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Imagining China: "Niehai Hua" as a national narrative

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Imagining China: "Niehai Hua" as a national narrative

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IMAGINING CHINA:
NIEHAIHUA AS A NATIONAL NARRATIVE
by
Guo-ou Zhuang
A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment o f the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
( Comparative Literature)
May 2000
Copyright 2000 Guo-ou Zhuang
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UM I Number 3018049
Copyright 2000 by
Zhuang, Guo-ou
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UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY PARK
LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA 90007
This dissertation, w ritten by
G u o - o u Z h u a n g
under the direction of h..i.s Dissertation
Committee, and approved by all its members►
has been presented to and accepted by The
Graduate School, in partial fulfillment of re
quirements for the degree of
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
wv«
...................................
Dean of Graduate Studies
Date ... r i . l . 2 u . .2000.
DISSERTATION COMMITTEE
Chairperson
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Imagining China: Niehai Hua as a National Narrative
(abstract)
Niehai Hua is an important Chinese novel written in the beginning o f the
twentieth century. This dissertation discusses the novel as a national narrative that
testifies to the emergence o f a modem form o f national consciousness of the Chinese,
using critical perspectives informed by postcolonial literary theory. Breaking away
from a previous critical paradigm that has narrowly focused on the novel’ s exposition
of the corruption o f Chinese society in the late imperial era, this study focuses on the
novel ’ s representation o f the transformation o f China from a waning empire into a
modem nation state.
This study situates the novel in the global cultural context of the late nineteenth
century and argues that the novel offers a representation o f the identity crisis o f the
Chinese in the modem world, in essence that it embodies the Chinese attempt to re-map
a changing China. Chinese imagination o f western nations in the novel is a crucial part
of the construction o f a new national identity. The literary representation of this
reveals layers o f consciousness that are overlooked by other discourses of the time. For
example, the alleged love affair between the heroine of the novel Caiyun and the allied
commander Alfred Von Waldersee, is interpreted as a metaphor for the complex
relationship between China and the Western powers, going beyond the simple dualism
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o f victim versus oppressor. The study also discusses the xenophobia o f the Chinese
represented in the novel in episodes such as the map incident. The portrayal o f the daily
life o f Chinese scholar-officials, which has been deemed insignificant by many critics,
is seen as a significant effort to hold on to a familiar cultural identity. The study also
discusses how the author o f Niehai Hua incorporated western narrative elements, but
meanwhile preserved indigenous narrative elements in an attempt to reconcile Chinese
and Western literary traditions. Criticism o f the novel's literary style reflects a
hegemonic dominance of western aesthetic discourses, while in fact the novel may
serve as a model for Chinese writers to reconstruct a native narrative tradition.
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I would like to thank Dr. Dominic Cheung, Dr. Bettine Birge, Dr. Dagmar
Bamouw, and Dr. David Eggenschwiler for their patient guidance and kind
encouragement during the writing of this dissertation. I am especially indebted to
Dr. Cheung for his constant support, guidance, and mentoring during the entire
period of my graduate study at USC.
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
INTRODUCTION
CHAPTER ONE NIEHAI HUA AS A NATIONAL NARRATIVE:
MODERN CHINESE FICTION IN THE LATE
IMPERIAL AGE 31
CHAPTER TWO ENCOUNTER WITH THE OTHER AND
CONSTRUCTION OF THE SELF: MYTH, ALLEGORY,
AND NATIONALISM 60
CHAPTER THREE THE COURTESAN AS THE PATRON-GODDESS
OF THE NATION: SEXUALITY AND NATIONALISM 89
CHAPTER FOUR NOSTALGIA OF THE OLD VS. WONDER OF THE
NEW: THE AGONY OF CULTURAL DISENCHANT
MENT AND THE TEMPTATION OF MODERNITY 126
CHAPTER FIVE
EPILOGUE
NATIONAL LONGING FOR A FORM AND
LONGING FOR A NATIONAL FORM 152
192
BIBLIOGRAPHY
GLOSSARY
APPENDICES
206
216
219
m
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Introduction
Our philological home is the earth:
it can no longer be the nation.
— Auerbach
This study attempts to examine early modem Chinese fiction from a new
perspective informed by theories and practice of postcolonial literary criticism and
cultural studies. By early modem Chinese fiction I refer to those works previously
labeled as "Late Qing Fiction" (1840-1919), representatives o f which are the novels
that have been called "the novels of condemnation"1 . In this study, both concepts,
"late Qing fiction" and "the novels o f condemnation", are replaced with the concept
of early modem Chinese fiction. The definitions and implications of the former two
terms have bounded the novels narrowly with a Chinese historical dynasty, the
Qing dynasty, to the neglect of their distinctive nature as cultural products of a
modem era in Chinese history. The two terms have demonstrated a form o f critical
provinciality in giving an account o f the fictional products of the historical era.
To classify late Qing fiction as early modem, the current study also
challenges the dominant critical paradigm in the studies o f Chinese literature which
“sees the May Fourth uprising - the famous 1919 declaration of a revolution in
literature — as the beginning of the modern stage of Chinese literature.” 2 Though
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the May Fourth generation o f Chinese writers may in some way claim themselves to
be the initiators o f modem Chinese literature, the representation of the experience
of the modem of the Chinese people had appeared much earlier. Therefore, a
revision of the traditional historical periodization is critically necessary as the
historical imagination o f the dynastic periodization has greatly impaired the
possibility of a more accurate and significant historical understanding of the novels
of this era. 3 This traditional periodization of literary history, which was borrowed
from an orthodox Marxist view of China’ s historical development in general, has
its ideological intentions aiming at a refusal o f acknowledging the importance of
the impact o f western civilization on the modem development of China.4
Postcolonial literary criticism, which argues for a connection between
narration and nation-building, provides useful suggestions for the current study.
Works by postcolonial critics such as Homi Bhabha convincingly established a
close relationship between the novel and the construction o f nation. As Patrick
Brantlinger pointed out, "A corollary is that the development o f the modem
nation-state and that o f the novel were not just simultaneous occurrences, but in
some sense codeterminent." ( 261 ) The examination of such a theoretical
assertion in the context o f a non-westem culture proves not only interesting but
necessary. In the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century Chinese
context, as novels were explicitly advocated as an instrument for moderni
zation, the link between the development o f the novel and the building of a
7
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modem nation is so obvious and direct that the critics seemed to have
overlooked the issue. A study of the early modem Chinese fiction from the
perspective of its relation to the process o f the birth of China as a modem national
state is called for. As my reading o f Niehai Hua— a . representative work of early
modem flction— shall prove, a distinctively new imagination o f China is the theme
of early modem Chinese fiction, contrary to the dominant critical opinions which
hold that the thematic significance of the novels of this era are no more than an
exposition of the corruption o f the late imperial Chinese society. A new
imagination of China is also the contribution to the public and the historical
function fulfilled by the novels in question. The thematic contents o f these novels
as revealed in this study cover far more broad realms than they have previously
been conceived to have covered. Situated in the social and historical context of a
clash between Chinese civilization and the Western civilization during the
imperialist expansion of nineteenth century, one dominant theme of these novels is
a revision of the imagination o f China in relation to the West. The relationship
between the novels and the effort o f nation building in early modem China is
beyond dispute.
The study o f fictional production o f this era is especially important also
because the novels o f this period occupy an important position in the develop
ment of the Chinese narrative tradition. If in the eighth century the historical
contact with the Buddhist narrative tradition initiated the form ation of Chinese
3
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novels in their early development, the exposure o f Chinese writers to the
western narrative tradition in this era began a significant transformation o f the
Chinese narrative tradition.5 Late Qing era is a moment o f massive production
of novels as well as a moment of critical changes in the development o f
Chinese narrative tradition.
As Ah Ying pointed out, late Qing is the period that has the largest
output of novels in the history of Chinese fiction.6 However, many critics
have repeatedly pointed out that despite the large quantity o f novels published
during this time, the quality o f the novels was poor. As was shown in a
summary in A History of Modem Chinese Literature, the novelists were
regarded as “low in their level o f thoughts and artistic cultivation” and the
novels were “o f low artistic achievement in general.” 7 Approached with a
limited and biased critical method o f oversimplified content analysis, the novels
have been downgraded and their significant achievement overlooked. The
sociological approach of the Chinese critics has the typical characteristic
pointed out by Lucien Goldmann, that “they try in effect to establish relations
between the contents of literary works and those o f the collective
o
consciousness.” Analysis in this fashion “allows the unity of the work to
escape, and with it its specifically literary character.” The content o f the
novels, of which a major part is the depiction o f contemporary society, should
not become the sole basis upon which the significance o f the novels are
4
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determined. A broader perspective which involves cultural analysis should be
employed to explore the complicated connection between a work and its social
context.
In my opinion, late Qing fiction is significant not only quantitatively,
but also qualitatively. It is because that during this era the function o f novels
had undergone a profound change: for the first time in history the status of
fiction was ascended in the hierarchy o f literature classification, partly due to
the flourishing o f novels as well as a general cultural change. More people have
come to recognize that the importance of the late Qing novels has been
underestimated in the study of Chinese literature.
It was the May Fourth critics such as Lu Xun and Hu Shi who set the
tone for the critical evaluation o f Niehai Hua , I have observed one radical and
significant contrast between the projection of the novelists regarding their
mission and intention, and the critical opinion which drew an entirely different
picture. As the novelists arrogated to themselves the mission of a nationalist
project that is invested with modem spirit, the critics, in an effort to secure the
modernness of their own position, pushed them back into the dark swamp of a
feudalist past by emphasizing their connection with a decaying dynasty. As
David Wang pointed out, the succeeding generation o f writers and critics o f the
May Fourth downgraded the late Qing writers of fiction because they
“appointed themselves the first generation to promote modem literature” .9 I
5
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want to argue here that the fact that the authors and the thematic contents of
their novels were closely connected to a feudal dynasty cannot be sufficient
reasons to deprive them o f the modernity they experienced in life and
represented in their works.
The label o f "the novels of condemnation" ( tiifijJ/MjiL), which was first
given by Lu Xun in his A Brief History o f Chinese Fiction in 1924, has been
widely accepted by Chinese critics and literary historians. He divided late Qing
fiction into three categories: the novel o f martial artists and court cases (
), the novels of debauchery ( ). and the novels of
condemnation ( iiftn/.M.&)- As to the novels of condemnation, Lu Xun thus gives
his rationale of the concept:
Since 1900, there has been a flourishing o f the novels of
condemnation...As people came to realize that the government
was not worth their cooperation in reformation, they began to
have the intention to criticize it. As for the novels, they were
aimed at an exposure of the hidden corruption, a severe
criticism o f current political situation, and sometimes a
criticism o f social customs... thus I give them the label "novels
of condemnation". 1 0
The paradigmatic efficacy o f his criticism, while bringing insights to certain
aspects of the novels, has limited the possibility o f adequately revealing the
richness and significance o f these works. For a long time since 1949, Lu Xun
has been an instrument o f the orthodox ideology o f the Chinese Communist
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Party, as a consequence , his paradigm has gained a hegemonic authority
against which little theoretical challenge has been attempted.
Current studies and criticisms on late Qing novels by Chinese critics
have not broken with this paradigm. One history o f Chinese fiction wrote:
The outstanding works of the reformist fiction
employed the cretaive method o f critical realism to
expose the ugly social reality o f their time, used
angry language to condemn that decayed society.
They actually denied the feudal system, called on
people not to cherish any hope for the Qing
government, urged them to go forward, stirred up in
them a desire to change the reaiity and to find their
way o f making progress. 1 1
The evaluation of the late Qing fiction here basically repeated the comments o f
Lu Xun's criticism. In their studies, political orientation o f the novels were
given prior considerations in evaluating the novels and social criticism was
considered the chief merit, if not the only merit, o f the novels. Criticisms such
as this are predicated on the intention o f the authors as the governing source of
the significances o f their works and presumed the author's full control over the
text, its thematic unity and its significance. Through a reexamination o f the
novels produced in this era, and in particular, through a close reading o f Niehai
Hua ( A Flower o f the Sinful Sea), a representative work o f this era, I attempt
to shake loose the theoretical hegemony and make a revision o f the opinions on
these works provided by such traditional literary studies. The meaning and
significance o f these works will not be limited to the intention o f their authors.
7
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The proposed new perspective, adapting the theoretical positions o f
postcolonial studies, situates early modem Chinese fiction in the international
historical context o f late nineteenth century and early twentieth century.1 2 The
novel Niehai Hua is therefore treated as a literary representation of the
historical moment when China entered the modem world in the nineteenth
century. I here endorse Edward Said ’ s position which he convincingly
argued in his Culture and Imperialism, that the history o f the nineteenth century
is the history o f imperialist expansion and that
Along with armed resistance in places as diverse as
nineteenth-century Algeria, Ireland, and Indonesia, there
also went considerable efforts in cultural resistance
almost everywhere, the assertions o f nationalist
identities, and, in the political realm, the creation o f
associations and parties whose common goal was self-
determination and national independence.1 3
In the later half of nineteenth century, a profound change in Chinese
culture and society took place as the result o f the aggressive presence of the
West in China. Following the Opium W ar with Britain in 1839 and the sign o f
the first unequal treaty The Treaty o f Nanjing in 1840, China witnessed
successive aggressions from other European nations and Japan. In 1860 the
armed forces o f Britain and France entered Beijing and burnt Yuan Ming Yuan,
the royal garden o f the Qing emperor. In 1885 a war broke out between China
and France over Vietnam, then a tributay state to China. In 1894 China and
8
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Japan fought on the sea and as the result Taiwan was taken from China by
Japan. In 1897 Germany took part o f China’ s Shandong province and made
Shandong its area o f control. Along with military resistance, cultural resistance
to the western influence was present in every aspect o f Chinese society, from
political ideologies to social customs. It was also during this time that China's
national identity began to take shape, o f which the necessity and urgency had
never been felt before when Chinese people adopted the traditional Chinese
viewr of the world. Said's assertion, more than making a statement of historical
fact, opens up a theoretical horizon for the study of literary and cultural
production o f the age.
As a matter o f fact, Chinese literary critics have long noticed the anti
imperialism and anti-colonialism o f the late Qing novels. Indeed, Ah Ying
classified in his A History of Late P ine Fiction according to the thematic
contents of the novels, and several o f them were related to this issue, such as
“The reflection o f the Boxer incident” and “The movement o f Anti-
discrimination against American treatment of Chinese laborers” 1 4 . He pointed
out that “there are not many achievements in novels to represent the anti
imperialist movement. Only the novels that narrate the Boxer incident and the
Exclusion Act against Chinese workers are close to being satisfactory in this
respect.” (52) He briefly discussed several novels such as Miserable Society
and The Golden World , focusing on the novels' exposition
9
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o f the exploitation o f Chinese workers in California and the Chinese resistance
against the discriminatory act. His critical account o f the im pact o f western
imperialist oppression o f Chinese people was nevertheless predicated on a
binary opposition o f the aggression and anti-aggression, the victim and the
oppressor. This approach failed to recognize the complex nature of the
interaction between China and the west o f the time. However, till today it is
still an exemplary approach in the research into the political, social, and
cultural contexts o f Late Qing fiction, limiting the study inside the boundary of
a highly confined national political history. The present study will situate the
novels o f the era into the international context o f historical development and
see the novels o f the era as literary representations o f China's progression from
a closed, self-sufficient, isolated empire into an open, modem , and national
state.
Scholarship outside China devoted to the study of early modem Chinese
fiction are scarce. C.T. Hsia, one o f the leading scholars o f the study o f both
classical and modem Chinese fiction in America, wrote two monumental works
The Classic Chinese Novel and A History o f Modem Chinese Fiction1 5 . The
former work discusses classic Chinese novels and ended with A Dream o f Red
Mansion , while the later begins with the discussion o f Lu X u n ’ s fictional
writing. While the first work highlighted the achievements o f classic Chinese
novels, the second work is a comprehensive history o f m odem Chinese fiction.
10
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Between the two periods, the classic period and the modem period, a
significant vacuum exists. This vacuum is not accidental as we have reason to
expect that the two works have been intended to form a systematic study o f
Chinese novels. With this clear absence o f devotion to the late Qing fiction, it
seems that the author, like other literary historians, also take the fiction o f late
Qing era as a transitory phase. Another work that deals with the novels o f this
era, Chinese Middlebrow Fiction, is a one vollume collection of the
translations o f excerpts from several o f the novels o f this era and several
commentary essays. The collection, edited by Liu Ts'un-yan, classified the
novels o f this era as Chinese middlebrow fiction, the term being meant “to
apply to traditional-style novels a cut or two below the very great” 1 6 , a clear
indication o f his unenthusiastic evaluation o f the novels in question.
Only recently there have appeared some important studies devoted to the
study o f late Qing fiction. The Chinese Novel at the Turn o f the Century, edited
by Dolezelova-Velingerova, included several essays that discuss the structure
and artistic characteristics o f the late Qing novels. Peter Li's Tseng P'u w as a
comprehensive study of Zeng Pu's literary career, with considerable volume of
discussion on Niehai Hua. David Dewei Wang's Fin-de-Siecle: Repressed
M odernities o f Late Qing Fiction. 1849-1911. published in 1997, marks the
beginning o f a significant new wave o f interest in the late Qing fiction. In
general, however, the study o f early m odem Chinese fiction is still a relatively
11
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less cultivated field o f literary scholarship. I hope my study will help expand
the interpretative horizon o f these novels to a cross-cultural scope so that the
works may reveal their significance that have so far not been discovered.
It is not without reservation that I draw my theoretical inspirations
mainly from current post-colonial theories. I am clearly aware of the danger
and the problematic of adopting a western theory' to the interpretation o f non-
western texts. Trinh T. Minh-ha is certainly correct when he warned that "the
west has been , and continues to think it is, in a position to define realities for
others, including those of westernization, authenticity ..." 1 7 Postcolonial
criticism may indeed be another form of defining realities for the third world
by intellectuals from the first world. As a third-world literary student trained in
the west, I am certainly susceptible to the influence o f the western critical
discourses of various kinds. However, compared to other various kinds of
literary theories produced in the west in the past and adopted by Third World
literary critics, post-colonial theories and cultural studies are unpretentiously
universal exactly because of its conscious rejection o f attempting theoretical
abstractions that appear to be universal. As Ashcroft and others pointed out in
The Empire Writes Back, postcolonial literary criticism
offers a broader, non-Eurocentric perspective on some traditional
questions of theory. What kinds of writing ‘ fit ’ or could be
considered to fit into the category ‘ literature ’ ;how do texts
‘ mean ’ ; by what criteria could or should these texts be
evaluated; how do they dismantle the process o f ascribing
‘ merit ’ through critical practice; and how applicable are the
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universalistic assertions o f European theory to the growing body
1 o
of post-European literatures.
Therefore, another important task o f the present study is, through a close
examination of the evalustions and criticisms on Niehai Hua, to reveal the
unconscious subjection to the western aesthetic doctrines by Chinese critics in
the past one hundred years. They embraced various western aesthetic ideas
enthusiastically in the belief o f them as universal principles, a fallacy—
intentionally or unintentionally, with or without pretension— created by
western thinkers, when they take no heed o f the culturally specific nature of
their theoretical construction and claim their work to be of general human
interest. Most western aesthetics and literary theories o f the past have the
tendency to negate their historical contingencies and to put on the appearance
of universal truths. What Isaiah Berlin observed o f Western political thought is
equally true of Western aesthetic thought. According to him, one o f the deepest
assumptions of Western political thought, found in Plato and scarcely
questioned since, is ‘ the conviction that there exist true, immutable, universal,
timeless objective values,valid for all men, everywhere, at all tim e.” 1 9 The
abstract nature o f the concepts and methodologies only serves as a deceptive
mask to cover the interestedness and the cultural limitations o f the western
theories. On the contrary, post-colonial theories, with little aspiration to
become universally applicable, address concrete historical realities and come up
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with perspectives that combine theoretical insights and real historical
situations. The emphasis on concrete historical situations o f texts and their
addresses make it less likely for one to subjugate a text to a dom inant theory at
the sacrifice of the individual characteristics of the texts.
As a set of critical concerns and strategies, post-colonial studies are still in
the process o f evolving and they are and should be at each and every moment
localized; therefore, their origination in the academic world o f the west should
not pose a barrier for its application into other non-western context. As my
work shall illustrate, the adaptation of post-colonial theories to the study of
early modem Chinese fiction is a process o f negotiation which involves direct
borrowing of concepts, appropriating sim ilar issues of concern, as well as
transforming certain theoretical positions and critical strategies. While the
danger of neo-colonization o f western theory over the third world literary
reality is still present, I do not hesitate to carry out such a study as I believe that
a refusal to allow a significant dialogue between western theories and third
world reality to take place, and attempts to keep the "primeval" and "innocent"
third world reality intact from the contamination o f western theories, may
suggest an unconscious endeavor to keep on mystifying the Other. Zhang .
Longxi gave a convincing defense of adapting western theories in his "Western
Theory and Chinese Reality" published in the 19th issue o f Critical Inquiry:
Western theory, when grabbed and assimilated by the
Chinese intellectuals, plays an important role in the cultural,
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ideological, and political transformation of China. The
trem endous official Chinese resistance to W estern theory
already testifies to its power and relevance. But when
theory travels to a different culture and plays a role in
the transformation of that culture, theory itself is also
transformed. (127)
To include the study o f early modem Chinese novel in post-colonial studies
will certainly change our view of the reality o f modem China, and will change
the landscape o f post-colonial studies as a discipline.
A direct reason to justify the adoption o f postcolonial criticism into the
study of early modem Chinese fiction may be China's historical involvement
more or less as a victim in the imperialist expansion o f European nations in
19th century. On the surface, the adaptation o f the perspectives o f current post
colonial studies has some difficulties indeed. That China was not completely
colonized ( except Hongkong and Macao, which respectively came under entire
British and Portuguese rule ), makes it difficult to include China in the picture
o f postcolonial studies. However, an in-depth look at China o f the past one
hundred and sixty year will be sufficient to absolve our critical skepticism.
Historically, the economic, missionary, and political interests o f the western
nations in China were incontestably an important motivation o f the imperial
expansion o f the European powers. Chinese are part o f the "more than three
quarters of the people living in the world today" who had their lives shaped by
the experience o f colonialism." (Aschcroft et als. 1) Though China was never
15
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completely colonized, it fell prey to European Powers after the Opium War with
Britain in 1840 and the Treaty7 o f Nanking. Major imperial powers forced China
to sign unequal treaties which gave foreigners privileges such as treaty ports
and extraterritoriality'. “From the first the treaty ports were important because
they were beyond the reach o f the Chinese government and thus were
demonstrations o f other kinds o f political behavior. Even their Chinese
inhabitants were insulated from Chinese legal and political controls, though
they remained less independent o f Chinese social norm s.” ( Rozman 101 )
C hina’ s sovereignty was damaged and it became, in Mao Zedong's words "a
semi-feudal, semi-colonial society." 2 0 Dr. Sun Yat-sen, the founder of the
Republic in China, called China a sub colony, "not a colony o f one country, but
o f many countries"2 1 .
The peculiar colonization o f China was different from the colonization
o f other countries during the imperialist expansion. First, it never entirely lost
its sovereignty, but in almost any place the Europeans set foot, the western
residents were under extraterritorial jurisdiction; Second, due to the vastness of
China, the degree of western dominance varied from region to region. Besides
Hong Kong and Macao, which were under complete colonization, the coastal
areas such as Shanghai, Tientsin, Amoy, Tsingtao were semi-colonized as
concessions were established. Third, China did not come under the dominant
influence o f one single western country but several, which include Britain,
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France, Germany, Portuguese, America, Russia, and one Asian country Japan.
Each western country had its own area o f dominance. One popular illustration
o f the time entitled “The Picture(map) o f Current Situation” vividly
represented the situation (see illustration 1).
The specificity of China’ s colonized status also has been discussed by
western scholars. In a recent study o f modem nationalism, John Breuilly
studied the cases of Turkey, China and Japan. He pointed out that
These three states, although profoundly affected by
contacts with the western world, were never subjected
to formal political control by western powers. The
contacts with the west help produce many o f the
features associated with anti-colonial
nationalism...Particularly in cultural and economic
matters the situation o f these countries was often as
'colonial' as that o f many formally colonized societies. 2 2
The contacts with the west not only helped produce anti-colonial
nationalism in China, but also exerted influence on the transformation o f China.
The political and cultural interactions with the west are the main causes that
turn the Qing dynasty into the last feudal dynasty in Chinese history and also
the main causes behind China's transformation from a decaying empire into a
modem national State in 1911. The western Other has been the entity against
which China differentiated itself and constructed its national identity and the
model to emulate in building a modem country. Literature of this era, especially
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the novel, not only reflected and represented the changes o f the time, but played
an important role in this process as well.
Several characteristics mark the literary production of this era: firstly, in
less than thirty years, it has produced an unsurpassed amount of fictional works
in Chinese history; secondly, the conscious use of fiction to serve a nationalist
cause in the name o f a "revolution o f fiction" raises the genre of novel to a
status o f importance in the literary hierarchy o f traditional China for the first
time and thus brings this hierarchy to an end. The scope o f fictional
representations have expanded to include a spectrum o f thematic varieties.
One phenomenon no less important and significant is the astonishing
amount o f translations o f western literary works, m ainly western fictions23. The
large amount o f translations o f western novels revealed a demand and an
enthusiasm o f the Chinese for the knowledge about the west. They also opened
up new grounds o f aesthetic expression which were new to the Chinese, such as
the glorification o f romantic love represented by Alexander Dumas' La Dame
aux Camel ics and the suspense exemplified by Conan Doyle's detective
novels.
Facing social and literary’ ’ phenomena o f such a scale, existing criticism
and scholarship have not been able to explore fully the rich contents and
significance o f the novels and to give them a just historical standing.
Thematically, they narrowiy concentrate on the exposition of corruption, an
18
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important but a far from inclusive theme of the works; artistically, they
underestimate their achievement;2 4 spatially, they discuss the works and the
social-historical within a national context; temporally, they depict a picture of
literary history of this time in terms of dynastic history instead of a national,
even less o f a world history. The critical consensus o f the Chinese critics on
the late Qing fiction may be represented by a recent critical study in which the
author wTOte:
The criticism on the evaluation o f late Qing fiction, for the
past thirty years since liberation, seems to have little
disagreement. Majority of the critics hold a negative
opinion on them. The reason may be two fold: first the
thematic contents o f the novels are very limited; second,
the artistic achievements are low and cannot attract today's
readers. 2 5
All these negative criticisms suggest the critics' inability to put the
novels in a right perspective and new critical revisions are necessary for a more
accurate assessment of the achievement of the novels .Therefore, it is the
attempt o f this study to systematically redraw the picture o f literary scene of
this era. The critical focus will be on Niehai Hua ( A Flower o f the Sinful Sea),
a representative work o f this era. It will be read as a national narrative that
gives a realistic account and subtle representation o f the Chinese experience of
the encounter with the west, an important part o f the construction o f post
colonial Chinese subjectivity. Though it has been labeled as a representative
work of “the novels o f condemnation” , this work, produced in 1905, is
19
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indeed a national narrative which testifies to the emergence o f a modem form
o f national consciousness o f the Chinese.
Like most other novels o f this era, Niehai Hua has been treated mainly
as a novel that exposes the corrupt life of the bureaucratic world o f China.
Chinese critics focus on the novel’s contribution to the exposure o f the
corrupted situation o f Chinese society, to the neglect of its representation of the
transformation o f China from a waning empire into a modem national state.
This critical blindness occurs as a result of the whole-scale adoption of Marxist
theories of history. As part o f the official ideology, the Marxist periodization of
human history has been widely accepted in contemporary China. According to
Marxist theory o f history, human society will inevitably develop progressively
from primitive society to slavery society, to feudalist society, to capitalist
society, and to the socialist society and finally into communist society. Each
stage is a progress from the previous and any social, political, cultural practice
that helps the progression is positive.2 6 The ideology of political revolution and
historical progress made the critics viewr this period of Chinese history simply
as the dusk of a feudalist society. They modeled their criticism on this novel
after Engles's criticism on Balzac, which viewed him as the historian who -
recorded the downfall o f the aristocracy in France. They believe that every
author belongs to a certain political class that has historical limitations in
making contributions to the progress of history. Therefore, according to the
20
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critics, the literary works inevitably reflect the hopeless situation o f a
historically doomed society. The critics cannot read out anything from the
novels other than the exposition o f evils. They believe that, since in this era
China had not yet a working class which is the historical subject o f a
revolution, the activities o f people in this era were insignificant compared to
the bourgeois democratic revolution that was to come in a decade. Historical
events that are not political revolutions are viewed as o f lesser historical
significance and this era serves only as a prelude to a significant historical new
age. The authors therefore can do no more than criticize the existing society as
any positive constructions will take place only when the working class, the
subject of historical development, enters the stage of history.27 This kind of
reading is the dominant mode of interpretation applied to the study of early
m odem Chinese fiction. It is so consistent that we discern a critical blindness
characterized by Paul de Man in Blindness and Insight:
In the history as well as in the historiography o f literature, this
blindness can take on the form o f a recurrently aberrant pattern
of interpretation with regard to a particular writer....The more
ambivalent the original utterance, the more uniform and
universal the pattern o f consistent error in the followers and
commentators. Despite the apparent alacrity with which one is
willing to assent in principle to the notion that all literary and
some philosophical language is essentially ambivalent, the
implied function o f most critical commentaries and some
literary influences is still to do away at all costs with these
ambivalence; by reducing them to contradictions, blotting out
the disturbing parts o f the work or, more subtly, by
manipulating the systems o f valorization that are operating
within the texts.2 8
21
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Perhaps the only difference from de Man's description that characterizes the
Chinese critics is that, with a strong adherence to an orthodoxical ideology,
they lack the alacrity with which to assent to the notion o f ambivalence in
literary works. Indeed, they explain away all the ambivalent elements in the
novels by reducing them to contradictions in the authors' political and class
position. It is this mode of rationalization that I want to displace in the current
study o f the early m odem Chinese novels. I want to replace the model o f
revolution with the model of nation building, a model I appropriate from
current post-colonial studies. Post-colonial theories provide a new historical
awareness and an international perspective that help bring newr significance to
the text. The theoretical positions and insights o f current cultural studies and
colonial studies open up possibilities o f new interpretations o f the novel. In my
study, the critical focus is on China's evolution from a self-centered empire to
an emerging nation-state in an international world as represented by the early
modem Chinese novels, especially by Niehai Hua ( A Flower of the Sinful
Sea).
As Prasenjit Duara pointed out in his Rescuing History From the Nation:
Questioning Narratives o f Modem China, the nation, “even where it is
manifestly not a recent invention, is hardly the realization o f an original
essence, but a historical configuration designed to include certains groups and
22
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exclude or marginalize others—often violently.” (15) By treating Niehai Hua
as a national narrative, I attempt to reconstruct an alternate account o f the
Chinese view o f itself as a nation from the perspective o f certain marginalized
group. W ithout an adequate attention to and inclusion o f such an account, any
account o f modem Chinese national consciousness would be marked by a lack
of cultural authenticity.
Critics so far have also interpreted Niehai Hua in the traditional practice
which bases their argument on the assumed original intention o f the author. It is
interpreted either as personal history, or as representations o f real historical
events. They look for unity o f understanding instead of diversity' of
interpretations. I attempt to practice a new reading strategy in this study, which
is quite different from traditional Chinese studies' emphasis on the "original
vision of the text". 2 9
Theoretical positions that contribute to a new interpretation o f the novel
in this paper include Edward Said's theory of fiction as active agents in
constructing national consciousness, a theoretical position that is reinforced by
Benedict Anderson's theory o f nation as the product of cultural imagination. I
also find my theoretical back up in the works of a group o f post-colonial critics,
a representative is Nation and Narration edited by Homi Bhabha. The
foundation o f argument and the strategy o f reading I take in this study owes
much to Bhabha's position:
23
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[T]he scraps, patches, and rags o f daily life must be
repeatedly turned into the signs o f a national culture,
while the very act o f the narrative performance
interpellates a growing circle o f national subjects. 3 0
This reading strategy enables me to find new significances in the incidents
portrayed in the novel that have previously been overlooked.
The first part of my work situates early Chinese fiction in the general
cultural context of the late imperial China, which was then reluctantly dragged
into the process o f globalization o f world politics, economy, and culture. The
novel Niehai Hua offers a true picture o f the identity crisis of the Chinese and
embodies their attempt to give a shape to a changing China.
The second part deals with the Chinese imagination o f the western
nations. It is a crucial part o f its construction o f national identity. China
developed its national identity in differentiating itself from the other nations.
As a civilization of over five thousand years, China has never stopped in its
search for an identity. The imagination o f the other is a fundamental part o f the
construction o f its identity. Various stages and traditions of imagining the Other
are given comparative studies with an emphasis on the nationalist stage o f its
identity' construction.
The third part discusses Caiyun, the heroine of the novel, and her alleged
love affair with the German commander Walderssee, the commander o f the
allied forces that invaded China during the Boxer Movement. This affair is
24
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more than an anecdote in the contact between China and the w estern nations.
Their story serves as a m etaphor for the relationship between China and the
Western powers that was projected in the conscious or unconscious o f the
Chinese. The traditional strategy in Chinese literature of adopting the man-
woman relationship as a metaphor for power relations is investigated in a new
context. The episode is employed as a specimen to reexamine post-colonial
Chinese subjectivity.
The fourth part, through analysis o f various episodes and events in the
novel, discusses xenophobia o f the Chinese literati and their situation o f being
caught between nostalgia for a secure and fam iliar past and an infatuation of
modernity in a changing world. Their attempts to establish and m aintain a
cultural identity through intellectual and literary activities are given analysis in
details. I also discuss the transformation o f Chinese intellectuals from
traditional literati to m odem intellectuals.
The fifth part deals with the criticism on the novel Niehai Hua. Through
an analysis of the criticism, I try to reveal a tendency in modem Chinese novel
criticism, which imposes a western narrative aesthetics on the Chinese novels.
The revolution in the realm o f fiction, an nationalist project, has been
discussed to show its inner contradictions. Liang Qichao, the principal
advocator of the revolution in the realm o f fiction, is also the m ajor
propagandist for China's political reform. The revolution in the realm o f fiction
25
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is discussed in a broader cultural context and is revealed to have contributed to
the break with a national narrative tradition and the establishment of a
hegemony of western aesthetics. The study into the distinctive aesthetic
features of Chinese narratives helps us understand that novel is a cultural
institution.
The concluding part discusses some related theoretical issues raised in
the process of adopting, or adapting, western theories to interpret texts from a
different culture. The introduction o f postcolonial theories and criticisms into
China in the last few years has aroused unexpected interest as well as
confusions. The problematics o f such an adoption, given thorough
investigations, may reveal more significant issue of the cultural dynamics of
our current world. How to bring the study of Chinese literature into a
meaningful dialogue with current literary studies in the west is a concern for
many Chinese critics. How not to subject myself to the currently dominant
academic discourse by imposing on a Chinese text a new W estern critical fad is
a constant concern throughout this study. However, I hope this study will prove
that the insights provided by theoretical positions o f postcolonial criticisms and
cultural studies may open up possibilities for new and valid interpretations-of
Chinese texts just as they have done to western texts.
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1 Qianze xiaoshuo ) > a name first put forward by Lu Xun to
label a particular group of texts, was inherited by most critics. They have been
translated as "expose novel" and “fiction of exposure” . See Lu Xun, A
Brief History o f Chinese Fiction. Hong Kong: Sanlian Shudian, 1977. P. 235.
2 David De-wei Wang. Fin-de-siel e Splendor. Standford: Stanford
University Press, 1997. P.2.
Several recently published works and articles also challenge the current
critical paradigm which valorizes the May Fourth Movement to the
denigration of pre-May Fourth literary achievements. Cf. Dominic Cheung
"Self-Strengthening and Enlightenment: the Mind and Phenomena of Pre-May
Fourth Literary Transformation” in Central Daily News. June 13th , 14th and
15th ,1996.
This correction is necessary as it is widely held that the Chinese interest in
novels “was aroused after 1918 under the influence o f European Literature,
and particularly in connection with the movement which attempted to
introduce the pai-hua (spoken language) as the general literary language.”
Jaroslav Prusek. Chinese History and Literature. Holland: D. Reidel
Publishing Company, 1970. p.233.
3 The issue o f modernity o f late Qing fiction has invited increasing
discussions and has become a central theme of some recently published works
during the course o f my current study. For example, in his Fin-de-siecle Splendor:
Repressed Modernities of Late Qing Fiction. 1849-1911. David Wang asked
questions such as “ what makes late Qing fiction m odem ” and “what has
kept us from talking about these late Qing modernities” . His discussion o f the
modernity of Qing fiction mainly focuses on the aesthetic modernity of the
novels, while I approach the issue from the perspective o f investigating the
contribution made by late Qing fiction in establishing a modem China.
4 Joseph R. Levenson, in his “The intellectual Revolution in China” , offers
a discerning discussion on the issue of periodization o f modem Chinese history:
If we begin this story with the Opium War (1839-1842) and the first set of
“Unequal Treaties” (1842-1845), we are assuming that the Western world
(in the first instance, England) was the catalyst o f revolution. But the Chinese
communists, in whose triumph the revolution culm inated, have quite another
view of it. They are committed to periodization on universal Marxist lines,
which would have Chinese capitalism and socialism, in necessary sequence,
27
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issuing from a feudal matrix; these stages could not depend on the
interference o f an outside civilization. (154)
5 For further discussion on the origin of Chinese novels, see J. Prusek’ s
article "Researches into the beginnings o f the Chinese Popular Novel” in Chinese
History and Literature. Holland: D. Reidel Publishing Company, 1970.
6 Ah Ying, A History of Late Qing Fiction Beijing: People's Literature
Press, 1980. p.l.
7 Zhongguo jindai wenxueshi bianxie xiaozu. ( A
Tentative History of Modem Chinese History). Hong Kong: Dawen Publishing
House, 1978. P.210.
8 Goldmann, Lucien. Towards a Sociology o f the Novel . trans. by Alan
Sheridan. Tavistock Publications, 1975. p.159.
9 David Wang. Fin-de-siel e Splendor. Standford: Stanford University
Press, 1997. p.20.
1 0 Lu Xun, A Brief History o f Chinese Fiction Hong Kong: Sanlian
shudian, 1978. p. 235.
1 1 See A Tentative History o f Chinese Fiction written by the Class o f 1955
o f the Chinese Department o f Bejing University. Beijing: People's Literature Press,
1960. p.496.
1 2 Scholars and critics argue over the theoretical feasibility o f bring colonial
study into Chinese context. Shu-mei Shi wrote in her "Gender, Race, and
Semicolonialism: Liu Na'ou's Urban Shanghai Landscape" in The Journal o f
Asian Studies vol 55. No.4. November 1996:
It has been noted that scholarship on China during the Cold War era
insisted that China was a "noncolonial" nation, thereby "displacing" the
need to examine colonialism. In contrast, recent scholarship has aimed
first to introduce colonialism as an important category of analysis and
then to define semicolonialism as a colonial formation specific to the
Chinese situation (Barlowl993, 224-67).
1 3 Said, Edward. Culture and Imperialism . New York: Alfred A. Knopf,
1993. p. 57.
28
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1 4 See Ah Ying, A History of Late Qing Fiction Beijing: People's
Literature Press, 1980.
1 5 C.T.Hsia. The Classic Chinese Novel. New York: Columbia University
Press, 1968 and A History o f Modem Chinese Fiction. New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1971.
1 6 Chinese Middlebrow Fiction: From the Ch ’ ing and Early Republican
Eras ed. by Liu Ts'un-yan. Hong Kong: The Chinese University Press, 1984.
“Preface” .
1 7 See Trinh T. Minh-ha ’ s speech in the panel discussin “O f Other
Peoples: Beyond the ‘ Savage' Paradigm” in Discussions in Contemporary
Culture, ed. by Hal Foster, Bay Press, 1977.
1 8 Aschroft et als. The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post
colonial Literatures. New York: Routledge, 1989. p.181.
1 9 Sidney Morgenbesser and Jonathan Lieberson. “Isaiah Berlin” in
Isaiah Berlin : A Celebration ed. Edna and Avishai Margalit. Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1991. p.3.
2 0 Mao, Zedong. “Chinese Revolution and Chinese Communist Party” in
Collected Works o f Mao Zedong vol. 2, p.626. Bejing : People's Press, 1991.
2 1 Sun, Zhongshan. “Three Principles o f the People” in Completed works
of Sun Zhongshan vol. 9, p. 183. Bejing: Zhonghua Shuju Press, 1986.
2 2 Breuilly, John. Nationalism and the State 2nd edition. The University
of Chicago Press, 1993- p. 230.
2 3 According to a study, translated novels amounts to more than two thirds
of the general output of novels of this time. Authors include Victor Hugo, H.
Rider Harggard, Conan Doyle, etc. See Ah Ying (A History
of Late Qing fiction) pp. 180-189. Shi Meng Eft «flfeM:/Jvi&» (Late Qing
Fiction). Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe,1989. P.24.
24 In a recent study, Fang Zhengyao wrote," the fiction of late qing era has no
work as good as earlier novels". See Fang, Zhengyao . Wanaine xiaoshuo vaniiu
29
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(A Study o f Late Qing Fiction). Shanghai: Huadong Normal University Press.
1991.
2 5 ibid.p.332
2 6 This is a popularized Marxist view o f history based on M arx’ s
discussion of historical dvelopment of human society. See “Bourgeois and
Proletarians” in Manifesto o f the Communist Partv in The Marx-Engles Reader
ed.by Robert C. Tucker. New York: W.W.Norton & Company, Inc. 1972.
2 7 See Mu Xin “How to Discuss Literature and Politics of the Late
Qing” in Zhongguo iindai wenxue Lunwenii (1949-19791. (Collected Papers on
Early Modem Chinese Literature) Beijing: Chinese Social Sciences Press, 1979.
28
Paul de Man. Blindness and Insight.-Essavs in the Rhetoric of
Contemporary Criticism. Minneapolis: University o f Minnesota Press, 1983. P.l 11.
2 9 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. The Post-colonial Critic . ed. by Sarah
Harasym. New York & London: Routledge, 1990. p. 50.
3 0 Homi K. Bhabha ed. Nation and Narration. London and New York:
Routledge, 1990. p.297.
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Chapter I Niehai Hua as a National Narrative:
Modem Chinese Fiction in the Late Imperial Stage
The flourish o f fiction during the late imperial era (1840-1919) in China is
an important phenomenon in the history o f Chinese literature. It was during this
period that novels began to take the place o f essays or poetry " N f— two major
literary genres that were legitimatized by Chinese literary traditions as authentic
modes of representing ideas and thoughts for the Chinese literati— to assume an
increasingly important function as a central mode of literary representation. Along
with social changes in every aspect o f Chinese society, the function and modes of
discursive expressions have undergone great changes.
One such change is the abolishment of the traditional civil examination
system as the chief method to sellect civil officials. It blocked the access of many
Chinese literati to a political career and to self-fulfilment. Their training in classical
Chinese scholarship, of which the most important part was the ability to write
essays and poetry, was no longer useful. The literati therefore look for new social
identities and new ways o f expression. Many of them joined the flourishing
business of printing press and became writers o f fiction. The rise of fiction in late
imperial China is closely associated with the press, as most works of fiction were
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first published in installment in the newspapers. It is a distinctly modem
phenomenon, not because that the genre o f novel had finally developed in China,
but because novel has come to take an unprecedented important position in Chinese
culture. It is viewed as more than a literary genre which serves the purpose of
entertainment, but an instrument o f reaching the wide public for social reform.
For more than two thousand years, fiction had been treated as a peripheral
and lower genre in the hierarchical taxonomy o f Chinese literature. Confucius, who
advocated the learning and use o f poetry, refused to talk about “the bizarre,
violence, insurrection, and ghosts” ( guai li j j , luan SL, shen # ) ” ,
elements that characterize the Chinese fictional works from tales and short stories
to novels. 1 The Chinese name for novel is xiaoshuo /hi& , which literally means
“small talk” . The term xiaoshuo first appeared in Zhuang Zi ’ s works, when he
proclaimed that “To ornament the small talk in order to achieve high reputation
makes one deviate from the great way.” » )
2 Chinese scholars took pride in composing poems and essays to express
themselves while, occasionally, they wrote fictional works to entertain themselves
and often published them under pseudonyms to cover their real identity.3 The
highly repressive ideological control over the individual expression was a
distinctive feature of traditional Chinese culture. Censorship was both carried out
publicly by the government in the form o f burning the books and penalize the
writers, and self-imposed by the scholars who, conscious o f their moral obligation
32
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to the society, partook in maintaining and perpetuating a decorum o f expression.
The sudden flourish of novel in late imperial era marked a revolutionary' rupture
with the tradition and embodied modernity. The political and ideological control
was loosen and freedom o f expression unprecedently expanded.
Focusing on literary movements and individual creativity, most current
literary criticism and studies attribute the rise of novel in late Qing era to the efforts
o f a group of Chinese literati who advocated the novel as an instrument to enlighten
the mass. The publishing o f the essays “Announcement of Our Intention to
Publish a Supplementary Section o f Fiction” (Benguan fiiyin shuobu yuanqi
1897 ) by Yan Fu and Xia Zengyou and “Introduction to the
Translation and Printing o f Political novels” ( # c[JlI&fn/JnjJLFp, 1898) by Liang
Qichao were regarded as the monumental beginning of the rise o f novel in modem
China. Therefore, late Qing fiction usually refers to the fictional works published
from 1900 to 1912.4 However, more recent studies propose a broader span for late
Qing fiction. For example, David Wang argued for the inclusion o f the second half
o f the nineteenth century into the study of late Qing fiction because “the signs of
reform and innovation” were discerned in the early works. (1)
The rise of Chinese novel in the late Qing era has distinctive modem
features. It has a close connection with the appearance of modem printing in China,
the flourishing of newspapers and the literary magazines, the establishment of
33
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modem publishing houses, and the birth of modem Chinese writers who had
different social status and functions from traditional Chinese literati.
Since the Opium War that opened China to an industrialized west, increased
commercial activities helped form the urban cities along the coast. Modem mass
media and modem printing industry started to appear in China. Many newspapers
were published. In order to win a large readership to increase subscriptions,
publishing installment of fictions became an important mean. The earliest
newspapers that carry fiction flourished in Shanghai. The development of mass
media in early modem China is one crucial factor that influenced the development
o f early Chinese Chinese fiction. It changed the form of circulation of works of
fiction and helped to bring about the class of independent writers, which was a
modem phenomenon in China.
Modem presses in China, even newspapers and magazines in Chinese, were
started by westerners. The earliest periodical was Chinese Monthly Magazine
' M t founded by a Protestant missionary Robert Morrison in
Malacca, the first volume appeared on August 5th o f 1818. The newspapers, in
order to win over readers from the competitors, published short stories and
installment of novels. In a big coastal city such as Shanghai, there were a dozen
newspapers which carry works of fiction.
Literary magazines also appeared. Before Liang Qichao founded the
magazine New Fiction Hf/jnjiL in Tokyo in 1902, Han Ziyun, a novelist published
34
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his own magazine Strange Works in Shanghai 4$, which was completely
devoted to the publication o f fictions. Since New Fiction, more magazines of fiction
were founded. They included Fiction Illustrated New New Fiction
fifU f'M ft, Fiction Monthly R M The Grove o f Fiction /JnjiL^Ts etc. An
inconclusive estimation has that there were seventeen magazines o f fiction
published at the same time. These periodicals and newspapers carried both
translations o f western novels and Chinese novels, and they greatly promoted the
production and consumption o f fictional works.
With the birth o f literary magazines and newspapers, there appear for the
first time professional novelists. The rapid changes in late imperial China
transformed the roles and function of Chinese literati. Most of the novelists were
associated with the press; some of them had their own newspapers5; This has two
significance: first, the novelists were more closely and directly involved in
influencing the formation o f public opinion; second, the installment o f novels in the
newspapers left impact on the structure and form o f the genre.
Modem publishing houses were established just for publishing novels. Zeng
Pu, the author of Niehai Hua, founded his own publishing house with the purpose
to “wipe out the contempt held by literati for novels” ,6 During this era, around
two thousand works of fiction were published. They covered many subgenres
including science fiction, detective fiction, romance, political novels, and historical
novels.
35
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Late Qing fiction flourished in an eventful period in the history of China.
Since the Opium W ar, China entered into a modem, international world. The
interaction with the west served as a catalyst to the social changes of China. In
1898, the Hundred Days Reform initiated by Chinese literati abo'rted. The changes
in less than half a century exceeded the changes which took place in the past two
thousand years. One historian thus described the late imperial China:
The longest lived and most populous polity in world history had
changed so slowly over millennia that sometimes it seemed not to
have changed at all. Certainly there had been nothing remotely
comparable to the steady and accelerating transformation of
European life beginning in the late Middle Ages. Then suddenly and
nearly simultaneously China was struck with equivalents o f the
Reformation, the French Revolution, and the Russian Revolution.
Marx and Darwin were new, but no newer than Aristotle and
Rousseau. Young Chinese discovered them all at the same
time.(Wright 6)
The most important aspect o f the late imperial China is that it was a period
when a modem China began to take shape. Literary productions o f this period
necessarily reflected the process of China’ s transformation from a decaying
empire into a modem national state.
Niehai Hua is one of the most representative national narratives, which
serves as a testimony to the transformation of China from a decaying empire to a
modem nation. Consequently, we begin to realize that early modem Chinese fiction
was closely intertwined into the nationalist project of enlightenment. The grand
Chinese narrative o f the age was Self-strengthening and Enlightenment. Novels
36
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played an important role in promoting changes in society and in the consciousness
of the time.
Many Chinese literary historians associate the rise of the novel in early
modem China with the calls from the advocators of political reform such as Liang
Qichao. In fact, the rise of novel in modem China does not have a decent and
magnificent beginning as we would like it to have. The aesthetic modernity of
Chinese novels is first shown in what were called the “novels of debauchery”
$£?|Tr Ivi£. As the first group o f modem novels appeared in China, they were
mainly novels about life in the brothels. The first novel of its kind, Precious Mirror
for Judging Flowers , which appeared in 1852, was a story about
homosexual love between a rich young man and an opera actor. In the 1880s, the
novels about life in the brothels flourished. The novel as a genre became the
medium of representation o f a formerly marginalized social class and targeted at the
traditional value o f decorum , marked that the aesthetic taste of lower class was
beginning to take the central stage. The spirit of decadence that informed these
early novels was carried on into later Chinese novels and made up the Zeitgeist o f
early modem China. From the year 1840 to 1895, few important novels appeared,
important in the sense that the novels take on themes that are of social significance.
It was not until the appearance o f the novels of condemnation that early modem
Chinese fiction was given a serious critical attention. Of the novels of
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condemnation, Niehai Hua was the most controversial work that invited many
critical disputes.
Niehai Hua ( A Flower in an Sinful Sea) is one o f the best known Chinese
novels of early twentieth century. The first edition o f the novel, which consisted of
the first twenty chapters, met the public in 1905 and became an immediate success.
"[Qjuickly running into fifteen printings, it sold more than fifty thousand copies"7.
This was quite an achievement given the literacy level of Chinese then. The
important position it has in the history of the development of Chinese fiction is
beyond dispute.
Based on real people and events, the novel tells the story o f a Chinese
courtesan Caiyun who, having married to a Chinese scholar-official Hung Jun,
accompanied him on his journey as the Chinese envoy to Germany, Austria,
Netherland and Russia from 1887 to 1891. While in Russia, she became acquainted
with the German Marshall von Walderssee, who was then a lieutenant in the
German army. They had a brief affair. After they came back to China, the husband
died. Caiyun returned to her old career as a courtesan.
It is very difficult to give a summary of the novel, as Niehai Hua, like most
Chinese novels o f its time, does not have an well-organized structure and focused
plot, as we would expect from a western novel. Though Caiyun is indisputably the
heroine and protagonist of the novel, there were many events in the novel in which
she was not involved. Chinese novels were structured more around events than of
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characters. Therefore, in the novel, stories of the activities o f quite a few other
people were given equal attention and focus. These include the activities o f the
Russian Nihilists, the political reformers, the scholars, and the revolutionaries.
The novel Niehai Hua was initiated by Jin Songcen who wrote and the first
two chapters. They first appeared in installments in October of 1903 in Jiangsu
(vol. 8), a magazine published by Chinese intellectuals in Tokyo, Japan. The first
edition o f the novel which included the first twenty chapters was published by
Xiaoshuo Lin Chuban She (Publishing house o f Fiction) in Shanghai in 1905.
Chapters twenty-one to twenty-five were installed in Xiaoshuo Lin Monthly in
1907. The novel was under continuous revision until a finalized edition was
published in 1925.
The novel was well received and was viewed as one important achievement
of fictional production. In February o f 1917, Qian Xuantong, an important thinker
and critic of the New Literature Movement, wrote a letter to Chen Duxiu, listed
Niehai Hua as one o f the six Chinese novels that are o f value, an equal to A Dream
o f Red Mansions and Water Margin.8
However, critical controversies also appeared regarding the achievement of
this novel. In May of the same year, Hu Shi wrote a letter to Chen Duxiu, the
leading figure o f the literary revolution movement, argued against Qian's judgment
and viewed the novel as "second-rate" and should not be ranked with other five
novels.(Ouyang 3).
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Such critical controversy suggests the difficulty and complexity o f the
situation they were dealing with. The first decade of twentieth century in China
witnessed a sudden growth in the production of narrative fiction in China. A
modest estimation has it that close to two thousand novels were produced during
this period, novels of various styles covering a great variety of thematic subjects.
The novel Niehai Hua belongs to a group of novels that are critically labeled as
novels of condemnation, texts that "have generally been disparaged because of their
supposedly intolerant, vituperative, exaggerated, and muckraking style" (Li 93). It
is usually taken as an important work that exposed the social evils of the late
imperial society. However, from the perspective o f postcolonial literary criticism,
this novel may be read as a national narrative, which addresses many important
issues of modem China in its formative age.
As the author had made it clear, he attempted to include in this novel "thirty
years o f history of the recent past of China". The era in which he lived and which he
wrote about is a historically eventful one for China. When the novel was written
and published, China was still under the reign of the Manchurians and it was the
last feudal dynasty in Chinese history. The first united Chinese empire was founded
in 221 B.C, and despite changes o f rulers and dynasties during the next two
thousand years, the basic social and economic structure remained stable. In 1840,
the Opium War was fought between China, a waning empire, and the Great Britain,
an empire at its most glorious hour of imperialist expansion. In 1911, China
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overturned Qing dynasty and established the first republic in Chinese history and in
1919 the New Culture Movement, which aimed at a radial break with traditional
Chinese culture, started. Niehai Hua was written in 1904, seven years before the
Chinese Revolution of 1911, which brings about the first national republic in
Chinese history. The author Zeng Pu intended to make his novel into a panoramic
picture of the historically eventful age.
Critics in the past have tried different interpretations o f this novel. The
criticism on the novel have been conducted by critics in-two camps, i.e. critics
inside China and the critics and scholars o f the west. In the critical world of the
west, Jaroslav Prusek believes that "admiration for heroes o f all kinds" may be the
unifying principle for Flower. 9 Peter Li holds that "a unifying principle is found in
the fact that practically all of the anecdotes are about a dozen or so high-level
officials or men of letters in Peking: the late Ch'ing intelligentsia". ( Li 98) He
further claims that "in short, Tseng Pu's Flower is a novel about the decline of the
late Ch'ing intelligentsia written by a member of that class with the interests of the
educated readers of that period in mind." (99) Milena Dolezelova-Veliongerova
organized a group of studies on the late Qing fiction. They argued that these novels
represent a transitional phase in Chinese novel both in terms of subject-matter and
technique. While all of them have made contributions to the understanding of the
novel, the studies of Prusek and Li adopted traditional approaches and searched for
a unifying principle of the novel by analyzing the characters. They seemed to have
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been contented with what was given by the author in the novel and recognized his
intention as the boundary o f their interpretation. The collection of papers edited by
Dolezelova-Veliongerova, using structural methods o f western literary studies,
studied the artistic innovations and structural.construction o f late Qing novels.
While emphasizing the influence o f western novels on the Chinese novels, the
studies did not pay sufficient to the resistance o f Chinese writers to the western
narrative mode and were not able to view the novels as sites o f aesthetic and
cultural negotiation.
Study o f the novels by Chinese critics have gone through several stages.
Before 1949, Lu Xun, Hu Shi, and Ah Ying had made important contributions in
analyzing and criticizing the novels.1 0 Their studies of these novels thus far have
mainly concentrated on their limited thematic elements: the criticism of the
feudalist morality, the bureaucratic culture, and other social darkness. This
perspective, though revealing to a great extent, has its limitations in that it is limited
by the discourse o f revolution, a moralistic and narrowly political one, which
discusses China's development in a diachronical fashion as simply the replacement
of the old by the new, the morally bankrupted one by a more legitimate one.
To get a new and different understanding of the nature of the novel, I shall
first put it into the general picture of the literary production of the time. Attempts
were made by Lu Xun and Ah Ying to categorize the novels o f this era. As we have
pointed out, Lu Xun put Zeng Pu's NiehaiHua into the category of novels of
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condemnation, emphasizing their origination from a discontent o f the social
situation and a fashion o f criticizing and muckraking (jueti bidou zhi feng). Ah
Ying made a comprehensive study of the late Qing fiction in his A History o f Late
Oing Fiction. Having classified early modem Chinese novels according to their
themes such as racial revolution, anti-superstition movement, women's liberation
movement, monarchy movement, etc, he put Niehai Hua in the category of general
representation of late Qing society. He praised the progressive thought o f the
author, considering it the main reason for its popularity. He noticed "a strong
revolutionary tendency" in the novel and cited as his proof Zeng's criticism on the
imperial examination system.
As we have seen, studies of the novel have so far focused their critical
attention on the political and social situations inside China, turning their back on
one important aspect o f the historical situation o f the time and peripheralizing the
very crucial events of the age, i.e. the imperialist expansion and the globalization of
world economy and politics. The novel was produced in an age when imperialist
expansion o f the West was going on in China and exercising immediate and
significant impact on the Chinese life in all aspects.
This study will give a more comprehensive and a different view- o f the
literary scene of early modem China, shifting the focus of observation from the
narrow point of view o f taking the novels merely as criticism of a decaying
feudalist culture to a global point of view; it will also penetrate through the surface
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of historical events into the deep layers o f experience, both psychological and
political. Niehai Hua will be presented as more than a novel of criticizing the
corrupted official culture, but as a truthful record of the birth of the modem form of
consciousness of nation and the process o f the subjectification o f the Chinese
intelligentsia facing the globalization of world economy and politics. It recorded
their struggles and attempts to understand the west and to readjust their conception
of China from the center of the world to one member of the international society.
The world of the scholars in the novel was permeated with a doubt about their own
culture and at the same time they still cling to tradition for a sense o f identity.
Though the novels of late Qing era has been conceptually tied to a decaying
historical past by the label "late Qing fiction", in fact the anxiety and
powerlessness of the scholars recorded in the novels represent the labour pain of
the birth of an emerging new nation.
Some critics suggest a concept of "twentieth century Chinese literature" as a
replacement of the old periodization.1 1 This concept, however, is rather arbitrary:
while emphasizing the temporality of the literary productions under discussion, it
fails to characterize the important elements of them, i.e, their modernity. It is for
this reason that this study recategorize late Qing fiction as early modem Chinese
fiction. As to classify early Chinese fiction as novels of condemnation and to stress
their moral criticism fail to account for the immediacy and urgency o f their
thematic addresses. In my opinion, moral criticisms are ahistorical and can be
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attributed to literary works o f any age. In those studies, the historical specificity of
the early modem Chinese fiction is ignored. The link between national formation
and the novel was not fortuitous. In fact, what is China? what does it mean to be
Chinese? Questions like these were more urgent in the consciousness o f the
Chinese people o f this era. Late Qing era was a time in which “having a nation is
not an inherent attribute of humanity, but it has now come to appear as such.”
(Gellner 6)
Indeed it seems that early modem Chinese fiction does not need to wait for
the postcolonial literary theories to bring to conscious the issues of imperial
aggression o f European nations. Ah Ying has given an adequate discussion o f the
condemnations for imperialist invasions and exploitation in the novels o f this era.
However, the analysis was very political. The issue of the presence o f the west in
China is a very complicated issue and it should be discussed in different approaches.
Just as European nationalism came into being in the eighteenth century
when the old social order dominated by religion waned and what then was required
was "a secular transformation o f fatality into continuity, contingency into meaning"
(Anderson 11), and as Anderson pointed out, "few things w'ere (are) better suited to
this end than an idea of a nation", (11) the idea of a nation is also a key constituents
of modem Chinese consciousness as China met with a great cultural crisis in the
later half o f nineteenth century.
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Niehai Hua occupies an important place in early modem Chinese fiction in
that it is one o f the first novels that gives a literary representation o f the western
nations by a Chinese writer, unlike the narrative histories o f the western nations of
the same period that aim at introducing geographical and political knowledge of
common sense to the Chinese reading public. It is a novel about the relationship of
China and the west. As one fine novel written under the influence o f "the revolution
in the realm o f fiction", (Shi Meng 28) a literary movement that is an important part
of the nationalist project, it is also a specimen for a study o f the integration of
western narrative tradition into native narrative production.
As a social discourse, the novel articulates things that are concealed by
other discourses. In the novel Niehai Hua, there were two kind of languages, the
authorial comments and story telling: one is conscious, and the other is
subconscious. Story telling could reveal more about the nation’ s consciousness
than other forms o f discourses. Several unique characteristics of Niehai Hua make
it qualified to be a national narrative more than other novels of its time. First, the
novel for the first time situates China into the map o f global politics and culture. It
addresses the cultural situation of China under the influence of the west. Since 16th
century, China had been visited by missionaries such as the Jesuits, however, the
impact o f the west on China had been insignificant until after 1839, when the
Opium War between China and Britain broke out and ended in the first unequal
treaty in Chinese history. China was facing a crisis: the existing order was
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threatened by the outside aggression and the inside turbulence. The traditional self
conception of China as the center of the world was bashed by treality. It is at this
moment that China was brought to a confusion about its national identity, and
embarked on a construction o f its modem national identity as one nation among
other nations.
Therefore, Niehai Hua is discussed in this study as a national narrative. A
national narrative is conventionally and conveniently conceptualized as a narrative
that is a modem equivalent of epic. It is more or less a foundation myth o f a nation,
a state, or a culture, telling the story of the birth o f national consciousness. As Homi
Bhabha points out, "[Njations, like narratives, lose their origins in the myths of
time and only fully realize their horizons in the mind's eye." (Bhabha 1) If we try to
find the origin o f the national consciousness in China, it has to be recovered
through the reading o f the novels that are to a great extent collective imaginations
of a people. This study attempts to prove that Niehai Hua is in reality such a novel,
which, through its panoramic portrayal o f various aspects of Chinese society,
embodies and represents the Chinese imagination of itself in the beginning of
twentieth century when China evolved from an imperial empire into a national
state.
Secondly, Niehai Hua is literally not a closed text as it does not have a
ending, a closure. It is a very interesting phenomenon to note that the novel, which
was intended to narrate the history of the past thirty years of history, failed to bring
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the story to closure. It would not be a far-fetched conclusion to say that as a
narrative of a nation in evolution, it naturally corresponds to the destiny o f the
nation which "loom[s] out of an immemorial past...glide into a limitless future."
(Anderson 19) . The novel was initiated by one author and continued by another
who could not carry it to an end. The composition and revision spanned over twenty
years and yet when in 1925 it ran into its revised edition, it was still an unfinished
text. It is a rather interesting phenomenon that the author should leave it in that
fashion and explicitly reveals its open-endedness. In a sense, it lacks what Homi
Bhabha termed as “the ‘ closure ’ o f textuality” . He wrote, "|T|f the problematic
'closure' of textuality questions the 'totalization' of national culture, then its positive
value lies in displaying the wide dissemination through which we construct the field
o f meanings and symbols associated with national life." (Bhabha 3)
The reading of this novel will show that, unlike cases of those nations
colonized by European powers, China presents a unique case in that its relationship
with the European cosmopolitan is not that between a master and a knave; it does
not view itself as peripheral to a center. The ambivalence towards the western
nations is uniquely Chinese and the strategies to reposition itself is different from
other colonized nations.
In the novel, the author still address audience directly, following the
convention of Chinese vernacular novels. However, he no longer address the reader
as audience ( S ^ k a n guan), but address them as citizens ( S K guo m in). This is
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not an insignificant detail and we may assert with confidence that the novel
intepellates the subject o f a modem nation.
Some stylistic features such as the use o f the allegory also make the novel
national narrative. In its very beginning, Niehai Hua reveals its intention to tell a
story of a nation rather than giving accounts to anecdotes of a limited group of
people. As a national narrative, the novel Niehai Hua is clearly allegorical in
nature. The first chapter has the title in traditional Chinese couplets:
A torrent o f waves washes over the Island o f Happy Slavery;
While depicting the Flower of Freedom, scenes o f over thirty
years are unrolled. ( I)
And it ends with a call from the narrator to his fellow countrymen:
Thirty years o f historical events,
with each word written in blood;
Four hundred million fellow-country-men
May you ascend the shores of enlightenment. ( 3 )
The Island o f Happy Slavery is clearly the symbol o f China, and the Flower of
Freedom covertly refers to Cain, the heroine o f the story. The narrator makes it
clear that the novel is more than a story about a single hero or heroine, but a story
of a nation. The apostrophic appeal to his fellow citizen to come to the shore of
enlightenment is the theme of this novel. The history o f thirty years written in blood
as the author thus explains his novel shows clearly that he expects the novel not be
taken as book o f anecdotes of useless literati.
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It is true that most events in the novel are ones o f private nature, especially
so when most o f the characters were modeled after real people in life that the author
personally knew. Except brief portrayal o f the activities of the revolutionaries led
by Dr. Sun Yatsen, the novel devotes most part o f it on events that are not
historically significant on the surface. Even the war between China and France in
Vietnam is represented indirectly in an episode that is domestic and private, told in
a song at a party by a singsong girl who entertained the guests. In Chapter Six
Wenqing was assigned to be an examination official in Jiangxi province. He was
invited to a party hosted by the governor. At the party two girls o f the Miao people,
a minor ethnic group in southwest China, performed Chinese acrobatics. And
“most amazingly they can dance on a rope while sing a very long song-poem
called 'The Song o f Huage'. ...The song included a lot o f secret plots of the war
between Vietnam and France.” (36) The song was written for Hua Ge, the second
wife o f general Liu Yongfii who fought against the French Army. Hua Ge was the
leader of a group o f women who were trained to walk on a rope, and with this
special skill they won victories. General Liu married Hua Ge as a reward for her
contribution. The two singsong girls -were two members of the group led by Hua
Ge. The war between China and France was not portrayed in a grand epic style but
was told from the songs of two singsong girls.
Therefore, to view Niehai Hua as a national narrative, one encounters the
difficulty that it lacks the epic style and manner one usually expects. However, the
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significance of the portrayal o f insignificant private events may be revealed if we
look deep into the nature of literature and its function in a society in which novels
functions differently from western novels. In his essay published in 1986, Frederic
Jameson proposes to read Third World texts as "national allegories". Conceding
that what he proposes may be "a sweeping hypothesis" and "grossly
oversimplified," he argues that Western realist and modernist novels and their
reading are predicated on
a radical split between the private and the public,
between the poetic and the political, between what
we have come to think o f as the domain of sexuality
and the unconscious and that of the public world of
classes, o f the economic, and of secular political
power: in other words, Freud versus Marx (69)
Third World texts are, on the contrary, stories o f "national allegory” : the story of
the private individual destiny is always an allegory of the embattled situation o f the
public third-world culture and society" (69) Jameson's observation is incontestably
insightful and throws light on the comparative study of western and eastern
narrative traditions.
Jameson for the first time discovered that while allegorical structures are not
so much absent as unconscious in modem Western texts, "third-world national
allegories are conscious and overt: they imply a radically different and objective
relationship of politics to libidinal dynamics" (80). This discerning critical insight
by Jameson's comes from a genuine understanding of both narrative traditions and
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is significant in that most modem Chinese critics, influenced by western aesthetic
and literary thought, fail to discover and appreciate the unique characteristics of
their literary tradition. Though they indeed emphasize the social significance of
literary works, they are unable to establish and discuss the relationship of political
dynamics to libidinal dynamics. Their superficial treatment and discussion of the
love affair between Caiyun and Walderssee is proof of such an inability.
They also failed to penetrate deep enough the politics and the aesthetics of
penname o f the narrators in the novel. Critics, holding traditional belief of the
identification of the narrator with the author, have hitherto neglected or were unable
to explain the pennames under which the authors wrote the novel. They have
treated the names as extratextual and an insignificant choice by the author rather
than being part of the text; the fact that Zeng Pu chose other pennames for his other
novels indicates that the pennames he chose for the narrators of this novel has much
to do with the theme o f the text. He is sending out strong signals which fail to be
picked up by many critics. "Lover o f liberty" J l § and "The Sick Man of East
Asia" as narrators ought to be treated as part of the text. The pennames
used to be adopted by traditional Chinese intelligentsia to add personal social and
cultural identities to that names given by the family. The pennames here have
connotations of national consciousness and become names for a large community
rather than personal identities.
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Many other aspects of the novels that make it a national narrative will be
discussed in further details in coming chapters. They include the discussion of the
fact that Niehai Hua is the first novel that tells of actual encounters with the west.
The novel give representations of aspects o f the Chinese experience that are not
addressed by dominant political discourse.
One story in the novel that arouses much critical debate is the character of
Caiyun and her alleged love affair with the German commander Walderssee.
Discussions have been centered on whether the love affair really took place or not. I
give my interpretation o f the alleged love affair as a metaphor for the relationship
between China and the Western powers, a telling metaphor that tells us more about
the real consciousness o f the Chinese which is commonly denied in other forms of
discourse addressing the same issue.
The novel is composed of anecdotes that do not form a clear picture of a
unified center. Many anecdotes are viewed as insignificant and senseless activities
of the Chinese intelligentsia that have no better things to do. One such anecdote is
the map incident. While in Russia the ambassador, who is a scholar busied him
with the study of geography, was deceived by an international swindler. The
ambassador bought a distorted map of the border areas between China and Russia
from this swindler and used the map in the negotiation between China and Russia
and thus caused a loss o f territory for China. The incident led to his downfall and
finally his death. This anecdote has never been given adequate discussion and its
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significance can only be revealed with a reading that situations it in the process of
the construction o f modem nation state.
Also the veneration rather than the condemnation of the traditional culture is
another issue that puzzles the critics. As a novel of condemnation, Niehai Hua is
expected to criticize the life o f the scholar-officials who are the pillars of the
decaying feudal dynasty. Yet in the novel, they are not the target o f mockery but are
given favorable depiction. The episode o f their gathering in which they composed a
poem collectively, each proudly talking about precious antique object they possess,
is a subtle reflection o f the predicament o f a nation in the process o f negotiating
with changes and o f transformation. The scholar-officials cling to the traditional
culture for assurance o f a cultural identity.
Some Chinese critics have noticed the blurred political position of the narrator
as he seems to embrace people o f different classes and different political views from
teachers o f the emperor to the revolutionaries that strive to overturn the dynasty. This
has been taken as the weakness o f the novel and the author has been criticized as
politically conservative. However, post-colonial theories about nation building
throws light on this camaraderie o f people that are more nation-conscious than
narrowly partisan-minded as "the nation is always conceived as a deep, horizontal
comradeship." (Anderson 7)
One important characteristic of the novel is the obvious absence of the racial
tension between the Manchurian rulers and the Han subjects. Peter Li attributed to the
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popularity o f the novel the strong anti-Manchu sentiments of the novel: “It praised
the activities o f the secret societies and revolutionaries, and condemned the
examination system and many traditional social conventions.” (97) Historically, this
was the era o f a nationalist revolution which finally turned down the Qing dynasty.
However, in the novel, a strong attempt was made to blur the distinction between the
revolutionaries who attempted to overturn the Manchu rulers and the reformists who
remained loyal to the Manchu emperor. This attempt was interpreted in the past by
critics as a reflection o f the author's conservative political standpoint. However, it is
actually a symptom of the formation o f a national consciousness, one in which racial
and class conflicts were dissolved and an emerging national collectivity began to take
shape. The legitimacy of the reign of the Manchurians, an ethnic foreign group, was
no longer a foregrounded issue. This set up a sharp contrast between the
revolutionary discourse and the literary discourse. The change is noteworthy because
racial tension had been the chief component of both the Taiping Revolution which
had taken place before the writing of the novel and the Republican revolution after
the novel:
For what the Taipings proclaimed was a national China, in which an
ethnically foreign dynasty, however Confucian in its sympathies and
culturally legitimate, was nationally illegitimate. (Levenson 156)
However, the novel provided a national imagination which superceded and
transcended the racial conflict with a more inclusive national consciousness. The
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manchurian ruling class was treated as a memeber o f the Chinese family because they
had been culturally domesticated.
Though commended by some critics for its employment of modem narrative
techniques, the artistic achievement o f early modem Chinese fiction have not been
recognized. Most o f the works were regarded as artistically deficient and coarse as
they have the features o f a transitional nature. They are a hybrid form that
incorporated traditional narrative form of Chinese fiction with novel western
techniques such as psychological description and first person narration. Chinese
literary histories tend to ignore the artistic achievement o f early modem Chinese
fiction. A recently published history o f Chinese fiction claims that:
A Dream of Red Mansions has every quality o f a modem novel,
yet the development o f the art of the novel came to a pause after
its appearance; only until after the May 4th movement that
happened some one hundred years later did Chinese novel enter a
new era. (Shi Changyu, p.395)
The novels written between A Dream of the Red Mansions and those
written after 1919 are unjustly dismissed as insignificant. As I shall prove, this
critical negligence is the result o f judging the late Qing novels with an aesthetic
standard of the west. A so-called universal critical standard was adopted. Post
colonial theories deconstruct the neutrality of literary and aesthetic concepts that
have been viewed as universally valid. The interestedness o f critical concepts has
been revealed and hybridity o f literary forms of national literatures are celebrated
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rather than condemned. Therefore the artistic achievement o f early modem Chinese
fiction should be reevaluated according to the new critical perspectives.
The criticism on its aesthetic deficiency is not convincing in that the critical
standards o f the critics are mostly "modem", that is, western. Since Hu Shi's
criticism o f Niehai Hua as a second rate novel, Chinese critics use literary concepts
from the west as universally truthful ones. For example, in his “Naturalism and
Modem Chinese Novel” Shen Yanbing advocated naturalist novelists such as Zola
whose “naturalism was baptized by modem science” and “their ways of
description, themes, and thoughts all have something to do with modem
science.” (236) Therefore he criticized that traditional Chinese novelist had shared
one common mistake, which was that “they even do not know that novels should
put emphasis on description, and write their novels with an ‘ book-keeping ’ style
of narrative technique...” (232) Judging the novels against such standards, the
novels are naturally "immature", "coarse", and "deficient". Unlike writers from the
colonies o f European nations, Chinese writers did not have the problem of writing
in an alien language. However, the hegemonic aesthetic influence of European
literature is what they have to wrestle with. The critical disbutes surround it prove
to be a representative case o f applying western aesthetic standard to an oriental text
without critical awareness.
Postcolonial theoretical positions are appropriated in this study. I in general
agree with Ashcroft's use o f the term 'post-colonial':
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We use the term 'post-colonial', however, to cover all the c
culture affected by the imperial process from the moment of
colonization to the present day. This is because there is a
continuity o f preoccupation throughout the historical process
initiated by European imperial aggression. (2)
In their discussion o f the current situation o f post-colonial criticism. Bill
Achcroft and his colleagues observe that the practice of post-colonial criticism
follows two major paths, namely, on the one hand, the reading of specific post
colonial texts and, on the other hand, the 'revisioning' of received tropes and modes
such as allegory, irony, and metaphor and the rereading o f "canonical" texts in the
light of post-colonial discursive practices. They believe that while the former has
been more closely associated with the traditional domain o f the field, the latter has
begun "to produce powerfully subversive general accounts of textuality and
concepts of'literariness' which open up important new areas of concern."1 2 It is in
the spirit of the latter that the present study has been attempted to produce a
rereading of Niehai Hua, a canonical early modem Chinese novel, so as to
reposition the text in the general picture of world literature at the imperial age,
giving a new identity to the text as a national narrative of China in the later 19th
and early 20th century global world. The cross-cultural appropriation of post
colonial theories will, I hope, also result in the expansion of the critical
applicability of post-colonial theories.
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1 See Book V II: 20 in The Analects o f Confucius trans.by Arthur Waley.
New York: Vintage Books,1989. P.127.
2 See Guo Qingfan ed. Zhuangzi Jishi (Zhuang Zi with
collected annotations). Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1961. Vol 4. P.927
3 This phenomenon is so common that for almost all major Chinese classic
novel, there were disputes over who authored them. An important part of modem
scholarship on Chinese fiction is to identify the author.
4 See Shi M eng’ s discussion in Wanqing Xiaoshuo fLate Qing Fiction).
Shanghai: Shanghai Classics Publishing House, 1989. P .l.
5 Li Boyuan was the founder o f the newspaper Youxi Bao ( Entertainment
Daily); Zeng Pu published almost all o f his novels first in the newspapers and
magazines.
6 Shi Meng. Late Qing Fiction. Shanghai: Shanghai Classics Press, 1989. P.9
7 See Zeng Pu's “Several Words after the Revision” in
(Resource Materials on Niehai Hua) Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 1982.
p. 129.
Q
Qian made this comment in a letter to Chen Duxiu in 1917. See Hu Shi
Wen Cun (Selected Works of Hu Shi). Vol 1. Taipei: Far East Books Company,
1975. P. 49.
9 Jaroslav Prusek. "The Changing Role of the Narrator in Chinese Novels at
the Beginning o f the Twentieth Century." Archiv Orientalni. No.38 (1970) p. 175
1 0 Three chapters of Lu Xun’ s A Brief History of Chinese Fiction were
devoted to the study o f Qing fiction. Ah Ying, besides his A History of Late Qing
Fiction, wrote many essays on the literatures of this period.
1 1 Chen Pingyuan, as a representative of a new generation of Chinese critics,
put forward this suggestion and carried out revision of Chinese literary history
accordingly. See “Preface to Critical materials on the novel bv twentieth-
century Chinese writers) vol. 1, 2. Beijing: Beijing University Press, 1989.
1 2 Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin. The Empire Writes Back:
Theory and Practice in Post-colonial Literatures. New York: Routledge, 1989.
p. 194.
59
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Chapter II Encounter with the Other and Construction
o f the Self: Myth, Allegory, and Nationalism
...stories are at the heart of what explorers and
novelists say about strange regions o f the world;
they also become the method colonized people
use to assert their own identity and the
existence o f their own history.
Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism, xii
On the eve o f the Lantern Festival, a fortnight after the Chinese new year of
1787, Emperor Qianlong wrote a poem:
In recent years there were people coming from alien regions,
I close the border passes to preserve the integrity of the land.
Human achievements and heavenly blessings are now at their greatest,
And yet my fear increases, meditating upon the development o f things.1
This year was his fifty second year as an emperor. Having ruled the empire for over
half a century, he had made achievements few emperors in China could parallel. At
the glorious moment of his life and a moment of celebration throughout the
country, he had a fear growing in his mind and it was due to the fact o f the presence
o f foreigners on his territory. Five years later (1792) he was about to receive an
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envoy from the King o f Britain who came to China to seek commercial
opportunities for the English merchants; disputes over whether the envoy should
pay homage to the emperor on his knees as his Chinese subjects would do during
the meeting became a big issue and ended in the failure of the diplomatic effort.
George Macartney did not get to meet the emperor as he refused to come down to
his knees. Facing more and more aggressive presence o f western merchants and
missionaries, the emperor adopted a policy of resistance by closing the door to the
outside world. He imposed strict restrictions on the contacts between Chinese and
westerners to keep intact the distinction between Chinese and westerners. The
westerners were referred to as barbarians (yi M), and an arrogant sense of Chinese
superiority was firm and beyond compromise.2 An adequate appreciation of the
achievement of the novel Niehai Hua would be impossible without it being
contrasted to the common belief of the time.
Niehai Hua is a unique novel in that even to this day it is one of the very few novels
in Chinese fiction which directly take foreign people and events as their subject of
representation.3 Though in an episodic and fragmentary manner, Zeng Pu spent
considerable volume o f the novel portraying events and situations of foreign
countries, in particular, the activities o f Russian nihilists and the social life of
German court. Chapter Twelve recorded Caiyun’ s social activities in Berlin:
...Caiyun was happy and socialized everywhere: today she was at
certain countess ’ dancing party, tomorrow she would be at the tea
party hosted by the daughter of a certain minister. In the morning
she visited Tiergarten, at the dusk she visited the palace. She was
61
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everywhere and was very popular...Big though the city o f Berlin
was, almost everyone knew that Caiyun was the number one beauty
of China and would like to get to know her. Even the wife of the
iron Prime Minister socialized with her on several occasions. (75)
2 j* tj£ s m :
& a s * w i £ . .......
A A ,
Chapters Fifteen, Sixteen, and Seventeen were devoted to the portrayal o f the
Russian nihilists’ activities, which include the assasination plot targeting the Tsar.
Indeed, for the characters in the novel Niehai Hua the world is the stage. The scope
of the horizon in Chinese fiction has never been so broad, with a setting of Asian
and European countries from China, Japan to Germany and Russia. It is a
breakthrough that has not been given adequate attention, as the act itself as well as
the representation in the novel revealed a genuine interest in the Other by the
Chinese. The imagination o f the western Other is part of the effort to establish a
new Chinese identity.
Since Edward Said's Orientalism, current postcolonial literary studies tend
to focus on the Western gaze upon its colonial subjects. However, as Rey Chow
observed, "the arguments that set up 'West' and 'East' in terms of spectator and
exhibit inevitably dwarf the fact that 'the East', too, is a spectator who is equally
caught up in the dialectic o f seeing".4 The descriptions and portrayal in the novel of
the west are one of the first Chinese gazes upon the western world, a gaze with
62
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admiration and perplexity at once. Here is the description o f how Wenqing first met
Xiayali, the Russian nihilist revolutionary, on his journey to Germany:
While he was listening, suddenly a light o f amazing beauty flashed
in front o f his eyes; it came from the door on the cabin at the
western comer o f the cabin. He looked attentively and saw a pretty
foreign woman around twenty years o f age. She wore a pure black
dress, with a straw hat on her head and a pair o f green- glass
spectacles on her nose. Though she was dressed plainly, her white
face, blonde hair, long eyebrow, delicate waist, blue eyes, and red
lips made up a wonderful portrait o f beauty. Leaning against the
door, she almost snatched the soul o f his excellency Wenqing. He
was almost dumfounded without knowing it...
m m j i , m m & i m jl, m m m , m , * s
(6o>
The description vividly portrayed the admiration of Wenqing for Xiayali, and yet it
was not a beginning of a romantic affair but remained a pure and distant
appreciation and admiration. This was not an erotic gaze and it was characteristic of
a general amazement o f the Chinese over western people and things. The woman
was not an object o f desire but “a wonderful portrait o f beauty” . Given the
traditional self-imposed isolation of the Chinese psyche, it is no less than a
revolution. The events and stories, which mixed historical actuality and vivid
imagination, are fascinating examples of giving account to a cultural Other and the
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strategies o f representation employed are revealed to be instruments serving
specific ideological purposes.
Niehai Hua was one of the first novels to put China as a member into the
international community. China as a nation is constructed in the novel through the
depiction o f territorial disputes, geographical descriptions, cartography,
comparisons with the west countries. That national communities are products of
imagination has been convincingly argued by Benedict Anderson: "it is an imagined
political community - and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign."5 and
"In fact, all communities larger than primordial village o f face-to-face contact (and
perhaps even these) are imagined."6 Anderson has not shown that, historically, for
the third world nations, this imagination necessarily entails an imagination o f the
western Other as a strategy to assert its own identity in order to differentiate itself
from the Other. "Creating a national self-consciousness, a sense of identity,
required differentiation from other communities, which is more easily
accomplished in the face of internal or external threats." ' China in the late 19th
century and early 20th century was facing both internal and external threats, the
internal threat coming from the racial tension between the Manchurian rulers and
their Han Chinese subjects and the external threat coming from the west. Both
threats make it an urgent task for Chinese people to find or establish a national
identity.
64
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China's contact with the outside world had for a long time been mainly
with neighboring countries. Its few expeditions in history that went beyond the
immediate neighbors had not left much impact on a wide Chinese public. The result
was a sino-centric world outlook.
The immediate threatening presence of the West of this time forced the
Chinese to adjust their view o f the world and to get a more objective view o f its
place in the world. The western Other in this instance, to quote Jacques Lacan , has
become "the locus from which the question of [the subject's] existence may be
presented to him" (1977 194). Indeed, the awareness o f a nationhood relies on its
imagination o f the cultural other. The literary representation of other nations in
Niehai Hua is a crucial part of Chinese construction of its national identity in the
modem world. In the novel China was for the first time situated in position to other
nations and was no longer the center of the world as the Chinese used to believe.
Therefore, before we go into the discussion of the portrayal of the West in the
novel, we must examine the Chinese imagination of itself before it was adjusted by
the encounter with the west.
Since ancient times, the Chinese have called their country Zhong Guo, "the
central kingdom. " This name, not only reflected their own geographical imagination
of China as the center of the world, but also carries with it a certain cultural pride.
The Chinese has another word to refer to its territory, "tian xia” (all under heaven).
65
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This sinocentrism became the main obstacle in China’ s journey into a modem
world order. As John Fairbank wrote in Cambridge History of China :
the underlying weakness was intellectual-institutional; that is,
an habituated ignorance o f foreign realities and a willful refusal
to take them into account. This was evidenced most signally in
the purblind adherence to an imperial policy of asserted
supremacy over all foreign sovereigns. Peking refused
intercourse on equal terms until it was perforce extorted on
unequal terms, (vol. 10, pt.l, p.260)
This unwillingness to realistically face a world order that is unfamiliar to the
Chinese had such a great impact in the history o f humiliating experiences of
contact with the West, that it prompted some historians to ask, “Was China’ s
disastrous course a product o f its assumptions o f cultural and political
centrality?” 8
Giving up the traditional Chinese identity is an inevitable consequence of
the Chinese contact with the west. However, this effort may also be viewed in an
international context of the early twentieth century when the conscious effort and
struggle for a readjustment o f cultural identity was universal. It is comparable to the
western readjustment of their view of world history and civilizations. In June of
1917, German historian Oswald Spengler published his The Decline o f the West.
As one of the first to attempt a criticism o f Eurocentrism, he put forward what he
termed "a typology of world history." He criticized the Ptolemaic system of the
western historical imagination. This criticism, which is obviously a revolutionary
66
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change in the European world outlook, came as a result o f a general "cultural
despair” in pre-World War I western Europe. The ethnocentric view of the
Europeans was challenged:
The most appropriate designation for this current West-European
scheme o f history, in which the great Cultures are made to follow
orbits round us as the presumed center of all world-happenings, is
the Ptolemaic system o f history. The system that is put forward in
this work in place of it I regard as the Copemican discovery in the
historical sphere, in that it admits no sort of privileged position to
the Classical or the Western Culture as against the Cultures of India,
Babylon, China, Egypt, the Arabs, Mexico— separate worlds of
dynamic being which in point o f mass count for just as much in the
general picture of history as the Classical, while frequently
surpassing it in point o f spiritual greatness and soaring power. (18)
The traditional sinocentric view of the Chinese regarding its national identity
is comparable to the Ptolemaic system of history and the new decentered
conception of China as one nation among many nations may be compared to the
Copemican system o f history. Both the Chinese and the Western efforts of
readjusting their view o f the world mark the historical moment in human history
when ethnocentrism is challenged and discarded. Though the west had been in
contact with the east in the previous centuries, a revision o f the western view of its
relationship to one another is only a recent endeavor. This is comparable to the
situation in China since mid- 19th century when attempts have been made to readjust
its imagination of its relationship to the west. Scholars such as Wei Yuan M M not
only recognized the existence of western civilizations, but also tried to promote a
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rational understanding o f them: “Among foreigners there are people who
understand rituals and conduct just deeds; about what is above our heads they have
knowledge o f astrology, and about what is under our feet they have knowledge of
geography; they have thorough knowledges of current affairs as well as historic
events. Indeed they are the outstanding people under heaven and good friends on
earth.” (Guo Tingyi 80) And he advised that “ Confucius take all people under
heaven as belonging to one family, and all men are brothers. Therefore it shows the
generosity o f the emperor to treat people coming from afar with respect and good
will; it shows the breadth o f understanding of the intelligent scholars to study other
customs and have a global outlook” (Guo 80) It is not by accident that it is an age
when there is an urgency to transcend the hemispheric limits to achieve a realistic
world picture for both occidental and oriental intellectuals. It was roughly at the
same time that China began to discard its own sinocentric view o f the world. Niehai
Hua provided an interesting record of the process. The genuine experience of
exposure of the Chinese to the west has not been more realistically documented
elsewhere. The new revision o f the world picture in the novel is part of the
imagination o f a new China and it marks a remarkable breakthrough in the cultural
imagination of China.
The realistic geographical sense shown in the novel is a modem element in
Chinese fiction. In the opening chapter entitled "A Torrent of Waves Washes Over
the Island o f Happy Slavery; While Depicting the Flower o f Freedom, Scenes of
68
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Over Thirty Years are Unrolled", the Island o f Happy Slavery, an allegorical figure
for China, was situated in a place waiting to be discovered by the west and located
with scientific precision:
Beyond the five oceans o f the world are places that
Columbus never found and Magellan never sailed to.There is
a great sea, called the Sea of Sin. In the sea was an
island, called the Island of Happy Slavery, about thirty
degrees north latitude and a hundred and ten degrees east
longitude...However, since ancient times, that island had no
connection with the outside world, and other countries did
not even know its name.
c j§£,
f f i v k m m i & F w m
The image of an island is a very novel conception in the imagination of the self by
Chinese. As we have mentioned above, China used to imagine itself as the center of
the earth and labeled its territory "tian xia" (all under heaven). Contrary to the
traditional imagination, this image reveals the feeling of isolation from the world
and the desire to be accepted into the world, to be discovered and recognized. The
fictitiously scientific situation is of course a rhetorical device, yet it shows the
attempt to look at China from outside, from an objective standpoint. The
objectification o f China in this passage shows a distintively new perspective of
observation. The speaking subject is no longer one from inside China. Setting the
western Other as a mirror and looking at China with a lenz borrowed from the
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Other (the use o f the scientific term of modem geography), the narrator clearly
wants to offer the reader a different China, This is a revolutionary step in the
progress o f Chinese consciousness o f the world and itself.
The geographical descriptions in this novel is more than providing a setting
for the activities o f the characters. They are there in their own rights to situate
China in a newly discovered world. Everything that takes place in China now is
linked to the outside world, even the import o f revolutionary ideas and political
thoughts, a rather abstract and complex process, take routes that are geographical:
While the cliques were fighting each other, two trends
flowed from the Atlantic in Europe: one current flowed
along the coast of Africa, passing the Atlantic, crossing
the Indian Ocean and reached Canton; the other
current flowed from America crossing the Pacific
Ocean and reached Hong Kong and Shanghai. These
two currents carried revolutionism.... though they
cannot match the young Italians by Mazzini... (p.220)
a ft
±Mo mrnrn
.......................................................t w #
Besides establishing geographical connections between China and the world,
the author also showed a conscious effort to incorporate Chinese history into world
history. Politics in China is no longer provincial but is part of the global world
70
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politics. In making historical references he freely transcends temporal, spatial, and
national boundaries:
Therefore its citizens merely survive, forming a character of
worshipping power and pleasing the foreign nations, and a
superstition of fate and retribution. As for the emperors,
they are as cruel as Qin Shihuang, Augustus, Chinggis Khan,
and Louis XIV, stupid as Sui Yangdi, Li Houzhu, Charles I,
and Louis XVL.." (1)
Here the stereotypical representative rulers o f China are juxtaposed with
Louis XIV and Charles I. It is a strikingly new form of political commentary to the
Chinese readers as it presumes a knowledge of western political history. This
formal “hybridity” is typical o f Chinese culture in a stage of critical
transformation. The equal status o f the people given in the novel reflects the desire
o f the Chinese to be admitted into the international community.
The imagination of the current world also depended upon traditional Chinese
historical conception. The imperialist age of world history was compared to the age
of Warring States in native Chinese history:
Nowadays each nation is filled with energy just like a
cup overfilled with water that has to spill out. The policies
of aggression are a natural result. Even the Russian Tsar
meant his words, how could he overpower the destiny....
For our own good, our country could only survive in this
big world of warring states through self-strengthening. (128)
« n —
- f t
& E H mm.
71
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• China is not only decentered as the center of the universe geographically,
but also in terms o f civilization. Here the situating o f China among a world of
nations is an effort to re-map China and the myth o f China as the center of the
world is displaced by a modem political view of China. China used to take the
westerners as barbarians, and now in the novel they changed sides.
By offering Chinese readers a comprehensive description of the west
nations, the author offered the readers a new awareness about themselves. "The
panorama o f life in China and Europe, described in chapters 8-19, must have been a
source o f fascination for the Chinese reading public at the time." (Dolezelova 162)
"And the new world-view of Flower placed China and her fate in a new
perspective, thus giving her people a new perception and consciousness about
themselves.” (163) The realization o f the existence o f the Western nations
displaces the Chinese in that they found themselves in a different world. Niehai
Hua describes the west in a panoramic fashion: from the palace of the German
Empress to Mediterranean scenery, from Bismarck to Russian nihilists, from
statesman to swindlers. This interest in the representation o f the west reflected the
demand from the public to know about the west. There was a wide enthusiasm for
the narratives of the history of western nations in the days when Niehai Hua was
written and published.
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Histories of the western nations were narrated in the form of novels and they
constitute an important subgenre o f early modem Chinese fiction. From 1901 to
1906, twenty one such novels were published in Shanghai and the statistic does not
include those published in magazines and periodicals.9 The interest in the western
countries was the time spirit of the age. The novel was clearly under the same
influence that produced the genre o f historical narratives of the western nations.
One important function o f traditional Chinese novel is to narrate history. The
historical novels carries on this tradition to tell the histories of the western
countries. "The amount o f these novels exceeds any other kind of novels in early
modem Chinese fiction." (Chen 266) Novels like this include The Storv of
American Independence. The Russian-T urkev War. Narrative History o f Nations.1 0
The imagination o f the west in this era is a necessary part of China’ s
construction of its modem national identity. It was radically different from the
traditional representation o f other nations in Chinese literature. It is revealing to
examine the imagination o f the Other in a cultural and historical context.
There is a tradition of im ag in in g the Other in Chinese literature, one that
goes back to the beginning of Chinese literature. The Classic of Mountains and
Seas, a collection of mythical accounts of people and things that are alien to the
Chinese. The nationalistic characteristic of Flower's literary imagination of the
other nations may be highlighted through the examination o f it against the tradition
of Chinese imagination o f the Other.
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The Classic o f Mountains and Seas, written two thousand years ago. has the
earliest record of Chinese attempt to imagine itself. The myths recorded
geographical landscapes and peoples from all sides around a center that cannot be
accurately determined. In many fragments o f myths, there can be discerned an effort
to differentiate a collective self from the Other. The records o f long-legged people
or three-eared people reflect a very primitive imagination o f the other. The narrative
o f the things recorded was presented in a factual manner as if what was recorded
were real. The recordings o f strange animals and people in the Classic o f Mountains
and Seas has revealed a primitive effort to differentiate a subject from its
surroundings. This tradition o f recording the alien, strange people and things is
carried on in later Chinese fiction and becomes one main characteristic feature,
aesthetic and generic, o f Chinese fiction.
There was another tradition of imagining the other in Chinese literature,
which may be represented by Tao Yuan-ming's essay "Peach Blossom Spring". It
recorded an accidental discovery o f fisherman who got lost on one of his fishing
trip. He found a world inhabited by people who led a life that had been the utopian
ideal o f ancient Chinese. This tradition may be termed as the allegorical tradition,
which imagined the Other as the opposite of the author's own time and society. The
imagination of the Other was meant as a social criticism of current political and
moral state of one's time. This tradition reaches its peak in Li Ruzhen' s The
Mirror and the Flower H&SiS, a 17th century Chinese novel. The novel depicted
74
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how Tang Ao, a Confiician scholar in the Tang Dynasty (618-906). having been
discouraged from pursuing a career in the court, took a journey overseas. On his trip
he visited a dozen o f countries which were imagined ones created by the author.
From the description o f the customs of these countries, the author expressed his
social, political and cultural ideals. The names of these countries such as the
kingdom of gentleman ( junzi guo) and the kingdom o f women (j£cJL@
nuer g u o ), were based on the records in The Classic of Mountains and Seas. People
in the countries lived a life that was exactly the opposite kind to that of China. For
example, in the kingdom o f gentleman, everyone was so gentle and respectful to
others that when they were engaged in trading, the seller always try to get the
lowest offer and offer the best goods while the buyer always insisted on paying a
higher price. The description of the imagined utopian societies was a mixture of
both the traditions o f The Classics of the Mountains and Seas and the social
criticism of Tao Yuan-ming. The people of these countries were imagined to be
different both physically and culturally from the Chinese.
Examined in the context of Chinese culture and literature, the imagination
of the Other in the Niehai Hua is evidently more realistic. The imagination of the
West as the imagination o f the Other is carried out in real historical context and in a
nationalist discursive practice. The nationalist element is the main element that
differentiate it from previous modes of imagination of the other, and that
imagination of the national community has its historical necessity and urgency.
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Just as the west created its Orientalism, the Chinese constructed its
Occidentalism. It is, like its western counterpart, imbued with prejudice and
imagination. Said's observation on Orientalism may also serve as accurate
description o f the Chinese Occidentalism:
Its objective discoveries...are and always have been
conditioned by the fact that its truths, like any truths
delivered by language, are embodied in language,
and what is the truth o f language, Nietzsche once said,
but "a mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and
anthropomorphisms - in short, a sum of human relations,
which have been enhanced, transposed, and embellished
poetically and rhetorically, and which after long use seem
firm, canonical, and obligatory to a people: truths are
illusions about which one has forgotten that this is what
they are. (Orientalism 203 )
The imagination o f the west in Niehai Hua is part of the Chinese Occidentalism.
The fictional imagination is less deceptive as it uses literary language, the illusive
nature of which is recognized and assumed by readers.
The west was set as the opposite o f China and represented an ideal for the
evolution of China. The difference between China and the west was dichotomized
as the opposition between savagery and civilization, slavery and freedom. The
novel often give positive descriptions to people who are eager to embrace the west.
Chapter seventeen describes a gathering of scholar officials who had personal
experiences of the west. At the gathering Xue Shuyun, a leading scholar in
introducing the west to Chinese, sighed:" If I had not been detained unfortunately
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by my illness, this moment I would be breathing the air o f freedom of the west in
London or Paris." (125)
A genuine interest in the western culture is discerned and the description
faithfully records the experience of the Chinese towards the Other. Everything
from the outside is greeted with appreciation:
You only see that yellow Arabian stallion galloping away
as if it is flying towards the bond(9);
In chapter two there was a discussion among Wenqing's friends on the means
of transportation. A journey by a steam-ship is a novel experience and they
discussed it with enthusiasm. The steam-ship represents the advanced technology
and power of the west. And as the shipping companies were usually run by
foreigners, their common business behaviour become significantly amusing:
Talking about steamship, the otherday I read in the
newspaper the timetable of the shipping company.
All their ships use names of Chinese cities
as their names.... The most amazing thing is that
the ship that goes in the Yangtze River is called
"Confucius". (6)
The discussion of the scholar officials on foreign countries are naive and superficial
despite their earnest and sincerity. They tried to adopt modem scientific terms in
their discussion:
Though the building of a modem army is urgent, yet in
my humble opinion, the army is only a compound according to
chemical principles, far from being the elements. Let
us look at other nations. Each has its own element: the
element of Britain is business, the element of Germany
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is technology, the element o f America is agriculture.
Those three elements are the life of a nation, given
different emphasis according to each nation's situation,
people's temperament, and national politics. If our
country wants to strengthen itself, it has to have new
business ideas, new industrial technology, new agricultural
technology. (129)
The west is the model in their mind for China's modernization. However, there is
deep distrust for the west that may be hidden in their unconscious. The various
encounters on the journey o f Wenqing to Europe described in the novel reflects
different aspects o f the complex view o f the west.
The first westerner they met was a Russian swindler called Pierre. He was
on the same ship with the ambassador and when Wenqing saw him he was
performing hypnotism on the deck.
On this day, having finished their lunch, Caiyun wanted take a
nap and asked Wenqing to go to chat with Cifang. Caiyun asked
Ah Fu to serve Wenqing but could not find him...They could hear
Ah Fu shouting at the boy “Come quickly to see the foreigner
playing magic.” While he was shouting, Wenqing came to the
door and looked inside. He saw three Chinese sitting in a row in
the center o.f the room; withtheir eyes shut and their heads
lowered, they seemed to have fallen in a doze. A middle-aged
foreigner with a beard, standing in front o f the three, gazed at
them attentively. Standing around were many Chinese and foreign
men and women; each raised his head and looked amazed. Cifang
and interpreters Huang and Ta were among the crowd, and they
came close to Wenqing to greet him when they saw him. Cifang
said, “you came just in time. Take a look at the magic o f Mr
Pierre.” Wenqing was at a loss. That foreigner quickly came up
to Wenqing and shook his hands, and he asked Cifang and the
two interpreters, “was his excellency the envoy to my
country?” Hearing that he was speaking in Chinese, Wenqing
said “I am Jin. And what is your name?” Interpreter Huang
introduced, “This is Mr. Pierre Schick, a well-known great
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doctor from Russia. He is also a well-known painter and is well-
trained in medicine. Besides, he can perform a strange magic that
can control the souls of human. When he performs the magic on a
person, that person will become unconscious and will act
following every order of Pierre until he is woke up. The mister
talked to us about it yesterday and he is trying it out now.” While
speaking, he pointed at the three people and said, “See for
yourself, your excellency. Are they not looking asleep?” On
hearing this Wenqing was really amazed. Pierre laughed, “This
is not magic. It is called Hyponotisme in our western countries
and it was invented by Italians. It works on the principles of
electric science and psychology and there is nothing strange to it
at all. Your excellency, let me raised their left hands at
once.” Finished saying this, he looked at the three people,
looking as if he was acting as a Taoist master, and shouted
“raise your left hand!” . The three people raised high their left
hands at once as if their hands were pulled by a string. Pierre then
said, “now also let me raise their right hands.” He shouted
again and the right hands of the three were also raised high. Upon
this applauses and praises filled the room like thunders. Out of
marvel Wenqing, Cifang and others all stuck their tongues out
and could not withdrew them back. (59)
The practice of hypnotism was seen by the Chinese as magic and the choice of
hypnotism as a representative of the western inventions is very meaningful. It
vividly and accurately pictures the response of the Chinese to western things. It is
this same man that later cheated the ambassador by selling him at a high price the
maps of the bordering areas between China and Russia. The maps altered the real
borderlines and as a consequence Wenqing lost his official post and died in shame.
This episode reveals the fascination of the Chinese about western technologies and
inventions, the dazzling effect of the modem sciences on them, and at the same
time a deep hidden anxiety and distrust in them towards the western things.
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When the ambassador handpicked another person to test the hypnotism of
Pierre, he picked Xiayali, a Russian nihilist revolutionary woman. She found out
about the incident and felt insulted, and wanted to take revenge upon Wenqing. The
conflict was solved by Wenqing giving her ten thousand Deutsche mark as a
support to her party. The novel devoted several chapters to the description of the
political activities of the Russian nihilists. The stories of the leading figures of the
Russian nihilists such as Gessya Gelfman, Zehlyabov were all briefly narrated by
the narrator of the novel. The revolutionary's plot of assassination of Russian
officials were given detailed description.
One of the most interesting episodes in the novel is the meeting of Cai Yun
and the German Empress Victoria. Cai Yun was acquainted with her at a party
without knowing her real identity. When the Empress sent for Cai Yun for a
meeting in the court she still hid her real identity. She sent a heavily veiled wagon
to pick up Cai Yun and brought her to a unknown place. Only when till the next day
when Cai Yun formally met the emperor and was given the picture she had taken
with the Empress did she found out that the lady she met was the Empress. The
description of the meeting between Cai Yun and the Empress used similar plot from
traditional Chinese stories, such as the veiled wagon and the mysterious identity.
When Empress Victoria send her maid to pick up Caiyun, the language used to
portray the German royal court o f William II made it no different from the Chinese
court. The familiarity of the language help lessen the strangeness o f the threatening
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edge o f the western power. The strategy o f treating them just like one of our own is
significant in that the author adopted a different approach toward the Other to make
it less hostile and threatening.
The novel thus gives us pictures of two "wests": a friendly and a threatening
one. While the comment on the political situation by the narrator often gives a
hostile west, the description o f the events happened during the trip gives a different
picture of the west, one that is comprehensible, amiable, and friendly.
One of the novel's important achievements is the successful displacement of
the Old China as the center o f the universe. A more rational and realistic picture
o f China as but a member o f the international family is offered. In Chapter eight,
the narrator mocks at the pretension o f China facing critical changes:
In the court there are still dancing and singing, while the
neighboring subject land and kingdom are taken year by year:
Japan took Okinawa, France took Vietnam, Britain took Burma.
China, doing nothing to stop them , still extravagantly put on its
empty air of a heavenly dynasty. ( 53)
Another attempt made by the author is the revision of the traditional belief
of the Chinese when they met the culturally Other and suggest a possibility of
understanding among peoples. The traditional Chinese belief held that "he who is
not one of our race is o f a different mind " reveals a
profound distrust for foreigners. The portrayal of foreigners in this novel
demonstrated an attempt to depict foreigners as people who were like us.
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The west in the novel is not only comprehensible but is taken as the model
for China to emulate. China and the west are contrasted to each other to reveal the
backwardness of China:
I think that you citizen, having not read stories about the imperial
examination, may not know the value of a "zhuangyuan". Among
nations on earth, only the unique China has it. (4)
The west was eulogized for its political democracy and equality while China was
criticized. It was for the first time that the political discontent o f the Chinese were
represented on the basis of comparison with other nations:
The story is too long. Let me start from the account of
an extremely savage and free nation o f slaves. Besides
the five oceans on earth, where Columbus has not set his
foot on and Magellan has never reached, there is a big
sea called "the sea o f sin". And there is an island in
the sea called "the Island o f Happy Slaves". (1)
This passage shows the disillusion of Chinese scholars about their own country.
China was seen as a place out o f civilization waiting to be civilized by explorers
such as Columbus. The moment o f "post-colonial crisis o f identity" (EWB 9)
offered the Chinese a chance for a self-reflexion. The tendency o f "cultural
denigration" we observed as a dominant theme in the novels o f the early modem
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Chinese fiction are revealed to be an important part o f China's effort to construct
its new national identity.
It is interesting to compare the pathos of this novel with other contemporary
novels. One popular subgenre o f the fiction of this time is political novels. The Soul
o f Rousseau has the following authorial comment:
let the world know that we Chinese are also capable of cultural and
military achievements, o f good government and care for its people;
we are not that type who are content to be enslaved as horses and
cows and forever yoked by foreigners.
The difference is evident in that one is infuriated by China's inferior position
in the modem world and shouted a nationalistic outcry while the other adopted a
more objective and rational position. The former, showing indignation of being
insulted and looked down upon, is one that posits China as a victim o f the imperial
expansion. The later, situating China in an age of what it compares to the warring
kingdoms era in Chinese history, encourages empathetic understanding and
knowledge of the Other.
The novel also recorded the changing paradigm o f knowledge o f the west. In
the novel are found two modes o f depicting the west. One is to represent the
presence of the west as immediate reality', either as a threatening presence or as a
welcome model. The other mode is to employ traditional literary language and
tropes to gain a sense of security and psychological distance , a mean to make the
presence of the west less urgent and threatening. The second mode is more
8 3
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interesting as it suggested a cultural strategy o f the Chinese intellectuals to contain
the west.
Chapter eighteen describes a gathering o f those Chinese scholar officials at
a garden party to discuss foreign cultures and affairs. The party was called by them
as "tan-ying hui" ( Talking about overseas affairs). This name, originated from a
poem "Lines on Visiting the Tianmu Mountain in a Dream” by Li Po, a Tang
dynasty poet, is meaningful. The lines o f the poem read:
The guest from the sea talked about the Ying land
Distanced by ocean waves, hard to prove the truth11
The allusion to classic Chinese literature gives them a subjective position, an
anchorage of certainty, to talk about foreign cultures. They take a hide in the
familiar position so as to compromise the strangeness, the Otherness, the
dangerousness of the unfamiliar and unknown. Ying Zhou in Chinese
mythology, is a fairy land in the east sea inhabited by immortals, an other-worldly
Utopia that is the object o f yearning for the Chinese scholars and an ideal place to
go when they tty to escape from the sufferings and anxieties of this realistic world.
The unreality of the legendary' land gives this trope a double meaning: desirable and
unreachable. This naming surreptitiously reveal the effort of the Chinese
intellectuals to contain the west as distant and unreal entities. It at the same time
reveals a certain form of self-deception, an inability and unwillingness to face the
reality realistically.
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The attempt to objectify the west as strange, bizarre, and yet aesthetically
pleasing is found in other places in the novel. Before Wenqing embarked on his
journey to Europe, one of his colleagues wrote him a few poems. His mission as an
ambassador was depicted as one resembled the historical trips taken by the envoys
Chinese emperors sent to neighboring barbarian kingdoms. The poem imagined an
enthusiasm from the European people to greet the ambassador :
Greeting the envoy from the Han Empire, eager to be acquainted
Blowing bugles and beating drums, they come from the city gates
(57)
He expected the ambassador to write about his journey in the literary genre
of zhu-zhi ci ft& w l (verse of bamboo branches), a poetic genre carrying the
function of recording folk customs o f people lived in distant and usually
uncultivated areas. Literary conventions are adopted as a strategy to contain the
other.
In foreign land you compose the bamboo-branch poems
The wind o f the wilderness blows on the prairie
(57)
He was advised to record exotic things and objects so that he may write
another yi-jian-zhi a book of strange events and peoples in Chinese
literature. The ambivalent attitude towards the other is evident: monsterize it,
belittle it, exoticize it.
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The literary language traditionally used to describe the unknown foreign
people as uncultivated barbarians are employed in depicting the west. The foreign
capital is conveniently referred to as the barbarian's courtyard.
The knowledge about the western nations was given high regard among the
Chinese scholars. In Chapter 3, when Hung was invited to a meal, he was
overwhelmed by those who know more about the west:
At the table, guests talked excitedly. Everyone is talking about
politics and arts o f the western nations. Wenqing listened in
silence and was quite at a loss. And he thought: "Though I got a
zhuang-yuan and thought myself a well-known celebrity, who
should know that here I hear about learning of other countries
that are beyond my imagination! The success in the imperial
examinations is really not much to boast of. Unless I acquire
some knowledge of the western learning and foreign affairs, and
obtain a position in the foreign affairs ministry, I have not
accomplished much. (11)
In this earliest novel which look out to the world, the gaze is with
fascination and admiration for the west. Though as we have discussed the
employment of traditional Chinese literary language may serve for the author as a
strategy to contain the unknown Other, the inadequacy o f the literary language in
accounting for the Other is obvious. When the past imagination of the Other often
stress the difference, this novel tried to familiarize the new and strange things. Yet
the picture is clearly a distortion when the court o f Victoria II is portrayed as almost
a copy of the Chinese court.
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At another place, the capital of Russia was referred to as the "courtyard o f
the barbarians". Although a cliche and an expedient usage, it still reveals the
remains of an age-old bias o f the Chines towards other nations and the nature o f the
novel as a representative of Chinese fiction in its transitional phase.
To conclude, the novel Niehai Hua is one of the rare works of Chinese
fiction which shows a genuine enthusiasm and interest about the outside world. In
setting China into the modem international world, it deconstructed the age-old
Chinese myth of the superiority" o f its civilization. The novel also tried to
domesticate the cultural Other by using traditional metaphors and literary language.
The look at the outside world was still conditioned by the beholder. Though the
knowledge and representation o f the west in the novel is superficial and simplified,
yet it is still a remarkable work in that it revealed a will to the knowledge of the
Other.
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1 See Chen, Xulu faM M - ^ (The
Transformation o f Early Modem Chinese Society) Shanghai: Shanghai People's
Press, 1992. P. 31.
2 For more detailed discussions o f the Chinese response to the west of this
era, see Guo, Yinyi HI (A History o f Early Modem
China) Hong Kong: Hong Kong Chinese UP, 1979.
3 There were translations and adapted biographies o f people such as
Napoleon and events such as the French Revolution. Most of them are narrative
histories of other nations and o f historical figures of other countries, but they were
not exactly creative literary representations.
4 Chow, Rey. Primitive Passions: Visualitv. Sexuality. Ethnography, and
Contemporary Chinese Cinema. New York: Columbia University Press, 1995.
pp.12-13.
5 Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities, p.6.
6 ibid.
7 Dittmer, Lowell and Samuel S. Kim, ed. China's Quest for National
Identity. Ithaca and London: Cornell UP, 1993. P.237.
o
Rozman, Gilbert, ed. The Modernization of China. New York: The Free
Press, 1981. p.23
9 See Chen, Bohai and Yuan Jin JjtiS:. Eds. (
A History o f Early Modem Shanghai Literature). Shanghai: Sh anghai People’ s
Press, 1993. P. 267.
1 0 See Chen, Bohai and Yuan Jin. Eds. A History of Early Modem Shanghai
Literature. Shanghai: Shanghai People’ s Press, 1993. P. 268.
1 1 See Three Hundred Poems o f Tang Dynasty, ed. with annotation by Tao
Jinvan. Nanchang: Jiangxi People’ s Press, 1980. P.69
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Chapter III The Courtesan as "the Patron Goddess o f the
Nation": Sexuality and Subjectivity in Niehai Hua
If modem Chinese literature emerges as an “other'” . a
“minor” literature in the global scene, it also
emerges by putting the spotlight on its oppressed
classes, among which women occupy one but not the
only place.
ReyChow “Against the Lures of Diaspora” 1
Despite its panoramic portrayal of early modem Chinese society, Niehai
Hua attracts the attention o f most readers and critics mainly by the story o f the
alleged love affair between Caiyun, the ambassador's concubine, and Alfred von
Waldersee the German Lieutenant2.
Alfred von Waldersee (1832 — 1904) was the chief-of — staff o f the German
Army under Bismarck during William II ’ s reign.. In the summer of 1900, when
the Boxer Rebellion broke out in China, European powers sent in their troops. As a
German minister was killed in the antiforeign movement, William II wanted a
German general to serve as the cammander of the international forces and Field
Marshal Waldersee was appointed to this postition. On their departure, William II
addressed his troops that “ As a thousand years ago the Huns under their king
Attila made a name for themselves that let them even now appear mighty in
tradition, so may the name German be impressed by you on China in such a manner
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that never again a Chinese will dare to look askance at a German.” 3 By the time
Waldersee arrived in China, it was too late for him to perform any major military
feat. However, he made other efforts to demonstrate the prowess of the military
might o f Germany. He took the I-luan Dian, the palace o f the Empress Dowager, as
his living quarters, which was a very symbolic and humiliating act for the Chinese.
According to some diplomatic documents of the time, “the violence of the
German troops made the Chinese people detest and fear them more than any other
foreign force.” 4
By this time, Waldersee was an old man of sixty-eight years of age and yet
there were rumours about his affair with Sai Jinhua, the heroine in Niehai Hua, who
was then the owner o f a brothel in Beijing. Due to her ealier experience abroad, she
might have served as a mediator between the allied forces and the local people.
Zeng Pu himself did not believe in the rumour o f the affair between Sai Jinhua and
Waldersee, nevertheless he created with his artistic imagination a love story with
the two as main actors.
Contrary to what was suggested by one Chinese critic that
[I]n a period... in which creative energies have to be channeled
toward fighting for the national cause, the literary' forms that can
be viewed as paradigms of explorations o f subjectivity, such as
biographies, autobiographies, diaries, first-person narratives, and
narratives that deal explicitly with issues o f sexuality, tend to live
brief lives and remain subordinated to the more conventionally
“public” concerns of history and realism..., 5
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this love story remained a topic of fascination among the Chinese public for a very
long time. Given the eventful history of the struggles o f modem China, this
fascination is almost inconceivably discordant and even comical. However, the
depiction of an event o f such a personal nature in fact has a greater symbolic
significance than that has appeared on the surface. As a trope for the imagined
relationship between China and the West, it reflected one aspect of the Chinese
imagination of its relationship with a west that is at once threatening and seductive.
Caiyun the heroine had a series o f love affairs and each one o f them can be
interpreted as having a symbolic meaning upon close examination.
Take a look at the cover o f 1928 edition o f Niehai Hua, one would not fail
to see a picture of the sketch version of the Goddess of Liberty (see illustration).
This figure clearly refered to Caiyun, who in the opening chapter was called the
flower of liberty. It also suggested that Caiyun in a sense became the symbol of
China, which was in search of liberty. Therefore Caiyun’ s destiny in the novel has
a strong symbolic significance. Her affair with Walderssee may be read as a hidden
desire for a equal and warm relationship with the West, while her affair with the
servant Ah Fu in the house and with Sun Saner the opera actor suggest a flirtatious
relationship with the lower class, a class which can no longer be ignored in modem
Chinese society. Both relationships may be interpreted as metaphors o f the two
most important factors o f the construction of modem Chinese subjectivity. What is
more suggestive and significant is that both Walderssee and Ah Fu were portrayed
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in the novel as competent lovers, while her legally married husband Hong Jun. a
symbol of the old China, was depicted as impotent. When her affair with Ah Fu
was discovered by Wenqing, Caiyun rebuked him saying “To tell the truth, I don't
think you have the ability to make me stay faithful to you! ” (149) Wenqing was
her legal husband and he had the legitimate claim over Caiyun. His relationship to
Caiyun is analogous to that o f the relationship between traditional Chinese culture
over a new China: the control o f traditional Chinese culture and political system
over China has become suffocating and for China to be invigorated, she has to go to
the more youthful and attractive West and the lower classes. Here we agree with
what Gail Hershatter wrote in her “Sexing Modem China” that
For China in the twentieth century the conversations in which
sexuality was embedded shifted in a fundamental way with the
introduction o f concerns about “modernity” . Those who wrote
about sexuality were acutely aware of China’ s weakness with
respect to would-be colonizing powers, and framed much o f their
writing by asking what these powers had that China should
acquire.6
and that “Desire's objects, expressions, control, suppression, transgression,
relative importance, and the venues in which all of these are expressed, are not
'natural' occurances, but social ones.” 7
Sexuality was not a topic openly discussed in China until a later time, an act
in itself a phenomenon of Chinese modernity. There had been no place for the
discussion of sexuality in any public discourse and the Confucianist tradition
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advocated a suppression of desire as a means to cultivate virtues. Usually sexuality
was only portrayed in fictional works such as Yingying Zhuan in the short
stories in Tang dynasty and in the vernacular stories o f Song dynasty. The discourse
o f fiction, which has always been subjugated to a less significant role than other
forms of discourses when it comes to the representation o f historical reality of a
large scale, does offer us a unique and different understanding of the reality that is
no less revealing than solemn political and historical discourses. In this case, the
sexuality portrayed in the novel Niehai Hua was closely linked with national
politics and revealed an ambivalent desire o f the west which rarely found an
expression in other Chinese discourses o f the era. Though some Chinese
intellectuals embraced the western technology and even political ideas, the purpose
was still to modernize China in order to resist against the west. The general feeling
of the Chinese towards the west was marked by a hostility resulted from the
humiliation the west had inflicted upon China. The basic tone of all political and
historical discourses of the era was to take the west as a threat or at best, a rival.
The novel Niehai Hua is by far one of the few works in Chinese literature
which depicts a romantic relationship between a Chinese and a westerner. Since the
publication of the novel in 1905, there have been many adaptations and rewritings
o f the love story in many different literary genres within a span of around thirty
years. Inspired by the success of the novel Niehai Hua , many writers tried to write
sequels to it. Though it is a common practice for Chinese writers to attempt writing
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sequels to a well-known novel by another writer, — classic novels such as Dream
o f the Red Mansion ( ) and Tale of the Marshes (7jC$pf^) all have
different sequels written by different writers— the many attempted sequels and
adaptions proved the popularity of the sotry. The novels that meant as sequels to
Niehai Hua include Bao Tianxiao's A Veil of Green Blood ( § 1 1 9 1 1 ) , Lu
Shi-e's New Story of Niehai Hua 1910), Zhang Hone’ s A Sequel to
Niehai Hua ( 1 9 4 3 ) . Adaptions of the story into the form of Peking
opera and other local operas include a script which has the same title, A Dream of
the Golden Flower ( Wife o f Zhuanevuan (H&TeA A ), and Summer
Place ( Epffn @ ) , etc. The plays include The Story of National Shame
( HHffihiS) and Xia Yan’ s Golden Flower ( ) . Among them the most
influential was a seven-act play by Xia Yan which was put on stage in 1936, when
China was on the eve of a war with Japan. It is no exaggeration to say that there
has been what may be called a "Golden Flower Fever"8. Though Niehai Hua is not
the first literary work to deal with this legendary incident, it is mainly responsible
for the spread o f the fictious story. As one critic pointed out, Caiyun the heroine
became "one of the most unforgettable courtesan characters in classical Chinese
fiction".9 The real life Caiyun, known as Sai Jinhua (the Golden Flower), was still
alive then and the subject of media coverage and became a celebrity.
Sai Jinhua in real life was also an enigmatic figure and there are little
information about her family background. While a courtesan in Suzhou, She
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married Hong Jun ( the model o f Jing Wenqing in the novel) as a concubine after
he obtained the zhuangyuan in the civil examination. When Hong was sent on a
journey to be an diplomat to Germany and Russia in 1887, she went along. After
Hong ’ s death, she resumed her career as a courtesan and opened a brothel in
Beijing. During the Boxer incident in 1900, she was said to have some contacts
with the Allied forces, because she could speak some German and had the
experience dealing with the foreigners. She later died in poverty.
Indeed, the discussion and argument over the character and the real person in
reality amounted to no less than an important cultural event in the process o f
China's interaction with the west. It is a unique cultural and historical phenomenon
that deserves serious critical attention. However, the debates over this incident has
not been seriously studied for its cultural and ideological significance, but
trivialized as an anecdote or a scandal for gossip. Most debates and discussions
argue over the truthfulness of the various accounts and the positivistic studies were
pointless and trivial1 0 .
Since the publication of Fan Zengxiang ’ s poems on Caiyun in 1899, to Xia
Yan’ s play in 1936, the constant fascination about the woman changed in its
significance. As Ah Ying summarized in 1936:
The appearances of the character Golden Flower in literature works
can be divided into three stages since the late Qing era till today:
Firstly, The Sick Man of East Asia used her to connect the historical
events o f several decades o f late Qing era in his Niehai Hua;
Secondly, it was after the breakout o f the Sino-Japanese war in
1931, people who were irritated by the non-resistance policy thought
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of this woman who served her country in the Boxer incident, and
used her to criticize the authority; they hoped that there would
appear another woman like her; and thirdly, it was only recently that
Xia Yan wrote his play The Golden Flower, in which she was used
as a central character to organize the history o f her era. The intention
of the play is to fulfill the task o f anti-imperialism and anti-treason.
From the subject of leisurely gossip of the old-time literati to the heroine of anti-
imperialist drama, the character Golden Flower became an enigmatic signifier in
modem Chinese history. What do people see or want to see in this legendary
woman?
O f all the literary works on the Golden Flower, Niehai Hua plays a crucial
role in creating this legendary woman. How a literary representation o f a courtesan
should arouse such deep enthusiasm among so wide an audience for so long a time?
The prevalent fascination with the alleged love affair over a long historical time and
from a wide spectrum of society reflects the far reaching impact of this story and
the national psyche behind this enthusiasm over such an anecdotal incident
deserves a thorough and in-depth study.
In the novel, the heroine Fu Caiyun was a courtesan who was married to a
Chinese scholar Jin Wenqing as a concubine. She followed him on his journey to
European countries as Jin became the Chinese ambassador to Germany and Russia
in the 1880s. It was in Germany at a party given by the German Empress that she
first met Waldersee and finally got to know him. Later, while she was with her
husband in Russia, she had a secret love affair with him. The love affair, which in
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the first place could be offensive and humiliating to the Chinese readers, was
portrayed with sympathy and affection.
Caiyun first met Walderssee at the Tiergarten in Berlin as she was waiting
to be taken to see Madame Victoria who later revealed her real identity to be the
queen. They were attracted to each other at first sight. Their meeting was cut short
by the appointment with the Madame. The second meeting occurred while Caiyun
followed her husband to Russia. It happened that Walderssee also came to Russia to
help the Russian nihilists. On a fine day, while Caiyun was singing on the balcony,
she dropped her hairpin to the ground. She did not know that the hairpin happened
to be picked up by Walderssee. He sent her a letter to make an appointment to bring
her the lost hairpin. She was overjoyed to find out that the young man was the very
same one she had met at Tiergarten. He not only returned her hairpin but also
brought her a diamond ring. After this meeting they found a secret place and met
each other several times in a month. This affair lasted for several months till
Walderssee was called back to Germany by the army. He did not even have the
chance to tell Caiyun about it, so he left her a passionate letter. And as Caiyun was
also left Russia for China, they never meet again.
According to the account of the son of the author, Zeng Pu's original
intention was to make this brief love affair the prelude to their final meeting in
Beijing during the Boxers movement when Walderssee led the allied army into
Beijing. He intended to make their romantic reunion the climax of the novel and to
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end the novel with their reunion. The novel was not completed as the author had
planned.1 1 This unfulfilled plan also tells us that the author intended to use the love
affair as the unified theme o f the novel. The main theme is indeed the relationship
between China and west as represented through this affair.
What is it that accounts for the wide popularity o f Caiyun, an otherwise
ordinary courtesan? When giving an explanation, critics often neglected the
significance of this love affair. In Peter Li's Tseng P 'u , when he explained the
popularity of the novel when it was first published, he wrote:
First, the novel dealt with a subject of perennial interest to the
Chinese audience: the romance between a talented scholar and a
beautiful courtesan (ts ’ ai-tzu chia-jen). Moreover, the talented
scholar and beautiful courtesan were based on actual people whom
the reader could easily identify. Chin Wen-ching, the hero, was in
real life Hung Chun (1840-1893), “the number one scholar on the
golden register of scholars” (ching-pang chuang-yuan). Fu
Ts ’ ai-yun, the beautiful singing-girl, was in real life the famous
courtesan Sai-chin-hua (1874-1936), the number one beauty on the
register o f beauties” (hua-pang chuang-yuan). (97)
As he pointed out correctly, the romance between a talented scholar and a
beautiful courtesan is indeed a subject of perennial interest to the Chinese, and for
this reason there were so many novels of this kind that they made up a popular
subgenre of novels, the novels o f “scholars and beauties” caizi
jiaren).1 2 However, Li completely ignored the love affair between Caiyun and
Walderssee. Niehai Hua, with a much broader horizon of social life than any novel
of “scholars and beauties” , is not a novel of this kind. Caiyun was from the
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beginning distinguished from ordinary courtesans not only by her beauty, but by her
legendary involvement with diplomacy and national/international politics.
From the beginning of the spread o f the myth o f Golden Flower, the interest
of the authors and readers was associated with her legendary involvement with
important western people. Caiyun was already a legend before the novel was
written and published. Fan Zengxiang, a well-known poet o f late Qing era, wrote
two long poems, written in 1899 and 1904 respectively. They were the first
influential works which spread the legend of Caiyun. In the preface to his first long
poem, The Poem o f Colorful Cloud he wrote:
As the scholar (Wenqing) took his journey as an envoy
to England, he braved ten thousand miles o f rough
waves, and Caiyun accompanied him and they looked
like a pair o f mandarin ducks...The late British queen was
eighty years old and a powerful leader of Europe, and
her majestic dignity had no parallel. Only Caiyun could
socialize with her in her inner court and acted as a equal.
She used to take pictures with the English King, sitting next
to each other, shoulder to shoulder, and the public opinion
of the day marveled at her deeds. (Zhou Xifii 133)
Caiyun in the poem was depicted as a companion and a guest to the British
Queen. This was obviously a factual error and beyond out an imagination. This
mistake also tells us about the poor state of knowledge o f Chinese literati then
regarding foreign countries. However, from the beginning o f this fabrication o f the
legend, she carried with her a symbolic status and significance. The public, the
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writer and the reader, wishfully imbued in her the fulfillment of a mission that
clearly went beyond the realm o f an ordinary social life. What are we seeing in this
woman who sit “shoulder to shoulder” to the British queen, an ordinary
courtesan, or indeed, a nation that was eager to become equal with world powers?
With this in mind, it is easier for us to see that the story o f the alleged love affair
between Caiyun and Waldersee is more than an occasional romance between a
Chinese courtesan and a German General. Beyond its romantic surface, the affair as
depicted reflects the profound psychological state of the postcolonial Chinese
subjectivity. That the novel adopted the techniques of traditional Chinese novel to
mix historical fact with fictional imaginations makes it difficult for the reader to
read the story symbolically.
Chinese critics have spent much of their efforts over the verification o f the
truthfulness of the account o f this encounter. As this novel is very close in nature to
a “roman a clef” — the characters and events are based on real historical people
and events— the novel helped to create the myth. Most o f the over three hundred
people mentioned in the novel have real people as their models and the names are
slightly changed but still leave enough hint for the reader to identify the real people
behind the characters.1 3 This unique strategy led or misled many critics to base their
criticism on the biographical accuracy of the novel and to become oblivious to its
symbolic and allegorical aspects. Therefore, most critics devote their attention to
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the debate of the truthfulness o f the affair between Caiyun and Waldersee. One
critic wrote:
To talk about historical facts, this novel is teemed with
errors. The heroine of the novel Golden Flower was distorted
by him....The greatest insult exercised by Zeng Pu's Niehai
Hua on Golden Flower is to accuse her o f an adulterous
affair with German Officer Waldersee in Petersburg,
describing him as "a handsome German young man in army
uniform with golden hair and an energetic look" so that
Golden Flower may fall in love with him on the first sight.
Walderssee as a veteran who joined the Prussia- France war
should be an old man over fifty at that time. The error in the
depiction o f his age proved the nonsense of the novel. For
the purpose o f writing a novel, he fabricated events to hurt a
weak woman who was insulted and oppressed all her life and
who had no power to fight back against the evil forces. (Zhou
14)
The indignation over the novel's portrayal of the love affair indicates the
critic's refusal to take it as a fiction. The truthfulness o f the affair is not a
consideration of this study as many studies have already proven the fictitious
fabrication of the novel1 4 . The truthfulness o f the portrayal of the affair is not an
important issue as the real event and people are only a suggestion for the novel. The
significance lies in the fact that the portrayal of the affair in the novel has deeper
symbolic meanings. It refracted the Chinese postcolonial subjectivity and their
projection of their relationship with the west.
The difficulty of talking about a "Chinese postcolonial subjectivity" lies in
that conventionally postcolonial is used to describe the post-independence phase of
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nations that had been European colonies. This difficulty may be solved by adopting
the broad definitions o f postcolonialism. Vijay Mishra and Bob Hodge in their
"What is colonialism?" observed that "we are talking about not one 'post
colonialism' but many postcolonialisms". They distinguish between two kinds of
postcolonialism, viewing them as ideological orientations rather than as a historical
stage. The first is what they call "oppositional postcolonialism", which is found in
its most overt form in post-independent colonies at the historical phase of'post
colonialism', a usage which corresponds to the OED's definition o f the 'post
colonial'. The second is a 'complicit postcolonialism': "an always present 'underside'
within colonization itself." (Patrick Williams 284) It is in the spirit of the second
kind o f postcolonialism that we conduct our study to examine the Chinese
subjectivity during the semi-colonization o f China since mid-19th century. It is
beyond doubt that fictional productions will in their unique way represent how
Chinese respond to the western invasion and how they situate themselves to the
invaders. Various other incidents in the novel, such as the map incident, the
hypnotism on the ship, carry more direct significance relating to the issues of
nation building, modernization, and the response to western aggression, while the
love affair must be read as an allegory to reveal its significance.
To accurately interpret the love story as an allegory, the novel must be read
from a broader perspective other than a discussion of the immediate thematic
elements. Comparing Niehai Hua to Liu E's Travels. Milena Dolezelova made the
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following statement: "In Travels the social theme is overwhelming and the romantic
one is merely touched upon, while in Flower, both social and romantic themes play
an equally important role". (13) She clearly dichotomizes the thematic contents of
the novel into social and romantic ones. By romantic theme she refers to the love
affair between Caiyun and the ambassador Jin Wenqing and other romantic affairs
that Caiyun had with Waldersee, Jack the Captain, and the servant Ah Fu. Our
reading o f the novel finds it hard to agree with such a dichotomization and we
believe that the love affairs are so intensely charged with ideological weight that to
term it "romantic" would be a misreading, or a weak reading, o f the story. The
romantic themes in the novel are part o f the social themes and it is unnecessary to
isolate the romantic theme from the organic structure o f the whole novel.
Some Chinese critics go even further in misjudging the significance o f the
theme. For instance, a contemporary scholar Cai Yuanpei made such a comment on
Niehai Hua: "The character Caiyun thus portrayed has nothing significant besides
her beauty and her nymphomania."1 5 Lu Xun, when criticizing the movie Golden
Flower, made a sarcastic comment on the positive portrayal o f the heroine: "Even
Golden Flower, the courtesan who had slept with Waldersee for a while, was made
a patron goddess o f the nation." 1 6
We have to differ from the other critics as we believe that the love affair
should be read as an allegory. The portrayal of the love affair reflects a certain
aspect of the Chinese construction o f its national subjectivity, its im agined
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relationship to the west. Their relationship is in a sense a metaphor for the
relationship between China and West conceived by the Chinese at the time.
I agree with Frederic Jameson’ s insight on the allegorical nature of third
world literary texts. In his “Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational
Capitalism” , he observed that "(T)hose texts, even those narratives which are
seemingly private and invested with a properly libidinal dynamic, necessarily
project a political dimension in the form of national allegory: the story of the
private individual destiny is always an allegory of the embattled situation of the
public Third World culture and society." (Koelb 142) Chinese novels of the era
played important roles in constructing a Chinese national identity, as national
identity is not a given entity in itself. One important part of the construction of
modem Chinese national consciousness in late 19th and early 20th century is its
relation to the western nations.
As some postcolonial critic noticed, one of the focuses o f colonial discourse
“might be termed psychosexual, exploring the ways in which colonial and
imperial discourse implicitly draws upon sexual paradigms to represent itself: to
what extent does the conquest of, and domination over, the land and people of the
colonies model itself upon the power relations of masculinity and femininity?”
(Williams 193) This adoption of the sexual relationship as a trope for the
relationship between the colonizers and the colonized indeed find its counterpart in
the literary representation o f the Chinese consciousness in Niehai Hua. In
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imagining China's relationship to a threatening west, Chinese writers also employed
the trope of gender to describe the relationship. The west is taken"as powerfully
masculine and seductive.
In his first appearance in the twelfth chapter of the novel when they first met
in Tiergarten in Berlin, Waldersee was almost a mythological Adonis:
As they reached the room they often frequented, Caiyun was just
about to step in when suddenly she heard a cough. She raised her
head to find a handsome German young man sitting in the
room. Wearing the army uniform, he had a red face and blonde
hair and looked magnificent. On seeing Caiyun, his graceful and
beautiful eyes quickly covered her from head to feet like a flash
of lightning... Caiyun was wondering who that young man was,
the Pan An and Song Yu of China could not be his match in
manhood even though they could be as good looking. ( 78 )
Pan An and Song Yu were classical legendary figures that had been the
stereotypes of good-looking Chinese men in Chinese culture. In traditional Chinese
literary^ works, they represented the ideal o f desirable men in a Confucian-oriented
society. That the seductive nature of Waldersee was set in contrast to the traditional
stereotypes clearly suggests a profound cultural judgment that goes beyond the
individual or incidental level of an occasional romance. The seductiveness of
Waldersee as a young, energetic, masculine figure lies beyond mere physical
attractions. The rhetoric o f the progressive reformists of the day compared China to
an old, decaying man and called for a China that is young and fresh. The model for
them to emulate is none other than their powerful western rival. A very distinct
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phenomenon of the discourse of the time which was overlooked by the critics,
overlooked because o f its obviousness, is a strong reluctance to identify China with
other colonized nations such as Poland and India. They had to identify themselves
with the powerful and thus the enemy became the teacher, the friend, and in the
novel, a lover.
The sexual insinuation was also found in other discourses such as essays.
Kang Youwei, the leading reformist thinker of China, thus described the interaction
between China and the West:
They broke our fortresses that have been closed for thousands of
years, woke us from a long sleep, entered our doors, ascended our
I •»
halls, and took our inner chambers.
That they took our inner chambers was clearly illustrated by the love affair between
Caiyun and Waldersee. The west was a threatening presence. This was also
revealed by the interesting description o f an episode which was a parody of a scene
in the Dream of Red Mansions . On his dying bed, in a frenzied state, Wen Qing
saw the model machine ship and the picture of a German Marshall on the wall, and
he was scared that the German would take his Caiyun away. While the hero finds
the west hostile, the heroine playfully explores opportunities in a new world.
The choice o f Waldersee as the foreign lover o f a Chinese ambassador’ s
concubine is symbolically significant and complicated as in historical reality it was
Field-Marshal Alfred von Waldersee who served as commander-in-chief of the
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allied forces o f seven European nations and Japan that invaded China in 1900. The
legend has it that Sai Jin Hua, who after the death o f her husband fled the family to
open a brothel in Beijing, assisted the allied armies purchasing food from the local
people. As a social celebrity who had experiences in dealing with the westerners,
she could be in the position to help the occupying forces. This could be the reason
that started the fictional love affair. As the commander, Walderssee in a sense is the
symbol o f the power of the west in the Chinese eyes.. The critics used the fact that
he was in real life an old man when Caiyun was in Germany to deny the fact that
the affair is possible. This interpretative effort clearly misses the point. Whether it
is factual or not is not of importance. The choice is artistic and symbolic. Critics
and scholars have spent much effort to prove the alleged affair is but a fabricated
story. However, they have not probed into the reason why Zeng Pu took over the
story and gave it an extravagant portrayal. It is the story between them, rather than
the story between Caiyun and the Zhuang Yuan, which is the more important theme
of the story. We find it necessary to disagree with critics who holds that the theme
of retribution is the main theme o f the story and one that provides the frame for the
story. Compared to the weight given to the treatment o f the love affair, the motif of
historical retribution is a less representative ideological attitude of the novel as
some critics observed. (Delozlova 12)
The ambivalence towards the west in the novel is a truthful representation of
the Chinese response towards the west. The West is seen as at the same time a
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source of humiliation and violence, and a source o f energy and model for
emulation. In the story, the comment on not losing the face o f the Chinese comes
from a servant when Caiyun was having an affair with another servant. However,
no accusation was made on the affair between Caiyun and Waldersee. It is
surprising to find that the love affair with Waldersee was depicted without slightest
indignation or condemnation, but with tenderness, affection, and sympathy instead.
In Chapter Eighteen, when Caiyun was about to go back to China, she was eager to
meet Waldersee again and to bid him fairwell. Waldersee was also called to return
to Germany and they were not able to meet each other. Under the pen of Zeng Pu,
Waldersee left a letter full of amorous feelings:
To lovely Madame Caiyun: while deep in sorrow finding out
about your departure from the newspaper, I myself am going to
return to the service o f the king. Alas! How unfortunate we two
are! Our love for the past ten months is coming to an end and I
have no place to shed my tears for separation...Now you are
leaving and I am also returning to my country! Thousands of
miles of waves lie between us and my love for you will last a
hundred years. I shall only see you again in dreams. Please
kindly let me know about your situation when it is convenient.
( 121)
There is no doubt that "under his pen, Waldersee is handsome, loving, and
outstanding. His filthy deeds with the ambassador’ s wife were portrayed with
appealing affection." (Ge 523) One Chinese critic thus expressed his puzzlement
and indignation, noticing the discrepancy in the novel between the explicit
nationalist comments by the narrator and the portrayal of the "enemy":
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The discontent for imperialism that the author expressed in
his narrative comments are washed away completely in his
concrete portrayal of the characters and plot o f the story. (Ge
524)
This puzzlement reveals a great discrepancy between the imagination o f the
relationship with the west in fiction and that in other discourses. To this day in
China's historical and political discourse, almost all accounts o f China's meeting
with the west characterize the process as one o f active nationalist resistance to the
western invasion. The presence of the west in China since mid- 19th century has
been denounced not as an inevitable consequence of the globalization of capitalist
economy but as ill-intended sadistic violence on the sovereignty o f China. Even the
role of economic interests are understated. The reaction of the Chinese towards the
west has been oversimplified as total rejection and resistance. The novel, which
made its first appearance four years after the invasion of Allied army, seems to have
a different story to tell. We have to acknowledge the contribution o f the novel for
its faithful and comprehensive representation o f the complicated impact left on
Chinese by the historical encounter with the west.
The portrayal o f Waldersee is significant in that he is not depicted as a dandy
boy who seeks opportunities of sexual conquest. Though the novel supposedly
depicted a young Waldersee a decade before his military expedition to China, he
was not negatively portrayed in the slightest. Instead he was depicted positively as
being a sympathizer of the Russian nihilists and active supporter o f their political
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revolt against the tsar. Before Waldersee entered Peking as a victor, he held a
parade in Shanghai. The parade was a news event in Shanghai, an event that could
not have escaped the attention o f Zeng Pu as he was then living in Shanghai.
Wilderness ’ s romance with Caiyun has not the slightest flavor of a sexual
conquest. Caiyun was as eager to embrace the affair if not more enthusiastic about
it. The prevalent discourse of the time addressed China as "an old and big empire"
(laoda diguo and advocated the birth o f "a young China" (Shaonian
zhongguo It is not difficult to discern a similarity between the depiction
of Waldersee and the rhetorical depiction of an expected new China. The west was
concretized in the figure o f Waldersee as young, fresh, energetic, and powerful, a
model for China to emulate.
The other side o f this romantic relationship is Caiyun, the heroine of the novel. It
would be hard to accept the observation that this concubine o f the ambassador, a
former courtesan, should be the symbol of China. Yet Caiyun is indeed the symbol
of China and it is clearly suggested in the opening chapter o f the novel. Observing
the traditional practice of Chinese novel, the title o f this chapter is a couplet:
A Sudden Wave Drowning the Happy Slave Island
Thirty Years of Shadowy Story Embodied in the Liberty Flower
Here the Liberty Flower clearly refers to Caiyun. A further proof of this
identification is supported by the fact that when it was republished in 1928, the
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novel had as its cover the silhouette of the Goddess of Liberty, alluding to the
heroine, (see Appendix 1) This further supports our observation that the heroine
Caiyun was indeed the Liberty Flower in the title o f the opening chapter. It also
shows the complicity of the construction of the colonial or post-colonial
subjectivity of Chinese. How did a courtesan become the Patron Goddess of the
nation? What is the mechanism o f the allegory?
In an account o f the origination of the novel, Zeng Up clearly stated his
intention to write a novel that is about a nation rather than a story about a courtesan:
This work was not initiated by me but by Lover of
Freedom. He is no other than my friend Mr.Jin
Songchen. He started this novel and wrote four or
five chapters when I was establishing my publishing
house of novels to promote translations o f foreign
novels. He sent me the manuscript. After reading it
Flower of Shanghai. I intended otherwise, attempting
to use the heroine as a thread to depict comprehensively
the history o f the past thirty years, not directly but
using interesting anecdotes as backgrounds to
historical events and thus a broad scheme.
I found the topic a very good one. But his original
version lays too much emphasis on the heroine, telling
merely a story o f a legendary courtesan with some
related current events. At its best, it may be matched
to The Peach-blossom Fan about Li Xiangjun, or Seasoned
Beauty about Chen Yuanyuan. Thus written, its artistry
would not surpass that of The Adventures of the Flower
of Shanghai. Mv intention was different. I wanted to use the
heroine as the thread to carry extensively the history of the past
thirty years. I would not directly portray these events but to
portray interesting anecdotes to provide background for these
events. My scheme would be of a more grand scale. (128)
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That Caiyun has an identity as the representative of China finds a strong suggestion
in another small but significant detail in the novel. The often neglected interesting
detail in the novel suggested the symbolic significance of the heroine and reveals a
more subtle social-psychological complexity o f such a representation.
The story goes like this: the official first wife of the ambassador declined the
opportunity to accompany the ambassador to Europe and sent Caiyun instead. She
loaned the costume, given by the emperor to important official’ s family as a symbol
of order, to Caiyun. The costume carries with it symbolically the imperial dignity,
honor, and feudalistic class order. (Chapter 9) The reason o f her decision not to go
is very interesting. When Wenqing came back to inform her his new mission as an
imperial envoy, they had such a conversation:
“This time it will be imposed on you a long journey!
I am worried if your weak health can endure the
hardship.” said Wenqing.
His wife smiled. “You don't have to worry about
it. My health is only a secondary concern. I heard
that according to western customs, even you
are an ambassador’ s wife, you still have to
meet guests, shake hands and exchange kisses.
I was bom of a decent family and shall
not be descended to practice that. I have been
trying to find a substitute to serve you.” ( 54)
The identity of the substitute Caiyun as a former courtesan seems make them feel
comfortable as to be appropriate to carry those socializing activities and be
subjected to possible taint by the westerners.
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Her relationship with Waldersee is a trope for the relationship o f China with
the west, because it reflected both a subconscious recognition o f the subjection of
China to the power o f the West and an unnamed desire to be accepted into the
world which was dominated by the West. Caiyun being a symbol o f the
transforming China, her flirtatious relationship with the servant and the actor
represents the corrosion o f the old order and the advent o f a democracy. In the end
o f the second edition o f the novel, the escape of Caiyun from the family of
Zhuangyuan is clearly a gesture of getting independence and freedom from the
feudalist order. In the title o f the last chapter, her escape was poetically compared to
a bird freed from a cage, (qingyang gang haoniao lilong .) Hence
the completion of the plot o f the journey of the Liberty Flower. Her personal
destiny becomes the trope for the destiny o f a nation. The political position o f Zeng
Pu determines that the break up with the traditional China he conceived can only be
a guilty yet triumphant betrayal to the old order. The ending suggests hope and
victory: a different yet meaningful portrayal of the historical fate o f a nation that
suggests an alternative to a revolution.
The depiction o f the heroine in this novel marks a radical turn o f the Chinese
narrative tradition in addressing the relationship between women and the nation. It
is an unobtrusive subversion o f the traditional theme o f “femme fatale” —
"women as the origin o f disaster In traditional Chinese literature
women, especially beautiful women, were always viewed as hidden threats to the
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stability and welfare o f the state. This tradition goes back to the stories of Baosi,
Yang Yuhuan, who seduce the emperors with their beauty, and thus overturn the
empire. Beautiful Face are the Perilous water that will overturn a kingdom. Though
there is still a residue of the traditional blame on women for political losses in the
suggestion that Caiyun embezzled money when assisting Wen Qing to purchase the
map, it is consciously or unconsciously repressed. A break up with the traditional
allegory o f women as the origin o f disaster has been replaced. She is not the hidden
threat to the state. She is the state. In the novel Caiyun was commended as "the
Cleopatra o f Asia" (79) by the Empress Victoria of Germany and received
recognition as one o f her own kind. This subversion of the traditional relationship
of women and power was not well received by the critics. Commenting on a play
adapted from the story, Lu Xun ruthlessly mocked at such an effort: "that whore
who had slept with Commander Waldersee has now become the patron Goddess of
China".1 8 Lu X un’ s remark revealed his own unconscious bias towards women’ s
role in Chinese society. In a traditional patriarchal society of male dominance, a
woman of a lower social class could not be at the central stage o f history.
Given such a social context, one may more appreciate Zeng Pu’ s portrayal
of Caiyun in the novel. Not only Caiyun, but other women were given positive
depiction. It is a systematic effort to put the spotlight on the supressed class of
women throughout the novel. The empowerment of women in a changing society is
an important part o f Chinese modernity.
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Caiyun ’ s diplomatic ingenuity and dexterity were set in sharp contrast
against Wen Qing ’ s clumsiness. While Wen Qing withdrew into his study and
seemed to be somewhat paralyzed in a foreign country, it was Caiyun who actively
associated with the upper class of Germany. She won the affection and friendship
of many, and became a guest at Empress Victoria’ s inner chamber.
This empowerment o f women is also reflected in the depiction of other
women characters. Xia Yali, the Russian nihilist revolutionary, was portrayed as
brave, selfless, and idealistic. She gave her life for the cause of overturning the Tsar
and was admired by her comrades.
The portrayal of the female characters in the novel is revolutionary, or at least
subversive, in the Chinese literary context, as it gives a radically new trope of the
relationship between women and the state.
It is significant to observe that women played an important role in the
situation when a form of national rivalry took place. The novel gives us another
interesting story about how Chinese women outwitted the westerners in a contest.
Wen Qing told this story to Caiyun about how the wife o f Zeng Xiaohou, a former
ambassador to England, won the top prize at a craft show at a private garden party
of the English upper class. The husband advised her not to attend the show because
they could produce nothing that would win honor for China. She surprised him by
setting up a booth displaying Chinese tea- wares and by offering tea to those thirsty
guests on a sunny afternoon, she won the top prize.
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The ingenuity and creativity o f women was set in sharp contrast against the
husband's inability and passiveness in a foreign country. While back in China
women were silenced and suppressed and could not show their talents, they were
liberated and became creative and talented. They were put out there at the front to
deal with a fearful, alien, and threatening world.
Some people may believe that it is a modem and western practice to use
gender as a trope for the relationship between the oppressed and the oppressor. In
fact, Zeng Pu’ s use of male-female relationship as a trope for the relationship
between China and the West owes much to the tradition of Chinese literature.
Jameson's theory' of third world literature as national allegory is a discerning
observation and this theoretical observation may be supported by historical
investigations. The use of allegory in the novel is not a new invention, but a
traditional narrative strategy- to serve a nationalist purpose. The use o f male-female
relationship as a metaphor for a power relationship between the dominating and the
dominated is a tradition of Chinese literature that dates back to the very beginning
of Chinese literature: The Book o f Songs (shi jing) and The Songs of Chu (chu ci).
In his monumental long poem The Poem of Sorrow , Qu Yuan compared himself to
a concubine o f the king and resented the king for ignoring him. The powerful king
was represented as the masculine figure while all his political subjects were
depicted as women who competed for the attention o f the male. This traditional
literary practice has widely been used in poetry' rather than fiction. However, in
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Chinese fiction, we do have works by Chinese writers who portray their
relationship to the neibouring small kingdoms as that of a male-female relationship.
The recurrent theme of the “kingdom o f women” in Chinese literature is
more than a Iibidinal fantasy. Instead it also reflects Chinese imagination of other
nations when itself was a powerful empire. One representative is the episode o f the
kingdom of women in the classic A Joumev to the West, a novel based on the real
expedition of a Buddhist monk o f Tang Dynasty who made his journey to India to
get Buddhist Sutras. The novel tells that on his way to India, he passed this
kingdom of women whose people were all women. The queen was eager to offer
the monk herself and her kingdom. It was during Tang dynasty that one most
powerful empire in Chinese history was established. Using male-female
relationship to represent relationship between nations is not an alien practice in
Chinese literature. The trope has been a traditional rhetorical device in Chinese
literature.
In modem world literatures, the orient has been constantly feminized when
facing the aggressive and threatening west. Madame Butterfly is such a
representative.1 9 As we have discussed, this feminization o f the east is not just a
western imagination. Oriental writers also participated in the construction of such a
myth. The association between femininity and the colonized Other is not just a
western invention, there is also a association between masculinity and the European
power by oriental writers. It is not always true that the powerful aggressors will
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necessarily assume the role o f the masculine. The strategy has been adapted to
different situations to serve various ideological purposes. As one critic pointed out:
“One theoretical approach to the gendering of colonialist discourse
has what can be termed an ideological focus. This involves scrutiny
of the ways in which imperialist and colonial discourses explicitly
feature gender relations; The mapping of the racial dynamics of
sexuality is another aspect o f ideological exploration: critics as
diverse as Frantz Fanon and the African-American Angela Davis
have explored the ways in which colonialism in practice as in
ideology draws upon a mythology of the black male sexual threat to
white femininity to legitimate itself” (William 193)
Oriental writers ’ femininizing the native facing the aggressive western could also
be a complicated ideological maneuver. There is a difference in the motivation to
create such a myth. While the western writers feminize the orient out of their
subjection of the female to an inferior position in the power relationship, the
oriental writers may have rooted their imagination in the traditional philosophical
belief of the yin-yang system in which the yin (feminine) overcomes the yang
(masculine). The final subjugation o f the powerful masculine by the irresistance
and perseverance of the feminine is taken as the natural law o f the universe.
Therefore, the allegorical relationship used to depict relationship among nations
does not have to be humiliating and embarrassing to a Chinese writer. Besides a
certain degree of self-pity and narcissism, the allegorical structure carries with it
elements of self-deception.
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It should be interesting to notice that in a later chapter of the novel the
relationship is reversed when the Chinese comprado Chen married two wives, one
English and the other French, and the two women fought over him and almost
ended in a duel. Chen was a Chinese student who had spent some years studing in
France. As the novel described.
He was already a distinguished young man who knew everything
about both China and the foreign countries and one whose talents
and brilliance could not be hidden. Then Francis, a beautiful
French girl student, fell in love with him and they got married.
And she was the French wife... He wrote many novels and plays
which were very popular in Paris. While the Chinese did not think
much o f his works, the French literary circle marveled at his work
and did not expect that China could have produced such a talented
person. Especially, a group o f fashionable French girls surrounded
him like butterflies and bees, and he was more than pleased to
accomodate them. (243)
This episode may reveal that the author could have been conscious of his use
of male-female relationship to portray relationship between nations and he found it
necessary to compensate for the metaphor to balance the power relationship.
The allegorical relationship may present to us a new way of imagination of
the relationship between imperialist nations and the victims of their aggression. The
relationship between the Third World nations and the First World imperialist
nations has often been polarized as a simple one of aggression and anti-aggression
in China. As a mode of analysis, postcolonial criticism “attempts to revise those
nationalist or ‘ nativist’ pedagogies that set up the relation of Third World and
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First World in a binary- structure of opposition. The postcolonial perspective resists
the attempt at holistic forms o f social explanation. It enforces a recognition of the
more complex cultural and political boundaries that exist on the cusp o f these often
opposed political spheres.” 20 The imagination o f the relationship between China
and the west in Niehai Hua offers an alternative: it is not necessarily the
relationship between a master and a slave or the conqueror and the conquered as we
may find in most colonial cases. The West represented some thing secretly desired
by the oriental nations. As we have discussed, that China was not a fully colonized
country enables the Chinese to take a unique position in the history o f European
expansion. As one Chinese critic recently observed, "the absence o f a tight-fitting
colonial structure also afforded Chinese intellectuals ideological, political, and
cultural options beyond the typical Manichean choices o f anticolonial nationalism
or antinationalist collaboration." 2 1
The use of male-female relationship as a trope for power relations is no
novel phenomenon in the history o f Chinese literature. However, this novel
embodies a significant deviation from a theme o f traditional Chinese literature in
which the adventure into a new world would always mean the sexual conquest by
men. That Caiyun became the protagonist of the journey to the west in Niehai Hua
has another significance: it announces the end of a tradition of Chinese stories
which often represent a journey as one of male conquest. There is a line o f fictional
works in Chinese literature which take journey into an alien land as their themes.
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This tradition started from the earliest legendary tales o f the journey o f the ancient
king Zhou Mu Wang who traveled to the west to m eet the Mother Queen of
West This story, recorded in The Storv of Mu the Son o f Heaven
was written during the Warring States period in the fourth century B.C.
The king went on an expedition of conquest and he met the Mother Queen of the
West. He was entertained by the Queen with a banquet and he was happy to such
an extent that he almost forgot to return.2 2 This story has been viewed as mythology
by Chinese critics. Though not explicit, the sexual implication is clearly there. This
is the earliest story in Chinese fiction which associates sexual conquest with a
journey of expedition. In the tales of Six Dynasties (5th century), this motif surfaced
again in the story o f Ruan Zhao and Liu Chen. On a journey to collect herb
medicine, Run run into several goddesses and was invited by these immortal to
their house hold. It became a repeated theme in Chinese poetry and fiction, and to a
certain extent an exemplary representation o f Chinese male fantasy.
Tang dynasty's "you xian ku" ( {ill M3 , the classical novel A Journey to
the West in the Ming Dynasty, are all representative of this theme. The first story
tells how a scholar accidently entered an unknown place and had love affairs with
several ladies who turn out to be immortal goddesses. In A Journey to the West.
while on his journey to the west to fetch Buddhist sutras, Monk Tripitaka was
kidnapped by the queen o f the kingdom of women and almost forced to marry the
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queen. Both stories represent the male fantasy for sexual conquest in traditional
Chinese literature.
However, in this novel the hero Jing Wenqing became remarkably inactive
and paralyzed in a unfamiliar world. Except for a very brief moment on the ship
when he encouraged the hypnotist to choose Xia Yali, the Russian nihilist
revolutionary, to be the subject of hypnotism, he had no romantic activity at all.
Therefore the male-female relationship is an imaginative device not just for the
colonial period. The gendered metaphor may be found out to be a more pervasive
motif throughout the whole tradition o f Chinese literature: while the masculine
suggests self-assurance but also self-closure, identification with the feminine
suggests an openness of mind and readiness to change. In Niehai Hua , a trip to the
foreign land is no longer the conquest o f the unknown by masculine force , instead
it becomes a trip o f discoveries, of opportunities for new relationships, and
enrichment of experiences. The symbolic significance o f the trip represents China's
entry into a new world order and a new historical time. The portrayal of the heroine
as the representative of a nation reveals the readjustment o f the national and
psychological identity of the Chinese when their old identity was turned outdated
and no longer suited the new national world.
To conclude, the use of the metaphor between a woman and her lover to
represent the relationship between China and west in Niehai Hua is indeed proven.
The romantic relationship between Caiyun and Walderssee is in fact an imagined
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political relationship. The gendered relationship between China and west in the
novel reflected the Chinese imagination o f their relationship to the west, one
imagination that is at once ambivalent and ambiguous. The representation o f the
relationship in the novel is more truthful than what has been reflected in other
nonliterary discourses regarding the issue. While other discourses represent the
west exclusively as aggressors and exploiters to the Chinese, west in the novel is
conceived as both enemy and friend. On the other hand, surreptitiously appealing to
the ancient Chinese philosophy of conquest by the weak, the depiction reveals a
state of powerlessness and a profound self-deception.
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1 Rey Chow. Writing Diaspora: Tactics o f Intervention in Contemporary
Cultural Studies. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993. p. 103.
2 In the novel, Alfred Waldersee was a lieutenant in the German Army at
the time when Caiyun met him.
3 See Hajo Holbom. A History o f Modem Germany 1840 -1945. New
York: Alfred A.Knopf, 1969. P. 311.
4 See Chester C. Tan The Boxer Catastrophe . New York: Norton &
Company Inc, 1967. P.145.
s Chow, Rey. Primitive Passions: Visualitv. Sexuality. Ethnography, and
Contemporary Chinese Cinema. New York: Columbia University Press, 1995.
P.lll.
6 Gail Hershatter. “Sex Modem China” in Remapping China: fissures
in Historical Terrain. Eds. by Gail Hershatter et als. Stanford: Standford
University Press, 1996. pp. 77-93. p.80.
7 ibid. p.78.
8 The heroine Cai Yun, is better known as the Golden Flower, the name
the courtesan adopted when she returned to her past career as a courtesan after
the ambassordor died.
9 Wang, David D.W. "Edifying Depravity: Three Late-Qing Courtesan
Novels", in Paradoxes o f Traditional Chinese Literature ed. Eva Hung. Hong
Kong: The Chinese University Press, 1994. p.251
1 0 For a detailed account of the investigations into the disputes over the
affair, see Random Talks on Niehai Hua, By Zhou Xifu. Hong Kong: Zhonghua
Shuju, 1989.
1 1 Zeng Xubai, the son of Zeng Pu, recorded this in his attached
commentary to Cai Yuan Pei ’ s essay mourning the death o f Zeng Pu. See Wei
Shaochang ed. Resource Materials on Niehai Hua Shanghai: Shanghai guji
chubanshe, 1982. P. 199.
1 2 One o f the traditional theme o f Chinese fiction and drama is the romance
between a literati and a courtesan, which according to Chinese ideal make a
good match o f talent and beauty. A typical novel of this kind was Stories o f the
Flowers in Shanghai by Han Bangqing in 1892.
124
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See “Index to the Characters in Niehai Hua” in Resource Materials
on Niehai Hua) Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 1982. P.323.
14
To compound the complexity o f the issue, the real Golden Flower in
history helped publicize the mystical affair by giving vague suggestions o f her
acquaintance with Walderssee. See Zhou, Xifu Random Talk on Niehai Hua.
Hong Kong: Zhonghua Shuju, 1990. p.30.
1 5 Cai Yunpei. "In Memory of Mr. Zeng Pu". Wei Shaochang. Four Major
Novelists o f Late Oing .p.230
1 6 Lu Xun. '"This is also life'..." an essay written on August 23rd o f 1936.
See Lu Xun Ouan Ji (Completed Works of Lu Xun): Beijing: People's Literature
Press, 1981. Vol. 6. P. 380.
1 7 Kang Youwei. Political Essays bv Kang Youwei Beijing: Zhonghua
Shuju, 1981. P. 122.
1 8 See footnote 16.
1 9 See Catherine Clement. Opera, or the Undoing of Women.
Mimmeapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988.
2 0 Bhabha, Homi. “The Postcolonial and the Postmodern” in The
Location of Culture. London and New York: Routledge ,1994. pp.171-197.
p.173.
2 1 Shi, Shumei. “Gender, Race, and Semicolonialism: Liu Na'ou's
Urban Shanghai Landscape” in The Journal of Asian Studies. November 1996.
Vol. 55. P.939.
2 2 See Yuan, Ke ^ SI ed. $££!:>> ( Classic of Mountains and
Seas, with annotation). Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 1980. P.103.
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Chapter IV Nostalgia o f the Old vs. Wonder o f the New:
the Agony o f Cultural Disenchantment and the
Temptation o f Modernity
To write the story o f the nation demands that
we articulate that archaic ambivalence that
informs modernity.
—Homi K. Bhabha1
Nations are the artifacts of men ’ s
convictions and loyalties and solidarities.
— Ernest Gellner2
In Chapter Twenty o f Niehai Hua, we have a party scene: a dozen
distinguished scholar officials gathered together to celebrate the birthday o f Li
Cunke an aged well-known scholar who does not hold an official position
in the court. He commanded authority among these scholar officials simply because
he had the power of carrying out one historical function delegated to Chinese
scholars, which was to write history. In the previous chapter, when the son o f an
official puzzled over the reason why his father tried to please Li by giving him
money. He asked:
“What power does this old man have that makes you so eager to
please him?”
The father told him:
“His power is beyond your imagination! You should know that
the power of emperors and ministers would last one hundred
years, while the brush and ink of scholars would exercise influence
over one thousand years! The judgment o f our deeds and
reputation depends on the tip of their brushes.” (137)
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This dialogue reveals how a consciousness o f history plays a role in the life of the
scholar officials: they feel that each one o f them has a personal connection to
history and they care about how history would portray them. It was in the name of
this scholar that the party was held. In a private garden of a relative o f the emperor,
the guests enjoyed themselves as they played music and composed poems as
Chinese scholars usually do to leisurely spend their time.
One unique thing about the party was the suggestion made by the host to
collectively compose a poem as the birthday gift to the star o f the day. Each scholar
would write a line which praises one treasure in his household. Each boasts of his
own treasure item and offers compliments to each other. The importance of this
activity lies in that the items they show off are antique objects they have collected,
varying from the rare prints from old stone tablets to old manuscripts by ancient
scholars.
When it is Wenqing ’ s turn to contribute his line, he apologized by saying,
“I just came back from overseas and have separated from our own antiquity for
too long, so I will make a line with the maps o f borders I have newly printed” . The
line he composed was “The long map of ten thousand li fortifies our solid
frontier” (145). The map as the treasure item he offered was unique and symbolic:
he put down China as a piece o f treasure and by this he suggested their obligation to
preserve its integrity, not only territorial but also cultural. This is a very revealing
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attempt which connects in a unique way the past history of China with a modem
world.
On the surface the party is a casual event in the novel which does not have
direct political significance. However, the scene, which is marked with a kind of
warmth and easiness, stands out distinctly' from the background of an eventful
outside world. It seems that the scholar officials have stolen a moment to find
comfort in the familiar world of antiques to shelter them from the uncertainties and
insecurity' of the outside world. The antique objects and a sense o f history make
them feel at home. For the scholars, and Wenqing in particular, a strong contrast
was felt between “ the heimlich pleasures o f the hearth” and “the unheimlich
terror o f the space or race o f the Other” /
Their demonstration of antique collection was more than a casual activity of
these scholars. The function of this activity may be compared to that of a museum,
an institution which did not exist in China then. The discussion o f museum as
institution of power in Benedict Anderson's Imagined Community may be helpful.
He pointed out that “museums, and the museumizing imagination, are both
profoundly political” 4 and
These three institutions were the census, the map, and the museum:
together, they profoundly shaped the way in which the colonial state
imagined its dominion - the nature o f the human beings it ruled, the
geography o f its domain, and the legitimacy of its ancestry. (164)
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Though his discussion were mainly focused on the nineteenth-century colonial
archeology, his thoughts are useful for us to ponder over the significance o f the
display of antiques in Niehai Hua. If the colonial regimes in Anderson ’ s study
attached themselves to antiquity for quite “straightforward Machiavellian-
legalistic reasons” (181), the Chinese scholars ’ attachment to antiquity was
clearly an effort to hold on to a history that could assure them a cultural identity in a
changing world. With these antiques they seem to have established a direct
connection between them and Chinese history. The display of the private collection
was symbolic, as if the collective ancestry was divided and guarded protectively by
these individuals. The fate of a national culture was in the hand of these scholars:
they will survive together or perish together. This strong demonstration o f the
connection between the individual and the history o f the nation is clearly more than
a simple hobby of the scholar officials.
What significance, then, can we attribute to the activities of these scholar
officials who indulged themselves in such trivial things during the moment of a
cultural crisis? Frantz Fanon observed in his The Wretched of the Earth this
passion for antiquity:
But it has been remarked several times that this passionate search for
a national culture which existed before the colonial era finds its
legitimate reason in the anxiety shared by native intellectuals to
shrink away from that Western culture in which they all risk being
swamped. 5
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This fear of being swamped by the Western culture was exactly what the Chinese
scholars felt at the time. Facing the modem world which threatens to render their
whole way of life obsolete, they tried to adapt themselves to a modem society and
at the same time cling to traditional culture values. In this sense, Niehai Hua
proposed a nationalist discourse. According to one critic,
A feature o f nationalist discourse that has generated considerable
consensus is its Janus-faced quality. It presents itself both as a
modem project that melts and transforms traditional attachments in
favor of new identities and as a reaffirmation of authentic cultural
values culled from the depths o f a presumed com m unal past.
(Kandiyoti 378)
This explains why Zeng Pu was on the one hand very critical o f many cultural
institutions of traditional China such as the imperial exam ination and eight-legged
style essay, and yet enthusiastically portrayed many other traditional cultural
activities.
Like most third world nations, China’ s modernization was an unnatural
process in that modernization started as a project imposed on it by the influence
from the world outside. As a nation that has a rich tradition o f culture, China’ s
journey into modernity is one that is full of tension and agony. Niehai Hua reflects
vividly the tension between a traditional Chinese culture that was struggling to
survive a profound crisis and an emerging modem Chinese culture that contains
hope and uncertainty at the same time. The new culture the Chinese have in mind is
one that models after the western civilization. The contrasts and conflicts between
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the traditional Chinese civilization and the modem western civilization in the novel
are represented not only on the level o f political commentary, but also on the level
of portrayal of everyday objects and technical novelties. In the novel, the Chinese
intelligentsia were equally fascinated with western technical inventions such as the
railways, ships and guns as well as Chinese antiques such as rare prints and
paintings. They were tom between a nostalgia for the old and a wonder for the new.
Indeed the novel demonstrates the Chinese predicament o f being caught between
“the heimlich pleasures of the hearth and the unheimlich terror o f the Other” . A
collective and profound nostalgia was felt among the Chinese intellectuals, which
reveals a deep sense o f despair over the destiny o f the empire and the culture.
However, by far the critics have been very unsympathetic with the
ambivalence represented in the novel. The critical blindness o f the existing
criticism on Niehai Hua is that, while they enthusiastically embrace the novel ’ s
criticism of the reality of the decaying feudalist Chinese empire, they refuse to
acknowledge the ambivalence that is revealed in a profound sympathy towards the
traditional culture. They rarely realize one contradiction in their criticism: that early
modem Chinese novels are praised for its harsh criticism on the Chinese culture
and reality, and at the same time they are criticized for their cultural conservatism.
The critical paradigm that serves the interest o f a revolutionary ideology, which
valorizes progress and development o f history, is obviously incapable of
overcoming this contradiction in their reasoning. A paradigm shift is needed in
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order to understand and appreciate the struggle carried out by the Chinese scholars
during the process o f transformation. Read as a novel that records the experience of
a modem nation in formation, many aspects of Niehai Hua will be viewed in a new
light. In this chapter. I would revise a critical opinion which has not ever been
challenged. My argument is that despite its sometimes ironical criticism o f the
Chinese intelligentsia of the time, the novel’ s main purpose, unlike what we have
held for some time, is not to criticize the Chinese scholars o f the time for their
vulgar and decadent life, but through the portrayal o f the activities of a group of
intellectuals to represent the cultural shock China encountered at the threshold of
modernity.
Despite the author's intention to write a novel that covers over thirty years of
Chinese history before the sino-Japanese war which took place in 1895, and
despite the novel's account of a few well-known historical events and portrayal of
characters from a wide spectrum of Chinese society — from the emperor to the
nationalist revolutionaries, the narration o f the novel are for the most part focused
on the activities o f a group o f traditional Chinese scholar officials, of which Hong
Jun was a representative. The novel started from his success in the imperial civil
examination which launched him onto a political career. The trajectory of his career
was a typical one and all other scholars more or less shared the same experience. It
was this group of Confucian scholars who took the central stage in the public world
of Chinese. They were at the same time representatives o f political power and
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cultural influence. After all, no other social group other than them had served as the
vehicle of cultural preservation and transmission in China. For quite a long time in
Communist China, under the influence of Marxist doctrine that proletariat are the
subject o f historical progress, there has been so pervasive a profound suspicion of
making intellectuals the subject of literary representation.
Peter Li found "a unifying principle" of the novel "in the fact that practically
all of the anecdotes are about a dozen or so high-level officials or men o f letters in
Peking: the late Ch'ing Intelligentsia." (98) The activities of these people— with the
exception of a few which were associated with real political and diplomatic events
of the day at which their efforts often failed tragically— are mostly literary and
cultural ones.6 They include scholarly discussions on academic issues, the
collection o f antiques, services at imperial examinations to recruit officials, and
literary activities such as composition of poems and criticism of essays. Several of
the group were zhuangyuan, the champions of the imperial examination and hence
the highest honorary position for a Chinese scholar to achieve, epitomizing the
traditional cultural orders. Why the choice o f scholar-officials and their lives as the
major subjects of the novel?
The portrayal of this group of distinguished officials and famous scholar-
officials (daguan mingshi) is taken by many critics as Zeng's attack on the
traditional scholars. Shi Meng's criticism is typical o f this type of criticism:
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Zeng's portrayal o f the distinguished officials and famous
scholars is different from those by Liu E, Li Boyuan, and Wu
Jianren: He does not focus on their greed, vulgarity and
shamelessness, but on the aspects of their decadent spirit behind
their educated and elegant appearances. Emphasizing on their
practice of useless conversation, bigotish arrogance, indulgence
in archeological research, hobby of collecting antique objects,
and claims o f learning, he reveals that though what he portrayed
are mostly people who have moral appearances, some even were
those "upright officials" who dared to criticize the emperor for
his misconduct, they were in fact stubborn and self-complacent,
ignorant, and pretentious people.... Penetratingly portraying their
spiritual world, Zeng therefore pictured the scenes of the last
dynasty on the eve o f its collapse. (89)
Shi Meng's criticism, which represents the mainstream of Chinese criticism,
interpreted the novel as an attack on the decadent lives of the scholar officials in a
decaying empire. The author was praised for his criticism of these people and
portrayal of sino-French war and sino-Japanese war. However, their activities are
more profoundly revealing than the narration o f real battles between China and
other countries. Their interest in archeological studies, collection o f antiques, and
study o f geography are of great significance in a moment of crisis in China's
evolution from an empire into a modem nation. Their activities, though they may
not be conscious of it, are real and natural responses to the aggression o f the
western culture. The scholar officials may be classified into two groups: one group
was composed of scholars who were loyal to the cultural traditions and who
practiced the traditional practices such as presiding over the civil examination;
another group were progressive scholars who had been exposed to the west and
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who enthusiastically embraced reformation. The former was headed by the minister
and teacher of the emperor Gong and the later was headed by Xue Shuyun, an
ambassador to Britain. France, Italy and Belgium. Hong Jun served as the bridge
between the two groups as he belonged to both groups: his position as zhuangyuan
in the civil examination secured his position in the traditional camp as the inheritor
of a cultural tradition, while his service in diplomatic affairs affiliated him with the
other group who attempted to modernize China by learning from the west. In the
novel, however, the portrayal o f the progressive group was considerably less in
volume that that given to the conservative group. The enthusiasm for the new
represented by the progressive group was outshined by the enthusiasm for the
tradition by the conservative group.. In his The Wreched o f the E arth, Frantz Fanon
wrote "perhaps unconsciously, the native intellectuals, since they could not stand
wonder-struck before the history o f today's barbarity, decided to go back farther and
to delve deeper down; and let us make no mistake, it was with the greatest delight
that they discovered that there was nothing to be ashamed o f in the past, but rather
dignity, glory and solemnity. "(168) Indeed, we find that what the intelligentsia’ s
did in the novel is no other than attempting to constructing a national identity
through their often clumsy activities. Their efforts came at a time when a cultural
identity crisis occurred on the threshold of modernity, as Levenson observed:
Cultural self-questioning, progressively deepening, left thinkers
unsure of their Chinese identity, as Confucian authority yielded
to Western authority and Chinese history seemed to be draining
off into Western channels. (Levenson 154)
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At this age Confucian authority was being replaced by Western Authority. The
emotional connection with the former was strong and the rational acknowledgment
of the late was growing. Caught in the dilemma, the Chinese intellectuals could not
but demonstrated a kind o f clumsiness. One Chinese historian ’ s comment may
help justify the novel ’ s choosing the group of scholar-officials as the subject:
“When a culture w'as decaying, those who had been cultured by this culture would
inevitably suffer. The more he embodied the culture, the harder his suffering.” 7
Niehai Hua, together with several other late Qing fiction, was classified as
the novel of condemnation. Their criticism, however, was less a criticism than a
profound cultural disenchantment with the traditional Chinese culture. The society
was dissolving, and what used to hold China together no longer makes sense.
One historian makes such an observation:
The basic thread o f Chinese history during the first half o f the
twentieth was the search—sometimes ebullient, often heart-broke—
for new institutions in every sphere of public and private life,
institutions which would connect the pride in a great past to high
hopes for a great future. In the tumultuous controversies o f fifty
years, the Chinese centered their attention on one or another facet of a
few great questions: what o f the old is worth keeping? Can we keep it
and survive in the modem world? What of the new is desirable? Must
we take the undesirable too in order to survive?...These questions
were of mounting urgency, for the Chinese state was prostrate and
Chinese life seemed to be disintegrating. (Mary C. Wright 6)
In his Modernity, an Unfinished Project, Ju rgen Habermas noted that Max Weber
"described as ’ rational' the process of disenchantment which led in Europe to a
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disintegration o f religious world views that issued in a secular culture".(l) The
pathos of the novel Niehai Hua , to speak of the narrator's voice, is more of
disenchantment than condemnation. The subject position is not originated from an
abstract historical philosophy or moral principles, but from the real experience of
modernity. This disenchantment with the tradition is the beginning o f China's
modernity. From this point China embarked on what in Max Weber's words "the
path of rationalization". (Harbemas 1) If Weber described "as "rational" the process
of disenchantment which led in Europe to a disintegration o f religious world views
that issued in a secular culture", we observed in the novel a process of
disenchantment which led in China to a disintegration o f traditional Chinese world
views. This rationalization did not happen as a natural development o f the native
culture but as the consequence of encountering the west. The novel vividly
represented the process in which was demonstrated Chinese intelligentsia’ s
clumsiness to embrace the new and a weak and futile defense o f the tradition
withered away.
The author of the novel was preoccupied with the dissolution o f traditional
Chinese culture and society under the impact of western learning—science,
technology, industrialism, capitalism.
In Chapter Two, just after Wen Qing gloriously returned to his home upon
obtaining the top prize Zhuangyuan in the imperial examination, he was advised by
one of the scholars:
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Wenqing, I congratulate you on your success. Now it is the age
o f communications between five continents and ten thousand
nations. Those scholarly learning we have are not all applicable
in today's world. In the past Confucius was said to have read
books of one hundred and twenty kingdoms; by the same token,
I think if we want to learn today, one had better know foreign
languages so that to know the reason for their prosperity and
power. We must learn everything about sound, light, electricity,
chemistry, the building of ships and guns. Only that can be
called real business. (8)
A new' way o f rationalization was shown in this comment. Dennis W rong thus
explained W eber’ s idea o f rationalization: “By “rationalization” Weber meant
the process by w'hich explicit, abstract, intellectually calculable rules and
procedures are increasingly substituted for sentiment, tradition, and rule o f thumb
in all spheres o f activity.” 8
In Five Faces of Modemitv. Matei Calinescu distinguishes “two distinct
and bitterly conflicting modernities” : modernity as a stage in the history o f
Western civilization and modernity as an aesthetic concept. He includes in the
former “the doctrine of progress, the confidence in the beneficial possibilities of
science and technology, the concern with time, the cult o f reason, and the idea of
freedom defined within the framework of an abstract humanism, but also the
orientation toward pragmatism and the cult o f action and success. ” (41) The
progressive scholars in the novel embodied modernity as they displayed a more
objective attitude towards tradition and began to adopt a pragmatic reasoning.
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One episode in the novel to which no adequate attention has been given is the
map incident. The issues of borderline only became urgent in the age of modem
national countries. It is not accidental that in the novel, as the ambassador to
Germany and Russia, Jinyun ’ s official diplomatic conducts were only briefly
mentioned, while the purchase of the maps that draw the borderline between China
and Russia, a private act by Jin as a scholar of frontier geography, was given a
detailed description. The ambassador in the novel did not carry out any important
diplomatic activities; on the contrary, it was his concubine Caiyun who extended
"her delicate diplomatic wrist" by getting invited to meeting with Empress Victoria
and having a secret affair with Walderssee. Jin the ambassador bought twelve maps
from a Russian swindler while he was in Russia. In this transaction he not only lost
money, but also caused a big trouble as the maps were forged to change the
borderline, taking away eight hundred square Li o f Chinese territory. This incident
finally brought him disgrace and caused him to lose his official position, rushing
him to his death.
Here the scholarship on historical geography o f frontiers was given a
nationalist twist. This episode indirectly reflects the distrust of the Chinese for
foreigners and a profound anxiety facing a hostile outside world. It ironically
pointed out that it is a task for which Chinese intellectuals were not adequately
equipped. Drawing the map o f borderlines is beyond doubt a nation-building
activity. The novel showed that the Chinese were not prepared for the coming of the
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age o f modem nations. Chinese culture revealed its weaknesses as it confronted a
world that had been changed by geographical discoveries, industrial revolution and
the globalization o f capitalist economy. Chinese scholars represented by Jin
Wenqing engaged themselves in this activity through the study of historical
geography, turning the nationalist mission into an institutionalized academic work.
A sense of powerlessness was felt through the lines and that the final settlement of
the border conflict was achieved with the arbitration of British government further
proved this inability to function in a modem world.
Caiyun thus criticized her husband:
My master, don't be boastful. Day and night you carry those old
books, muttering words that are neither Chinese nor foreign tongues,
putting aside your official business. Talk not about territory in the
homeland. You would not know it even if people carry your
body away. I really don't understand, you think you can open up new
territory for China just by studying the names of places of the
previous Mongol empire?
As Anderson pointed out, the census, the map, and the museum were three
institutions of power which "profoundly shaped the way in which the colonial state
imagined its dominion— the nature o f the human beings it ruled, the geography of its
domain, and the legitimacy of its ancestry." (164) Chinese intellectuals indeed felt
the necessity to carry out such activities, but they did them without consciously
putting them to the service of building a modem nation. Not only the people
depicted in the novel did not have such a consciousness, the author of the novel
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also betrayed his lack of such a consciousness. The map incident, an incident
treated too briefly in the novel, is in fact more significant when we find out that one
o f the important contributions o f the novel itself is, in a sense, to re-map China.
In the novel the Chinese intellectual's involvement in international politics
ended in a failure. The incident is also an indirect criticism o f traditional Chinese
humanist culture which has a tendency to textualize realistic conflicts of all kinds,
moral, political, social, and historical. The portrayal o f the incident also reveals the
anxiety of entering a unpredictable future, the puzzle and a sense of helplessness
towards a new world.
It is not accidental in the novel that Wen Qing's first encounter with the west
on the ship to Germany is his experience o f hypnotism practice by a Russian
swindler. Pierre, a trickster, performed hypnotism on the ship. Wen Qing got to
know him and suggested him to perform it on the Russian woman Xia Yali. Later it
was this same man who sold him the distorted map of the borderlines between
China and Russia. The map eventually brought Wen Qing disgrace, for the
misrepresentation o f the map almost cost China a large piece o f territory when
China had territorial disputes with Russia.
The image o f map is very symbolic as it signified that the disoriented
Chinese intellectuals in a modem world were making efforts to find directions. The
novel embodies the bewildered and confused state o f Chinese intellectuals facing
choices and tom between a safe tradition, the helmlich home and its antique and an
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inevitable yet uncertain new world. Literally the narrator advocates change in the
comments, yet an anxiety is clearly discerned.
The map incident is only an indication of a larger and often unconscious
attempt to distinguish the inside and the outside. The criticism o f traditional
scholarship on geography studies is oriented in a modem national sense. The study
o f geography by the Chinese intelligentsia was popular in the sense that it is a
fashionable scholarship, the negotiation between an urgent need with the formal
propriety and legitimization demanded by the orthodox culture.
The study o f frontier geography goes hand in hand with the pursuit o f
knowledge about the world. One is still a sino-centered academic pursuit, the other
shows a international vision that is new to China. Besides being an established
scholar in the study o f Mongolia history, "Wenqing read Xu Songkan's A Brief
Record o f the World Around Us. Chen Zizhai's Hearings and Seeings of the
Countries on the Sea. Wei Yuan's Illustrated Account o f the Countries on the Sea,
and thus he gradually became an expert on foreign affairs and was evaluated highly
by his superiors." (21)
The appearance of frontier geographers and the study o f "bian-jiang-shi-di"
i&HS (history and geography o f border areas) has often been discussed as a
turning of academic interests within the scholarly community o f late imperial China
The study o f frontier historical geography has been considered by many Chinese
critics as a means for the Qing intelligentsia to escape political oppression and
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ideological control exercised by the Qing emperors, as the ruling class which
belongs to an ethnic minority of China discouraged the Han intelligentsia to
participate in political affairs. This is certainly an accurate and discerning discovery
to an extent. However, the enterprise also had motivations other than a passive and
interest-free academic pursuit. In the beginning, the study served the interest o f the
expanding Qing empire in its conquest and control of those ethnic tribes inhabited
in the remote areas; it gradually became an effort to help confronting an
increasingly encroaching threat from the west. The maps that Wenqing brought
back from Europe was used in negotiating borderlines between China and Russia
(146). The traditional scholarship, under its academic disguise, becomes a powerful
and engaging means for the construction o f a modem national identity. The national
interest took the place o f ethnic interests. Wen Qing's words clearly proclaim this
intention:
I have always been paying attention to the geography of Northwest
Border area and have noticed that we have very ambiguous records
o f those borderlines. Russia has always cherished the desire to
encroach on our land and have taken surreptitiously our land who
knows how big! We have to swallow the bitter fruit due to the lack
of geographical knowledge on us Chinese side, (p.55)
Thus the frontier historical geography clearly becomes a nationalist project as
"[T]he frontier does not merely close the nation in on itself, but also, immediately,
opens it to an outside, to other nations." (Bennington 121) Frontiers are " places of
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communication and exchange" and "places of dissociation and association, of
separation and articulation" (121).
Besides the geographical mapping of China, there is also what we may term as
a political mapping o f China going on in the novel. The portrayals o f different
political groups are equally sympathetic. There is a certain kind o f camaraderie that
transcends different political groups o f different political interests. The bureaucrats
and the nationalist revolutionaries are all treated as equals. The novel portrays the
meeting between Tan Sitong, a leading reformist and royalist who advocates
political reforms with the cooperation from the emperor, and Lu Haodong, a radical
revolutionary who is engaged in armed uprisings to overturn the Qing regime.
When Lu tried to kill Tan for overhearing the secret conversations o f the
revolutionaries, Tan told him " we are all comrades despite the differences in our
approaches and our goal o f saving the nation is one" (266). This description is
almost an illustration o f Anderson's observation: "Finally, it is imagined as a
community, because, regardless of the actual inequality and exploitation that may
prevail in each, the nation is always conceived as a deep, horizontal comradeship"
(Anderson 7) The author is often criticized for his political position as a moderate
reformist. The interpretation from his class background is not convincing. Our
reading of the novel reveals that he is first and foremost a nationalist.
If the map incident represents Chinese imagination of their whereabouts, the
banquet scenes in Chapter Twenty is an attempt to search into history for its roots.
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At the party, each guest is requested to contribute a line to compose a collective
poem in which they proudly eulogize the most precious item o f their collected
antiques. Incidents that show a kind of fixation on the antique such as seals and
ancient paintings are scattered in the novel in separate situations and incidents.
Another incident about the collection of antiques is the seizing o f an old
painting from a poor widow by a scoundrel in an attempt to bribe the officials for
an official post. The husband o f the widow which has the name of Antique Zhang
(Zhang Gudong 3fcl*r3l[) gave away all his property for the painting and
commanded on his dying bed that his offspring should keep it at all cost. The
widow and her son pursued the scoundrel on a long journey in order to get the
painting back after the scoundrel cheated it out of them. The scoundrel conspired
with local officials to put the widow into prison. With the help of Master Saber
Wang, a righteous martial artist, the widow was rescued and the painting returned.
That each incident is unconnected makes more apparent the unconscious desire of
holding to the tradition. This incident shows that even the poor class still remain
loyal to the tradition symbolized by the antique. This fetishism for the antique
clearly has a significance of revealing a cultural tradition in crisis as a nostalgia for
the familiar past. What is this fetishism if not an attempt to search in one's own
legacies objects which made them proud, enabled them a connection to their own
past, to a sense o f ownership, and to a hemlich sense o f feeling at home? This
attachment and loyalty' to the antique represented a desire to maintain and to defend
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a tradition facing changes and the threatening presence of the unknown Other. At
the same time, the novel offers criticism and mockery over this attachment to the
antiques of Chinese intellegentsia. One official known for his expertise on antiques
got fooled when he was mischievously given ink prints made from cakes and he
mistook them as prints from coins of Shang dynasty (186). Another scholar
official, upon obtaining a Han seal which has the inscription of " duliao jiangjun"
(general who conquers northeast), took the seal as a divine sign for him to achieve
military success in the battle with the Japanese in Korea. Encouraged by this seal,
he volunteered for the task to lead the Chinese army into the battles and only ended
in tragic failure and shame (186-187). Even when they were facing with an urgent
war which would change the future, the Chinese scholars still tried to build a
connection between current situation with history. We are reminded of
Anderson ’ s remark: "If nation-states are widely conceded to be 'new' and
‘ historical', the nations to which they give political expression always loom out of
an immemorial past, and still more important, glide into a limitless future. It is the
magic of nationalism to turn chance into destiny." (Anderson 11-12)
The significance o f the party scene in Chapter Twenty is all the more
significant when it was set as a sharp contrast to the other party "Tan Ying Hui" in
Chapter Eighteen, at which a group of Chinese intellectuals who are enthusiastic
about the west culture discussed about foreign countries and China's reform. While
at this party, progressive Chinese scholars discussed international situation and
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world politics. They openly endorsed not only the technological prowess of the
west but also the political and social system:
Taixia said: “In my humble opinion, the root o f the prosperity and
power of the western nations is not just in things such as the military
force, manufacturing industry, and commerce. The foremost is their
political system. The westerners take the country as the public
property of all people, not as the inherited fortune o f the court For
administration of state affairs, there are parliaments in the capital and
autonomous regions outside. Everyone has the right to discuss state
affairs and consequently everyone has patriotic feelings. The second
is education.. Now we want to imitate the west on everything. It is
futile merely paying attention to those superficial matters such as
machine manufacturing.”
Xitang echoed, “As for the state affair, in China it was dictated by
the emperor alone for the past thousands of years and it may not be
changed immediately. Education is more urgent. Now we have a
population of four hundred million and the literate people are no
more than one hundred million. Majority of the population is illiterate
and ignorant. No wonder they would call ours a semi-civilized
nation...” (129, 130)
While scholars at the second party enthusiastically embraced western learning and
political system, scholars at the first party were trying to reaffirm their connection
to history'.
The passion for the antique is not just a passion for the past. One of the
scholars at the party, the old scholar in whose name the party was called, when
expressed that he had no antique to show off, was suggested to use his diary
instead: "The diary' of your excellency, continued for forty years, is a marvelous
piece of antique"( 144) There is a tendency to connect their present activity with the
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past, a conscious and active unification with the past. The effort of identifying with
the past is an important part for them to situate themselves in a changing world.
There is also an attempt to adopt a modem attitude towards the collection of
antiques. One scholar thus advised Wen Qing:
Even the study o f antiques, conducted with methods of
today, shifts its focus on to the social customs o f the ancient
times, no longer being limited to artistic appreciation onlv.
(20)
This modem approach suggested by one intellectual who was enthusiastic for
the western learning clearly adopts an objective attitude towards the past o f China
against which the subjective loyalty and passion on the side of those conservative
officials become more political.
The novel in a way also predicted the coming debate between cultural
conservatism and the belief of total westernisation. Postcolonial studies may cast
new light on the century long debate in China over the construction o f a national
culture. The debate between total westernization and cultural conservatism started
from Zhang Zhidong when he put forward the ideal o f "Chinese learning as the
foundation, western learning as means." The wrestling between the two is far from
reaching an end. We are still in one o f the "various stages o f assimilation and
rejection of the culture of the colonizer" (Patrick W illiam 2)
One very interesting character in the novel, one who is so peripheral in the
novel that no Chinese critics has given him any attention, is the collaborationist
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Gong Xiaoqi. He was the son of a well-known Chinese scholar who was murdered
by a Manchurian nobility due to his love affair with the concubine of the
Manchurian. The murder o f his father turned Gong Xiaoqi an enemy o f the
Manchurian. He turned to westerners for support in taking his revenge on the
Manchurians. His studio name of "ban-lun" ( morally half-human )
represented a complete bankruptcy of traditional Chinese values as it mocked at the
traditional Confiician concept of the social obligations of a human being. He
volunteered to be the teacher of Chinese for Thomas Waley, an English missionary'.
His peripheral position does not conceal the fact that his position as one other
possible position taken by Chinese intellectuals is justified in the novel. He is an
iconoclast whose position is received by mainstream Chinese intelligentsia with
suspicion and admiration. He had a racial hatred towards the Manchurians and tried
to revenge his father's death caused by the Manchurian people. Out of this hatred he
turned to the westerners for help, and he was the one who suggested the English
troops to bum down Yuanming Garden, the royal garden of the Qing emperor. His
deeds were controversial. “Some called him a traitor, which he would deny; others
praised him as a revolutionary, he would not admit either.” (16) He was detested
by other Chinese scholars because of he put the interest of his family prior to that
of the nation. What differentiated him from other Chinese scholars was that in a
national crisis, other scholars weighed cultural affiliation more than individual or
racial revenges. This was clearly stated by the well-known reformer Tan Sitong:
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“As for the issue o f races, I do not think it important. Though our China was
constantly invaded by foreign races, there is an unimaginable potential force in the
nature of our race. As a result, foreign races could not conquer us and often were
sinocized instead. Witness the customs and nature of the Manchurians of today. Is
there any difference between them and us? There remains not a slight flavor of the
Tartars!” (267) The indirect criticism of Gong Xiaoqi’ s deeds reveals that among
the mainstream Chinese intellectuals, the survival o f China as a nation had taken
priority over the racial interest of the Han Chinese.
In this chapter, by using the novel Niehai Hua as an example, we have
examined the predicament faced by various Chinese scholars at the turn of the
century: they were lured by modernity represented by the western learning on the
one hand, while on the other hand they were tied by an emotional link with the
tradition. In a disintegrating society, they were struggling with the preservation of
their own cultural identity and constructing a new identity. The opposing groups of
Chinese literati in the novel in fact reflected the schizophrenic state of the Chinese
consciousness on the threshold to modernity.
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1 Homi Bhabha. ed. Nation and Narration. London and New York:
Routledge.1990. p. 294.
2 Ernest Gellner. Nations and Nationalism, Cornell University Press, 1983.
p.7.
3 Bhabha, Homi K. ed. Nation and Narration. London and New York:
Routledge ,1990.p.2.
4 Anderson, Benedict. Imagined C om m unities . London and New York:
Verso,1991. p.178.
5 Frantz Fanon The Wretched of the Earth trans. Constance Farrington
Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1967; 1990. p. 168.
6 Traditional Chinese scholars were responsible for carrying out all kinds of
activities, from governing the country, promoting education, presiding over court
trials, to leading the army. The tragic failure o f Jin Wenqing at diplomatic affairs
and Zhang Lunqiao and Wu Dacheng's defeat in the battles against Japanese army
reveal the fundamental inadequacy of Chinese cultural and political systems in a
modem world.
7 Chen Yinke. “Preface to the elegy for W ang Guowei” .
a
Dennis H. Wrong.ed. Max Weber .Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey:
Prentice-Hall Inc., 1970.p. 26
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Chapter V National Longing for a Form and Longing for a
National Form: Niehai Hua and the Reinventing o f a
Native Narrative Tradition
The Western critical tradition has a canon, as the
Western literary tradition does. I once thought it
our most important gesture to master the canon o f
criticism, to imitate and apply it, but I now believe
that we must turn to the black tradition itself to
develop theories of criticism indigenous to our
literatures.
—Henry Louis Gates, Jr. 1
For literary critics o f Third World nations, one o f the significant
contributions of postcolonial criticism is to make them aware o f “the mistake of
accepting the empowering language o f white critical theory as ‘ universal ’ or as
our own language.” 2 This critical awareness throws light on our study o f modem
Chinese literary criticism. Modem Chinese literary criticism, as part of the
comprehensive effort to modernize Chinese literature, broke away completely from
traditional Chinese literary criticism by adopting new critical concepts. Chinese
literary historians so far have celebrated the profound rupture occurred between
modem Chinese literature with traditional Chinese literature and the paradigmatic
change that took place in the field o f literary criticism. The literature revolution of
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the May Fourth era and the earlier “revolution in the realm of fiction” were
epoch-marking events that have been praised to have brought Chinese literature
into a modem stage by bringing about first the new novel and then the new
literature. What has not been brought to the awareness is the total westernization of
literary culture initiated by these movements. Since Wang Guowei adapted
Schopenhauer's philosophy to the critique o f The Dream of Red Mansions in 1904.
modem Chinese literary criticism and theory, in search of new critical concepts and
languages, turned to western literary theory for ideas. Modem Chinese critics
adopted a universal notion o f literary concepts, genres, movements. Thus we have
criticisms which apply concepts like romanticism and realism to the Chinese
literature without an awareness of the cultural specific nature o f literary
phenomena. Some Chinese critics deplored over the absence o f epic and tragedy in
Chinese literature, as they tried to look for them with the uncompromised
definitions of literary' genres they took from the west. For example, in an article on
the comparative study of Chinese drama and western drama, a critic wrote:
Speaking of tragedy of our country, I really could not find one.
Pi-pa-ji is not a tragedy, because its hero does not have free
will...77ie Peach Blossom Fan is not a tragedy. I would not
acknowledge the several acts after the awakening from the
dream to be of the same merit as previous acts in Romance o f
the West Chamber, and even the previous acts do not measure
up to the standard o f a tragedy... China needs tragedy. 3
Such critical practice was typical of most modem Chinese literary criticism: the
artistic merits of Chinese literary works were assessed by measuring them against
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the literary standards imported from the west. This same practice was followed in
the criticism of Chinese fiction. While the tendency of total westernization in other
areas of social practices and discourses have been checked by a nationalist politics,
the westernization in the field of literature production and criticism has been under
little suspicion.4
In this chapter, starting from an analysis of the critical disputes over the
artistic value and achievements of the novel Niehai Hua, I intend to reveal that the
criticism and attack on Niehai Hua by influential Chinese critics such as Hu Shi
came from a theoretical position rooted in western aesthetics and therefore were
marred by an unsympathetic understanding of the novel. For the past one hundred
years more or less, as Chinese literary critics carry out their activities to modernize
Chinese narrative tradition, they consciously or unconsciously established a western
aesthetic hegemony in evaluating Chinese literature. Western critical concepts were
held as of universal applicability without regard for specific cultural contexts. To
correct this critical negligence, I try to give an account of the aesthetic features that
distinguish Chinese novels from western novels, so as to reveal the inadequacy of
western critical concepts when they are applied to the Chinese texts.
The cultural turn in early twentieth century China was the result of a wide
endorsement of social Darwinism.5 The idea o f evolution was one of the most
important and most popular western ideas which was embraced by the Chinese
whole-heartedly. In order to survive the competition, most modem Chinese
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intellectuals believe that China should fit itself to the changing world. To
modernize was to westernize. West was not only a model of industrial progress.
political power, commercial success, but also an origin o f truth, knowledge, and
enlightenment. Chinese literary critics therefore discarded the traditional Chinese
critical concepts and language and eagerly adopted western aesthetic theories.
Modem Chinese criticism have been subjected to the hegemony of the aesthetics of
the west to such an extent that James Liu, a well-known scholar of Chinese literary
theory, refused to discuss Chinese literary theories o f the twentieth century. In his
Chinese Theories of Literature, he wrote:
I shall not deal with twentieth-century Chinese theories, except
those held by purely traditionalist critics, since these have been
dominated by one sort o f Western influence or another, be it
Romanticist, Symbolist, or Marxist, and do not possess the same
kind o f value and interest as do traditional theories, which
constitute a largely independent source o f critical ideas. (5)
What we see here is not a form o f cultural conservatism, but a protest against an
unreserved dominance of the Western influence in the name of progress and
modernity.
This criticism has only been echoed recently by some other Chinese literary
scholars. As David Wang noted.
By the time that China was recognized as an important part of
modem civilization, however, it had submitted to a monolithic
discourse in which only Western theoxy and Western modernities
could be spoken.
(Wang 1)
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The development o f Chinese novel in the past one hundred years has
generally been considered the modem phase o f the development o f Chinese fiction.
Initiated by the movement o f "the revolution in the realm o f fiction", it takes a
detour o f a long period o f honeymoon with the western narrative tradition only to
return to the native narrative tradition recently.6 In his essay “1985” , Li Tuo
vehemently raised the question: “If the superstition of realism that was formed
since after May Fourth Movement was quite a disaster for Chinese literature caused
by westernization, shall we still repeat the mistake?” (70) In the past few years
this phenomenon have been brought to the awareness of more Chinese critics. Liu
Zaifu, a well-known contemporary Chinese literary critic, recently pointed out that
Chinese literature bifurcated at the beginning o f twentieth century, the one that
takes the central stage is the so called New Literature brought forth by the May
Fourth literary revolution, the other is the indigenous literature which kept the
traditional form of Chinese literature but was invested with new spirit.7
Though he identified the former with the so called New Literature brought
forth by the May Fourth literary revolution, the tendency in fact began to take shape
decades before May Fourth in the late Qing era. This critical negligence has been
pointed out by Mao Dun in the 1980s:
When we discuss the May Fourth new literature movement, special
chapters should be written to discuss the changes of the general
milieu at the end of Qing dynasty and to discuss some pioneers who
indirectly left impact on the movement. The literary movements
launched by Liang Qichao and Huang Zunxian— the new novel
movement and the revolution in the realm of poetry—had already
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shaken loose the foundation o f the old literature, and at the same
time made preparation for the May Fourth new literature movement
a
to a certain extent.
The new orientation of Chinese literature had already taken shape in the late Qing
literary productions and literary thoughts. In the field of novel production and
criticism, for most part of the last one hundred years, the aesthetic o f realism
imported from the west has been the dominant influence.
One of the tasks proposed by postcolonial critics is to “dismantle the
process of ascribing ‘ merit ’ through critical practice” .9 Therefore, we would
examine how modem Chinese critics, in order to establish a new orthodox aesthetic
standard, had tried their critical teeth first at the novel Niehai Hua. Western
aesthetic and critical standards became the legendary Procrustean bed against which
Chinese literary works were brought to judgment.
Embodying a tension between the indigenous narrative tradition and the
western form o f narration which is represented by realism, the novel Niehai Hua is
a typical national narrative not only for its nationalist themes but also for its
artistically national form. The novel adopts the traditional Chinese narrative form of
episodic structure, which according to Milena Dolezelova-Velingerova, "has been
considered the principal feature differentiating the Chinese novel from its Western
counterpart”.1 0 Though the author tried to incorporate western narrative techniques
in the creation o f the novel, the structure of a traditional Chinese novel largely
determines the nature of his novel as typically Chinese. Besides the adoption of the
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traditional episodic structure, the features o f native narrative tradition include the
use of classic language, the motifs o f reincarnation, and the appropriation of other
literaiy genres in the text. The contribution o f the novel Niehai Hua to the
development of Chinese novel is that, meeting the challenge o f a new historical era.
it carried out a creative transformation o f the Chinese narrative tradition.
Zeng Pu openly acknowledged his indebtedness to the western narrative
tradition in giving account of his experience with western literature in a letter to Hu
Shi. Among the writers he listed were mainly French writers as he used to be a
student of French and could read French literature in the original language. They
included Rabelais, Hugo, Duma, Flaubert, Zola, Maupassant and other European
writers whose works were available in French. In 1928, in a letter to Hu Shi, Zeng
Pu gave an emphatic account of his contact with the western narrative tradition.
Before 1898, he got acquainted with a friend General Chen Jitong, who was well-
versed in French literature:
Ever since I got to know him, I went to visit him daily to
learn from him and he gave me instructions without getting
tired. He told me about the Renaissance, the difference
between Classicism and Romanticism, the tendencies o f
Naturalism, Symbolism and other recent literary
developments. For the classic works he instructed me to read
Rabelais's Gargantua et Pangtagruel. Ronsand's poems, the
comedies and tragedies by Racine and Moliere, the Ars
Poetica by Boileau, Penses by Pascal, essays by Montaigne;
For the romantics, he let me read Voltaire's historical works,
Rouseau's essays, Hugo's novels, Vingy's poems, plays by
Dumas,... ( 193)
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The influence of the western novels did find its way into the novel. Despite
the fact that Zeng Pu observed the traditional episodic structure, he tried in Niehai
Hua to organize the events around one character Caiyun, “indeed I clustered the
anecdotes that I have observed and heard and attached them to the line o f the
heroine.” (130) He made it clear that Caiyun was the character that unifies the
novel as a whole. The attempt to organize events in the novel around one
protagonist was influenced by western novels.
However, while his effort to incorporate western techniques was praised, the
national characteristic of its artistic form has not been celebrated but has been
deemed as its defects. It is significant to notice that modem Chinese
critics ’ criticism mostly focused exactly on the traditional narrative features. Hu
Shi's criticism on Nihai hua is a critical event that has not been given adequate
discussion. His criticism was usually treated as a discussion on the technical
aspects, the structure and plot o f the novel. However, as we shall see, the
presumption of H u’ s criticism is a universal principle o f plot and structure for all
novels, a principle which he drew from the western aesthetic of narrative. While
making efforts to elevate the status of fiction in Chinese literature, he
unconsciously exercised a rude and unself-reflexive assault on the native Chinese
narrative tradition. As Hu was one of the seminal influence in enhancing the status
of novel in modem China, his criticism was widely influential.
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He wrote his criticism of Niehai Hua in America in 1917 while studying
philosophy at Columbia University. In a letter addressed to Chen Duxiu and Qian
Xuantong, he wrote:
As for Niehai Hua, I believe it can only be a second-rate novel
and it should not be ranked together with other five novels that
Mr. Qian listed. Who could deny its merits in portraying historic
events o f the recent past? However, its structure is arbitrary, its
materials are too many; and it can only be viewed as fitting the
style o f essays and not to be taken as a good novel.
Descriptions such as Caiyun was the reincarnation of a former
prostitute because she was bom at the moment the prostitute
dies, and that a red line around her neck is the evidence that she
hanged herself in her previous life, are all absurd and
superstitious. This is exactly what Mr. Qian called “the
muddle-headedness of the old reformists” . (39)
He was very critical o f the novel and his attack on the novel clearly
originated from a position that took its root in the western aesthetic of narratives.
His letter was published in New Youth, one o f the most influential periodicals of the
time to advocate new culture. In his criticism, he first labeled the novel Niehai Hua
as a second-rate novel. His first accusation was targeted at the episodic structure of
the novel, he wrote that the novel in his opinion was more like a volume of
occasional notes than a novel; then he attacked the fantastic elements o f the novel,
which was that the author "indulges in groundless superstition" which showed the
author’ s "old-fashioned muddle-headedness", by this he referred to the retribution
motif in the novel which suggested that Cai Yun was the reincarnation of a
courtesan that Hong Jun used to acquaint and who had died because of his
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unfaithfulness; the third is that the structure of the novel is loose, plotless, and
episodic. (Li 150)
Zeng Pu rebuked Hu's attack in his preface for the revised edition. What is
interesting is that his defense appealed to the same narrative tradition as that of Hu
Shi's: Zeng Pu uses the western examples to defend his own adoption of the design
of retribution, citing examples of the use o f fantastic and supernatural elements in
western literature from Greek tragedies to Prosper M erimee's short stories. H u’ s
attack on Zeng Pu ’ s use of retribution m otif as superstition clearly showed a new
view of reality demanded of the novels, one that was clearly influenced by the
western view of reality w'hich had derived from rationalism. As the novel was used
as an instrument for the purpose of enlightenment of the mass, the fantastic
elements of the novel was criticized as unscientific and superstitious.
It is revealing that when the author tried to defend his novel against Hu’ s
attack, he showed a distinct attempt to differentiate his novel from the Chinese
narrative tradition:
As for Hu Shi's charge that the organization of Niehai
Hua is like that of Rulin waishi (The Scholars), I dare
not agree. Although a large number of brief accounts are
used to make up the story (as is the case in The
Scholars), the method of organization is drastically
different. Let us take the analogy of stringing beads.
The incidents in The Scholars are like beads strung
straight through from beginning to end on one string.
The end result is just one straight strand of beads. In my
case, I coil and twist the string, this way and that; I
tighten and loosen it, but never losing sight o f the center.
The end result is a string o f beads in the shape o f a
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flower. ...It cannot be said that my novel does not have a
complex structure. (130)
Zeng successfully rebuked Hu ’ s attack on the fantastic elements in his
novel. H u’ s first and third points concern a more innate characteristic of Chinese
narrative. That the novel lacks a unity and is loose in structure is not just a
criticism o f the novel but an attack at the whole narrative Chinese narrative
tradition. Peter Li is definitely right when he pointed out that the seemingly loose,
episodic structure is not just of this novel, but "of Chinese prose fiction in
general". (Li 151) Modem Chinese critics o f fiction since Hu Shi all associate the
episodic structure with anti-modem and thus should be discarded. Lu Xun would
agree with Hu Shi ’ s criticism of the structure o f Niehai H u a , as he wrote his
criticism o f The Scholars in his A Brief History o f Chinese Fiction
that
The novel lacks a dominant plot. What the author does is to
drive various characters in a sequence, giving account of
happenings that come along with the character and finishes his
story when he is gone. In form it is a novel, actually it is a
collection o f short stories. (178)
Like Hu Shi, when Lu Xun made this comment, he obviously had in his mind ideal
o f a western novel which is characterized by an action o f magnitude and a central
plot. Modem Chinese literary critics, in an attempt to modernize Chinese literature,
were unwilling to show a sympathetic understanding o f the traditional narrative
tradition. They were unable to look into the nature o f novel as a cultural institution
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and their criticisms, which on the surface were about artistic techniques, covered
the ideological bias they had in common.
James Liu gave one of the rare and convincing defenses of the episodic
structure in his Essentials of Chinese Literature with a sympathetic understanding:
As mentioned before, some traditional Chinese novels evolved
from oral stories linked together and naturally cannot be
expected to have single plots and unified structures. Even
novels written by individual authors tend to have an episodic
structure rather than a tightly unified one. This is related to the
Chinese novelists ’ attitude to life mentioned above: since they
accepted life as a whole, they wished to present as many facets
o f it as possible, rather than selecting only those aspects of life
that would form a consistent and unified structure. If these
novels appear formless, it is because life itself often appears to
be. (Liu 67)
What is interesting is that the author o f Niehai Hua himself in fact shared the
same bias with his critics. In trying to emphasize the difference between his work
and The Scholars, Zeng Pu clearly attempted to distance the novel from the whole
narrative tradition, displaying a eagerness to identify with the Western novel and a
unconscious recognition o f the superiority o f the Western narratives.
His effort was unsuccessful in the eyes o f critics, not because o f the
introduction of western techniques, but an unsuccessful reconciliation between the
traditional episodic structure and the techniques. Jaroslav Prusek wrote:
The way Tseng P ’ u ’ linked the individual story of his
heroes with historical facts, however, is a perfect example of
how the mechanical combination o f heterogeneous material
ends in artistic fiasco....The author revealed stylistic skill and
showed that he had learned some o f the European techniques
by which to express the mental state o f his heroes.
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Unfortunately his attempt to insert into this unified and
romantically conceived narrative incident showing the
struggle of different nations for freedom was an utter failure.
All these episodes remain alien elements artificially tacked on
to the main plot....In the mind of the author the unifying
element was probably his admiration for heroes of all kinds,
but he did not manage to find adequate literary expression for
his admiration. (175-76)
Peter Li also found the novel to be “disjointed, artificial and episodic” . (Li 98)
Most criticisms on the artistic aspects o f the novel focus on concrete
devices, as the study by Dolezelova and Peter Li have shown. In fact aesthetic
issues of the novel have a far closer and more fundamental connection with the
cultural issues of the novel. Almost all of the criticisms on the artistic aspects of
Niehai Hua, Chinese and western, are predicated on a presumption of western
critical ideas.
The novel embodies a predicament o f the native narrative tradition
encountering an Other narrative tradition. In his novel, Zeng tried to combine the
traditional episodic structure, which was convenient for panoramic portrayal of
social events, with the western narrative tradition to plot the novel around a central
character. It is at the moment of a choice that the characteristics o f either is made
apparent. The impact o f the native Chinese narrative tradition is most obvious when
an effort to break up with it w’ as carried out. A tension between the native narrative
tradition and the western narrative tradition is found not only in the critical debate
the author and Hu Shi, but also in the very structure of the story. On the one hand,
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the novel remained loyal to the Chinese narrative tradition of in all its conventions;
on the other hand, he attempted to apply in his novel the principle of structure of
western novels.
Despite his clear intention to distance his work from the native narrative
tradition, Zeng clearly uses a national aesthetic form of narrative. The novel
Niehai Hua is a successful example which proves that a Chinese aesthetic o f fiction
is still much alive and valid. When one Chinese critic made the assertion that
“[B]y the time Yan Fu and Liang Qichao proposed reforms along the lines of
Japanese and Western novels (in 1897 and 1898, respectively), Chinese fictional
convention had shown every sign of disintegrating and reinventing itself.” (Wang
4), he is only half-right: reinvention, yes; disintegration, no. Zeng obviously
attempted to reinvent the narrative convention by incorporating into his novel a
western structure of narrative.
As we may see clearly from James Liu ’ s exposition of the cultural
significance o f episodic structure, the issue o f the structure of the novel is in fact an
issue of a radically different world view. For Niehai Hua, which attempted to
reconcile the episodic structure with the western concept o f the immediacy of
events, the structural predicament is between an allegorical structure and a realistic
historical time. The author obviously got lost in the process of writing the novel and
could not make a choice. The allegorical structure, which is typical of Chinese
narratives, cannot be fully implemented as the novel narrated current events. That
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the author cannot bring the novel to a closure is a telling fact that revealed the
limitations of the native narrative devices. The novel has thirty five chapters in its
present form, which is far short of the author’ s original plan for the novel. Zeng
Xubai, the son of Zeng Pu, later explained his father’ s intention:
The original plan for Niehai Hua was to finish the story on events
of 1901. However, when he later published the revised edition, he
found that Caiyun would lose her function as the main character
after 1900. So he decided to conclude the story with the romance
between Caiyun and Waldersee, which would be a powerful and
climatic ending... Who could have imagined that his decreasing
health prevented him from accomplish his last effort. (Wei 201)
The inner conflicts between two distinctive narrative modes, in my opinion, are the
more important reason than his health which made the completion o f the novel
impossible.
Social life and reality are mediated differently in Chinese narrative tradition
and the western narrative. As Su Mansu observed, "Chinese novels often narrate
past events, while the novels o f the west write more about current people."11 This
observation by one o f the early modem Chinese writers, though simple and direct,
is very helpful for us to explore the distinctive difference of the native Chinese
narrative tradition from that o f the west. Traditional Chinese novels had a closer
connection to the historical narratives, as Sheldon Lu in his From Historicity to
Fictionalitv has argued. Few fictional narratives deal with current events, even for
short stories. The events were always placed in distant time and place. It would not
be an exaggeration to say that distance is one key aesthetic element in Chinese
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narratives. It is the distance that makes it possible to give the events narrated a
meaning and a structure.
Late Qing fiction as a whole differs from previous fictional works in
Chinese literature. Niehai Hua observed the traditional Chinese narrative practice
by opening the novel with an allegorical episode, which according to the narrative
convention would serve as a summary of the whole novel and give the events an
expected shape. The torrent of waves that overtake the Island o f Happy Slavery
allegorically suggested the theme o f the novel: that it is a story about a country's
struggle in a world o f overwhelming changes. Usually a Chinese novel will, in one
way or another, return to the beginning to make it complete. The meaning and
implication of the allegorical beginning would be fully revealed at the end and the
event brought to a completion. However, this is not what we witness in the case of
Niehai Hua. Zeng Pu tried to bring it to an end on two occasions without success
and the novel therefore remains without an end or an open end. This partly owes to
the fact in this novel Zeng was representing current events. Though some of the
events took place a dozen years earlier, he attempted to make them part of the
process to the present. We detect that Zeng in his novel followed another structural
principle, the one o f chronological time. An episodic structure would enable
Chinese storytellers to freely travel the places and time in the novel and to break up
the natural chronological order of events. This freedom make up the textuality,
narrativity and fxctionality that account for the charm of Chinese narratives. The
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titles of chapters in a Chinese novel usually are poetic couplets which are structured
by similarities and contrasts both phonetically and semiotically. The parallelism in
the chapter titles can serve as an organizing principle. Two unrelated events that
have no causal relationship may be coerced into one chapter and still make sense.
Aesthetic of Chinese narrative is deeply imbedded with ideological and cultural
elements. While behind the linear development o f western narratives lies the belief
in the causal relationship of historic events, traditional Chinese narrative did not
endorse a teleological view of history. The structure demanded by modem Chinese
critics such as Hu Shi is a western concept. When Zeng Pu tried to adopt techniques
and devices from the western narrative tradition, he ran into difficulties in blending
them. There we find irreconcilable conflicts as the western narrative tradition has
its own ideological bearings.
One important reason among many that account for the critics ’ negligence
is their failure to recognize what distinguishes the Chinese novels "from
superficially analogous cultural forms in the first world". (Jameson 78) The
observation by Frederic Jameson shares the critical position of postcolonial
perspectives which "intervene in those ideological discourses of modernity that
attempt to give a hegemonic 'normality' to the uneven development and the
differential, often disadvantaged, histories of nations, races, communities, peoples.”
(Bhabha 94: 171) Such critical insights are valuable for the study o f Chinese novels
as they subvert the traditional notion of a universal mode of novel.
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Novel as a literary genre is a cultural institution. By viewing novel as a
cultural institution, one usually acknowledges “novel’ s productive role in
culture” ,1 2 One other aspect of this notion is that novel is an institution the nature
o f which was formed and defined in specific cultural context. Therefore, we shall
spend some effort to find out the elements that distinguish the native Chinese
tradition from that o f the western. We find the criticisms o f Niehai Hua by Hu Shi
and some other Chinese critics have been doing exactly what Homi Bhabha pointed
out: imposing "a hegemonic 'normality"' to Chinese narratives that are
fundamentally different from their western counterpart. The western narrative form
has been taken as a norm and the aesthetic standard of the west has been so
internalized that critics have been unconscious of the implicit Eurocentrism in their
criticism.
The rise of theoretical studies and criticism of the genre o f novel started
very late in China. Lu X un’ s A Brief History o f Chinese Fiction was the
pioneering work in the writing of history of Chinese fiction. Modem Chinese
scholarship on the development of Chinese novel, though divergent in many ways,
share a fundamental fallacy o f using novel as a generic term to describe Chinese
narrative works of all times, without carefully examining the fundamental cultural
differences that distinguish Chinese narratives from their western counterparts.
Today, when we evaluate Chinese novels, we should but agree with the warning by
Homi Bhabha that:
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It becomes crucial to distinguish between the semblance and
similitude o f the symbols across diverse cultural experiences —
literature, art, music ritual, life, death — and the social specificity o f
each o f these productions of meaning as they circulate as signs
within specific contextual locations and social systems of value.1 3
The concept o f novel is exactly such a symbol o f which the social and cultural
specificity should be carefully examined when it is used. In the discussion o f
Chinese narratives, the meaning and significance o f the term novel need to be
constantly reinscribed and reinterpreted.
In modernizing Chinese literary thought, western concepts of literature,
literary history, and generic terms were adopted by Chinese critics without much
reservation. Chinese literature was measured against the western critical standards.
This led to their failure to appreciate adequately the aesthetic merits of the native
Chinese narratives.
Zeng Pu, in the twenty-first chapter of the novel, inserted a passage o f his
own comment on the novel. This passage revealed his view o f narrative aesthetics:
This novel Niehai Hua, written by me, is rather different from other
novels which fabricate buildings in the air, starting and ending as the
authors wish, whatever he can cook out. My novel, their is not a
single false sentence, not a single lying word, I use the mechanism o f
writing to harness the facts instead o f using the facts only as
inspirations for fiction. (148)
j z , r n r n m m , —
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This narratorial comment was made to ensure the readers of its truthfulness
of giving accounts to historical facts, to gratify the demand of the
readers ’ traditional aesthetic demand for truthfulness. It also reflect a dilemma the
author faces in writing the novel. The western aesthetic of novels demands a
different kind o f truth, the probable, while the Chinese narrative aesthetic demands
factual truth in novels. One element which distinguishes the Chinese narrative from
the western ones is the Chinese demand of a historical actuality. The difference
between them may be called the difference between a “mimetic realism” and a
“historical realism” . The west aesthetics o f realism is based on the concept of
mimesis, a representation of life that is probable. Aristotle claimed that there was
more truth in poetry, the probable, than in history', the actual. On the contrary,
Chinese narrative, developed from the discourse of history, makes the truthfulness
of an event an important element o f its aesthetics. Most Chinese classic novels such
as Romance o f the Three Kingdoms and Water Marsh are all historical novels.
They are fictional elaboration of historical events and figures. It is not that Chinese
narrative tradition forbids imagination, but the imagination should be a plausible
and reasonable supplement to the basic event.
The novel Niehai Hua was so regarded as a history novel as it portrayed the
activities of real historical individuals. Jing Wenqing was in real life Horig
Jun Li Cunke was Li Ciming etc.1 4 It shows a fusion of
the narrative mode of the western roman-a -clef and the native narrative tradition
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of jiangshi the telling of history, which was a dominant subgenre in Chinese
fiction. While the historical novel in the west is not a predominant genre, almost all
major Chinese novels were written based on real historical events and personalities.
This fact profoundly influenced Chinese aesthetic ideal of fiction as the readers
took pleasure in knowing that the events were real rather than fictional. We may
adapt the concepts of metaphor and metonymy here to accommodate the differences
between the Chinese aesthetic of fiction and that o f the west: while the western
mimetic verisimilitude is metaphorical, the Chinese demand for historical actuality
is metonymical, which is to say that the fictional elements are but extensions of real
historical events instead of creating a fictional world that is entirely imaginative.
For the western narratives, reality means a mimetic verisimilitude, while for the
Chinese narrative, reality means a historical actuality. Though the love affair
between Caiyun and Waldersee was purely an invention, that the characters were
real historical figures add a different dimension to the reading pleasure. A purely
fictional work would receive less enthusiasm than the fictionized account of events
and personalities of historical actuality.
The other distinctive feature of a traditional Chinese novel is its generic
hybridity. It is not by accident that Qian Xuantong compared Niehai Hua to the
Dream o f the Red Chamber. ( Hu 38) Like the latter, Niehai Hua provides "in one
volume a summation o f the three-thousand-year span of Chinese literary
civilization." (Plaks 11) Like it, it contains within its pages a sampling o f all of the
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major modes (poetry, drama, etc) and genres (shih, ci, etc.). Each provides a
different aesthetic pleasure for the reader and the hybridity makes the novel to have
a certain playfulness which helps deconstruct the myth o f reality. Unlike most
realist fictions of the west o f which the goal were to make believe, traditional
Chinese novels often try to keep the reader at a distance from the events in the
novel. Generic mixture is one o f the means to achieve that effect.
Related to the generic hybridity is the issue o f language. The generic
mixture explores many possibilities of the language. Ian Watt pointed out that
formal realism o f the novel “allows a more immediate imitation o f individual
experience set in its temporal and spatial environment than do other literary
forms” 1 5 and “the function of language is much more largely referential in the
novel than in other literary forms” ,1 6 Early modem Chinese novel, in order to
serve as instruments to the modernization of China as demanded by the Chinese
intellectuals, had to make a shift to make their language and stories more referential
The advocators valorized the vernacular as the only proper language for literary
production in the attempt to make their political ideals more accessible to the
public. They demanded from the Chinese novel a sacrifice of its distinctive
aesthetic features to put on the altar o f progress and modernization. However,
Niehai Hua braved against the trend and was a example o f negotiating between the
demand of the time and the demand from the artistic integrity o f a narrative
tradition.
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Novels since the New Culture movement are mostly novels that are no
different from western novels. While as their predecessors, the novels which is
discussed in this study preserved most features of Chinese narrative tradition. It is
very unfortunate that the development and achievement o f novel in this era have not
been given sufficient analysis, as they not only represent the vitality of a native
narrative tradition but also serve as the direction for Chinese narratives to make
really significant achievements.
Novel then should not be discussed as just an innocent and value-free
generic form. Post-colonial critics are right to point out the co-determinant
relationship between novel and the nation. "It was the novel that historically
accompanied the rise of nations by objectifying the 'one, yet many* of national life,
and by mimicking the structure of the nation, a clearly bordered jumble of
languages and styles. Socially, the novel joined the newspaper as the major vehicle
o f the national print media, helping to standardize language, encourage literacy, and
remove mutual incomprehensibility. But it did much more than that. Its manners of
presentation allowed people to imagine the special community that was the
nation."(Brennan 49) The genre o f novel has national consciousness as one of its
basic genetic elements.
National consciousness is an important part o f Chinese modernity. Though
in its long history' China had numerous territorial disputes and cultural conflicts
with neighboring peoples, and numerous conquests o f or by the surrounding
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countries, Chinese consciousness of a nation only began to take shape after the
contact with the west since 16th century. The presence of the west was more
urgently and significantly felt by the public only after the Opium war in 1839. It is
also from this moment that Chinese novel began to develop its national characters.
Chinese had produced fictional works long before this era, yet it is from the late
Qing era that novel began to be treated as an important genre for its function as an
instrument of modernization. It is valued for its potential to reach and influence the
public. A consciousness o f the importance o f the mass is a modem thought, as the
mass only becomes important in the age of nationalism. The destiny o f Chinese
novel changed with the advent of nationalism. The revival of the novel in modem
China is a proof that the genre and the nation has a common fate. It is decided by
the nature of the genre of novel and the nationalist need to reach a far wider
audience. The Chinese advocators of a revolution of novel were the same people
who advocated a national reformation and later a national revolution. The power of
novel to influence the public more effectively than other forms of discourses is the
main reason that attracted their attention. A perspective of viewing the artistic form
of novel in relation to nation construction is necessary in order to portray the
trajectory of the rise of Chinese novel and faithfully depict its historical fate.
Chinese novels have been discussed in fragmented and isolated fashion and a
comprehensible general picture is lacking. As an artistic form, Chinese novel first
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developed with the advent o f urban society in Song Dynasty but reached its zenith
o f development at the nationalist era.
A historical retrospective analysis of the appropriation of western ideal of
fiction by Chinese critics may be helpful to appreciate the national characteristics of
Chinese novels. This effort originated from the “revolution in the realm of
fiction” , one of the first modem literary movements in China which advocated
using fiction as tools for nation building. The nationalist project, in an eager effort
to bring China into modernization, ironically subjected China to a hegemony of
wr estem influence. Revolution in the realm of fiction was launched by
Liang Qichao in 1902 when he published “Announcement o f the Publication of
the Translations of Political Novels” . In News o f Current Affairs ( ), Liang
published his “A Comprehensive Discussion o f Reformation” ( ,
one of the chapters is entitled “On the Education o f Children, the Novels” .
Liang criticized traditional Chinese novels as “teaching theft and indulgence in
sexuality” and the customs o f China was rotten as a result without being conscious
o f its corruptive power. He proposed a new kind o f novel which would give “
miscellaneous accounts o f histories, stirring the national sense o f shame, reporting
the conditions of foreign countries and peoples, and reforming the customs” . 1 7
The movement o f "revolution in the realm of fiction" is the conscious
attempt of Chinese to elevate the status o f the novel. It is more than a literary
movement and has from the beginning been explicit about its nationalist goals. For
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the first time, Chinese writers were exposed to an other tradition, Just as its
encounter with the Buddhist narrative tradition initiated the birth of novel, this
encounter with the western narrative tradition transformed the genre of Chinese
novel.
The advocators o f the realm o f fiction were very direct about the nationalist
goal of their movement:
The purpose to promote the production of novels today
is to enliven the spirit and open the mind o f Chinese
citizens and therefore radically different from those
previous novels which encourage obscenity and burglary.
If you want to reform the citizen o f a nation, you have
to reform novel o f the nation. To reform morality,
you must reform novel; to reform religion, you must reform
novel; to reform politics, you must reform novel; to reform
customs, you must reform novel; to reform knowledge, you
must reform novel; you must reform novel to reform peoples'
mind and personality.... Therefore to reform the society,
you must start from the revolution in the realm o f fiction;
the reformation o f the people starts from the reformation
of novel. (Liang 50)
In order to raise the status o f novel to be the "highest form of literature", the
espousers of the revolution in the realm o f fiction invented a myth about the
relations between fiction and the power and strongness o f a nation. The progress
and power of the western nations were attributed to the advancement of the western
novel:
At the beginning o f the reformation of European nations, the
great intellectuals and scholars, people of noble spirit,
often embody their own life experience and their political
ideas in the form o f novel.... Often the public opinion of the
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whole country would change with the publication of a new
novel. The advancement o f politics in countries such as
America, Britain, Germany, France, Austria, Italy and Japan
owe most to political novels. A certain English celebrity said
that novel is the soul o f a nation. Who would disagree with
him? Who would disagree with him? (Liang 37)
With a myth like this, advocators of the revolution in the realm o f fiction
initiated the establishment o f the hegemony o f western aesthetic discourse. The
irony is that the movement of revolution in the realm of fiction, intended as a
nationalist cause, was entangled with an over-enthusiastic willingness to subject it
to a western norm. The widely advocated cultural strategy of "learning from the
foreigner in order to subdue the foreigner" was brought into the practice o f cultural
production. Yet the practice turned out unexpected result: an inferiority complex
was deeply imbedded in the collective conscious or subconscious of Chinese
writers.
From the very' beginning the advocators o f the revolution in the realm of
fiction tried to reform Chinese fiction in a fashion that emulated the literary models
o f the European powers. Along with the presence o f the European military power,
political advancement, and industrial progresses in China, there appeared many
translations of literary works from the European nations. The enthusiasm for
western novels encouraged the reformation o f Chinese novel. The comparison of
western novels and traditional Chinese novels almost inevitably ended in the
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condemnation of the traditional Chinese novel as they, according to the logic of the
myth, were held responsible for China's backwardness.
The result is the identification of economical and political power with
cultural and aesthetic power. There was comparison between western novels and
Chinese novels that always put Chinese novel and the whole narrative tradition into
an artistically inferior position. A cultural hegemony of the Western aesthetics was
gradually established and its impact lasts till today. This also reflects the other
deficiency of the movement: when an artistic form such as novel was used as tools
for political reformation, the aesthetic elements are unconsciously sacrificed. A
movement attempted at the empowering o f a nation resulted in a cultural
subjugation of the nation.
The novel Niehai Hua was written when this movement was in vogue.
Zeng Pu the author published a magazine that carry installments o f novels and he
published Niehai Hua in his magazine. He answered the call for a reformation of
Chinese fiction. The dominance o f western aesthetics in the movement was
typically reflected in the debate on the criticism of his novel Niehai Hua between
Hu Shi and the author Zeng Pu. Hu Shih's criticism and Zeng Pu's defense, though
differ in many ways, share the same stand o f position in recognizing the dominance
of the western novel and assuming the aesthetic standard of the west as an objective
and universal standard.
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As Bergonzi observed o f the western narrative tradition, "the ideology that
sustained the novel for the first two centuries o f its existence, its belief in
unmediated experience, in originality and individuality and progress" are
characteristic of the western novel. Homi Bhabha also pointed out in his
"Representation and the Colonial Text: A Critical Exploration o f Some Form of
Mimeticism" that:
The historical and ideological determinants of Western
narrative — bourgeois individualism, organicism, liberal
humanism, autonomy, progression— cannot adequately reflect,
for instance, the Caribbean environment...(97)
In the writing o f modem Chinese novel as well as in the criticism of Chinese
novel, there have been an apparent absence of the awareness o f the cultural specific
features to the novels. It was in Niehai Hua and some other early modem Chinese
novels that the ideological determinants o f Chinese narrative were preserved.
We may say that Zeng faithfully followed in his production the principle of
keeping "the Chinese as body and the West as means of implementation", a
principle of cultural appropriation widely promoted by Chinese intellectuals in the
discursive practices o f this period. A national narrative aesthetic based on Chinese
narratives emphasizes a combination and balance o f historicity and fictionality.
This is true of most Chinese novels, for example, Romance o f the Three Kingdoms.
A Joumev to the West, and Dream of Red Mansion. The Chinese readers demand
that the plausibility o f events accounted in the novel should be supported by real
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historical facts. The task of novel is to play with the real historical events and all
fictional imaginations should grow like leaves on the trunk o f historical events.
Chinese novels alw’ ays have to take real geographical cites and historical times as
the setting of the novel. The pleasure o f the novel is derived from the belief that the
events narrated really took place. Historical plausibility rather than logical
plausibility is the comer stone o f Chinese narrative aesthetics. One pair of the
important critical concepts o f Chinese narrative was fiction |fi and actuality
which damanded that a novel should not be entirely a fiction, but an imaginative
account of an event. It seems one o f the aesthetic pleasure the Chinese readers draw
from the novel is the pleasure o f indeterminacy. Romance o f the Three Kingdoms ,
one of the Chinese classics was a novel based on the history o f struggles among
three kingdoms after the decline o f Han Dynasty. The novel was so popular among
the readers that the critics worried that the stories in the novel would be taken as
1 S
real historical events.
One traditional Chinese critic characterized Chinese fiction as follows;
Chinese novels in general do not merely show their strength
through
suspense and complicated plots; their profound savor lies in the
development of the events, the spirit of the characters, and the
liveliness of the writing.
p.92)
The development of events here usually refers to a panoramic narrative like
the scrolls of Chinese painting. There is a basic aesthetic difference between the
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Chiense “event” and the western idea of plot. While the western plot in the novel
is mainly driven by the act of the characters, the Chinese event usually focus on the
development itself. The individuality of the characters are of less importance in the
account of an event.
Another conflict is between the Chinese story-telling tradition and
description, which is the basic element of realism. Critics notice Zeng Pu's adoption
o f Western narrative devices such as psychological description and herald it as a
progress. In the novel, the psychological descriptions are more of the story-telling
style than the Western psychological description which aims at enhancing the
immediacy, a peculiarly western aesthetic ideal. From psychological description to
stream-of-consciousness. Western narratives have been endeavoring to bring reader
closer and closer to the existential experience of the individual. The Chinese
narrative tradition took a different route: individuals are social and communal
animals, and their experiences are never individually significant. From this we can
see that an introduction of an artistic device is never simple , neutral, and value-
free. It is always ideological. As Homi Bhabha points out in his "Representation
and the Colonial Text: A Critical Exploration of Some Forms of Mimeticism" that
"What we are made aware of immediately, is that the values of historicism and
realism, the 'unmediated' and sequential progression to truth, the originality of
vision - what Leavis would call the wholeness o f their resolution - are historical and
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ideological productions without any of the inevitability that they claim. They are
necessary fictions that tragically believed too much in their necessity and too little
in their own fictionality." ( 99)
One of the requirements of realist fiction is to create characters that are
typical, which is characterization. Critics such as Shi Meng criticized the novels for
its weakness in characterization (125). This is a typical example o f applying
western aesthetic standard on the Chinese fiction as the traditional function of the
novels has the nature o f anecdote as its basic aesthetic demands. Marston
Anderson, in his The Limits o f Realism: Chinese Fiction in the Revolutionary
Period, correctly pointed out that “realism presented the Chinese with a
fundamentally new model o f aesthetic experience.”(24) Characterization is one of
the principles of realism.“Realism seemed the most progressive o f Western
aesthetic modes, in part because o f its scientism, in part because realist works took
as their subjects a far wider range of social phenomena than earlier, more
aristocratic forms did.” (Marston Anderson 25) Characterization in the western
narrative tradition has its idealistic element and is predicated on the assumption of
individualism. While in traditional Chinese narratives, what has happened often
take priority to who was involved in importance.
One distinctive aesthetic characteristic o f Chinese narrative tradition is its
pursuit o f literariness o f its language. This characteristic is directly opposing the
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ideal of a novel o f the west. W alter L. Reed in his "The Problem with a Poetics o f
the Novel" wrote:
The novel, I would argue, is a long prose fiction which opposes the
forms of everyday life, social and psychological, to the conventional
forms of literature, classical or popular, inherited from the past. The
novel is a type of literature suspicious of its own literariness; it is
inherently anti-traditional in its literary code. (64)
The pursuit of literariness of language in the narrative production is defined
by the features of Chinese language. As a monosyllabic and tonal language,
Chinese language has many possibilities and functions other than the referential
function. The demand o f realism in novel production limited the creative use of
Chinese language. In Niehai Hua, the fusion of literary language ( ) and
vernacular ( S tS - ) is another characteristic of the novel. The fusion o f the literary
language and the vernacular opens a possibility for Chinese narrative to develop a
distinctive national aesthetic mode. The literary and the vernacular traditions in
traditional Chinese fiction both have their unique aesthetic contribution. This split
must be transcended with a fusion and Niehai Hua made an attempt at it. The
traditional genre for people like Zeng Pu is fee novel o f the literati ”(
W NjiL); yet this work o f his engulfed all social classes and m old them into one. It is
beyond doubt that there had been two distinct genres: the novel o f the literati and
the vernacular novel ( SiS/MiiL ). Though the boundary' was crossed occasionally
as a writer may engage himself in the production of works o f both genres, they
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basically remained independent o f each other. Niehai Hua made a conscious
attempt to bring the two together. The elegance of the literary language and the
familiarity of the vernacular commingled to produce a heteroglossia that is uniquely
Chinese. Unfortunately, the popular and superficially progressive notion of using
the novel as a tool for the enlightenment o f people changed the direction and the
development o f the fusion of languages was put to a stop. The literary language has
been treated with contempt as dead language. Niehai Hua, as a representative of the
late Qing fiction, is one of the last works that give us a taste of the glory and charm
of the literary language.
In general Niehai Hua is a representative work that reflects a moment of the
meeting between the narrative traditions of China and the West. It still held the
front for the native narrative tradition while novels produced after it abandoned the
native narrative tradition completely and endorsed a different narrative mode
represented by realism.
The advocators of the revolution in the realm of fiction raised the status of
novel successfully against a Confucian tradition by assigning to it the mission of
creating a national consciousness. As novel was granted the mission to enlighten
the mass, there came the demand that the novels were to be written in vernacular.
Though Hu Shi and Chen Duxiu were viewed as the initiators of the vernacular
movement in the literary revolution in 1917, an unpretentious effort to use
vernacular in literature had already been made by the writers of late Qing fiction.
However, the Chinese advocacy of vernacular is different from that of the European
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nations. While in European nations the vernaculars were in fact national languages,
Chinese language was united more than two thousand years ago during the first
imperial dynasty, the Qin dynasty. The difference between vernacular and written
language was more of a class issue rather than a national issue.
The integration o f political discourse into fiction is one distinctive feature
o f the mainstream novel production of this time. Looking back at the development
of Chinese fiction in this century, we noticed that disputes over language was at the
core o f the literary revolution. However, the opposition of the classic Chinese
( 3tl§ ) and vernacular ( 1 = 3 ) was in fact the difference between literary language
and prose language ( ). The written language was a literary language and
the vernacular was prose. The movement of vernacular may be viewed as a
nationalist project in that it advocated a democracy o f representation from all social
classes.
One Chinese critic reported that in the later half of the 1980s when a group of
Chinese novelists gathered to discuss the novel Hundred Year’s Solitude by Garcia
M arquez, one of them exclaimed, Alas, so novels could be written this way!”1 9
The narrative mode of magic realism, mixing fantasies and reality, came as a shock
to them. Having been exposed to the realist narrative tradition o f 19th century
Europe, the only one endorsed by modem Chinese ideology, Chinese novelists
could not imagine other ways of writing a novel. Recently there is a revival of the
native narrative tradition. The renewed interest in novels that are characterized with
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national aesthetic elements: the martial arts novel, the Chinese style romance; more
historical novels written in episodic structure became popular.
It is time to turn our attention to the national elements o f Chinese novels.
Nation and novel has a natural link in that a nation needs its own form of narration
to narrate its story: the story has to be told in its own language. From this
perspective we have to admit that late Qing fiction is the culmination of Chinese
narrative art. The most national is the most universal. In the postmodern age, the
native elements should be stressed in order to maintain its own identity, not to let it
be drowned by dominating cultural influences from the cultural superpowers.
The study o f Niehai Hua reveals an unsuccessful suppression of the native
narrative tradition by imported realism and an alternative for fictional production.
Recently, there has been a belated awareness o f the existence o f a native narrative
tradition. Li Tuo, a Chinese critic, noted that through the novels o f Garcia Marquez
Chinese writers became aware o f their own narrative tradition and started to cast a
new look on realism:
The introduction o f western theoretical discourse o f realism
into China is not entirely unbeneficial. However, in general,
I think it has more negative impact than positive. To use the
standard o f realism to judge and describe Chinese literary
history and to advocate realistic depiction in writing have
brought serious consequences. The rich tradition o f Chinese
literature is brutally simplified. Many valuable traditions
were either excluded from the discourse of literary history,
or supressed and ignored as "negative" literary phenomena.
An evidence is that, in terms o f fictional production, there
was barely a sign o f inheritance from the traditions o f A
Dream of
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Red Mansion. Fantastic Stories from Liao Zai. A Journey
to the West, and The Story of M irror and Flowers.
Why was Garcia Marquez so popular in China? It is
not that his novels are good, but that he enlightened the
Chinese writers that they have their own tradition of
writing fiction, a tradition that cannot be regulated or
coerced by the western literary discourse. 2 0
(Li Today 1991 vol.3-4 p.73)
This awakening can now be further backed up by the critical efforts o f post-colonial
literary theories to affirm and celebrate indigenous narrative traditions and hybrid
aesthetic forms. At the beginning of 20th century, [T]he Chinese reformers assumed
that, once successfully transplanted, realism would encourage its readers to actively
involve themselves in the important social and political issues confronting the
nation.” (Marston Anderson 25) Novel has become the instrument serving the cause
of nationalism. Now a return to the native narrative tradition may be a logical
development as nationalism entered a postmodern age.
In this chapter, we have demonstrated that modem Chinese criticism on
Niehai Hua was biased due to its subjection to a hegemony o f western aesthetics.
By looking into the distinctive features of Chinese narrative tradition, we reveal that
novel as a genre is a cultural institution. What we did is precisely what Roland
Barthes prescribed for the historians of literature:
History tells us that there is no such thing as a timeless essence of
literature, but under the rubric Hterature”a process of very
different forms, functions, institutions,reasons, and projects
whose relativity it is precisely the historian’s responsibility to
discern....
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Under the rubric o f the generic term fiovel”, in different cultural contexts, there are
different forms assumed, different functions performed, different modes of
institutionization practiced.
It is predictable that future Chinese novelists will turn to works such as
Niehai Hua for inspirations in reinventing a narrative tradition that is typically
Chinese.
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1 Henry Louis Gates, Jr. “Canon Formation, Literary History, and The Afro-
American Tradition: From the Seen to the Told” . In Afro-American Literary Study
In the 1990s . ed. By Houston A. Baker, Jr. and Patricia Redmond. Chicago and
London: The University of Chicago Press, 1989.
2 Henry Louis Gates, Jr. “Authority, (White) Power, and the (Black) Critic; or,
it ’ s all Greek to me” in The Future o f Literary Theory. Ed. by Ralph Cohen. New
York and London: Routledge, 1989. p.345
3 Bing Xin. “A Comparison between Chinese Drama and Western Drama” .
First published in Cheng B an Fn K an (Literary Supplement to the Morning Post) on
November 18th, 1926. See Essavs in Modem Chinese Comparative Literature.
Compiled by Institute of Comparative Literature o f Peking University. Beijing: Beijing
University Press, 1989. Pp.240 — 243.
4 During the various stages o f cultural discussions in modem China, the
tendency o f total westernization was checked by cultural conservatism that
emphasized the preservation o f the essence o f Chinese culture. However, in the realm
o f literature, the enthusiasm for western literary culture seemed to have overwhelmed.
No challenge or doubt has been exercised regarding the superiority of western
aesthetic thoughts. See Zheng, Shiqu and Shi Gexin Reflections of the Disputes
Between Chinese Culture and Western Culture Beijing: Advanced Education Press,
1991.
5 Since Tian Yart Ltm, the selected Chinese translation of Thomas Henry
Huxley ’ s Evolution and Ethics by Yan Fu appeared in 1898, social Darwinism
became a dominant trend in the Chinese thought.
6 In the 1980s a noticeble trend among the Chinese novelists such as such as Yu
Hua, Ge Fei and others was to break away from the narrative norm of realism which
was the orthodox paradigm of novel production since the May Fourth New Cultural
Movement. See Li Tuo ’ s article “ 1985” in Jin Tian. No.3/4,1991. pp.59-73.
7 Liu, Zaifu’ s keynote speech for the International conference “Jin Yong ’ s
Novels and Twentieth Century Chinese Literature” in Ming Bao Monthly. August
1998. One interesting point is that the novels that he classifed as the second group
were mainly novels written by Chinese novelists in Hong Kong, an area relatively
independent of the modernization project carried out in the mainlan area. The irony is
that in Hong Kong, the actual colony o f Britain, more native and traditional cultural
values were preserved.
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8 Mao Dun. “Another Way to Write the History of Modem Chinese
Literature—a letter to Comrade Jiegong” . Published in Shehui kexue zhanxian.
1980. Vol 2. Pp.87 — 89.
9 Aschroft et als. Empire Writes Back p. 181.
1 0 Dolezelova-Velingerova. The Chinese Novel at the Turn o f the Centurv.
p.40 .
1 1 See “A Symposium on Fiction” in Chen Pingyuan and Xia Xiaohong.
Eds. Critical materials on the novel bv twentieth-centurv Chinese writers Beijing:
Beijing University Press, 1989. Vol 1. P.88.
12 •
Deidre Lynch and William B. Warner. “Introduction: The Transport of the
Novel” in Cultural Institutions o f the Novel. D urham and London: Duke
University Press, 1996. P.3
1 3 Homi Bhabha, Locations o f Culture, p. 172
1 4 See “Index to characters in Niehai Hua” by Liu Wenshao in Wei
Shaochang ed. (Resource Materials on Niehai Hud) Shanghai:
Shanghai guji chubanshe, 1982. Pp.323-353.
1 5 Ian Watt. The Rise o f the Novel. University of California Press, 1957. P.32.
1 6 ibid. p.30.
1 7 See Chen Pingyuan and Xia XiaohongJC|n££L Eds.
(Critical materials on the novel by twentieth-
century Chinese writers) Beijing: Beijing University Press, 1989. Vol. 1. P.28
1 8 See Lu Xun’ s A Brief History of Chinese Fiction. Hong Kong: Sanlian
Shudian, p..99.
1 9 LiTuo. “1985” Jintian 1991. vol.3-4. p.73.
2 0 ibid.
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Epilogue
In this study I have examined the novel Niehai Hua from a new perspective
informed by current theories of postcolonial criticism and cultural studies. During
the past two decades since the 1980s, western literary and cultural theories have
rushed into China at a day/ling speed. Each theory has enjoyed a glorious but brief
attention, from New Criticism to Structuralism, from Freudian psychoanalytical
criticism to deconstruction. However, none o f them seemed to have exerted a deep
and lasting influence on Chinese literary studies and research. 1 Contemporary
Chinese critics are more concerned with catching up with the latest theoretical
trends in the west, rather than digesting them so as to make convincing and solid
critical results. They seem to have ignored the fact that western theories have their
goals set in their own historical and cultural context and when they travel to a
different culture, they need to be transformed with a clear sense o f purpose and an
awareness of their limits o f applicability. We need to ask how and in what way a
theory will benefit us in applying it to the Chinese context.
In the early years when Chinese scholars first encountered western thoughts,
some scholars proposed to take Chinese learning for fundamental principles;
western learning for practical application”(zhong-xue wei ti, xi-xue wei yong
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).2 This proposal has often been criticized as a typical
proposal o f cultural conservatism. Yet one of the merits o f this idea that has been
neglected is its call for a critical self-consciousness in cultural interaction and
import. The establishment o f a solid cultural subject position is the premise of
cultural import. Import for the sake of import without a purpose is the symptom of
an absence o f critical abilities and sound judgments.
The introduction o f postcolonial cultural theories has been in a similar
situation. Few works have been done to make a fruitful connection between the
theories and Chinese reality. There have been some preliminary introductions of
postcolonial cultural theories in China and some critics use them to analyze
contemporary Chinese cinem a 3 Chinese cinema was discussed from the point of
examining the relationship between first world culture and third world culture in
the global context, which is one o f the main concerns o f postcolonial cultural
theories. As cinema less limited as languages are, is more universal than literature,
Chinese movies quickly stepped onto the international stage. Contemporary
Chinese cinema provides direct and expedient subjects for the critical adaptation of
postcolonial critical theories. For example, movies such as Raise the Red Lantern
and Ju Dou by Zhang Yimou were criticized as pandering to the western
imagination o f China and subjecting to the hegemony o f Orientalist discourse o f the
west.4
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However, the theoretical potential o f postcolonial critical theories is much
greater than what has already been realized. It can provide important perspectives
for a more broad study o f Chinese literature and culture. It is not an exaggeration to
say that, for most cultural issues since the first contact between China and the west,
postcolonial critical theories may offer valuable perspectives and critical
approaches.
In this study I have made an attempt to incorporate contemporary
postcolonial literary criticism into the study o f early modem Chinese fiction. I hope
what I have achieved in this study could prove that there are possibilities of re
reading the canonical texts o f Chinese literature in new and challenging ways. It is
a modest contribution to a paradigm shift in the study of early modem Chinese
fiction by articulating the connection between the rise of novel in the late Qing era
with the emergence o f a modem Chinese national consciousness.
This effort also helps highlight the historicity o f novel as a literary genre.
This is a significant revision as studies of genres are usually inclined to be oblivious
of the interactions between a literary genre and social reality. The relationship
between social reality and a literary genre is not as simple as that between water and
the cup which gives form to the water. It is more important to study the
manifestations of specific features, stylistic or generic, of a genre in a specific
historical context.
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Adapting postcolonial criticism to the study of Chinese fiction may
reasonably arouse the suspicion of committing anachronism and o f exercising a
new form o f colonization on Chinese texts by imposing on them western critical
paradigms.
As for the danger o f anachronism, modem literary scholarship has dispensed
with the notion o f a fixed identity of a text. As the charge o f anachronism is always
predicated on the assumption that temporal space in which a text is written is the
defining constituent o f the identity of a text, it may be dismissed if we adopt the
belief that the identity o f a text is no longer determined by its historical temporality
and location. This is exactly the theoretical position to which most contemporary
literary theories and practices have adhered. A literary text will always be open for
new interpretations. "C'est le point de vue qui cree l’ objet," as Saussure declares in
Cours de Linguistique Generate (162,63). As long as we are conscious of the
political and ideological charges and consequences of the perspectives from which
we observe texts, we are justified in adopting new perspectives to reveal the
significance o f texts.
For the charge o f exercising a new form o f domination by the western
critical discourse, I believe, as I have argued, that besides exercise critical
awareness, the post-colonial theories are the least provincial o f all theories that
have been produced in the west. The current postcolonial criticism, as an important
part of the contemporary theories, belongs to the general culture of postmodernism,
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which, according to Frederic Jameson, "articulates the logic of a new global and
multinational late capitalism" and "can no longer be considered a purely Western
export but may be expected to characterize at least certain other local zones of
reality around the capitalist world" (pp 75-76)
Some critics warn us o f the danger of a new form of colonization by
postcolonial theories. Aijaz Ahmad even suggest that $ostcolonial theory is simply
one more medium through which the authority of the West over the formerly
imperialized parts of the globe is currently being reinscribed within the neocolonial
rfew world order’ and is, indeed, best understood as a new expression of the
West’s historical will to power over the rest o f the world.” 5 It is always a sign of
good judgment to be aware of the interests and limitations of one’ s own theoretical
position, and yet this awareness should not at all prevent us from exercising the
critical insight and power that a theory may provide.
Post-colonial literary studies are still developing. The present study, by
giving an interpretation of a Chinese text in the context of global imperial
expansion, expands our conception o f a historical reality narrowly defined upon
which the grouping of literary texts have been conducted. The post-colonial space is
no longer restricted to nations which had been under direct British colonization and
post-colonial writings no longer refer to just those written in English by third world
writers.
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What postcolonial literary theories do to this study is that they provide a
revealing perspective to discuss the genre o f novel, i.e. its correlative relationship
with the growth of nationalism. They also contribute to the strategies o f reading that
produces significant and important results. The counter-Eurocentrism o f the post
colonial theories makes it possible for non-westem people to realize that they have
aesthetics of their own that are as valid as that of the West. Only with this insight, it
is possible to reveal the theoretical colonization o f western discourse on the
consciousness o f third world writers and critics.
The text Niehai Hua read in this spirit is found to have been endowed with
meanings that have not been adequately explored so far. With a new reading
enabled by the revision of critical perspectives, it becomes a unique counterpart to
the master texts produced in the West as it gives an account to the other side's story
of response to European expansion. The novel N iehai Hua has been proved to be a
text that, besides social criticism, addresses the issue o f national identity
construction, reflects an allegorical relationship between China and the West, the
Chinese awareness of a modem world, adjusts its imagination o f the Other,
achieves artistic achievement in transforming the traditional Chinese narrative.
The study also aims at revealing the subjection to western discourse o f
Chinese literary critics in their criticism on this novel. Such a reading reveals the
hegemony of the western aesthetics that remains unconscious to most Chinese
critics. The lesson to be drawn is o f a far wider significance.
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The theoretical significance of such a critical attempt is more important to the
Chinese literary critical world which remain alien to many of the current critical
ideas. Here I shall briefly discuss two such ideas which encounter critical resistance
from the Chinese literary critics, and which, if received with creative
transformation, will break new grounds for Chinese criticism.
First, does there exist such a thing as the identity o f a text? and what
constitutes the identity o f the text? Though critics have written extensively on a
work, their attempts are aimed at searching for the writer’ s original vision. Literary
study that focuses on "the strategy of reading rather than in recovering the writer's
'original vision'" is still to be encouraged (Sara Harasym ed. Spivak p.50)
The so called Original vision”is certainly a myth, the arbitrariness and
artificialness o f which was forgotten, to parody Nietzche’s observation o f the
concept of truth. There is a certain naiveness in the traditional criticism in directly
relating the events in the novel to actual historical realities. And in building the
connection, it created a fixed identity for the text. This study proves that the
identity of a text is a continuous process of construction and reconstruction, and as
a result, the significance of a text cannot be limited. The attempt to anchor the text
to one historical position impoverishes the richness o f a text.
Also the identity o f a literary text should not be constructed and decided
exclusively by its aesthetic features alone. As Vincent Leitch observes in his
Cultural Criticism. Literary Theory. Poststructuralism, "literary works are
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increasingly regarded as communal documents or as events with social, historical,
and political dimensions rather than as autonomous artifacts within an aesthetic
domain." (Leitch ix)
Second, what is the identity of a theory?
With post-colonial theory and criticism, the nature o f contemporary Western
theory has undergone a fundamental change. The activities o f third world critics
have been gaining an increasing influence in the first world. They brought into
theories new perspectives and preoccupation that originate from third world reality.
The distinction between the East and West is blurred. We are justified to ask a
question: is post-colonial theory a western theory? The answer is negative. It is a
dialogue between the East and the West. The tyranny o f the western theory can only
be defeated by working from inside with active appropriations to the service o f our
own agenda. It is not likely that the hegemony of western theoretical discourse will
lose its institutional advantage in a near future. What we can do at the moment is
still to position us as a translator o f theories.
I am especially interested in finding out the theoretical implication of
postcolonial theories for the institutionalized field of comparative literature and
especially for the study of East-West literary relations. As 8n important mode of
cultural analysis;” postcolonial criticism offers crucial insights on the assumptions
and practices o f our field. Edward Said is one o f the first who points out the
political unconscious o f the discipline:
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...the history of fields like comparative literature, English
Studies, cultural analysis, anthropology can be seen as
affiliated with the empire and, in a m anner o f speaking, even
contributing to its methods for maintaining Western
ascendancy over non-Westem natives...
He further points out that “Without significant exception the
universalizing discourses o f modem Europe and the United States assume the
silence, willing or otherwise, of the non-European world.” 6 This is of course not to
deny that there have been important and significant achievements in the field and it
is less a charge on the sincerity and earnest of the literary scholars in the field of
comparative literature than a wake-up call to remind us of our critical unawareness.
While western critics often judge third world literary productions with their
aesthetic taste and standard, comparativists and literary critics in the third world
nations often endeavor to prove the merit of the literary works of their culture by
showing that they are up to the same standard. In comparative literary studies, the
case is often that “Third World cultural producers send ‘primary’ material
(novels, for example) to the metropolis which is then turned into a ‘refined’
product (theory), principally for consumption by the metropolitan cultural elite.”
59 and what we do is no more than “incorporate cultural material from the Third
World and process it for worldwide consumption—just as it does with raw material
for industrial and commercial purposes.” The counter-Euro-centrism of the
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postcolonial literary theories help revise the vision we have of our field and may
indeed help fulfill the vision o f Goethe's ideal o f a genuine world literature.
If there is a danger o f subjecting oneself to a new form o f colonialism in
appropriating western theories to interpret non-westem texts, there is equally the
danger o f maintaining the purity o f the non-westem texts from the contamination o f
western theories, however good the intention may be. The application o f western
theories in the criticism of third world texts will enrich the meaning and
significance of the text if we mean it to be one interpretation among many which
shall not claim itself to be the only valid one. One postcolonial critic made a very
good suggestion when he wrote
Western cultural forms can be taken out o f the autonomous
enclosures in which they have been protected, and placed instead in
the dynamic global environment created by imperialism, itself
revised as an ongoing contest between north and south, metropolis
and periphery, white and native. (Said 51)
Literary study is an ever progressive enterprise. East-West literary relations
have been an important constitutive element o f comparative literary studies. The
conventional polarization o f East and West, if its necessity was justified in the past,
has become problematic. New concerns and new questions render past studies
obsolete and irrelevant. The implications of several current literary theories and
practices such as text-oriented deconstruction and structuralism and historically
oriented postcolonialism may all be fruitfully put into practice in the study of East
and West literary relations. Several scholars who engage themselves with the study
201
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o f East-West literary relations have at different times outlined the tasks for East-
West literary studies, suggesting the possibilities opened up by a variety of
theoretical positions, such as Fokkema’ s, John Deeney's, Wai-lim Yip's, etc.7
Postcolonial literary criticism may be a very powerful support to base our study on
a stronger foothold in the ongoing contest. The East-west split which has often been
taken for granted and served as the premise o f our study should be reexamined.
Postcolonial literary critics are redefining the fields of comparatives studies such as
East-West literary relationship and useful suggestion may be drawn from the
critical practices by them. One suggestion comes from Said’ s vision of his critical
project:
My principal aim is not to separate but to connect, and I am
interested in this for the main philosophical and methodological
reason that cultural forms are hybrid, mixed, impure, and the time
has come in cultural analysis to reconnect their analysis with their
actuality. (Said Culture and Imperialism. 14)
We have often predicated our study on the presumption o f the purity and unity o f
cultural traditions, o f disciplines, o f critical concepts, o f the works.
This study differs from previous studies o f East-West literary relations in
that what I scrutinize is a concrete historical moment of importance in the
interaction between the east and the west and the discursive practice of and about
this moment, instead o f a group of texts that are discussed in a theoretically abstract
202
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fashion. This is an important moment at which the east met the west, a temporal
moment when the political and cultural spaces collapsed.
East-West literary relations is a traditional subfield of comparative
literature. While the literary influence of one literature upon the other was given
meticulous scrutiny, past studies o f this field did not realize that the literary
relations is also one of politics and power. Fight for dominance is inevitable. Quite
often it ends in the subjugation of third world texts to the theoretical conceptions of
the west. It is time for us to truthfully depict the real relationship and situation, one
in which the two sides are revealed to be interdependent. This relationship may
have been illuminated by the postcolonial critical concepts such as the concept o f
hybridity and the celebration of it. The field of current colonial and post-colonial
literary studies may be expanded to include the study of east-west literary relations
besides the traditional topics that have been covered, such as the study o f works by
native writers during colonization and their literary response to colonization; works
by native writers today that demonstrate lasting linguistic, political and ideological
impact of Western culture on the native culture; European writers' works in the era
of European Imperialism are reinterpreted in the light o f colonial discourse;
establishing a counter canon of non-westem literature; and the colonization o f -
current western academic theories over the Other literatures.
As Lydia Liu pointed out, in examining various problems in human history
brought forth by modernity, "post-colonial theories have achieved what is beyond
203
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the capability o f other cultural crticical theories since the Frankfurt School, that is,
to simultaneously take into our critical perspective issues of modernity, national
states, knowledge production, and Euro-American cultural hegemony, and thus
provide us a position, a perspective, a historical point of view that is different from
those of the west." (Liu Tushu) I hope that this study embodies such a position
and may be an example of "a huge and remarkable adjustment in perspective and
understanding" (Said, Culture and Imperialism 243), a paradigm shift that situates
the Chinese texts in a historical stage globally just as "it becomes normative to see
the West as fundamentally constituted by its imperial enterprises, as unthinkable
apart from them." (Pratt 2) It may be added that study of modem Chinese literature
is also unthinkable if it fails to take into account the modem global historical
situation from which it cannot exclude itself. In her The Post-colonial Critic.
Spivak has refereed to the texts produced by European authors as the master texts
and discovered that the master texts need the third world Other in the construction
of their texts. In a similar fashion, as my study has proved, the third world texts
produced in the age o f European expansion also need the West Other to construct
their texts. The task she sets for herself, which is "to explore the differences and
similarities between texts coming from the two sides which are engaged with the
same problem at the same time"8 , should become the common task o f contemporary
literary scholars, the fundamental legitimizing reason o f whose work is the
enhancement of human understanding.
204
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1 The introduction o f western literary theories to the Chinese readers were
mainly conducted by teachers in the foreign languages and literatures
departments in Chinese universities. The teachers and scholars of Chinese
literature were not very enthusiastic about adopting western literary theories in
their work.
2 This proposal was raised by Zhang Zhidong 1837 - 1909) in his
"Exhortation to Study” which was first published in 1898. See Rozman,
Gilbert, ed. The Modernization of China. New York: The Free Press, 1981. P. 262.
3 See Liu, Kang and Jin Hengshan . “Postcolonial Criticism:From the West
to China” in Wenxue Pingltin fLiterarv Criticism), 1998 vol. 1.pp. 149-159.
4 See Yuan, Ying . “Cultural Criticism o f Modernity and Chinese Film
Theory” in Dianving vishu (Trim Art) .vol 1. .1999. Pp. 17-22.
5 Moore-Gilbert, Bart., Gareth Stanton and Willy Maley. eds. Postcolonial
Criticism. London and New York: Longman Ltd. 1997. P.57.
6 Edward Said. Culture and Imperialism . New York: Alfred A. Knopf,
1993. P.50.
7 See Douwe W. Fokkema “New Strategies in the Comparative Study o f
Literature and Their Application to Contemporary Chinese Literature” in China
and the West: Comparative Literature Studies Hong Kong: Chinese UP, 1980.
John Deeney “New Orientations for Comparative Literature” in Tamkang
Review 1977 8:1: Wai-lim Yip “The Use o f ‘Models’ in East-W est
Comparative Literature” in Tamkang Review. 1975-76. 6.
8 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. The Post-colonial Critic . ed. by Sarah
Harasym. New York & London: Routledge, 1990. P.73.
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216
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Liang Qichao
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Asset Metadata

Creator Zhuang, Guo-ou (author)

Core Title Imagining China: "Niehai Hua" as a national narrative

School Graduate School

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program Comparative Literature

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag comparative literature,history, Asia, Australia and Oceania,literature, Asian,OAI-PMH Harvest

Language English

Contributor Digitized by ProQuest (provenance)

Advisor Cheung, Dominic (committee chair), Barnouw, Dagmar (committee member), Birge, Bettine (committee member), Eggenschwiler, David (committee member)

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c16-70996

Unique identifier UC11328281

Identifier 3018049.pdf (filename),usctheses-c16-70996 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier 3018049.pdf

Dmrecord 70996

Document Type Dissertation

Rights Zhuang, Guo-ou

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Access Conditions The author retains rights to his/her dissertation, thesis or other graduate work according to U.S. copyright law. Electronic access is being provided by the USC Libraries in agreement with the au...

Repository Name University of Southern California Digital Library

Repository Location USC Digital Library, University of Southern California, University Park Campus, Los Angeles, California 90089, USA