Twentieth-Century Literary Encounters in China

Modernism, Travel, and Form

Jeffrey Mather

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781000727487
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Littérature
• Subtopic: Critique littéraire

From the travel writing of the eccentric plant collector and Reginald Farrer, to Emily Hahn's insider depictions of bohemian life in semi-colonial Shanghai, to Ezra Pound's mediated 'journeys' to Southwest China via the explorer Joseph Rock – Anglo-American representations of China during the first half of the twentieth century were often unconventional in terms of style, form, and content. By examining a range of texts that were written in the flux of travel – including poems, novels, autobiographies – this study argues that the tumultuous social and political context of China's Republican Period (1912-49) was a key setting for conceptualizing cultural modernity in global and transnational terms. In contrast with accounts that examine China's influence on Western modernism through language, translation, and discourse, the book recovers a materialist engagement with landscapes, objects, and things as transcribed through travel, ethnographic encounter, and embodied experience. The book is organized by three themes which suggest formal strategies through which notions cultural modernity were explored or contested: borderlands, cosmopolitan performances, and mobile poetics. As it draws from archival sources in order to develop these themes, this study offers a place-based historical perspective on China's changing status in Western literary cultures.

1 Introduction

In the context of twenty-first-century globalization, fewer stories have dominated the headlines more than China’s economic expansion and emergence as a global superpower. The issues that have emerged are multifaceted as they are politically and ethically complex, ranging from discussions to do with censorship to human rights, from the expansion of China’s interest in Africa to an increasingly imperialistic stance in the South China seas, and from China’s role as a rising technological innovator to its increasingly alarming environmental situation. At the time of writing, close to my own home, China’s influence in Hong Kong politics has provoked large-scale demonstrations and civil unrest, some of it violent, as local residents have taken to the streets again to protest against China, in this case, regarding the impending extradition laws (laws that many believe will allow for China to arrest and deport political dissidents, or other individuals deemed criminal by the state). For those of us watching these events closely, or who are personally affected by them, China’s presence is felt on both intellectual and emotional levels: as an academic and a long-term foreign resident of Hong Kong, I am implicated within the political turmoil, sympathizing with the views of my students, many of whom have taken to the streets, worrying for academic and press freedoms, but also concerned about the violence and blind anger that has recently erupted and will, no doubt, continue to emerge.

While there are indeed real issues at stake which continue to demand political and social action, it might also be said that China has been defined or characterized in ways that reveal historically enduring social anxieties. As China, as well as the Chinese economy, has become increasingly linked with many other countries of the world, it has also been repeatedly and consistently characterized as an entity other to the West: the closer it approaches, and the more undisguisable it becomes, the more it is defined as something else. Variously accused of manipulating currencies, distorting markets, stealing jobs, or appropriating intellectual property, China is not only criticized for its actions, it is often painted as the villain, a bad actor, bending or breaking the rules of proper international conduct. Here in Hong Kong, within a space that is neither within nor completely outside of that entity which we fear, the issues are not just political but also, at times, deeply cultural, and even existential in significance (not uncommon in protest art, placards, or slogans we see the epic battle narrativized, with China figured as an evil, even Satanic, dark force). The polarization of us and them and intensity of these feelings is arguably indicative of other problems closer to home and needs to be viewed in relation to ideas of selfhood that are vulnerable and under threat for reasons that extend beyond the seemingly black and white present-day issues that we confront.

I begin this book by raising the question of ‘China’ in contemporary affairs not in order to weigh in on the politics of the present day, but to argue that China’s status as a political and cultural entity – as it has been variously imagined from ‘the outside’ – is both symbolic and historically unfolding. As China creates so much content for the world’s newsfeeds, it performs powerful symbolic work as an ideological, political, and cultural touchstone. This book argues that much of this symbolic work has been inherited from the previous century, and that in order to better understand the present day, we are behooved to read the past, to delve into the history of writing in order to better understand the constant push and pull between the real and the fictive, the political and imaginary, the self and the other. This notion that the West might rely on China – or the Orient more generally – in order to fashion its own image is, of course, not a new idea. One needs to begin this discussion with Edward Said’s Orientalism (1979), a seminal text of postcolonial studies which argued for an approach to understanding East/West relations through discourse and in relation to a history of imperialism. In this influential study, Said argued that European colonial representation functioned systematically as part of a discourse that itself was imaginary, but which nevertheless sustained Western material civilization:

… the Orient has helped to define Europe (or the West) as its contrasting image, idea, personality, experience. Yet none of this Orient is merely imaginative. The Orient is an integral part of European material civilization and culture. Orientalism expresses and represents that part culturally and even ideologically as a mode of discourse with supporting institutions, vocabulary, scholarship, imagery, doctrines, even colonial bureaucracies and colonial styles. (1–2)

For Said, such divisions were articulated through a range of cultural texts, and despite a diversity in form and genre, a remarkably consistent ‘Orient’ remained:

Orientalism is a style of thought based upon ontological and epistemological distinction made between “the Orient” and (most of the time) “the Occident.” Thus a very large mass of writers, among whom are poets, novelists, philosophers, political theorists, economists, and imperial administrators, have accepted the basic distinction between East and West as the starting point for elaborate accounts concerning the Orient, its people, customs, “mind,” destiny, and so on. (2–3)

Although Said focused primarily on the Arab world and the Middle East, one might extend such an analysis to Western imaginings of East Asia. Indeed, China has long served as a foil to ideas of Western modernity, and throughout history one finds a number of binaries that reinforce key temporal and spatial distinctions. Notions of being open or closed, dynamic or static, real or fake, democratic or despotic: these distinctions were often evoked to bolster and justify Western expansion at various points in history. For example, in the context of the eighteenth century, David Porter has illustrated how Europe built up a ‘discourse of commerce’ in regard to China and the West, elucidating the extent to which notions of free trade and images of circulation and restraint were key conceptual frameworks for European imaginings of self and other. In the case of Adam Smith, Defoe, Addison, and Lillo, free trade was understood as a “guarantor of social order and stability” and achieved a kind of “axiomatic status with respect to civilized society” (185). Porter states: “the economic metaphors of circulation and blockage are systematically adapted from the commercial context to intellectual, linguistic, and social spheres” (188). In a context where circulation is equated with pleasure and health, China was continually aligned with “imagery of obstruction, languor, and tedious monotony” (188).

During the nineteenth century, the development of Western institutionalized expertise on China began to coincide directly with a more aggressive form of military and economic presence in East Asia. According to the OED, the word ‘sinologist’ first appeared in 1816, followed by ‘sinologue’ in 1853 (that is, “one versed in the Chinese language, or in the customs and history of China”), and finally ‘sinology’ in 1882 (defined as “the study of things Chinese”). It is not entirely coincidental, then, that these terms emerged at a historical moment when there was unprecedented missionary activity and imperial aggression (manifest in the two Opium Wars of 1839–42 and 1856–60). Similar to the ways in which fields such as Egyptology and Indology offered ways of knowing and simultaneously controlling imperial territories, China became increasingly conceived within a discourse of ‘the Orient’.

Yet the closer we examine the history and the textual record, the more we find that these imaginings were both inconsistent and often ambiguous in terms of political or social implications. Indeed, historians of imperialism in China have often emphasized the difficulty of categorically applying a theoretical model such as orientalism, and have offered more nuanced descriptions of Western imperial interests. For example, in his study of British colonial cultures in China, Robert Bickers has described how British interests were often contingent upon local circumstances and were often generated through private and localized business interests rather than through state-apparatuses:

In the years after the 1842 Treaty of Nanjing, which delivered that depot – Hong Kong – and first opened China to British residence and trade, a British presence developed in China which was neither formally colonial nor merely definable as ‘informal influence’. Hong Kong nominally became an orthodox colony. Administrative forms and practices were recognisable within the context of the wider British empire and the policies and practices of the Colonial Office, which administered the territory. What evolved in the parts of the rest of China in the interstices of the system of treaties fashioned between the Qing state and the foreign powers was quite singular, and owed no direct loyalties, or dues of obedience, to the British state. This was largely private enterprise imperialism: as such it was also international in character, even when it was nominally British. (5–6)

Similarly, James Hevia describes the ‘pedagogical’ campaign of conversion and discipline in historical discourse, emphasizing the ‘disorderly’ and ‘inconsistent’ nature of colonialist representation in China. Citing a number of Said’s critics, Hevia argues that “the East was not a passive recipient of an external coercive regime of power: colonialisms were transformed in multiple encounters, along class, race, and gender lines, between colonizers and colonized” (19). He goes on to make a number of points that further nuance interpretations of imperialism in China as a closed theory of West over East:

The situation in China through much of the second half of the nineteenth century was as complex as that to be found in settings where European political control appeared to be more formalized. Moreover, as in other instances of Euroamerican and indigenous contact, the China scene presents us with a number of seemingly contradictory developments that defy easy historical interpretation and raise troublesome moral issues. How, for example, do we reconcile the obviously venal opium trade with the well-intentioned missionary activities in nineteenth-century China, particularly when we recognize that both sought to penetrate and reconfigure the same bodies and polity? What are we to make of a use of force that justifies its self-interested violence on the grounds of abstract principles generated from a moral, humanist tradition and that, after World War II, provided the intellectual foundations for a concept of universal human rights? How are we to deal with and interpret direct aggression that claims to stand for the rule of law and presents itself as doing the good work of universalizing that rule? How are we to understand the willingness of some Chinese in this century to reject long- standing cultural beliefs and forms of indigenous knowledge and embrace Western science and political forms at the same time as they claim to be staunch anti-imperialists? How does one distinguish, within reference to whose interests, between the ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ impact of the West in China? (20)

Such complications and questions about the nature of Western imperialism in China have been examined in various studies of China’s representation through literature and travel writing. Works by historians and literary critics such as Nicholas Clifford, Susan Thurin, Colin Mackerras, Julia Kuehn, and Ross Forman have offered perspectives on the ways in which China was imagined and described through different types of texts including travel writing, literature, and photography. This work has revealed that Western representations of China are diverse in terms of their ideological leanings, ranging from the sympathetic, to the problematically sympathetic, to the outwardly imperialistic. The texts that scholars have brought to our attention are similarly varied in genres and modes as they draw from different categories of experience and speak to a range of audiences or interlocutors.

The result of much of this work has led to a historically engaged discussion about China’s status in the Western imagination, a useful problematizing of imperialism itself as a discourse, and to some extent, a questioning of East and West distinctions themselves and the extent to which they hold up under scrutiny. Some critics have approached the representation of China in terms of a debate over the extent to which texts are able to represent historical experience accurately. For example, in A Truthful Impression of the Country: British and American Travel Writing in China, 1880–1949 (2001), Nicholas Clifford argues for the historical efficacy of travel writing, taking issue with postcolonial critiques that tend to align Western travel with discourses of power, expansion, and conquest. While accepting the usefulness of certain critical concepts in colonial discourse analysis, Clifford remains skeptical of studies that he claims deny the existence of historical realities. By evoking Isabella Bird’s travel narrative of the same title, Clifford’s ‘Truthful Impression’ argues against the trend in contemporary criticism to rely upon words like ‘imaginings’ or ‘inventions’ in their titles; such approaches, Clifford argues, end up “seeing translations of the travel writers as no more than ‘inventions’ or ‘imaginings’, as if the object, once translated, existed only in the mind of the person representing it, no more real, say, than in Roland Barthes’s fictive Japan” (14). But in most other cases, critics have recognized that ‘travel writing’ on China is inevitably tied to discourses of power to varying degrees. Indeed, most scholarship in this area has revealed how representations of travel and contact in China often present unstable and self-reflective knowledge. For example, work in nineteenth-century studies has revealed the ways in which British interests in China were often self-effacing, mobile, and difficult to disentangle from larger global systems of exchange. Emphasizing the notion of the contact zone as opposed to one-sided ideas of imperialist domination, Ross Forman has described how Britons often imagined China in terms of shared or “entwining” imperial interests and within a shifting and heterogeneous project of overlapping informal and formal strategies (5). Or in a more comparative context, Klaudia Lee has revealed that works by Charles Dickens were not only formative in terms of British conceptualization of the cultural otherness but had a particularly important and influential reception in China itself, as these works were translated in ways that problematize our understanding to the ‘original’ text (xi). Others have recognized that the ways in which Western travelers describe China’s ‘return gaze’ present a challenge to imposed imperial hierarchies. Tamara Wagner describes such reversals as eliciting various reactions, ranging from “discomfort or unease to appreciative self-irony” (24), while Susan Thurin suggests that such reversals create a more dynamic interplay between Chinese occidentalism and Western orientalism:

The Chinese racializing of the foreign visitor demonstrates the reverse of Pratt’s findings on the ‘gaze’ … The ‘foreign devil’ meeting the ‘celestial’ and the ‘barbarian’ meeting the ‘barbarous’ represents a unique combat between counter- stereotypes, a simultaneous Orientalizing and Occidentalizing. (20)

Arguably, these moments of Westerners watching themselves being watched present disruptive moments of self-awareness, and even a productive sense of humor. Recently, Wendy Gan has developed this line of thought more fully in her book Comic China (2018) where she argues that such reversals, incongruities, and juxtapositions elicited a cosmopolitan humor and a negotiation of power relations in the context of ‘colonial’ interactions with China. Laughter, Gan suggests,

sometimes reveal alternatives to the suspicions and misunderstandings that vex histories of cross-cultural encounters, alternatives that also hint at what humor and comedy are good at, namely, playful subversions that resolve harmoniously, providing new ways to imagine interacting with the alien other – alternatives that, at a specific point in time (given the right conditions), may actually take flight. (6)

While this existing research has revealed that China’s status in Western literature and writing has always been complex and self-effacing, in the context of the early twentieth century it becomes even more difficult to conceptualize China and the West as distinguishing or mutually opposed concepts. For one thing, China became increasingly global in terms of its own cultural transformations during this period. In 1905, China’s thousand-year-old examination system was replaced, and soon after missionary stations and Christian colleges began appearing throughout the country. Bickers notes that in 1919 only about 106 (about 6%) of China’s 1,704 counties were without some form of missionary presence. Almost 2,000 Britons worked for British missionary societies in China in 1919, running 384 mission stations (69). In 1900, there were 164 American Christian colleges in China, but by the end of the First World War, there were more than 2,000 (Chang 90). These foreign incursions had a profound influence on China’s historical development, and although small relative to China’s numbers, missionary and educational initiatives would have long-term effects. For example, the Boxer Indemnity Scholarship Program was established in 1909 as a compensation in place of a cash payout after the Boxer Rebellion (a form of ‘goodwill’ that China had, in fact, no choice but to pay for). Under the terms of this program, gifted Chinese students who had studied at American colleges in China were sent to prestigious universities in America every year. Notable recipients of the scholarship include Hu Shi (one of China’s most important reformist intellectuals), the celebrated poet and writer Bing Xin, the accomplished linguist Zhou Ziqi, and the political leader Yuen Renchao (who eventually became acting president of the Republic of China for a brief period).

As Julia Kuehn (2015) has described in her examination of late Victorian travelers to Hong Kong, it became possible during this transitional period to imagine a paradoxical ‘cosmopolitan colonialism’ as the travel impressions of writers such as Kipling mark a shift from an ethical mindset to a more economic outlook. The very notion of empire, therefore, however overlapping, relationally defined, or informal in nature, became eclipsed by new ways of conceptualizing culture and the status of the individual within economic systems of global circulation. As I have mentioned above, China has long been imagined in relation to its potential market and its seeming intransigence to Western ideas of commercial traffic, but with changes in transportation, industrialization, and tourism during the twentieth century, trade became increasingly recognized as reciprocal and mutually dependent. In many Western countries, there was desire for ‘Chinese things’, and they – silk, porcelain, and tea – were always in demand, but with widespread industrialization during the early twentieth century, China also began exporting commodities like glue, ink, tobacco, corn, and cotton. In the meantime, China also began trading in unprecedented ways. In Exotic Commodities, Frank Dikötter (2006) has shown that the import of items into China during the early decades of the twentieth century – objects like bicycles, kerosene, ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction
• Part I Borderlands
• Part II Cosmopolitan Performances
• Part III Mobile Poetics
• Index