through examining

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a number of modernist and postmodernist works of fiction by Western writers that literary taste and style are closely connected with transnational concerns and worldviews. She writes, “cosmopolitanism refers to a philosophical project and also to an attitude (refusing to specify positively and definitively).”3 Although early-twentieth-century Chinese culture has many differences from the cultural contexts of the British and American writers Walkowitz examines, her emphasis on style and narrative gesture is very helpful for us to link The China Critic as a textual practice with its politics. Writing in English for Chinese writers has a kind of performative quality that mediates the distance between the stylistic and the political, the urban and the national. Furthermore, since the late 1920s and early 1930s was a period of innovation and experimentalism, the particular narrative posture cultivated by this magazine should be situated in conjunction with other kinds of cultural experiments, many of which took place in different arenas such as Chinese-language print and visual culture and material culture. In other words, even when cultural practitioners at that time did not advertise themselves as “cosmopolitan,” their cultural practices could very well carry translational, transnational and experimental qualities, which could be considered as “cosmopolitan styles,” according to Walkowitz’s definition. Periodicals such as The China Critic embody a particular kind of mobility—the migration of cultural professionals from the world of the university to public culture. Due to the flexibility of the periodical form and its ability to transgress generic divisions, this publication demonstrates how the cultural and the political, an experimental flair and a commitment to the local context were connected to each other.At the same time, however, when we juxtapose the cosmopolitan editor against other types of cosmopolitan personalities and cultural gestures of the same time period, the borders of this particular kind of cosmopolitan translation are exposed. In this chapter, I will situate The China Critic in the semicolonial city in the late 1920s and then discuss the multiple forms and levels of cosmopolitan translation conducted by this magazine. I will focus mainly on the editorials and the writings of select editors, because these texts enable me to consider the degree of openness of the periodical form and contrast the editors’ cultural position with other practitioners of vernacular cosmopolitanism in Shanghai of the same period. Shanghai—A City of Borde r s In a 2002 article entitled “Cosmopolitan De-scriptions: Shanghai and Hong Kong,”Ackbar Abbas invites us to think of global cities as the concrete site for exploring the possibility of a new cosmopolitanism. Abbas states, “Whether a cosmopolitanism for the global age will emerge depends on our ability to grasp a space, that of the global city, that is always concrete even in

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its elusiveness. And this involves not so much imagining a transnational state as reimagining the city.”4 However, focusing on cities rather than the nationstate is not natural for Chinese studies, originally conceived as an area studies discipline, for which the nation-state has been the primary category of study. But exactly for this reason, from another perspective, studying the city would lead us to rethink the state, reembedding it in a network of transnational relations, many of which have left concrete traces on urban space. In recent years, much has been written about the two formally colonial and now very different global cities in the Chinese-speaking region, Hong Kong and Shanghai.An interesting difference can be observed in some writings on these two cities: whereas contemporary Hong Kong has elicited many discussions of identity and belonging, contemporary Shanghai has not.This difference, of course, has to do with the recent political change in the status of Hong Kong, but one wonders whether the ambivalent relationship between the nation-state and the city, which is still very much an issue with contemporary Hong Kong, was not also a thorny topic for the old Shanghai. The social history of Shanghai in the late 1920s tells us that the city was in every sense of the word a dueling ground for various nation-states. In the Republican era, Shanghai’s status as the manufacturing, distribution, and financial center of China was inseparable from its status as a semicolony. In the late 1920s, according to The History of Shanghai, a ten-volume book project written by leading scholars in mainland China, the combined area of Shanghai’s concessions was several times bigger than the area of the Chinese section of Shanghai. The concessions had better roads and residential facilities, more shops, financial businesses, and trading companies than the Chinese section of the city.Although many residents in the concessions were Chinese, the legal and political institutions, including the military, were all foreign controlled, and this colonial infrastructure, which directly influenced many aspects of the political and economic life in Shanghai, was complete and in place by the late 1920s.5 However, the late 1920s was also the period when the Nationalist government began to seize control of Shanghai. Frederic Wakeman’s book Policing Shanghai, 1927–1937 contains many memorable details of the attempts made by the Nationalist Party to implement order in this disorderly city and control the “vices” of the “reds,” prostitution and drugs.Anti-imperialism was part of the Nationalist government’s agenda to gain control over the city. After the Nationalist Party set up its government in Nanjing in 1927, it made many efforts to take back the concessions in order to be truthful to its anti-imperialist and nationalist ideology. It managed to reclaim concessions in Zhenjiang and Wuhan soon after 1927, but Shanghai’s concessions were not taken back until 1943. According to The History of Shanghai, the Nationalist government

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perceived economic development and modernization as an anti-imperialistic strategy in Shanghai. A typical example of this policy is a poster issued by the municipal government of Shanghai in 1927. On it, four figures representing Shanghai citizens of different classes are asked questions about the nature of imperialism and its real intention in China. Echoing the intended official line, the citizens answer, as shown on the poster, “If China wants to prosper, we have to uphold economic development” and “Peaceful coexistence between Chinese and foreigners is vital for economic development.”6 In the year 1927, the Nationalist government named Shanghai a special municipality, under the direct jurisdiction of the Nanjing government.Taking advantage of this special status, the city government designed an ambitious urban development project for the Chinese section of the city, intending to replace the concessions’ important position as nodal points of connection between China and the world. Roads, schools, and hospitals were constructed, and the population of the Chinese section of the city grew rapidly.This urban development project lasted for about ten years, until war with Japan officially broke out in 1937. Although this project was not completed, it attracted many foreign-trained professionals, intellectuals, and artists to Shanghai, making it truly a city of immigrants on the translocal scale. Several editors of The China Critic were among the new professional immigrants who made their way to Shanghai to participate in this modernization project. If semicolonialism can be simply understood as the simultaneous existence of sovereignty and colonialism, then this short account of the history of Shanghai suggests that both left their marks on the physical space of the city.The city’s history of modernization was inseparable from both its semicolonial status and the Nationalist Party. It is partly because of the existence of foreign-controlled territories that Shanghai managed to become a privileged site of a state-sponsored modernization project, however short-lived this project was. The China Critic was founded in 1928, when the concessions, both as a contemporary reality of colonialism and as a reminder of a history of humiliation in the past, were a challenge to the new nation-state represented by the Nationalist Party. This magazine was set up as a cultural platform to compete with foreign powers. However, I would argue that the editors’ political and cultural position, although closely connected with the Nationalist Party, was far more complex and multifaceted than the Nationalist Party’s ideology. Previous scholars have tended to evaluate cosmopolitan cultural practitioners in the Chinese urban context within the domestic context by measuring the distance between a particular cultural practice or practitioner and the ruling party. In Revolution and Cosmopolitanism: The Western Stage and Chinese Stages, for instance, Joseph Levenson portrays the Shanghai

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bourgeois cosmopolitans as self-indulgent pursuers of pure aestheticism who were opposed to revolution and nationalism.7 As we know, Levenson’s book is an unfinished project in which many complicated issues have been left unresolved. Communist nationalism is not the only brand of nationalism in twentieth-century China, and the intellectual’s relationship with the nationstate was intertwined in a complex manner throughout the twentieth century. In addition, the small amount of scholarship on Chinese-owned foreignlanguage newspapers tends to analyze these publications’ political positions on the basis of studying their relationships to the state. For instance, Eugene Lubot, one of a few scholars who have written about The China Critic, characterizes this publication as a “liberal magazine,” one that “adopted positions similar to those of the New Cultural liberals” such as Cai Yuanpei and Hu Shi, and often struck an antagonistic pose to the Nationalist government.8 This magazine perhaps received financial and administrative support from the Nationalist government, however, its contents––especially in the issues published before the war––are much more heterogenous than what one would expect from a mere Kuomintang mouthpiece. Most editorials in The China Critic show that they were related not just to the nation-state but also to the city, which is unique and complex in modern Chinese history. The multilingual urban public culture, more than the policies of the Nationalist government, determined this magazine’s political and cultural positions. As some scholars have pointed out, Chinese modern media were transnational and translational in their origin.As early as the late nineteenth century, some Chinese-language newspapers and magazines were owned by foreign businessmen.9 By the late 1920s, this transnationality was carried over into the linguistic realm. According to the historian of journalism Hu Daojing, as many as ninety-six English-language newspapers and journals had been published in Shanghai on various subjects including ethics, law, religion, and science by the late 1920s, and there were publications in other languages as well.10 When it was first published, in most of its advertisements The China Critic proudly claimed to be the first Chinese-edited English-language newspaper. In the mid-1930s, the publication tried to attract readers by claiming to be the oldest Chinese-edited English-language newspaper. These advertisements show that Hu Daojing was right in suggesting that publishing a magazine from an self-proclaimed Chinese standpoint was a novel phenomenon in the late 1920s, and that this in itself could become an advertising strategy to attract more readers. However, The China Critic had to compete for its place with other English-language publications at the same time. For instance, on September 26, 1929, The China Critic published a short editorial that enables us to observe the power struggles in the bilingual and interracial public sphere of the semicolonial city. Entitled “The Shanghai

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Evening Post,” this editorial tells the story of an American-run Englishlanguage newspaper, the Shanghai Evening Post, being attacked by another foreign-run publication for “being the paid organ of the Chinese” because it regularly published editorial comments translated from the Chinese press. The writer of The China Critic editorial endorses the Post for its “liberal policy” and “attempt to give China a square deal,” and expresses regret that it discontinued this practice for fear of “unnecessary controversy.”The editorial then complains that: after all Shanghai is still too “hot” for fair-minded foreigners, and the power of indirect censorship is many times more dangerous than the actual censorship by the National Government. Our foreign friends clamor for the freedom of speech when Nanking attempts to exercise a certain amount of control over offending papers, but when a foreign paper practices the principle of freedom of speech by giving space to Chinese opinions, it is immediately subjected to all kinds of insidious rumors and abuses. We have read in [the] Annual Report of the Shanghai Municipal Council the criticism that the Chinese press has no opinions to express so as to inform the foreign public of what the Chinese are thinking. Now that we have had opinions to express, the foreign public seems to think we are “making too much noise.” The under-dog must not remain quiet and yet must not be heard. The mind of the average foreigner is beyond comprehension. Perhaps the Oriental atmosphere is eroding it.11 This editorial reminds us that the public culture in Shanghai was not just multilingual but also interwoven.Translational practices employed by a particular newspaper could enable public opinions to be shared with audiences of a different language group. However, this public culture was far from being in a state of peaceful coexistence. Regulations implemented by the government and the opinions of readers (what the editorial writer calls “indirect censorship”) controlled a publication’s political position. In this context, evoking the rhetoric of freedom of expression and the double-talk about Oriental corruption were strategic moves for the purpose of defending a position of Chineseness.The writer of this editorial clearly did not believe that freedom of expression already existed in Shanghai, but instead of abandoning this Western liberal value, he held onto it in order to defend his own position. This kind of strategic cultural translation shows that cosmopolitanism coexisted with nationalism in this publication. One editor, Lin Yutang, was particularly skillful at negotiating with the language of universalism. Born in a village close to China’s entry port in south Fujian province in 1895,

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Lin Yutang received training at St. John’s University in Shanghai that would prepare him to become a minister. But influenced by the New Culture Movement in the late 1910s, he changed his academic pursuits from religion to English and Western literature. He went to Harvard and the University of Leipzig, where he studied linguistics, before he became involved with The China Critic. In the early 1920s, he joined a student movement against the corrupt warlords in Beijing and openly expressed his support for the activists after the authorities of Beijing massacred several hundred students in 1926. As a result, Lin was put on the government’s blacklist and fled from the city. 12 In the late 1920s, he gradually withdrew from the political frontline and began to publish more and more in English. Lin was a columnist in addition to being an editor of The China Critic. An article published in Lin’s column “The Little Critic” entitled “The Spirit of Chinese Culture” was originally a speech delivered before the Peace Group from Oxford University in 1932. A section of the article reads as follows: I wish first to establish the point that the Chinese are an intensely human people and that the Chinese culture is an intensely human culture. It is the culture of the old man, tolerant, humorous, peaceful, and content, with the mellow wisdom and weakness of old age. Much of that contempt of the West for China is that of an impatient young reformer for the old man, while the annoyance of China at the West is that of an old man, who has seen a great deal of life and knows what it amounts to, at being dragged away by the young and clever persons from his armchair by the fireside to take a sea bath on a September morn.You will perhaps perceive already why I would not even attempt to impose the calm philosophy of an old man on the young philosophers of the West.The danger is that while the old man will have enough commonsense to see the fun of a dip on a September morn, the young man will not have common sense enough to appreciate the beauty of a place by the fireside. It would be apparently foolish to ask the question who is happier? If you are truly Chinese and human, you would answer,“Both are fairly happy and fairly unhappy.”13 The word “human” in the above passage is of course not a neutral term that carries equal weight with regard to the West and the Chinese. This passage can be considered as engaging in a process of translation that would transport the term “human” into the Chinese context. In doing so, a rhetorical struggle for the ownership of this value-laden term is staged in this passage which ends with the conjoining of two very different terms— “Chinese” and “human.” While the writer Lin Yutang can be accused of

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evoking a familiar Orientalist formula––the East equals spirituality and old age, the West equals materiality and youth––this self-ascribed Orientalism was employed strategically and almost self-consciously. One could think of this instance of cultural translation as an intentional exchange based on careful calculation of gains and losses. In a different context, alluding to the financial industry in the contemporary era of globalization,Ackbar Abbas describes the cultural practices and rhetorical strategies used by subaltern cosmopolitans in global cities as a kind of “cultural arbitrage.”Arbitrage, he explains,“refers to the ways profits are obtained by capitalizing, through the use of electronic technologies, on price differentials in markets situated in different time zones and parts of the world.” 14 This strategy of maximizing profit through cutting across conventional boundaries of time and space is invented by the dominant party in globalization; however, Abbas argues that it can also be usurped by the cosmopolitans from below as a strategy to bargain with the dominant party. Lin’s use of the term “human” can be seen as an example of cultural arbitrage. His prose destabilizes the spatial fixedness of the term “human” in association with the West and enables it to travel to another part of the world. However, this strategy of playing with spatial disjunction is not riskfree. In Abbas’s article, the transnational migrant labor entering the space of the global city would have to risk losing their rootedness at home while wagering with the global capital. Lin was also aware of the risks and danger involved in Anglophone writing and translation between Chinese and Western terms, and this awareness was conveyed through the edginess of his tone in these early English-language writings. If, due to its language, the editors’ background, and the historical context of modernization within which this publication was situated, The China Critic can be considered as a cosmopolitan cultural production, then as I have suggested in the above analysis, this particular brand of cosmopolitanism is not equivalent to celebration of liberal values for their own sake. Rather, its goal was to negotiate for some kind of hospitable coexistence in the urban context. In a particularly interesting essay by Lin on the issue of extraterritoriality entitled “An Open Letter to an American Friend” published in “The Little Critic,” one can see how political and ethical implications of the condition of extraterritoriality were welded to the politics of language, bilingual competence, and cultural education. At the beginning of the article, Lin first argues that extraterritoriality contradicts the spirit of the law by allowing some people to be placed above law. Extraterritoriality is a self-interested condition and “is one of the modern conveniences you [referring to the ‘American Friend’ in the title] don’t like to do without. But it is a ‘modern convenience’ you can well afford only while your gunboats can at any time silence C.T. Wang, when they choose to.”15 (C.T. Wang

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was the Nationalist government’s Foreign Minister at that time.) After emphasizing the connection between military power and the practice of extraterritoriality, Lin shifts the focus of his article to manners and language usage. “You don’t know what a luxurious feeling it gives to a fellow to ride round in a rickshaw—extra-territorially, i.e., feeling oneself above all the police, police-regulations, laws, customs, and tribunals of the land. It is distinctly aristocratic. . . . Extra-territoriality is demoralizing. It breeds bad manners, and it exempts the persons enjoying the privilege from the social obligation of being pleasant to one’s neighbors.”16 Here Lin implies that extraterritoriality was an obstacle to a harmonious state of living for people of different races and national origins or a condition of neighborliness and friendship, and he suggests that its abolition could perhaps start with a language class to teach English speakers a few Chinese words of greeting and apology. The essay ends with a powerful statement: “It [extraterritoriality] is an atrocious word any way, and ought to be abolished linguistically and lexicographically.”17 If “extraterritoriality” can be understood as literally meaning “above or beyond the territory,” this article revolves around a question of whether abolishing “extraterritorial” privileges would require an “extralingual” action, in other words, action beyond the realm of language and communication. The article’s ending in a language lesson to alleviate cultural misunderstanding and abolish extraterritorial privilege would imply that Lin had high hopes for interlingual communication and intercultural understanding. Linking a political condition directly with cultural practice and linguistic education, Lin’s article conveys his faith in humanism which actually represents the position of the entire periodical The China Critic. Lin’s habit of evoking a social and political context that explains why the particular kind of interlingual communication as practiced by this periodical exists is a common tendency in almost all editorials in The China Critic. Reading through the editorials, we realize that this was a city divided into multiple national spaces and inhabited by people speaking various languages, and that in fact, the trope of the border is crucial to understanding both the city and the magazine’s cultural position. Border can be understood geographically in reference to the spatial divisions created by the existence of concessions and the International Settlement, and conceptually as a description of the relationship between of the editor and the urban environment. The trope of the border registers on multiple levels. Whereas politically, The China Critic had a clearly articulated anti-imperialist agenda, this political position was complicated by the cultural and linguistic borders manifested in this publication. In the words of the editors, they understood cosmopolitanism as a political position that combined “nationalism” with “internationalism.”Yet in a much-divided city

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with heterogeneous cultures and people, what these terms meant was not self-evident, but needed definition and clarification.The urban environment that was undergoing many changes in the late 1920s presented itself as a cultural border for Chinese intellectuals, posing epistemological challenges to them. Shanghai’s mixed urban environment was perceived as chaotic, rootless, and even threatening to the identity of the Chinese.Therefore, one can say that there seemed to be a contradiction between cosmopolitanism as an intellectual agenda advocated by the magazine editors and cosmopolitanism as urban experience. Hy b ri di ty Transp lante d In 1931, the editors defined the goal of the magazine as performing a task of double translation:“Although our publication is in a foreign language, and it would be most natural for us to devote our efforts to making China better understood by the outside world, we nevertheless consider our important mission not fulfilled without also making the outside world better known to our own people.”18 This self-definition both aligns this publication with a domestic cosmopolitan practice of Chinese translations of foreign culture for purposes of self-strengthening and enlightenment—a prolonged cultural history dating back to several centuries before––and clarifies the publication’s difference from this tradition. First, unlike Chinese translations of foreign books, the targeted readership for this publication was mixed in terms of nationality and expansive in terms of geographic location. The magazine had a small circulation abroad, and its domestic readership consisted of both Chinese and foreigners living in China. Its readership will be discused further in the next section. Second, English as target language of translation carried different cultural significance from the more common Chinese. English was a world language and a lingua franca for various national communities living in Shanghai; however, as a means of communication with the Chinese readers who were also a part of this magazine’s targeted audience, the medium of English restricted the recipients of cultural knowledge to specific sectors of the urban society while placing the editors within this elite group as well. (The use of vernacular Chinese was also restricted to a particular class and education at this time.) Thus, English in the context of this magazine, was both a universal language and a local cultural capital. It played an important role in shaping the cultural community in Shanghai, while registering the distance between Shanghai and the world as well as the differing social status of English and Chinese. This ambition did not rest easy with the editors themselves. Communicating with the outside world from its local position created all kinds of anxiety that was captured by the usage of the term “hybridity” in this publication. Hybridity is a familiar term in histories of colonialism as well

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as in contemporary postcolonial theory. By looking at the specific usages of this term in the Chinese context, we can gain a fuller understanding of the complexity of the semicolonial condition and of the magazine’s cultural position. The genealogy of the term “hybridity” is generally associated with the development of the natural sciences and in particular botany and zoology, where it refers to the outcome of a cross between two separate species of plant or animal. In the nineteenth century, hybridity was associated with taxonomies of race and linked with the racial management of the colonial subject, such as the implementation of anti-miscegenation laws. In contemporary cultural theories, however, the complicated history of the term is sometimes forgotten. Hybridity indicates a positive condition of cultural syncretism in opposition to certain notions of racial or cultural purity. In postcolonial theories, such as in Homi Bhabha’s writings, hybridity refers to the built-in ambivalence in the colonial discourse that enables dialectical subversion by the postcolonial subject. In Hybrid Cultures, the Latin American sociologist Nestor Canclini gives a different and more complicated definition of the term “hybridity” in relation not just to the dominant colonial discourse but also to intersecting temporalities and the intertwining relationship of the nation and the market in Latin American modernities. The China Critic’s use of the term “hybridity” does not follow either the deconstructive model of Homi Bhabha or the sociological usage of Canclini. Here the term indicates a connection that contains risks and danger if mismanaged.This term does not have a fixed meaning, but what is more interesting is the variety of contexts in which it appears in the publication. Since several editors received scientific or social scientific training in the United States, this term’s original meaning in botany as well as its racial connotations might have been clear to them, but in the context of the journal,“hybridity” is not specifically connected to race, but sometimes used to refer to cultural mixings both within Chinese culture and in a crosscultural context. The related term “hybrid” refers to Western-trained educated Chinese such as the editors themselves or diasporic Chinese. Hybridization is not considered an automatically desirable situation, as it appears to be in contemporary cultural theories. Rather, it is a moment of opening and change that provokes a range of psychological responses from anxiety to acceptance. The background of these concerns with hybridization has to do with the rapid transformation from a traditional society to a modern society manifested in the specific urban context, Shanghai. How to adjust to this change is a major theme in the editorials, especially in the late 1920s and early 1930s. The editors were open but cautious toward modernization in

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the cultural realm. The title of one editorial, “Let Us Not Force Cultural Revolution,” is representative of this attitude. In this editorial, the writer mentions a few debates in the intellectual circle about whether social institutions such as marriage and the traditional extended family should be abolished. Opposing radical “cultural revolution,” he argues that “social and cultural evolution is naturally born and not artificially created.”19 In another editorial entitled “National Characteristics and the Needs of Time,” the writer wants the reader to use reason and rationality in moments of change. He asks,“We see many visible changes in our people in recent years, but are these fundamental or merely visible changes? . . . The only thing we hope to inspire is that our people would not be led by the obvious but superficial changes our country is undergoing to believe that we are actually becoming ‘modernized.’ If we are looking forward for a strong, powerful and modernized China, we must, aside from preserving what is valuable in our old cultural heritage, stoop down to learn from others, and we must formulate plans to obtain any end we have in mind.” 20 In an editorial entitled “What Is Chinese Culture?,” the term “hybridity” is used to describe amalgamation within Chinese culture itself. The writer starts off by describing his own difficulty with following some complicated rituals in Chinese traditional funerals and goes on to doubt whether descriptive terms such as “cultured” or “civilized” are still valid, since so few people truly understand traditional practices. He then suggests that many cultural practices that have been considered to be Chinese were in fact “cultural hybrids,” and often rigid traditionalism is advocated only by culturally hybrid and multilingual intellectuals such as Gu Hongming. So “what is Chinese culture?” this editor asks. He concludes that “as we must avoid cultural hybridity, and as culture is an essential factor of racial and national existence, we should have a clear notion as to what our culture is.”21 On the surface, the writer of this editorial presents cultural mixing as a negative condition, but in fact by raising a rhetorical question, “What is Chinese culture?” and leaving it open-ended, he opens the door for cultural mixing to take place within Chinese culture. Another particularly interesting use of the term “hybridity” is its association with a desire to manage it for nationalist ends, and this connection is most obvious in the writings of the American-trained evolutionary biologist and eugenicist Pan Guangdan, who was also an editor of this magazine In his essays published in The China Critic, Pan is interested in the role of the Westernized intellectual within the domestic context and refers to him as the “cultural hybrid.” In “The Problem of the Cultural Hybrid,” Pan Guangdan warns his reader of the many problems the “cultural hybrid” has to face on the native soil:

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Although by birth Chinese, he has become by discipline AmericanChinese, British-Chinese, Japanese-Chinese, German-Chinese, French-Chinese, or some further combination of these, as the case may be. Or, better truth to tell, he is neither sufficiently Chinese or sufficiently foreign or non-Chinese to stand by himself as a harmonious, integrated, self-confident cultural entity. He is a nondescript, like the bat in the old fable. In short, he is a hybrid, if the writer may be permitted to borrow a perfectly respectable biological term. Now obviously, the hybrid does not fare well in the world of nature, neither would it in the realm of social and cultural life. It violates in both cases the principle of continuity and established harmony.22 In this essay, Pan positions the “cultural hybrid” in an uneasy position between nature and culture, China and the West. He acknowledges the importance of this cultural figure in “formulating and introducing theories of reform,” but at the same time, he doubts whether their theories would automatically gain popularity, for “China has been a veritable hot-bed to which have been introduced all kinds of social theories, tenable or untenable.” 23 Still, Pan thinks the cultural hybrid should be allowed to exist, because it is a condition necessary for surviving in the modern world: “hybridity might mean increased vigor, greater viability, and wider range of variation, provided in the first place, that the nature and worth of the two culture parties are sufficiently known, and in the second, that only selected elements on both sides are allowed to come together. In short, successful hybridity follows, and follows only, rational discrimination and selection.”24 Pan Guangdan’s essay expresses an anxiety toward the Western-trained cosmopolitan intellectual’s adjustment to and reception in the local Chinese society. Calling for the patriotic commitment of the overseas student to the nation, Pan repeatedly says that sending students abroad should not be taken as “itself an end, but always a means to an end” and that excessive cultural borrowing was no different from colonization. In other English essays published in The China Critic and his Chinese books written at the same time, Pan offers detailed discussions of Chinese national character and ventures to offer eugenics as a solution to national empowerment. Pan’s interest in eugenics has always been interpreted as a form of cultural and political conservatism by Chinese and foreign scholars, but in a brilliant discussion of the eugenics discourse in Japan and China, Juliette Chung helps us situate Pan within a long-standing discussion of the national characters of China, a debate at one point participated in by such revolutionary figures as Lu Xun and Chen Duxiu. The China Critic, especially in its first few years, caught the tail end of this discussion. Whereas Lu Xun and Chen Duxiu perceived the national characters of China as

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inherently degenerate, Pan believed that Chinese weakness was due to a combination of reasons––cultural, social, and racial––and that its national character could be improved. Unlike most rigid eugenicists, Pan believed that culture and education could improve a race that was lagging behind in the evolutionary process.According to Chung, Pan’s promotion of eugenics assumed a logic of “self-improvement” through “self-criticism and selfknowledge.” Eugenics was never implemented as a state-legislated social practice, so it is more appropriate to think of it as a cultural program rather than a social practice in the Chinese context. As Chung argues, Chinese eugenics “went down the route of cultural renaissance and rejuvenation rather than to eugenics bills or legislation.”25 In “Problems of the Cultural Hybrid,” Pan suggests that the migrant intellectual is similar to the diasporic Chinese. This representation of the Westernized intellectual can be situated in the context of The China Critic’s extensive coverage of overseas Chinese communities in North America and Southeast Asia. Stories of discrimination against the overseas Chinese were not unfamiliar to readers of The China Critic. Both in the editorials and in contributed articles, most writers suggest coming back to China as a solution to the unequal social status of overseas Chinese, so one can argue The China Critic’s interest in the diaspora is articulated from the self-defined position of “home” even though, ironically, “home” or “Chineseness” are contested categories to start with. The China Critic also frequently voices its protest against Hollywood’s stereotypical representation of the Chinese, but the editors are eager to dissociate themselves from the Chinese in Chinatown, who they think could hardly represent the best of Chinese values. Overall, The China Critic exposes the boundaries of its “China” as it tries to represent it in the image of home. Shu-mei Shih has argued that some Chinese-language modernist literature turned away from issues such as colonialism by employing what she called “a bifurcating strategy” that separated the metropolitan West/Japan from the colonial West/Japan.26 The English-language publication The China Critic was not able to fully separate the colonial from the metropolitan, but registered unease toward the connection between the two terms. Although receptive to Western ideas, The China Critic editors appeared to be much more critical toward the West than their May Fourth predecessors. They saw themselves as inheriting the legacy as well as correcting the mistakes of the New Cultural radicals such as Hu Shi. Citing the history of colonization, for instance, they were suspicious of Hu Shi’s cultural program of “wholesale Westernization.” Pan Guangdan stated in an article that in opposition to Hu Shi, he was in favor of “modernization,” not “Westernization.” Pan’s position was echoed frequently by other writers in The China Critic. In an editorial entitled “Dr. Hu Shih and the ‘Spiritual West,’” an editor

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directly challenged Hu Shi’s idealistic interpretations of Western civilization, stating that “Dr. Hu is doubtless aware of the history of imperialism and the exploitation of India, Africa, and even China by the ruthless traders of the West. . . .A civilization that has enriched itself at the expense of other human beings can hardly be truly spiritual.” This writer cited the Chinese Exclusion Act in the United States as evidence to show why the West should be evaluated critically and accepted selectively into Chinese culture. Rather than “swallow[ing] [Western civilization] line and hook,” he proposed “reviv[ing] the best of our civilization and assimilat[ing] the best that is in Western civilization”27 At the same time, the editors were not in favor of what they called “diehard” nationalism, either. In the magazine’s mission statement in 1931, the editors expressed a yearning for an ideal cosmopolitan situation when “the ‘twain’ [of the East and the West] will be brought together” in the future. Even though in other publications at the same time The China Critic was labeled “nationalist,” the editors tried hard to distinguish themselves from what they considered to be “narrow-minded nationalism” both within China and in the outside world. They argued in 1931 that “on account of the prevalence of militant and narrow-minded nationalism in Europe, which has more than once led to war, pacifists and liberal-minded people are inclined to view nationalism with suspicion and distaste. Nor do we hold any brief for the militant type. But it would be a serious mistake to think that nationalism in China is necessarily destined to reach that stage. In fact Chinese nationalism is not incompatible with international understanding and goodwill.” “Nationalism and internationalism should be harmonized,” they suggested, and upholding “the Chinese point of view” should not preclude the integration of the West into Chinese culture.28 The above discussions demonstrate that the term “hybridity” can be thought of as a description of disjunction and unevenness, not just of harmonious blending or coexistence, and it also expresses a wish to transcend this unevenness by creating a bridge of connection and communication between the local and the global.The various psychological responses elicited by this term are reflective of the difficult position that the bilingual Chinese editors created for themselves. The Meaning of English at a Time of Change What was the meaning of English in semicolonial Shanghai? In order to answer this question, we need to situate the magazine in relation to local practices of cosmopolitanism, particularly the May Fourth tradition. A number of scholars have characterized the May Fourth tradition as “Occidentalism,” “the use of the West for specific discursive purposes, mainly as

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a means to produce symbolic power.”29 However, evaluations of the May Fourth legacy given by different scholars are different: some have argued that this kind of Occidentalism is equivalent to acceptance of Western domination, others have suggested that the importation of the West during the May Fourth era should be characterized as a kind of “localization.”30 On top of these discussions, Shu-mei Shih draws our attention to what she calls “a particularization of Chinese culture and a universalization of Western culture” during the May Fourth Movement. However, The China Critic offers an implicit challenge to the hierarchy of the universal and the particular by simply adopting English as a global language. The China Critic enables us to see that not all cultural formations following the May Fourth moment were integrated into the May Fourth discourse. Even though this magazine is an English-language publication, the cultural discussions in The China Critic have a certain degree of continuity with the debates about the East and the West in the May Fourth era, which were mostly conducted in Chinese. Lydia Liu has persuasively argued that the cultural debates in the 1910s and 1920s might seem to be situated in the domestic context of China while, in fact, foreign authority and foreign connections often played an important role. “It was common for literary associations and cliques in early Republican China to form on the basis of something like an alumni association [for people trained in the West or Japan] as well as on ideological grounds,” says Liu. 31 A notable example of such an alumni association is the magazine Xue Heng or Critical Review, also founded by Qinghua graduates, as was The China Critic. Published from 1923 to 1930, Xue Heng drew together a community of Westernized intellectuals who promoted Confucianism, classical Chinese, and some vaguely defined notion of “national essence.” Some editors of Xue Heng later became editors of The China Critic. Liu argues that the Xue Heng group’s traditionalism, which can be perceived as an attempt to revive a particular version of Confucian cosmopolitanism of the past, but is routed through the Harvard professor Irving Babbitt, should be considered as a transnational and crosscultural phenomenon, since “this group tried to reframe the debate on national essence in terms of a contemporary American academic discourse (Irving Babbitt’s humanism), whose authority they claimed to represent.”32 An important difference between Xue Heng and The China Critic is that Xue Heng was created with a deliberate intention of opposing the New Cultural Movement. Although including in later years some members of the former Xue Heng group, The China Critic was also supported by radical intellectuals who were sympathetic with the anti-traditionalism of the New Cultural Movement. Xue Heng was a cultural platform for a few intellectuals interested in traditional culture and classical Chinese, but The China Critic’s editors were interested in social and political issues in relation to

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the modernization in an urban context. A letter to the editor in one of the early issues of The China Critic is a typical example of how modernity was perceived by this magazine’s readers and editors as both exotic and assimilable into the Chinese context.33 This anonymous letter writer celebrated a Chinese jazz performance in Shanghai’s Majestic Hotel and disagreed with a foreign reporter’s dismissive comment on the performance’s inauthenticity.The purpose of the letter is to prove that “China can be modernized.” A hybrid cultural production such as jazz in an unlikely location, a hotel in Shanghai, is a small but rather typical example of the transnational travel of some modern culture, and if when The China Critic was founded this performance was still looked upon as exotic and still provoked controversy among foreigners and Chinese alike, then as Andrew Jones suggests in Yellow Music, the scene would become increasingly familiar and indigenous as time went on. 34 Another obvious difference between Xue Heng and The China Critic is, of course, language. Several editors of The China Critic had worked for American newspapers or overseas Chinese publications before joining The China Critic, and almost all the editors wrote in Chinese at the same time as The China Critic was published. For these editors, English could be perceived as a way of getting around the division between classical and vernacular Chinese, a division that was extremely important for the proponents of New Culture in the end of the 1910s. From a postcolonial perspective, John Zou’s study of a Western-trained Qinghua graduate John Wong-Quincy and his English book about hunting trips in north China can serve as a contrast to The China Critic. Zou argues that English was a way for the writer to define himself both as a colonial subject and as upperclass Chinese. “English . . . goes across the world to discover subjects of colonialism” in situations where a well established colonial structure is absent and after migrant subjects have returned home from the West.35 Sharing cultural training similar to that of John Wong-Quincy, the editors of The China Critic also used English to figure out their relationship to Chinese society as home. An article by T.K.C. in The China Critic describes the slippery identity of the migrant intellectual who has returned home as the “Brahmin of the Chinese society” and satirizes his contradiction of writing in English on the one hand and promoting Chinese tradition on the other.36 However, in addition to being an indicator of privilege, English also plays an important political function in a culturally and racially mixed place such as Shanghai. The fact that Sun Yat-sen had to emphatically point out that “Shanghai is China” in a public speech given in 1925 indicates that because of its colonial presence, the city’s Chinese identity was not something to be taken for granted. By the same logic, using English from a self-defined “Chinese” point of view also carried specific connotations in this context.

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Zou’s dismissal of publications such as The China Critic as “propagandistic” might have something to do with his lack of attention to the cultural politics in metropolitan areas such as Shanghai. John Wong-Quincy’s book is mostly set in the rural areas of northern China, where an English book would have fewer local readers than it would in a treaty port. As I have mentioned, it is generally assumed that English-language magazines such as The China Critic were published primarily for foreign residents in Shanghai, but in reality, local Chinese intellectuals who understood English became a part of this journal’s readership as well.37 Although no concrete figures of circulation could be found, according to an editorial published in the January 1, 1931, issue of The China Critic, this magazine had “a large circulation among our intellectual class, including a large number of college undergraduates.”38 Pearl Buck recalled in the 1940s, in the preface to Lin Yutang’s With Love and Irony, that The China Critic was extremely influential among both foreigners and Chinese intellectuals in Shanghai.The Shanghai scholar Ge Gongzhen also observed that although foreign-language newspapers were published primarily for migrant foreigners in China, Chinese graduates from local foreign schools as well as other Chinese who had interests in foreign affairs were also among their readers.Therefore, “one cannot say that these newspapers do not have direct relations with the Chinese community.”39 In addition, it is possible that this magazine had an audience outside China, since many issues of the magazine carried an advertisement of itself with the address of a New York bookstore as its overseas distributor. In The China Critic, cosmopolitanism is equivalent to utilizing a kind of cultural capital to certain purposes closely related to local and national politics. On another level, publishing an English-language magazine that aimed for international circulation was understood by the editors as a modern cultural gesture that had personal significance related to their romantic self-perception as citizens of the world. If The China Critic’s usage of English can be considered as a performance of the global in the local context, then we have to agree with Shih that this performance can produce various effects and multiple outcomes. Shih states, “When the idea of the ‘West’ traveled from the metropole to China, its original meaning was never entirely reinscribed or its power neutralized; hence we need to ask questions regarding the conditions of traveling and appropriation.”40 For a periodical that contains the writings of many different authors, it is quite possible that a singular cultural production can contain a variety of ways in which English is used and politicized. In The China Critic, in addition to using English as a medium to conduct political discussions, one editor of the magazine, Lin Yutang, looked upon English as a modernistic means of expression to create a defamilarizing effect in one’s representations of the local environment. In this respect, Lin’s English writings offer

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an interesting contrast to the predominantly Chinese-language modernism in the Republican period. Similar to his fellow modernist writers such as Shi Zhecun and Mu Shiying, who used Chinese to represent the modernity of Shanghai, Lin Yutang’s modernism is most revealing in articles that take Shanghai as their subject of representation. Like Mu Shiying, he touches upon Shanghai’s moral laxity and sensual stimulation, but he is more interested in the diverse cultures that made Shanghai into a uniquely “modern” city. In an article written for “The Little Critic” in the August 14, 1930, issue, Lin sings a “hymn” to the “Great Terrible City” by listing the many vices of the city, ranging from poverty and moral degeneracy to the presence of colonial powers. He depicts Shanghai as a city that is “terrible in her strange mixture of eastern and western vulgarity, in her superficial refinements, in her naked and unmasked worship of Mammon, in her emptiness, commonness, and bad taste.” 41 For him, Shanghai was represented by those “denaturalized women, dehumanized coolies, devitalized newspapers, decapitalized banks, and denationalized creatures.”42 Although he paints a dark picture of hell for the city of Shanghai, the highly “denaturalized” style he adopts conveys a spirit of experimentalism that decreases the realist value of his prose. In some sentences, he mixes Chinese with English words to mirror the “strange mixture” of nationalities and cultures that he has just ridiculed. For instance, one sentence reads: “One thinketh of thy successful, pien-pien-bellied merchants, and forgeteth whether they are Italian, French, Russian, English or Chinese.”43 “Pien-pien” describes vividly the posture of a pot-bellied and pompous merchant. Stylistic devices of this kind demand the reader’s bilingual competence to achieve their effect, so the readership of Lin’s essays must have been self-selective. Compared to the Chinese-language modernist writers, Lin’s essays contain more direct representations of Shanghai’s colonialism, although his depiction of colonialism is highly aesthetic and he makes it seem like one layer in the collage of local colors. For instance, in the same essay on Shanghai, he depicts “thy haughty, ungentlemanly foreigner . . . men with a moderate head, but stiff boots and strong-calf-muscles” as a part of Shanghai’s urban scene.Another subject of his essays is analysis of the essence of Chinese culture; he does not present an objective representation of Chinese culture, but one that is seen from the point of view of an outsider. This representation adds to the myriad and strange colors in a colonial metropolis such as Shanghai. As he argues in “The Chinese People,” If I were a world tourist passing through Shanghai, I would not hesitate to tell you that the Chinese are a great people. To be great is to be misunderstood. When we call a man great, we mean by it our

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inability to understand him. Here is a Chinaman, a washerman, perhaps, or a rickshaw coolie, whose face is not particularly inspiring, and whom many white people would not think twice before kicking, and yet he represents a people that has somehow dragged on for four thousand years without seeming much the worse for it, a feat which neither the glorious Romans nor the illustrious Greeks were able to accomplish.44 Lin criticizes modernity from a Romanticist perspective that he attributes directly to Nietzsche but in fact is more strongly resonant of Lin’s contemporary Lu Xun. In both “Zarathustra and the Jester” and “A Pageant of Costumes,” Lin calls on Nietzsche’s Romantic hero to save the “city where wisdom decays.”Adopting the voice of the court jester, Lin criticizes the superficial “gaiety” of the city and calls for “fire” and “sun” to give warmth and life to the world. Walkowitz has argued that modernist cultivations of the self can lead to cosmopolitan thinking and feeling beyond the nation.45 But this does not mean that all modernistic experimentations would follow this ethical orientation. In Lin’s case, modernist sensibility and his essentialist cultural self-representation did not necessarily contradict with each other. Defamiliarizing representations of the city of the present and returning to the past of Chinese culture and national characteristics were closely related to each other. By 1936, his ethnographic account of Chinese culture My Country and My People was already published the United States and sold very well. Lin quickly became a critically acclaimed and widely recognized Chinese expert after the publication of this book. This again proves that English as a global cultural commodity could serve very different purposes depending on situation and time. English’s circulation in the world does not cancel out the heterogeneity of many specific contexts in which this linguist medium has been put to use. Re pre se nting the City and Its People The China Critic fuses a certain version of intellectual cosmopolitanism with worldly and political concerns.This journal is a conscious act of selffashioning as well as an active attempt at constructing a community. The magazine itself was a “liberal cosmopolitan club,” just like the one that the editors proposed to establish in Shanghai in an editorial published in the third anniversary issue. In this proposal, the editors mentioned that this club was to be made up of “men who are citizens of the world and can come together to thrash out some of the problems confronting mankind as a whole.” 46 The position of this club was to be “non-political, nonnationalistic, and non-partisan,” and its objective was to foster “international

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fellowship” based on common interests in “intellectual issues.” One year later, the editors reported that “applications for membership have come in from different classes, [including] college presidents, professors, men of letters, journalists, poets, judges, and public functionaries.”47 The China Critic’s intention of presenting the Western-trained Chinese intellectuals as a new community and giving emphasis to their views can also be observed in the form of this publication. Editorials, which were unsigned, took up a significant portion of each issue and fostered the assumption that the editors were a collectivity that shared more or less similar views on major cultural and political issues. The cosmopolitan Chinese intellectuals did not stick to their promise of being “nonpolitical.” The editors responded promptly to all kinds of political issues and participated actively in the discussions about urban affairs, such as how public facilities in the concessions should be utilized, how well legal and political institutions functioned, and what kind of foreign fashions should be adopted by people in Shanghai. Although the editors could represent only the interests of a specific class of Shanghai citizens, their discussions of cultural matters were not of an abstract nature; rather, they were tied to very concrete issues related to urban life. The editorial I cited earlier argues for more space for Chinese opinions in foreign newspapers. In another editorial, the editors complained that the public libraries in the concessions should have not only English books but Chinese books as well. These examples demonstrate that the cosmopolitan “Chineseness” of The China Critic was closely associated with a specific urban environment of mixedness and colonialism. The rapidly modernizing semicolonial city both enabled the publication of this magazine and exposed its limits. In an editorial interestingly entitled “Who Is Shanghai?” the editor described Shanghai as a “person who is equally interested in everything that appears therein, the commercial pages, the correspondence, the leader, the outpost letters, the ‘locals,’ the news from all quarters of the earth.” Presenting the city in the figure of a modern man of letters who had wide interests in the print cultures of the world raises the question of point of view. In the same article, the editor considered the mission of this publication to be one that exposed the people in power, claiming that Shanghai was controlled by “men who represent and misrepresent it, who rule and misrule it, who squeeze and fatten on it, who trample on Chinese rights and prosper on Chinese money, who promise the Chinese one thing one day and give them something else the next, who come to power and stay in power. They make Shanghai go round and go wrong.”48 Yet in many pages of the magazine, Shanghai, a city of growing heterogeneity, appeared to be a cognitive enigma that the intellectuals had to come

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to terms with frequently, and one finds that The China Critic’s cosmopolitanism was coded in class and gender terms. On many issues related to social life, The China Critic editors challenged the policies of colonial civil authorities. For example, in August 1928, they protested against the lack of funding for establishing an up-to-date public library. In the same year, they protested against biased regulations enforced against Chinese citizens concerning the use of a public open-air swimming pool. In 1930, they spoke up against insufficient representation of the Chinese in concession government offices. In all these discussions of civil affairs, a position critical of foreign powers and protective of the rights of the Chinese was unanimously adopted. At the same time, however, the editors’ moralistic overtone was pronounced throughout. Concerned with the so-called “moral hygiene” of the Chinese, the editors repeatedly criticized what they perceived to be the “moral degeneracy” of Shanghai, but their criticism often betrays gender and class bias and a lack of psychological preparation in face of Shanghai’s emerging modernity. Sexuality was a topic evoked by the editors to express their ambivalence toward the city. In an editorial commenting on “Shanghai’s sexual obsession,” the writer suggested that the intermingling of different races created a natural condition for the growth of “sexual obsession,” because “when different races come together, they feel that they have more ground to be disrespectful to one another than they could afford to be if they are cast among their own people.”49 In the same article, the writer also argued that the overflow of immigrants, depicted as “outcasts, desperadoes, and opportunists,” might contribute to the city’s material prosperity, but immigrants also made the city sink to “its present level of grossness.”These conservative arguments bring The China Critic editors into sharp contrast with other Shanghai writers. In contrast to the ambivalence of The China Critic toward Shanghai, Shanghai writers of the late 1920s such as Zhang Ruogu flaunted Shanghai’s exotic flavor and elevated the city to the status of “a cultural laboratory” for future China.50 Their attitude to Shanghai was much more accepting than that of The China Critic editors. Being able to defend Chinese interests along racial lines does not automatically bring sensitivity toward gender issues. For example, in an article entitled “Nude Models and Public Morals,” the editor told a story of a nude show of three Russian women in the French concession. Condemning the show as “an exhibition of the human anatomy with emphasis on morbidity,” this writer criticized the French concession authority for its double standards. According to the editor, the concession authority had stipulated that scenes in movies or performances which would hold white women to ridicule had to be deleted. Referring to this law, the editor argued,

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It [the concession authority] cannot allow one class of foreign women to be degraded without degrading white women as a whole. It cannot ignore accepted moral standards without corrupting public morals. It cannot permit an indecent show without encouraging indecency among the ignorant. Furthermore, as the Chinese constitute the bulk of the French Concession, their welfare should be given the utmost consideration. . . . If the Council were convinced that naked shows were what the French community would want or approve of, then let it have them in big order. But, mon dieu, keep them away from the Chinese!51 The writer took advantage of the fact that the French concession had a mixed residential population and skillfully turned the table and challenged the colonial regulations, but he was blind to the fact that this incident did not concern public morality in general terms, but rather the specific moral issue of the exploitation of women. It is a general tendency in The China Critic to speak of culture in homogeneous terms or put cultural matters at a higher position than gender and class considerations, but for a number of years the magazine published a special column called “Women’s World” that offered interesting discussions of women’s place in the public sphere. If the actors in the above-mentioned performance had been Chinese women, would the editors have been equally insensitive to their interests? It is hard to say. The China Critic often presents the “coolies,” working-class Chinese, and women as easy victims of Western corruption. In some articles, the Chinese who participated in “corrupt” activities were more harshly condemned than Westerners. Covering a so-called “nudist movement” in Hong Kong for the November 17, 1932, issue of The China Critic, for instance, an editor expressed outrage toward what he interpreted as an attempt to out-Westernize the Westerner. He reported that “although three quarters of the membership of the [nudist] society are non-Chinese, it is only the Chinese who have taken to actual nude bathing. The westerners are more bashful and prudish . . . whereas the Chinese are truly enthusiastic, particularly Chinese girls.” 52 The interaction between the city and this publication happened in both directions. Although I have criticized the editors’ moralism, one gets a sense that the representations of Shanghai’s urban life often undermine the editors’ own wish to properly delineate the good and the bad, the real and the fake, and that the city’s semi-colonialism has produced a messy but dynamic cultural arena that defied comfortable categorization. The criss-crossing of the East and the West only generated more crossings in other areas. How to face the different forms of difference in a truly open-minded manner is a question that is provocatively raised but only tentatively answered by The China Critic.Tension between representing the self and representing others,

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between recognizing heterogeneity and attempting to control it remains unresolved in the course of this magazine’s publication.This tension can serve as a reminder of an extremely messy urban context that proved to be a challenge for communication across various social and cultural barriers. OVERALL, THE CHINA CRITIC is a bundle of contradiction that combined ownership of universal terms with commitment to local politics and wavered between accepting and censoring the increasingly heterogeneous urban culture. Its context was also full of contradiction and conflict—an internally divided city with the borders of the nation inscribed on its surface. This publication had multiple tasks of representing national interest, representing the self of the cosmopolitan intellectual, and representing the city. This magazine’s editorials show that the public was a contested space with selective inclusiveness; however, it is also clear that this magazine’s cosmopolitanism in the form of an dialogue with the city is more than a romantic gesture and a glamorous image. It should be endorsed as one of many attempts made by Chinese intellectuals to define the locality within a transnational context of unevenness and inequality.

C hap te r 2

T’ien Hsia Co smopolitanism in Crisis T’IEN HSIA, an English-language monthly published in Shanghai from August 1935 to November 1941, was another Chinese-edited magazine that consciously practiced cosmopolitanism through translating in both directions between China and the outside world. Led by the literary critic Wen Yuanning as chief editor, the editorial board of this magazine consisted of the following: the legal scholar John C. H. Wu, the philosopher T. K. Chuan, literary critics Lin Yutang and Ye Qiuyuan, and the playwright Yao Hsin-nung (a.k.a.Yao Ke). All of the editors except Yao had worked on The China Critic, but The China Critic’s editorial board was a larger group with several social scientists on it. T’ien Hsia’s editors mostly came from a humanistic background. The only exception, John C. H. Wu, had a deep interest in literature, as we can see from his poems and articles on classical Chinese poetry published in T’ien Hsia. Because of the overall humanistic inclination of T’ien Hsia’s editors, this magazine is an important resource for literary scholars to rethink literary history from the point of view of transnational and translocal circulation. The term “t’ien hsia” (tian xia) means “the universe,” and it was taken from a phrase used by the leader of the Republican Revolution SunYat-sen,“tianxia weigong”—“the universe is for everyone.” In Sun Yat-sen’s writings, the idea of the universe for everyone conveys a yearning for equality and openness within the global context. Cosmopolitanism and nationalism were understood by Sun Yat-sen to be interrelated rather than in opposition to one another. In his fourth lecture on “The Three Principles of the People” written in 1924, for instance, Sun advocated for the revival of Chinese nationalism as a way to attain the ideal of cosmopolitanism. He made this argument on the basis of an understanding of a new global context, in which emergence of a new internationalism, represented by the establishment of the League of the Nations after the First World War, and availability of ideological support to extend rights to smaller and weaker nations made it seem possible for these nations to compete with world powers on the global stage. In this speech, 59

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Sun spoke highly of both Woodrow Wilson, who advocated the right of selfdetermination and the formation of the League of Nations, and the Russian Revolution that put this principle to practice. Sun also critiqued a dominant version of cosmopolitanism upheld by “the Powers,” implying that their cosmopolitanism was but a new form of imperialism. He suggested that Russia and Asia had already replaced Europe as new centers of cosmopolitanism through their pursuit of nationalism.As he stated in this speech,“The English expression ‘might is right’ means that fighting for acquisition is just. The Chinese mind has never regarded acquisition by war as right; it considers aggressive warfare barbarous. This pacifist morality is the true spirit of cosmopolitanism. Upon what foundation can we defend and build up this sprit?—Upon nationalism.”1 Therefore, we can say that although the term “t’ien hsia” has a long history that can be traced back to the writings of ancient philosophers such as Mencius, Sun Yat-sen gave new meanings to this term and made it relevant to world historical trends in the early twentieth century. Sun Yat-sen’s understanding of anti-imperialist nationalism and his advocacy of an alternative version of cosmopolitanism to replace the dominant version were inherited by Sun Yat-sen’s son Sun Ke (a.k.a. Sun Fo), who supported T’ien Hsia as the chairman of the Sun Yat-sen Institute for the Advancement of Culture and Education, the organization that provided funding for the magazine. Sun Ke wrote a foreword for the first issue, in which he transposed Sun Yat-sen’s observations about the global geopolitical order into the mid-1930s. Reminding his readers of the treacherous global situation of his time, Sun Ke explained that his vision for this magazine was for it to become a platform of transnational cultural exchange and carry out the mission of the League of Nations from a cultural perspective: “Now, there is one activity of the League of Nations which has not been given the prominence it deserves— the work of the International Institute of Intellectual Co-operation. We think so much of the political and economic functions of the League, that we are apt to forget its cultural function, but it is a function which, we are sure, will increase in importance with time. No real political and economic understanding can exist, unless it is based upon a cultural understanding.”2 Sun Ke also expressed a sense of disappointment with the outcomes of economic globalization and technological development, stating that “in the nineteenth century, it was hoped that with the rapid development of communications by land, sea and air, nations by being brought together would come to a better understanding of each other. In this, we have been sadly disillusioned.”3 However, he sounded optimistic that the power of culture could bridge national differences, arguing that culture “has no national boundaries, it enriches itself by what it gives as by what it takes. In it, everybody can participate.”4

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That Sun Ke might have written this English essay himself can be explained by his educational background. Born in 1891 in Canton, China, Sun Ke was sent to Hawaii at the age of three and grew up on the farms of Maui. He was given a bilingual education in classical Chinese and English and studied in the University of California, Berkeley.After his graduation in 1916, he took various positions as editor, journalist, and translator in different organizations related to Sun Yat-sen’s revolutionary cause. His official position in the 1930s was the head of the Legislative Yuan, where he was in charge of the drafting of the constitution for the Nationalist government. How does this magazine materialize Sun Ke’s ideal of achieving globalism through culture? How does his emphasis on the cultural relate to social and political issues in this critical moment right before the impending war? Not only are these questions important for the interpretation of this magazine but it is also worth investigating how the magazine’s form as a serial publication lends itself to the representation of the Chinese nation and its culture. This chapter will follow these three strands of thinking and try to discuss the magazine’s transcultural position along with its domestic role of constructing the nation. T’ien Hsia was created in a context of internal and external fragmentation, division, and migration. As we can infer from Sun Ke’s articles, the cosmopolitanism of T’ien Hsia was both a reflection of and response to a variety of crises on both national and international scales. The geographic location of the magazine’s office, at 400 Perry Road in the heart of the International Settlement, and its history that spanned the entire first phase of the war, the period of the partial colonization of Shanghai, were indicative of both the general context of turmoil and the magazine’s strategic self-placement that enabled it to survive in this tumultuous environment. In the first phase of the Sino-Japanese War, the Chinese section of the city was already occupied by the Japanese army, but the foreign sections were not.The magazine folded right before the bombing of Pearl Harbor, an incident that started the second phase of the war and turned the entire city, including the International Settlement, into a colony. Publishing a magazine in the International Settlement in a way repeated Shanghai’s earlier history as a city of refuge, to use the term of Jacque Derrida. In the middle of the nineteenth century, according to the historian Meng Yue, Shanghai’s development had a lot to do with “multiple processes of social, political, and cultural decentering.”“By ‘decentering’ I particularly refer to those processes in which groups and individuals either moved to Shanghai from the Western metropolis as diasporas or were uprooted from the previous political and cultural centers of the Qing because of the Taiping Rebellion,” Meng Yue states.5 It seems that this history was partially repeated in the late 1930s and early 1940s. On the one hand, the International Settlement’s

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privileged status as the uncolonized “lonely isle” (in Chinese, gudao) provided the magazine with a relatively safe haven, enabling it to have a “slow and steady increase in circulation” even in 1937, when many Chinese-language newspapers and magazines were closing down or moving to the hinterland or Hong Kong. 6 On the other hand, the International Settlement was hardly an ivory tower, since at this time many war refugees—people from other districts in Shanghai and neighboring small towns—were pouring into the International Settlement to escape Japanese invasion. The safety associated with the magazine’s privileged position was temporary and contingent on whether the many forms of crisis in its immediate environment could be managed. According to Wen-hsin Yeh, the International Settlement was a “strategically critical site for a Nationalist presence in the lower Yangzi region” during the first half of the war.7 However, since the nation viewed from this “strategic site” was not always a homogenous entity, but one that had many political and social divisions as well as geographical unevenness, the nation had to be actively made through symbolic means, in this case, print culture. While trying to represent and construct an entire nation, T’ien Hsia transgressed some political and geographic divisions between the left and the right that dominated the cultural circle in the first half of the 1930s. This was possible partly because of the establishment of a United Front between the Nationalist and the Communist parties in 1936. In the same year, Sun Ke assumed a government position as the chairman of “Sino-Soviet Cultural Council” and was put in charge of diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union during the war. T’ien Hsia reflected this changed political climate and published the works of leftist and Soviet writers along with nonleft writers. Short stories in translation by leftist authors such as Lu Xun were published along with interviews conducted in the Communist base,Yan’an, with a woman writer Ding Ling, who had been imprisoned by the Nationalist government in the early 1930s. In addition, cultural activities that took place in other parts of China outside Shanghai, including Yan’an and the hinterland, were reported in the chronicles, a separate section in each issue devoted to the documentation of recent activities in a particular cultural field. In terms of its outreach to the world, this magazine published articles on Soviet literature and drama in addition to the many articles on Anglo-American culture.This blurring of the boundary between the left and the right, the mixing of leftist internationalism with liberal cosmopolitanism, made this magazine an unusual cultural publication that was enabled by the “lonely isle” of Shanghai. In the case of T’ien Hsia, one encounters a specific form of intersection of cosmopolitanism and nationalism, which was conditioned by the specific context in China in the 1930s. On the one hand, the magazine exhibited some distinctly cosmopolitan traits, such as its use of a foreign language, English; the inclusion of the writings of many non-Chinese nationals; and its

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active attempts to continue to introduce foreign cultures during the war. On the other hand, the magazine also showed a nationalist inclination through activities such as meticulously documenting China’s recent cultural achievements and tirelessly translating Chinese literature into English. We can probably account for this intersection in terms of a desire to communicate with the outside world from a position self-identified as “Chinese.” Some speeches given by Sun Ke illustrate this kind of desire. In an article written in 1933, for example, Sun Ke expressed an evolutionist view on culture, presenting culture as “the driving force of social development and historical evolution” and an essential element for “the formation, unity, and continuity of a race.” However, just as he emphasized the nationalistic function of culture, Sun Ke also recognized the importance for a nation to interact with the world. He wrote, “The nation is a constitutive part of the world, so the survival and development of a nation is contingent upon the development of the world, and vice versa. . . .The new culture following the Three Principles starts with advocating national culture and ends with promoting the universalism of world culture.”8 In other writings written in the same period, Sun attempted to reconcile nationalism with internationalism, and one of his ways of doing this was by making a distinction between nationalism and stateism.The distinction between the two, according to him, was that whereas stateism was “aggressive” and “exploitative,” the ultimate aim of nationalism was to “resist aggression from the outside” and “conserve one’s own force.”9 If the aim of T’ien Hsia was to address the world from a self-defined national position, then a key question for interpreting this text is how to take account of its linguistic medium and the various forms of mobility and circulation along with its nationalist agenda. To put this in a crude form, to what extent can this text be read as a “national allegory” in the Jamesonian sense of the term? Fredric Jameson suggests in his much-debated 1986 essay “Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism” that “all third-world texts, are necessarily . . . allegorical, and in a very specific way: they are to be read as what I will call national allegories, even when, or perhaps I should say, particularly when, their forms develop out of predominantly western machineries of representation, such as the novel.”10 As other scholars have pointed out, this statement by Jameson moves very rapidly from a big generalization, “all third-world texts,” to a specific literary genre, “the novel.”11 Since T’ien Hsia is not a novel, but a multi-authored serial publication, would the term “national allegory” still apply to it? Although T’ien Hsia can be considered as actively forging a nation, the notion of “national allegory” as defined by Jameson would actually be unable to do justice to the eclectic nature of a magazine as text. The transnational and translocal flows and the various forms of foreignness, mobility, and

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traveling in this text create an image of a nation that did not follow one singular fixed design, but one whose internal landscapes were dynamically interwoven between its different localities, and whose external boundaries were unclear and open. The making of such a nation had to be repeated in a manner that followed the serial form. Jameson’s article intends to bridge the split between the private and the public in First World culture by turning to the Third World, where “the story of the private individual destiny is always an allegory of the embattled situation of the public third-world culture and society.”12 His article has aroused many controversies, mainly revolving around his generalization that all third-world texts are “national allegories” and the implicit argument that the national is the primary category from which to interpret third-world texts. In conjunction with the public cultural forms considered here, one question that needs to be resolved before Jameson’s notion of “national allegory” can be applied to the current case of the English-language periodical is the notion of “publicness” in association with a particular cultural form. Jameson does not provide any complex analysis of publicness in his 1986 article, and the word “public” is sometimes used interchangeably with “social.” On the other hand, it is the intention of my book as a whole and this chapter in particular to emphasize the various forms of mediation by public cultural practices such as translation, reprinting, and serial publication to the meaning of national culture and specific literary works. For instance, Jameson uses Lu Xun as a quintessential example of a third-world public intellectual whose writings engage with “the embattled situation of the public third-world culture and society.” However, as this chapter will show, T’ien Hsia’s decision to translate one of Lu Xun’s early stories that was originally written in classical Chinese, later forgotten, and finally rediscovered in the mid-1930s is to be understood as a gesture that challenges the dominant version of national culture exclusively focused on New Culture and vernacular Chinese. An implicit argument I make in this chapter is that there were multiple forms of publicness in association with different visions of the nation in the 1930s. It is this complexity in Third World cultural histories to which Jameson fails to give full credit in his article. In her article discussing contemporary Taiwanese literature and the concept of national allegory, Margaret Hillenbrand argues that it is necessary to retain Jameson’s concept because much of contemporary Taiwan literature engages with the nation and national history in an explicit manner. However, Hillenbrand criticizes Jameson for failing to take into account the complexity of the allegorical form. In Walter Benjamin’s analysis of Baudelaire, for instance, allegory signals the fragmentation of social reality as much as its cohesiveness. “Allegory ends up registering the disintegration of fixity just as doggedly as it may affirm the ‘truth’ in didactic fashion.”13 In fact, Jameson offers a similar

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discussion of allegory not in his 1986 article, but in his more recent work A Singular Modernity.There, Jameson stresses the deconstructive potential of allegorical reading through a reading of Paul de Man’s Allegory of Reading. Setting out to correct a simplistic understanding of the opposition between symbol and allegory, Jameson points out that Paul de Man thinks of the difference between these two rhetorical modes not as an issue of transparency but as a question of temporality. It is not that “symbolic” readings of texts present immediate or transparent interpretations while “allegorical” readings correct that mistake. Rather, allegory is “the second moment, the second reading, the moment distinguished from the first symbolic one.” Jameson writes: What we must rather insist on is a situation in which the same word stands for the whole and its part, the genre and its species: for here “allegory” means the second moment, the second reading, the moment distinguished from the first symbolic one; but it also designates the whole process as such, the temporality whereby the naive symbolic or representational reading is superseded by the reflexive literary and rhetorical: “it remains necessary, if there is to be allegory, that the allegorical sign refer to another sign that precedes it.” And this is, clearly enough, why the two moments cannot simply be opposites in some binary equivalence (for example of space to time), for the first symbolic moment can stand by itself without reference to the second one; or, at the least, it claims the self-sufficiency of a full meaning, a full representation, a symbolic synchrony; whereas the second moment, abolishing that appearance, is necessarily a very different kind and species.14 As a practice of translation and re-presentation in a foreign language, T’ien Hsia also to a certain extent represents a second moment, a moment of reinscription, vis-à-vis Chinese-language literature and cultural history. However, this magazine also contains another kind of translational culture, which is introducing foreign books, writers, and ideas into the Chinese context, To think of this magazine as national allegory would require that we take into account this “crazy” multidirectionality and multifacetedness of the magazine, which I consider to be an allegory of “worldliness.” Would it be possible to consider some Chinese texts as allegories of the world? If so, what would those texts look like? And how would consideration of these texts’ “form” challenge us to reconsider allegory as a literary genre from a comparative and transnational perspective? While this chapter cannot fully answer these questions, it will make some attempts in this direction. The rest of this chapter will bring together the two kinds of real and imaginary connections: the transnational and the translocal, and discuss the magazine’s cosmopolitan tactics without losing sight of its nation-making efforts.

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U se s of M ode rn C ulture at a Time of Crisis In 1942, after Shanghai had fallen into total colonization, a Chineselanguage magazine with a name similar to T’ien Hsia—Wan Xiang—was published.The term wan xiang can be loosely translated as “panorama,” a word that like the Chinese word for the generic category za zhi, with its origin traced back to daily-life encyclopedias, notation books, and contemporary miscellanies in the Ming Daynasty, connotes a sense of eclecticism and inclusiveness, just those qualities that enable a publication to claim to be a “universe” on its own.15 Synonyms such as “t’ien-hsia,” “wan xiang” or “za zhi” thus carry a self-referential function that invites us to link the contents of a periodical publication with its form. Using a special issue on popular culture of the magazine Wan Xiang as a forum, the editor Chen Dieyi pondered the question of whether wartime was an appropriate moment for cultural production and development. Chen was a well-known songwriter who had written a number of popular lyrics in the mid-1930s. In his introduction to this special issue published in 1942, Chen presented two divergent views on wartime culture upheld by Lu Xun on the one side, and the journalist and writer Cao Juren on the other. While Lu Xun, according to Chen, had predicted before the war began that material deprivation, particularly the shortage of paper, would force cultural development to go into a state of “stasis” during the war, Cao Juren argued that in spite of material restrictions, it was likely that a “new culture” would emerge during wartime. Unlike the New Culture of the late 1910s, an important characteristic of this “new culture” would be its acceptance by the general public, according to Cao. Chen Dieyi agreed with Cao’s views and considered his magazine Wan Xiang exemplary of the “new culture” that Cao promoted. In his further explications of the term “new culture” in the rest of the essay, Chen argued that the division between classical and vernacular cultures was in fact very difficult to define or uphold, in spite of the rigorous attempts of some participants of the New Culture Movement to separate the two.The “new culture” of the 1940s should transcend this division and make something new out of the hybridization of vernacular and classical cultures.The social background for this new culture was the emergence of the urban middle class—in Chen’s own terms,“the class of leisure” in the middle of the 1930s. However, Chen also emphasized that the culture of this new urban class should not reject progressive ideas or even radical “ideology”; rather, it should be modern and politically engaged, while remaining popular at the same time. Chen’s introduction to the special issue draws our attention to a particular form of interaction between cultural production and the war from the specific location of the colonized city. It suggests that cultural production in

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this urban site would follow a different path and demand a more complicated narration than simple dichotomies and clear-cut oppositions used to describe cultural productions both before the war and on the battlefront during the war. His remarks also make us wonder why magazines such as T’ien Hsia and Wan Xiang, in spite of their many differences, would both want to create a self-image of going beyond familiar cultural divisions and attempt to communicate beyond national and linguistic borders in this critical moment. The pressure of popularity and general acceptance was reinforced by the need for nationalist mobilization during wartime. In this context, one wonders what the position of the cosmopolitan writer and cosmopolitan cultural production would be during the war. It is a common assumption that wartime had no use for cosmopolitan culture unless it was assimilated into the local context. While this assumption rightfully considers the need of nationalist mobilization during the wartime, it unnecessarily polarizes the city and the country, the foreign and the indigenous. For instance, resistance literature is often associated with a narrowly defined realist form, exemplified by such genres as reportage, or it was supposed to be produced in the countryside or the hinterland, having nothing to do with the coastal city, the figure of the foreign, translational activities, or formalist experimentation. T’ien Hsia in more than one way challenges these historical assumptions about the disconnection between cosmopolitan aesthetics and sensibility and resistant politics. T’ien Hsia to a certain extent politicized modern culture as a global phenomenon by calling for the indigenization of Western modernism. In the context of modern Chinese literary history, modernism is often associated with the magazine Xiandai Zazhi and the small group of writers often branded even by themselves as apolitical, neither right nor left, belonging to “a third category.”16 However, whether modernism as continued into the war period remained apolitical or neutral is a question that few scholars have addressed. The chief editor of T’ien Hsia, Wen Yuanning, was a Cambridge-trained law scholar who taught English literature at Beijing University after he returned to China. Before he took up the position as the editor of T’ien Hsia, Wen had published a book of humorous essays entitled “Imperfect Understandings,” which depicts the lives of a few Western-trained scholars and politicians who shared a similar background with him. Harold Acton, a British writer who taught at Beijing University along with Wen and translated some Chinese poetry and drama for T’ien Hsia, describes Wen as someone with extensive knowledge of British literature, particularly of modernist writers such as T. S. Eliot. However, one can see from the many commentaries written by Wen for T’ien Hsia that the war had taken his concerns and interests outside the narrow confines of the university and the elite cultural circle to which he had previously belonged.

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His interests in Western modernism influenced his interpretation of the war in China. His depiction of the war as an “evil” and “ugly side of humanity” was informed by his understanding of the aesthetics of British artists such as Aubrey Beardsley and the French poet Baudelaire. He praised both artists for their ability to “depict states of evil rather than states of goodness.”17 In some editorials, Wen spoke of the war as not just a conflict between nation-states, but as a war that exposed the irrational side of modern civilization, an insight that reflected his interest in Western modernism. In an editorial for the August 1939 issue, for instance, he wrote about the war by assuming the persona of “Everyman,” a universal modern individual who could be from any national or cultural background: Possibilities of the whole civilized world being blown to bits insinuate themselves alarmingly in the four corners of his mind.The background of his life is one smoldering fire of hate, distrust, uncertainty and fear. Turn wheresoever he may, in the dark of the immediate future he sees nothing but murderous eyes leering at him. From being an adventure, life becomes to him a gigantic gamble in which there are no rules, of which the stakes are millions of nonentities like himself. . . . With the exigencies of the international situation being what they are, and with life and death always trembling in the balance for Everyman, what wonder that he should be in no mood to browse in the fields of literature and philosophy!18 Wen’s idea of literature came into conflict with the reality of the wartime. Although he understood that during the war “our poets should . . . dip their pens in blood to express their detestation of the enemy and their glorification of our unknown heroes,” he did not consider this condition favorably.19 He believed that individualism, an important condition for artistic creativity, was inevitably compromised during the war. He wrote in an editorial in the March 1940 issue that “war also throws men into crowds. . . . Individuality dies, and a mob is born. With the extinction of individuality, literature and culture die too: for the life blood of literature and culture is the individual in his uniqueness.” But he also wrote that “it is useless to regret about what must be,” for the war could prove to be an opportunity for modern culture to reestablish its connections with Chinese reality. 20 In his editorial in the February 1939 issue, he argued that the war should provide an opportunity for artists to rethink their position “in modern China.” This was important and necessary, because “the modern spirit in China can only find shelter and rest from trees which grow and thrive in the soil of modern China, and Chinese arts and letters can be alive and great only by being truly modern and Chinese. It is not enough for them to be only modern, they must also be

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thoroughly Chinese. And this, we believe the present war has helped them to be.” In the same editorial, Wen also denounced the tendency of attempting to go back to Chinese tradition, stating that “the soil of ancient China has long been denuded of its life-nourishing elements: nothing will grow in it but cactus and desert plants, beautiful things in their way, but not verdurous and shady enough to give shelter and rest to the modern spirit.”21 Wen’s argument that the war could provide a chance to “sinicize” modern culture shows that Western-trained editors such as Wen were concerned with the localization of global culture. Wen Yuanning did not elaborate on what a “thoroughly Chinese” modern culture was or how it could take root in China. However, he occasionally used a comparative perspective to investigate cultural problems. For instance, in an article on Aubrey Beardsley published in the May 1937 issue, he praised Beardsley’s power of abstraction,“his distinction— his never accepting anything as it comes in all its importunate reality, his brilliant exploration of the recondite in the conventional, his avoidance of the commonplace and the obvious.” But he emphasized that abstraction should not be considered an exclusive characteristic of Western modernism. Rather, he approached Western modernist art from a comparative point of view, comparing its simplicity and “abstraction” with “the abstraction and refinement of the Chinese artists of the T’ang Dynasty.” He wrote,“Indeed, it would be more correct to say that the T’ang artists abstract and refine to simplify: Beardsley refines and abstracts to complicate. In the one case, simplicity results in spirituality; in the other, complexity results in intellectuality.”22 Even though Wen had stated his belief in individualism as the basis of modern art, he was aware that the wartime created many different kinds of collective performance, which would also inspire the creation of modern culture. In the same editorial in which he discussed a “truly Chinese” modern culture in the February 1939 issue, he predicted that “modern Chinese drama . . . is in a position to profit by this war.” “For one thing, this war is full of dramatic material, especially of the kind that great drama is made. But there is another and better reason: drama is the only form of art in wartime which, without ceasing to be beautiful, can also be true, great and popular.And last but not least, it also be useful—as propaganda to stir up the masses, as recreation and amusement to millions who have no other way of enjoying themselves in wartime, and as catharsis for feelings which the present hostilities have aroused in every Chinese breast.”23 Here, we can see that by emphasizing drama’s accessibility to the masses and admitting that art could also function as propaganda, Wen already blurred the distinction between art and politics. Although when he wrote about James Joyce, A. E. Housman, and other Western writers, his approach was completely aesthetic, his observations about Chinese culture of his contemporary period showed a receptive and open attitude toward the demands of the local social situation and the taste of the Chinese readership.

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Wen Yuanning and his editorials thus represent a new moment in the history of circulation when the rapid importation of Western culture and modernism in urban arenas was brought face to face with the exigencies of the Chinese society manifested in terms of the nationalist need of self-defense and mobilization. Just as in the case of Chen Dieyi’s introduction to the special issue of Wan Xiang, Wen Yuanning’s editorials as well as the magazine T’ien Hsia as a whole opened up a space for reconceptualizing the relationship of modernism as global culture and cosmopolitan cultural translation with the general public and the political demand of nationalism. The Itine rant Care e r of Jack Che n Other writers for T’ien Hsia shared Wen’s modernistic sensibility but had different answers as to the definition of modern Chinese art and its relation to the war. In an article on “Chinese National Defence Literature” published in the February 1939 issue of a British magazine Life and Letters Today, the author Jack Chen, who also wrote for T’ien Hsia around the same time, described the Japanese invasion not as a war in the common sense of the word, but specifically as a war against culture. Similar to the editor of Wan Xiang, Chen also believed that “the barbarous destruction of culture in Manchuria and in Japanese-occupied cities in other parts of China” did not forestall the development of culture as a whole; on the contrary, “the tempo of cultural development in China has actually quickened.”24 According to Chen, this new development was due to the fact that many Chinese artists realized that “the fascist cry of ‘War against Art!’ must be answered by the cry of ‘Art against the War!’” In the rest of the article, Chen provided a list of new magazines that had just been launched and discussed the birth of new poetic styles in unoccupied territories, including Yan’an. He cited these recent cases of cultural production as examples to demonstrate the vibrancy and growth in the cultural arena during the wartime. What is particularly interesting about his observations is an undertone of Confucianism that guided his understanding of the relationship between culture and society. He wrote: The unity of all culture, the interdependence of art and society has for millennia been a recognized concept in Chinese social philosophy. It has been distorted during periods of Imperial decadence and even in the first years of the Republic it was overshadowed by the temporary importation of the Western idea “l’art pour l’art.”The democratic revolution, however, and the exigencies of war have again brought this concept to the fore. The artist and writer once again recognize the close connection between the development of art and the “social demand,” between art and the development of state.25

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Chen’s perception of the modern artist as an analogous figure to the traditional literatus is the foundation for his particular version of nationalism. Even though Chen believed that the artist should serve the state, he himself was neither a state ideologue nor even a close follower of the Nationalist regime. On the contrary, he was a sympathizer of the Communist Party and befriended Mao and other Communist Party leaders, whom he met and interviewed in Yan’an in the 1930s and 1940s. In other words, Chen’s political affiliation, his artistic sensibility, and his philosophy of culture all together make him a somewhat unusual figure among both intellectuals on the left and those on the right. In Part One of his personal account of contemporary Chinese history in Inside the Cultural Revolution, a book published after Chen had left China for the United States in the 1970s, Jack Chen tells us that he grew up in a family with close ties to Sun Yat-sen’s Nationalist Revolution. Jack was born into a Hakka family whose ancestors went to Trinidad as indentured labor. His grandfather saved enough money to buy a plantation and supported the son Eugene Chen through a college education in Port-of-Spain, Trinidad. Eugene practiced law after graduating from college and later became a follower of Sun Yat-sen. After the Republican Revolution in 1911, Eugene returned to China and took up various important positions as Sun’s personal secretary and representative of the Nationalist government at the Paris Peace Conference. Eugene also represented the Nationalist government during its negotiations with the British government in 1927, which resulted in the reclaiming of the British concession in Wuhan. Eugene and Jack Chen belonged to the leftist faction of the Nationalist Party that opposed to the rule of Chiang Kai-shek and, as a result, they were both exiled to the Soviet Union in the late 1920s. Jack received art training there and went on to work as a journalist for various English-language newspapers based in Shanghai and London in the 1930s and the 1940s. He traveled widely during that time, traversing both oppositional political territories and faraway localities such as Yan’an, Moscow, Wuhan, and London with amazing facility. This itinerant identity cultivated Chen’s modernist sensibility in a particular manner. In several of his articles published in T’ien Hsia and other Anglophone magazines in the late 1930s on recent artistic trends in China, he made a typical modernist claim that modern art needed to break away from the aesthetic mold of traditional art. In “The Younger Group of Shanghai Artists” published in the September 1937 issue of T’ien Hsia, he wrote that “an older generation of artists” might have “greater proficiency in both Chinese and Western classical medium” compared to a younger generation (he considered woodcut artists and cartoonists as representatives of the younger generation of artists), but they weren’t interested in representing “the inelegant

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pulsating life of this modern Eurasian Babylon.”26 He advised his readers to stay away from “the neat shops on Nanking Road” and the “ink drawings of junks and beggars and barrows”; rather, they should turn to “the garret studios” where reflections of Shanghai’s “poverty-stricken ugliness, its Eurasian exoticism” and “its many moods and meanings” were produced.Through his critical evaluations of both foreign and Chinese Shanghai artists, we can get a glimpse of Jack Chen’s own “politics of modernism,” to use Raymond Williams’s term.That is, he believed that a modern artist should come out of the studio and get into “closer creative contact with the life around him,” whether this life was on the streets of the metropolis or in the fields of the revolutionary base,Yan’an. In addition to T’ien Hsia, Chen also wrote frequently for other Englishlanguage magazines, such as China Today, a magazine that was closely connected to both Chinese and American Communist parties. His articles published in 1938 and 1939 in this magazine emphasized the need for artists to “[throw] themselves and their art into the main stream of cultural and political activity.”27 Synthesis of Eastern and Western artistic sensibilities was a secondary issue for him. Although he was receptive toward foreign influence on Chinese art and artists, he was opposed to “experimentation in the ‘isms’” or “exploits in ‘abstract’ composition, cubism and surrealism.”28 Following this line of thinking, he criticized some established figures in the art circle such as Liu Haisu, who had studied abroad and been successful in fusing the East and the West, but lacked what Chen called “creative realism.” In “Modern Chinese Art” published in China Today in 1938, he promoted the cartoon because he believed that the convenience of graphic art’s reproduction and circulation was consistent with the political ideal of democratic nationalism. He wrote in this article,“It is characteristic of the new outlook of the Chinese artist that he devotes his main attention to graphic art. This is truly democratic in its suitability for reproduction in thousands and even millions of copies.”29 He also defined the spirit of contemporary Chinese woodcuts and cartoons as a kind of “practical humanism,” manifested in terms of their ability to bring together the masses with the artists, the local reality of contemporary China with “international issues.” Jack Chen’s own career as a cultural worker also embodies mobility and movement. In the 1930s, at the same time that Chen was writing articles on contemporary Chinese art and theater for English-language magazines both inside and outside China, he was also known within the Chinese cultural circle as a curator who organized several exhibitions of contemporary Chinese art.According to the writer of an “Art Chronicle” in T’ien Hsia, Chun Kumwen, the aim of an exhibition organized by Jack Chen that consisted of “drawings and caricatures by American, British as well as Chinese artists” was to “bring together all the leading artists of their respective countries and

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firmly uniting progressive artists on an international scale for Peace, Democracy and Cultural Progress.” Chinese cartoonists such as Hu Ke and Ye Qianyu; British artists Stephen Bone and Gertrude Herms; and American artists Rockwell Kent, Elizabeth Olds, and Louis Losowick were featured at this exhibition. Hu Ke’s large-scale drawing entitled “Refugees,” which depicted “peasant folks with what little belongings they could possibly gather from their devastated homes, wandering on to escape the yoke of Japanese might,” conveyed a distinct socialist nationalist message, according to Chun Kum-wen.30 This exhibition traveled to several different places including Hong Kong, Canton, Hankow, and importantly,Yan’an. In Chen’s account of this international art exhibition in Inside the Cultural Revolution, he described the contents of the exhibition as artworks that “American and British had entrusted me with as their gift to fighting for China.”31 Chen also mentioned in this account that leading Communist leaders in Yan’an were invited to this exhibition, and since Mao could not attend the opening, he was given a special private show. An article entitled “The New Cultural Great Wall,” published in the January 1939 issue of China Today, best conveys Jack Chen’s belief that circulation of cultural products and mobility of cultural workers had a positive effect on the cause of nationalism.This article begins with a description of a song in circulation—“March of the Volunteers.” The rest of the article cites the shift of the cultural center from Shanghai to rural areas and the hinterland, the traveling performance troupe led by the leftist writer Ding Ling, and the printing and dissemination of antiwar posters as examples of the “quickened pace” in “mass education and literacy.”32 Chen considered this accelerated pace of cultural circulation across the nation as testimony to “Chinese culture’s uninterrupted development” and “a deadly antidote to Emperor worship, fascism, slavery, war.” In other words, he saw a direct correlation among mobility, circulation, democracy, and nationalism. His translation of the Chinese writer Yao Xueyin’s short story “Chabacheh Makai,” published in the December 1938 issue of T’ien Hsia, further captures the close relationship of circulation, modernism, and nationalist politics.The translation of this story was the result of the collaboration between Chen and “Ma Er,” the penname of the well-known Chinese translator and playwright Ye Junjian. This story written by the young and previously unknown writer Yao Xueyin describes a nameless peasant’s brief but memorable involvement in the guerrilla warfare against the Japanese invaders. The Chinese version was published in the March 1938 issue of Artistic Base edited by Mao Dun, and this publication quickly turned the author into a “new star on the literary scene since the beginning of the War of Resistance,” according to the editor of a postwar collection of Yao’s works.That its English version came out not long afterward demonstrates the close connection between the Englishlanguage magazine T’ien Hsia and the Chinese-language public culture.

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Yao’s short story is generally interpreted as a work of folk literature, since the quality that most impressed his critics is Yao’s skillful usage of local idioms and vivid description of an illiterate peasant figure. However, like many progressive writers of his contemporary period,Yao was not interested in folk culture per se; he was more interested in utilizing folk cultural elements to serve the cause of nationalist mobilization and enlightenment. In an autobiographical essay written in the early 1940s reflecting on his own writing experience,Yao mentioned that the language of his fiction came from eclectic sources. In one summer in the mid-1930s, he tried to compile a glossary of idiomatic expressions based on his recollection of a short period spent in the countryside during early childhood.At the same time he tried to teach himself Esperanto and Russian fictions in translation, which he claimed provided him with a model of how to depict peasant figures with humorous detachment.33 Yao’s account reminds us that his literary language came from many different sources and that he could not represent the folk in any pure and uncorrupted form. Similarly, Jack Chen’s translation of “Chabacheh Makai,” the famous resistance short story celebrated for its folk cultural elements, also should not be understood as a cosmopolitan intellectual’s encounter with the folk in its pure form; rather, this translation simply added one additional layer to the short story’s already multilingual cultural system. Both the translators Chen and Ye as well as the writer seemed to be aware of the fact that translation, both from dialect to vernacular Chinese and from Chinese to English, cannot truly represent the consciousness of the folk characters in this story. They all signified in their different versions of the story the limitation of the translator’s ability to access the folk. Anyone reading the short story for the first time would immediately raise the question: “What does the title ‘Chabacheh Makai’ mean?” According to a footnote in the English translation, “Chabacheh Makai” is an idiomatic northern expression referring to “someone not good or smart enough,” and this is how the main character—a peasant figure, introduces himself when he is mistaken by the Chinese guerrilla fighters to be a Japanese soldier. The phrase is just as inscrutable to a Mandarin Chinese reader as it would be to an English reader without consulting the footnote. What is interesting about the English version is that the translators chose to not translate this word into a meaningful phrase, but retain the sound “Chabacheh Makai.” It can thus be argued that the writer Yao Xueyin as well as the two translators Ma Er and Jack Chen all understood that this inscrutable phrase was meaningful beyond itself and had a structural function of disrupting the transparency of the text. This sign of inscrutability takes on a life of its own as the story progresses. In fact, if the phrase “Chabancheh Makai” can be taken as a theme of the entire story, then this story’s theme would have to be about translation, disjunc-

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tion, and contradiction rather than unity and transparency. In the beginning, the other guerrilla soldiers begin to use the phrase “Chabancheh Makai” to refer to anything and anyone funny.“Anyone could be a Chabancheh Makai. Even the Commander. When he sometimes refused to give us cigarettes, hiding them in his waist band, we’d all call out with a roar,‘Hey, Commander Chabancheh Makai!’ Or if someone sneezed over the men unexpectedly they would yell out derisively ‘Ai, you Chabancheh Makai!’”34 The circulation of the phrase “Chabancheh Makai” among the guerrilla fighters serves the purpose of simultaneously bridging the distance between the peasant figure and other more experienced soldiers, while highlighting their difference and noncommunication at the same time. Whereas the content of the story is about the peasant’s patriotic involvement in the War of Resistance, the language of the story presents another narrative about the cultural conflict between the folk and the elite. Since the term “Chabancheh Makai” carries a slightly derogatory connotation and has been imposed on the main character by a fellow villager, one can say that the self of the peasant soldier is alienated from his name from the very beginning. In fact, the rest of the story shows that this character brings a different worldview that results in his further alienation from the other guerrilla soldiers, all of whom have had more experience in the army. The story tells us that he has trouble learning patriotic songs, but he knows many tunes from local operas; he is reluctant to address his fellow soldiers as “comrades,” but he has his own term drawn from his local dialect to convey a sense of camaraderie toward his fellow soldiers. He is illiterate but knows many bandits’ slang words and jargon.Toward the end of the story, the other guerrilla soldiers have not succeeded in assimilating him into the culture of the army before he is removed from the battlefront due to an injury. “Chabancheh Makai” therefore remains a sign of inscrutability throughout the story, untranslated and unassimilatable even though it is circulated in the everyday speech of the guerrilla fighters even after the main character is gone. Through staging this encounter between the culture of the folk and that of the revolution, the story “Chabancheh Makai” in both Chinese and English versions stages translation as an intercultural and inter-lingual activity that facilitates communication and cooperation while retaining the heterogeneity of language and worldview at the same time. Unlike the thoughtfulness conveyed by his translation of this work of resistance literature, Jack Chen’s other writings that attempt to bring together the folk and the global tend to depict this union in a utopic fashion. His 1948 book on the Chinese theater published in London is a good example in this respect. In this book, Chen divides the history of the Chinese theater into three periods: the Classical Theater, the Western Theater, and the Yangko Theater.Yangko is a folk cultural form that originated from the northwestern

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part of China close to Yan’an, the revolutionary base. Chen argues in the introduction that whereas “the Western Style Theatre is essentially a product of the urban middle class intellectuals, the Yangko Theatre is a product of the revolutionary alliance between the modern intellectuals and the peasantry— the inexhaustible source of China’s vitality and strength and eternal renewal.”35 Unlike his English translation of contemporary Chinese short stories, where he engages with the heteroglossia of modern Chinese, Chen’s discussion does not deal with the process of Yangko’s creative adaptation in the contemporary context of the War of Resistance in any detailed manner. His perspective remains that of an outsider, an enthusiastic spectator who admires the performance with a bit of exoticism. As he claims in the middle of the narrative, “I had always thought that the mincing steps, the paper umbrellas and fans, the peculiar way in which ballerinas of the classical Western ballet in ‘Chinese transformation scenes’ dance with the index finger of both hand pointing upwards before them, was entirely make-believe ‘Chinoiserie,’ but I found that this style of representing Chinese dancing is quite authentic. These are the very steps and gestures that one sees in Shensi Yangko dancing.”36 His eagerness to locate the original source of some form of representation of Chinese culture he encountered in the West distracted him from engaging in a detailed analysis of the complexity of transnational cultural circulation. Betwe e n the City and the Country Chen’s writings prove that modernism, circulation, and resistance sentiments were not antagonistic to one another. His translation of the short story “Chabancheh Makai” further shows that communication between the folk and the elite, Chinese and English would necessarily encounter and produce the untranslatable. If Jack Chen represented the transnational circuit covered by T’ien Hsia, this magazine also enabled translocal connections among the urban center Shanghai, the Communist base Yan’an, and Nationalist government’s wartime capital Chongqing mainly through chronicling the cultural activities in these three different localities. Here it seems appropriate to evoke a term of Louisa Schein and Tim Oaks—“translocal China”—to describe the relationship of different localities represented by this magazine. Schein and Oaks state that their volume of esssays entitled “Translocal China” is a study of the “multiplying forms of mobility” and the “localities” that have been affected by mobility.They argue that “translocality draws our focus to local scales of activity while not losing sight of the broader scales of interaction that link the local to the regional and national scales.” The term “translocality” describes various kinds of flow of people, culture, and ideas between and among different localities.37 Borrowing their term “translocal China,” I would argue that T’ien Hsia’s cosmopolitanism was reflected in its ability to capture a “translocal China” that was unique to the late

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1930s to the early 1940s. The local position of T’ien Hsia was of course Shanghai; however, this magazine’s coverage did not focus on one city, but spanned the entire country and revealed the path of circulation of culture and people in this critical moment before and during the war. Making connections between Shanghai and Yan’an was particularly sensitive for both social and political reasons.Yan’an was not just the political Other to the Nationalist government that controlled Chongqing but also the underdeveloped countryside compared to the burgeoning modernity represented by the semicolonial city. In “Metropolitan Perceptions and the Emergence of Modernism,” Raymond Williams describes a particular kind of movement associated with the emergence of modernism—the movement from the country to the city.38 However, the trajectory of movement in the Chinese context during the war was more complex than the British situation as described by Williams. The period of the late 1930s and early 1940s was marked by massive migration of cultural workers and the change of cultural center from the city to the country, from the coastal regions to the hinterland.As the historian Chang-tai Hung argues, new literary genres and artistic forms such as reportage and cartoons were invented in the process of this movement, and existing cultural forms such as modern drama (also known as the spoken drama in the Chinese context) witnessed another renaissance by infusing folk cultural elements and redefining its relationship with the audience.39 In terms of cultural polemics, a folk cultural movement was created and joined hands with the political agenda of mass mobilization and national defense. However, as critics have argued, this folk cultural movement was not a simplistic and naïve return to the rural and to roots, whatever were the intentions of the intellectuals participating in this movement.40 It was another modernity project that was aimed to transform folk culture and integrate it into discourses of enlightenment and nationalism. In terms of actual practice, the spatial movement of culture to rural areas did not always result in the harmonious marriage of the urban and the folk. Through the description of one enthusiastic participant in this folk cultural movement, a realist novelist from Beijing, Lao She, we can clearly see the goal of the folk cultural movement and the difficulties it encountered: I started composing popular literature after the victory in Tai Er Zhuang when everyone was shouting slogans such as “Literature must go to the countryside,” “Literature must join the army.” I wrote drama that followed old forms but had new subject matters. I also wrote drum songs and Henan Zuizi [ballad songs popular in Henan province]. . . . On the surface, I was opting for the easier task, for I had given up creative work in my own style to follow other people’s models. . . . But my experience told me that this was not easy. First, one has to be

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accurate and needs to study in order to achieve accuracy. One has to learn the old models first before making new things out of them. Whether it is a traditional play or a drum song, they might be old stuff, but they are still alive; the reason we compose in these old forms is so that we can give them new blood for them to grow and play an active part in the war of resistance.41 Lao She’s remarks betray a tendency to organize cultural forms according to a teleological order from the old to the new. A metaphor used by him and other cultural workers to describe the folk culture movement—“putting new wine into old bottles” further shows that the goal of this movement was to transform folk cultural forms, not simply return to them. However, as a cultural practitioner, Lao She was sensitive enough to realize the problems with these perceptions and terminology. He wrote, “As the writer gradually approached the war, he would find out that the war was not as simple as he had originally understood. . . .The more thoroughly and deeply he understood reality, the more he would find it difficult to fit into the old bottle. If he insisted on trying, then the ‘old bottle’ would explode.”42 As cultural workers and cultural production moved to the rural areas and the hinterland, T’ien Hsia’s coverage of this migration charted another trajectory that brought news about these areas back to the coastal city.This cultural cartography, which consisted of back-and-forth movement between the country and city, is obviously more complex than the formation of modernism that Williams described in the European context, since not only were the city and the country not completely cut off from each other but real and imaginary travels between these two localities contributed to the formation of several different forms of cosmopolitan culture anchored in Yan’an or Chongqing, the wartime capital. Although these various forms of culture could not all be considered “modernistic” in the canonical sense of the word, they actually betray characteristics similar to European modernism according to Williams’s description, such as the estranged perspective of the mobile subject and alienation of language and sensibility. Many of these translocal connections were recorded by the chronicles in T’ien Hsia, rendering the depiction of this transitional period multidudinous, fragmented, and not unified around a coherent ideology of either the Nationalist Party or the Communist Party. Later historical narratives of the culture during the War of Resistance tend to privilege one particular locality, emphasizing the centrality of either one of the two ideologically laden localities, Chongqing, the wartime capital of the Nationalist Party, or Yan’an, the Communist power base.At the same time, the colonized city is often described as apolitical, decadent, filled with commercial or middlebrow culture. By contrast, T’ien Hsia depicted a much more ambiguous “scale of aggregation,”

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to use the term of Wai Chee Dimock, who juxtaposed transnational and translocal cultural flows. Reading the chronicles on one literary form by different writers allows us to perceive a geographical and ideological shift from the perspective of an intellectual exchange. The poetry chronicles by the accomplished poet Zau Sinmay (Shao Xunmei) in October 1936 and November 1937 and Ling Tai in December 1939 are exemplary. Shao Xunmei (1906–1968) is a poet known for his decadent taste and bold erotic poetry. Born into a wealthy family in Shanghai, Shao studied in England and traveled widely in Europe. After he came back to Shanghai, he soon became a prominent figure in the local cultural circle. In addition to writing poetry, Shao was also actively involved in other cultural activities, such as publishing magazines, printing books in his own publishing house, and running a bookstore. Shao’s poetry was influenced by an eclectic group of Western authors, including late Victorian and early modernist English writers Swinburne and Wilde, the ancient Greek poet Sappho, as well as French writers such as Verlaine and Baudelaire. The two poetry chronicles in T’ien Hsia are a perfect illustration of Shao’s modernist sensibility. He is in favor of formalistically refined poetry with an intellectual bent and is critical toward leftist authors and war literature; he pays attention to aesthetic borrowings between Chinese and Western poetry and translation activities of foreign-language poetry. As an editor and publisher, he provides up-to-date information about new publishing projects, especially those that focus on poetry, such as the publication of a poetry series or the launching of a new poetry magazine. Shao likes to interpret the works of new poetry talents in the context of a literary history, but the genealogy of modern poetry he provides in the chronicles is selective and reveals his biases against poets with a different sense of aesthetics and politics. In the October 1936 chronicle, he praises intellectual poets such as Bian Zhilin, Chen Mengjia, Zhu Xiang, Jin Kemu, and Hou Juhwa. Among these poets, all but Hou Juhwa were also scholars who held teaching positions in major universities. Quoting from Bian Zhilin’s poem “On the Way Home”: “Like an astronomer turning from his telescope,/ Amid the noises I hear my own slow steps,” Shao endorses the poet’s detached sensibility, the ability to “‘hear his own slow steps’ amid the noises of the busy world.”43 This positive evaluation of Bian’s poems is in contrast to his criticism of leftist writers in his second chronicle, written one year later. Surveying the development of modern poetry in November 1937, several months after the war had started, Shao divides poets into three types: the intellectual, the emotional, and the expressionistic. Among the intellectual poets, he mentions two poets, He Qifang and Li Guangtian, in addition to Bian Zhilin, whose poetry he already reviewed in the earlier chronicle, and describes their common characteristics as “refined diction,”“delicate sentiment,” and “skeptical conception.”All three

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poets, he tells us, were “formerly students of Peking National University . . . of the same age, [and] lived together in the same room.” Shao does not have too much to say about the aesthetics and sensibility of the second type, emotional poetry, and he only cites Ai Ching’s “Ta-yen River” and Zang Kejia’s “Self-Portrait” as examples of this type. For the expressionist type, he singles out Xu Chi’s poems to criticize. “Most of them are impossible to read in any language but their own, for typography plays a large part in their effect. Poems printed zigzag; poems arranged like human figures. Word-pictures they may well be called, but does the ‘poem’ still exist after one has discounted all the trouble of printing and deciphering?”44 Shao Xunmei’s poetry chronicles demonstrate his modernistic sensibility and urban anchor as well as his lack of acceptance of resistance literature. He concludes his November 1937 chronicle by lamenting the closings of many literary magazines and announcing that “nowadays there is much talk of war literature,” writing: A daily paper is being published by the Federation of Cultural Associations, and it is called Salvation. The first page is devoted to war news, the fourth to rapportage [sic], while the second and third are covered by ‘feature stories,’ poetry, and songs. So it is practically a literary paper. Writers such as Kuo Mo-jo (Guo Moruo), Tseng Chen-to (Zheng Zhenduo),Yao Su-feng, and T’ien Han (Tian Han) are among its editors, and all of them contribute with fervor. The poems they write are, of course, war poems: not a line of them is without some comment upon the heroic deeds of our soldiers, or the beastliness of the Japanese army, or cruelties that have been inflicted upon our helpless civilians. But does not prose go with this subject better than poetry? . . .They sound unreal. And this is the worst one can say of a paper meant for propaganda.45 In contrast to the poetry chronicles written by Shao, those written by Ling Tai in the December 1939 issue show a completely different take on wartime poetry. Beginning with a pronouncement that “gone indeed is the age when Chinese poets used to seclude themselves in the Ivory Tower,” Ling Tai shows no ambivalence in his praise of “poems which may be jarring to the ear, but are nevertheless very vital.” In contradiction to Shao’s emphasis on crosscultural aesthetics and translation, which Ling Tai thinks belongs to “a tendency of the past,” Ling observes that poetry is going through a “movement . . . of sinicization” during the war. By “sinicization,” Ling Tai refers to poetry written in the “medium which the people know well” and gives examples of “declamatory poetry,”“wall poetry,” and “street poetry.” Ling Tai also thinks that poetry as well as poets should “go to the people,” and ends the chronicle by praising a poet Wang Ta Tzu (literally, “Big Sister Huang”) who used to be a factory

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worker in Shanghai and was by then a guerrilla fighter. Her long poem was published in a literary magazine that had a nationwide distribution. “For an ex-factory worker, that is a rare distinction indeed!” Ling Tai exclaims. The fact that this movement is mentioned but not covered in depth in T’ien Hsia is revealing of the urban anchor of this magazine. In the first issue of T’ien Hsia, Shao Xunmei’s erotic poem “The Serpent” is published next to another accomplished poet Wen Yiduo’s poem “Dead Water,” both translated by Harold Acton and Chen Shixiang. Both poems contain rich allusions to classical Chinese poetry and Western mythology and are formalistically refined in different ways. However, throughout the publication history of this magazine, no example of “wall poetry” or “street poetry” is published. It is difficult not to read the poetry chronicles by Shao Xunmei’s and Ling Tai’s views on poetry as diametrically oppositional to each other. By asking different writers to write about different schools of poetry, the magazine managed to follow shifting cultural trends and demonstrated an ambition to “cover” the entire nation. In addition to this spatial dimension, there is another temporal dimension to the making of the nation that we will examine in the following section. A Diffe re nt Se rial Log ic of the Nation Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities argues that there is an inherent connection between the realist novel in circulation and the emergence of nationalist consciousness. However, since his description of the realist novel contains much ambiguity, one wonders whether other genres of writing that in some way might be more real than the realist novel—journalism and news reports, for instance––would have the same ability of conjuring up a collectivity through their form. Anderson has mentioned that the newspaper has a similar capability of nation-building as the realist novel; however, from a textual point of view, it remains vague whether it is the representation of the collectivity by the text or a particular form of reading of the text that contributes to the rise of nationalist consciousness. As we have seen, many issues of T’ien Hsia contain a section called the “chronicle” that documents the latest cultural activities and achievements in a serial form. Although the chronicles convey a sense of detail and comprehensiveness that one would probably associate with a collective notion of “Chineseness,” they in fact contain much subtlety and complexity that complicate the connection between circulation and nationalism. The chronicle became a regular feature of T’ien Hsia starting from the August 1936 issue. Focused on a literary genre, a cultural form, or a field of cultural production, each chronicle provided a sketch of the latest developments in the subject area. There was not a set format or length, and the degree to which the writer of a chronicle participated in current debates and

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controversies in a specific cultural field also varied. While some chronicle writers sounded argumentative and took a clearly stated position in a particular cultural debate, other writers tended to take a neutral position and use an objective tone in their accounts of the latest cultural trends. One common characteristic of the chronicles is that they all read like a kind of listing, containing many names and titles often presented in English with Chinese originals included in parentheses; few attempts were made to give a detailed account of these cultural productions in terms of plot summary or biographical information of an author.This characteristic indicates that the chronicles were not meant for the cultural outsider; instead, they were supposed to be read as texts that paralleled and bore close connections to other cultural productions and serial publications of the same period, many of which were likely to be in Chinese. Although a chronicle is a kind of historical documentation, the chronicles in T’ien Hsia do not just have a linear structure; they actually invite comparative reading and have an indexical relationship with other publications of the same period. It was expected that the ideal reader of the chronicle would already have some knowledge about Chinese contemporary culture or be a reader of other magazines and publications. Since all of the chronicles focus on culture, it is important to investigate the semantic meanings of the word “culture” in this magazine. In Sun Ke’s forward and the editorial commentary at the beginning of each issue by the chief editor Wen Yuanning, the meaning of the word “culture” sounds very similar to the civilizational discourse that Presenjit Duara has described in his book Sovereignty and Authenticity: Manchukuo and the East Asian Modern. Duara argues in the third chapter of the book that a new idea of civilization advocated by German philosophers Herder and Humbolt emerged in the early nineteenth century in Europe and gradually gained momentum in the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century. This notion of civilization is counter-evolutionary and oppositional to the imperialistic notion of Civilization that was both universalistic and Social Darwinian. Duara argues that this alternative civilizational discourse was especially popular after the First World War, when it “served as the ultimate rationale for the sovereignty” of the newly formed nation-states.46 According to Duara, an important work in the German counterevolutionary intellectual tradition in the post–World War I period, Oswald Spengler’s Decline of the West, presents this vision of civilization (cultures, or Kultur in Spengler’s term) as “multiple, spiritual, and—as the highest expression of a people’s achievements, virtues, and authenticity—authorizing.”47 However, even though Sun Ke and the editor Wen Yuanning’s writings show that they were influenced by the Germanic notion of civilization, many other articles published in the magazine T’ien Hsia did not follow closely this definition of culture. Most of the “cultures” represented in this magazine either do not cohere

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into a national “whole,” or the connection between them and the national essence or spirit was not spelled out. One often gets the feeling that most writers perceived culture as material objects rather than spiritual essence.The tendency to enumerate a variety of cultural productions in order to demonstrate cultural vibrancy is an indication of this perception of culture as things. Overall, we cannot say that this magazine is the realization of a singular intellectual mind; rather, the chronicles indicate that the magazine’s mission seemed to be both to provide a description of the cultures in circulation (such as foreign books, the writings by Chinese and non-Chinese writers, and cultural news) and to participate in the process of circulation in itself. In addition to being a cultural insider, another requirement for the ideal reader of the chronicles was that he or she should have a more or less open view of culture and be unrestricted by conventional divisions between elite and popular cultures, academic and public cultures, traditional and modern knowledge.The chronicles traverse these divisions very easily.The writers of these chronicles were usually practitioners or experts in a particular field, but the editor and the reader were expected to be nonspecialists, with interests extending beyond one particular field. The juxtaposition of chronicles in different fields also did not follow standard divisions of knowledge in science, social science, or the humanities. Hence the chronicles cover very eclectic fields including drama, poetry, architecture, anthropology, archeology, publications (print culture), philosophy, movies, music, biological sciences, art, library, science, and paleontology. Whereas the contents of the music, movie, drama, and publication chronicles tend to mix academic developments with popular trends, archeology and philosophy chronicles are generally focused on activities in the universities. Using the word “chronicle” to refer to a cultural report conveys a sense of time. The chronicle is an ancient form, but it is also a living practice in many cultures, particularly in countries of Latin America, such as Mexico. According to Hayden White, one distinct feature of the chronicle is, of course, that of “registering time (chronos) and establishing a temporal order to events.” Yet, chronicles are considered by him as an inferior form of history writing because although a chronicle can “capture the immediate,” history writing requires coherent narratives that establish cause and effect relationship, construct anticipations, or predict outcomes of a historical occurrence. White considers the chronicle as lacking closure:“The chronicle, like the annals but unlike the history, does not so much conclude as simply terminate; typically it lacks closure, that summing up of the ‘meaning’ of the chain of events with which it deals that we normally expect from the well-made story.”48 Another trait of the chronicle is its generic ambiguity. Contemporary Mexican chronicles often appear in newspapers. Experts on this genre Ignacio Corona and Beth E. Jorgensen find that the chronicle is “contiguous to four subgenres, with which

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clear-cut borders do not exist: in journalism with reportage and human interest pieces; and in literature with short story and the essay.”49 This fluid genre lends itself to multiple uses, depending on the content of a chronicle and its context. As a contemporary Mexican chronicler Carlos Monsivais states, the chronicle is somewhere “between literature and society, between history and everyday life, between reader and literary taste, between information and entertainment, between testimony and raw material for fiction, between journalism and nation-building.”50 The temporality conveyed by the cultural chronicles in T’ien Hsia emphasizes individual moments of cultural creation and consumption rather than an abstract idea of time in association with linear progress.These many concrete moments are unpredictable, just as the frequency of a chronicle in a particular field is irregular. Since the reader of a chronicle in a particular field could not anticipate when this field was going to be discussed again, the reader would have a feeling of what Hayden White has described as lacking closure with regard to the development of this field. If due to its serial form and comprehensive coverage, the chronicle as a regular feature of this magazine could be seen as contributing to the construction of the nation, the nation represented by these chronicles was neither stable nor completely unified.The chronicle form conveyed a sense of concreteness and lack of abstraction; however, the fluidity of the form proved to have an additional advantage during the time of war: the war had rendered many cultural institutions volatile and changed the original cultural center in terms of location and structure; therefore, the chronicle provided the representation of national culture the kind of openness that was necessary at this moment. This serial form also enabled the editor to track culture’s movement from the city to the country as reflected in the changes in a particular literary genre—poetry, for instance––without being confined to the ways in which this history has been narrated by a particular poetic school or clique. In other words, in ways similar to the Mexican chronicles described by Carlos Monsivais, chronicles in T’ien Hsia have the capability of mediating between “history and everyday life,” between the grand conception of time as progress and an alternative conception of time as the present and the momentary, and between journalism and nation-building. The seriality of the T’ien Hsia chronicles is of a different kind from the logic of nationalism as narrated by Benedict Anderson.The chronicles describe the shifts and turns in the cultural arena as well as the movement of people and cultures across national borders and regional boundaries. Although these trends can in turn be mapped onto the unstable condition of the nation at war, the representation of the cultural collectivity does not readily lend itself to the figuration of the national collectivity. Although the chronicle was published in a serial publication, its circulation would not render the various

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localities into a national “whole,” but on the contrary, it would expose the disjunction between different localities. In addition, this English-language periodical was circulated mainly in the cities, and its readers were restricted to the educated elite class.Therefore, the chronicles had more to do with the speed and shape of cultural change and circulation than it had to do the construction of the nation as collective consciousness. If we compare the chronicle’s treatment of time with another collective writing exercise of the same time period, then we can see that this other project is much more like the realist fiction described by Anderson and has a much clearer agenda of unifying the nation through cultural means. In spring 1936, newspapers and magazines in China published advertisements calling for submissions to a collective writing exercise called “One Day in China.” This day was randomly chosen by the organizers of this event—the Literary Research Society and the editorial board of “One Day in China”––and it was to be May 21, 1936.The intention of this event was “to reveal the entire face of China during one day.”51 According to the chief editor Mao Dun, who was by then already one of the most accomplished realist novelists in China, over three thousand essays were received, and they came from “every province and city throughout the entire country” except “Xinjiang, Qinghai, Xikang, Tibet, and Mongolia.” Mao Dun explained, Except those with a special “way of life” such as Buddhists, Daoists, prostitutes, and itinerant peddlers, there is not a single social stratum or vocational way of life unrepresented among the large number of essays received. . . . May twenty-first aroused the hearts of almost all those Chinese able to read who are within the country or abroad, who are concerned about the destiny of our motherland, and who are eager to know the whole, true face of our motherland which is at this perilous juncture. They have brought about a general mobilization of minds.52 Looking further into the editorial process of the resulting anthology allows us to see the connection between this writing project and the realist novel on the one hand, and nationalism on the other. The book includes 469 essays, selected on the basis of a set of five criteria that were explained by Mao Dun at the beginning of the book. In addition to giving equal representation to various regions in China, Mao Dun and the other editors were concerned with providing a cross-section of all social classes and an even representation of various regions in China.“For example, in the section of Shanghai, we included two essays describing life in textile factories, one written by a clerk and another written by a worker. (If there had been an essay by an owner of a textile factory, we would feel better about it. . . . ) Finally, if we received only one piece on a certain aspect of life, then we used it no matter how badly it was written—and

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edited it to make it intelligible without changing the original meaning.”53 Quality of writing was considered to be secondary compared to the representativeness of the text; in fact, the editors “drew most heavily on the essays written by those who had never before published (that is, the non-professional writers).”54 The selected essays were then organized by geographic region rather than subject, and Mao Dun’s justification for this organization pattern was that it would provide a regionally specific explanation for a particular social issue. Another interesting feature of this book is the three addenda compiled by the editors: one addendum lists the major events “at the national level” on May 21, 1936; the second is a list of major newspapers in China with the editor’s explanation of what “kind of public opinion organization” a particular newspaper was.These descriptions were written on the basis of readings of the “editorials, headlines, and essays from literary supplements.”55 Finally, the third addendum is a list of entertainment events in China on that day, including radio programs, movies, plays, and so on. Mao Dun was going to include a fourth addendum of statistical figures of industrial production, imports and exports, and other aspects of social life, but he abandoned this idea since these figures were hard to obtain at that time. We can see that there are many differences between these two ways of representing the nation through culture, one of which is temporality. When the writing project “One Day in China” was published as a book, a prominent intellectual Cai Yuanpei commented on the significance of time in this project. Cai wrote that this writing project had turned a random day, May 21, 1936, into a landmark; this day was no longer ordinary since representations of this day would be historically more comprehensive and thorough than any other day on the calendar.To use Anderson’s language, this day can be considered a moment of simultaneity that provided a structural connection for different narratives taking place in various parts of China. By contrast, one can see that the T’ien Hsia chronicles construct a different sense of time that was focused on not a singular moment, but on multiple moments that cannot be abstracted into a grand narrative of progress. I would argue that the temporal structure conveyed by T’ien Hsia’s chronicles can be considered as translational time, rather than national time, mainly because this temporal structure does not attempt to represent history in terms of empty homogenous time, but rather as a continuous process made up of many concrete moments of narrativization, memory, and rewriting. In addition, the sense of space in T’ien Hsia’s chronicles is also different from that in the “One Day in China” writing project. Since disparate localities elicited in T’ien Hsia’s chronicles roughly followed the general trend of the shift of cultural center and migration of cultural workers from coastal and urban areas to the countryside and the hinterland, we can vaguely discern some form of

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connectivity of these different localities. We can perhaps say that the localities seem to be translational to each other. In comparison, the “One Day in China” writing project attempts to map the entire China onto myriad representations of local life coming from different localities. Particularly when published as a single volume, the project conveys a sense of completeness in terms of national territory. The two projects also differ in terms of their writers and readers. Whereas the T’ien Hsia chronicles were written by elite cultural professionals (the English-language medium to a large extent determined their elite status) and were intended to be read by members of a similar class background, the “One Day in China” project gave an opportunity to some previously unpublished writers. Since the writers came from different class backgrounds, the readers must also have been more heterogeneous than T’ien Hsia magazine. The comparison tells us that the nation was “imagined” and created in more than one way in the mid- to late 1930s and that seriality did not always translate into unity and abstraction. Tran slat i on and L i te rary H i stori og raphy I have used the term “translational time” to describe the spatial-temporal structure in T’ien Hsia’s chronicles in order to emphasize the concreteness of historical time and specificity of locality in association with the narration of cultural activities. The term “translational time” is inspired by Wai Chee Dimock’s notion of “planetary time,” which refers to a larger temporal scheme than the so-called “national chronology,” a scale that corresponds to and intersects with the spatial expansion that occurs with globalization. Dimock writes, Scale enlargement changes not only the demarcation and organization of space; it changes also the demarcation and organization of time. National territoriality is no longer the sole determinant in the conduct of human beings, the loyalty they sustain, the frames of reference they adopt. National chronology is even less a determinant. For much of the world’s population, time has perhaps always been subnational in one sense, supranational in another. Supranational time seems to me especially important, if currently undertheorized, in the context of globalization. What I have in mind is a duration antedating the birth of any nation and outlasting the demise of all. 56 The creation of planetary time, according to Dimock, has a great deal to do with the reading and circulation of cultural texts across national borders and through historical time. “Words are not pointlike. They spread out, spill over into unexpected historical periods, unexpected human communities: the bidirectional flow of time is such as to fill any given text with recesses of

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antecedence and stretches of afterlife.”This kind of cultural circulation is also a process of translation, loosely defined. Dimock gives an example of the Bhagavad Gita, a text that was circulated in the United States and whose spirit was incorporated into Thoreau’s Walden, which in turn influenced Indian spiritual and political leader Gandhi. This kind of circulation/translation serves “as a bond uniting the living, the dead, and the unborn, a continuum across space and time as well as across languages.”57 In other words, by thinking about globalization in temporal terms, Dimock implicitly invites us to contemplate questions such as “What would be the form of historiography that is constituted through translation and circulation?” and “How different would this kind of historiography be from national historiography?” Following this lead, we can see that what I have called “translational time” exemplified by T’ien Hsia’s chronicles is also manifested in the English translations of Chinese literature, which were published in a separate section of every issue of T’ien Hsia.The literary works in English translation published in T’ien Hsia were eclectic in terms of politics, genre, style, and literary period. In addition to featuring “new literature,” that is, literature written after and influenced by the New Culture Movement, T’ien Hsia also published premodern literature, including both canonical works such as Tang dynasty poetry and noncanonical works such as Wang Xiuchu’s “A Memoir of a Ten Days’ Massacre in Yangchow,” written in the seventeenth century. This wide range of selection conveys an understanding of time similar to Dimock’s notion of planetary time, since it mixes the past, the present, and the future and emphasizes the relation among the three time frames. In addition, this literary genealogy is also different from that which is conveyed by the authoritative Compendium of New Literature, a literary history-making project of the same time period. As translations are intended to give non-Chinese readers some idea about China and Chinese literature, T’ien Hsia translations also differ in terms of their understanding of literary history from a similar type of translation project conducted by American internationalist scholars and activists Harold Isaacs and Edgar Snow. I will discuss these translation and anthology projects in detail in the next chapter. In order to give an idea of the eclectic nature of the selections, I am including here an incomplete list of literature in translation published in T’ien Hsia, organized by genre. poetry “Dead Water” by Wen Yiduo, “Fly in Autumn” and “My Memory” by Dai Wang-shu, “A Journey” by Li Guangtian, “The Return of the Native” by Bian Zhilin, “The Serpent” and “Voice” by Shao Xunmei, “The Shooting Star” by Li Kwangtian, “Souvenir” and “Vespers” by Liang Zongdai, nine poems by Su Dong-po, and fortysix classical Chinese poems.

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short stories “Green Jade and Green Jade” by Shen Congwen, “Chabanche Makai” by Yao Xueyin, “Departure” by Wu Yan, “Star” by Ba Jin, “Hands” by Xiao Hong, “A Poet Goes Mad” by Ling Shuhua, “Looking Back to the Past,” “Remorse,” and “A Hermit at Large” by Lu Xun, “Revenge” by Yang Zhensheng, “They Gather Heart Again” by Lao She, “The Tragedy of Tsui Ning: An Anonymous Story Written in the Sung Dynasty,” and “Good Iron is Not for Nails” by Lu Yan. memoirs “Six Chapters of a Floating Life” by Lin Yutang, “A Strange Story of Sian” by Jiang Xiaolian, and “A Memoir of a Ten Days’ Massacre in Yangchow” by Wang Xiuchu. drama “Madame Cassia,”“Chun Xiang Nao Xue,” and “Thunder and Rain” by Cao Yu. It is not my intention to discuss specific translation strategies, techniques, or the quality of translation with regard to particular works of literature, since they differ greatly depending on the translator and the work itself. However, I am concerned with the question of “What kind of literary world-making project do these English translations represent?” From the above list, we can see that the translations clearly cross the boundary of the left and the right and cover very different historical periods from the tenth century to the twentieth. In this temporal continuum, the present is represented as a moment that stands in relation to, not in isolation from, other moments. This can be seen from the various ways that Chinese literature in English in T’ien Hsia attempted to address the contemporary reality of the anti-Japanese war. First, T’ien Hsia tried to keep up with the pace of cultural development by publishing new stories in the category of “national defense literature.”Altogether four stories of this category were published, Lu Yan’s “Good Iron is Not for Nails,” Wu Yan’s “Departure,” Lao She’s “They Gather Heart Again,” and Yao Xueyin’s “Chabancheh Makai.” Second, the magazine also tried to address contemporary reality through reprinting old literary works that depict wars. For instance, “A Memoir of a Ten Days’ Massacre in Yangchow,” written in the seventeenth century by Wang Xiuchu, describes the experience of surviving the massacre in Yangchow by the Manchu soldiers. At least one reprinting of this text’s original Chinese version was published in April 1937, just one month before the English translation came out in T’ien Hsia. The Chinese version was published as a book

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in a series entitled “historical records of Chinese internal problems and external troubles,” a description that explicitly states the contemporary relevance of this publication project. The fact that the English version came out so soon after the publication of the Chinese text testifies to the active interaction of the Chinese-language public with this particular English-language public. The third way of addressing contemporary events is by publishing memoirs of people who fought in the war. “My First Air Battle” is an example of this category; it is an account of a Chinese pilot who described his first air battle against the Japanese army.The magazine also translated and published several titles of classical Chinese literature that did not have much connection with the social reality of the 1930s, such as “The Six Chapters of a Floating Life” or Sung Dynasty poetry.The choice of these titles reflects the personal tastes of individual translators and editors. Addressing contemporary affairs by way of publishing texts that belong to different periods exemplifies what Dimock has called “relativity of simultaneity” with regard to the temporality of literary reading. According to her, “relativity of simultaneity highlights the existence of different time frames in any population of readers.The apparent unity of the chronological date gives way to plurality of operative nows.These nows are not discretely or uniformly slotted; they do not all line up on the same synchronic plane.They owe their shapes to the irregular compass of words: words with different antecedents, different extensions of meaning.”58 The citation of texts belonging to other time periods for the purpose of representing the present creates the exact situation of the “plurality of operative nows.” Dimock argues that this multiplicity, enabled by reading practices that cross national borders, creates not world literature in the conventional sense but a “literature for the planet.” Even though in T’ien Hsia’s case the texts translated into English all originate from the same source of Chinese literature, and they do not seem to fit into the larger global context that Dimock discusses in her article, in a way Chinese literature mediated through English already anticipates this larger context of global literary reading and can therefore be considered as “literature for the planet” in exactly the way Dimock has defined the term. The sense of now that is embedded in a relationship with the past and the future is to a certain extent antithetical to the idea of literary revolution championed by key proponents of Chinese New Culture. As we know, the literary revolution accompanying the radical May Fourth Movement in 1919 was all about overthrowing classical Chinese and Confucianism. Ironically, one of the most radical thinkers of the May Fourth generation, Lu Xun, actually had a rather complicated understanding of temporality and progress, which was illustrated in a short story by him that was forgotten by most readers and the writer himself until the mid-1930s. After the rediscovery of the original Chinese version, T’ien Hsia published an English translation.This

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story in English translation represents in a compact manner the literary historiography embodied by the entire translation project of T’ien Hsia. T’ien Hsia published three stories by Lu Xun,“Looking Back to the Past,” “Remorse,” and “A Hermit at Large.” Of the three stories,“Looking Back to the Past” is a somewhat unusual choice since it is an obscure piece and was hardly considered to be a representative work by the author. Not included in any of Lu Xun’s short story collections, this piece was forgotten even by the author himself and reprinted for the first time only after his death in 1938 as an item in the seventh volume of his collected works—“Collection of Items Not Included in Any Collection.”An English version of this short story came out in the February 1938 issue of T’ien Hsia, a detail that once again shows the close connection between this magazine with Chinese-language public culture of the same period. In fact, “Looking Back to the Past” is an important piece in Lu Xun’s oeuvre since it is the first story he ever wrote, and to the Chinese reader of the 1930s, this piece reveals a different and somewhat unfamiliar aspect of Lu Xun.The story was written in classical Chinese and therefore did not fit into the edicts of the New Culture Movement. “Looking Back to the Past” describes a boy’s experience of acquiring two different kinds of knowledge through studying with his tutor, a Mr. Baldhead, and by listening to the talk stories of an old man in the neighborhood, the Old Wang. There is not much development in the story, but the difference between two different kinds of knowledge respectively represented by the two older men can be considered its theme. Mr. Baldhead is a pedantic teacher of the old school who asks his student to compose couplets without providing much instruction. He is portrayed largely in a negative light as a hypocritical and boring man, so “short-sighted” that “as he spoke, his lips in some way often touched my books.” In the middle of the story, Mr. Baldhead runs away to his hometown when he learns that the Boxers, referred to as “the long-hairs” in the story, are about to take over the town. Old Wang, Mother Lee (the caretaker of the boy), and the boy himself are the only ones remaining in this town. Without much to do, Old Wang begins to “talk stories” about previous visits of this town by the “long-hairs” in the past. The story is open-ended since it ends at the conclusion of Old Wang’s stories without providing much resolution or conclusion. Going back into their room, Mother Lee and the boy fall asleep, but they both are woken up in the middle of the night by nightmares reflecting the traumas they have had in their lives. In one way, the story is rightly faulted for being thin and formless. However, if we focus not on plot but on the question of literacy and language, we can see that this story describes a familiar theme that preoccupies Lu Xun in many of his later stories, such as “Diary of a Mad Man” and “My Hometown.” As Ted Huters points out, “Lu Xun never directly represents either the conflicting perspectives [between ‘the modern authorial/narratorial

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consciousness and other mentalities’] . . . or the China/West split that is a key feature behind it.”59 In other words, binary oppositions between China and the West, modern and the premodern are underlying operatives in Lu Xun’s fictions even when these themes are not overtly represented. In terms of the story’s scheme of temporality, possibilities of change are offset by a pattern of repetition: the current invasion of the town by “longhairs” repeats similar troubles of the past; Old Wang’s horrifying stories about how ordinary folks were tortured and killed by bandits cause just as much pain to the little boy as the Confucian teachings of Mr. Baldhead. If the schoolmaster Mr. Baldhead can be seen as a representative figure of the traditional civil order, then disorder represented by the rebels hardly offers any relief. Therefore, the precocious nine-year-old protagonist is beset by worries, anxiety, and cynicism toward the future: “what fun it can be to think of tomorrow!” At the same time, like all schoolboys, he cannot help indulging in fantasies once in a while:“If by chance I should not feel fit tomorrow morning . . . Or maybe Mr. Baldhead himself would fall sick. It would even be better if he should really die.”60 This paradoxical psychology of hope, loss, anticipation, and disillusionment creates a temporal pattern that blurs fixed boundaries among the past, the present, and the future, resulting in a nightmarish vision of now.The picture of the next day given by the boy is hardly a comforting one: “I saw there were hundreds of pedestrians coming and going like ants, all with worried looks or blank expressions of consternation. . . . They were refugees, Old Wang informed me. Most of them came from Ho town, but strangely enough this was the place to which some of our people were wanting to go.”61 “Now” is invaded by traumas of the past and disillusionment toward the future, all of which comes back to haunt the protagonist and Mother Lee through dreams.The boy dreams of being scolded by his teacher for not doing well in his studies, while Mother Lee has her own nightmare of being the only survivor of this social unrest and forced to witness the decapitation of her master. On the surface, the boy’s rebellion against the traditional system of learning has no connection with the anxiety of common folk such as Old Wang and Mother Lee; however, all of them live in an uncertain world in which the future of uprooting the old civil order is hardly compensated by any promise of the establishment of a new order. That the past is not a fixed place in time but a psychological structure which, like a narrative, can be evoked anachronistically is a sustaining theme in Lu Xun’s short stories, including those in which he takes a much more clearly iconoclastic stance toward tradition than in “Looking Back to the Past.” In his “The Diary of a Madman,” for instance, language and narrative serve as a platform for the consideration of revolution and one’s relationship with the past. In “The Diary of a Mad Man,” the protagonist tries to “look . . . up [the practice of cannibalism] in history” and finds that “my history has no

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chronology and scrawled all over each page are the words: ‘Virtue and Morality.’”“Since I could not sleep anyway, I read intently half the night until I began to see words between the lines.The whole book was filled with two words—‘Eat humans.’”62 As most translation experts would tell us, translation is not a technical or instrumental process that transports literature in one language to another in any simple manner; rather, it is a process of rewriting. However, in the case of T’ien Hsia, the mediation of translation toward the creation of new meaning did not just happen on the level of specific words or individual texts.As several of the above examples show, T’ien Hsia’s practice of translation borders on and sometimes is mixed with other practices such as reprinting. These practices put together allow textual connections to be made across different temporal zones. T’ien Hsia’s translation section raises questions such as “How does translation create a new temporality?” and “How does this new temporality reflect or adjust to the rhythm of local cultural change?” and these questions are often ignored by developmental accounts of literary histories structured according to one singular national language or literary genealogy.

C hap te r 3

Internationalism as a Culture of Translation A ng loph one I nte rnat i onal i st M agaz i ne s and L i te rary Tran slat i on

Literary translation is a much-discussed subject in Chinese studies, but due to nationalist biases, translations of foreign literature into Chinese often get far more attention from Chinese studies scholars than translations of Chinese literature into foreign languages.1 For example, there are few studies of English translations of modern Chinese literature published during the Republican era. However, according to Donald Gibbs and Yunchen Li’s A Bibliography of Studies and Translations of Modern Chinese Literature, 1918–1942, the works of at least thirty Chinese writers and poets of the contemporary period were translated into English within the three decades between 1919 and 1949.These translations were published in journals such as Asia, Life and Letters Today, People’s Tribune, T’ien Hsia, and China Forum, based variously in New York, London, and Shanghai. In addition, close to twenty poetry and short story anthologies as well as individual collections were published in these same cities. Although these figures cannot represent the entire picture of the global circulation of modern Chinese literature, since only English translations are counted, they still give us a glimpse of how active translingual and transnational cultural activities were during the Republican era. Many instances of English translations of modern Chinese literature intersect with the history of internationalism. In the early 1930s, English-language magazines such as China Forum, China Today, People’s Tribune, T’ien Hsia, Asia, The China Journal of Science and Art, and Life and Letters Today all had some coverage of the contemporary Chinese literary scene, but it was leftist magazines such as China Forum and China Today that first paid attention to important Chinese writers such as Lu Xun and Mao Dun. These two writers in turn collaborated with the magazine editors, introducing to them other Chinese writers and their works and using the forum of the magazine to express their opinions on political topics that generated worldwide interest. Although Lu 95

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Xun did not know English well enough to compose articles in English, some of his essays were intentionally written for English-language magazines such as China Forum, China Today, or New Masses.They were translated into English by others, including well-known leftist activists such as Agnes Smedley. This chapter describes internationalist activism in conjunction with the circulation of modern Chinese literature as intertwined histories linked by the commonality of English as a global language. Bringing these two histories together defines a broad transnational context where intersections between the cultural and the political need to be considered in each specific local context. Considering the two histories of internationalism and literary translation together allows the presentation of an image of the literary left in China as, in Michael Denning’s term, a “cultural front,” in this case, a cultural front with a particular translingual and transnational slant. Denning describes the term “cultural front” as a twofold metaphor that simultaneously refers to “cultural industries and apparatuses” and “the alliance of radical artists and intellectuals who made up the ‘cultural’ part of the Popular Front.”2 This term summarizes the methodology of his book, one that moves away from an exclusive focus on individual “fellow travelers” and their political commitments to a consideration of both the cultural mechanism and a democratic social movement—the Popular Front. In the context of modern China, English-language magazines on the left constituted a transnational and translational cultural front that served the political goals of leftist activism. The exchange between English- and Chinese-language public cultures in these periodicals relies on literary translation, leading us to raise questions such as: What was the motivation behind the translation of Chinese literature, particularly that of the contemporary period? Why were some writers translated more frequently than others? These questions are related to the geopolitical world order of that particular time and some translators’ and editors’ understanding of culture’s relationship to this geopolitical order.Therefore, addressing these questions demands a broader perspective than that which is offered by the traditional approach to translation as “a system of meaningvalue.” In their preface to a recent issue of Public Culture, Dilip Gaonkar and Elizabeth Povinelli criticize the flaws of traditional theories of translation “as an exemplar of theories of meaning,” stating that “these theories of meaningvalue continually orient us towards a theory of the sign, mark, or trace and away from a theory of the social embeddedness of the sign, of the very social practices that these histories wish to describe. In other words, no matter the richness of these social studies, theories of translation continually return to the question of how to translate well from one language to another.” In lieu of this traditional conception of translation, they suggest that translation can perhaps be thought of as “a complex, multifaceted signal phenomenon— signaling the interior content of aesthetic form and message and exterior

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political and social commitment to the circulation of this form and message as well as entailing the cultural logic of the circulatory matrix itself.” They also propose to approach translation as “transfiguration” to emphasize “the functions of indexicality and mimesis” in the process of transmitting a cultural sign from one context to another.3 Taking the cue from Gaonkar and Povinelli, we find the meaning of internationalism revised when one links this political history with the cultural project of translation, circulation, and the movement of texts across national and linguistic borders in these periodicals. Whereas to the magazine editors themselves, internationalism might have meant simply the political project of making alliance among Communist parties worldwide, translation as a transnational cultural activity changes and pluralizes this original meaning. My discussions of various Anglophone leftist magazines will show, for instance, in the context of China Forum, internationalism was also associated with bilingualism as avant-garde aesthetics. Internationalism did not mean just unity in terms of political and cultural understanding; it also implied a certain degree of heterogeneity and difference between the political and the cultural worker, between cultures and national contexts. In another context, the magazine Voice of China represented Chinese-language texts as coming from and on the way to becoming texts in other languages; in other words, instead of representing Chinese literature as original or terminal products, translations of Chinese literature in this magazine situated Chinese language in relation to other languages, thus exhibiting a certain kind of “worldliness” of these literary texts’ existence. In a third case, China Today, representing China as a member of the internationalist network was not the sole purpose of this magazine. The magazine also showed an affinity to the local immigrant communities in the United States. Therefore, while on the one hand serving the cause of internationalism, literary translation on the other hand also carries the subversive potential of undoing the original historiography of internationalism, enriching its meaning so as to enable us to evaluate the cultural legacy of this political history from today’s perspective.Thinking about translation and internationalism together thus offers a two-way revisionist perspective to both the practice of translation and the logic of internationalism; it also draws our attention to the connective tissue in between—the magazine as a translingual and transnational cultural form. The English-language medium had an uneasy relationship with the democratic appeal of leftist politics in the Chinese context. Although English was an elitist new modern (and foreign) language, English translations actually could not completely repress the linguistic and cultural heterogeneity in the cultural arena of modern China. In the 1930s, China was not short of examples of linguistic imperialism that involved English––for instance, the BASIC English program invented by the Cambridge scholar I.A. Richards.This project, which

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attempted to popularize English by reducing its vocabulary to 850 words, was not a simple language-teaching project; it had a complex ideology behind it that was summarized by the five words that make up this acronym: British, American, Scientific, International, and Commercial. Yet, in spite of some criticism from a few Chinese scholars, the project received a great deal of support from influential intellectuals such as Hu Shi and Nationalist government officials in Nanjing because its philosophy happened to coincide with the May Fourth intellectuals’ interest in linguist universalism.4 Around the time of the New Culture Movement, ten years before Richards’s first visit to China, quite a few Chinese intellectuals contemplated the possibility of abolishing the Chinese written language and replacing it with either a phonetic language or an artificial global language so that it would be easier for the Chinese to communicate with the outside world. In 1918, for example, Qian Xuantong argued in New Youth, a stronghold of cultural radicals,“a fundamental way [of abolishing Confucianism and eliminating Taoism] is to abolish the written Chinese language, in which Confucian thought and fallacious Taoist sayings are recorded.After the abolishment of the written Chinese language . . . in my view, the artificial language Esperanto should be adopted: its grammar is simple, its pronunciation unified, and its etymology pure.”5 Other intellectuals such as Lu Xun and Chen Duxiu all openly supported Esperanto, which by the 1920s was taught in many universities and middle schools in China. While the history of BASIC in China reopens the vexing question of how to evaluate May Fourth cosmopolitanism—Is it a project of enlightenment or self-colonization?—it also serves as a reminder that English could not and did not completely dominate China. In addition to the indigenous language, English had at least one other rival—the artificial universal language of Esperanto.Although both were global or universal languages, they had different histories. Similarly, the internationalism manifested through the leftist Englishlanguage publications was transnational not in only two ways, but in multiple ways, combining various cosmopolitan trajectories that involved the Soviet Union, the United States, more than one European country, and Japan. Englishlanguage culture in Shanghai embodied a particular kind of impurity, which was different from the impurity of English-language cultures elsewhere. In addition, even though the project of translating Chinese literature into English shares similarity with Richards’s BASIC program by exhibiting the same kind of desire for English as the global language, literary translation of modern Chinese literature is a more complex practice since it necessarily has to come to terms with the domestic Chinese practice of literary cosmopolitanism. A quick glance at any book of history of modern Chinese literature would reveal that Chinese writers, many of whom were also translators, were influenced not just by English and American literature but also by Russian, Japanese, French, Scandinavian, and Eastern European literatures. If translation into

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Chinese has already created the heteroglossia of modern Chinese, the encounter of modern Chinese literature with English is technically an interaction of multiple languages and cultures, not just two. How can the target language convey such heteroglossia and translate the temporality and historical formation of modern Chinese literature? Attempting to resolve this difficulty in the process of translation poses a challenge to Richards’s promotion of English as the only privileged language of globalization, since a failure of English as the target language has to be anticipated. If 1930s China can be characterized as a time and place of competing conceptualizations of global order and simultaneous existence of multiple cosmopolitanisms, then it would be too easy for us to assert that translations into English, particularly those translations done for leftist political purposes, amounted to nothing more than submission to the colonialist geopolitical world order. Instead, the cultural work of the leftist magazines contributed to and complicated one of the agendas of internationalism—democracy. Since English was not a value-neutral medium, and in these magazines there is not much evidence of critical reflection of English’s elite status or the foreignness of the medium, one can probably say that the magazines’ relationship to the Chinese local context was not very close. Local and monolingual Chinese readers were not the ideal audience of these magazines.Therefore, although literary translation from Chinese to English was meant to advance the agenda of internationalism, it also exposed the ambivalence of internationalism as a form of global alliance, since uneven distribution of cultural capital was to a certain extent reproduced in internationalist cultural production. The goals of this chapter are threefold—to describe an English-language transnational network where Chinese literature was circulated, to note the shift of meaning and the process of representing China in the process of circulating Chinese literature, and to describe and analyze the cultural milieu of the 1930s that made it possible for these Anglophone publications to exist. One influential figure, the Chinese writer Lu Xun, is a linchpin that links the three strands of discussion together. Lu Xun was arguably the most frequently translated and the most global among all modern Chinese writers, favored particularly by internationalist intellectuals both in the past and the contemporary period from Carlos Bulosan to Fredric Jameson. Yet in spite of his great popularity, he was also an enigmatic figure with multiple identities and roles: a practicing translator for a major portion of his life, a creative writer with a knack for linguistic innovation, an enthusiastic advocate of radical cultural reforms, and an independent political thinker with an ambivalent relationship with the leftist establishment. Lu Xun’s encounter with Englishlanguage leftist magazines thus manifests itself as a complicated involvement that brings out the disjunction between the message and the medium, the transnational and the local.

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One might think that focusing on a singular figure, especially one like Lu Xun, would run the danger of reproducing the iconic status of Lu Xun in what Jameson has called the “national allegory” of third-world literature.6 In fact, the long paper trail he left behind in leftist English-language magazines offers some useful complications to Jameson’s notion of national allegory.To give one example, there were at least two different Lu Xuns in the Englishlanguage international circuit—one the short-story writer, the other the writer of argumentative essays (zawen). In his Chinese writings, Lu Xun the short story writer and essay writer have sequential temporal positions; however, English translations of his works do not connote this temporal sequence but are circulated in different contexts. English translations of his short stories were circulated in magazines of various political leanings, while his essays were circulated exclusively in leftist magazines. While the short stories in English did not have close connections with the politics of contemporary China, his essays had many immediate connections with political situations within China. The comparative timelessness of Lu Xun as short story writer and his immediate relevance as an essay writer parallel the contradiction of Lu Xun as an icon of the left and a strategic and independent “fellow traveler.” These two identities had a push-and-pull effect on the cause of internationalist propaganda. It is this complication I will address in this chapter. De bating Translation, De bating the Le ft The first issue to be addressed is the connection between translation and the left. As Lydia Liu has pointed out, the question of translation in modern China “must be considered along with a whole set of other competing theories and discourses . . . about what literature is and how it should function in modern Chinese society.”7 It may not be enough just to consider translation issues along with other theories and discourses. As the following discussion of a translation debate in the end of the 1920s will show, translation issues did not occupy a separate space in isolation from the larger cultural sphere; it was the medium through which other literary discourses, such as that regarding class, were constructed and defined.Therefore, in order to chart the trajectory of translingual practice in Chinese modernity, it is necessary to pay attention to the sites of intersection between discussions of translation and other literary discourses by asking, “How do translation issues translate into other discourses?” As we shall see, a number of complicated issues can be elicited from a translation debate from the late 1920s and early 1930s: the position of the translator/writer within the literary institution, the relationship between translation and the reader, and the issue of national language. Discussions revolving around these issues show that the relationship between the cosmopolitan and the local was not completely set at that time, but in the process of definition. Reviewing

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the terms of this debate, this chapter reiterates a key argument of the entire book, that is, genealogies of the formation of national culture and the continuous flow of cultural circulation need to be considered together in the Chinese context. As Lawrence Wong points out, literary histories of modern China written in the late 1920s generally include literature in translation as one component.This was no longer the case in the 1930s, when literature in translation tended to be categorized as Western literature. A famous debate about the standard of translation taking place in the late 1920s and early 1930s not only clearly demonstrates the vibrancy of a culture of translation that was the general context of almost all polemical debates about literature; it also shows specifically various ways of constructing the cosmopolitan’s relation to the local. Conventional readings of this debate betray a utilitarian perspective toward translation, which considers translation as nothing but a vehicle for some other discussions, such as class, and disregards it as a cultural act with social significance of its own. This utilitarian perspective results in the underestimation of the translingual and transcultural context in which the left was constructed.To change perspective toward translation means emphasizing not just the subject matter of the debate but, more importantly, its language. It is important to pay attention to the surface of this debate rather than reading through it. If we stay close to the textuality of the debate, then we can see that the central issue can be rephrased from the familiar question “Does literature have class?” to “Does translation have class?” There was no clear beginning of this debate on translation. Here I will focus only on the antagonistic exchange between the Harvard-educated literary scholar Liang Shiqiu and Lu Xun over the question of class in relation to literature, and some friendly discussions between Lu Xun and the Communist activist and literary critic Qu Qiubai. In most literary histories of this period, the main division in this debate has been described as that between the left and the bourgeois, with Lu Xun and Qu Qiubai occupying one side of this division, and Liang Shiqiu occupying the other side.This kind of description emphasizes Lu Xun and Qu Qiubai’s recognition of class interests and class consciousness and Liang Shiqiu’s blindness to these issues. However, a closer look at the writings of these three tells us that, on the contrary, class is an operative category in all their writings. In “Does Literature Have Class?”— the 1929 article that started the debate—Liang recognizes the existence of class as a social category by acknowledging the increasing disparity under capitalism and the necessity of proletarian revolution. What he objects to is not so much the proletarian class or proletarian activism, but the association of literature with both. He particularly dislikes the concept of proletarian literature. The rest of the article gives two examples from recent Soviet literature and urges readers to judge the literary merits of these works of proletarian literature for themselves. The article deals with a much more specific issue than is

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suggested by the amorphous title “Does literature have class?”; it wants to question whether there is any intrinsic connection between the proletarian class and literature. In Liang’s other writings of the same period, he repeatedly draws the reader’s attention to what he perceives to be the missing link between literature and the proletarian class. In “Literature and the General Public (‘Dazhong’),” for instance, he states that the concept “literature for the majority” is oxymoronic in the sense that the majority of people do not have literary taste, and the practitioners of literary writing and criticism are always the minority.8 Contradictory to the common assumption that he denies that all literature has class, this statement suggests that he acknowledges the existence of class in conjunction with literature but would only accept the association of literature with one class, the elite, but not with another class, the proletariat. Following the teachings of Irving Babbitt, whose New Humanism enabled Liang’s transformation from a Romanticist to a NeoClassicist, Liang emphasizes that literature is governed by some internal laws that define “literariness.” His article “The Discipline of Literature,” written around the same time, is both a defense of form as an indispensable literary quality as well as a defense of the disciplinarity of literature manifested through form and style. Translation becomes an issue for Liang because of his criticism of the category of proletarian literature as a new vogue created by translators and “by revolutionary activists.”Yet if we assume that by dismissing the term “proletarian literature” as merely a fashionable neologism Liang would oppose all translation or attempts of cultural importation, this assumption would not hold because Liang did not adopt a parochial localist position toward all translations; instead, he repeatedly used his authority as a foreign-trained expert. His rhetoric suggests the pervasiveness of foreign culture in local knowledge formation in cultures both of the left and of the nonleft. A passage from his article “Does Literature Have Class?” shows that he performatively evokes the translator’s authority while criticizing translation’s incapablility of producing anything else other than new terms. In this process, he effectively turns the question of what and how to translate into a key factor for determining a writer’s class position: “Puluolietaliya Literature”! What a brand new term! In actuality,“Puluolietaliya” is hardly a new term; it is the transliteration of the word “Proletariat” [written in English in the original version]. Those who don’t know a foreign language would find it novel when they see the Chinese transliteration of the foreign term. They would start talking about “Puluolietaliya Literature,” since new things are always considered as better than old. In fact, the meaning of the term is hardly glorifying.

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Look it up in the Webster’s dictionary, and you will find that “Proletary” refers to “A citizen of the lowest class who serves the state not with property, but only by having children.” [This definition is in English, followed by a Chinese translation that conveys the same meaning.] “Puluolietaliya” is the class of people who only know how to have children. At least that’s the case in the Roman times. I think we are better off using the term “literature of the property-less class,” a term that would at least sound not so much like a curse [ fuzhou].9 This passage contains a veiled attack on women, but that is not something Lu Xun addresses in his critique of Liang’s article. In “Literature and Discipline,” Liang states that he believes literature should be “masculine and robust, not feminine and soft,” a remark that further exposes the misogynistic tendency of his literary views.10 Yet, gender concerns aside, this passage from Liang’s article summarizes his view on translation that prefers “assimilative or indiginizing translation” to “alienating or foreignizing translation,” the translation of meaning rather than the transliteration of sound.This is a position that Liang holds consistently throughout his career as writer and translator, and it is well known that Lu Xun holds an opposite view on the language of translation. Another issue is the curious position of the common reader, referred to as “those who don’t know a foreign language” in his article. Whereas the translator is supposed to give consideration to the common reader, the article is addressed to anyone but such a common reader. In fact, one might say that Liang Shiqiu had only one ideal reader in his mind, and that is Lu Xun.This article was published in the same issue of the literary magazine Xin Yue (Crescent Moon) as another piece also by Liang that is essentially a scathing attack on Lu Xun’s translations of the writings of Soviet literary critics Lunacharsky and Plekhanov.These two articles together want to accomplish several goals: to attack Lu Xun as an individual translator and as representative of the leftist literary circle, and to attack proletarian literature as a whole. However, while making this transition from the specificity of one author to proletarian literature as a category, Liang’s article exposes its weakness of being unclear about its targeted audience. With its bilingual coding and the allusion to Webster’s, the passage quoted above is hardly an example of the “assimilative” translation that Liang advocates. Who is the intended reader for this passage? Who would consult Webster’s dictionary to find out the definition of the term “proletarian” as used in the Roman times? While attempting to dismiss the significance of Lu Xun’s translations as nothing more than a trendy project, Liang exposes his own reliance on foreign knowledge and authority derived from the possession of this cultural capital. His rhetorical trajectory is as much translational as Lu Xun’s translation projects.

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This self-contradiction in Liang’s article allows Lu Xun to deconstruct Liang’s position in his rebuttal essay “‘Hard Translation’ and ‘the Class Nature of Literature.’” Lu Xun criticizes Liang for disingenuously evoking the common reader only for the purpose of defending his own authority as a member of the professional managerial class. Lu Xun then states his own position on the issue of class with the following sentences: “In a class society, although a literary man considers himself free and above class, unconsciously he is still governed by the collective consciousness of his class. His works cannot represent the culture of other classes.”11 Refuting Liang’s criticism that Lu Xun’s translation is “jargonistic,” “sub-standard,” and contrary to “propaganda literature’s goal of making propaganda,” Lu Xun defends his translations, stating that they are not for the purpose of edifying the masses directly, but “for myself, several others who consider themselves as proletarian literary critics, and those readers who do not look for ‘easy read,’ are not discouraged by difficulty, and would not mind learning some theories.”12 This emphasis on a small group of professional readers as the targeted audience for his translations raises the question about the ultimate difference between Lu Xun and Liang Shiqiu. Where do the two writers stand vis-à-vis the literary institution on the one hand and the general public on the other? My reading of Liang Shiqiu’s essay suggests that he believes in and guards the disciplinary boundaries of literature and considers the translator as a member of the literary establishment, in spite of his claim that translation is needed to serve the common reader. Lu Xun holds a directly opposite position, refusing to give the translator a definite position in the literary establishment and considering the reading public as a socially divided heterogeneous collective. Toward the end of this rebuttal essay, Lu Xun describes the translator as a martyr, saying,“People have often compared a revolutionary to the legendary Prometheus, for in stealing fire for man he was punished by Zeus but remained unrepentant. His magnanimity and forbearance is the same [as that of a revolutionary]. But I have stolen fire from other countries with the intention of cooking my own flesh. I think if the taste is good, the other chewers may get something out of it, and I shall not sacrifice my body in vain.”13 The analogy of the self-sacrificing translator with the figure of the martyr links translation with revolution on the one hand and expresses a wish to destabilize the translator on the other, refusing to place him in any fixed position in regard to either the literary institution or the masses. As Leo Ou-fan Lee suggests, in Lu Xun’s favorite Soviet novel, The Rout, which he translated and which inspired yet another round of discussions on the question of translation, the figure of the translator is similar to the character Levenson in the novel. Levenson is described by the author as an “interim” man in the revolutionary genealogy, not a “positive hero,” but someone who strives to pass down the spirit of the revolution to future generations.This translator is equiv-

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alent to such an interim man who serves the readers without occupying a fixed or permanent position. However, the labor of this interim man is productive labor, for in a 1933 essay, Lu Xun compares the translator to a parent.14 On another occasion, he writes that he loved the Russian novel The Rout “like his own son.” These analogies echo his earlier call to “save the children” in the short story “Diary of a Mad Man.”The life-giving capability of the translator recalls the earlier image of the enlightened intellectual attempting to guide future generations toward a better future while remaining ambivalent toward the cause of revolution. Lu Xun recognizes that translation cannot serve the entirety of the masses as an undifferentiated category, and that social disparities in terms of difference in literacy level and cultural capital are inevitably reproduced through translation. It is this recognition that distinguishes him from the Communist literary critic Qu Qiubai, whom he befriended and temporarily sheltered from the Nationalist government’s pursuit. The correspondence in 1931 between Lu Xun and Qu Qiubai after the publication of Lu Xun’s translation of The Rout also contains discussions about some technical aspects of translation. It considers the specific question of whether it is more important for a translation to be faithful to the original or to be fluent in rendition. Lu Xun wrote that he would rather accept “faithful but not smooth” translations than “smooth” but “unfaithful” translations, because as he argued, the translator’s choice of language was socially determined by his understanding of his own identity and position in the society as a whole. Lu Xun was keenly aware that the translator needed to be fully embedded in the indigenous community. He wrote to Qu Qiubai that he thought the reason that Yan Fu, the Chinese translator of Huxley’s Social Darwinist theories, chose to use classical Chinese in his translation was that “back in those days foreign trained students were not as privileged as now. The majority of the society thought that Westerners only knew how to make machines . . . and foreign trained students only knew how to speak foreign languages. They [foreign trained students] were not considered as ‘the gentry.’”15 Similarly, his own choice of language in translation was based on his observation of contemporary Chinese readership, which he believed consisted of three classes: the highly educated class, the somewhat educated class, and the illiterate class. Lu Xun believed that his standard of translation was most appropriate for the highly educated readership to whom his writings were mainly addressed. He chose to present what he called “hard translations” because “the syntax of Chinese language is highly imprecise,” and it is necessary to “import foreign syntactical patterns from the past, other places or countries and consider them as our own.”As for the second group of readers, Lu Xun admitted that he had not given them much consideration. He was doubtful that literary language should be combined with dialect. “If you

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combine literary language with dialect, you would get either a particular kind of vernacular or a vernacular restricted to a particular place.The second type of vernacular is problematic since readers outside of this region would not be able to understand it. If we are concerned with popularity, then we have to go with the first type, which means there would be more elements of classical Chinese in this vernacular language.”16 These remarks show that Lu Xun was acutely aware that in a context in which culture and language were not unified or evenly distributed, translation would inevitably reproduce existing social divisions and hierarchy, and that the creation of a revolutionary culture for the entirety of the masses would be an illusion. Lu Xun’s cautious approach to translation was not shared by other leftist critics and writers. His friend Qu Qiubai, for instance, conveyed a more utopian understanding of the function of translation in his letters to Lu Xun about translations of Russian literature. Disagreeing with Lu Xun’s elitist approach to translation, Qu argued that “abstruse” translations should not be tolerated; rather, the task of the translator was to create a new language that was truly consistent with the vernacular of the masses. These views on translation are related to Qu’s general observations on the condition and future of cultural development in China in the 1930s and his belief that cultural work should benefit the masses, not just a small group of Western-trained professionals. In another article,“On the Question of Literature for the Masses,” Qu argues that the true “language of the masses” needs to be distinguished from four different kinds of existing written languages: the standard classical language (rhymed, four or six characters in one sentence); a more relaxed form of classical language used in the late Qing period; a Westernized vernacular invented in the May Fourth era; and the vernacular of popular literature, such as the language used in novels of the old style. Of these four, he seems to hold the highest regard for the vernacular of popular fiction, since this is the language that can reach a wider public. However, he also argues that this vernacular is still a vernacular of the past; it “belongs to the Ming dynasty” and is “a dead language.”The “contemporary” and “living” Chinese vernacular is the language of the proletariat, and it needs to be distinguished from the vernacular of the peasant and the dialects in the countryside. Qu writes, “The proletarian[s] are not the same as peasants and ‘country bumpkins.’The language of the ‘country bumpkin’ is crude and primitive. But the proletarian live[s] in the city of heterogeneity and work[s] in modern factories. His language in fact is the seed for a Chinese vernacular (not the so-called ‘national language’ of bureaucrats).”17 This debate signifies a transitional moment in Chinese literary history when translation was not yet fully replaced by native-language national culture. It captures a highly performative moment in the culture of circulation, when not only was the content of circulation—what and how to translate—being debated, but active attempts were made to define, shape, and regulate the envi-

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ronment or platform where cultural circulation was to take place. Liang Shiqiu and Qu Qiubai shared some commonality in spite of their ideological differences. Both had high hopes for a cosmopolitan cultural activity such as translation: one imagined the literary and cultural translator as the political avant-garde; the other envisioned the translator to play the role of the guardian of literary taste and authority of literary studies. However, they both tried to discipline translation and attempted to find it a position within the local cultural and social institution, and both evoked universal categories of literariness or the proletarian class. In contrast, Lu Xun’s views are both subtle and ambivalent. He was less concerned with the institutional position of translation or the translator as he was interested in translation as a social force of change. Although he certainly did not oppose universal categories such as the proletarian and revolution, he was more aware of local cultural structure and its internal divisions.The figure of the translator as the interim man is positioned between the local and the universal and displaced in both schemes at the same time. The translator, therefore, lives in perpetual contradiction, embodying both life (“a parent”) and death (“a martyr”). Similarly, the labor of the translator is generative and dynamic while refusing permanence and fixity. Lu Xun in the Inte rnationalist Network: C H I N A F O RU M If Donald A. Gibbs and Yun-chen Li are correct, then the first English translation of one of Lu Xun’s short stories is “The True Story of Ah Q,” translated by George Kin Leung and published by the Commercial Press in 1926 in Shanghai. Shortly afterward, in 1930, The Tragedy of Ah Qui and Other Modern Chinese Stories translated both from Chinese and French by J. B. Kyn Yn Yu and E.H.F. Mills was published by George Routledge & Sons. This collection contains three short stories by Lu Xun: “Con Y Ki,” “The Tragedy of Ah Qui,” and “The Native Country.” All three titles are important early works by the author, but the translations of Yu and Mills contain many errors and in some cases are significantly shorter than the original works. In the 1930s, after Lu Xun’s essays became increasingly leftist and subversive, English translations of his stories continued to appear in many magazines, including those sponsored by the Nationalist Party such as People’s Tribune. Thus politics in the English-language international arena overlapped with but did not exactly correspond to politics in the domestic cultural circle. Histories of translation published in mainland China tend to follow literary history’s categorization by literary clique, society, or school; as a result of these divisions, it appears that Japanese and Russian were the two foreign languages preferred by the left while English and Anglo-American connections, mainly represented by the Crescent Moon society, belong to the bourgeois faction. However, there also existed a network of Anglophone internationalism made

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up of several English publications published in Shanghai and New York. China Forum (1932–1934) edited by Harold Isaacs in Shanghai; China Today (1933–1937) edited by an organization called the American Friends of the Chinese People in New York; and Voice of China (1936–?) published in Shanghai were three major internationalist publications closely connected to the Communist parties in China and the United States.A circuit of literary circulation is traceable through these three magazines. China Forum’s editorial office was located in the French concession. Devoted to “the publication of news ignored, distorted and suppressed” in both the Chinese and foreign press, this publication protested against the Nationalist government’s “white terror” by exposing its persecution of Communist activists and leftist writers in Shanghai. It also published special issues on the achievements of the Soviet Union. As a result of publishing these subversive stories, the magazine was suspended several times by the concession authority and the Nationalist government during its short history of a little over two years. It began as a weekly publication, but due to frequent suspensions and change of printers, it was later published at irregular intervals. Literature by contemporary Chinese writers was an important component of this magazine, especially in its first year. Altogether fourteen short stories and two poems were published. Only some selections were closely connected with the political focus of the magazine at a particular moment, while other titles and writers were not directly connected to the political contents of the magazine. For instance, the magazine covered the arrest and execution of over twenty Communist Party members in Shanghai in its first issue in 1932, and in conjunction with this incident, it published the stories and poem by four writers: Hu Yeping, Ro Shi, Yin Fu, and Feng Keng, who were among those secretly murdered. A fictional account of their arrest and execution by Hu Yueping’s wife, Ding Ling, was also published in the China Forum around the same time. As T. A. Hsia observes, the four revolutionary martyrs were not yet mature writers by the time they were arrested.18 Although Ding Ling had published some important works by this time, the short story published in China Forum,“One Certain Night,” is not her best work. These stories were chosen obviously not because of their aesthetic merit, but due to the political significance of their writers in relation to the tragic incident, which quickly became the focus of international attention. According to Agnes Smedley’s biography, shortly after the arrest of the revolutionary writers, Lu Xun responded by writing a protest article, which was later translated by Smedley and published in New Masses.19 This incident attracted a great deal of attention from leftist political organizations abroad and international writers’ community as a result of this article. In its first issue, China Forum published a letter of protest signed by a list of American writers against “the murder of Chinese youths.”

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The question of how Chinese literature in translation related to the revolutionary cause was not discussed in China Form. Neither the editor Isaacs nor his close friend Smedley, who edited a small volume of short stories from China after the incident of the massacre, seemed to be aware that a debate on literature and revolution had already taken place within the Chinese literary circle in the late 1920s.20 China Forum chose to define “revolutionary literature” by mainly selecting its authors from the list of members of the Leftist Writers’ League, and perhaps also by listening to the advice of close friends. In his preface to a short story collection that he was preparing for publication at the same time that he was editing the magazine, Isaacs tells us that two most prominent leftist writers Lu Xun and Mao Dun, with whom Isaacs had frequent contact as editor of China Forum, chose the titles for the collection.21 It is possible that they also had influence over the magazine’s coverage of Chinese literature as well. As a result, the stories published in the magazine are not unified by a theme or restricted by one singular style, but only three of the writers whose works were published in China Forum, Yu Dafu, Guo Moruo, and Ye Shengtao, did not belong to the League.The stories by contemporary Chinese writers collectively describe different kinds of revolution and a variety of responses to it; they do not follow any prescribed format from either Moscow or the United States on how to represent the proletarian revolution. Several local forms of oppression are represented in these short stories, such as the oppression of women or the hardship of soldiers. Interestingly, none of the short stories overtly addresses the topic of imperialism, since most of the stories are set in the countryside or small towns, where all the characters are Chinese. All the literary works published in Isaacs’ magazine were translated by Sze Ming-ting, whom Isaacs introduces as “a young teacher of Chinese in a Settlement school.” His real name was George A. Kennedy, and according to Isaacs, “George was very far indeed from having any serious interest in the politics of that time in Shanghai.”22 If the kind of translation performed by Sze was linguistic, Isaacs was also a translator in a different sense. Under his editorship, an unusual feature of this magazine that made it simultaneously linguistically innovative and politically effective was the practice of bilingualism. When China Forum resumed publication in February 1933 after five months’ suspension, a Chinese edition was added to each issue, turning the magazine into a bilingual publication. According to the editor, this change of format resulted in the growth of Chinese readership and expansion to more provinces outside Shanghai, including Hebei and Canton.23 Although the agenda of the magazine remained the same––the exposure of atrocities inflicted by the Nationalist government—the bilingual format represented a further step toward localization and enabled more Chinese writers to become involved and represented in this publication. After it turned into a bilingual publication, the magazine’s

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appearance was less literary, since there were no more English translations of Chinese literature; however, it more effectively bridged the Chinese writers’ communities with the Anglophone reading public by letting Chinese writers provide their opinions on specific and timely subjects. In fact, one might argue that the magazine was still interested in publishing Chinese literature, but there was a shift of genre from short story and poem to literary and political essay after the magazine adopted the bilingual format. This change implied a different perception toward translation and literature: whereas in the English-only issues, works of Chinese literature were presented as cultural artifacts ambivalently related to the revolutionary cause, after the magazine became bilingual, literature became a platform of political discussion and activism. In the English issues, literature was a cultural object waiting to be translated, but in the bilingual issues, literature took a more proactive role and became translational in itself. With regard to the publication of Lu Xun’s writings, the difference between the English version of China Forum and its bilingual version is pronounced. In the first year, the magazine published Sze Ming-ting’s mostly faithful and highly readable translations of two short stories by Lu Xun,“Medicine” and “Con Yi Chi,” both written over ten years earlier. The editor’s introduction to “Medicine” presents Lu Xun as an uncompromising individualist uncorrupted by the Nationalist government or foreign imperialists. Its also confirms Lu Xun’s identity as a fellow traveler in league with “the social and revolutionary writers in Europe and America.”24 The editor justifies the choice of short story by presenting Lu Xun as “the first [Chinese writer] to introduce the modern short-story form into China and weld it to Chinese life and needs.” However, there is no mention of the New Culture Movement or any revolutionary activity at the turn of the century. English-language readers who cannot situate Lu Xun’s literary practice within an appropriate historical context could easily interpret the story as a straightforward depiction of superstitious practices in traditional Chinese society, rather than a comment on the relationship between cultural reform and social movement. The bilingual issues of the magazine no longer published short stories by Lu Xun, but it did publish a few of his essays that addressed political topics discussed in those particular issues.These essays, along with their English translations, demonstrate the different understandings of Lu Xun and Harold Isaacs toward internationalism as a political ideal and cultural practice. For instance, Lu Xun’s article “Sino-Soviet Relations” was published in both Chinese and English versions when the Nationalist government resumed diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union in 1933. Compared to the publication of his short stories in this magazine, the time lag between the writing of the essay and its publication in English was significantly shortened—only three months. A careful reader would notice that the titles of the Chinese and the English

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versions invite different readings of the essay. The English title of Lu Xun’s essay is “Sino-Soviet Relations,” whereas the Chinese title, literally translated, is “A Tribute to the Linguistic Relations between China and Russia.” The difference between these two titles is significant, for the distinction between cultural exchange and official diplomatic relationship is one of the key arguments in this essay. Lu Xun’s essay attempts to define a form of unofficial internationalism through tracing a history of translation of Soviet literature and literary theories. For Lu Xun, the “linguistic relationship between China and the Soviet Union” is not synonymous with the diplomatic relation between the two nations. One has a much longer history than the other; in addition, literary translation, as long as it involves the Soviet Union, has always been and will remain a subversive act, regardless of whether or not the Nationalist government resumed diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union. Referring to the special issues, published in the 1920s, of the literary journal Xiaoshuo Yuebao (The Short Story Monthly), which focused on Russian literature and the literatures of “oppressed nations,” Lu Xun emphasizes literary exchange, critical reading, and imaginative identification with the oppressed as the basis for anti-imperialistic transnationalism. He writes in this article,“We knew Russian literature could be our teacher and friend, because we could recognize the kind souls of the oppressed, their sufferings and hardship in this literature. We burned with yearning along with Russian literature of the 1840s. We identified with the sadness in the literature of the 1860s. Did we not know that the Russian empire was invading China at that time? But we learned one thing from literature, that is, the world has two kinds of people: the oppressor and the oppressed.”25 This passage makes it clear that Lu Xun did not consider the political relationship between the two nation-states as a determinant factor for internationalism. Nation or nationalism was not viewed as a viable solution to imperialism. Lu Xun believed that the Nationalist government, in spite of its resumed relationship with the Soviet Union, would remain an oppressive force and continue to persecute the left. Literary exchange offered the only possibility for an anti-imperialist internationalism that perpetually protests against the dominant power. While Lu Xun understood internationalism as literary exchange, Isaacs (and the translators he worked with) understood it as political alliance forged on the basis of the common goal of world revolution among people in oppressed nations. This difference is also shown in the different choice of words in the Chinese and English versions. In several places in the essay where Lu Xun refers to “Chinese readers,” the English translation uses the phrase “Chinese people.” It should be pointed out that while editing the magazine, Isaacs also disagreed with and rebelled against the official internationalism of the Communist

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International. In his 1985 book “Re-encounters in China: Notes of a Journey in a Time Capsule,” Isaacs gives a short account of editing China Forum in Shanghai. He says that “doubts about Communist affairs elsewhere in the world, the merits of Stalin-Trotsky struggle in Russia, and perhaps most of all, the crushing events in Germany where Stalin’s insistence upon regarding the Social Democrats, not the Nazis, as the main enemy, had opened Hitler’s road to power” led him to diverge from the official line of the Comintern carefully guarded by the underground Communist Party in Shanghai that supported his magazine.26 His report on anti-Japanese resistance in the Shanghai battle in 1932 and published in China Forum differed from the official story and was “criticized” in a letter to the editor, which he dutifully published in the magazine. When he refused to publish a tribute to Stalin, “all support was abruptly withdrawn.”27 Isaacs then left Shanghai for Beijing, where he worked on the short-story collection entitled Straw Sandals and a controversial history of the Chinese revolution that focused on the problematic intervention from Stalin and the Comintern in the 1920s. This book further turned him into an outcast among his Communist comrades in China and abroad. Given this history and its experimental practice of bilingualism, perhaps one way to describe the internationalism of China Forum is its palimpsest quality of multilayered forms of translation. The short stories by Chinese writers published in English in the first year of the magazine’s lifespan contributed less to the pluralism of the magazine than did the essays by Chinese writers. For readers with no background knowledge of Chinese literary history, these stories rendered flat readings of Chinese society and helped to reinforce an image of global solidarity without any suggestion of difference in terms of local history or politics.The bilingual editions present a more complicated and contemporary picture of the Chinese intellectual circle by allowing writers such as Lu Xun to directly present their own opinions, thus turning the magazine into a dynamic forum of dialogue that could accommodate different views on culture and politics. China Forum published very little writing by Anglophone creative writers, with the exception of an article by Langston Hughes published in both English and Chinese under the title “From Moscow to Shanghai.”The magazine did cover some cultural activities related to internationalism, such as the performance of a Soviet play Roar, China! in Shanghai. M ak i ng Conne c t i on s betwe e n S hang ha i and New York: C H I N A T O D AY Literary translations published in the internationalist magazine China Today based in New York further demonstrate that internationalism between the wars had a complicated history of internal division and local difference.The initial editors of China Today were Chi Ch’ao-ting,T. A. Bisson, and Philip J. Jaffe, all of whom were closely affiliated with American and Chinese Commu-

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nist parties.28 The editorial board underwent many changes after its initial formation. According to Philip J. Jaffe, close connections were maintained between the New York editorial office and Shanghai during 1933 and 1934, the first two years of the magazine’s publication.“Most of the writing, if that’s what one would call it, was done by me and one or two others. All of it was in the main a rewrite of material received by the Chinese Bureau of the American Communist Party from Shanghai in the form of carbon copies on rice paper.” But “beginning with October 1934, China Today underwent a radical change both physically and politically. . . . Its articles were now no longer rewrites but mainly original pieces written by the editors as well as by invited writers not connected with either the magazine or the organization.”29 Chinese short stories of the contemporary period appeared in this magazine, mainly between 1934 and 1936 under the editorship of Chi Ch’ao-ting, Philip J. Jaffe, and T. A. Bisson, along with some short stories and poems that dealt with Chinese topics by non-Chinese writers. After October 1936, very little literature was published; however, there was continuous journalistic coverage of activities in various areas of Chinese culture. One visible connection between New York and Shanghai can be detected through two references to Harold Isaacs and China Forum in China Today, as well as the reprinting of some short stories and poems that had previously appeared in China Forum. A poem by Yin Fu entitled “Words of Blood” and two short stories, “Twenty-one Men” by Zhang Tianyi and “Comedy” by Mao Dun, all of which had been translated by Sze Ming-ting and had first appeared in China Forum, were reprinted in China Today in 1934 with very little change from their initial English versions.At the same time, China Today had its own translators and selected other titles whose English versions had not been previously published elsewhere. Several of the pieces selected were written by obscure writers, such as “People’s Therapy” by Hu Ming-shu, “A Clan Divided” by Ping Shan, “Bad Luck” by Hsu Chuan-Peng, and “Commissar Han—A Short Story” by Li Dan.These selections indicate both China Today’s distance from the domestic Chinese literary circle and a preference similar to that of China Forum for political subject matter when selecting material for publication. In comparison with China Forum, one can say that China Today embodied a greater degree of heterogeneity in terms of the writers’ backgrounds. For instance, it published some literary works by non-Chinese writers, such as two poems on Shanghai by Mike Pell, a poem titled “Until Yesterday:A Chinese Mood” by Regino Pedroso “translated from the Spanish by Langston Hughes,” and a short story by the Canadian doctor Norman Bethune. Importantly, this magazine also attempted to give representation to some Japanese artists and writers.This is significant, since Japanese imperialism became an increasingly important concern during the magazine’s publication history.An article written

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by E. P. Green on Eitaro Ishigaki, a Japanese artist in New York, was published in the May 1936 issue of China Today. Ishigaki’s painting discussed in this article,“Uprising,” portrays a confrontation between black plantation workers and white owners against a backdrop of Caribbean landscape. In the February 1936 issue, an article by Fumio Tanabe on “Proletarian Literature in Japan” was also published; it introduced major representatives of Japanese workingclass literature and their venues of publication to the American readership. As indicated by the several references to China Forum in China Today, the two magazines did not agree with each other on certain key political issues. From Isaacs’s perspective, as he explains in his introduction to Straw Sandals, the seed for his disagreement with the Chinese Communist Party’s official line had been sown when he wrote and published a number of articles exposing the “untruth” and “exaggeration” in Communist propaganda in China Forum. In the February-March 1934 issue of China Today, the magazine published a short notice congratulating China Forum for remaining in publication for a second year.This notice conveys a perception of China Forum as a publication of the “fellow traveler.” However, a month later, the tone changed. China Today published a special notice denouncing Harold Isaacs as a traitor and claiming to sever all “collaborative contact” with him and his magazine. Shortly afterward, China Today published two more articles criticizing “the Trotskyist views” of Harold Isaacs.The first was written by Hansu Chan, the pseudonym of Chi Ch’ao-ting, who was, according to Philip J. Jaffe, “the political guide” among the editors. This article was published in September 1935; in it Chi suggested that Isaacs had wrongly followed Trotsky, who perceived the urban proletariat as the only acceptable revolutionary force. Echoing the official Communist party lingo, Chi then pointed out that Chinese revolution was to follow a different route and adopt “a policy of first sovietizing the countryside, encircling the towns and cities.”30 The second article that mentions the China Forum and Harold Isaacs was written by Joseph Lee and published in June 1937, on the eve of the outbreak of the anti-Japanese war. It argues that Trotskyists, such as Harold Isaacs, who criticized the Communist Party’s policy of the United Front, were co-conspirators with fascist-terrorists. These critical reactions to Isaacs expose the internal divisions within the Chinese internationalist circle; they also confirm the existence of an English-language cultural network that extended far beyond the national borders of China. Considering the focus of this book on the uses of English by the left in modern China, I will not attempt to present comprehensive histories of both China Forum and China Today here. It is important to note that China Today often shows awareness of its placement in an English-language cultural network through alluding to and commenting on other English-language books on China and magazines published in Shanghai. In the book review

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section, it covered books such as Lin Yutang’s My Country and My People and Edgar Snow’s Red Star over China. An article published in the June 1935 issue entitled “China Today versus The China Weekly Review” clarifies the proCommunist, anti-imperialistic position of China Today by comparing it with the pro-Nationalist, anti-imperialistic position of China Weekly Review, an American-owned magazine in Shanghai. In terms of its relationship with the Chinese-language cultural arena, journalistic accounts on Chinese revolutionary art, poster and woodcut art, Chinese-language magazines, as well as mass language movements were also published, in addition to publishing Chinese literature. But a unique feature of this magazine is that it also attempts to integrate Chinese communities in the United States into anti-imperialistic struggles. For instance, in the June 1937 issue an article by E. G. Collins on “The Chinese Hand Laundry Alliance,” and an article in the December 1938 issue on “Chinatown Still Goes Forth to War” by Pardee Lowe are representative of this magazine’s concern for community issues. Him Mark Lai’s manuscript “To Bring Forth a New China, to Build a Better America: The Chinese Left in America to the 1960s” shows that the Chinese Marxist left had tried to work in immigrant communities in New York and San Francisco even before the world antifascist struggles had begun, but their work was not successful in all cases. For the present purpose, it should be noted that this magazine showed interest in the community more as a social and political agent than as a cultural creator. Lu Xun and his writings were given a significant amount of attention in China Today. In fact, he was one of the four Chinese writers of stature in the domestic arena who were represented by this magazine. However, just like the former China Forum, this magazine was not interested in writing a cultural or literary history of China. As a result, both magazines show no attempt at comprehensive coverage of Chinese literature, important historical moments such as the New Culture Movement, or Lu Xun’s concerns with Chinese cultural reforms. Lu Xun’s political position as the leader of the Leftist Writers’ League appeared to be an important reason behind the magazine’s interest in him. China Today published two of Lu Xun’s most important short stories, “Our Story of Ah Q” in the November 1935 issue and “Diary of a Mad Man” in the December 1941 issue, both translated by Wang Chi-Chen, in addition to two of his political essays.The first of the two essays, published in the February 1935 issue, is entitled “Monsters in the Chinese Literary World,” “written in Shanghai especially for ‘China Today.’”A footnote from the editor reads, “We are proud to announce that the League of Left Writers of China have agreed to write one article a month for China Today.This is the first one, written by the outstanding critic in China, Lu Hsun.”31 This goal was not fulfilled in later issues of the magazine. Through reviewing current literary trends, Lu Xun protests against the censorship laws implemented in 1934 by

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the Nationalist government against the publication of leftist literature. The article traces the current Nationalist-Communist division to an earlier moment of the Nationalist Party’s collaboration with the Soviet Union. It also criticizes two literary camps of the “National literature” and the “Third Category” for their collaborations with the Nationalist Party. Although this piece continues with the author’s persistent concern in all of his writings of the 1930s, which is to protest against “white terror” from both social and cultural perspectives, it also shows an attempt to offer an explanation of the condition of the domestic cultural circle to the international world by combining a historical perspective and a contemporary focus. In other words, one can see that this article was written with the outsider reader in mind. Here Lu Xun appears not as a disinterested observer of China but as an active participant of the Chinese literary scene with a clearly stated political position of his own.Through this essay it can be seen that he has accepted the role of the spokesperson of Chinese leftist culture circle in a transnational context. The publication in China Today of another essay by Lu Xun has a slightly different circulation history from the first article. Whereas the first article was written for an Anglophone audience, the second article, an open letter to a Troskyist identified as “Mr. Chen,” was published first in Chinese in July 1936, and then translated into English and published in China Today in April 1937. Its English version came out after Lu Xun had already died. In the article Lu Xun forcefully argued that by rejecting the United Front, Chinese Troskyists were merely collaborating with the fascists.The contrast in terms of the textual and circulation history of the two essays serves as a reminder that Lu Xun’s collaboration with English-language magazines needs to be further differentiated by the two kinds of circulation—direct contribution as against reprinting. With regard to the publication of Lu Xun’s short stories, it should be noted that some stories translated by Wang Chi-chen and published in China Today, such as “A Hermit at Large” and “Remorse,” were also published in other English-language magazines in China at around the same time, including Far Eastern Magazine, The China Journal of Art and Science, and T’ien Hsia. These publications did not exhibit any affiliation with the Communist Party or any distinct leftist tendency. Thus one can argue that there were two different personae of Lu Xun, one as a short story writer and the other as an essayist. Whereas Lu Xun’s short stories were accepted by both the left and the nonleft and perceived as less political, to the extent that a magazine sponsored by the Nationalist government, People’s Tribune, could also publish them, his essays were published only in leftist magazines and thus had a different connection with politics.32 The American journalist Edgar Snow wrote in his 1935 study of Lu Xun that “the ‘Real Story of Ah Q’ has a special value for foreigners. It is perhaps the first attempt made by a Chinese to examine the mentality of

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his so-called ‘inscrutable’ fellow Chinese. It is Chinese psychology in action, and in Ah Q the reader sees, as through some giant lens thrown across the nation, the mind of rural China.”33 If Snow’s remark can be taken as an explanation of why Lu Xun the short story writer was upheld by both the left and the nonleft as the national cultural spokesperson, then it seems that his essays interrupt this reputation by bringing in specificity in terms of temporality, locality, and political position. The different circulation paths of his short stories and essays in English further remind us that literary translation as a translingual and transnational practice did not always follow the patterns of domestic cultural history; its politics were complex, multifaceted, and exceeded those conventional categories such as the left, the middle, or the right that are often used in domestic cultural histories. Voice s of the People during the War : VO I C E O F C H I N A Voice of China was a biweekly magazine published by the Eastern Publishing House in Shanghai. According to Smedley’s biography, the funding for this magazine was arranged by Madame Sun Yat-sen, and its editors, Grace and Manny Granich, had been sent from the United States by Earl Browder, secretary general of the American Communist Party. Smedley had an ambivalent relationship with the editors and Madame Sun due to their disagreements over the magazine’s funding and some of its contents.34 Its first issue came out on March 15, 1936, a few years later than China Forum and China Today. In contrast to the political agendas of China Forum and China Today, this magazine promoted a combination of nationalism and democracy, setting its goal in the first issue as an attempt to “give expression” to the multiple voices of the Chinese people during the time of national crisis. Consistent with its interpretation of democracy as a political as well as cultural agenda, every issue of the magazine contained a section entitled “Voices of the People,” which essentially reprinted from the Chinese-language press accounts of the war given by various individuals and groups.The magazine continued to hold a subtle anti-Nationalist position like the two previous leftist magazines, while embracing the United Front at the same time. In its first issue, for example, the “Voices of the People” section included excerpts from Chinese newspapers that commemorate the Peking-Hankow Railway workers’ strike in 1923. In addition, a letter from Zou Taofen, the chief editor of a leftist magazine Shenghuo (The Life of the Masses), was also published in the same section. The Chinese version of the letter had been published in the last issue of The Life of the Masses magazine before it was closed down by the Nationalist government and Zou had gone into hiding.This letter upholds a typical leftist position before the war by calling for the unification of the Chinese people on the one hand, and protesting against authoritarianism and oppression of

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the masses on the other. Further indications of the magazine’s leftist orientation can be seen in the articles written by former members of the Leftist Writers’ League, including Mao Dun and Xia Yen. Voice of China capitalized on the iconic status of Lu Xun as the leader of the Chinese cultural left by printing a charcoal portrait of Lu Xun on the cover of its first issue. Its November 15, 1936, issue was a commemorative issue containing several articles written by Chinese and Japanese authors for Lu Xun’s funeral. Structured around the iconic figure of Lu Xun, this magazine also reprinted and published some of his writings in order to reconfirm the several political goals of this magazine—a combination of internationalism, nationalism, anti-imperialism, and democracy.Although only three essays by Lu Xun and none of his short stories were published in Voice of China in its entire history, the choice of the three pieces is revealing of the magazine’s political and cultural position. The first, “A Little Incident,” describes the writer’s encounter with a working-class person—a rickshaw puller.Although this piece was written in 1920 around the same time as his short stories “Medicine” and “Kong Yi Ji,” it provides a much more sympathetic portrayal of the working class than do the short stories. Compared to this short essay, “Medicine” and “Kong Yi Ji” expose the superstition and backwardness of the masses as a means of critiquing the flawed national character of the Chinese. “A Little Incident” reverses the gaze to expose the distrust and hypocrisy of the writer himself. The publication of this short essay by Lu Xun, along with two short stories, “Dog” by Ba Jin and “Aboard the S.S. Dairen Maru” by Tien Chun (Xiao Jun), in the first two issues of this magazine (March 15 and April 1, 1936) effectively convey the editors’ position as sympathetic to the subaltern’s perspective. Ba Jin’s “Dog” is a story told from the perspective of a dog that is confused about his identity and troubled by his inexplicable yearnings for human affection and understanding.Tien Chun’s story describes the experience of a young couple who travel from Japanese-occupied Manchuria toward the Chinesecontrolled territories, and survive a horrifying interrogation from the Japanese police while aboard the ship. These three pieces share a common characteristic of not identifying their protagonists by name: the dog in Ba Jin’s story “Dog” begins with the claim, “I don’t know my own name.”The young man in Tien Chun’s story identifies himself first as “an unemployed beggar” and then as an office clerk, a fake identity he has assumed to get through the interrogation. Lu Xun’s “A Little Incident” also does not give a name to the rickshaw puller. Nameless individuals populate various other sections of the magazine. Letters from readers published in the “Mailbox” section of the magazine are signed by individuals identified as “an interested American,”“a Tientsin Senior Middle School Student,” or “A Chinese girl.” In addition to publishing literary works by well-known Chinese authors such as Mao Dun, this magazine also

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published plays that had collective authorship, lyrics written by unknown authors, and poems taken from the walls of remote villages. These selections on the one hand reconfirm the goal of the magazine as one that promotes an anti-elitist and politically engaged culture, and on the other hand reflect the new shifts and turns in the domestic Chinese cultural arena.35 The other two essays by Lu Xun published in this magazine,“Written in Deep Night” and “I Want to Fool People,” were written in 1936; they both explicitly or implicitly address translation issues or evoke the context of transnational circulation, issues that in turn simultaneously advanced and complicated the magazine’s agenda of promoting both political and cultural democracy. Reading these two articles in the context of this magazine, itself a translational and transnational platform, presents a different experience from reading them in other contexts, for it is hard to not consider the language and the form of the magazine that frame Lu Xun’s essays. Since Lu Xun appeared to be particularly sensitive to vehicles of circulation and translation issues in his essays, some kind of linguistic and cultural heterogeneity is exposed by reading the texts and context together. His article “I Want to Fool People” was originally written in Japanese and published in the April issue of Kaizo; it was subsequently published in English in the April 15, 1936, issue of Voice of China, and also translated by the author himself into Chinese and published in a magazine based in Shanghai in June of the same year. When the Japanese version of the article was published, several words referring to the Japanese government were deleted by the censors in Japan, but these omissions were corrected and noted by the author in the article’s English and Chinese versions.This path of translation with different traces of deletion and amendment shatters the myth of the singular and original copy. Lu Xun’s article embodies an interesting tension between the content and the three languages into which it was translated.The article questions the possibility of truth telling and international communication in nationalist media. It begins by exposing the deceptive propaganda of both Japanese and Chinese presses, which have turned the public into “fools.” Although the writer refuses to participate in this game of deception, he cannot escape from it since there is no other alternative and trustworthy venue to voice his opinions.This essay further explores the question of truth by testing it out in the context of other cultural forms. The writer goes to see movies in the International Settlement, but in the movies he finds only stories of imperialist deception, depicting either “an Englishman conquering a brutal Indian chief for his country” or “an American who became a millionaire in Africa.” On the way home from the theater, he makes a contribution to the flood relief fund, a humanistic act that, on second thought, strikes him as tasteless and insignificant. (The metaphor used is “chewing soap or something similar.”)

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In the end, he reluctantly picks up the pen to expose the only truth available, which is that true international sentiments cannot be expressed at the present moment. This article juxtaposes truth as the object of a philosophical and ethical pursuit against existing cultural forms and the humanitarian efforts represented by the flood relief fund. The writer pushes against the limits of representation of the cultural forms mentioned in the article. At the end of this article, Lu Xun refuses to offer a facile solution to the difficult question of how to communicate across national divisions in the current moment of impending war. The English version fails to fully convey the writer’s deeply cynical attitude toward the future:“Perhaps it [truth] cannot be said until ‘Sino-Japanese friendship’ has been firmly established. Sooner or later this ‘friendship’ may develop in China to such an extent that any antiJapanese person will be called a traitor (indeed, some say that the Communists are using anti-Japanese slogans to bring about the destruction of China) and the guillotines of the rising sun shine in every corner of the land. Up to that time, it will still be too early to say what is really in one’s mind.”36 For the reader of the English version of this essay, it remains ambiguous whether Lu Xun truly believes in a future of Sino-Japanese friendship. However, when it is complemented by the Chinese version, which was created by the writer himself, the reader would understand that the “Sino-Japanese friendship” is yet another ideological construction, an excuse for the expurgating of domestic opponents—the Communists––from China. The future, described by the image of the “guillotines of the rising sun,” is a totally bleak picture that holds no promise for truth in the positive sense. However, the writer also seems to suggest that exposing the false constructions of ideology and propaganda is perhaps the only truth worth telling, “Perhaps all this is merely my own anxiety. It would be a good thing if, by pen, tongue, or tears . . . one could see and understand what is truly in the hearts of others.”37 The essay ends by endorsing the value of truth and truth telling by pushing against the limits of existing media and political machinery. It conveys a spirit of internationalism not by celebrating the transnational as a utopian category, but by criticizing nationalist propaganda. One term erased by the Japanese censors is “the rising sun” in reference to the Japanese flag that flies over the guillotines all over the Chinese land. In the English version this phrase is italicized and accompanied by the explanation that it was once removed from the Japanese version.This mark of erasure is also a moment of différance implying a delay in the completion of the text’s full meaning and the supplementary relationship of the three languages where it was circulated. Taking into account the three existing versions, we can say that the text embodies a certain form of heterogeneity that on the one hand demands the codependence of the three languages, and on the other hand marks each of them as incomplete. The three-way translation unsettles the status of Chinese as the first or original language and English as the only

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target language. It is hard to characterize this text as either solely “Chinese” or simply “foreign.”Attaining this state of heterogeneity does not require that the languages involved have to be of equivalent power status. Another article, “Written in Deep Night,” also exemplifies a three-way translation by discussing the woodcuts by the German woman artist Käthe Kollwitz and the Chinese writer and revolutionary martyr Rou Shi, who first introduced Kollwitz’s woodcuts to the Chinese audience. Here again, the figure of the cultural translator and that of the martyr are collapsed into one, but what marks this essay as different from Lu Xun’s other essays on translation is that the translator figure takes on a feminist connotation and is female. In the article, Rou Shi’s “old blind” mother,“the only person who continued to think of her beloved son as still working as a translator and proofreader in Shanghai [after his death],” parallels the self-portrait of Kollwitz included in the artist’s collected works that Lu Xun has helped to publish.“There was more love and pity than hatred and wrath” in both images, Lu Xun states. “To me, this self-portrait seemed representative of the mothers of all who are insulted and injured. The same type of mother is to be found in the rural regions of China where polished fingernails are never seen. I think this mother loves her strong and useful son also. But he is able and strong, she devotes herself to her ‘insulted and injured’ child,” Lu Xun writes.38 The phrase “insulted and injured” comes from the title of a novel by Dostoyevsky and is therefore a translated phrase. In his preface to a collection of Kollwitz’s works written in the same year, which was not translated into English, Lu Xun speaks of the internationalist compassion of Kollwitz. “She does not just protest against the miserable life in her immediate surroundings, and she has not been as apathetic toward China as China has ignored her. In January 1931, when six young writers were murdered and progressive artists around the world got together to protest against this atrocity, she was among those who signed their names.”39 This statement suggests that Lu Xun does not consider Rou Shi as the only translator, but Kollwitz as a translator as well. Furthermore, relating Kollwitz to Rou Shi’s mother, Lu Xun implicitly conveys his understanding of internationalism as not just the technical process of translation but an emotional investment of love. Toward the end of the essay, Lu Xun writes,“Chinese who have not had an opportunity to travel abroad often have the idea that all white people are either preachers of the ideas of Jesus, or well-dressed, well-fed managers of business firms given to the habit of kicking people about when out of humor.The works of Käthe Kollwitz show that the ‘injured and insulted’—our national friends—exist in very many other places on the earth and have among them artists who mourn, protest, and struggle on their behalf.”40 The death of Lu Xun in 1936 provided an occasion for magazines in Chinese, English, and Japanese to work together and enable the articulation

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of internationalist sentiment in conjunction with mourning.The November 1936 issue of Voice of China devoted three pages to the memorial of Lu Xun, who had died one month before. The articles written by Japanese authors Uchiyama and Shikaji and by the Chinese writer Mao Dun are published in this section. Uchiyama was a bookstore owner and a close friend of Lu Xun in the 1930s. Shikaji was a scholar of Chinese and the Japanese translator of many Chinese literary works published in the magazine Kaizo. The Chinese versions of these articles by the Japanese writers were simultaneously published in the November issue of a translation magazine titled Yi Wen, founded by Lu Xun and Mao Dun. The contents of all three articles confirm Lu Xun’s significance not just within China but also in the international arena. The republication of these articles in English effectively situates the figure of Lu Xun at the center of translingual communication and displaces Chinese as the only language of Lu Xun’s oeuvre. Lu Xun’s death enabled translingual communication at least among Chinese, English, and Japanese; here I have not addressed the Russian connection, which also should not be ignored.41 Translation and translingual circulation of Lu Xun’s short stories, essays, and even news of his death enabled Lu Xun to gain the status of a global writer from China in the first half of the twentieth century. However, linking the physical existence of the leftist cultural network enabled and participated in by Lu Xun with his own consciousness of translator, we come to realize that globalism is not just a sociological category but also has to do with a writer’s global consciousness, particularly an imaginative understanding of translation as a cultural activity that transgresses linguistic and national boundaries. Lu Xun was emphatic toward both the necessity of translation and local inventiveness. Going back to the translation debate I discussed earlier, we can see that the difference between Lu Xun’s approach to translation and those of both Qu Qiubai and Liang Shiqiu is reflected in Lu Xun’s emphasis on translation’s ability to create history. In this respect, Lu Xun’s approach to translation is very similar to Walter Benjamin’s notion of “after-life” in his article “The Task of the Translator.” According to Derrida, who presents an explication of Benjamin’s article in Des Tours de Babel, translation is an idealistic but at the same time historically embedded practice. “Benjamin calls us to think life, starting from spirit or history and not from ‘organic corporeality’ alone,” Derrida argues.42 Quoting from Benjamin, Derrida writes,“It is rather in recognizing for everything of which there is history and which is not merely the setting for history that one does justice to this concept of life. For it is starting from history, not from nature . . . , that the domain of life must finally be circumscribed. So is born for the philosopher the task of comprehending all natural life starting from this life, of much vaster extension, that is the life of history.”43 For Lu Xun, translation is both history and that which gives life to history. It is situated at the intersection between a tran-

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scendental interpretation of “life” and the empirical notion of “history.” Although translation must start with some sort of faith in the kinship of human languages, it cannot hope to restore this original unity. Both Benjamin and Derrida also use a parent/child analogy similar to that seen in Lu Xun’s writings. Derrida writes,“Benjamin says as much, in the translation the original becomes larger; it grows rather than reproduces itself—and I will add: like a child, its own, no doubt, but with the power to speak on its own which makes of a child something other than a product subjected to the law of reproduction.”44 Re-Collecting Mode rn Chine se Lite rature The American journalist Edgar Snow was an important figure in the circuit of Anglophone internationalism. He translated a number of modern Chinese short stories into English and published them in the collection Living China, through British publishing company George G. Harrap, in 1936. Before this short story collection came out in 1935, his article “Lu Shun, Master of Pai-hua,” one of the earliest English-language studies of the author, had been published in the magazine Asia along with some translations of the short stories to be included in Living China. Other pieces from the collection, including Snow’s wife Nym Wales’s long essay on “The Modern Chinese Literary Movement,” had also been published in the British magazine Life and Letters Today. Neither Asia nor Life and Letters Today was an underground partyaffiliated magazine, unlike China Forum or China Today.Thus one could argue that Snow’s translations and collection brought Lu Xun and modern Chinese literature to a wider and more mainstream audience in the West.45 At the same time, however, Snow himself was not only a reader but also a contributing writer to the leftist Anglophone magazines I have discussed in previous sections. Among the short stories and essays Snow chose to include in his anthology, Rou Shi’s “Slave Mother” and Ding Ling’s “Flood” had already been published in China Forum and the nonleft magazine People’s Tribune. Ba Jin’s short story “Dog,” Lu Xun’s essay “A Little Incident,” and Mao Dun’s short story “Mud” had first been published in Voice of China and China Today before they were included in this short story collection.The translator for these three stories,T’ung Tso, was in fact the pseudonym of Snow and his Chinese collaborator Xiao Qian.46 When these three pieces were published in the magazines, they were followed by brief explanatory notes that they were “especially translated” for China Today or Voice of China.These details suggest that this collection was not a self-contained cultural production but was closely related to other Anglophone publications of the same era, some of which were overtly political by nature. Taking the short stories out of the context of the periodical and publishing them in a new format—the collection—demonstrates both similarities and

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differences from the culture of museum collecting.47 On the one hand, the similarity lies in the process of organization and display. According to Julia Simon, Cultural object collections . . . often seek to invoke an entire culture through certain key objects.This was increasingly true in the eighteenthcentury context of collecting, as collectors began to attempt to represent foreign cultures through artifact collections. Consistent with [Susan] Stewart’s analysis, cultural objects are removed from specific contexts and then made to stand in for the abstract whole of a culture or a people in museum and private collections. . . . Each object in a collection sits beside other objects, all removed from their original context, now creating new relationships through their contiguity.”48 Like cultural objects in a museum, the short stories in Snow’s collection convey a new pattern of “organization and display” that can “stand in for an abstract whole of a culture of people.” However, not all cultural objects are the same and invite the same habit of reading from the audience. In the case of a literature collection, fostering a new kind of reading practice through collecting would require not just “organization and display” but also rewriting and translation. In addition, Snow’s short-story collection is different from ordinary collecting, since the literary pieces were already in transnational circulation before they were included in this collection, unlike some cultural artifacts that originally belonged to a tribal community. Snow’s collection is in a sense a recollection, bearing a double-layered relationship with both the periodicals in which the English versions were first published and the historicity of the original Chinese stories. Since some works of leftist literature had been published only in leftist magazines and circulated mostly within the leftist community, Snow’s collection opened up new channels of circulation for them, thereby creating new forms of relationship between culture and politics. The term “re-collection” carries a particularly strong connotation of temporality. Snow foregrounds temporality as a major concern that defines his intention for publishing this book and determines its content. Living China is intended to give the reader an idea of a changing society through its literature. However, re-collection also connotes a sense of historicity beyond the here and now, alluding to a prior moment both in terms of the short stories’ publication history and the past of Chinese society. Embodying the tension between a desire to represent contemporaneity and the book’s indexical relationship with the past, Living China is in many ways an unwieldy and incomplete project, constantly inviting the reader to look beyond the book itself for answers to the question Snow sets out as his book’s goal—“What is happening to the creative mind in modern China?” In fact, when the book

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first came out, several reviewers noticed this disjunctive quality and considered it as a flaw that reflected the editor’s lack of knowledge and expertise in the area of modern Chinese literature.49 Whereas some might think of the book’s disjunctiveness as a problem, to me, it indicates Snow’s rewriting of Chinese modernity. In the preface of Living China, Snow speaks highly of several recent publications of English translations of Chinese classical novels, such as All Men Are Brothers, Dream of the Red Chamber, Strange Stories from a Chinese studio, and Three Kingdoms, but he justifies his contemporary perspective by stating that he is interested not in representing the past, but rather in capturing a “living China,” a China that has put its past behind it and has become integrated into the global network of modernity. He writes in the introduction: No one can stay long in this country without realizing that he is living in a milieu disturbed and enriched by the materials of dynamic art.The break-up of the world’s oldest continuous culture, the collapse of a many-walled fortress of old values, and the struggle internally and externally to impose something new to replace them; the focusing of a sharp critical lens on ideas, things, and institutions that for centuries have been accepted as moral, virtuous, and normal, with the consequent rejection of whole series of beliefs; the discovery of new dimensions in time and space judgments; the kind of healthy chaos everywhere in which are being fermented the germs of mighty and meaningful economic, political, and cultural transitions over the whole of Eastern Asia—these are the broad areas of conflict and contrast and revaluation in which the flood of human life beats turbulently in China today. 50 In essence, the object of Snow’s representation is China’s emerging modernity. However, Snow’s understanding of Chinese modernity differs from both the take of the leftist English-language magazines and the construction of modernity within the domestic Chinese cultural circle. From a comparative perspective, it is interesting to look at Snow’s collection in conjunction with the Compendium of New Chinese Literature, 1917–1927, a ten-volume collection of “new literature” that was also an attempt to canonize and legitimize China’s literary modernity on the global stage.51 The Compendium was published in 1936, the same year as Living China, and it was targeted mainly to domestic Chinese readers.The table of contents of Snow’s collection is divided into two parts: Part One features only one writer, Lu Xun, and contains several of his short stories and some of his essays. Snow is not strict about the generic distinction between short story and essay. Part Two consists of the short stories by other Chinese writers, some of whom were already well-established figures on the literary scene by the mid-1930s, such

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as Mao Dun, Ding Ling, and Lin Yutang; others were younger and less wellknown writers such as Rou Shi, Xiao Qian, and Sun Xizhen. Whereas Part One isolates Lu Xun from the rest of the literary circle, Part Two defies the conventional categorization according to literary clique and society used in most histories of modern Chinese literature and sets the writers on the left (Mao Dun) side by side with those in the middle (Lin Yutang and Shen Congwen), an older generation of modern writers (Guo Moruo and Chang Tianyi) with the younger generation (Sha Ting and Xiao Jun). In comparison, the Compendium of New Chinese Literature, 1917–1927 is a very different and much more comprehensive project. It consists of five categories: theories and debates (two volumes), fiction (three volumes), prose (two volumes), drama (one volume), and poetry (one volume). The two volumes of theories and debates are further divided into “Theories of Construction of New Literature” and “Literary Debates since the May Fourth Movement,” each volume having its unique perspective and covering a portion of the ten-year period (the first volume, 1917–1920; the second volume, 1920–1927). The three fiction volumes, where one would find the most correlations with Snow’s short-story collection in terms of genre, use literary society as their exclusive mode of categorization.This particular approach to literary history between 1917 and 1927 suggests that the editors paid a great deal of attention to cultural institutions in the domestic Chinese context and considered them as crucial to the collective formation of new literature. Snow was not unaware of the many literary societies in the Chinese cultural circle. In “Lu Shun, Master of Pai-Hua,” his critical introduction of the writer published in Asia in 1935, he conveyed an understanding of the multiple meanings of “leftist” in China and wrote that in late 1920s, “Quarrels in this Leftist intellectual movement ensued. Divided mainly into ‘Creationists,’ ‘Sun Society members,’ pink radicals of Hu Shih’s ‘Crescent Moon’ group and Marxists, they began to attack each other.”52 His very usage of the word Pai-Hua indicates that he understood that the literary revolution within which Lu Xun played a pivotal role started with a reexamination of the Chinese written language and a shift from classical to vernacular Chinese. It can therefore be said that Snow did not aim to produce an English version of the Compendium, nor was his collection put in the same category as the Compendium by either Chinese or non-Chinese reviewers of his time. Even though several reviewers criticized Snow’s selection criteria, they did not compare Living China with the Compendium, since the Compendium was not circulated in the same circle as Living China.The few English-language periodicals that reviewed Living China and Snow’s other famous book, Red Star over China, showed no sign that they were aware of the Compendium. On the contrary, Snow’s books, especially Red Star over China, were reviewed by several Chinese-language periodicals. This detail reminds us that translingual circu-

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lation in the two directions was often unequal.Translation into English required a different historical narration of cosmopolitanism that overlapped but did not necessarily coincide with the May Fourth cosmopolitanism represented by the editors of the Compendium, many of whom were key players in the New Culture Movement in China. Snow did not attempt to participate in the formation of “national culture” in Lydia Liu’s sense, but his short-story collection conveys as much concern with modernity and nationalism as that of the Compendium editors.53 He approached leftism in the Chinese literary circle from the point of view of translation and comparison.This perspective is revealing in his analogy between Lu Xun and Upton Sinclair in the following statement: “As a matter of fact Lu Hsun is no more a true proletarian writer than Upton Sinclair, who is also on the black list in China, together with that arch-radical John Dewey and many other foreigners whose books have been translated into pai-hua.”54 This analogy with Upton Sinclair is based on Snow’s interpretation of the commonality between Lu Xun and Sinclair as resistance writers, those “on the black list,” but this analogy was not made randomly, since it suggests Snow probably had some knowledge about the history of literary translation and its huge impact on many Chinese writers in the Republican period.There would not have been any connection between Lu Xun and Upton Sinclair to speak of if the works of Sinclair had not been translated into Chinese. In his selection of the short stories, Snow often blurs the distinction between the left and the liberal, a crucial distinction that was upheld by leftist writers such as Lu Xun. Snow’s article on Lu Xun published in Asia puts Lu Xun side by side with Lin Yutang,“the wittiest and liveliest of China’s editors,” even though by the mid-1930s Lu Xun had already parted ways with Lin because of differences in political position. In his introduction to Lu Xun in Living China, Snow quotes from Lin Yutang’s journal The Analects to reinforce his views on Lu Xun, although Lin’s judgment of Lu Xun would not have been acceptable to the Left. In this statement quoted by Snow, Lin points out that Lu Xun’s humor and detachment were his most endearing qualities and implies that Lu Xun’s scathing criticism of Chinese society and his antagonism toward the Nationalist party were secondary. Lu Xun, on the other hand, had made several critical comments on Lin’s liberal cultural position in a number of essays he wrote in the 1930s. To make sense of the politics of Snow’s collection, it is important to recognize that Snow’s internationalism is an eclectic blend of anti-imperialism, liberalism, socialism, and humanism.This combination of different beliefs and values allowed him to make friends in various sectors of Chinese society, including Madam Sun Yat-sen and her friends who belonged to the progressive sector of the Nationalist Party, the leaders in the Communist Party such as Mao Zedong, and many Chinese writers and intellectuals—“the Western-

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oriented liberal individualists” in Snow’s term.Although Living China reflects his commitment to literary representations of the conditions of the working class or social problems in Chinese society, several pieces in this anthology also bring up other issues that were unanticipated by Snow, issues that once again remind us of the complicated relationship between literature and social change. For instance, Snow’s intention of representing contemporary China is often undercut by the temporal ambiguity of some short stories, and the crosscultural textuality of modern Chinese literature that begs the question of “What is ‘Chinese’ about modern Chinese literature?” In his preface to the anthology, Snow defines his approach to translation as one that is diametrically opposite to that of Lu Xun: instead of sacrificing fluency for literalness, Snow opts for fluency, not literalness, in his translations of modern Chinese short stories. This approach shows that his relationship to English is rather different from Lu Xun’s relationship to the Chinese language, but it helps him to construct a more coherent picture of modern China, one quite different from the complex and multilayered pictures of China presented by the short stories in their original Chinese versions. Snow warns in the preface that “Sinologists, should any care to peruse these tales and compare them with the originals, are advised to have strong stimulants near by, for in some cases they will be needed to minimize the shocks over liberties taken in the functions of editing.”55 He sounds skeptical about the aesthetic quality of some Chinese short fiction, commenting in the introduction that “there is often padding with essentially meaningless though usually pretty enough dialogue and narrative, which contributes nothing to the development of the story, thus sacrificing interest, coherence, and compactness of style and form in order to pay the rice-vendor—a practice by no means unknown in the West.” He takes the liberty of omitting “certain passages and episodes.” He chooses to “retain original idioms wherever possible,” but sometimes for fear of “contribut[ing] further to the legend that the Chinese are ‘queer’ people,”“I have refused to keep a simple pun or historical or classical allusion that would require a half-page footnote to make it comprehensible.”56 This approach reduces the textual complexity of several modern Chinese writers’ works, such as those by Mao Dun, and to a lesser extent those by Lu Xun. Lu Xun’s story “Medicine,” for instance, describes the Hua family’s desperate attempt to save their son’s life with a bun soaked in an executed revolutionary’s blood. The story exposes the superstitions of the masses and conveys a sense of tragedy in the revolutionary’s self-sacrifice.The last scene ties together the sides of the masses and the revolutionary by showing two mothers meeting at the graveside, where they surprisingly find “at the top of the little mound [the revolutionary’s grave], a circlet of scarlet and white flowers.” Snow’s translation of this passage is as follows: “‘What could be the

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explanation?’ she muses.Tears stream from her face, and she cries out,‘Yu, my son! You have been wronged, but you don’t forget. Is it that your heart is still full of pain, and you choose this day and this method of telling me?’”57 In the Chinese original, Lu Xun uses the term xianling in the last line of the passage to refer to the appearance of the spirit of the revolutionary. Snow chooses to suppress the superstitious overtone of the term by using the vague description “this method of telling me.”A more recent English version by Yang Xianyi and Gladys Yang translates the phrase into “work this wonder.”58 The word xianling sets the worldview of the unenlightened female in opposition to that of the revolutionary, a spokesperson for enlightenment and rationality. Snow’s translation does not emphasize this opposition and simplifies the multiple-layered sadness of both the mother figure and her revolutionary son. Snow’s translation is not necessarily wrong, nor is he the first one to practice liberal translation.59 In fact, Snow often sounds apologetic about his translation of Lu Xun’s short stories, frequently acknowledging their untranslatability. As he says in the introduction to the English version of “Medicine,”“Lu Hsin’s double entendres are recondite, and his numerous puns and allusions, his delicately shaped irony and censure are frequently said to defy translation. Fortunately, Medicine, though simply conceived, is more elaborately constructed than most of his fiction. Hence it can be appreciated for its inherent storyvalue even though the richer qualities of style possessed by the original are denied us.”60 Terms such as xianling undercut the contemporaneity of Chinese modernity by showing the ghost of the past.Although it is true that Lu Xun should be positioned within a modern era marked by “the breaking up of the world’s oldest continuous culture” and “the collapse of a many-walled fortress of old values,” Snow underestimated the strong influence of classical Chinese and traditional values on the author. Another liberal translation of Mao Dun’s short story “Suicide” in the second part of the anthology also shows that the historical transition that Snow sets out to depict is by no means linear or singular. This is one of the three stories that Snow finds to be particularly “formless”; he decides to perform “surgery” on them with “the author’s consent.”61 Snow’s translation of “Suicide” leaves out the entire first section of the short story, probably because, as he states in his introduction,“Chinese do not seem to mind such purposeless rambling, for it is an old trick of the oral story-teller—who, however, is licensed to spin out his yarn because he deals in the formless epic. But the Western reader is sure to find it irritating in the short story.”62 Although Mao Dun is a good fit in this collection, since the majority of writers are socially conscious and radical, and Mao Dun was a Communist Party member as early as 1921. “Suicide” is not a straightforward representation of revolution but places a depressed and sentimental woman in its center.

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In a way, the entire story is made up of the “purposeless rambling” of Miss Huan, a woman who suffers from depression and melancholy after being abandoned by a revolutionary fighter whom she has met only three times. When she discovers that she is pregnant with his child, she decides to commit suicide. Contemporary critics have found the gender politics of this story problematic while conceding that it took a bold step in the representation of female sexuality. David Der-wei Wang, for instance, has argued that Mao Dun places “evasive” and “austere” demands on women, subjecting them first to the challenge of “the liberation of body and thought,” only to deny them the benefits of such a liberation afterward.63 Feminist critics such as Rey Chow have criticized this story’s depiction of woman as “the traditional, visually fetishized object” in spite of the new and liberated condition in which she is situated. Yet one aspect of the story that has not received much critical attention is the story’s many allusions to a subgenre of popular romantic literature and visual culture, which greatly shape the protagonist’s self-identity. There are three moments in the story that make reference to the popular print and visual culture of Mao Dun’s times. The first occurs at the beginning, when the relatives of Miss Huan get together in the living room to gossip about her and mock her moodiness.The second is in the middle of the story where the protagonist browses through a newspaper and finds that its social section is filled with melodramatic accounts of suffering maidens and faithless men.Tired of the unintended mockery posed by these real-life stories, she throws down the newspaper and picks up an “old novel” that tells the familiar story of “a foolish sentimental girl and a man with a cold heart.”64 The third allusion can be found toward the end of the story, when Huan is taken to a new movie by her cousin. Although Huan thinks of it a “totally worthless” melodrama, it still makes her feel as though it was a reflection of her own pitiful life. Mao Dun remains vague about whether the cultural education Huan acquires from popular literature, tabloids, and melodramatic films is empowering or damaging to her self-identity. One way or the other, these allusions to popular culture serve the purpose of providing a local context for the universal discourse on women’s issues in which Mao Dun’s story should be situated. It is well known that Mao Dun played an active role in introducing the writings of Western feminists Mary Wollstonecraft, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and Ellen Key to Chinese readers in the early 1920s, but could he have also been influenced by the popular fiction of his times?65 Snow’s decision to leave out the first three pages of the story betrays his impatience with the “purposeless rambling” of the feminine genre of modern Chinese urban literature, since in his introduction to the collection he indicates that he does not mind the masculine genres of classical epics, heroic narratives, or the historical novel Three Kingdoms. The category of urban literature includes a wide variety of

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literature, from the popular novels of the Mandarin Duck and Butterfly school to the modernist literature of the 1930s. Snow also shows no awareness of the development and social impact of contemporary Chinese movies, many of which were melodramas, the kind of stories that are likely to influence female spectators such as Miss Huan. As Snow’s Chinese student Xiao Qian remembers, while selecting titles for this collection Snow was uninterested in the literature published in Shanghai’s modernist journal Xian Dai,“pieces that depict the shape and rhythm of urban life”; rather, he was interested in the stories that “expose, criticize, and represent the reality of Chinese society.”66 However, whether different cultural sectors in Chinese society became modern in the same manner and at the same pace is a question left unanswered in Snow’s collection. In Mao Dun’s original version, parts of the first three pages are written in a southern dialect, a stylistic choice frequently employed by writers of popular romance around the turn of the twentieth century. Since most leftist writers of Mao Dun’s time tried hard to dissociate themselves from the writers of popular novels, it seems as though Snow managed to position Mao Dun even more centrally within the canon of New Culture by cutting out the narrative excess of the first three pages. After all, these deletions were made with the author’s consent.There is another interesting change Snow made to the end of the story that indicates his impatience with the murkiness of this story’s message. Snow’s translation of the ending is as follows: “Precisely at that moment a vague thought fought for light somewhere in the darkness of her benumbed brain.‘There is still a way out,’ it seemed to say,‘if you bravely join the world struggle to change society . . . if you move forward . . . if you keep pace with the urgent advance of social devel–’ But the sash had gripped into her throat and the idea was choked into silence.”67 The ending of Mao Dun’s short story is not at all as clear as Snow’s rendition. The half sentence “if you bravely join the world struggle to change society” is entirely Snow’s invention, and it seems to be more of a description of Snow’s social concern than that of the protagonist. The translation process of Living China involved not just Snow himself but also at least two of his students at Yanjing University, Xiao Qian and Yang Gang.The practice of collaboration in the Chinese context can be traced to the nineteenth century, when missionaries solicited the help of their Chinese assistants to translate Western science and technology into Chinese.68 In terms of literary translation, Patrick Hanan finds that “a two-person method of translation into Chinese was practically universal in the nineteenth century until close to its end, and it would be surprising to find someone translating a novel on his own in the 1870s, particularly one that required special knowledge in a number of fields.”69 Although the nature of this collaboration in the case of Living China is hard to know, Xiao Qian has mentioned in his

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preface to a Chinese edition of Living China that he and other students gave Snow suggestions of what to include in his collection. Therefore, instead of considering Snow’s liberal translations as errors resulting from some miscomprehension of the nuances of the Chinese language, we could think of it a form of collaboration and rewriting that reflects the collective political and cultural orientation of a bilingual literary community in the 1930s. Recent scholarship on Chinese modernity attempts to recover the repressed histories written off by the grand narrative of the May Fourth enlightenment, which was effectively reproduced by the Compendium of New Chinese Literature.These include the histories of the new novel before and after the May Fourth Movement, popular culture such as film and music, material culture, and women’s issues.70 Although, as I have argued, Snow’s collection did not overtly participate in the formation of the Chinese-language national culture, it is uncanny to observe the many similarities between his approach to Chinese modernity and that of the Chinese New Culturalists. We can therefore think of the collaboration between Snow and important Chinese writers Lu Xun and Mao Dun as a form of transnational co-writing that produced Chinese national culture. Although translation can contribute to the emergence of new canons and ideologies, the difference between English and Chinese as a target language gives a different accent to this process.A revealing example in this respect can be found in Snow’s translation of Yu Ta-fu’s “Wistaria and Dodder,” which shows how Snow deals with foreignness in Chinese-language modern texts. In the story’s original version, the writer Yu Ta-fu quotes a section of A. E. Housman’s “A Shropshire Lad” in English and then translates that quotation into Chinese himself. This insertion of a foreign-language text in a work of Chinese literature is meaningful, since it represents a self-conscious moment of cultural borrowing intrinsic to the formation of modern Chinese literature. It is necessary to include a Chinese translation of Housman’s poem excerpt in the story because, structured as a letter, the story is addressed to the speaker’s wife who comes from a provincial background and has not acquired much modern knowledge or new ideas of womanhood. In this way, the story indicates that English and Chinese have an unequal social status that parallels the division between the traditional and the modern. In Snow’s English version, however, the fact that Housman’s poem is translated into Chinese by the speaker is left out, and Snow has also added the dismissive phrase “a silly foreign poem” instead of mentioning the name of the poet or the title of the poem. Writing off these signs of unwanted foreignness, Snow and his collaborators have made Chinese national culture seem more monolingual and Chinese than it is.They have also downplayed the issue of social disparity with regard to language and translation, ignoring the fact that those who know

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foreign languages and can engage in translation necessarily command higher cultural authority than those who only read or consume translated literature. Similarly, the man equipped with modern knowledge has a higher class position than the woman with traditional knowledge.These disparities are internal and intrinsic to Chinese modernity. Erasing these signs of discrepancy allows Snow and his collaborators to portray Chinese cultural modernity as a homogeneous and essentially liberating process.The temporal ambiguity of Chinese modernity, which sometimes is also an expression of some writers’ ambivalence toward modernity, is deemphasized as well. In other words, one can argue that Living China as a translation exercise has helped reinforce a teleological understanding of Chinese cultural modernity. Po st sc ri p t Internationalism as a culture of translation does not circulate only spatially across national borders; it also circulates temporally through retelling of stories of the past. In contemporary China, the legacy of internationalism still exists and is redefined through stories of old and new internationalisms in public culture. For example, some recent TV series and theater productions featureWestern internationalists such as Edgar Snow and Norman Bethune. Although these productions are read by many Chinese viewers as propagandistic reproductions of the Communist state ideology in its most rigid form, they are, in fact, not as simple and straightforward as that. Some are closely related to contemporary conditions of transnationalism and globalization. For instance, one theatrical adaptation of Edgar Snow’s Red Star over China casts Da Shan, a Canadian national who has become a popular television icon in China, to play the role of Edgar Snow. When I watched the play Red Star over China in Shanghai in 2007, I was surprised to find that the play does not mention any direct or mediated contact between Snow and the American or Chinese Communist Party prior to his first trip to Yan’an in 1936. Internationalist public culture such as the Anglophone periodicals and newspapers discussed in this chapter, which distributed news about Chinese Communism and of which Snow was a reader, did not exist in this play. This omission serves to reinforce the mysterious aura of Yan’an and Communism by situating both in a provincial and faraway location, in opposition to the corrupting forces of capitalism and imperialism in the big cities. Although this kind of representation plays up Snow’s idealism, it forecloses the possibility of reinterpreting internationalism as a cultural history of transnational communication. It makes it seem as though this political history did not have to rely on cultural means and mediation such as bilingualism, circulation and translation, and cultural industry in urban centers such as Shanghai.This omission, in conjunction with the casting of Da Shan, represses certain signs of transnationality while highlighting others for the purpose of updating the “old”

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history of internationalist struggles to fit contemporary taste. Although this chapter does not advocate an historicist attitude toward the past, it tries to suggest that the past might be already global or transnational in ways that we have not considered. How to read the layering of multiple signs of transnationality in internationalist narratives is crucial to understanding the past. This contemporary theatrical production reinforces the central argument of this chapter that the histories of internationalism and Chinese modernity should be considered together. It is my hope that my historical investigation of internationalism and cultural of circulation will inspire critical thinking on the relevant form of internationalism in the contemporary moment of globalization.

C hap te r 4

Migration and Diaspora The Afte rlife of Chine se Co smopolitanism

MOST OF THE MAGAZINES discussed in chapters one through three ended before the beginning of the second phase of Shanghai’s wartime history—the stage of total colonization. The discussions in the preceding chapters try to prove that in spite of the use of a foreign linguistic medium and the participation of foreign-trained Chinese or non-Chinese writers, the magazines themselves were by no means “unlocal” in the sense of being unrelated to such pressing social concerns as colonization, nation building, modernization, Japanese invasion, or the proletarian revolution. At the same time, the magazines also took advantage of the novelty value of a foreign language and charted out a cultural genealogy that was different from the nationalist cultural history we know of. An implicit argument in previous chapters is that these English magazines provide a picture of a much “messier,” more dynamically multilingual and translational Republican China than what we have learned from official histories of this period. Since the formation of these cosmopolitan publics was closely related to the turn of history, it would be interesting to ask questions such as,“What happens when this social history changed?” “What other uses did people make of English after Shanghai had been completely occupied by Japanese army?” “Why was it impossible for these cosmopolitan publics to continue to exist?” Klaus M e hne rt : E x i le and Nati onal i sm To answer these questions, we may want to revisit a magazine that was published in Shanghai between October 1941 and April/May 1945, covering almost the entire period of Japanese occupation.This magazine, entitled The XXth Century, was different from all the other periodicals discussed in this book in that it did not have any pronounced Chinese consciousness attached to it. Its editor, Klaus Mehnert, was an exile who shared a similar kind of itinerant life as some Chinese editors of The China Critic and T’ien Hsia, but he had a different relationship to China and Shanghai, where the magazine was 135

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published. Born in Russia in 1906, Mehnert emigrated to Germany after the Russian Revolution and completed his education at the University of Berlin. Afterward he returned to the Soviet Union, where he worked as a reporter and writer for a German newspaper until he was forced to leave there in 1936. He then took up several teaching positions in Russian history at the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of Hawaii from 1930s to the early 1940s before moving once again to Shanghai in October 1941 to edit The XXth Century. Shanghai was but one brief stop in Mehnert’s itinerant life; however, taking a close look at his magazine The XXth Century would enable us to gain a new understanding of the city’s function in international communication.The very first article of The XXth Century published in October 1941 captures the exilic sensibility of its chief editor Mehnert quite well. Entitled “Aloha!,” a Hawaiian word that ambiguously denotes both greeting and farewell, this article by Mehnert describes both his excitement at the discovery of a paradise in Hawaii and his realization of its impending transformation. Mehnert confessed that he had had many departures in his wanderings in life, but none could be compared with this current departure from Hawaii, since not only was this a departure in physical terms but it also foreshadowed loss and transformation. “Hawaii’s transformation from a south sea paradise to a naval and military fortress of first magnitude seems inevitable.The time may soon come when people . . . will link the islands with nothing but coast artillery, bombers, and naval battles, as if Hawaii were another Gibraltar or Singapore,” Mehnert wrote. 1 For him, leaving Hawaii meant not so much an escape from this inevitable transformation as it was a “journey to a war,” in a different sense from what the phrase meant to W. H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood. Mehnert’s appreciation for Hawaii did not go far beyond the islands’ natural beauty, and he had only a superficial understanding of its history. In a brief account of Hawaiian history given in this article, he neglected many harsh realities such the islands’ brutal colonization by European settlers, the economic exploitation of indentured labor, and complex race relations on the plantations. Mehnert depicted Hawaii idealistically as “a melting pot of races”: “Nowhere in the world can you study race problems better than in Hawaii, where you have not only Hawaiians, whites of all nationalities (called haoles), Chinese, Japanese, Koreans, Filipinos, and negroes, but also their increasingly mixed descendents, all of them living peacefully side by side.”2 In addition to giving a utopian representation of Hawaii, this sentence also underscores a particular scientific perspective which would be characteristic of Mehnert’s approach to social and political problems in China and elsewhere in most articles that he wrote for The XXth Century. Regardless of subject, whether it concerned a new phrase of the war, a political issue such as the development of Bolshevism, or a social topic such as the Japanese construction of

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Manchuria, Mehnert would habitually adopt the tone of a scholar and place hard evidence and logical analysis at a prominent position. However, this scholarly appearance does not mean that Mehnert did not have a clear sense of his political affiliation. He was an outspoken apologist for the interests of the Axis nations, particularly Japan and Germany, and a very harsh critic of both the United States and the Soviet Union. His attitude toward China could be described as apathetic and slightly ambivalent. Although war was an inescapable reality in almost all the magazines discussed so far in this book, no other magazine was as closely related to the reality of the war as The XXth Century: this magazine’s lifespan started with the outbreak of the Pacific War and ended with Germany’s defeat in May 1945. Its last issue in June 1945 announced that the publication would be ended because the editor felt that it would no longer be possible to predict and report the changes in Europe after the war. It was clear from the editor’s articles and other pieces that this publication was closely connected with the interests of one side of the war. However, The XXth Century also tried to present a cosmopolitan worldview by claiming in the very first issue that this publication was set up to be “a symbol of peace and fairness, of the will to understand people, and of the ability to get along with them—the symbol of Aloha.” Its mission was to advance “genuine understanding rather than hatred, to fair and sane discussion rather than one-sided argument.”3 Since, as I have previously argued, all cosmopolitan discourses are situated in particular social contexts, it is necessary to examine Mehnert’s claims of objectivity and fairness in conjunction with his other arguments related to the war and nationalism. Perhaps one difference between Mehnert’s pro-Axis position and a “standard” nationalist position in favor of either Japan or Germany was his self-recognition as an exile. He considered his magazine a forum to address and communicate with other exiles like himself. For instance, in his article published in the January 1942 issue, Mehnert responded to the bombing of Pearl Harbor by evoking the language of neutrality and fairness. Believing that most readers of this magazine were similar to himself in that they had “spent most of their lives outside the boundaries of their own countries,” Mehnert claimed that it was necessary to use a language that “would be understandable to all” to address both sides of the war. What follows in the rest of the article is an unambivalent defense of Axis powers not so much from a position of what Mehnert calls “narrow nationalism,” as from a universalistic perspective that defends progress, revolution, democracy, and peace. Mehnert argued that the war along with the cruelties of the concentration camp should be seen as “extreme measures” taken during a revolution whose ultimate goal was to create a more equal world. In this article, Mehnert gave a clearer explication of his theory of the war as a “New Revolution” that followed the footsteps of the French and

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American revolutions. He argued that the goals of the American and French revolutions had been betrayed by excessive development of individualism, increased polarization between the rich and the poor, and intensified social conflicts after World War I. In this situation, it would be necessary to start another revolution, spearheaded by Germany, Italy, and Japan as the agents of change, in order to rectify the problems of capitalism and continue the legacy of earlier revolutions. It is quite clear from this and other articles by Mehnert that as chief editor of The XXth Century, his role was to use his academic expertise in European and Russian history to provide theoretical justification for the interests of the Axis powers during the war. Mehnert’s exile status proved to be a cosmopolitan advantage that enabled him to explain the war from a universalistic perspective of a larger scale, not a narrowly defined “nationalistic” perspective. In some articles by Mehnert, he took up the persona of a traveler and wrote about his visits to various East Asian cities with an intention of broadcasting the achievements of the East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. In an April 1943 article entitled “Round Trip through East Asia,” he reported that significant improvements had been made to the railroad system in Nagasaki and with the progress of war,Tokyo had become an even busier city as “the center of the whole East Asia.” In the same article, Mehnert also described his visit to Manchukuo, his second visit since 1936. Of the many positive changes he described, he noted in particular the transformation of Hsinking from “a raw settlement in the midst of a virgin plain to the most modern capital in East Asia” and the architectural styles of some buildings that reflected a synthesis of “what is best in Japanese, Chinese, and Manchu traditions.” He also cited other examples of multiculturalism in Manchukuo––for instance, a detail of the national anthem of Manchukuo sung bilingually in both Japanese and Chinese. What is particularly interesting is Mehnert’s description toward the end of the article of his visit to the Ming tombs outside Beijing. In Mehnert’s eyes, the war could not be farther away from the fields near the Ming Tombs, where he saw peasants sitting around at leisure in the sun outside their houses and women and children playing in the dusty fields—a picture-perfect rendition of the “impressive harmony” of the East Asia Co-prosperity Sphere. Mehnert’s travelogue is in many ways a map of imperialistic desire that intends to replace the contemporary reality of the war with an idealistic image of the empire. Mehnert’s tone is detached and analytical throughout the article. In the last few sentences, where he enumerated the many political regimes that the city of Peking witnessed in the first three decades of the twentieth century, he observed calmly that “the present change of Flags show[s] that North China is passing through a new stage.”4 It seems that deaths, sacrifices, and atrocities accompanying this “change” were deliberately forgotten and left out of Mehnert’s travelogue.

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It would be incorrect to assume that Mehnert did not know of or was shut off from the reality of suffering and pain during the war. In an article entitled “Socialism from Above” published in the March 1944 issue of The XXth Century, Mehnert described in great detail the aftershock left by air raids over German cities. He expressed his sympathy toward the survivors’ pain and their agony over the loss of loved ones. However, he quickly reminded his reader that it was not enough for Germans to be concerned with one’s personal home, but the concern for Germany was even more important. He called for a “spiritual reevaluation” during the time of war.“Like a man who suddenly loses his sight, the bombing victim begins to build up a spiritual kingdom that is all the richer for his loss.” A reinforced sense of duty for “their family, their home, their Germany, with its forests and factories, its fields and songs” was needed during the time of war.5 Mehnert’s political affinity with Germany and its allies was unwavering and pronounced in every article he wrote for The XXth Century, but this was not the case with some articles written by other authors in this magazine. An article entitled “Voices from Germany” published not long after Mehnert’s own piece on air raids in German cities contains a few letters exchanged among air raid survivors in Germany and was less ideological than Mehnert’s piece. The fact that Mehnert could not accept the common sense of human suffering during the war shows that the experience of exile did not automatically translate into the ability of thinking beyond the nation, especially at the critical moment when polarized national interests dominated the political stage. His claim of searching for commonality among opposing nations was unsubstantiated, since this magazine represented a version of cosmopolitanism that came from top down and had little to do with the people in different nations affected by the war. In relation to the theme of this book, a question that would be interesting to ask is “Why was a magazine like The XXth Century published in Shanghai?” What did the existence of this magazine tell us about the state of social life at a particular moment of urban history? Perhaps one reason that a highly politicized publication such as The XXth Century would be published in Shanghai is that the city was an important site of information gathering and exchange before and during the war. Shanghai’s history of simultaneous occupation by several foreign powers in conjunction with its well-developed capitalist cultural infrastructure enabled it to become some sort of “global city,” although in a different sense from what contemporary discussions of globalization have told us. A comparable situation is perhaps the city of Hong Kong during the Cold War period, when the movement of people, ideology, and capital had a great effect on local cultural production. In Shanghai during the 1930s and 1940s as much as in Hong Kong during the Cold War period, sharp ideological difference and polarized political interests motivated as well as controlled knowledge production and

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circulation. Activities related to information gathering and exchange simultaneously produced and reproduced various stereotypical Orientalist or Occidentalist misrepresentations, both old and new. In this kind of situation, it is not hard to imagine the cultural worker directly playing the role of an information secret agent, needing hardly any mediation between culture and politics. Klaus Mehnert’s academic training before he took over the editorship of The XXth Century was as a scholar in Soviet politics. While editing the magazine, he wrote and published several articles with titles such as “Eastern Siberia—Underpopulated Treasure House,” “Bolshevism and Its Pedigree,” “Bolshevist Humor,” and “The Red Road.” In these articles, Mehnert analyzed insightfully the philosophical contradictions in Bolshevist ideology, the history of Russia and its effect on contemporary Soviet politics, the changes in Soviet politics and ideology, and the transformation of the global Communist organization—the Comintern. Therefore, we can say that one of the ways for Mehnert to serve the interests of the Axis nations was through the academic identity of a “Soviet watcher,” a description he gave to himself after the war. In one article, Mehnert described the unique advantage of Shanghai for gathering information about Russia: Out of all the cities outside the Soviet Union—with the possible exception of Ankara—Shanghai is the best equipped for the study of the developments in the USSR. It is the only place in East Asia, and one of the few places in the world, where one can simply step into a bookstore and purchase literature—newspapers, magazines, novels, plays, pamphlets, scientific treatises—fresh from the Moscow presses; where three Soviet dailies (two in Russian and one in English) as well as three Soviet magazines (two in Russian and one in Chinese) appear; where Bolshevist editorials are frequently made verbatim to Shanghai readers and radio listeners within a few hours of their publication in Moscow, where a Soviet radio station transmits daily from morning to night in Russian, Chinese, German, and English.6 The Chinese-language magazine on the Soviet Union that drew Mehnert’s attention was probably Sulian Wenyi (Soviet Culture), which published translated essays on Soviet literature, cultural policies, and the reception and criticism of Chinese writers’ works in the Soviet Union. Sulian Wenyi had a leftist orientation that was quite different from Mehnert’s own magazine, but it confirmed Mehnert’s observation that Shanghai was in a unique position to gather information about the Soviet Union.

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E i le e n C hang and S hang ha i Mehnert’s remarks raise the question of how local Chinese responded to the city as a nexus of information exchange and circulation. Mehnert’s articles show that coming from a position sympathetic to Japan’s ideology of the EastAsia Co-prosperity Sphere, he was interested in representing China only as a collaborator of Japan.Therefore, most articles on Chinese culture, society, and politics published in this magazine were limited in terms of time to the wartime period, and in terms of space to cities under the control of the Japanese army. The depth of discussion of Chinese history and culture in most articles on China could not compete with similar articles published in The China Critic and T’ien Hsia. Unlike in T’ien Hsia, the vast majority of the Chinese hinterland that was also the battlefront between the Chinese resistance forces and the Japanese army was mostly left out of The XXth Century during its entire publication history.Therefore, the impression of China one gets from this magazine was not of a nation undergoing a war, but of one involved in the same global political battle as Japan against Western domination and global capitalism. For instance, an article by Liu Sze-Hsun on “Chinese Movies” published in March 1943 discussed the movies made by the China Film Company, a Sino-Japanese joint enterprise established in 1938, and treated this subject quite independently from the context of the history of Chinese movie industry in the twentieth century. Mehnert wrote a preface for this article, in which he celebrated Chinese movie industry not for its overall achievements, but mainly because the Chinese movie industry represented a counter-force against the domination of Hollywood movies in Asia. Overall, The XXth Century’s interest in Chinese culture was both limited and instrumental, unlike the other English-language publications discussed in this book so far. The XXth Century’s writers came from different national backgrounds, including Japan, China, France, Russia, and America. Most Chinese writers had been educated abroad and some had taught in American universities.The majority of them were not closely connected with the local Chinese-language public culture, so their names are hardly known to most contemporary scholars. However, one writer proved to be an exception. Her name is Eileen Chang, and I would argue that the significance of her participation in The XXth Century had less to do with the quality of the four articles by her that were published here than their illumination of the local context, with which The XXth Century editor seemed to be unconcerned most of the time. In order to understand Chang’s conscious representation of the locality of Shanghai, one would have to go beyond The XXth Century, traverse linguistic boundaries, and read Chang’s English articles in conjunction with her Chinese writings. Although The XXth Century was cross-cultural in more than one way, it did not require the reader to have a translingual perspective in order

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to read the magazine.Through description and practice, Chang’s writings both illuminate some important characteristics of Shanghai in the global circuit of information exchange and participate in this activity in their own way. Chang’s writing career had just begun in the late 1930s, and even though she wrote in both English and Chinese throughout her life, her writings in Chinese far surpassed those in English in terms of subtlety and complexity. However, the significance of Chang’s English writings should not be evaluated purely from the point of view of linguistic competence, and their simplicity and even instrumentality prove to be an advantage in terms of providing a more straightforward depiction of the physical context in which she lived. Chang’s awareness of Shanghai as a particular kind of global city is best illustrated in a Chinese-language short story “Sealed Off,” written by her in 1943, the same year that her English articles were published in The XXth Century. This story describes a paradoxical condition of stasis and movement, enclosure and circulation in a city under the attack of an air raid. Because of the air raid, the city is forced to a standstill; in spite of this static state, however, there are still traces in people’s everyday life that show the city’s connections to global stories of modernity and development as well as translocal figures of poverty and dislocation. The city is portrayed as simultaneously deeply embedded in China and the world and detached from both. Significant gaps exist between the city and the rest of the country as well as the world as a whole. However, gaps are depicted positively and considered constitutive toward the formation of the local, since the brief period of stasis during the air raid gives the main characters in the story a valuable opportunity to contemplate making changes in their respective lives. Chang uses a metaphor of translation to describe the state of life in Shanghai in relation to the world:“Life was like the Bible, translated from Hebrew into Greek, from Greek into Latin, from Latin into English, from English into Chinese. When Cuiyuan read it, she translated the standard Chinese into Shanghainese. Gaps were unavoidable.”7 If in the context of this short story translation created possibilities for a romantic connection, opening up “gaps” in Chang’s words, then in other contexts,“gaps” of translation carried significant political ramification. Reading Chang’s English and Chinese writings together makes us realize that Chang knew that various kinds of translational activities could be conducted in Shanghai during the war, and that translation or writing about another culture sometimes was not an innocent or inconsequential matter. Chang’s essays published in The XXth Century in the same year as her short story “Sealed Off ” do not just illustrate but also practice the same translational perspectives discussed in this short story. Chang wrote three essays for The XXth Century, all of which were written with a clear understanding of the foreign reader, and they all try to “offer an

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amusing psychoanalysis of China” (in the words of editor Mehnert) through discussions of changes in clothing and fashion, the aesthetics of Peking Opera, and Chinese religious practices. In the editor’s note accompanying the first essay, Mehnert considered the writer talented and unusual because of her “deep curiosity for her own people.” The articles themselves contain many generalizations about Chinese behavior, pattern of thinking, habits, and lifestyle for the consumption of a foreign readership. For instance, the very first sentence of the article “Chinese Life and Fashion” goes like this: “Come and see the Chinese family on the day when the clothes handed down for generations are given their annual sunning!” Whom does this sentence address? Who would be interested in the intimate family life of the Chinese? Sentences like this one suggest that her articles try to navigate through the divisions between the cultural insider and outsider, the private and the public in their depictions of Chinese life. Chang and Mehnert shared one similarity in this magazine: they both facilitated some type of information exchange across cultural and national borders. However, this commonality does not mean that their translational activities were situated similarly vis-à-vis the Chinese local community. Unlike Mehnert, Chang did not consider the English-speaking readers of The XXth Century as the only reading community in Shanghai. She translated her own essays into Chinese and published them in a magazine Gujin (Past and Present) less than a year later. There are many subtle differences between the English and the Chinese versions of the essays, but without going into a detailed discussion of these differences here, I would argue that moving back and forth between various language groups was viewed by Chang as a constructive exercise that would enhance self-understanding and self-love. Chang wrote the following statements in her Chinese article entitled “On Foreigners Watching Peking Opera,” which was roughly based on her English article on the same subject: It is not entirely meaningless to try to look at China in the same way that foreigners appreciate Peking Opera. . . . Many young people who claim to love China actually cannot see clearly the target of their affection. It is of course enviable to be able to love one’s country blindly, the only drawback of this being that once your ideal is shattered by reality, you can easily become disillusioned. For those who live among fellow Chinese, we don’t have the good fortune as do some overseas Chinese of keeping at a safe distance from our beloved homeland. So we might as well take a close look at what it is. If we observe China in the same way that foreigners appreciate Peking Opera, then we will be surprised and awed at first, and afterward, we will be enlightened. Only then do we recognize clearly what is the object of our love. (My translation)

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In this short passage, just as in Chang’s other essays, we witness a succession of shift of perspective: from the Chinese to the foreigner and then back to the Chinese. This instability of perspective, in conjunction with repeated translation, reminds us not only that the city’s life indeed was translation, but also that as Chang wrote in “Sealed Off,”“gaps were unavoidable, but this time, “gaps” of a different kind of love, something close to self-love. Mehnert is right that Chang has a “deep curiosity for her own people”; however, he did not mention that Chang’s essays and short story do not assume a predefined and selfcontained culture as an object of representation. It was a journey of discovery upon which she took her reader, and this journey by definition had to traverse multiple linguistic zones. Although her English essays seem to offer many flat generalizations about China, those readers who only read her in English get a partial view of her as a writer. What is missing is the process of translation, which engendered the worldliness embodied by her vision of China. Chang’s transnational perspective is rather different from that of Mehnert as conveyed by The XXth Century. Mehnert claims that the goal of his magazine was to represent the commonality of human beings around the world; however, his definition of commonality was predefined and derived from a particular political position. On the contrary, Eileen Chang’s essays and short story show that the world was so polarized during the time of war that a predefined idea of commonality could not be realized in real life. Life had to be translated; there was no other possibility. For her, a cosmopolitan perspective appropriate for this divided world required repeated translation back and forth between the foreign and the Chinese. Narratives of the local were dependent on these acts of translation. Yao Ke : Narrat i ng H ong Kong during the Cold War The particular brand of English-language-mediated Chinese cosmopolitanism represented by the several periodicals ended before the end of the Second World War. However, this did not mean that circulation, translation, transnational and translocal activities stopped happening in the postwar and post-1949 period. Rather, specific forms of cosmopolitanism based in particular places emerged in different social contexts. In the last issue of The XXth Century, the June 1945 issue, Mehnert announced that although “the Third Reich is dead,” “the German nation lives and continue to live.” His other article in the same issue, which discusses a few contemporary Soviet authors whose works did not fit with the Soviet party line, carries the tone of disillusionment characteristic of many Western liberal writers’ perception of the Soviet Union before and during the Cold War era. However, in the 1950s, according to Tina Chen, Soviet films and other popular culture were avidly consumed in mainland China and played an important role in shaping “not

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only revolutionary consciousness but also understandings of China, the future, and ‘the global.’” These Soviet films can be seen as an example of an internationalism “simultaneously embedded within national structures and boundaries and constitutive of a world revolutionary order.”8 Some writers and editors for The China Critic, T’ien Hsia, and the leftist internationalist magazines of the 1930s, such as Jack Chen, returned to China from abroad or continued to live in China after 1949. If travel and circulation are the trope of Chinese cosmopolitanism, however, then it is important to mention that other editors of the Anglophone magazines migrated to other destinations either temporarily or permanently, where the cultures they practiced and embodied had various relationships to the local with regard to places outside mainland China. I will discuss the works of two editors, Yao Ke and Lin Yutang, and their cultural practices in Hong Kong and the United States as examples of the afterlife of Anglophone-mediated cosmopolitanism. In the case of Yao Ke, one of the founding editors and theater critic of T’ien Hsia, writing for the English-language magazines was not the only form of writing he was good at. He was also an accomplished playwright, director, theater critic, and film script writer well known in the Chinese-language cultural circle. Shortly before 1949, he emigrated to Hong Kong, along with thousands of mainland émigrés who tried to escape the turbulence of the Civil War, the collapse of China’s economic and financial system, and the impending Communist control of China. Due to political, economic, and regional differences, the mainland émigrés in Hong Kong did not immediately assimilate into the largely Cantonese-speaking local culture. Instead, they formed separate communities and defined their allegiance and affiliation with far-away native places in China or with the West.The writers in this group are collectively identified as “Nanlai Zuojia” (writers from the north or southbound writers) in reference to the southern location of Hong Kong compared to most native place origins of mainland émigré writers. Most social historians of Hong Kong argue that a sense of Hong Kong identity emerged in the 1970s, when Hong Kong’s economic development had picked up pace and a new generation of Hong Kongese who were the children of the mainland émigrés and born after World War II in Hong Kong had come of age. In the same period, Hong Kong’s colonial government actively cultivated local consciousness by using Cold War propaganda, “encouraging consumerism as a contrast to the socialism in China” and toughening its policies on illegal immigrants at the same time.9 Yao Ke lived and worked in Hong Kong before the emergence of a local Hong Kong identity as collective consciousness although this does not mean that all writers in Hong Kong had the same relationship to the city. His period was one in which contested and multiple versions of the local were being narrated, and many of these narratives relied on translation from nonlocal narratives and diasporic perspectives.

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Yao Ke’s relationship to Hong Kong as a locality was manifested as a particular kind of double consciousness that belonged to the identity of a translator, someone who was an expert in transporting and transcribing a story from one context to another. His double consciousness also befit the social position of Hong Kong, a place whose borders, both literal and metaphoric, vis-à-vis the West, Taiwan, and mainland China were simultaneously porous and constantly policed. Many of Yao Ke’s plays and film scripts result from rewriting, adapting, and transplanting from Western or Russian sources and the works of well-established modern Chinese writers such as Lu Xun. For example, a script he wrote in 1950, “The Insulted and Injured” (Hao Men Nie Zha), is a retelling of Dostoevsky’s novel The Insulted and Humiliated in a Chinese setting. Another film script by him, “A Strange Woman” (Yi Dai Yao Ji), closely resembles Puccini’s opera Tosca, especially in its ending. In 1971, he was commissioned to translate Arthur Miller’s play Death of a Salesman by the World Today Publishing House, a cultural institution that was funded by USIA and that organized large-scale translation projects that many mainland émigré writers, including Eileen Chang, participated in. The World Today publishing project can be considered as a case of U.S.sponsored Hong Kong cosmopolitanism in the Cold War period, and it is emblematic of a pervasive cultural phenomenon of translation in Hong Kong that involved various cultural fields such as movies in both Cantonese and Mandarin Chinese, literature, print culture in general, and ideology and political thoughts. An in-depth discussion of the political ramifications of the World Today translation project or the general culture of translation in Hong Kong during the Cold War period is beyond the scope of my discussion here; suffice it to say that these translation projects testify to the complex and intricate relationship that Hong Kong had with various places in the West, Southeast Asia, and East Asia. Literary relations were closely related to and mediated by global geopolitics, of which USIA was a powerful institution, and by the local and translocal cultural markets.Translation and adaptation were therefore a process of negotiation on multiple levels, textual, social, and political. Hong Kong literary critic Huang Jichi argues that some mainland émigré writers were influenced by the New Culture Movement but alienated from local society and consciousness.10 This statement represents a typical view of mainland émigré writers and certainly states the truth about some writers. However, a more critical question that is not addressed by this statement is how, through adaptation and rewriting, the tradition of the New Culture was continued or revised to reflect the new locality of Hong Kong.Yao was deeply embedded in the genealogy of the New Culture. While he was in Shanghai in the 1930s, he was the intermediary between the New Culture icon Lu Xun and the left-leaning American journalist Edgar Snow, and he facilitated Lu Xun’s communication with the Anglophone world. Letters from Lu Xun

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to Yao Ke between 1933 and 1936 show their common interests as translators of literature and culture in both directions between Chinese and foreign languages. For instance, Lu Xun repeatedly encouraged Yao to write in English and explain the “real” conditions of the Chinese cultural circle to the world: It is very good that you have been writing continuously [in English] about the condition of Chinese culture. It seems to me that foreigners can be easily confused about these things. The so-called “masters” and “experts” [in China] are interested only in self-promotion and therefore completely unreliable. Many young people don’t speak foreign languages well and find it hard to express their thoughts. So it is confusion all around.Although it is easier for Japanese people to read Chinese characters, their writings can also be quite ludicrous sometimes.A writer who stayed in Shanghai for only half a month finished a book about the city, which is filled with stories about gambling and prostitution as if that is what China is. But more and more readers have become suspicious of this kind of writings.11 In 1933 Lu Xun wrote to Yao Ke, giving him his editorial opinions on Snow’s article on Lu Xun forthcoming in the English magazine Asia. This article would later be included as an introduction to an anthology of contemporary Chinese fiction, Living China, edited by Snow. In Hong Kong, one adaptation project Yao Ke undertook in 1962 is the short story “The True Story of Ah Q” by Lu Xun. If adaptation can be considered as a kind of translation, the difference between Yao Ke’s screenplay based on Lu Xun’s “The True Story of Ah Q” cannot be reduced to a question of artistic medium.Yao significantly toned down the sarcasm and bitterness in the narrator’s voice. He turned Ah Q from an allegorical figure standing for social apathy, cowardice, sexism, and self-pity––all those negative qualities that Lu Xun associated with “Chineseness”––into a flesh-and-blood working-class character who had reasonable and clearly articulated demands for various worldly pleasures. In other words, instead of criticizing China through the figure of Ah Q, the movie invites the audience to sympathize with him. Ah Q was no longer a representative standing in for China’s weaknesses as in the hands of Lu Xun; instead, he was a victim of the traditional feudal society and its many wrong-headed revolutions.Yao’s turning away from the mode of national allegory reflected his interest in everyday life mediated through the convention of melodrama. Another significant change in Yao’s adaptation of Lu Xun’s story is related to his portrayal of the only significant female character in the story—a young widow called Wu Ma. In Lu Xun’s original story, women are represented only from the point of view of Ah Q, and they appear to be mostly apathetic and

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vulnerable, often subject to Ah Q’s verbal and physical sexual abuse. Whereas Wu Ma is hardly more than a silent object of Ah Q’s sexist taunts in Lu Xun’s story, her character is given a lot more room to develop in Yao’s film script. In a scene depicting Ah Q’s sexual advance toward her, we as audience are given hints that Ah Q is not the only bad guy at that moment; had she not already internalized traditional views on widowhood, she probably would have been more conscious about her needs and desire. She is as much a victim as Ah Q, since her screaming and exposing of his harassment is immediately taken advantage of and becomes an excuse to persecute Ah Q.This subtle and sensitive treatment of woman deconstructs Ah Q as a singular representative of China’s problems. In fact, Ah Q’s plight could not stand for that of the entire working class or all of the oppressed people. Women’s stories, for instance, cannot be told from Ah Q’s perspective. It is interesting that the last shot of the film is a close-up of Wu Ma’s face, which indicates that her perspective is given a privileged position in the end. Wu Ma’s facial expression connotes sorrow and sympathy after she hears about Ah Q’s decapitation. Literally taking over a male-dominated perspective in the original story by Lu Xun, this face of a woman conveys a sufficient degree of ambiguity that makes us question whether it is more accurate to read her attitude as one of sympathy with Ah Q because of her identification with him as a fellow member of the lower class, or as an expression of pity because of his lack of ability to empathize with her as female. Lu Xun’s original interpretation of “The True Story of Ah Q” as a piece that makes one “sad for his [Ah Q’s] misfortune and angry towards his passivity” takes a new meaning that refers not just to Ah Q or China as a holistic subject, but also to women as an internally oppressed group. “The True Story of Ah Q” is a representative work of May Fourth literature. Yao Ke’s translation was not intended to turn this short story into a local story in the sense of representing Hong Kong society or capturing its sensibility.Yao’s script was written for a mandarin movie that was eventually produced by one of the two left-wing China-funded film studios—the Great Wall. However, even though mainland émigré writers did not directly represent their new locale of residence, their “China,” however nostalgically reenacted, is still an artifice, a cultural construction that bears evidence of distance and displacement. In Yao Ke’s case, if “The True Story of Ah Q” represents a subtle rewriting of a national allegory, then the reception of another film script written by him,“Sorrows of the Forbidden City,” brought the official inscription of the exile status onto the writer. “Sorrows of the Forbidden City” is a historical play that depicts the struggles in the late 1900s inside the late Qing imperial family between two forces respectively represented by the conservative Empress Dowager and the reformer Emperor Guangxu along with his concubine Zhenfei.The play

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was first staged in Shanghai in 1940 and the movie based on this play was made in 1948 by a mainland émigré film studio based in Hong Kong; it won instant popularity and commercial success when it was released in Hong Kong, mainland China, and Southeast Asia.This movie was criticized by the Chinese Central Government in 1966, however, more than fifteen years after its initial release. Even though criticism of this movie was directed at its director Zhu Shilin and script writer Yao Ke, it was symptomatic of the barriers erected between the mainland and Hong Kong, the left and the nonleft during the Cultural Revolution, the barriers that eventually defined the difference between the nation and the diaspora. In 1966, the film Sorrows of the Forbidden City was criticized by the Communist Party’s policy mouthpiece The Red Banner for its problematic take on three issues—imperialism, the Boxer Movement, and the Qing court’s reform movement in 1898. With only thin evidence from the text itself, the film along with its director and script writer were considered to have betrayed the nation and smeared the image of the proletarian. In fact, the movie’s critical reception is not a simply matter of literary or cultural criticism; it played directly into the power struggles between high-level party leaders Mao Zedong and his opponent Liu Shaoqi during the Cultural Revolution. Although the real motive and logic of these power struggles were beyond the reach of ordinary people in China, and certainly even more remote for people in Hong Kong, the ramification of these power struggles and the cultural battles associated with them were not restricted to Beijing or mainland China. One can say that the Cultural Revolution and the 1967 riots, a local Hong Kong incident influenced by the Cultural Revolution, redefined Hong Kong’s relationship vis-à-vis both the British colonial government and mainland China and solidified the political, social, and psychological boundary between the two Chinese-speaking regions. It was not accidental that the criticism of Sorrows of the Forbidden City revolved around the central issue of anti-imperialist nationalism. Whether the film could be considered “loving the country” or “selling out” is the provocative title of the critical article published in The Red Banner. In the minds of local Hong Kongese, the 1967 disturbances in Hong Kong also revolved around anti-imperialist issues and strategies.The 1967 riots started out as strikes and marches organized by Hong Kong Communist organizations in protest against the British colonial government.The situation quickly escalated into physical attacks of colonial policemen and planting bombs on the streets that eventually killed innocent citizens, all of which encountered a harsh crackdown by the colonial government.The Beijing government, which initially supported the rioters, retracted its support and resisted calls from the local Red Guards to overthrow colonialism. According to John Carroll, the effect of the 1967 riots on the general population of Hong Kong was that, “forced to choose

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between the PRC and Hong Kong, most people in Hong Kong identified with the colonial regime as their government.At the same time, they increasingly saw themselves as members of a special community, separate both from the colonial government and from their compatriots on the mainland.”12 Although there is no explicit connection between the criticism of Sorrows of the Forbidden City and the 1967 riots, these incidents can be considered as two separate chapters of the same story. The Beijing government’s criticism of Sorrows of the Forbidden City was tantamount to conferring the status of exile to mainland émigré artists such as Yao Ke and Zhu Shili, the director of the film. The fact that this criticism was also articulated by the leftist organs in Hong Kong underscores the complicated and entangled political relationship between the two locales, which in turned controlled the border between them. If we are to use the term “diaspora” to describe the condition of dislocation and displacement of mainland émigré writers during the Cold War period, then the diasporic subject’s relationship to the nation-state was defined not just by his physical location but also by the political factions within the diasporic community. Whereas Yao Ke’s friendship with Lu Xun and his decision to adapt Lu Xun’s short story for a China-funded film studio could have been interpreted as a subtle left-leaning orientation (he signed his screenplay “The True Story of Ah Q” with a pseudonym Xu Yan), the label of “traitor” in effect cut him off from the leftist camp and mainland China. He emigrated once again to the United States after 1967. Before the 1967 riots,Yao Ke had written a few plays and film scripts that were not based on historical events but contain some depictions of the contemporary Hong Kong society. One particularly notable work is a play called Abyss that depicts drug addicts in the Kowloon Walled City, an inner-city ghetto situated in the heart of the New Territories. Kowloon Walled City’s legal status was ambivalent, since it was excluded from the 1898 lease of the New Territories, and the British colonial government adopted a hands-off approach to this inner-city enclave. Historian Jan Morris depicts the place as “a frightful slum. No four-wheeled vehicle could enter it—there were no streets wide enough—and its buildings, rising sometimes to ten or twelve storeys, were so inextricably packed together that they seemed to form one congealed mass of masonry, sealed together by overlapping structures, ladders, walk-ways, pipes and cables, and ventilated only by fetid air-shafts. . . .A maze of dark alleys pierced the mass from one side to the other.Virtually no daylight reached them. Looped electric cables festooned their low ceilings, dripping alarmingly with moisture.”13 Yao Ke’s depiction of the Kowloon Walled City is quite similar to that provided by Morris. In an article by Yao about the creative process of Abyss, he told us that the play was meant to depict “vignettes of life” of a Hong Kong community, and that in order to achieve a realistic effect, the play was not divided into acts and scenes.Transition between different

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sections of the play was solely controlled by lighting, in the same way that a movie camera defines its focus.14 However, in spite of his emphasis on realism, his play was heavily influenced by certain conventional representations of Hong Kong communities. Yao designed certain sound effects and costumes that appear to be incongruous with the Kowloon City setting. For instance, the first scene opens in the sound of Western music—“Khachaturian’s Concerto for Piano and Orchestra, 2nd Movement” or “Liszt’s Fantasia quasi sonata,” as specified in Yao’s script.After the music dies out, one would hear “the clacking of Majhong tiles and the sound of Cantonese opera broadcast from the radio.” This cacophony of sounds, a mixture of local and nonlocal, high and low cultures, was a typical way of introducing a standard Hong Kong scene that is frequently seen in many Cantonese and some mandarin Chinese melodramas such as those directed by Yao Ke’s collaborator Zhu Shilin. To evoke this feature at the beginning of the play shows Yao Ke’s familiarity with the melodramatic convention in general and Cantonese-language movies in particular. Yao’s play Abyss presents a case of translation between Cantonese and Mandarin Chinese popular culture, particularly in terms of their common employment of the tenement convention and some archetypical features associated with this convention.A typical story following the tenement convention takes place in an overcrowded building in which several working-class families live and struggle to make ends meet. Individual families occupy small living spaces in the same apartment, separated only by curtains or thin wooden boards. Sometimes, poorer families or children occupy single beds that line the hallway of this apartment. On the opposite side of these working-class characters is the wealthy class, usually represented by a subcontractor who also lives in the same apartment and collects rent on behalf of the landlord, and the landlord, who may or may not live in the building or even appear in the movie. The landlord represents an ominous social force that controls everyone’s life, and the occasional appearance of the police or the tax collector, who are in most cases corrupt and unhelpful, represents the ineffective colonial government. Because of shortage of water in Hong Kong, conflicts often revolve around water supply, and the oppositional sides of the conflict are often spatially arranged in terms of upstairs versus downstairs. Fire hazard is a constant threat that looms large over everyone’s life, and when a fire breaks out, it can sometimes serve as catalyst to soften class conflicts and unite the entire community in their common battle for a better life. Not all of these details appear in any given movie that depicts life in a tenement apartment. In spite of their subtle differences, the moral message is always the same, that is, unity and harmony are better than conflict. In a Cantonese classic in this genre, In the Face of Demolition (1953), this message is conveyed by a statement that says, “Everyone else lends a helping hand to

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me, and I do the same to them.” In another Mandarin Chinese movie, Between Water and Fire, directed by Zhu Shilin,Yao Ke’s collaborator in Sorrows of the Forbidden City, this message is phrased in the terms of “A harmonious family brings prosperity.” Stereotypical representations of select social types populate movies of this genre, and these often include an out-of-job school teacher or a unsuccessful writer; a “diamond-in-the-rough” kind of girl who happens to work as a taxi dancer in a dance hall; the mean wife of the subcontractor, usually portrayed as a heavyset middle-aged woman; and the lascivious husband in the wealthy family upstairs who cannot conceal his desire for the innocent poor girl who lives downstairs. It is hard to pinpoint the exact origin of this narrative genre. We can already find examples in movies and plays created in the 1940s that depict the lives of the lower class in Shanghai, for instance the movie “The Crow and the Sparrow.” In the 1950s and 1960s Hong Kong, the story of the tenement can be found everywhere, in both Cantonese and Mandarin Chinese language movies, literature, and in Yao’s case, drama.Yao’s play Abyss shares many similarities with the Cantonese classic In the Face of Demolition as well as the Mandarin movie Between Water and Fire in terms of privileging collectivity over individual heroes and creating certain social stereotypes.These similarities show that Yao was influenced by the popular culture of different languages and origins that was circulated in Hong Kong in the 1950s and 1960s. The play Abyss was commissioned by an antidrug association in Hong Kong, so not only does the play emphasize the evils of drug addiction but it also portrays positively the collective battle against drug dealers who control different levels of the drug ring. It shows the self-empowerment and selfawareness of poor people who are addicted to drugs and deemphasizes the role of the police and other government forces in this battle. Although the play contains many similarities with the Cantonese classic In the Face of Demolition, subtle differences exist between these two texts that indicate Yao Ke’s attempt to denaturalize this convention and arouse the audience’s awareness of the wall that separates the theatre and the real world. For instance, the taxi dancer character in In the Face of Demolition is changed to a prostitute who used to be a famous actress in Shanghai.The mainland émigré background of this character adds to her sense of discomfort and alienation from her new condition of living. Using her training as an actress, she manages to create an alternative identity that serves as a psychological barrier between her and the immediate surroundings. She is not a true member of this community and, in fact, many other characters on stage are new immigrants to Hong Kong. None of these representations of dislocation is found in the Cantonese melodrama In the Face of Demolition. Compared to the mostly local community depicted in that movie,Yao makes it a point to emphasize the ad-hoc nature

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of the collective made up of immigrants from everywhere else, a change that mirrors his own distance from the local culture of Hong Kong. The walls around the Kowloon Walled City have not stopped some characters in Abyss from exchanging information between the inside and the outside of this community. The reporter Yang from the outside world and a charismatic elder Luo who, in effect, is the leader of this community facilitate this exchange. Both Yang and Luo can be seen as figures of the translator or informer that mediate the relationship between the stage and the audience, the community and the outside world. News about the local community would be inaccessible to us without these translators. If in the Shanghai phase of Yao Ke’s life, cosmopolitanism meant the mixing of China and the West, the meanings of both “China” and the “West” changed with the change of location to Hong Kong. For one thing, the “West” was not accompanied by the use of English as a cultural sign. Since the discussion above focuses on the Chinese-language writings of Yao Ke, which he primarily practiced after moving to Hong Kong, translocal flow and regional cultural mixings remind us that it is impossible to assume China as a holistic category that would also include Hong Kong. Yao Ke’s writings and their critical reception prove that complex “flows” of people and culture among the different localities including mainland China, Hong Kong, and various places in the West were constitutive of the shape and meaning of the “local” in Hong Kong in the 1950s and the 1960s. At the same time, the patrolling of the borders among these different localities also manifested itself in terms of a control over cultural productions that crossed these borders. Lin Yutang: Narrating China and Chinatown Another editor of T’ien Hsia, Lin Yutang, who also edited the earlier magazine China Critic, had a transnational life and career even before the end of the Sino-Japanese War. Lin’s involvement with The China Critic established his reputation as a bilingual representative for China to American readers. In 1935, Lin accepted Pearl Buck’s proposal to write a book about China in English, to be published in the United States.15 Rigorously rehashing and adapting his already formulated ideas in other essays into the new project My Country and My People, Lin finished within a matter of months this ambitious project that attempts to summarize the entire Chinese history, China’s national characteristics, its racial temperaments, aesthetics, and the Chinese way of life. My Country and My People (1936) was reprinted seven times within a short period of four months in the United States. On the basis of this success, Lin would go on to write forty works in the next four decades, thirty-six of them in English and published in the United States. His works cover a wide range

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of genres: ethnographic history, translation, novels, and essay collections. Some of these books were written for academic audiences, but others belong to the category of popular fiction. Lin was arguably the most popular Chinese writer with the largest readership in the United States during and after the war. Like most other editors and writers for The China Critic, Lin believed in modernity as a global project and tried to find a position for Chinese culture within it. In his preface to On the Wisdom of America (1948), Lin defines his subject position in relation to the modernity of America, arguing that “in looking at American as well as at Chinese thought, I have always felt myself a ‘modern’ [man], sharing the modern man’s problems and pleasures of discoveries. Wherever I say ‘we,’ I mean ‘we moderns.’”16 At the same time, Lin’s other identity was a Chinese expert, whose audience was mostly American and European readers.Taking Lin’s writings from the 1930s to the 1960s as a whole, we find that Lin tried very hard to reconcile his self-identification as the “modern man” and his Chineseness, since from his perspective they did not fit with each other naturally. Lin utilized his privilege of the translator, redefining tradition and attributing new meanings to originally conflicting cultural terms. In his most successful work, My Country and My People, Lin organizes Chinese culture by creating oppositional categories of youth and old age, innocence and sophistication, masculinity and femininity, spirituality and materialism, family and the nation. In the process, he also aligns Chinese tradition and Western culture along a series of binary oppositions: science versus art; analytical thinking versus simple mind; reason versus intuition; the desire of aggression versus the satisfaction of a peaceful life; democracy versus the lack of social consciousness, and masculinity versus the “feminine mind,” and so on. Evoking metaphors of natural growth, such as spring and autumn, and stages of human development, such as childhood and old age, to describe the historical changes in Chinese society, he reinterprets Darwinism to argue that a “primitive” people does not necessarily mean that they are “uncivilized” or “culturally inferior”; rather, they have “a prolonged childhood” and that China is “culturally old” but “racially young.” Lin states that “the brief sketch of the general constitution and physical condition of the Chinese people shows, not that they have entirely escaped the effects of long civilized living, but they have developed traits which render them helpless at the hands of a fresher and more warlike race.”17 But at the same time, he is convinced that China can “ward off ” its enemies, because it has always “profited from them by the infusion of new blood.” “The loss of the pristine vigor” is thus connected with “racial stamina and power for resistance.” By the 1920s, according to the Chinese historian Frank Dikotter, “the discourse of race was theorized at the academic level and popularized by the congshu [pamphlets] series.”18 Zhang Ziping, a Japanese-educated mineralo-

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gist turned novelist, wrote several books on geography and evolution in which he discussed skin color and hair as predominant signs that contributed to racial thinking in Chinese history.19 My Country and My People contains many allusions to scientific documents that inform the development of social history. For example, Lin cites the study of a Doctor J. S. Lee on the “periodic recurrence of internecine wars in China” and reproduces his diagrams to illustrate the relationship of war and the characteristics of a certain historical period. Based on these diagrams, Lin warns his readers that China would be subjugated by a “foreign race” in the near future. Lin’s discussions of racial and aesthetic connotations of hair and skin suggest that he could have read Zhang’s pamphlet, which was widely circulated in China. Although My Country and My People was supposed to convey a scientific approach to Chinese culture, Lin’s narrative is quite individualistic.This book can be read as a systematic construction of the individual speaker’s identity as it attempts to forge an image of national life. In the prologue, Lin defines such a speaker as the “true” interpreter of “China,” distinguished from both Western sinologists and traditional Chinese experts by his bilingual and bicultural competence.This speaker bases his truthfulness on his hybridity, which is also the source of his identity conflict. The “true” interpreter is divided between “reason” and “heart,” the objective “critical appraisal” of China and an unconditional “real appreciation” toward China, his sense of “shame” and “pride,” the figures of the “West” and his “Chinese-ness.”The modern Westerntrained Chinese intellectual is torn between “a conflict of loyalties belonging to different poles, a loyalty to old China . . . and a loyalty to open-eyed wisdom. . . . Sometimes his clan-pride gets the better of him, and between proper pride and mere reactionism there is only a thin margin, and sometimes his instinct of shame gets the better of him, and between a sincere desire for reform and a mere shallow modernity . . . there is also only a very thin margin. To escape that is indeed a delicate task.”20 Setting up Oriental “innocence” and “simplicity” in opposition to the “clever games” of the West, Lin repeatedly emphasizes the romantic appeal of tradition and Chinese identity. He depicts the intellectual as a traveler who “explored the beauties and glories of the West” and is simultaneously enchanted by “the echo of age-old folk songs and pastoral lyrics of the Orient.” Returning to Chineseness is achieved when he finds a mirror image of himself in the portrait of the speaker’s father. Facing this image, he willingly corrects his Western manners and sheds his Western attire. Although My Country and My People was written when Lin was still in China, it already qualifies as a diasporic narrative because of the author’s meditations over identity conflict, hybridity, and cultural roots.Therefore, when Lin went on to write about Chinatown, the same pattern of redefining Chinese culture in opposition to Western culture, the racialization of culture, and

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concerns over the self-identity of hybrid individuals appears again in immigrant narratives. There is no essential difference between a story about an immigrant family in New York and a cultural allegory of hybridity, identity, and cultural essence. In Chinatown Family (1948), a novel that explores the meanings of “Chineseness” in New York’s Chinatown, Lin turns Chinatown into a testing ground for the value of Chinese culture in the modern world. Chinatown Family focuses on a Chinese laundryman Tom Fong Sr. and his three sons Loy, Freddie, and Tom Jr., and contrasts the older generation’s experience with the different life paths chosen by the younger generation and their attitudes toward Americanization. Lin’s reception among Asian American literary critics has always been controversial. Asian American writers Frank Chin and others involved in the compilation of Aiiieeeee, the first anthology of Asian American literature, portray him as “consciously set out to become American . . . in the stereotypical sense of the good, loyal, obedient, passive, law-abiding, cultured sense of the word.”21 Chin also groups Lin’s novel with Leong Gor Xun in Chinatown Inside Out (1936) and No-yong Park’s Chinaman’s Chance (1940) and dismisses all of them as “fake” representations of Chinatown life; but in fact, it is not a question of the real versus the fake that determines this novel’s representation of Chinatown. Lin’s novel is not an exposure of the corruptions of the political system in Chinatown, as is Chinatown Inside Out, nor does Lin hold a favorable attitude toward assimilation and upward mobility, as does the author of Chinaman’s Chance. There is a deeper cultural logic in Lin’s novel that can be understood only by referring to his earlier writings written in China. Lin transforms the history of Chinese immigration into a saga because the ability to survive exclusion or persecution shows the power and durability of the Chinese race. Lin writes,“On and on the villagers’ sons came, and the immigration officials were merely obstacles placed in the path of men determined to achieve success with patience and persistence.”22 The Chinese community in New York is unified around a mythic figure Old Tuck, who after encountering and surviving anti-Chinese violence in California, led a group of Chinese workers across America to New York. As a respected leader of Chinatown, Old Tuck settles Tong fights, maintains order and selfgovernance in the Chinese community, and speaks at important social events such as weddings and birthday parties.23 The function of this figure is not just limited within the community of immigrants; he is also the cultural and political link between the immigrants and the politics in mainland China. We are told that because of his open support of the Nationalist revolution in 1911, Old Tuck is invited by Sun Yat-Sen to fill an important position in the Nationalist government, but as a Taoist,Tuck adamantly refuses to be involved in politics. A legendary hero as well as a self-taught intellectual and philosopher, Old Tuck combines strength with wisdom; he is “known for his physical

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prowess, but by the time he reached New York he was a cunning, wise old man, as if he had read the three thousand years of Chinese history.” Tuck’s rich life experience alone is not enough for maintaining his “Chinese-ness”; he is also an eager student, making “himself study ancient Chinese at the age of thirty-five.”24 Old Tuck is thus the combination of two ideals of a Taoist philosopher and a nationalist hero. From Lin’s Chinese writings, particularly his essays, which he considered to have been modeled after the English “familiar essay,” we know that his reinterpretation of classical Chinese culture emphasizes the merging of the collective and the individualistic, and the blending of the personal with the traditional. In this novel, Lin articulates in even clearer terms that the identity of Chinese is a result of heritage and learning, nature and nurture. Romantic connection and the feeling of love, for instance, are important educational tools to maintain Chineseness, as in the case of the young Tom Fong, the third son of the Fong family. Tom, who grows up in Chinatown and doesn’t know much Chinese, is brought to the realization of his Chinese identity through a romantic connection with Elsie, a teacher at the Chinese school in Chinatown.The relationship between Elsie and Tom is thus pressed into service to establish the lost connection between immigrants and their homeland. Elsie’s attraction to Tom is asexual, natural, and romantic. When Tom first meets Elsie, his passion for her is depicted as “hearing exotic music that he had known and forgotten, had hidden somewhere deep in his being, and now he heard it and recognized it as something belonging to other lands, other times. He was seized emotionally, but he did not know what.”25 The same metaphor of exotic music can be found in the preface of My Country and My People, where the bilingual translator’s spiritual affinity with the nation is depicted. In fact, Tom Fong Jr. is in many ways the personification of the bilingual writer himself, who translates his knowledge of the West into a vision of Chinese identity. Chinatown Family thus shows the process of the intellectual in exile working his way back into the center of national culture. Tom’s brother Fred Fong is a foil to Tom, and the purpose of his role is to emphasize the moral authority of family structure. In Lin’s novel, Fred presents an unsuccessful case of assimilation into America. As a salesman and the writer of a Chinese pamphlet that gives practical advice for self-adjustment to the American way of life, Fred is depicted as an example of someone corrupted by American commercialism. Even his facial features have become increasingly un-Chinese. “Yiko’s face oozed a kind of animal energy. His cheeks were well filled, his nostrils extended, and his lips were thick, revealing his gums when he talked. His hair was thick and black, glistening with lanolin. His chest muscles bulged under his shirt.”26 Fred’s desire for a Chinese entertainer Sing Toy further causes his downfall and condemnation by the Chinese community. As we can see from My Country and My People, sexuality is a

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contending site of “foreignness” with “Chineseness.” Because this demarcation is dangerously blurred by Sing Toy, who shows up in the nightclub like a “China-doll” wrapped in “an American evening dress,” she is made into a villain. When her affair with Fred’s American colleague Sandy Bull is discovered, Fred’s American dream is completely shattered. Toward the end of the novel, Fred returns to the family divorced and humiliated. In Chinatown Family, the boundaries of the male-centered family are secured at the expense of women and sexuality. Lin’s depiction of the family as nation actually follows a rather conventional model, but that is not the only available depiction of immigrant families in the same period. Louis Chu’s Eat a Bowl of Tea, for instance, depicts a Chinatown family of roughly the same period in a different manner. Situating the narrative within the same intersection of nationality and sexuality, Chu shows that identification with the values of the Chinese community and maleness are contradictory to each other, and the problem is largely due to the internalization of certain racist stereotypes in American society. Chinatown Family follows Lin’s cultural agenda, which neatly separates Chinese and Western cultures by using oppositional categories of the “traditional” and the “modern,” the “spiritual” and the “materialistic.”Therefore, one can say that his version of cosmopolitanism actually did not have much to do with the real Chinatown in the United States. Conc lusi on The stories of the individuals discussed in this chapter and the entire book share some common characteristics that can be roughly described as cosmopolitan: the experience of exile, the practice of translation, the use of a foreign language, and the borrowing of foreign cultures.As we can see from this chapter, cosmopolitanism as a cultural practice in general is not inherently a libratory practice for everyone, and different cases need to be studied individually. Cosmopolitan culture in terms of formation, content, and reception is inevitably inscribed by and sometimes invested in a particular local context and a particular perspective. One of the goals of this book is trying to access and study the locality of Shanghai through analyzing the complex interactions between mobility and localness, travel and place at a specific moment in history, but it also implicitly makes a bigger argument that cosmopolitan cultural formations are intrinsic to twentieth-century Chinese cultural history, representing a formidable force that interacts in many complicated ways with indigenous culture, Chinese language, and the definition of “Chineseness.” There is no doubt that some of the Chinese editors and writers discussed in this book were members of the cultural and political elite and centrally placed in the cartography of “Chineseness.” Many of them could speak and

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write Chinese; they traveled but returned home.This was a privilege from the point of view of many migrant Chinese people.At the same time, their ability to read and write in English and their experience of travel also set them apart from many local Chinese. However, this chapter shows that some of them were not completely cut off in terms of both personal history and acquired knowledge from diasporic and immigrant experience. Therefore, some questions raised by this last chapter further emphasize the need to be place- and timespecific when when we use terms such as “Chinese cosmopolitanism,” and it further reminds us that different groups of people in the same locality can have very different ideas about cosmopolitanism. Ien Ang is one of the contemporary critics of the notion of “Chinese cosmopolitanism” because she sees it as a reaffirmation of a certain kind of centering on “Chineseness.” Writing about two different contemporary intellectuals, Leo Ou-fan Lee and Ouyang Yu, Ang states that “Lee and Ouyang know that they are Chinese, and they are known by others as such. While both express a desire to go beyond their Chinese identities . . . their bottomline Chineseness is not in doubt. Theirs, in other words, is a relatively straightforward narrative of (self-)exile from the homeland, and as such they are still easily incorporated in Tu’s cultural China and firmed attached to the branches of the living tree.” In contrast to these cosmopolitan Chinese intellectuals, Ang presents the case of Southeast Asian Chinese immigrants, who have “much more radical, complicated, and checkered routes of diasporic dispersal . . . that any residual attachment to the center tends to fade.”27 Ang’s polarization of the intellectual in exile and the second- or thirdgeneration immigrant might be simplistic; however, the danger of reaffirming the values at the center in a context of migration and heterogeneity is real and worth paying attention to in many diasporic places. Although this book is not a focused study of a particular diasporic community, one implicit argument I raise in several chapters is that the divide between the diaspora and the nation is not absolute.The traveling of people and circulation of culture have blurred the boundaries of the nation-state and enabled identities and ideologies to be formed in spite of the physical change of locality and condition. That is why diasporic cultures often exhibit multilayed mixedness and take advantage of practices of multilingualism and transnationalism in the process of creation of new place-based identities.The diaspora is not a holistic category, as is already suggested in Ang’s article, and the diasporic public sphere should also not be conceived in a singular and homogenous manner. Chineselanguage writings by immigrant or diasporic writers in a predominantly English-language nation do not have the same social status as English-language writing in semicolonial Shanghai; however, they share a commonality of embodying a history of travel and circulation. How diasporic identities are performatively created by using these cultural materials in circulation and

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when and why one cultural form (film, for instance) replaces another cultural form (print culture) as the primary medium for the construction of community are some important questions whose answers are crucial for the construction of diasporic cultural genealogies. Throughout the book, my analysis tries to emphasize both the specificity of a particular location and the interconnectedness among places. Place can be interpreted literally as the city or symbolically as an imaginary, and these real and imaginary places might be of a scale larger or smaller than that of the nation-state. A common characteristic of all of the magazines discussed in this book is that they are not self-enclosed, but retain all kinds of connections with the outside.Therefore, even though this project does not deal with the Chinese diaspora until the last chapter, it addresses some relevant concerns to ethnic and diasporic studies.

N ote s

Introduction Anglophone Pe riodicals as Co smopolitan Publics 1. See Chow, Writing Diaspora, and Chow,“Introduction: On Chineseness as a Theoretical Problem.” 2. Some examples of new books on transnationalism and circulation are Jones, Yellow Music, and Shih, The Lure of the Modern. 3. Frederic E. Wakeman, Jr.’s book Policing Shanghai: 1927–1937 is an example of existing studies on the urban-state relationship. 4. Viswanathan, Masks of Conquest. 5. Landry and MacLean, eds., The Spivak Reader. 6. See Bishnupriya Ghosh’s book When Borne Across for discussion of the renaissance of Anglophone literature from India. 7. Ibid., 97. 8. See Shu-mei Shih’s book The Lure of the Modern for a discussion of the concept of semicolonialism. 9. Ibid., “Introduction,” 36. 10. Urban, Metaculture, 58. 11. Jones, Yellow Music. 12. Abbas, “Cosmopolitan De-scriptions,” 212. 13. Scholars such as Shu-mei Shih and Leo Ou-fan Lee have focused on urban cultural formations in the 1920s and the 1930s to discuss the cross-cultural textuality of modernist works. 14. Aravamudan, Guru English, 1. 15. Britton, The Chinese Periodical Press 1800–1912, 18. 16. Ibid., 27. 17. Bolton. “Chinese Englishes,” 184. 18. Ibid., 185. 19. Ibid., 185–186. 20. Ibid., 188. 21. Bolton’s Chinese Englishes:A Sociolinguistic History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003) gives one of the most complete and authoritative accounts of English in China. He makes this argument in his book. 22. Gu, ed., Shanghai Yangchang Zhuzhi Ci, 464. 23. Ibid. 24. Mittler, A Newspaper for China?, 324. 25. Some of the poems contain so many pidgin usages that they are like complicated word play; others manage to present vivid representations of the life of people working in the foreign firms in Shanghai. For instance, one poem reads, One greets others with “Good Morning.” One says “How do you do?” to express good feelings towards others.

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If one does not try to squeeze money from others, He would not be considered a gentleman or “mister.” Another poem reads: A club house with a billiard room, What a nice place to meet and spend the evening. A groom who takes care of fully-clothed horses, He has to wait up for the whole night and endure the snow and frost. In these two poems, the italicized words are Chinese transliterations of pidgin English words. Pidgin words often refer to everyday usages in foreign firms or the names of the material objects imported from the West, such as telegram, photograph, or arsenal. In one poem,Yang’s placement of a pidgin word is so skillful that the sentence conveys different tones when read in Chinese and English. This poem reads: A man either hires a sedan chair or drives around in a carriage. He puffs on a cigar cavalierly as he parades around, wanting people nearby to know that he is savvy.

26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34.

35. 36.

37. 38.

The second sentence could also be translated into “As he parades around with a cigar sticking out of his mouth, does he care how other people feel toward him?” This ambiguity is caused by whether one reads the word “sha wei” as a pidgin word, meaning “savvy,” or whether one reads it as a Chinese word, meaning “what kind of taste.” A sentence like this one takes full advantage of pidgin English’s ambiguous belonging and creates an effect of double entendre that adequately expresses the poet’s attitude toward this urban scene. See Mittler,“Introduction” to A Newspaper for China? for a description of the newspaper’s relationship with the Qing government and the Chinese-language public sphere. Mittler, A Newspaper for China?, chapter 5, “Multiple Personalities: Image and Voice of the Shanghairen,” especially the section on advertisements, 315–322; quote on 318. Hu, Tales of Translation, 103. Huters, “The Advent of the Modern as Business Venture,” 23. Yeh, The Alienated Academy,15. Ibid., 23–28. Ibid., 27. Ibid., 39. The May Fourth Movement refers to a series of student actions that began on May 4, 1919. It was an anti-imperialist movement launched mainly by students in Beijing in reaction against the Treaty of Versailles.The radical spirit embodied by the May Fourth Movement was also manifested in the New Culture Movement of the same period, whose trademarks were anti-traditionalism and cultural reforms.The stronghold for the New Culture Movement was the Youth Magazine edited by scholars and students in Beijing University. Hu, “Shanghai de Dingqi Kanwu” (Regular Publications in Shanghai), 860. Zheng, “Guomin Wenxue Lun” (On National Literature), in Chuangzuo she Congshu:Wenyi Lilun Juan (Research Materials on the Creation Society: Articles on Literary Theory), edited by Huang Houxing (Beijing: Wenyuan Chubanshe, 1992), 110. Ibid., 109. Levenson, Revolution and Cosmopolitanism.

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39. Lee, Shanghai Modern. 40. Abbas, “Cosmopolitan De-scriptions”; Ang, On Not Speaking Chinese.; Meng, Shanghai and the Edges of Empires. 41. Dharwadker, “Introduction,” 1. See also Breckenridge, Pollock, Bhabha, and Chakrabarty, eds., Cosmopolitanism. 42. Calhoun, “The Class Consciousness of Frequent Travelers”;. Brennan, “CosmoTheory”; Robbins, “Comparative Cosmopolitanisms.” 43. See Robbins, “Introduction Part I.” 44. Phoenix TV, Information Channel. “Wendao Feichang Dao” (Wendao Conversations on Culture), April 4, 2008. 45. Liang, “Wei Xizang Wenti Xunzhao Zuida de Gongyueshu—Qidai Minzu de hejie” (Looking for the Largest Common Denominator for Tibet—Praying for Inter-Ethnic Harmony,” http://www.bullog.cn/blogs/liangwendao. 46. Liang, “Aiguo shi Zheyangzi Ai de ma?” (Is This How We Love Our Country?) http://www.bullog.cn/blogs/liangwendao. 47. Ibid. 48. Deng,“Xianggang Juli ‘Shiwei Zhi Cheng’Yu Lai Yu Yuan” (Hong Kong Reverses Its Image of ‘A City of Protest’), Ming Bao, D4, May 13, 2008. 49. Robbins, “Introduction Part I.” 50. Shih, Visuality and Identity, 173. 51. Brennan, “Cosmo-Theory,” 669. 52. Lydia Liu, Translingual Practice. 53. Walkowitz, Cosmopolitan Style, 9. 54. Hung, Going to the People. 55. Meng Yue, “’Bai Maonu’ Yanbian de Qishi” (On the Evolution of the Story of the White-Haired Girl) in Wang Xiaoming, ed., “Ershi Shiji Zhongguo Wenxue Shi Lun” (Critical Essays on Twentieth-Century Chinese Literary History), 1:183–203. Shanghai: Dongfang Chuban Zhongxin, 1997. 56. Clifford, “Travelling Cultures.” 57. Song Yongyi’s book Wenhua Da Geming: Lishi Zhenxiang he Jiti Jiyi (The Cultural Revolution: Historical Truth and Collective Memories) (Hong Kong: Tianyuan Shuwu, 2007) contains discussions of underground reading activities during the Cultural Revolution. 58. Meng, Shanghai and the Edges of Empires. 59. Beetham, “Towards a Theory of the Periodical as a Publishing Genre,” 28. 60. Ibid., 29. 61. Habermas, Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, and Warner, The Letters of the Republic. 62. Lean, “Introduction,” 8. 63. Examples are Goodman, “Being Public,” and Lean’s Public Passions. 64. Warner, Publics and Counterpublics, 105–106. 65. Robbins, ed., The Phantom of Public Sphere, “Introduction,” xvii; see the article for criticism from various perspectives of the liberal public sphere. 66. Warner, Publics and Counterpublics, 107. 67. Anderson, Imagined Communities, 33. 68. Anderson, “Nationalism, Identity and the World-in-Motion,” 117. 69. From a historical perspective, Presenjit Duara has also discussed the heterogeneity of models of nationalism in the Republican period. See his book Rescuing History from the Nation: Questioning Narratives of Modern China. In a study of a public celebration of the Queen Victoria’s Jubilee in Shanghai in 1893, historian Bryna Goodman similarly depicts a far more complicated picture of the articulation of nationalism through public culture than that which is presented by Anderson. See

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Notes to Pages 30–45

Goodman, “Improvisation on a Semicolonial Theme.” Goodman points out that the institution that played a key role in negotiations of foreign-Chinese relations was not the national sovereignty at that time represented by the Qing government, but rather native-place associations or highly organized “guilds” of Chinese traders in Shanghai. “The Chinese community . . . was also fractured by differing lines of loyalty and organization, encompassing an array of distinct and often competing regional ethnicities, several of which had built powerful corporate organizations in the city,” Goodman states in his article (894).These native-place associations had a complicated competitive as well as collaborative relationship with the foreign powers in Shanghai, and at the same time, they also skillfully usurped this colonial ceremony to redefine their ambivalent sense of affinity with the Qing government, represented by the Empress Dowager. 70. McKeon, The Secret History of Domesticity, 76. 71. Warner, Publics and Counterpublics, 76. 72. Ibid., 73.

C hap te r 1 T H E C H I N A C R I T I C : Writing the City, the Nation, and the World 1. “Editorial,” China Critic, November 13, 1930, 1085. 2. See Rebecca Walkowitz’s book Cosmopolitan Style for discussions of modernistic cosmopolitanism. 3. Ibid., 5. 4. Abbas, “Cosmopolitan De-scriptions,” 226. 5. Xiong, ed., Shanghai Tong Shi (Shanghai History) 7: 306–307. 6. Ibid., 9: 426. 7. Levenson. Revolution and Cosmopolitanism. 8. Lubot, Liberalism in an Illiberal Age, 90. 9. Ge, Zhongguo Baoxue Shi, provides detailed analysis of some Chinese-language newspapers that were owned by foreign businessmen. 10. See Hu Daojing’s article “Shanghai de Dingqi Kanwu.” 11. “The Shanghai Evening Post,” in China Critic, September 26, 1929, 766. 12. Besides his direct exposure to Western cultures, Lin Yutang was influenced by Chinese intellectuals such as Hu Shi, who suggested that he study Chinese linguistics in Europe to “re-discover” the value of Chinese culture. Lin’s friendship with Lu Xun and Zhou Zuo Ren, Lu Xun’s brother, who were the organizers of the progressive literary group called Yu Si, influenced his radical political position in the 1920s. In 1926, after several hundred students were murdered during an antigovernment protest, Lin wrote several essays commemorating the martyrs of this revolution. He not only exposed the brutality of the Beijing warlords for ordering this massacre in these essays but also criticized the intellectuals’ hesitation to support the students and their compromise with the government. 13. Lin, The Little Critic, 5. 14. Abbas, “Cosmopolitan De-scriptions,” 224. 15. Lin, The Little Critic, 129. 16. Ibid., 130. 17. Ibid., 131. 18. “Editorial,” China Critic, January 1, 1931, 3. 19. “Let Us Not Force Cultural Revolution,” China Critic, January 7, 1931, 149. 20. “National Characteristics and the Needs of Time,” China Critic, January 7, 1931, 149. 21. “What Is Chinese Culture?,” China Critic, September 13, 1928, 306.

Notes to Pages 46–62

22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52.

165

Pan, “The Cultural Hybrid,” 248. Ibid. Ibid., 248–249. Juliette Chung, “Struggle for National Survival—Social Darwinism and Chinese Eugenics,” Shih, The Lure of the Modern. “Dr. Hu Shih and the ‘Spiritual West,’” China Critic, January 30, 1930, 100. China Critic, January 1, 1931, 4. Shih, The Lure of the Modern, 128. According to Shu-mei Shih’s discussion in chapter 5 of The Lure of the Modern, 134–135, these two different views are held by Xiaomei Chen and Tani Barlow, respectively. Lydia Liu, Translingual Practice, 248. Ibid., 250 China Critic, August 9, 1928, 220. See Jones, Yellow Music. Quoted in Zou, “English Idiom and Republican China.” China Critic, July 20, 1933, 716. This is based on my interviews with Shanghai writers Zhou Shao and Wang Yao, who read The China Critic when they were young. China Critic, January 1, 1931, 4. Ge, History of Chinese Newspapers, 105. Shih, The Lure of the Modern, 136. China Critic, August 14, 1930, 779. Ibid., 780. Ibid. Lin, The Little Critic, 227. Walkowitz, “Introduction,” Cosmopolitan Style. China Critic, November 13, 1930, 1085. China Critic, November 20, 1931, 1133. China Critic, October 24, 1929, 846. China Critic, June 28, 1928, 84. Heinrich Fruehauf uses this term to describe the modernist experiments in Shanghai in the 1930s in his article “Urban Exoticism on Modern and Contemporary Chinese Literature.” China Critic, July 31, 1931, 725. China Critic, November 17, 1932, 214.

Chapter 2 T’ I E N H S I A : Co smop ol i tan i sm i n Cri s i s 1. Sun Yat-sen, “San Min Chu I, Selections from Lecture 4” (The Three Principles of the People), in Duara, ed., Decolonization, 28. 2. T’ien Hsia 1.1 (August 1935): 4–5. 3. Ibid., 3. 4. Ibid., 4. 5. Meng, “Re-envisioning the Greater Interior.” 6. According to Edward Gunn, after the war broke out in Shanghai, the Municipal Council of the International Settlement prohibited many Chinese-language newspapers from printing “inflammatory articles, including the use of the word ‘enemy’ to refer to Japan. . . .Violators were threatened with suspension.” Unwelcome Muse, 21. It is unclear whether T’ien Hsia, being an English-language publication, received the same kind of censorship from the Municipal Council; however, there

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7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50.

Notes to Pages 62–84

are references to censorship in Tien Hsia’s chronicles. One drama chronicle, for instance, mentions that some resistance plays had been banned by the Municipal Council. Wen-hsin Yeh, “Prologue,” in Yeh, ed., Wartime Shanghai, 4. Sun, Sun Ke Wenji, 108. Ibid., 36. Jameson, “Third World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism,” 69. See Brent Hayes Edwards’s article,“Introduction:The Genres of Postcolonialism,” for discussion of other genres of postcolonial writing. Jameson, “Third World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism,” 69. Hillenbrand, “The National Allegory Revisited.” Jameson, A Singular Modernity, 114. Wei, “Jin Ping Mei and the Late Ming Print Culture,” 209. See Shu-mei Shih’s book The Lure of the Modern for detailed analysis of Chinese modernism. Wen Yuanning, “A Note on Aubrey Beardsley,” T’ien Hsia 5.5 (May 1937): 453. T’ien Hsia 9.1 (August 1939): 5. T’ien Hsia 8.2 (February 1939): 113. T’ien Hsia 10.3 (March 1940): 207 T’ien Hsia 8.2 (February 1939): 115. Wen, “A Note on Aubrey Beardsley.” T’ien Hsia 8.2 (February 1939): 116. Chen, “Chinese National Defence Literature,” 11. Ibid., 12. T’ien Hsia 5.2 (September 1937): 148. Chen, “Modern Chinese Art.” Chen, “The Younger Group of Shanghai Artists.” Chen, “Modern Chinese Art.” Chun Kum-wan, “Art Chronicle,” T’ien Hsia 7.2 (September 1938): 209. Chen, Inside the Cultural Revolution, 44. Chen, “The New Cultural Great Wall.” Yao, “Where I Learned Literary Language.” Mar and Chen, trans., “Chabancheh Makai.” Chen, The Chinese Theatre, 8. Ibid., 56. Oaks and Schein, eds., Translocal China, 1. See Raymond Williams’s article “Metropolitan Perceptions and the Emergence of Modernism.” Hung, War and Popular Culture. See Meng Yue’s article “‘Bai Mao Nu’ Yanbian de Qishi” (The History of the Evolution of the Opera “White-Haired Girl”) for discussion of the appropriation of folk culture for nationalist mobilization. Quoted in Wang Yao, Zhongguo Xinwenxue Shigao, 370. Ibid., 372–373. Shao Xunmei, “Poetry Chronicle,” T’ien Hsia 3.3 (October 1936): 266. Shao Xunmei, “Poetry Chronicle,” T’ien Hsia 5.4 (November 1937): 402. Ibid. Duara, Sovereignty and Authenticity, 94. Ibid., 93. White, The Content of the Form, 4, 8, 16. Corona and Jorgensen, The Contemporary Mexican Chronicle, “Introduction,” 4. Monsiváis,“On the Chronicle in Mexico” in Corona and Jorgensen, The Contemporary Mexican Chronicle, 25.

Notes to Pages 85–109

167

51. Cochran, and Hsieh, with Cochran, trans. and eds., One Day in China, May 21, 1936, “An Announcement Calling for Essays,” 266. 52. Mao Dun, “On the Editorial Process,” ibid., 271. 53. Ibid., 273. 54. Ibid., 275 55. Ibid., 274. 56. Wai Chee Dimock, “Scales of Aggregation: Prenational, Subnationa, Transnational,” American Literary History 18:2 (Summer 2006): 290. 57. Dimock, “Planetary Time and Global Translation,” 493, 505. 58. Dimock, “Literature for the Planet,” 174. 59. Huters, Bring the World Home, 264. 60. Lu Xun, “Looking Back to the Past,” T’ien Hsia 6.2 (February 1938): 149. 61. Ibid., 156. 62. Yang and Yang, trans., Lu Xun, Selected Works, 6.

Chapte r 3 Inte rnationalism as a Culture of Translation: Anglophone Inte rnationalist Magazine s and Lite rary Translation 1. The fact that most studies focus on the translation of foreign literature, Western science, or social science into China and Chinese deserves some critical reflection. In Writing Diaspora, Rey Chow criticizes area studies’ nationalistic tendency of privileging China or Mandarin Chinese as the fetishized object of study.The neglect shown toward foreign-language translations is a manifestation of this problem. 2. Denning, The Cultural Front, “Introduction,” xix. Also see other recent studies of the U.S. literary left in the 1930s: Cary Nelson’s Repression and Recovery, Paula Rabinowitz’s Labor and Desire, and Alan Wald’s Exiles from a Future Time. 3. Gaonkar and Povinnelli, “Technologies of Public Forms,” 393–395. 4. See Q. S. Tong’s article, “The Bathos of a Universalism.” 5. Quoted by Tong, ibid., 339. 6. Jameson, “Third World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism.” 7. Liu, Translingual Practice, 188. 8. Li, ed., Lu Xun Liang Shiqiu Lunzhan Shilu, 273. 9. Ibid., 173. 10. Ibid., 144. 11. Quoted by Leo Ou-fan Lee, “Literature on the Eve of Revolution,” 284–285. 12. Li, ed., Lu Xun Liang Shiqiu Lunzhan Shilu, 207. 13. Quoted by Leo Ou-fan Lee in “Literature on the Eve of Revolution,” 321. 14. Ibid., 319. 15. Lu, Lu Xun Quan Ji (Lu Xun’s Collected Works), 4: 375. 16. Ibid., 379. 17. Qu, Qu Qiubai Xuanji, 493. 18. Hsia, “Enigma of the Five Martyrs.” 19. MacKinnon and MacKinnon, Agnes Smedley, 153. 20. Short Stories from China, edited by Agnes Smedly and published in London in 1933, contains some stories that had already been published in the China Forum. In addition to the works of the four martyrs and Ding Ling, Smedley’s volume also includes another leftist writer, Chang Tianyi, and a writer who can hardly be considered to be on the “left”—Yu Dafu. In her preface, Smedley admits that some of the pieces that she included in this volume do not fit well into the category of “revolutionary literature.” For instance, the short story “One Spring

168

21.

22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28.

Notes to Pages 109–113

Night” by Yu Ta-fu (Yu Dafu), which describes the hard life and daydreams of a struggling school teacher living in the International Settlement, strikes Smedley as sentimental and self-obsessed. The content of the story is hardly relevant to the revolutionary cause, Smedley complains. In addition to Yu’s piece, she also criticizes a collectively composed story “Three Pagodas” for veering from the revolutionary theme and focusing too much on a critique of feudal beliefs and customs. Her criticism indicates that Smedley had different interpretations of the short stories’ political messages from the short story writers. In the story collection that he later published under the title Straw Sandals, Isaacs kept almost all of the stories that had been published in China Forum and added other works by the same writers that were more representative and better written. Isaacs writes in his preface of the mid-1930s: “The collection is designed to give a consecutive picture of the development of the new Chinese literature in the last fifteen years. . . . With this purpose in mind, the original list from which the selection was made was drawn up by Lu Hsun and Mao Dun. Valuable supplementary suggestions were made by Professor Cheng Chen-to” (“Introduction” to Isaacs, ed., Straw Sandals, xliii). Since the publication of this collection was delayed until 1974, during which time Isaacs made some revisions on the basis of advice from American professors of Chinese studies, it is safe to assume that the final product can only partially reflect the choices that Lu Xun and Mao Dun made in the mid-1930s. “Introduction,” Straw Sandals, xliii. “CFRA Groups Organize, Conference Scheduled” China Forum 3.1 (November 7, 1933): 17. China Forum, March 25, 1932, 8. Lu Xun, Lu Xun Quan Ji, 4: 460. Isaacs, Re-Encounters in China, 30. Ibid., 31. Historian Him Mark Lai’s manuscript “To Bring Forth a New China, to Build a Better America: The Chinese Left in America to the 1960s” contains the most detailed description that I can find of Chi Ch’ao-ting’s background and activities as well as the magazine China Today. Chi Ch’ao-ting was a student of Tsing Hua University in the early 1920s when he joined Chaotao, a “policy-making core group” within left-leaning political organization Weizhen Xuehui. Weizhen Xuehui was founded by Chi’s schoolmate, another leftist student by the name of Shi Huang. In 1924 Chi left China for the United States and was enrolled in the University of Chicago, where he organized and participated in a variety of antiimperialistic activities among Chinese students and the Chinese community. He was also the first Chinese member of the American Communist Party. In the late 1920s, he traveled to Europe to participate in the World Anti-Imperialist Congress and the International Congress of the Oppressed People. When he returned to the United States, he entered graduate school at Columbia University and wrote a doctoral dissertation on Chinese economic history, which was eventually published in 1936. Chi was cosmopolitan, skilled at public speaking, and had many American friends outside the Chinese students’ circle. He was married to Harriet Levine, an American from New York. In 1933 Chi founded Friends of the American People along with several American Communist Party members including Philip J. Jaffe, who was Chi’s wife’s cousin. In addition to publishing China Today, the group also organized many street demonstrations for antiimperialism and anti-fascism. It often worked together with the American League against War and Fascism. China Today was published between 1933 and 1937, at which point it was replaced by another magazine, Amerasia (Lai’s manuscript, pp.

Notes to Pages 113–127

29. 30. 31. 32.

33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41.

42. 43. 44. 45.

46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51.

52. 53.

169

8–25. This manuscript has been published as “A Short History of Left Organizations in the Chinese Community of America” in Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars, San Francisco, 1972). Jaffe, “Introduction.” China Today 1.12 (September 1935): 230. China Today 1.5 (February 1935): 88. The People’s Tribune published six short stories by Lu Xun translated into English by Lin Yi-Chin. Although Lin Yi-Chin’s choice of titles suggests a personal preference for the more introspective pieces among Lu Xun’s short stories, such as “Old Friends at the Wine-Shop,” some representative pieces such as “The Tragedy of K’ung I-Chi” were also included. Snow, “Lu Shun, Master of Pai-hua,” 42. With regard to both the background of this magazine and Smedley’s involvement with it, see MacKinnon and MacKinnon, Agnes Smedley, 168. There are a number of books that discuss the cultural developments during the anti-Japanese war. Hung Chang-tai’s War and Popular Culture provides a comprehensive and updated discussion of wartime culture in China. Voice of China 1.3 (April 15, 1936): 15. Ibid. Voice of China 1.6 (June 1, 1936): 6. Lu Xun, Lu Xun Quan Ji 6: 472. According to a footnote of the editor, Lu Xun’s reference to the “six young writers” is a mistake. The correct version should be “five young writers.” Voice of China 1.6 (June 1, 1936): 21. Lu Xun’s short stories and essays were translated into Russian and studied by Russian scholars around the same time that they were circulated among Anglophone readers. For more information of the reception of Lu Xun in the Soviet Union before 1949, consult the magazine Sulian Wenyi (Soviet Culture), which was published in Shanghai in the 1940s. Derrida, “Des Tours de Babel,” 179. Ibid., 188. Ibid., 191. Although I could not find the sales figure for Living China, it was reviewed in influential publications on both sides of the Atlantic, such as Times Literary Supplement, New Republic, Manchester Guardian, Christian Century, and Pacific Affairs, all shortly after the book was published. See Xiao Qian’s introduction to the Chinese version of Living China, entitled “Sinuo he Zhongguo Xinwenhua Yundong” (Snow and the New Culture Movement in China). For discussions of the culture of collecting, consult Susan Stewart, On Longing. Simon, “On Collecting Culture in Graffigny,” 25. See George Taylor’s review of Living China in Pacific Affairs 10.1 (March 1937): 88–91. Snow, “Introduction,” Living China, 11. For a detailed discussion of The Compendium of New Chinese Literature as an effort of canonization and self-legitimization on the global stage, see chapter 8 of Lydia Liu’s Translingual Practice. I prefer the phrase “new literature” to “modern literature” in the title, since the former is more faithful to the original Chinese version. Snow, “Lu Shun, Master of Pai-Hua,” 42. Lydia Liu describes the Compendium as an awkward confluence of “self-colonialization” and nationalism—a new struggle over “who owned the right to speak for China and the West” in the continuous stream of internal cultural change

170

54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70.

Notes to Pages 127–153

propelled by global modernity and imperialism. She points out that several editors of the Compendium used “the European Renaissance . . . as an undisputed trope to legitimize and canonize the works of May Fourth writers, and hence the Compendium itself ” (Translingual Practice, 234–235). Snow, Living China, 25. Ibid., 15. Ibid., 16, 17, 15. Ibid., 39. Yang and Yang, trans., Lu Xun: Selected Works. See their translation of Lu Xun’s short story “Medicine.” In nineteenth-century China, liberal translation of foreign authors’ works was a common practice, much more popular than literal and precise translation. Snow, Living China, 30 Ibid., 17. Ibid., 16. Wang, Fictional Realism in Twentieth-Century China, 81. Snow’s translation of “Suicide” in Living China, 132–133. For a discussion of the influence of Western feminist theories on Mao Dun, see Liu Jianmei’s Revolution Plus Love, 80. Xiao Qian’s introduction to the Chinese version of Living China, titled “Sinuo he Zhongguo Xinwenhua Yundong,” 6. Snow, Living China, 141. See Elman, On Their Own Terms, and Meng, Shanghai and the Edges of Empires for discussions of translational practices in nineteenth-century China. Hanan, “The First Novel Translated into Chinese,” 89. For examples of revisionist views on Chinese modernity, see Lee, Shanghai Modern, and Zhang, An Amorous History of the Silver Screen.

Chapter 4 Mig ration and Diaspora: The Afte rlife of Chine se Co smopolitanism 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15.

Klaus Mehnert, “Aloha!” The XXth Century 1.1 (October 1941): 1. Ibid., 4. Ibid., 7. Klaus Mehnert, “Round Trip through Asia,” The XXth Century 4.4 (April 1943): 247. Klaus Mehnert,“Socialism from Above,” The XXth Century 6.3 (March 1944): 159, 162. Klaus Mehnert, “Should Straps—And Then?” The XXth Century 6.2, (February 1944): 81. Zhang, “Sealed Off,” 177. Chen, “Internationalism and Cultural Experience,” 89, 86. See John Carroll’s A Concise History of Hong Kong, 172, and chapter 7,“Becoming Hong Kongese.” Huang, Zheng, and Lu, Zuizong Xianggang Wenxue. Lu Xun, “Letter to Yao Ke on March 6, 1934,” in Lu Xun Liang Shiqiu Lunzhan Shilu, 1: 501. Carroll, A Concise History of Hong Kong, 158. Morris, Hong Kong: Epilogue to an Empire, 264. Quoted in Carroll, A Concise History of Hong Kong, 187–188. Yao Ke, Zuo Wang Zi (Xianggang: Chun Wenxue Chubanshe, 1967), 166. Pearl Buck played a critical role in introducing Lin Yutang to American readers.

Notes to Pages 154–159

16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27.

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In the early 1930s, Pearl Buck read many English essays that Lin wrote for The China Critic and knew him as a reputable bilingual scholar. In her preface to Lin’s My Country and My People, Pearl Buck spoke very highly of Lin, considering him among the few Chinese intellectuals who were not “lost in the confusion of the times,” “humorous enough to see life as it is,” “keen enough to understand their own civilization as well as others,” and “wise enough to choose what is native to them and therefore truly their own” (xi). At the same time, Pearl Buck’s own novels about China impressed Lin and other liberal Chinese intellectuals with her humanistic appeal and sympathy toward under-class laborers and peasants. Lin, Lin Yutang on the Wisdom of America, “Preface,” xv. Lin, My Country and My People, 28. Dikotter, Discourse of Race in Modern China, 140. Ibid. Lin, My Country and My People, 13. Frank Chin et al., eds., Aiiieeeee! An Anthology of Asian-American Writers (New York: Mentor, 1991), 199. Lin, Chinatown Family, 7. A “tong” is a native-place organization that had significant power in Chinatown social and economic life from the nineteenth to the first half of the twentieth century. Lin, Chinatown Family, 81. Ibid., 157. Ibid., 70. Ang, “Can One Say No to Chineseness,” 292–293.

B ibl iog raphy

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I nde x

Acton, Harold, 67, 81 allegory, national, 20, 100, 147–148, 155 Anderson, Benedict, 29, 81, 84–86 Anglophone: internationalism, 107, 123; internationalist magazine, 91; leftist magazine, 97; literature by writers from Chinese-speaking regions, 3; literature or writing from India and Indian diasporas, 2, 3; mediated cosmopolitanism, 145; periodical or magazine, 1, 26, 71, 123, 133, 145; publication, 99, 123; reading public or audience, 110, 116; writer or creative writer, 2, 112; writing, 2, 41; world, 146 Artistic Base ( journal), 73 Asia ( journal), 95, 123, 126,127 Ba Jin, 89, 118, 123; “Dog,” 118 BASIC English, 97 Baudelaire, Charles Pierre, 64, 68, 79 Beardsley, Aubrey, 68–69 Benjamin, Walter, 64, 122; “Task of the Translator,” 122–123 Bhabha, Homi, 16, 44 bilingualism, 97, 109,112, 133 Bisson, T. A., 113 Cao Juren, 66 Chang, Eileen, 141–144; “Sealed Off,” 142, 144 Chen Duxiu, 46, 98 Chen Dieyi, 66

Chen, Eugene, 71 Chen, Jack, 70–76, 145; “Chabacheh Makai,” 73–74; Inside the Cultural Revolution, 71, 73 Chi Ch’ao-ting, 114 Chiang Kai-shek, 71 China Critic,The ( journal), 13–14, 23, 30–31, 33–42, 44–57, 135, 141, 145, 153–154 China Forum ( journal), 95–97, 107–110, 112–115, 117; bilingual issues of, 110 China Journal of Science and Art,The ( journal), 95 China Today ( journal), 72–73, 95–97, 108, 112–117, 123, 125 Chineseness, 1, 10, 26, 32, 47, 54, 81, 157–159 circulation, 31, 43, 51, 53, 81, 83, 85, 87–88, 116–117, 119, 122, 124, 126, 133–134, 139, 141–142, 144, 159 chronicle, 62, 72, 81; of art, 72; in Mexico, 83–84; of poetry, 79–81; theory of, 83–85 “citizen of the world,” 14, 18, 34 Compendium of New Chinese Literature, 1917–1927 (anthology), 88, 125–127 concessions, 34, 42, 71, 108; The China Critic’s editors’ criticism of, 54–56; French Concession, 56, 108; social history of, 36–37 cosmopolitanism, 14, 33, 34, 35, 37, 39, 41, 43, 48, 49, 51, 53, 55, 57, 59, 60, 61, 76, 98, 99, 126, 139, 144, 145,

179

180

Index

cosmopolitanism (continued) 146, 153, 158, 159; contemporary discourses of, 15–17; new cosmopolitanism, 17, 23, 24; old cosmopolitanism, 16 cosmopolitanism, Chinese: afterlife of, 135; critique of, 159; discussions of, 13–16, 17–21; in historical perspective, 21–25 Derrida, Jacques, 61, 122–123; “Des Tours de Babel,” 122 diaspora, 2, 15, 25, 61, 135, 149, 150, 159, 160 Dimock, Wai Chee, 79, 87–90 Ding Ling, 62, 73, 108, 126 Eliot, T. S., 67 Esperanto, 74, 98 eugenics, 46 extraterritoriality, 34, 42 Gu Hongming, 3, 45 gudao (“lonely isle”), 62 hybrid, 6, 33, 45–47 hybridity, 5, 43, 48 hybridization, 9, 66 In the Face of Demolition (film), 151–152 International Settlement, 42, 61, 62, 119 internationalism, 13, 32, 42, 48, 59, 62, 63, 88, 107, 121, 123, 127, 133–134, 145; definitions of, 110–113 internationalist magazines, 95–99 Isaacs, Harold, 88, 114; as editor of China Forum (see China Forum) Jaffe, Philip J., 112, 114 Jameson, Fredric, 63–65, 99, 100 Kollwitz, Käthe, 121 Lao She, 89 Leftist Writers’ League, 109, 115, 118

liberal cosmopolitan club, 34, 53 Liang Shiqiu, 101, 103–104, 106, 122 Life and Letters Today ( journal), 70, 95, 123 Lin Yutang, 34, 39, 40, 51–52, 59, 89, 115, 126–127, 145, 153; Chinatown Family, 156–158; My Country and My People, 53, 115, 153–155, 157 Ling Tai, 80–81 Lu Xun, 12, 46, 62, 64, 66, 91, 95–96, 98–101, 110–111, 115–116, 118–123, 125–129, 132, 146–147, 150; “Diary of a Mad Man,” 91–92, 105, 115; “A Hermit at Large,” 89, 91, 110; “I Want to Fool People,” 119; “Looking Back to the Past,” 89, 91–92; “Medicine,” 110, 118, 128–129;“My Hometown,” 91;“Remorse,” 89, 91, 110;“Sino-Soviet Relations,” 110–111; theory of translation, 103–107; translation of “The Rout,” 104–105; The Tragedy of Ah Qui and Other Modern Chinese Stories, 107;“The True Story of Ah Q,” 107, 147–148, 150;“Writing in Deep Night,” 119 Ma Er (Ye Junjian), 73–74 Mao Dun, 73, 85, 113, 118, 122–123, 126, 128–132 May Fourth tradition, 13, 48 Mehnert, Klaus, 141, 144; as editor of The XXth Century, 135–140; and Eileen Chang, 142–144 mobility, 22, 24, 35, 63, 72–73, 76, 156, 158 modern culture, Chinese, 15, 50, 66–69 modernism, 5, 26, 52, 67–70, 72–73, 76–78 Mu Shiying, 52 national character, Chinese, 46–47 nationalism, 4, 5, 13, 16–17, 20, 23–24, 38–39, 42, 48, 59, 60, 62–63, 70–73, 77, 81, 84–85, 111, 117–118, 127, 135, 137, 149

Index

Nationalist government, 39 Nationalist Party, 13, 36–37, 71, 78, 107, 115–116, 127 New Culture Movement, 10, 11, 13, 34, 40, 98, 110, 115, 127, 146 New Masses ( journal), 96, 108 Pan Guangdan, 33; “Problem of the Cultural,” 45–47 People’s Tribune ( journal), 95, 107, 110, 123 proletarian literature, 101–103, 113 public, 2, 5, 6, 9, 10–13, 18–19, 28, 30–31, 39, 57, 64, 66, 70, 90, 102, 104, 106, 110, 143 Public Culture ( journal), 96 publics, 1, 25, 27–31, 135; nonAnglophone, 29 Qu Qiubai, 101, 105–107, 122; “One Day in China,” 85–87 Richards, I. A., 97–99; and BASIC English, 97 Robbins, Bruce, 16, 20, 28 semi-colonialism, 56 Shanghai, 31, 48, 50, 59, 66, 71, 79, 81, 85, 95, 98, 117, 119, 121, 131, 133, 159; China Forum and, 107–109; as a city of borders, 35–43; as a city of refuge, 61–62; translocal connections, 76–77; transnational connections, 112–115 Shao Xunmei (Zau Sinmay), 79–81, 88; “The Serpent,” 81, 88 Shih Shu-mei, 4, 21, 47, 51 Smedley, Agnes, 96, 108–109, 117 Snow, Edgar, 88, 115–117, 123–133, 146–147; Living China, 123–128, 131–133, 147; Red Star over China, 115, 126, 133 Soviet literature, 62, 101, 111 Sulian Wenyi ( journal), 14, 140

181

Sun Ke, 33, 34, 60–63, 82 Sun Yat-sen, 21, 50, 33, 59, 60, 71, 117, 127 Sun Yat-sen Institute for Advancement of Culture and Education, 33, 60 Sze Ming-ting (George A. Kennedy), 109, 113, 116 T’ien Hsia ( journal), 13–14, 29, 31, 59–67, 70–73, 76–78, 81–82, 84, 86–91, 93, 95, 110, 135, 141, 145, 153 Tien Chun (Xiao Jun), 118, 126 tianxia weigong (“the universe is for everyone”), 59 translational practices, 39 translational time, 86–88 translingual practice, 100 translocal China, 76 traveling cultures, 15, 25 Voice of China ( journal), 97, 108, 117–119, 122–123 Wang Xiuchu: “A Memoir of a Ten Days’ Massacre in Yangchow,” 88 “Welt-literatur,” 14–15 Wen Yuanning, 59, 67, 69, 70, 82 Wen Yiduo, 81, 88; “Dead Water,” 81, 88 White, Hayden, 83–84 Xiandai Zazhi (Les Contemporaines) ( journal), 67 Xue Heng ( journal), 49, 50 Xiaoshuo Yuebao (Short Story Monthly) ( journal), 111 XXth Century,The ( journal), 135–137, 144 Yan’an, 24, 62, 70–73, 75–78, 133 Yao Ke, 59, 144–153; “Abyss,” 150–153; adaptation of “The True Story of Ah Q,” 107, 147–148, 150; “Sorrows of the Forbidden City,” 148–150 Yao Xueyin, 73–74, 89

A bout th e Auth or

Shuang Shen received her education from Beijing University in China and the City University of New York, Graduate Center. She has taught in the English departments of Queensborough Community College and Hunter College of the City University of New York and Rutgers University, New Brunswick. She currently teaches in the Chinese Department of Lingnan University in Hong Kong. She has published articles on Asian American literature, Chinese diasporic literature, and translation studies in leading journals including Genre and PMLA, as well in edited volumes such as China Abroad, forthcoming from Hong Kong University Press. She is an active participant in the Chinese-language public cultures in China and Hong and writes frequently for the newspapers and magazines published there.

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